Peaceable Kingdom (mobi) (29 page)

“Change your style. Write them a big fat blockbuster.”

She opened a fresh pack of Winstons.

“I don’t have a big fat blockbuster in me, Richard. Nothing wrong with them if you have the stamina, if you can sustain it.
Lonesome Dove
certainly manages. But I rarely read them and I rarely like them when I do, and I’m damned if I’m going to write something just for the money or so some editor can be flavor of the month with the boys on publishers’ row. Anyhow, all that’s beside the point now.”

She lit the cigarette and held out the pack. He took one and she lit that too.

“Thank God,” she said. “A smoker.”

Cigarette smoke rode the back of the woodsmoke from the stove and mingled with tonight’s earlier cooking smells. Steak. Baked potato and steamed squash.

“More coffee?”

“If it’s not too much trouble. The flight. Then the drive here.”

“No trouble if you don’t mind microwave this time.”

“That’s fine.”

She got up and went to the sink and rinsed his cup, filled it with lukewarm coffee and put it in the microwave. The timer buzzed away the seconds. She watched the moths fluttering at the window over the sink, dozens of them drawn to the light, wanting in. She turned away from them.

“I’m not interested in getting rich,” she said. “I make enough to squeak by on and I’ve long since come to terms with that. The
work’s
the thing, Richard. I work hard and carefully at what I do and I think I do it fairly well. I’m no Dostoevski but I’m no hack either. You get themes in my books, you get people, issues—though I try hard not to hammer you over the head with them. You get some decent writing. What you
don’t
get I hope is simple, comfortable beach-reading. Tub-reading. Subway-reading. You don’t get Jackie Collins. It’s the
work
not getting out there—that it’s simply unavailable most of the time even if you wanted
to read it, even if you’re looking for it—that’s what gets my goat. That’s what I always come back to.”

The buzzer sounded. She brought him the steaming mug. She set it down in front of him and then walked to the living room and took a slim black dog-eared paperback off the bookshelves and brought it back with her into the kitchen. She flipped through it for a moment and found what she wanted and then sat down again.

“You mind doing some reading?”

“Not at all.”

She held it out to him.

“Pages eighty-two to ninety-four, where the scene breaks. My first novel. It made me some money and it made my reputation. Or maybe I should say notoriety.”

She watched him slip the elastic band into his jacket pocket and settle back in the chair and begin reading and saw that he did not break the binding—no more than it was already broken, the book having been lent and lent again. So in fact he
was
a reader. He knew how to treat a paperback.

He was also fast. By the time she’d refreshed her own mug he was almost through.

“You are good,” he said, smiling, closing the book. “And you
are
brutal. Unusual for a woman.”

“Try some of Joyce Carol Oates. Try Susanna Brown. It can be a brutal world, I figure. Anyhow the scene you’ve just read and a few other scenes got the publisher so upset he damn near fired the editor. Distributors were furious. So they decided to bury it, pretend it never happened. Pulled all the advertising, window posters, point-of-purchase displays, all that sort of thing—which were already set in motion by the way—and never put it into a second printing. This despite the fact that the book made money for them. That it sold a quarter-million copies, by word of mouth alone. Now I’m told it’s a collector’s item.”

He handed her the book and sat back in his chair and looked at her.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re thinking this is all very interesting and she’s paid me a good retainer and flown me out here but now let’s cut to the chase please. Let’s get on with it.”

He nodded. “Something like that. May I?”

He reached for another cigarette, lit it and stared at her through the smoke. The stare did not make her uncomfortable.

“I guess the question in my mind,” he said, “is who exactly is it? Who do you want me to get rid of? Your publisher? Your editor? Who’s the target?”

She almost laughed. She
did
smile. There were so many publishers, so many editors. So many distributors for that matter. To hire him to get all of them would take millions.

“Me,” she said. “I’m the target.”

If this surprised him she couldn’t see it. He just sat there calmly smoking, watching her. She sighed.

“The disease always strikes me as so damn banal. Bone cancer. I smoke two and half packs a day. It should have been lung cancer at least. Something that has something to do with me, something to do with the way I live. But I’m assured it will be painful enough.”

“So you don’t want to wait.”

“No, I don’t want to wait. I do want something else though.”

“Which would be what.”

“I want it done a certain way. In fact you’ve just read the way I want it done.”

And now she saw that she
had
managed to surprise him.

“You mean an approximation. Some kind of staging.”

“No. I want it done as closely as possible to the scene you just read. You see why I told you before that without knowing me you’d probably refuse the contract? But I’m not crazy and I’m not some kind of masochist. Someone is going to
notice
if you do it this way. Any other way and I’m just one more dead writer. But if you do it this way someone is going to refer it back to the book. Plenty of people
will, I think. And the book is going to go back into print, big-time. In fact if you do it right they’ll
all
go back into print. I know the way this works.”

He snubbed out the cigarette and nodded slowly, frowning.

“Give me the book again,” he said.

“Page eighty-two.”

“I know.”

She watched him read for a moment, reading it in a different way now, with a different understanding, then stood and went to the window by the sink. The moths fluttered, tapping with tiny feet and wings. On the hill outside she could see the dark outline of the tree. The rope was already there waiting coiled at its base beside the bucket. The pegs were driven. The kindling and logs all piled for the fire.

“Good God,” he said. “You really want this? All of it?”

“I want a good cop or a good forensics man to be able to go over every detail in the book and find it right there, in the flesh, outside. This is about the
work
, Richard, not about pain. I can handle the pain. I have a feeling you’re good. I have a feeling it won’t last long. Not as long as bone cancer anyway.”

