About the Author (10 page)

The man, ignoring this, continued, “Maybe I can help you?”

“Well,” I said, “I doubt that. I really do need to speak to—”

“
Honey? Was that the doorbell
?” the woman’s voice said, drawing closer.

“
Yes
!” he bellowed over his shoulder. Then, in a quieter voice, to me: “Here’s my wife. I’m just going to . . .” He looked down at the heavy bags he was carrying.

“Sorry, go ahead,” I said. I stepped backward across the porch. He nodded in thanks and trudged past me, out the screen door, which I held open for him. It was at this precise moment that an orange blur streaked across the bottom of my vision and I heard both children scream: “
Gertie
!” It was too late. The cat, dodging around the guy’s bare ankles, bounded out the door and ran off across the lawn, disappearing—in one long, elegant jump—into some tall grass. The children burst past me, wailing.

Just then, the woman appeared in the doorway. She was a rattled, too-thin suburban-housewife type dressed in a polo shirt and denim skirt, and she, too, was carrying a suitcase, which she put down. She squinted at me and said, “Are you here about the house?”

“The house,” I said.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to talk to Janet, the owner. We’ve just been renting for the summer.”

“
Gertie
!” the kids were calling into the yard. “
Here kitty, kitty, kitty
!”

“I see,” I said.

“So, I’m afraid I really can’t—”

The phone rang from within the house. The woman started, then said, “Just a moment, please.” She hurried away. I glanced off to my right and saw that her husband, having abandoned the bags on the driveway, had joined the two children in trying to lure the cat back. “Gertie!” he was fluting in a high-pitched voice. “Gertie!”

Alone for the time being, I stood in the doorway, sizing up the situation.

Had I understood this woman to say that she and her brats had been in this house
all summer
? Might that not mean that they had been in occupancy on
July 2
? Did that mean they’d been here when Stewart’s FedEx package arrived? Did that mean Janet Greene had not yet seen the manuscript? Even as this possibility formed in my mind’s eye, my
corporeal
eye lit upon the table in the vestibule in front of me—a narrow, dark wooden table set against the back wall. There, on its surface, was a stack of mail, clearly Janet Greene’s mail, the accumulation of two months’ worth of magazines, letters, and envelopes of all shapes and sizes. By far the biggest piece of correspondence, the one you really couldn’t miss, not only because of its bulk but also because of its distinctive coloration, was the carton with the vivid purple and orange lettering reading FEDERAL EXPRESS.

I could hear the woman’s muffled voice as she chattered away into the phone. A glance to my right revealed, through the porch screen, a tableau of father, son, and daughter, their backs to me, as they cried out over the grass, “
Gertiiieee
!”

It was now or never.

I swept across the threshold, stepped with one foot over the heaped sports equipment, and with my right hand seized the FedEx carton, which I tried to wiggle loose from the middle of the pile without sending the rest of the stacked mail onto the floor. I had not yet managed to work the box free when I heard the woman’s voice climb into an end-of-phone-call register. Immediately, she hung up, and her footsteps rapidly approached. At the same moment, I heard one of the children cry, “
I got Gertie
!” Desperate, I tightened my grip on the edge of the carton, then whipped it from the pile in the manner of a magician yanking a cloth out from under a full table setting. The box came free without tumbling a single piece of mail to the floor. As the woman rounded the corner, and her daughter bounded up the porch steps, I managed to high-step back over the heaped sports equipment, feint back through the doorway—and simultaneously stuff the bulky object under my raincoat.

The woman looked surprised to discover that I was still around.

“Sorry to bother you further,” I said, trying to control my breathing. “But when, exactly, does Janet get back?”

“She told me that her plane would get in around nine. So I suppose she should be home around ten.”

“You let Gertie out!” said a voice at waist level.

I looked down. The little girl, pouting, thrust the cat’s triangular face up at me. I would’ve patted the beast between its batlike ears, in thanks, if I hadn’t been using both hands to hold the manuscript concealed under my raincoat. I was starting to tremble now, in a combination of fear, excitement, and relief. It was very much time for me to leave.

