Eve couldn’t pinpoint when her suspicion of lists began, but it must have been early. Maybe as early as seven or eight . . . In the basement of St. Mary’s . . . where she and the rest of the second graders memorized the Ten Commandments in Latin as their parents dozed to Father O’Connor upstairs.

Soon after that came the Twelve Apostles—with the Thirty Presidents close on their heels. The Seven Deadly Sins. The Five Hundred Rules of Grammar. And that list of all lists: the forever unfurling one that Ol’ Saint Nick used to separate the naughty from the nice.

Yep. In Indiana, a young girl had good reason to suspect that lists were the foot soldiers of tyranny—crafted for the sole purpose of bridling the unbridled. A quashing, squashing, squelching of the human spirit by means of itemization.

In search of refuge, at the age of seventeen Eve began stopping in at St. Mary’s on the way home from school to light a candle and mutter a prayer. Three months (and sixty nickels) later, Eve’s parents actually agreed to send her to Switzerland for a year. They even acted like it was their idea! But when Eve finally arrived at the académie, and opened the trunk that had been sent in advance, there on top of a lifetime supply of white buttoned blouses was a handwritten list of Ten Things a Young Lady Should Remember When Traveling Abroad.

Naturally, in the heat of the moment this discovery was irksome. But upon reflection, it was the perfect surprise with which to start her excursion. For having smoothed the pleats of her skirt, Eve sat at her desk, corrected her posture, and proceeded to tear her mother’s list into five hundred pieces.

Which is actually much harder than it sounds!

The first two hundred tears come rather easy. They’re like pulling the drumsticks from a well-roasted turkey. But thereafter, the scraps of paper that you’re rending are less than half an inch square. To execute five hundred individual tears requires the delicate finger-work and otherworldly patience of those who scratch the names of angels on the heads of pins.

But, if Eve couldn’t pinpoint when her suspicion of lists began, she could remember exactly when it ended: She was somewhere in the interminable majesty of the American West, sitting in the dining car of the Golden State Limited, reading a detective novel.

The Crimson Gown . . .

Living up to the promise of its cover, the story began brightly with the strangling of a starlet. In the pages that followed, the nasty particulars of the victim’s rise to fame were slowly revealed. Piece by piece the lonely detective puts the sordid puzzle together. But only in chapter nineteen does it finally dawn on him that the hands around the starlet’s throat in chapter one had been those of the Oriental chanteuse whom he’d fallen for in chapter five.