Contents ( 85)
- Contents
- Part I
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-One
- Twenty-Two
- Twenty-Three
- Twenty-Four
- Twenty-Five
- Twenty-Six
- Twenty-Seven
- Twenty-Eight
- Twenty-Nine
- Part II
- Thirty
- Thirty-One
- Thirty-Two
- Thirty-Three
- Thirty-Four
- Thirty-Five
- Thirty-Six
- Thirty-Seven
- Thirty-Eight
- Thirty-Nine
- Forty
- Forty-One
- Forty-Two
- Forty-Three
- Part III
- Forty-Four
- Forty-Five
- Forty-Six
- Forty-Seven
- Forty-Eight
- Forty-Nine
- Fifty
- Fifty-One
- Fifty-Two
- Fifty-Three
- Fifty-Four
- Fifty-Five
- Fifty-Six
- Fifty-Seven
- Fifty-Eight
- Fifty-Nine
- Sixty
- Sixty-One
- Sixty-Two
- Sixty-Three
- Sixty-Four
- Sixty-Five
- Sixty-Six
- Sixty-Seven
- Sixty-Eight
- Sixty-Nine
- Seventy
- Seventy-One
- Seventy-Two
- One
- Two
- Reading Group Guide
- A Conversation with the Author
- Acknowledgments
- About the Author
Colin had neither.
He barely even had a sense of Rose Yates. Before the trip, he found as much as he could about her online. There had been a handful of blogs by and about her, a couple of podcast interviews, and even a brief local TV news interview from a few years ago when her second book had come out.
Colin thought he had a good picture of the woman. How to approach her. How to act to get her to trust him.
But he’d been wrong.
Rose Yates was a fortress wall, smooth and solid, with no place for handholds.
Colin paused for one last moment before getting in the cruiser waiting for him. One breath. Three seconds of silence. Then he opened the passenger-side door and slid in.
“No go?” Officer Drew Simmons—Colin’s local PD escort while he was in Bury—started the ignition, and cool air blew from the Dodge Charger’s air vents. Colin hadn’t been expecting seventy-degree weather in New Hampshire in the second half of October.
“Negative,” Colin said.
“So now what?”
“ I go back to Milwaukee tonight.”
“That’s a shame,” Simmons said.
“Yeah.” Colin sighed. “It is.”
Simmons pulled the cruiser from Tuli’s parking lot and turned right on Bryson Street toward the police station, about a mile away. He kept to the speed limit, bringing all other cars around theirs to the exact same speed. Everyone’s cautious around a cop, Colin thought. Some of the folks in traffic just didn’t want a ticket. Others perhaps really had something to hide, maybe the kind of crime that only gets discovered after a routine traffic stop.
Colin scanned the rows of houses along the boulevard, sensing he was staring at a Norman Rockwell painting. After taking in the town for a few seconds, he turned to Simmons. “How old are you?”
“Twenty-five.”
“And you said you grew up here?”
“That’s right.”
“What was that like? I mean, this place seems so perfect.”
Simmons shrugged, as if he had never considered his childhood before. “It was okay. Boring, I suppose. I’m sure my parents hoped I’d do something other than be a cop, but it’s what I wanted.”
“Boring,” Colin repeated. “Nothing exciting ever happened?”
Simmons turned to him. “Exciting like how?”
Ever since Colin had found out about Clara Tomson, he couldn’t get the write-what-you-know notion out of his head. It was an overly simplified and ignorant notion, of course. Writers didn’t only write what they knew. There would never be a Game of Thrones or Pet Sematary if wild imagination didn’t come into play.
But Colin had also learned to listen to himself. When an idea struck him in a certain way, as obtuse as it might be, he’d learned how to nurture that idea until it yielded something of substance. The idea that Clara Tomson committed murder when she was a teen and then lived the rest of her life writing mystery novels… Well, that struck Colin in a certain way, especially when he added Rose Yates into that same thought process.