2

EVE PARISH STOOD IN THE CENTER of a large empty room trying to imagine a metal desk anywhere in it. A futile attempt, she decided, and tried with an equally ugly army-issue desk from half a century earlier. She had looked at them both earlier that morning, along with a third desk meant for a six-year-old. But she had to have a desk. Working on the kitchen table signified a disaster sooner or later. Spilled coffee on her laptop, or hot soup, bread crumbs… It was a toss-up about which would go first, her laptop or her back. The table was too high for work.

Her apartment was twice as big as the one she had lived in while attending NYU, and it was half the price, but one of the three rooms was bare. Her landlady, Mrs. Hammond, had explained: the two previous renters, both professors, had put two desks in there, bookcases, file cabinets, boxes of papers. They had filled it to overflowing and when they left, they took it all with them.

“I decided to leave it alone,” Mrs. Hammond had said apologetically. “I mean, new tenants would probably have their own things.”

Eve left the empty room and considered the living room. A nice sofa, easy chair, tables and lamps, plenty of furniture, and room for a good desk if she decided to go that way, but she wanted a separate room, a study, even if all she put in it was a desk. The boxes of books stacked against a wall would go in there, and while she had her sister’s car, she planned to buy some cement blocks and boards for shelves. For the study, she told herself. A desk and books on shelving of some sort equaled a separate study.

She glanced at her watch, consulted her map of Stillwater again, and left to go inspect the only remaining secondhand desk on her list. She had been in town for one week, long enough to decide she loved it. The first two nights she had come wide awake repeatedly, listening. Her two years of living in New York while getting a masters degree at NYU had conditioned her to hear and disregard the never-ending sounds of night. Here, when they didn’t come, she had roused again and again anyway, tense and anxious, waiting for the other shoe to drop, she had said lightly to her sister Jenna. It just doesn’t happen here: no sirens, no traffic noises, no voices in the hall, no airplanes overhead, alarms… nothing at all to hear. It was spooky, she had thought uneasily. The third night she had slept for ten hours. She had forgotten how much she had craved quiet sleep. Her kind of town, she thought, driving on Adams Street, almost devoid of traffic. She was watching for Crest Drive. It came unexpectedly soon. She turned and started up a hill that made one boundary of the town of twenty-five thousand. With woods on one side, skirting Stillwater Lake, Crest Drive made a sweeping curve away from the lake to a residential area of large and imposing houses with beautifully landscaped grounds.

“Where the elite dwell,” she said under her breath, “up above the turmoil.” She smiled broadly at the idea and slowed down, looking at house numbers.

The house she sought was dove gray, tall, with bay windows on both sides of a covered front entrance. As soon as Eve saw the expensive houses on Crest Drive, she had accepted that this was not the sort of neighborhood where she might buy a cheap desk. At least she would look, she decided, pulling into the driveway.

#

“Hello,” she said to the woman who opened the door at her ring. “I’m Eve Parish. I called about the desk.”

“Oh, of course. Come in. Dorothy Dumond. The desk is upstairs.”

Eve’s suspicion that this was not the right kind of neighborhood was confirmed in the foyer she entered. On one wall a narrow, marble-topped table with curved, heavily carved legs was under a massive ornate mirror. Antiques, Eve assumed, and no doubt very valuable. Car keys were on the table, along with a silver vase with a few red roses.

A red Persian rug carpeted the foyer, and a similar runner carpeted stairs that Dorothy Dumond started up. She was slender and appeared sinewy, as if she ran marathons perhaps. Strawberry blonde, discreet makeup, dressed in tan silk pants with an ecru overblouse belted with a bright-green sash, sandals, she looked as if she were ready to pose for a photographer. Fifty, Eve guessed, possibly mid fifties—but a very well-preserved fifty-something, a very careful fifty-something.

They walked through an upper hallway to a closed door that Dorothy Dumond opened, and then stood aside for Eve to enter. “I won’t go in,” she said. “The room’s been closed up for ages and it’s musty. Cigarette smoke still clings to things, I’m afraid. But you can see the desk yourself.”

The desk was exactly what she had been looking for. Eve knew instantly. An extension the right height for a computer, plenty of space for papers, drawers. And not an antique. Just an ordinary desk.

“May I open the drawers?” she asked.

“Of course. Help yourself.”

The drawers had an assortment of paper clips, a stapler, box of staples, some pencils and pens, and one drawer had regular copy paper and envelopes, another held a full ream of paper that had not been opened.

“It still has some office supplies,” Eve said to Dorothy Dumond.

“It all goes with the desk,” she said.

“How much do you want for it?”

“I believe my notice mentioned fifty dollars.” Before Eve could say sold, Dorothy Dumond asked, “Can you use anything else in the room? I want to clean it out, have painters redo it.”

Eve looked about quickly. There was a futon, an office chair that went perfectly with the desk, an armoire against the wall, a bookcase. Regretfully she shook her head. “I’m afraid my budget wouldn’t stretch that far.”

Dorothy, still standing at the door, more in the hallway than in the room, pointed to the futon. “They said that… thing has inner springs and that it’s very comfortable. I wouldn’t know about it. One hundred dollars for the whole lot. I just want to get rid of it all.”

Eve caught in her breath. “I’ll take it all,” she said. She had planned to spend about a hundred just for a desk and a good chair, and she had planned to sleep on the couch when her sister came in September. She could have not only a study but also a guest room. It was almost too good to be true. Even the armoire would come in handy for out-of-season clothes, for Jenna’s clothes when she came, for any guest. And no cement blocks and boards, but a real book case! She wanted to whip out her checkbook and write a check instantly before Dorothy Dumond changed her mind, or said she meant one hundred for each piece, or something else.

