old Jules de Grandin and John Thunstone pulps. I’m not a big fan of horror, but I had
side.
here anymore.”
I decided to try a different approach. “Can I get your name? Maybe he’ll phone me
witches to be hanged. Cute.
teenagers in black lipstick – boys and girls – or chainmail jewelry on middle-aged men who
with broken furniture or the building struck by a lightning bolt.
impulse to finish off the last of the drugstore champagne and hide in the stockroom.
in fact, he looked like the male half of the illustration on a historical romance: unruly raven
rhinestones in his teeth? Certainly something shone in his right earlobe. He wore leather
“But this is charming,” Gabriel assured me, as Friedlander navigated his star in my
Enthusiastic applause from the waiting audience echoed off the dark beams.
understand you write also.”
“A little.” Not enough, thank God, that anyone wanted to send me out on the road.
“You’re too modest. I’ve read Murder Will Out. Very witty.”
Either this guy did his homework like nobody I’d ever met before, or he was gay. My
books don’t attract many mainstream readers.
“But you need a hook,” he said. “A platform.”
acclaimed literary fiction that no one wanted to read, and then what happens? He comes up
audience loved it. They stayed silent as the proverbial grave while he read. Not a whisper,
“As you know, I’ve made a fortune telling stories about the occult and its practitioners,
evidence of a real-life, secret cult, a sinister organization which has preyed upon the young
plan to expose that cult and its leaders to the world.”
shaking. I glanced up. His round face was white, perspiring; he looked terrified.
a best-selling book. At the back of the room, however, stood a small group of young women.
Elvira: the Early Years. They appeared to be hissing at Savant.
The first Saturday of each month I had brunch with my mother, at the ancestral ruins
(an initial attempt to make a break for it). I’d learned to drive in the quiet surrounding
the fake open beams and poster of a boyishly grinning Robert Redford in The Natural.
“Darling,” Lisa gently protested when I could breathe again. “You shouldn’t talk with
The “why nots” were so many that I was speechless. The worst part of it all was that for
Seeing my moment of weakness, she moved in for the kill.
challenges of running a small business. “And when you talk about needing to expand, I
darling. Whereas this house is paid for free and clear.”
give in to whatever she wanted for me.
“Actually, I’m thinking of getting married.”
In the silence that followed her words, I heard one of the Christmas ornaments fall
through the branches of the ten-foot noble fir taking up a quarter of the dining room.