Bedtime Story (28 page)

The water was so close now that he could smell it, a cold metallic odour that would have made him choke if he had been able to take a deep breath.

“Almost there,” Matt said. “Almost there.”

With every step the light grew larger, brighter, a sliver of warmth seeming to expand as he watched it, until it resolved itself into a doorway, a tall rectangle of daylight.

David threw himself through it.

The light was almost blinding, but David couldn’t stop. Tucking the cylinder into his shirt, he ran across the entry chamber, the thunder of the river seeming to surround him now. The water exploded through the door at the top of the stairs, a silver-grey jet that shot into the room.

The wall of water chased David across the stone bridge, down the short corridor, and, without even a momentary pause, right off the edge of the canyon wall, into the cool air above the river.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered into David’s hair, worrying that someone might overhear. Chris had sent Jacqui, tearful still and barely coherent, home in a cab to get some rest. “I’m sorry. I meant to get back, I really did.”

He was aware of how pathetic it all sounded.

“Can I make it up to you a little?” He reached for his bag and pulled out the book. “Can I read you a little bit now? I know it’s late, but I thought you might like to hear some anyway.”

He started from where they had left off the day before. As he read he kept glancing up, comforted by the way David’s hands stopped moving as he read, the way his body relaxed.

He read longer than he should have, long past the point where the words stopped making sense, long past the point where his mouth stopped moving, where the words stopped coming from him.

The next time the nurse checked on David, she found Chris asleep in the chair beside the bed, an old book fallen open on his lap.

The nurse smiled to herself and thought of small mercies as she checked David’s pulse and temperature, taking care not to wake his father. When she left, she dimmed the light and closed the curtain as quietly as she could.

As David’s feet stepped into the air high over the river, he thought of two things.

The first was those old cartoons that his dad had made him watch with the coyote and the roadrunner, when the coyote runs off a cliff and hangs, motionless, in the air for a moment, until the full reality of his situation hits him, and only then, with wide eyes and scrambling feet, does he fall with a puff of dust.

And he remembered his swimming instructor from last summer, that day his class had first gone off the high-diving board.

“Right now we’re just jumping,” he had said. “No fancy diving. And no belly flops.” Everyone had laughed. “Keep your body straight, and your feet together. You can wrap your arms around your chest if you want, it doesn’t really matter.”

David did as he had been told.

“Take a deep breath, and remember, stay relaxed. Don’t tense up. That’s how people hurt themselves.”

David inhaled as deeply as he could and willed his legs to soften, his knees to unlock. He didn’t let himself think about how high up he
was, or the possibility of rocks in the river under him—there was nothing he could do now but close his eyes.

He entered the water with a cold, sharp shock. He had to fight to hold his breath, and flailed instinctively, struggling against the current to get up to the surface.

His breath exploded from him the moment he reached the air. He took a deep breath, struggled to open his eyes.

He didn’t have time to take another breath before the water from the cave crashed down on him, pushing him deep below the surface of the river, spinning him out of control.

I
GOT BACK TO MY
apartment at about four-thirty the next morning. It was cold and quiet, the way I had liked it when I used to come in every morning to write.

I sat at my desk.

If Took’s granddaughter had no idea about
To the Four Directions
, I’d exhausted every possibility, hadn’t I?

I flipped through the notes that I had been taking, and it occurred to me: every possibility save one. The e-mail from the rights department at Davis & Keelor had been useless, and I knew that I probably wouldn’t hear from them for weeks, if at all. I’d need to get their attention in a different way.

I quickly scanned the bookshelves behind my reading chair. There it was:
The Last Family
. I had reviewed it the year before: I had been expecting another trashy true-crime book, but I had been surprised. The book was a surprisingly well-written history of the Marcelli crime family from Sicily to New York, and an account of the life and misdeeds of the author, Anthony Marcelli. His decision to become a federal informant, and the brutal, damning testimony that had brought down his family, followed a crisis of faith right out of classical tragedy. I had praised it in my review, and I hadn’t been alone in my assessment. The book had spent several weeks on the
New York Times
best-seller list.

