“I can get you into an anthology,” she said, in her Slavic lilt that men of all persuasions supposedly found irresistible back in the seventies.

“Who with?”

“What does it matter who with? You need to get yourself back into circulation, my dear. Look at Stephen King—he wrote Carrie in 1974 and there he is, still plowing away at it, top drawer, bottom drawer, all the drawers.”

“So Steve’s actually going to be in this thing?”

“No . . .” said Lena, carefully. “It’s a new crowd. Fresh blood. That’s why we think it’ll be good to have you in the mix. You get to be the éminence grise, baby.”

“You promised we wouldn’t be discussing the book business.”

“But we are not—it’s a magazine anthology.”

“Magazine?” Raymond lost his appetite. “Yeesh.”

“All right, journal. Do you want to spend the next hour talking semantics? There’ll be slots for you—two, three times a year. Mid to high word-rate, so don’t sulk. Guaranteed slots, so you won’t need to suffer the humiliation of submission.” She watched the muscles above his jowls tighten. “Raymond, I worry about you. You behave as if you’re some mummified corpse. It’s a colossal waste. All I’m trying to do is wake you up.”

“I’ve been percolating, that’s all.” Raymond called for the check.

Lena raised a kohl-painted eyebrow. “That’s not the best way to make coffee. Nespresso will tell you that. So what’s brewing?”

“I’ve been toying for some time with the idea for a book, sort of. It’ll draw parallels between modern American life and the Middle Ages in Europe. You know, the atmosphere of fanaticism, witch-hunting, the belief in the supernatural, and so on . . .”

“Fascinating.” Lena squeezed his hand, which meant shut up. “But in the meantime, why don’t you cook up a couple of short stories? You used to be able to whip those up in no time. You used to understand fear so well.” She watched him squirm, and savored it. She grinned like the Cheshire cat: “Just think of your father.”

Lena was right. His old man was the real horror. If he hadn’t had to pay for his old man’s expenses, he would have put in a pool years ago. He would have turned his garage into a gym-and-sauna combo. He would have done all that plus maybe bought a house in Cabo or the Palm Desert. Paying for his dad to live at Dartmoor was like sending two kids to Harvard for the rest of their lives. Twenty-four-hour call buttons, low-sodium cordon bleu dinners and Jazzercise with Nobel laureates.