attributed to the popular media’s saturation of society and its tendency
not merely to simplify all issues to the point of absurdity but to
confuse fiction and reality. Television news emphasized dramatic
footage over facts, sensationalism over substance, seeking ratings with
cop and courtroom dramas. Documentaries about real historical figures
had become “docudramas” in which accurate details of famous lives and
events were relentlessly subordinated to entertainment values or even to
the personal fantasies of the show’s creators, grossly distorting the
past. Patent medicines were sold in TV commercials by performers who
also played doctors in highly rated programs, as if they had in fact
graduated from Harvard Medical School instead of merely having attended
an acting class or two. Politicians made cameo appearances on episodes
of situation comedies. Actors in those comedies appeared at political
rallies. Not long ago the vice president of the United States engaged in
a protracted argument with a fictional television reporter from a
sitcom. The public confused actors and politicians with the roles they
played. A mystery writer was supposed to be not merely like a character
in one of his books but like the cartoonish archetype of the most common
character in the entire genre. And year by troubled year, fewer people
were able to think clearly about important issues or separate fantasy
from reality.
Marty had been determined not to contribute to that sickness, but he had
been suckered. Now he was fixed in the public mind as Martin
Stillwater, creepy and mysterious author of creepy murder mysteries,
preoccupied with the dark side of life, as brooding and strange as any
of the characters about whom he wrote.
Sooner or later a disturbed citizen, having confused Marty’s
manipulation of fictional people in novels for the manipulation of
actual people in real life, would arrive at his house in an old van
decorated with signs accusing him of having killed John Lennon, John
Kennedy, Rick Nelson, and God-alone-knew-who-else, even though he was an
infant when Lee Harvey Oswald pulled the trigger on Kennedy (or when
seventeen thousand and thirty-seven homosexual conspirators pulled the
trigger, if you believed Oliver Stone’s movie).
Something similar had happened to Stephen King, hadn’t it? And Salman
Rushdie had sure experienced a few years as suspenseful as any endured
by a character in a Robert Ludlum extravaganza.
Chagrined by the bizarre image the magazine had given him, flushed with
embarrassment, Marty surveyed the parking lot to be sure no one was
watching him as he read about himself. A couple of people were going to
and from their cars, but they were paying no attention to him.
Clouds had crept into the previously sunny day. The wind spun dead
leaves into a miniature tornado that danced across an empty expanse of
blacktop.
He read the article, punctuating it with sighs and mutters. Although it
contained a few minor errors, the text was generally factual.
But the spin on it matched the photographs. Spooky old Marty
Stillwater. What a dour and gloomy guy. Sees a criminal’s wicked grin
behind every smile. Works in a dimly lighted office, almost dark, and
says he’s just trying to reduce the glare on the computer screen (wink,
wink).
His refusal to allow Charlotte and Emily to be photographed, based upon
a desire to protect their privacy and to guard against their being
teased by schoolmates, was interpreted as a fear of kidnappers lurking
under every bush. After all, he had written a novel about a kidnapping
a few years ago.
Paige, “as pretty and cerebral as a Martin Stillwater heroine,” was said
to be a “psychologist whose own job requires her to probe into the
darkest secrets of her patients,” as if she was engaged not in the
counseling of children troubled by their parents’ divorces or the death
of a loved one but in the deep analysis of the era’s most savage serial
killers.
“Spooky old Paige Stillwater,” he said aloud. “Well, why else would she
have married me if she wasn’t already a little weird?”
He told himself he was over-reacting.
Closing the magazine, he said, “Thank God I didn’t let the girls
participate. They’d have come out of it looking like the children in