“What can I do?” Walter asked, his voice gentle again.

I shook my head. I murdered, too. Cut out a woman’s heart and shot a man in the head, because Orson told me to. The words ricocheted inside my head, but I couldn’t tell Walter what I’d done. Somehow, I thought it’d be enough that he knew about Orson and where I’d been.

“I have nightmares every night. I can’t write. The things I saw…”

“You have to talk to someone. Something like this could fuck you over for—”

“I’m talking to you,” I said, watching a boat drag an inner tube across the lake and wondering what really was coursing through Walter’s mind.

He came to the window, and we both leaned against the glass.

“She’s right out there,” I said, pointing toward the woods. “In a shallow grave.”

We stood for ages by the window. I thought he might push for more details, but he kept the silence, and I was grateful.

It was soon time for him to leave. He had his daughter’s play to attend. I pictured Jenna onstage, Walter and Beth in the audience, beaming. I swear it only lasted a second, but I was gorged with envy.

16

JEANETTE Thomas lived alone in a dying neighborhood in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in the same ranch-style house where her sons had grown up and her husband had died. It had been a thriving middle-class neighborhood when I was a child, but now as I drove my red CJ-7 slowly along Race Street, I marveled at how the area had changed. Rusted chain-link fences enclosed the yards, and some of the homes were derelict. It seemed as if an elderly person sat in a rocking chair on every front porch, waving at the infrequent cars that passed through. This neighborhood served as the final zone of independence for many of its residents, most only several years from a nursing home existence.

Approaching my mother’s house, I couldn’t help but ruminate on what this place had once been. In my childhood, kids had filled the streets, and I saw them now, riding bicycles and scrap-wood contraptions, laughing, fighting, chasing the ice-cream truck as it made the rounds on a sweltering summer afternoon. A wonderland, shrouded in shady green trees and electric with youthful energy, it had been mine and Orson’s world. We’d climbed its trees, navigated the cool darkness of the drainage ditches, and explored the forbidden woods that bordered the north side of the neighborhood. We’d formed secret clubs, constructed rickety tree houses, and smoked our first cigarette here on a deserted baseball diamond one winter night. Because it was the only home of my childhood, the memories were thick and staggering. They overcame me every time I returned, and now that this neighborhood had become a ghost town, my childhood felt far more spectacular. The present listless decay made my memories rich and resplendent.

My mother always parked her car at the bottom of the driveway so she wouldn’t back over the mailbox. When I saw her car edged slightly into the street, I smiled and parked near the curb in front of her house. I cut off the Jeep and opened the door to the grating whine of a leaf blower. Stepping outside, I slammed the door.

Across the street, an old man sat in a chair on his front porch, smoking a pipe and watching a crew of teenagers blow the leaves on his lawn into a brown pile. He waved to me, and I waved back. Mr. Harrison. We were twelve when we learned about your subscription to Playboy. Stole the magazine for three consecutive months. Checked your mailbox every day for its delivery when we got home from school. You caught us the fourth month. Peeped from behind your curtain for a whole week, waiting to identify the thieves. Came tearing out of the house, fully intent on dragging us to our mother, until you realized she’d know you were a dirty old man. “Well, you got three of ’em already!” you shouted, then whispered, “I’ll leave ’em on my back porch when I’m through. How about that? At least let me get my money’s worth.” That was fine by us.

“Hey!” a man shouted from a gray Honda that had stopped in the middle of the street. I stepped back down off the curb and walked toward the car.

“Can I help you with something?” I asked. I placed him at twenty-six or twenty-seven. His hair was very black, and his razor-thin face was baby ass–smooth and white. The interior of his car reeked of Windex. I didn’t like his eyes.

“Are you Andrew Thomas?” he asked.

Here we go.

Since the publication of my first novel, I’d kept a running count—excluding conferences, literary festivals, and other publicized appearances, this was the thirty-third time I’d been recognized.

I nodded. “No way! I’m reading your book right now. Um, The Incinerator—no, ah, I know what it’s called.…”

“The Scorcher.”

“That’s it. I love it. In fact, I’ve got it with me. Do you think that, um, that…”

“Would you like for me to sign it?”

“Would you?”

“Be happy to.” He reached onto the floorboard in the back, grabbed my newest hardcover, and handed it to me. I guess I just look like I have a pen on me. Sometimes it was disappointing meeting the fans. “You got a pen?” I asked.

“Shit, I don’t—oh, wait.” He opened the glove compartment and retrieved a short, dull pencil. He’d played miniature golf recently. As I took the pencil, I glanced at the jacket of The Scorcher—an evil smiling face, consumed in flames. I hadn’t been particularly pleased with this jacket design, but no one cares what the author thinks.

“You want me just to sign it?” I asked.

“Could you do it to …sign it to my girlfriend?”

“Sure.” Are you gonna tell me her name, or do I have to ask? …I have to ask. “What’s her name?”

“Jenna.”

“J-E-N-N-A?”

“Yep.” I set my book on the roof of his car and scribbled her name and one of the three dedications I always use: “To Jenna—may your hands tremble and your heart pound. Andrew Z. Thomas.” I closed the book and returned it. “She’s gonna love this,” he said, shifting the car back into drive. “Thank you so much.” I shook his cold, thin hand and stepped back over the curb.

As he drove away, I walked through my mother’s uncut grass toward the front door. A gusty wind passed through the trees and tickled my spine. The morning sky was overcast, filled with bumpy mattresslike clouds, which in the coming months might be filled with snow. In the center of her lawn, against the ashen late-October sky, a silver maple exploded in burnt orange.

As I continued through the grass, the appearance of her house grew dismal. Beginning to pull away from the roof, the gutters overflowed with leaves, and the siding had peeled and buckled. Even the yard had turned into a jungle, and I didn’t doubt Mom had fired the lawn service I’d hired for her. She’d been infuriatingly stubborn in her refusal to accept any degree of financial assistance. I’d tried to buy her a new house after The Killer and His Weapon was sold to Hollywood, but she refused. She wouldn’t let me pay her bills, buy her a car, or even send her on a cruise. Whether it was her pride or just ignorance concerning how much money I made, I wasn’t sure, but it irritated me to no end. She insisted on scraping by with Social Security, her teacher’s pension, and the tiny chunk of Dad’s life insurance, now almost gone.

I stepped up onto the front porch and rang the doorbell. Bob Barker’s voice from The Price Is Right escaped through a cracked window. I heard my mother dragging a stool across the floor so she could reach the peephole.

“It’s me, Mom,” I said through the door.

“Andrew, is that you?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Three dead bolts turned, and it opened.