“Turns out the playwright is famous,” said Myrna. “But not in the way you’d hope. It’s John Fleming.”

Clara shook her head. The name meant nothing. And yet, there was a small niggling, more a gnawing really.

Myrna waited.

Clara looked off, trying to place the name. The man. John Fleming.

“Is it someone we’ve met?” she asked, and Myrna shook her head. “But we know him?”

Myrna nodded.

And then Clara had it. Headlines. Television images of jostling photographers, trying to get a picture of the little man in the neat suit, being led into court.

How different real monsters were from the film kind.

John Fleming was famous indeed.

*   *   *

Ruth closed the last page of the script and laid a blue-veined hand on the stack of paper.

Then, making up her mind, she lit the logs in the hearth and held the script over it until her thin skin sizzled. But she couldn’t do it.

“Stay here,” she commanded Rosa, who watched from her flannel nest.

Finding a small shovel, Ruth went outside, and sinking to her knees she hacked at the earth. Cutting away at the grass. Digging deeper, fighting the ground for every inch, as though it knew her intention and was resisting. But Ruth didn’t give up. If she could have dug down to the bedrock, she would have. Finally she was deep enough for her purpose.

Picking up the script, Ruth placed it in the hole. Then she covered it up, shoving the dirt in with her hands. Sitting back on her heels, kneeling under the night sky, she wondered if she should say something. A thin prayer. A curse?

“And now it is now,” she whispered, quoting her own poem over the fresh-turned earth.

And the dark thing is here,

and after all it is nothing new;

it is only a memory, after all:

She got to her feet and stared down and thought about what she’d done. And what he’d done.

A memory of a fear.

Perhaps she should say something to Armand. But maybe it would be all right. Maybe it would stay buried.

Ruth went inside, locking the door behind her.

Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

“I’m thinking of quitting the play,” said Gabri.

The breakfast rush at the bistro was over and his guests at the B and B had left after the weekend. Now he sat in a comfortable armchair in the bay window of Myrna’s New and Used Bookstore. Myrna sat across from him in her own chair, unmistakable because it had taken on, over the years, her ample form. Beside her, on the floor, was a stack of books to be priced and put on shelves.

From the outside they might have looked like mannequins in a window display, except for their grim expressions.

“I’ve decided to quit,” said Myrna.