Envy Read Free Page B

just as the boy spoke, and also because what he thought he heard the boy say was a strange answer to the question.
    The officer must have thought so, too. He shook his
    #head with misapprehension and leaned forward ####21
    to hear better. "Come again? Speak up, son."
    The young man raised his head and took a swipe at his nose with the back of his hand. He cleared his throat. He blinked the officer into focus with his one functioning eye.
    "Envy," he said gruffly. "That's what this is all about. Envy."
    P.M.E.
    St. Anne Island, Georgia
    February 2002

CHAPTER 1
    "But there's got to be." Maris Matherly-Reed impatiently tapped her pencil against the notepad upon which she had doodled a series of triangles and a chain of loops. Below those she'd rough-sketched an idea for a book jacket.
    "P.M.E., correct?"
    "Correct."
    "I'm sorry, ma'am, there's no such listing.
    I double-checked."
    The idea for the book jacket--an
    autobiographical account of the author's murky relationship with her stepsibling--had come to Maris while she was waiting for the directory assistance operator to locate the telephone number. A call that should have taken no more than a few seconds had stretched into several minutes.
    "You don't have a listing for P.M.E. in this area code?"
    "In any area code," the operator replied. "I've accessed the entire U.S."
    "Maybe it's a business listing, not a residential."
    ###"I checked both." #################23
    "Could it be an unlisted number?"
    "It would appear with that designation. I don't have anything under those initials, period. If you had a last name--was
    "But I don't."
    "Then I'm sorry."
    "Thank you for trying."
    Frustrated, Maris reconsidered her
    sketch, then scribbled over it. She wasn't going to like that book no matter what the jacket looked like. The incestuous overtones made her uncomfortable, and she was afraid a large number of readers would share her uneasiness.
    But the editor to whom the manuscript had been submitted felt strongly about buying it. The subject matter guaranteed author appearances on TV and radio talk shows, write-ups in magazines, probably a movie-of-the-week option. Even if the reviews were poor, the book's subject matter was titillating enough to generate sales in large numbers. The other decision makers in the hardcover division of Matherly Press had agreed with the editor when she pled her case, so Maris had deferred to the majority. They owed her one.
    Which brought her back to the prologue of _Envy she had read that afternoon. She had discovered it among a stack of unsolicited manuscripts. They had been occupying a shelf in her office for months, collecting dust until that unspecified day when her schedule permitted her to scan them before sending the anxious authors the standard rejection letter. Imagining their crushing disappointment when they read that impersonal and transparent kiss-off, she felt that each writer deserved at least a few minutes of her time.
    And there was always that outside, one-in-a-million, once-in-a-blue-moon chance that the next Steinbeck or Faulkner or Hemingway would be mined from the slush pile. That, of course, was every book editor's pipe dream.
    Maris would settle for finding a bestseller.
    These twelve pages of prologue had definite promise. They had excited Maris more than anything she had read recently, even material from her portfolio of published authors, and certainly more than anything she'd read from fledgling novelists.
    It had piqued her curiosity, as a
    #prologue or first chapter should. She was ####25
    hooked, eager to know more, anxious to read the rest of the story. Had the rest of the story been written?
    she wondered. Or at least outlined? Was this the author's first attempt at fiction writing? Had he or she written in another genre? What were his/her credentials? Did he/she have any credentials?
    There was nothing to indicate the writer's gender, although her gut feeling said male. Hatch Walker's internal dialogue rang true
    to