Twisted: The Collected Short Stories of Jeffery Deaver

Jeffery Deaver Twisted: The Collected Short Stories of Jeffery Deaver

To my sister and fellow writer, Julie Reece Deaver

Introduction

My experience with the short story form goes back to the distant past.

I was a clumsy, chubby, socially awkward boy with no aptitude for sports whatsoever and, as befit someone like that, I was drawn to reading and writing, particularly the works of short story writers like Poe, O. Henry, A. Conan Doyle and Ray Bradbury, not to mention one of the greatest forums for short surprise-ending drama in the past fifty years: The Twilight Zone. (I defy any fans of the show to tell me they don't get a chill recalling the famous social services manual, To Serve Man.)

When I was given a writing assignment in junior high school, I'd invariably try my hand at a short story. I didn't, however, write detective or science fiction stories, but, with youthful hubris, created my own subgenre of fiction: These tales usually involved clumsy, chubby, socially awkward boys rescuing cheerleaders and pompom girls from catastrophes that were both spectacular and highly improbable, such as my heroes' daring mountaineering exploits (embarrassingly set just outside of Chicago, where I lived, and where mountains were conspicuously absent).

The stories were met with just the exasperation you'd expect from teachers who'd spent hours offering us the entire pantheon of literary superstars as models. ('Let's push ourselves, Jeffery' — the 1960s' equivalent of todays jargon, 'Think outside the box.')

Fortunately for their sanity, and my career as a scribe, I abandoned this vein of angst-ridden outpourings rather quickly and grew more diligent in my efforts to become a writer, a path that led me to poetry, songwriting, journalism and, eventually, novels.

Although I continued to read and enjoy short fiction — in Ellery Queen, Alfred Hitchcock, Playboy (a publication that I'm told also featured photography), The New Yorker and anthologies — I just didn't seem to have the time to write any myself.

But a few years after I quit my day job to be a full-time novelist, a fellow author, compiling an anthology of original short stories, asked if I'd consider contributing one to the volume.

Why not? I asked myself and plowed ahead.

I found, to my surprise, that the experience was absolutely delightful — and for a reason I hadn't expected. In my novels, I adhere to strict conventions; though I love to make evil appear to be good (and vice versa) and to dangle the potential for disaster before my readers, nonetheless, in the end, good is good and bad is bad, and good more or less prevails. Authors have a contract with their readers and I think too much of mine to have them invest their time, money and emotion in a full-length novel, only to leave them disappointed by a grim, cynical ending.

With a thirty-page short story, however, all bets are off.

Readers don't have the same emotional investment as in a novel. The payoff in the case of short stories isn't a roller coaster of plot reversals involving characters they've spent time learning about and loving or hating, set in places with atmosphere carefully described. Short stories are like a sniper's bullet. Fast and shocking. In a story, I can make good bad and bad badder and, most fun of all, really good really bad.

I found too that as a craftsman, I like the discipline required by short stories. As I tell writing students, it's far easier to write long than it is to write short, but of course this business isn't about what's easy for the author; it's about what's best for the reader, and short fiction doesn't let us get away with slacking off.

Finally, a word of thanks to those who've encouraged me to write these stories, particularly Janet Hutchings and her inestimable Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, its sister publication Alfred Hitchcock, Marty Greenberg and the crew at Teknobooks, Otto Penzler and Evan Hunter.

The stories that follow are quite varied, with characters ranging from William Shakespeare to brilliant attorneys to savvy lowlifes to despicable killers to families that can, at the most generous, be called dysfunctional. I've written an original Lincoln Rhyme and Amelia Sachs story, 'The Christmas Present,' just for this volume, and see if you can spot the revenge-of-the-nerd tale included here, a — dare I say — twisted throw-back to my days as an adolescent writer. Unfortunately, as with most of my writing, I can't say much more for fear I'll drop hints that spoil the twists. Perhaps it's best to say simply: Read, enjoy… and remember that not all is what it seems to be.

— J.W.D.

Without Jonathan

Marissa Cooper turned her car onto Route 232, which would take her from Portsmouth to Green Harbor, twenty miles away.

Thinking: This was the same road that she and Jonathan had taken to and from the mall a thousand times, carting back necessities, silly luxuries and occasional treasures.

The road near which they'd found their dream house when they'd moved to Maine seven years ago.

The road they'd taken to go to their anniversary celebration last May.

Tonight, though, all those memories led to one place: her life without Jonathan.

The setting sun behind her, she steered through the lazy turns, hoping to lose those difficult — but tenacious — thoughts.

Don't think about it!

Look around you, she ordered herself. Look at the rugged scenery: the slabs of purple clouds hanging over the maple and oak leaves — some gold, some red as a heart.

Look at the sunlight, a glowing ribbon draped along the dark pelt of hemlock and pine. At the absurd line of cows, walking single file in their spontaneous day-end commute back to the barn.

At the stately white spires of a small village, tucked five miles off the highway.

And look at you: a thirty-four-year-old woman in a sprightly silver Toyota, driving fast, toward a new life.

A life without Jonathan.

Twenty minutes later she came to Dannerville and braked for the first of the town's two stoplights. As her car idled, clutch in, she glanced to her right. Her heart did a little thud at what she saw.

It was a store that sold boating and fishing gear. She'd noticed in the window an ad for some kind of marine engine treatment. In this part of coastal Maine you couldn't avoid boats. They were in tourist paintings and photos, on mugs, T-shirts and key chains. And, of course, there were thousands of the real things everywhere: vessels in the water, on trailers, in dry docks, sitting in front yards — the New England version of pickup trucks on blocks in the rural South.

But what had struck her hard was that the boat pictured in the ad she was now looking at was a Chris-Craft. A big one, maybe thirty-six or thirty-eight feet.

Just like Jonathan's boat. Nearly identical, in fact: the same colors, the same configuration.

He'd bought his five years ago, and though Marissa thought his interest in it would flag (like that of any boy with a new toy) he'd proved her wrong and spent nearly every weekend on the vessel, cruising up and down the