The Architecture of Snow (The David Morrell Short Fiction Collection #4)

by David Morrell

  “October 15.”

  “October 15?” The date sounded vaguely familiar. Then it hit me. “Oh . . . .The day your family died in the accident.”

  For the first time, Wentworth started to look his true age, his cheeks shrinking, his eyes clouding. “I deceive myself by blaming my work. I trick myself into thinking that, if I hadn’t sold ‘The Fortune Teller’ to Hollywood, we wouldn’t have driven to New York to see the damned movie. But the movie didn’t kill my family. The movie wasn’t driving the car when it flipped.”

  “The weather turned bad. It was an accident.”

  “So I tell myself. But every time I write another novel about a father and a son, I think about my two boys crushed in a heap of steel. Each year, it seems easier to handle. But some anniversaries . . . Even after all these years . . .”

  “The gun was in your hand?”

  “In my mouth. I want to save you because you saved me. I’ll sign a contract for The Architecture of Snow.”

  * * *

  Throughout the long drive back to Manhattan, I felt a familiar heaviness creep over me. I reached my apartment around midnight, but as Wentworth predicted, I slept poorly.

  “Terrific!” My boss slapped my back when I gave him the news Monday morning. “Outstanding! I won’t forget this!”

  After the magic of the compound, the office was depressing. “But Wentworth has three conditions,” I said.

  “Fine, fine. Just give me the contract you took up there to get signed.”

  “He didn’t sign it.”

  “What? But you said–”

  “That contract’s made out to R. J. Wentworth. He wants another contract, one made out to Peter Thomas.”

  “The pseudonym on the manuscript?”

  “That’s the first condition. The second is that the book needs to be published with the name Peter Thomas on the cover.”

  The head of marketing gasped.

  “The third condition is that Wentworth won’t do interviews.”

  Now the head of marketing turned red, as if choking on something. “We’ll lose CNN and the Today show and the magazine covers and –”

  “No interviews? That makes it worthless,” my CEO complained. “Who the hell’s going to buy a book about a kid in a snowstorm when its author’s a nobody?”

  “Those are his conditions.”

  “Couldn’t you talk him out of that?”

  “He wants the book to speak for itself. He says part of the reason he’s famous is that his family died. He won’t capitalize on that, and he won’t allow himself to be asked about it.”

  “Worthless,” my boss moaned. “How can I tell the Gladstone executives we won’t have a million seller? I’ll lose my job. You’ve already lost yours.”

  “There’s a way to get around Wentworth’s conditions,” a voice said.

  Everyone looked in that direction, toward the person next to me: my assistant, who wore his usual black turtleneck and black sports jacket.

  “Make out the contract to Peter Thomas,” my assistant continued. “Put in clauses guaranteeing that the book will be published under that name and that there won’t be any interviews.”

  “Weren’t you listening? An unknown author. No interviews. No serial killer or global conspiracy in the plot. We’ll be lucky to sell ten copies.”

  “A million. You’ll get the million,” my assistant promised.

  “Will you please start making sense.”

  “The Internet will take care of everything. A month from pub date, I’ll leak rumors to hundreds of chat groups. I’ll put up a fan website. On the social networks, I’ll spread the word that Wentworth’s the actual author. I’ll point out parallels between his early work and this one. I’ll talk about the mysterious arrival of the manuscript just as his editor died. I’ll mention that a March & Sons editor, Robert Neal, had a weekend conference at Wentworth’s home in October, something that can be verified by checking with the motel where Mr. Neal stayed. I’ll juice it up until everyone buys the rumor. Believe me, the Internet thrives on gossip. It’ll get out of control fast. Since what passes for news these days is half speculation, reporters and TV commentators will do pieces about the rumors. After a week, it’ll be taken for granted that Peter Thomas is R. J. Wentworth. People will want to be the first to buy the book to see what all the fuss is about. Believe me, you’ll sell a million copies.”

  I was too stunned to say anything.

  So were the others.

  Finally my boss opened his mouth. “I love the way this guy thinks.” He gave me a dismissive glance. “Take the new contract back to Wentworth. Tell him he’ll get everything he wants.”

  * * *

  So, on Tuesday, I drove back to Tipton. Because I was now familiar with the route, I made excellent time and arrived at four in the afternoon. Indeed, I often broke the speed limit, eager to see Wentworth again and warn him how March & Sons intended to betray him.

  I saw the smoke before I got to town. As I approached the main street, I found it deserted. With a terrible premonition, I stopped at the park. The smoke shrouded Wentworth’s compound. His fence was down. A fire engine rumbled next to it. Running through the leaves, I saw townspeople gathered in shock. I saw the waitress from Meg’s Pantry, the waiter from the Tipton Tavern, Jonathan Wade from the book store, the barber who was the town constable, and Becky. I raced toward her.

  “What happened?”

  The constable turned from speaking to three state policemen. “The two outsiders who’ve been hanging around town broke into Bob’s place. The state police found fresh cigarette butts at the back fence. Next to a locked gate, there’s a tree so close to the fence it’s almost a ladder.”

  My knees weakened when I realized he was talking about the tree I’d climbed to get over the fence. I showed them the way, I thought. I taught them how to get into the compound.

  “Some of the neighbors thought they heard a shot,” the constable said, “but since this is hunting season, the shot didn’t seem unusual, except that it was close to town. Then the neighbors noticed smoke rising from the compound. Seems that after the outsiders stole what they could, they set fire to the place—to make Bob’s death look like an accident.”

