Monty Lazarus smiled. His eyes were very blue—a startlingly intense sky blue that was almost the color of Garrison Ladd’s. Almost the color of Davy’s.
“When you’re writing, how many drafts do you do on a book?” Monty asked.
Diana shrugged. “I don’t know for sure. Three—four maybe. I can’t tell. Every time I open up a chapter on the computer, I end up changing something. Maybe it’s nothing more than shortening a sentence here and there or breaking up a paragraph in a different way so the words look better on the page. Sometimes I find places where I’ve used the same word twice within two or three lines. At that rate, everything’s a different draft.”
“And you’re polishing as you go.”
“Yes, always.”
“Do things ever change in all that polishing?”
“Well, probably, but—”
“You see,” Monty Lazarus said with a smile, “the reason I like to do in-depth interviews is that I want to hear what the person is saying in his or her own words—without all the polishing. Without all the real feelings and emotions cleaned up and taken out. Those are the things that never show up on the pages of a book.
“For instance, a little while ago we were talking about your marriage to Brandon Walker. When I asked how long you’d been married, you said twenty years. Were you aware, though, that when you told me that, there was a little half-smile playing around the corners of your mouth?”
“No,” Diana conceded. “I wasn’t aware of that.”
“And when I asked you about your children and you started discussing your stepchildren, you looked as though you’d put what you thought was a piece of candy in your mouth and discovered, too late, that it was really dog shit. See what I mean?”
Diana smiled. “Yes,” she said. “I suppose I do.”
Monty Lazarus smiled in turn and then leaned back in his chair, regarding Diana thoughtfully over the low coffee table between them. “I want you to tell me a little about the process of this book. Did you seek out Andrew Carlisle, or was it the other way around?”
“He asked me,” Diana said. “He wrote to me in care of my publisher.”
“Let me get this straight. The man who killed your husband, and raped you, wrote you a letter and asked that you write his story? And despite everything that had happened before, despite all that history, you still agreed?”
“
“I’d have to say that the book is generally pretty unflinching,” Lazarus said. “Blazingly so at times, but there’s a gap that I find puzzling.”
“Which gap is that?”
“You barely mention the interviews themselves,” Monty Lazarus said. “I’m assuming they took place in the state prison up at Florence, since that’s where Carlisle was incarcerated. Is that true?”
“Yes,” Diana said. “In the visiting room up there to begin with. Then later on, when he was hospitalized for symptoms related to AIDS, they let me interview him in the infirmary.”
“But why didn’t you talk about that?” Lazarus persisted. “It seems to me that’s an important part of the story, for the victim to triumph over the perpetrator, as it were. For you to see your tormentor laid low—blind, crippled, horribly disfigured, and finally dying of AIDS. I’m surprised you didn’t share that satisfaction with your readers, that sense of vindication.”
“I didn’t write about satisfaction or vindication because they weren’t there,” Diana answered quietly.
“They weren’t?” Monty Lazarus asked. Then, after a moment, he added, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. What did you feel then, when you met him again after all those years?”
“Horror,” Diana said simply.
“Horror?” Lazarus repeated. “At the way he looked? Because of the burns on his face and chest? Because of his mangled arm?”
Diana shook her head. “No,” she replied. “It had nothing at all to do with the way he looked. It was because of what he was—what he stood for.”
“Which was?”
“Evil,” she said. “Outside catechism classes, I had never actually met the devil before, somebody who could pass for Satan. I was afraid that if I wrote about him that way, no one would believe me. He seemed to have an almost hypnotic effect on people, certainly on my first husband. If Andrew Carlisle told Garrison Ladd that black was white and vice versa, I think Gary would have gone to his death trying to prove it was true.”
“I see,” Monty said, writing something down in his notebook, but Diana Ladd Walker wasn’t at all sure he understood. In fact, she wasn’t entirely sure she did, either.
The morning of Diana’s first scheduled interview with Andrew Carlisle had dawned clear and dry and hot. Already dressed for work himself, Brandon Walker lounged in the doorway between their bedroom and the master bath, drinking a cup of coffee and watching as his wife carefully applied her makeup.
“I could always take the day off and come along with you,” he offered. “That way I’d be right there in case anything went wrong.”
“Nothing’s going to go wrong, Brandon,” Diana said, trying to sound less anxious than she felt. “It isn’t as though I’ll be alone with him. There are guards. There’ll be other visitors in the room as well. I’ll be fine.”
For a time after that, Brandon Walker sipped his coffee in silence. “Are you going to try to see Quentin while you’re there?”
Diana put down her mascara brush. Her gaze met Brandon’s in the neutral territory of the bathroom mirror’s
