I Heard That Song Before

By Mary Higgins Clark

Two Little Girls in Blue

No Place Like Home

Nighttime Is My Time

The Second Time Around

Kitchen Privileges

Mount Vernon Love Story

Daddy’s Little Girl

On the Street Where You Live

Before I Say Good-bye

We’ll Meet Again

All Through the Night

You Belong to Me

Pretend You Don’t See Her

My Gal Sunday

Moonlight Becomes You

Silent Night

Let Me Call You Sweetheart

The Lottery Winner

Remember Me

I’ll Be Seeing You

All Around the Town

Loves Music, Loves to Dance

The Anastasia Syndrome and Other Stories

While My Pretty One Sleeps

Weep No More, My Lady

Stillwatch

A Cry in the Night

The Cradle Will Fall

A Stranger Is Watching

Where Are the Children?

BY MARY HIGGINS CLARK AND CAROL HIGGINS CLARK

Santa Cruise

The Christmas Thief

He Sees You When You’re Sleeping

Deck the Halls

Simon & Schuster 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2007 by Mary Higgins Clark

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Simon & Schuster Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020

SIMON & SCHUSTER and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

Designed by Jan Pisciotta

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Clark, Mary Higgins.

I heard that song before / Mary Higgins Clark.—1st Simon & Schuster hardcover ed.

p. cm.

1. Rich people–Fiction. 2. Sleepwalking—Fiction. 3. Englewood (N.J.)—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3553.L287I15 2007

813’.54—dc22 2007006241

ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-3962-9
ISBN 10: 1-4165-3962-X

Visit us on the World Wide Web:

http://www.SimonSays.com

Acknowledgments

Writing is essentially a lonely occupation. A writer is blessed who has people who support and encourage along the way. When I begin to tell the tale, my forever editor, Michael V. Korda, and senior editor Chuck Adams continue to cheer and advise me. My thanks always to them and to Lisl Cade my publicist, my agent Sam Pinkus, and Associate Director of Copyediting Gypsy da Silva and her special team: Joshua Cohen and Jonathan Evans.

Kudos and thanks to my family, children, and grandchildren, to Himself, the ever-perfect John Conheeney, to my closeknit supporters Agnes Newton, Nadine Petry, and Irene Clark. You’re a grand group, and I love you all.

And now, my dear readers, I hope you enjoy this story.

For Marilyn

My Firstborn Child and Very Dear Friend

With love

M
y father was the landscaper for the Carrington estate. With fifty acres, it was one of the last remaining private properties of that size in Englewood, New Jersey, an upscale town three miles west of Manhattan via the George Washington Bridge.

One Saturday afternoon in August twenty-two years ago, when I was six years old, my father decided, even though it was his day off, that he had to go there to check on the newly installed outside lighting. The Carringtons were having a formal dinner party that evening for two hundred people. Already in trouble with his employers because of his drinking problem, Daddy knew that if the lights placed throughout the formal gardens did not function properly, it might mean the end of his job.

Because we lived alone, he had no choice except to take me with him. He settled me on a bench in the garden nearest the terrace with strict instructions to stay right there until he came back. Then he added, “I may be a little while, so if you have to use the bathroom, go through the screen door around the corner. You’ll see the staff powder room just inside it.”

That sort of permission was exactly what I needed. I had heard my father describe the inside of the great stone mansion to my grandmother, and my imagination had gone wild visualizing it. It had been built in Wales in the seventeenth century and even had a hidden chapel where a priest could both live and celebrate Mass in secrecy during the era of Oliver Cromwell’s bloody attempt to erase all traces of Catholicism from England. In 1848 the first Peter Carrington had the mansion taken down and reassembled stone by stone in Englewood.

I knew from my father’s description that the chapel had a heavy wooden door and was located at the very end of the second floor.

I had to see it.

I waited five minutes after he disappeared into the gardens and then raced through the door he had pointed out. The back staircase was to my immediate right, and I silently made my way upstairs. If I did encounter anyone, I planned to say that I was looking for a bathroom, which I persuaded myself was partially true.

On the second floor, with rising anxiety I tiptoed down one carpeted hallway after another as I encountered a maze of unexpected turns. But then I saw it: the heavy wooden door my father had described, so out of place in the rest of the thoroughly modernized house.

Emboldened by my luck in having encountered no one in my adventure, I ran the last few steps and rushed to open the door. It squeaked as I tugged at it, but it opened just enough for me to squeeze through.

Being in the chapel was like going back in time. It was much smaller than I’d expected. I had pictured it as similar to the Lady Chapel in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where my grandmother always stopped to light a candle for my mother, on the rare occasions when we shopped in New York. She never failed to tell me how beautiful my mother had looked the day she and my father were married there.

The walls and floor of this chapel were built of stone, and the air I was breathing felt damp and cold.

A nicked and peeling statue of the Virgin Mary was the room’s only religious artifact, and a battery-lit votive candle in front of it provided the only dim and shadowy lighting. Two rows of wooden pews faced the small wooden table that must have served as an altar.

As I was taking it all in, I heard the door begin to squeak and I knew someone was pushing it open. I did the only thing I could do—I ran between the pews and dropped to the ground, then ostrichlike buried my face in my hands.

From the voices I could tell that a man and a woman had entered the chapel. Their whispers, harsh and angry, echoed against the stone. They were arguing about money, a subject I knew well. My grandmother was always sniping at my father, telling him that if he kept up the drinking there wouldn’t be a roof over his head or mine.

The woman was demanding money, and the man was saying that he already had paid her enough. Then she said, “This will be the last time, I swear,” and he said, “I heard that song before.”

I know my memory of that moment is accurate. From the time I could understand that, unlike my friends in kindergarten, I did not have a mother, I had begged my grandmother to tell me about her, every single thing she could remember. Among the memories my grandmother shared with me was one of my mother starring in the high school play and singing a song called “I Heard That Song Before.” “Oh, Kathryn, she sang it so beautifully. She had a lovely voice. Everyone clapped so long and shouted, ‘
encore, encore.
’ She had to sing it again.” Then my grandmother would hum it for me.