  “Death?” I could barely say the word.

  “The county fire department found his body in the embers.”

  My legs were so unsteady that I feared I’d collapse. I reached for something to support me. Becky’s shoulder. She held me up.

  “The police caught the two guys who did it,” the constable said.

  I wanted to get my hands on them and—

  “Bob came to see me after you drove back to New York,” Becky said. “As you know, he needed an attorney.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Becky looked puzzled. “You aren’t aware he changed his will?”

  “His will?”

  “He said you were the kind of man he hoped that his sons would have grown up to be. He made you his heir, his literary executor, everything. This place is yours now.”

  Tears rolled down my cheeks. They rolled even harder an hour later when the firemen let Becky and me onto the property and showed us where they’d found Wentworth’s body in the charred kitchen. The corpse was gone now, but the outline in the ashes was vivid. I stared at the blackened timbers of the gazebo. I walked toward Wentworth’s gutted writing studio. A fireman stopped me from getting too close. But even from twenty feet away, I saw the clump of twisted metal that was once a typewriter. And the piles of ashes that had once been twenty-one manuscripts.

  * * *

  Now you know the background. I spend a lot of time trying to rebuild the compound, although I doubt I’ll ever regain its magic. Becky often comes to help me. I couldn’t do it without her.

  But The Architecture of Snow is what I mostly think about. I told March & Sons to go to hell, with a special invitation to my assistant, my boss, and the head of marketing. I arranged for the novel to be privately printed under
the name Peter Thomas. A Tipton artist designed a cover that shows the hint of a farmhouse within gusting snow, almost as if the snow is constructing the house. There’s no author’s biography. Exactly as Wentworth intended.

  I keep boxes of the novel in my car. I drive from book store to book store throughout New England, but only a few will take the chance on an unknown author. I tell them it’s an absolutely wonderful book, and they look blank as if “wonderful” isn’t what customers want these days. Is there a serial killer or a global conspiracy?

  Wade has dozens of copies in his store. His front window’s filled with it. He tries to convince visitors to buy it, but his tourist customers want books that have photographs of ski slopes and covered bridges. He hasn’t sold even one. The townspeople? The waitress at Meg’s Pantry spoke the truth. She isn’t much of a reader. Nor is anybody else. I’ve tried until I don’t know what else to do. I’m so desperate I finally betrayed Wentworth’s trust and told you who wrote it. Take my word—it’s wonderful. Buy it, will you? Please. Buy this book.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  David Morrell is the award-winning author of First Blood, the novel in which Rambo was created. He was born in 1943 in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. In 1960, at the age of seventeen, he became a fan of the classic television series, Route 66, about two young men in a Corvette convertible traveling the United States in search of America and themselves. The scripts by Stirling Silliphant so impressed Morrell that he decided to become a writer.

  In 1966, the work of another writer (Hemingway scholar Philip Young) prompted Morrell to move to the United States, where he studied with Young at the Pennsylvania State University and received his M.A. and Ph. D. in American literature. There, he also met the esteemed science-fiction author William Tenn (real name Philip Klass), who taught Morrell the basics of fiction writing. The result was First Blood, a ground-breaking novel about a returned Vietnam veteran suffering from post-trauma stress disorder who comes into conflict with a small-town police chief and fights his own version of the Vietnam War.

  That “father” of modern action novels was published in 1972 while Morrell was a professor in the English department at the University of Iowa. He taught there from 1970 to 1986, simultaneously writing other novels, many of them international bestsellers, including the classic spy trilogy, The Brotherhood of the Rose (the basis for a top-rated NBC miniseries that premiered after a Super Bowl), The Fraternity of the Stone, and The League of Night and Fog.

  Eventually wearying of two professions, Morrell gave up his academic tenure in order to write full time. Shortly afterward, his fifteen-year-old son Matthew was diagnosed with a rare form of bone cancer and died in 1987, a loss that haunts not only Morrell’s life but his work, as in his memoir about Matthew, Fireflies, and his novel Desperate Measures, whose main character lost a son.

  “The mild-mannered professor with the bloody-minded visions,” as one reviewer called him, Morrell is the author of thirty-three books, including such high-action thrillers as The Naked Edge, Creepers, and The Spy Who Came for Christmas (set in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he lives). Always interested in different ways to tell a story, he wrote the six-part comic-book series, Captain America: The Chosen. His writing book, The Successful Novelist, analyzes what he has learned during his four decades as an author.

  Morrell is a co-founder of the International Thriller Writers organization. Noted for his research, he is a graduate of the National Outdoor Leadership School for wilderness survival as well as the G. Gordon Liddy Academy of Corporate Security. He is also an honorary lifetime member of the Special Operations Association and the Association of Intelligence Officers. He has been trained in firearms, hostage negotiation, assuming identities, executive protection, and car fighting, among numerous other action skills that he describes in his novels. To research the aerial sequences in The Shimmer, he became a private pilot.

  Morrell is an Edgar, Anthony, and Macavity nominee as well as a three-time recipient of the distinguished Stoker Award from the Horror Writers Association. The International Thriller Writers organization gave him its prestigious career-achievement Thriller Master Award. His short stories have appeared in numerous Year’s Best collections. With eighteen million copies in print, his work has been translated into twenty-six languages. To send him an email, please go to the CONTACT page of his website, www.davidmorrell.net.