I flipped directly to the Acknowledgements.

I skipped past the usual stuff—though one had to admire a mafia traitor who nonetheless thanks his family—scanning almost to the end before the sentence that I was looking for jumped out at me.

“And finally, my editor, Tony Markus, without whom this book would not exist.”

Tony Markus—I’d forgotten his name. He’d gotten a lot of coverage in the trades when the book was camped at the top of the charts—the young editor who, for his first book, had gone after a mafia soldier, a confessed killer, and convinced him to write the story of his life and crimes. That sort of thing gets you noticed in the publishing world, and Markus had been hailed as a wunderkind, heir apparent to a generation of editors on their way into retirement.

“But what have you done lately?” I muttered as I searched his name online.

The answer, as near as I could tell after going through the first six pages of mostly obscure results, was
nothing
. In the year since
The Last Family
had been published, Markus had not been credited with publishing or acquiring anything remotely of interest.

I clicked on the Contact button under his bio on the D&K page and took a moment to mentally compose my opening line.

I titled the message “Possible Future Project.”

I included my telephone number and address and reread the message.

The e-mail left me with a slightly dirty feeling. I hadn’t lied—there really was a fifth book, and Cat had asked for my help in getting her grandfather’s books back into print. I never claimed to be working for the estate, or empowered to make deals on their behalf.

All I was guilty of, really, was using the craven interests of a young editor, probably hungry for his next success and vulnerable to a little flattery, to get access to information that might somehow help David.

And it might work out to everyone’s benefit, no matter what I got out of it. Fantasy was huge in publishing circles these days, and
To the Four Directions
could be a huge success, just as I had described. Hell, it had gotten David reading. Wasn’t that the surest testament to its appeal?

Tony Markus pushed himself away from his desk and spun to face his printer. “Come on,” he muttered, tapping at the arm of his chair. The wait was excruciating, but not surprising: the printer was probably a cast-off from two floors up. Certainly the rest of his office was made up of crap that nobody upstairs wanted.

At least he had the luxury of a private office, even if rumours and lingering smells suggested it had once been a janitor’s closet. Four walls and a door beat a cubicle every time, and Markus knew that he was the envy of most of his colleagues. If the fast track took him through a janitor’s closet for a couple of years, that was the price to be paid.

“Come on,” he urged the printer again. When it finally roared into action, he yanked the paper free of the rollers before the machine had even finished.

He took his time on the stairs. He needed a chance to think this through, to make sure that his story was in place. Plus, he didn’t want to arrive at Sharon’s office winded and sweaty.

In his own mind, Tony Markus was a solid, imposing presence: not fat, solid. Impressive. The way his uncles were: broad-shouldered and hard, good-looking without even needing to try.

The reality was somewhat different.

Despite the slow pace, he was still out of breath by the time he got to the executive floor.

“Is she in?” he asked Traci, Sharon’s assistant, stopping at her desk with feigned confidence, as if his meeting with Sharon Cahill, publisher of Davis & Keelor, was an everyday occurrence.

Traci glanced down at Sharon’s calendar and Tony’s eyes drifted to the neckline of her blouse. “She’s got a ten-thirty,” she said, glancing up and catching him looking. She sat up straighter.

“I just need a couple of minutes,” Tony said, gesturing with the printed e-mail as if it were the most important thing in the world.

“Just a sec.”

He watched her fingers as she dialled the phone: they were small and fine, pale, with delicate pink polish.

“Sharon, I’ve got Tony Markus out here. He says he needs a couple of minutes.” She listened a moment, then hung up. “Go on in.”

“Thanks, Traci,” he said, smiling broadly, but she had already gone back to whatever she had been doing before.

He found Sharon leaning over her desk, studying two cover designs side by side. She didn’t look up.