“The last line . . . there’s no way in hell I could . . .”

“I anticipated that problem. And believe me I wouldn’t ask you to. So here’s the only area we’ll fudge a little.”

She opened the drawer in front of her beside the sink and reached in and withdrew what she’d made for him weeks ago and walked over and set it on the table. Two halves of a can of Pepsi. She’d taken scissors to each half and cut into them into two jagged lines.

“Ten years later I did a sequel,” she said. “Another attempt to get this first book back in print. It didn’t work. But these were in the sequel. Use them instead. Surrogate teeth, not real ones. Use them, take what you need to take and then dispose of them somewhere. Turn to the next chapter. Where it says
1:18 a.m
. That’s how it ends for her.
You haven’t read that yet. That’s how
I
end.”

He read. For a moment he actually went pale. He shook his head.

“I honestly don’t know if I can do this,” he said. “God knows you’re paying me well but . . .”

She sat down across from him and reached urgently across the table and gripped his hand so hard her knuckles went white.

“I’m paying you
everything
, Richard. Everything I have. My bank account has exactly fifty two dollars in it. I’ll show it to you. That’s what this means to me. One last gamble, Richard. All or nothing. Everything riding on the work. Your work and mine. Please. Do it right. I’m begging you.”

He stared at her hard across the table, searching for something inside her she thought or perhaps inside himself and then at last he seemed to find what he needed.

“Thank you,” she said.

They lay naked side by side in the bed because that was in the book too, that was how it started and Richard had not complained or balked at that, at the wearing of two hats so to speak but now it was time for the rest of it to happen. She had found him alternately a rough and tender lover and her orgasm perhaps because it was to be her last astonished her with its fierce complexity, its rhythms, smooth and jarring, so much like the way she wrote. She watched him rise from the bed and put on his clothes and glance at her bathed in moonlight, taking her in.

“Please. Do it
all
,” she said.

“I will.”

She lay peaceful in the silence waiting for him knowing that he would not lie to her, wondering if he’d read her now in the days and weeks to come, feeling that probably he would for how could he not be curious to give the work a try after this, thinking this as suddenly shattered glass was everywhere, she felt it spray across her breasts and stomach, her face and hair and felt hands close hard over
her wrists and pull her roughly across the broken windowpane raking her backbone, the broken shards of glass cutting deep and then she was out in the cool night air exactly as it should be, exactly as she’d written, and the end of her night began.

The
New York Times
reporter hung up the phone.

My God
, he thought,
what he’d done to her
.

He’d promised the Dead River, Maine PD to withhold some information just in case they caught the guy and to eliminate the cranks and crazies but felt pretty certain they were withholding none from him. These cops were so excited with their find they probably would have talked to the
Enquirer
.

Besides, the
Times
was
all the news that’s fit to print
.

And a whole lot of this didn’t qualify.

He went over the notes in front of him. The writer’s name was unfamiliar. Forty-nine years old. Female. Unmarried. No children. He made a mental note to get a photo. It would help if she was a looker. Eight novels under her belt. Her publisher was here in New York.

Then the details.

The writer had been dragged naked through her bedroom window in the middle of the night, punched in the jaw probably to unconciousness, hauled up the limb of a tree by ropes tied to her feet while two more ropes tied off each arm to pegs driven into the ground. There were indications she had awakened at some point and struggled, struggled hard, rope-burns on her wrists and ankles. The guy had taken a knife to her, slit her open from vagina to collar-bone and then slashed her throat, bleeding her into a large metal tub. Then he’d opened her up and took the heart.

And apparently ate quite a bit of it.

He’d taken out the liver and the kidneys and spitted her over a fire. He’d hacked meat off loins and breast, hacked off one of her legs, severed the head and cracked it open
on a rock and then scooped out the brains. All these showed signs of having been significantly nibbled too.

His story was going to be a monster.

He dialed information and got the number for her publisher, dialed that and asked to speak to her editor. Then he waited hoping he was going to get to the guy before the police did, hoping for the perfect stunned reaction.

His pencil was hot and ready.

The editor sat at his desk cluttered with notes and books and contracts and unanswered correspondence not to mention the telephone which he felt had just now bitten him like a snake and gazed up at the unkempt rows of westerns, mystery novels, suspense novels, romance novels, spy novels, all of which he had bought with hopes ranging from high through meager to almost none at all, none of which had done him any good within the company, few of which had earned out their advances and thought,
I’ve got to call the boss, my God I’ve got to call the boss, Jesus jumping christ I
never
call the boss but I’ve got to on this one
.

First, though
, he thought.

He pushed up from the swivel chair and away from the desk feeling a whole lot lighter than his two-hundred twenty-five pounds and ran out of the tiny nasty cubicle they called his goddamn office and out into the hall and leaned over his secretary’s desk and asked how many books they had of hers.
How many? she said. Copies? Not
copies
you dummy he said
, contracts!
How many books of hers are still under
contract!
Three, she said, the last three, rights have reverted on the rest. Well we’re sure as shit buyin’ ’em back!
he thundered so that a copy editor he thought a total incompetant because he actually insisted on reading a book through before he would deign to take a red pencil to the thing looked up at him and scowled because to the copy editor this was some kind of goddamn library not a fucking publishing company and he went back to his office and sat in his chair and calmed himself and laughed and shook his head and thought,
I love this job
and then he made the call.