An Agent's Inbox #42

Dear Agent:

BAY OF SILENCE (adult contemporary; 81,000 words) centers on an African-American diplomat who jeopardizes his career, marriage, and life to search for his son's remains in the chaos of post-Castro Cuba. After sacrificing everything he values most, he learns that the child, by some miracle, may still be alive. 

Vincent Lucius gets recalled to Washington after losing his seven-year-old in a windsurfing accident off Cuba's north coast. With his marriage fraying and his older son refusing to believe his little brother drowned, Vincent finagles a solo assignment back to strife-torn Cuba. His day job is attempting to prevent the outbreak of civil war. At night he haunts the morgues. Within a few months, the U.S. ambassador banishes him for disregarding embassy priorities. Vincent is boarding the flight home when he hears of a boy resembling his son who drifted onto a remote barrier island. Alive. At the risk of alienating his wife and getting bounced from the foreign service, he pursues this murky hope across Cuba's dangerous terrain. An informant tips off a vengeful real estate mogul whose plans Vincent had thwarted. Whether Vincent’s son or not, the child's fate hinges on who finds him first.

My fiction and humor have appeared in Potomac Review, Hot Hot Phone, and SpliceToday. I am a former U.S. diplomat. My foreign service experience included embassy tours in Moscow, Santo Domingo, Skopje, and Tokyo, plus a stint in Havana. Among my Washington duties was a two-year assignment on Secretary of State Clinton's policy planning staff.

Thank you for considering BAY OF SILENCE. Please find the first page copied below. I look forward to sending you more if the story stirs your interest.

Sincerely,

T.N.

BAY OF SILENCE

Dimming light, November chill. In a neighborhood outside Washington, D.C., a man raked. Long, smooth strokes. Vincent Lucius normally did his brooding at the dining room table, staring out the window into the thicket of bushes behind the property. The distraction of yardwork provided no relief. Still, there was something pleasing in the motion of his shoulders and hips, a reminder of his physicality. He elevated his right elbow and tucked his left arm close to his torso, the way a gondolier might handle his oar. Not that Vincent had ever been to Europe. After embassy assignments in Guatemala and Venezuela, plus the partial one in Cuba--truncated by tragedy and post-Castro chaos--the State Department saw him as a Latin America guy. Or Africa, of course, if he wanted.

Vincent cleared the walk that led to the front door, creating a channel. On either side lay a sea of yellow, red, and brown. He worked down from the house toward the curb, building up lines of leaves that stretched across the lawn. Little leaf bodies, curled up and dead. He maneuvered the rake with a certain tenderness. The lines turned into waves and the waves grew and by the time they reached the street they were tsunamis.

He could give a rip about protecting the grass, if that was what raking was for, or about which of their Takoma Park neighbors approved and which were fine with leaving things natural. But he figured Sarah would notice. It wasn’t much, he knew. A gesture.