“Let’s go downstairs,” Dorothy said. “The odor is giving me a headache.”

Eve didn’t dispute her, although, except for the stale air always found in a closed-in space, she had noticed no odor. She followed Dorothy back down the wide stairs, this time to a room on the first floor with its own desk and a file cabinet.

“I can give you a check, or if you prefer I can go to the bank and withdraw cash,” Eve said. “And I’ll have to find someone who can move everything to my apartment.”

“Hank Cranshaw,” Dorothy said. “He does hauling, moving, other odd jobs. Where do you live? He’ll charge according to the distance as much as anything.”

Eve told her the house number on Second Street. “It’s the Hammond house.”

Dorothy looked at her sharply. “I never knew Gladys to take in students.”

“I’m not a student. I’ll be working in the office at the college. I have a one-year appointment. I’ve finished my coursework at NYU, and I’ll be writing my master’s thesis during the coming year.”

“You came out here, instead of doing your research in New York?” Dorothy was still eyeing her with suspicion.

“I saw the position posted at NYU and it seemed like an omen, a sign or something. My thesis will be about a few contemporary writers, and one of them is Earl Marshall. I’d read that he grew up in Stillwater, New Jersey—” She stopped when Dorothy Dumond drew back, her face almost contorted with a furious expression. “What did I say?” Eve asked in confusion.

“You came here, to this house, pretending you just wanted to buy a used desk? I think our business is concluded, Ms. Parish.”

“I don’t understand! What did I do?”

“You’re not the first one to come snooping around, prying into our business, his business. Don’t pretend you didn’t know that Earl is my brother.”

Eve felt her cheeks burn. Helplessly she shook her head. “I didn’t know. The names… I haven’t read about his personal life, his family, just his novel… The book jacket said Stillwater. I’m sorry. I’ll go. I’m sorry.” She would have fled if Dorothy Dumond had not been between her and the door.

Dorothy continued to study her for another moment, then relaxed a little. “You really didn’t know, did you?”

“No.”

“Write your check. Hank will charge twenty-five dollars, and don’t give him a penny more. He’ll want cash. Give me a number where he can reach you. I’ll call him to collect everything and he’ll get in touch with you about when to deliver it. Is that satisfactory?”

Eve nodded. She jotted her phone number on a page she tore out of her notebook and wrote the check. Dorothy went to the door with her, where she paused and said, “Ms. Parish, my brother always comes to visit in August. Perhaps you’ll have an opportunity to meet him.”

Eve couldn’t tell if the woman was still angry with her, still suspicious, if the words meant any more than face value, if there had been sarcasm, skepticism, any hidden meaning behind them. She couldn’t tell a thing about Dorothy Dumond, but she did know she had not made a friend.

Later that day Eve arranged and rearranged furniture in her study half a dozen times. Better to do it mentally than shift real stuff around, she told herself when she finally had a firm picture of where things should go. She wrote about her adventures in locating a desk in her journal, and about meeting Dorothy Dumond and her sudden anger, and at nine she called her sister.

“Jenna,” she said, “you sound tired.”

“That’s because I’m tired. God, it’s a madhouse at the company, ten-, twelve-, fourteen-hour days, but Dirk swears they’ll meet their deadline; and starting in September he plans to vanish for at least a month. And so do I.”

Her Cambridge company was working against a deadline for the development of a mammoth computer security system. Dirk was the chief of the project and Jenna his office manager. She claimed that she was responsible for holding the world together.

Eve made some sympathetic noises, then recounted her day. “All of it for just a hundred dollars, plus delivery, which will be another twenty-five. And Dumond doesn’t like me. I think she believes I’m a hack for a tabloid or something, out to get the lowdown on her brother. I bet she’ll check with the college to make sure I’m going to work there. She more or less warned me off her brother.”

Jenna laughed. “Little sister’s getting paranoid?”

“Right. I can’t wait for you to come see this place. It’s so great!”

“I think what I’ll do is train down to New York and hang out a couple of days, not get in the Labor Day traffic, and head out your way on Tuesday. Okay with you?”

“Absolutely! Just let me know and I’ll meet the train. I have to check in at the college, get my ID and stuff, but I won’t start work until Wednesday after Labor Day. It’s only three days a week, so we’ll have time to kill. Good swimming in the lake, bring your swimsuit.”

They chatted a few minutes longer until Jenna said she had to go beddie-bye or the world would fall apart the next day. Then, resisting the temptation to start unloading the boxes of books, Eve sat regarding them. Earl Marshall’s book was in one of them along with copies of the other two novels she had chosen for her thesis. The only thing the three novelists had in common, as far as she knew at present, she added to herself, was that they all had become overnight successes and hit the best-seller list. First novels, best sellers. One of the writers was a physicist and he had gone on to do academic work. One had written a sensational thriller, and followed it up with two more best sellers, and the third, Earl Marshall, had not published anything since his first novel. All three had appeared on the scene with their instant successes at roughly the same time, ten years ago. One of the ideas Eve intended to pursue in her thesis was what the effect of great monetary rewards for a first novel had on the writer.

Dumond had been rightfully suspicious, Eve thought then. She did intend to snoop and pry, to find out as much as possible about Marshall, and also, if possible, to find out why he hadn’t produced a second novel in ten years. Another Harper Lee? her advisor had suggested. Jenna had been more blunt and much more vulgar. “The guy shot his wad.”