“Well,” I said, returning my gaze to the woman. “Thanks very much. I will talk to Janet.”

“
Caveat emptor
is all I can say.” It was the man, coming in through the screen door. “Great view. Charming place. But the roof leaks, foundation is shot, wiring’s ancient.”

“That right?” I said, backing away toward the exit. With a buttock nudge, I got the screen door open. “I’ll bear that in mind.”

“Unless you’re into handyman’s specials.”

“Not really,” I said.

“Then I’d give it a miss.”

“Yes, well, thanks for the advice. And good-bye!”

I turned and hustled down the two steps to the gravel drive and, without so much as a glance back at the nuclear Blonds, climbed into my car and drove off with my prize.

Do you recall what it was like, back in high school, when you had neglected to study for a major math test? You dragged yourself to school, your mind seething with half-digested algebraic formulas. As you entered the classroom and proceeded up the aisle to your desk, you felt like a convicted killer climbing the gallows. But remember how you felt when the vice principal appeared before the cloudy blackboard to inform you (like the governor bearing a stay of execution) that Mr. Quadratic was sick, and that your test was postponed until Monday? And that, furthermore, you had a “free study period”? Oh, the expanding sense of wonder and relief, the ripening elation, the dawning sense that God loved you after all, that life was, indeed, Good and Beautiful!

Such ecstasy of disaster averted was, maybe, one one-millionth of the joy I felt that morning as I guided my Celica down Janet Greene’s hill to the main road, then (for the sheer joy-riding hell of it) up a street that branched off opposite the Snak Shak—up above the town, up into the green hills that opened out before me. I rolled down my window and hooted into the rushing wind. I stomped the pedal to the floor, and my Celica swooshed to the top of a grade as if it might launch into the air the way cars do in cop dramas. But no cop was chasing me! No sirree. I was free, free, free! I had committed no transgression worse than stealing the fat FedEx carton that bounced now like a baby (the Lindbergh baby, I guess) on the passenger seat beside me. As for the Blond family’s noticing, in its final moments in the Greene house, that a piece of the chaotically piled mail was missing, the chances of that were so remote as to be nonexistent.

Euphoria, however, cannot be sustained indefinitely. As I guided my Celica over the road, my mood cooled from uncontrolled exultation to a mere inward glow of serenity that finally permitted the first practical consideration to bob to the surface of my brain. Where, exactly, to dispose of my little kidnap victim?

Coming up on my right was an abandoned tractor trail that nibbled its way into an overgrown field. I slowed, turned off, then crept my car along the path, which cut through the lacy grass like a sunburned part in hair. Ahead, the path disappeared, dipping over a ridge. I nosed the car over the brow, then parked it some way down the grade, where it could not be seen from the highway. I got out with the carton, sat on the grass, and opened the package. On top was the original of Stewart’s letter to Janet Greene (“I hope you will read the enclosed manuscript . . .”). I whisked this horrible thing away. Staring me in the face was a still more horrible object: the carbon copy of Stewart’s title page, each letter cloudier and smudgier than on the original that I had burned in Fort Tryon Park, but still perfectly legible:

I scrunched this obscene page into a ball, then used the dashboard cigarette lighter to set it aflame. Twenty minutes later, Janet Greene’s copy of the novel no longer existed. Packing dirt over the heap of ashes, I experienced not only a pang of déjà vu but also a feeling that I was stuffing stubborn Stewart back into the earth where he belonged. And it was funny: not until I had reconsigned him to his final resting place was I able fully to relax and, finally, absorb the world around me. What a world!

Cupped in the valley below me was blue Lake Sylvan, with New Halcyon clustered at its tip. To my right, the lake’s shining flank widened and stretched away into the distance, melting into a line of rounded blue hills beyond which was an actual chain of mountains, their conical summits fading into the sky. I could not remember when my eyes, geared to New York’s cramped perspectives, had last set themselves on such infinite focus. Never, certainly, had I seen a landscape of such overwhelming, almost supernatural, beauty. I don’t know how long I stood trying to drink in that view, trying to answer the subtle riddle it seemed to pose. Perhaps an hour. And in that hour, on that silent ridge overlooking paradise, I knew pure peace—a peace untroubled by the thought that, as with those high school math tests, disaster averted is often simply disaster postponed.

