So Shelly Read Free

Shelly or gleaned from the few-and-far-between conversations I had with him, but I have to believe that much of what he shared was, to say the least, embellished. Anyway, he is not the type of person one
knows
so much as knows
of
. Some things I learned from the publicity that followed the publication of his bestselling fantasy novel. In the spring of his eighth-grade year, Gordon finished his novel and Googled New York City literary agencies until he found the one that was the largest and most prestigious. By June, Gordon and his mother had signed contracts enlisting Martin Literary LLC as Gordon’s representative.
    With a keen understanding of the marketplace and the particular needs and interests of the various major publishinghouses, Ms. Mandy Martin had
Manfred
placed within a week, with a healthy advance and a major—but nonnegotiable—request from Adam Pandroth of Pandroth Publications: “Make Manfred a vampire. That shit sells.” (No one has ever died from a vampire bite.) After a quick rewrite, a professional edit, and an unusually high marketing budget for a first-time and teenage novelist,
Manfred
was fast-tracked for release the following summer.
    Manfred
is the story of an American boy expatriated to the care of distant relatives after the death of the boy’s parents in an automobile accident (41 percent of all accidental deaths). Consigned to his ancestral home in the Scottish highlands, he meets and studies under the mentorship of a mountain wizard from whom he learns the secrets of conjuring, shape-shifting, and the controlling of spirits, including those of his mother and father. The novel made an impressive splash in the young-adult market. I was astounded that a boy nearly the same age as me and from my own backwater town had been allowed to swim in the deep end of literature at all. I became not only an ardent but also an envious admirer.
    The remainder of my knowledge of Gordon was attained through the grapevine of rumor that sprouted incessantly around him. Regardless of the source, I have no doubt that much of what I’m about to share has been exaggerated, but, I swear, this is how I heard it.
    I grew up and still live in a crowded low-class neighborhood of single-dwelling homes on the east end of Ogontz, less than a mile from the entranceway to the Strand but millions of dollars distant. If I walk one block north to the shoreon the bay side, I can look northeast across the water to see the palaces rising over their putting-green lawns. These lawns run to backyard beaches from which wooden docks extend, Gatsbyesque, lined with WaveRunners and sailboats and powerboats of varying lengths. The two most prominently visible Georgian monstrosities, at which I still sometimes stare from my cement-footed poverty, belong to Gordon’s and Shelly’s families. The families are next-door neighbors; although, you could fit ten of
my
neighbors’ homes between the two houses.
    Prior to the events that followed the stealing of Shelly’s ashes, the only intimate connection between Gordon and me, outside of our unrelated friendships with Shelly, had been that we’d both lost our fathers. Gordon’s father abandoned him and his mother when Gordon was still an infant. The little that Gordon knows of him was dripped like poison from his mother’s vengeful lips.
    Gordon is the final bud on his father’s Ohio branch of a patrician family of Virginia. The family’s sons, all Annapolis-trained, had made their reputations in the United States Navy and their fortunes in the boatbuilding trade in the Chesapeake Bay region and along the Ohio shores of Lake Erie, where for more than a hundred years the Byron brand of cruising and fishing boats have dominated the waters of the Great Lakes.
    When he was forced to retire with a less-than-honorable discharge after a female ensign’s never-litigated claim of sexual harassment, Gordon’s father, the handsome John Byron, still in his midthirties, took his partial pension,