Tatiana ‘Tash’ Perkins, a brilliant young journalist, is sent by her paper to interview the State Governor’s wife, and a strange interview it is: the woman behaves like a zombie, and when they are alone together she slips a letter to Tash and asks her to post it. But before Tash can do so, her handbag is snatched and the letter with it.
Yet the governor charms her, and soon she is accepting a job as his campaign speech-writer. But Tash is soon drawn into a frightening sequence of events, ranging from the killing of a canary to murder by arson, and an assassination at a political rally.
HELEN MCCLOY was a member of a speech-writing committee for a Vice-Presidential candidate a few years ago and so has had a backstage view of political campaigning.
She received her first check for writing when she was fourteen and has been writing ever since. After nearly ten years as an art critic in Paris she returned to this country to write fiction. Her recent novels include The Sleepwalker and A Change of Heart.
MINOTAUR COUNTRY
A Novel of Suspense
HELEN McCLOY
DODD, MEAD & COMPANY • NEW YORK
Copyright © 1975 by Helen McCloy
All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form
without permission in writing from the publisher
Printed in the United States of America
by The Haddon Craftsmen, Inc., Penna.
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
McCloy, Helen.
Minotaur country.
I. Title.
PZ3.Ml3358Mg [PS3525.A1587] 813'.5'2 74-28370
ISBN 0-396-07004-3
To Halliday Dresser with love
There are other things, animals crashing around in the forest. I can hear them, but I can’t see them.
—SENATOR HOWARD BAKER,
December 30th, 1973.
PART I
Leafy Way
1
IT WAS A Border state between North and South on the Eastern seaboard, embracing ten thousand square miles. It had been one of the thirteen original colonies, but not one of the eleven Confederate states. It had nineteen counties, one great university, and one good newspaper.
Tatiana Perkins worked for the newspaper.
She was named Tatiana because her artist father admired the heroine of Eugene Onyegin. The moment she began to talk she called herself “Tash,” and she had been Tash ever since.
By the time she was twelve, her parents were divorced. They still loved each other and Tash, but her father was in love with someone else. She heard him explain it to her mother:
“I didn’t want this to happen. Try to think of me as if I had been driving a rickety car too fast on a rough mountain road.”
That was when Tash decided that she herself would never fall in love.
No rickety cars on rough mountain roads for her. She liked men, but she did not like the havoc of passion. She was going to be happy.
Tash’s father went to live in Rome with a mistress he couldn’t marry because of her Catholic conscience. Tash’s mother settled in Boston with a new husband, the last green shoot on old, dry, Brahmin stock.
Tash herself did not feel at home in either household. When she left college, she drifted to the capital city of the Border state.
She had trouble getting a job because she looked so much younger than she actually was. She had the half-starved face of a street urchin: big eyes sunk too deep, thin cheeks too hollow, wide mouth too thin-lipped.
She finally landed her newspaper job because there happened to be a vacancy when she applied. She was soon trapped on the Women’s Page, which bored her. One day she chanced to read a new novel advertised as “excitingly different” and “daringly original.”
Oh, if only she were a book reviewer! She let off steam pounding out on her office typewriter the review she might have written.
A copy boy assumed it was for publication. A makeup man slid it into a slot on the daily book review page between two small ads. It glided past copy readers and assistant book editors without being noticed, and no one else saw it before publication. Next morning a furious book editor-in-chief asked the managing editor to fire Tash.
The managing editor refused.
“It was the copy boy’s mistake, not hers. I’ve read the book. It’s all she says and worse. I’m going to take her off the Women’s Page. She needs more scope.”
Two years later Tash had a syndicated column under her own byline and license to write about anything she pleased from sport to politics.
The first time she appeared as a guest on a television show, the producer gasped. “Isn’t there anything—anything—you can do about your hair?”
She tossed the tangled, black mop out of her eyes and said, “No.”
In a week the “mop cut” was all over town.
So she had done exactly what she set out to do. She had made a safe, little niche for herself in a brutally competitive world by her own efforts, and she had not fallen in love with anybody.
She was sitting at her desk one cold, sunny morning in April when a copy boy told her that the Old Man wanted to see her.
“Hi, Tash!” The managing editor, Bill Brewer, leaned back in the scruffy, swivel chair he cherished, both hands clasped behind his neck. “I’m going to make you mad.”
“You couldn’t.”
“Oh, yes, I could. I’m going to ask you to do one more story for the Women’s Page. An interview.”
Tash gritted her teeth. “When ICBMs are falling, will you ask me for five hundred words on annhilation from the woman’s point of view?”
“Our readers would love it.”
Tash sighed. “All right. Who am I to interview? Miss Hayseed, 1956? Or the champion chicken-fryer of Backwoods County?”
“Neither. What do you know about Vivian Playfair?”
“The Governor’s wife?” Tash whistled, an accomplishment she had cultivated ever since she was told as a child that whistling girls and crowing hens never come to very good ends.
“You seem impressed.”
“I am. She never gives interviews.”
“What else do you know about her?”
“She and the Governor are a matched pair. They have everything that most people want: health, youth, looks, power, position, money. All