A combination of mountain air and emotional relief had awakened my appetite. Back in town, I stopped at the Snak Shak and had breakfast—my first food in two days. The logical thing to do now is hop the first flight home, I thought as I munched through a stack of pancakes smothered in local maple syrup. And yet . . . my epiphany on the hill above New Halcyon had left me feeling anything but logical. Convinced that luck was once again on my side, I felt no particular pressure to hurry back to steaming New York.

And so, stunned by starch and maple sugar, I strolled out into the street and became a tourist. I ambled to my right, past the little bank, past a shop I hadn’t noticed the night before, called Antiques & Things, then stopped and read the announcements on a public bulletin board: notices advertising winter rentals (entire houses for three hundred a month!); barn sales; art shows; local theater productions; baby-sitting; leaf-raking. These motley announcements affected me keenly; they spoke of community, of a human-scaled interaction unknown to towering New York. The crazy thought shot through me that I would never leave New Halcyon, that I would retire here in rustic splendor, a poet germinating lyrical effusions while good-naturedly sleeping with the local farmers’ daughters. At the local prices, I could live here like a king, on the interest from my publisher’s advance and Hollywood loot, never touching the principle, until my death at age ninety. And if I never produced another scrap of writing, would that really be so strange? American letters teemed with one-hit wonders gone to rot in rural backwaters. Why, it was almost a literary tradition!

I spent the rest of that Saturday trying to drink the place in, to store it away like treasure in my sense-memory. At around seven-thirty, the light began to die. I sat on a dock as the sun slid behind the hill opposite. It was time to go back to the hotel. I let my eyes linger for a moment longer on the distant, steadily burning light that I had been staring at for the past two hours: Janet Greene’s porch light, left on by the Blond family, presumably to discourage thieves, if such people existed in this idyllic hamlet. Of course,
I
was a thief who had, that very day, stolen Janet Greene’s personal property, but this thought did not occur to me then, as so much else did not. Even as my eyes settled, again, on that distant dab of light, another bulb switched on in the house! Then another! I glanced at my watch. Ten past ten. She was right on schedule. Janet Greene was
here
in New Halcyon, a mere five minute’s drive away! This seemed a momentous revelation, and with it came the further, unexpected, realization that I had, in fact, been waiting for her all along.

Ask me why I stuck around in New Halcyon one more day to rig up a meeting with Janet Greene, and I will say, simply, “Curiosity.”

Of course, it was more than idle curiosity that led me to risk an in-person encounter with Stewart’s mystery woman. By now it was obvious to me that my trip to Vermont had been a mission almost as much to learn about Janet Greene as to intercept the manuscript. I could not leave with her riddle unsolved; I could not return to New York until I had met the woman who’d played such an important role in the life of my ghostwriter.

It was around nine-thirty the next morning when I settled up “Colin Coleman” ’s hotel bill and then set out for Janet Greene’s place. My trip was not nearly as fraught as it had been the day before. I had invented a plausible enough reason for dropping in on her unannounced. No need to speak of depressed roommates, stolen novels, Hedda Gableresque manuscript burnings, odd and untimely deaths. I was simply a friendly, inquisitive out-of-towner who had fallen in love with New Halcyon. Not so far from the truth.

Today, a battered gray pickup was parked out front of her house, in the same spot where the Blond family’s Bronco had sat. I parked behind the truck and got out. There was a ladder leaning against the side of the house. I followed up it with my eyes. A red-faced workman dressed in blue coveralls and holding a hammer was regarding me from behind a shallow roof projection. He seemed stamped against the blue sky like a decal.

“Help you?” he said, peering down at me over the eaves.

He was in his eighties, at least. For a moment I wondered if this might not be Mr. Greene, Janet’s husband, and if Stewart’s letter might not have been a love note, rather than a respectful missive to a favored old female English professor, a wizened old crone, Dr. Janet Greene, who’d once encouraged his writing.