Potboiler

“Oh I know. Believe me.” She smiled mischievously. “Sometimes when I’m out here I swear I can smell them. The goats.”

Pfefferkorn tried and failed to smell the goats.

“All right,” she said. “Let’s see where the magic happens.”

What struck Pfefferkorn most of all about Bill’s office was its modesty. Only a tenth of the barn had been sectioned off and finished, and that left comparatively spare. Indeed, it was strange to think that such phenomenal wealth as Pfefferkorn had just seen could be produced in a room so plain. Atop a rickety desk were an electric typewriter, a jar of pens, and a neatly stacked manuscript. The familiarity of the arrangement caused Pfefferkorn to shiver.

There had been few embellishments in thirty-some-odd years. There was an easy chair that looked as if it had been slept in a lot. There was a low bookcase filled with Bill’s own prodigious oeuvre. On the wall above the desk hung a framed photo of Carlotta, a formal portrait made perhaps fifteen years prior. Below it was a photo Pfefferkorn identified as the source for both the pop-up invitation and the enlargement displayed at the funeral. The uncropped original had been taken at the marina. Bill stood on a dock piled with rope, smiling jauntily from beneath his captain’s hat as sunset inflamed a sliver of ocean.

The dog, seeking his missing master’s feet, settled morosely beneath the desk.

“I almost went out with him,” Carlotta said.

Pfefferkorn looked at her.

“That day, I mean. I changed my mind at the last minute.”

“Thank God.”

“You think? Don’t get me wrong. It’s not like I have any notion of us waltzing off together into some spongy afterlife . . . Still. There’s guilt.” She indicated the manuscript. “That’s the new one.”

It was hefty, five hundred pages or more. Pfefferkorn wiped the title page free of dust.

SHADOWGAME

a novel of suspense

William de Vallée

Whatever Pfefferkorn’s opinion of Bill as a writer, the idea of the novel going unfinished gave him a pang.

“What’s going to happen to it?” he asked.

“Honestly, I haven’t given it much thought. It hasn’t seemed important, given everything else.” She rubbed her cheek. “Sooner or later I suppose I’ll have to burn it.”

He looked at her with surprise.

“I know,” she said. “Très eighteen seventies. It sounds pointless in the computer age. Believe it or not, he still did all his first drafts on the Olivetti. That’s the only copy.”

He continued to stare at her.

“What,” she said.

“You’re going to destroy it?”

“Did you have a better idea?”

“I’m sure his publisher would love to have it.”

“Oh, I’m sure they would, too, but Bill never would have approved. He hated anyone reading his unfinished material. That includes me, by the way. Way back in the beginning I used to give him feedback but it wasn’t good for our marriage.”

There was a silence.

“You’re wondering if I’m tempted to read it now,” Carlotta said.

“Are you?”

“Not in the slightest. It would be like listening to him. I don’t think I could take it.”

He nodded.

“I wish we’d been able to convince you to visit sooner,” she said. “Your approval meant the world to him.”

Pfefferkorn stared guiltily at the floor.

“It’s true.” She walked to the bookcase. “Look.”

Among everything Bill had ever published there was but a single book by another author. It was Pfefferkorn’s novel.

Pfefferkorn was moved.

“In many ways,” she said, “you made him a writer.”

“Let’s not get carried away.”

“It’s true. You brought him out of the closet, so to speak.”

“I’m sure he would have found his way out sooner or later.”

“Don’t underestimate yourself. He worshipped you.”

“Carlotta, please. This is unnecessary.”

“You really have no idea, do you?”

Pfefferkorn said nothing.