Jack of Spades Read Online Free PDF Page A

you someone I know?”
    “Yes! I am someone you know— I am someone you have been stealing from .”
    “But—how is this possible? Stealing what? How?”
    “Out of my house. You have been stealing out of my house, and it has to stop, and it will stop.”
    “But—this isn’t true! I don’t know you, or where you live—I don’t have any idea what you are talking about. ‘Pages’—‘novels’ . . .”
    “The judge will punish you, on Monday! You will see, then. All of the world will see, then. Thief! Plagi-a-rist! They will vilify you .”
    The woman gave a wild little cry, a burst of childish laughter. The line went dead.
    She is mad. Madness.
    Nothing to do with you.
    Call a lawyer. Do not become involved.
    Dazed, disbelieving. For a long time I stood at an octagonal window in my study, staring into the distance—(the grassy meadow, a fleeting view of Mill Brook on the farther side of the road)—without seeming to see anything. My thoughts beat like great deranged wings. Vilify, she’d said. The word stung. They will vilify you.
    Plagi-a-rist . A worse word.
    Just kill her. Silence the voice, the threat will go away.
    Through the millennia, that has been the most effective strategy.
    Jack of Spades would not hesitate. Jack of Spades had a ready solution for any problem.

5 The Good Citizen
    “It has to be a misunderstanding. Why would she select me .”
    With a part of my mind I understood that “C. W. Haider” was mentally ill, and that this bizarre accusation had nothing to do with “Andrew J. Rush” personally; yet with another part of my mind I felt threatened as if physically under siege.
    I had never been accused of any crime before, nor even any misdemeanor. Through my life of more than five decades, I’d accumulated, perhaps, less than a half-dozen parking and speeding tickets.
    I had never been sued. I had never been “arrested.”
    I had never been served a summons. A subpoena.
    Wanting to protest to C. W. Haider: I am a good person! I am a person who loves his family, and I am a citizen who cares about his community.
    I am a person whom others respect, admire, love.
    I am not a petty criminal.
    I am not a plagiarist!
    You will not vilify me!
    It was in 1998 that Irina and I made the decision to buy Mill Brook House, as it’s called. A somewhat overgrown, just-slightly-shabby but beautiful eleven-acre property north of the village of Harbourton within view of meandering Mill Brook.
    We bought the property, or rather made a down payment and acquired a mortgage, with money from the sales of my first several novels. We were not rich—hardly!—but suddenly, it seemed that we had money, we could afford to live on a scale we’d never have anticipated when I began writing and sending out my work with the blind optimism of a man fishing with a half-dozen lines.
    Until then we’d been living in a small ranch-style house in suburban New Brunswick where I taught English at Highland Park High School, and Irina was a Montessori instructor. Humdrum is the word that comes to mind—though I try to beat it away as you’d beat away a loud-buzzing fly it is humdrum that comes to mind most ignominiously.
    Humdrum lives for humdrum folks.
    Before Jack of Spades emerged out of Nowhere.
    Often we visited my parents in Harbourton forty miles to the west and south, where I’d been born and grown up and still had—still have—many friends from childhood. Humdrum life too it had been there—probably—but my memories are happy ones, overall. My father was a small-town merchant (footwear, ladies’ handbags) who did moderately well in the context of other Harbourton merchants and who never complained of his life though when I was a boy of about thirteen, seeing Dad’s store on Main Street, one glass-fronted facade among others, each showcasing merchandise to the street, a dizzying realization came to me: What if no one buys? Suddenly—from now on—no one?
    There is terror in such a realization, when you