“And by that you mean?”

She cocked her head a little. Who was testing whom? Was I ignorant of what it meant, or did I suspect that she was using a word that was too big for her? She said, “Garish, glitzy, ornate yet phony. Tinsel and tawdry.”

“Alright, but why would you want to go someplace like that?”

“To give me the opportunity to say ‘meretricious.’ It’s such a gorgeous and underutilized word in a world that’s growing more meretricious every day.”

“You like using ostentatious words in a pretentious way,” I said.

“I thought,” she said, “it would make me seem precocious and eager to appear older than I am.”

“How old are you? Really.”

“I meant in terms of the scenario. A precocious fourteen-year-old, who’s read too many books and would like to know more of real life but trembles before it.” Which was pretty much how she sounded.

“I think this is going to work,” I said.

“Where are we going for this party?” she asked. “And how should I dress?”

“It’s actually a fundraiser,” I said.

“For?”

“For the libraries of the Hudson Valley.”

“That’s so…laudable,” she said. “I majored in literature. Briefly. But I still have a great admiration for it. And where is it?”

“About an hour and a half upstate. Near Rhinebeck.”

“Oh, how perfect,” she said. “How wonderful to be back there.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

PRAYERS?

“A JOURNEY OF A THOUSAND miles begins with a single step.”

That comes from Tao Te Ching, by Lao Tzu, the father of Taoism. All such things are open to multiple interpretations, even if they aren’t translations from an archaic version of a distant language and credited to a person whose very existence is disputed. Nonetheless, this aphorism seems to have a certain clarity to it. However long the journey, it must start with that first step. If you try to look 1,000 miles ahead and think about how long it will take and how much effort is needed, you will be overwhelmed. Instead, take the single step. Next, all you need to do is take one step. Not one more step, there is no past to weary you, no endless future to intimidate you, only the present, with one single step.

Murdering Mick McMunchun—so it wouldn’t look like murder, getting away with it, making sure I got paid the promised amount—was a journey of 1,000 miles. Too great a distance, too many mountains to climb, rivers to cross, people who might try to stop me on purpose or by accident, too many possible accidents to anticipate, too many mistakes I might make.

Finding the girl, having her seem so right—it felt like that first step. The first step that I was certain was going forward on that journey. I’d been a half-dead thing. Saying yes to this beyond-the-bounds project into precarious and treacherous territory had made me feel like I was coming back to life. Looking at myself from an imaginary distance, as we often do, I was watching a sci-fi film, and I was an automaton taken out of storage, experiencing reactivation.