on hearing about his one bad moment in an otherwise fine day.
She looked up and met his eyes at last, still embracing him, and said,
“It might be nothing.”
“It’s something.”
“But I mean, nothing physical.”
He smiled ruefully. “It’s so comforting to have a psychologist in the
house.”
“Well, it could be psychological.”
“Somehow, it doesn’t help that maybe I’m just crazy.”
“Not crazy. Stressed.”
“Ah, yes, stress. The twentieth-century excuse, the favorite of
goldbrickers filing fake disability claims, politicians trying to
explain why they were drunk in a motel with naked teenage girls–” She
let go of him, turned away, angry. She wasn’t upset with Marty,
exactly, but with God or fate or whatever force had suddenly brought
turbulent currents into their smoothly flowing lives.
She started toward the desk to get her glass of wine before she
remembered she had already drunk it. She turned to Marty again.
“All right . . . except when Charlotte was so sick that time, you’ve
always been about as stressed out as a clam. But maybe you’re just a
secret worrier. And lately, you’ve had a lot of pressures.”
“I have?” he asked, raising his eyebrows.
“The deadline on this book is tighter than usual.”
“But I’ve still got three months, and I think I’ll need one.”
“All the new career expectations–your publisher and agent and everyone
in the business watching you in a different way now.”
The paperback reprints of his two most recent novels had placed on the
New York Times bestseller list, each for eight weeks. He had not yet
enjoyed a hardcover bestseller, but that new level of success seemed
imminent with the release of his new novel in January.
The sudden sales growth was exciting but also daunting. Though Marty
wanted a larger audience, he also was determined not to tailor his
writing to have wider appeal and thereby lose what made his books fresh.
He knew he was in danger of unconsciously modifying his work, so lately
he was being unusually hard on himself, even though he had always been
his own toughest critic and had always revised each page of a story as
many as twenty and thirty times.
“Then there’s People magazine,” she said.
“That’s not stressful. It’s over and done with.”
A writer for People had come to the house a few weeks ago, and a
photographer followed two days later for a ten-hour shoot. Marty being
Marty, he liked them and they liked him, although first he had
desperately resisted his publisher’s entreaties to do the piece.
Given his friendly relationship with the People people, he had no reason
to think the article would be negative, but even favorable publicity
usually made him feel cheap and grasping. To him, the books were what
mattered, not the person who wrote them, and he did not want to be, as
he put it, “the Madonna of the mystery novel, posing nude in a library
with a snake in my teeth to hype sales.”
“It’s not over and done with,” Paige disagreed. The issue with the
article about Marty would not hit the newsstands until Monday. “I know
you’re dreading it.”
He sighed. “I don’t want to be”
“Madonna with a snake in your teeth.
I know, baby. What I’m saying is, you’re more stressed about the
magazine than you realize.”
“Stressed enough to black out for seven minutes?”
“Sure. Why not? I’ll bet that’s what the doctor will say.”
Marty looked skeptical.
Paige moved into his arms again. “Everything’s been going so well for
us lately, almost too well. There’s a tendency to get a little
superstitious about it. But we worked hard, we earned all of this.
Nothing’s going to go wrong. You hear me?”
“I hear you,” he said, holding her close.
“Nothing’s going to go wrong,” she repeated. “Nothing.”
After midnight.
The neighborhood boasts big lots, and the large houses are set far back
from the front property lines. Huge trees, so ancient they seem almost
to have acquired nascent intelligence, stand sentinel along the streets,
watching over the prosperous residents, autumn stripped black limbs
bristling like high-tech antennae, gathering information beyond the
brick and stone walls.
The killer parks around the corner from the house in which his work