More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Nicky, a sentimentalist, values pen and paper. Ink sinks into stationery, indelible as a scar; email is breath on glass, an instant dissolve.
Nicky lifts the watch from his hand. The metal is cool; the engraving reads TIME IS THE BEST KILLER.
“You and I might even solve an old mystery or two while we’re at it.”
Conversations are always dangerous if you have something to hide.
“Life is hard. After all, it kills you.” He strokes his tie. “It came for Dominic on a dark road. Left him there, too. Midnight hit-and-run on the Pacific Coast Highway. Talk about stooping low. A cruel twist—he’d kept me alive after Hope and Cole disappeared.”
“People your age—young people, I mean—you treat your lives like galleries, for public display, open to all. My life is no gallery. It’s a vault, a black box, and—I’m sorry I can’t put this more elegantly—it’s nobody’s damn business.”
what about an ex-soldier turned sleuth?’ The First World War ends, aristocratic veteran seeks distraction. He’s independently wealthy, I decide, because they all are. You don’t want a detective on a budget.
“For ages, I couldn’t understand writers who resented their characters. Those characters were their meal tickets! Golden geese! Conan Doyle killed off Holmes, as you’re aware. Pitched him over the Reichenbach Falls.
“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful. To St. John or to a reader. The greatest joy in any writer’s career is the attention of his audience. And mystery readers are the most attentive audience of all. So ignore me when I complain,”
“I can’t drive,” she says. Sebastian tucks himself inside, grins. “And I’ve drunk three beers, and I’m suddenly quite tired, and I don’t like that setup. I’ll steer you through it.”
Nicky sighs, spots a FOR RENT sign in a dusty storefront, AMY’S LAUNDRY painted across the glass. “When I see a sign like that,” she says, “I think, Man, it must’ve been so exciting for Amy, watching them stencil the window, getting business cards printed, the grand opening . . . Her family must’ve felt proud.” They slide beneath a green light. “And then working, probably very hard, for whatever it was she wanted, and putting up with whatever she put up with, only to wind up like that.” The Amy-less store recedes from view. “Opening a business must be like a marriage,” Nicky concludes. “Nobody
...more
This highlight has been truncated due to consecutive passage length restrictions.
“Was that your first driving lesson?” “Practically.” “You’re a natural.” “Am I?” She feels pleased. “Not really, no. But we survived.”
“You’d make quite the psychoanalyst. Or at least a priest. There’s a whiff of the confessional about you.” Sebastian’s eyes are narrowed, as though he’s trying to locate the exact words. “A man finds himself saying what he hadn’t meant to say. That’s a gift. And a weapon.”
“As Simon St. John tells us, the past is a poison. Tolerable only in trace amounts.” “I remember. But the past is gone.” “Oh, no.” Now he turns to her, and his smile is so sad she could cry. “The past isn’t gone. It’s just waiting.”
“How were the children?” asks her stepmother. “I do not mind them in a room, I do not want one in my womb. I ducked out during fingerpainting.”
CHERCHEZ LA FEMME Magic Markered across it in godawful cursive. “That’s a detective-fiction term, I believe.” “‘Look for the woman,’” Nicky explains to Diana,
“Sorry. In any classic mystery, a lady’s the cause of all the mayhem.”
Jean-Luc is Madeleine’s off-again-on-again boyfriend of three years, a Parisian she met at a dinner party in Marin County. Jean-Luc is handsome. Jean-Luc is an architect. Jean-Luc is imaginary.
Women, he adds, make better crime writers than men; “I think it’s because every day they must contend with sinister forces.” Nicky answers unintelligibly. Sebastian speaks again: “Men.”
“‘A woman who doesn’t lie,’” she replies, “‘is a woman without imagination and without sympathy.’”
“Tell them that Misty is what a stripper calls herself, and Aspen is what a stripper calls herself when she thinks she’s too high-class to be a Misty.”
“And if young Aspen even thinks about thinking about your brother again, I will visit Leys Academy, and I will haul her out of the cafeteria by her training bra, and come graduation that knuckle-dragging little bitch will be voted Most Likely to Get a Handicapped Parking Space.”
“Hope and Cole.” Those eyes gleam. “The greatest mystery in Sebastian’s life, right? Why isn’t he making a public appeal in his dying days? Trying to smoke out the truth? Must be a reason.” “Are you saying he already knows?” “It’s a possibility.”
“Agatha Christie went missing once. Just up and left, no abduction or anything. National manhunt, media circus, the works.” “How long until they found her?” “Eleven days. She was identified by a banjo player at the hotel where she’d holed up.” “Where’s a banjo player when we need one?
“We say ‘She’s full of heart’ or ‘He’s got guts,’ but the fact is, most of us are made of not a little scar tissue. I’m interested in the wounds a person keeps secret. Even the madness. Why do we hide them?” “Why would we show them?”
And I vowed to her that, for the sake of our daughter, I would never take my life. She forced me to swear at knifepoint, which sent a confusing message.”
‘To say goodbye is to die a little.’”
MEN ARE SUPPOSED TO WALK DOWNSTAIRS before women, you know,” Jonathan is saying in the dark of the staircase. “Because if a woman trips on the steps, she’ll just bump into a big strong bloke, but if he topples onto her, she shall surely perish.”
“So—back up: why would anyone want to . . . what, murder her?” Like it’s a dirty word. Nicky supposes it is. “I sound as though I’m stressing every syllable in that sentence. Why? Anyone? Her?” “You stressed murder, too.” “Murder is inherently stressful.”
“Ms. Trapp, I’m calling from the Chronicle. We’d love to talk to you about your father’s wife—” “I would rather explode,” screams Madeleine.
“Hashtag-MurderSequel was trending when I woke up.”
“It’s you!” she squeaks. “Come in, come in—” She grasps her visitor by the arm, drags her inside. I will die here, Nicky thinks.
“People tend to be more truthful in a cooler climate,” the woman explains. “It also discourages aggression. Come!” she says, aggressively.
“When did I spend my childhood there? Around the time I was a child. Approximately.”
“Ye olde ghosts-of-long-ago. An instance in the present echoes an instance in the past. You certainly can’t write a traditional mystery without it. But, my dear child,” he says, his voice warm yet ominous, like winds whispering about a storm, “you’re not in a traditional mystery. You’re in a psychological thriller.”
“We’re all in that story. Life is a thriller. The ending is fatal and the conclusion is final.”
“How did you know I was at the door?” asks Nicky. “I didn’t know at all.” Smoke billows from his mouth. “Every so often I’ve rested my fingers and shouted in case you were loitering outside.”
It’s human nature . . . ,’” she recites slowly. “‘. . . to hate him whom you have hurt.’”
“Men.” He snorts. “Men are where evolution backed itself into a corner.”
“How could you remember a stamp?” My voice sounds distant. He squints, as though the answer should be obvious. “I had spent a happy afternoon with my child,” he says. “How could I forget?”
how absurd it suddenly seemed—not that a person could end somebody else, but that he might ever believe that that death wouldn’t end him, as well.
She was simply on the wrong side of the human instinct to protect our young at any cost.”
Perhaps glass has a memory. Why not? Everything else does.
There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.
