I picked up the phone, switched off the speaker, and interrupted to tell Linda that Ric was calling from my house and that we’d made up our differences, that he’d been pouring out his soul to me. He was drunk, yes, but what he had told her was no different than what he had told me when he was sober. He was leaving for Mexico tonight and might not be back for quite a while. How was he going to fulfil his contracts? No problem. Just because he was going on a retreat in Mexico, that didn’t mean he wouldn’t be writing. Honest work was what he thrived on. It was food for his soul.
By then, Ric was almost asleep. After I hung up, I roused him, made him sign two documents that I’d prepared, then made him tell me where he was living in Malibu. I put him in his car, drove over to his place, packed a couple of his suitcases, crammed them into the car, and set out for Mexico.
We got there shortly after dawn. He was somewhat conscious when we crossed the border, enough to be able to answer a few questions and to keep the Mexican immigration officer from becoming suspicious. After that, I drugged him again.
I drove until mid-afternoon, took a back road into the desert, gave him a final lethal amount of the drug, and dumped his body into a sinkhole. I drove back to Tijuana, left Ric’s suitcases minus identification in an alley, left his Ferrari minus identification in another alley, the key in the ignition, and caught a bus back to Los Angeles. I was confident that neither the suitcases nor the car would ever be reported. I was also confident that by the time Ric’s body was discovered, if ever, it would be in such bad shape that the Mexican authorities, with limited resources, wouldn’t be able to identify it. Ric had once told me that he hadn’t spoken to his parents in five years, so I knew they wouldn’t wonder why he wasn’t in touch with them. As far as his friends went, well, he didn’t have any. He’d ditched them when he came into money. They wouldn’t miss him.
For an old guy, I’m resilient. I’d kept up my energy, driven all night and most of the day. I finally got some sleep on the bus. Not shabby, although toward the end I felt as if something had broken in me and I doubt I’ll ever be able to put in that much effort again. But I had to, you see. Ric was going to keep hounding me, enticing me, using me. And I was going to be too desperate to tell him to get lost. Because I knew that no matter how well I wrote, I would never be able to sell a script under my own name again.
When I first started as a writer, the money and the ego didn’t matter to me as much as the need to work, to tell stories, to teach and delight, as the Latin poet Horace said. But when the money started coming in, I began to depend on it. And I grew to love the action of being with powerful people, of having a reputation for being able to deliver quality work with amazing speed. Ego. That’s why I hated Ric the most. Because producers stroked his ego over scripts that I had written.
But not anymore. Ric was gone, and his agent had heard him say that he was going, and I had a document, with his signature on it, saying that he was going to mail in his scripts through me, that I was his mentor and that he wanted me to go to script meetings on his behalf. The document also gave me his power of attorney, with permission to oversee his income while he was away.
And that should have been the end of it. Linda was puzzled but went along. After all, she’d heard Ric on the phone. Ballard was even more puzzled, but he was also enormously pleased with the spec script that I pulled out of a drawer and sent in with Ric’s name on it. As far as Ballard was concerned, if Ric wanted to be eccentric, that was fine as long as Ric kept delivering. Really, his speed and the quality of his work were amazing.
So in a way I got what I wanted-the action and the pleasure of selling my work. But there’s a problem. When I sit down to do rewrites, when I type “Revisions by Eric Potter,” I suddenly find myself gazing out the window, wanting to sit in the sun. At the same time, I find that I can’t sleep. Like Ric, I’ve become a night person.
I’ve sold the spec scripts that I wrote over the years and kept in a drawer. All I had to do was change the tides. Nobody remembered reading the original stories. But I couldn’t seem to do the rewrites, and now that I’ve run out of old scripts, now that I’m faced with writing something new…
For the first time in my life, I’ve got writer’s block. All I have to do is think of the tide page and the words by Eric Potter, and my imagination freezes. It’s agony. All my life, every day, I’ve been a writer. For thirty-five years of married life, except for the last two when Doris got sick, I wrote every day. I sacrificed everything to my craft. I didn’t have children because I thought it would interfere with my schedule. Nothing was more important than putting words on a page. Now I sit at my desk, stare at my word processor, and…
Mary had a little…
I can’t bear this anymore.
I need rest.
The quick brown fox jumped over…
I need to forget about Ric.
Now is the time for all good men to…
Joyce Carol Oates
The high imaginative powers of Joyce Carol Oates are by now seen as a virtual force of nature: like waves, her fiction comes ever on, beating up against our fragile defences and sucking us into the very heart of its intensity. She began her career in 1963 with the novel ‘By the North Gate’; since then she’s published scores of books, none less sharply observed or intricately textured than the next. Under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith, she produces some of the most compelling psychological suspense stories of our time.
It is, of course, always an honour to be able to present a new work from her, particularly when it relates to a theme as suited to her hypnotic talents as revenge.
Trust Ms. Oates to spiral around the issues of guilt and motive, keeping us once again off balance and attempting, futilely, to hold our own against the onslaught of her diabolic inventiveness. ‘Murder-Two’ quite intentionally echoes the headlines we wince to read these days, but the character of its subtle surprises is unique to this author.
Murder-Two
1.
This, he swore.
He’d returned to the town house on East End Avenue after eleven P.M. and found the front door unlocked and, inside, his mother lying in a pool of squid ink on the hardwood floor at the foot of the stairs. She’d apparently fallen down die steep length of the stairs and broken her neck, judging from her twisted upper body. She’d also been bludgeoned to death, the back of her skull caved in, with one of her own golf clubs, a two-iron, but he hadn’t seemed to see that, immediately.
Squid ink?-well, die blood had looked black in the dim foyer light. It was a trick his eyes played on his brain sometimes when he’d been studying too hard, getting too little sleep. An optic tic. Meaning you see something clearly, but it registers surreally in the brain as something else. Like in your neurological programming there’s an occasional bleep.
In Derek Peck, Jr.’s case, confronted with the crumpled, lifeless body of his mother, this was an obvious symptom of trauma. Shock, the visceral numbness that blocks immediate grief-the unsayable, the unknowable. He’d last seen his mother, in that same buttercup-yellow quilted satin robe that had given her the look of an upright, bulky Easter toy, early that morning, before he’d left for school. He’d been away all day. And this abrupt, weird transition-from differential calculus to the body on the floor, from the anxiety-driven jokes of his Math Club friends (a hard core of them were meeting late, weekdays, preparing for upcoming SAT exams) to the profound and terrible silence of the town house that had seemed to him, even as he’d pushed open the mysteriously unlocked front door, a hostile silence, a silence that vibrated with dread.