Jack of Spades Read Online Free PDF

are thirteen.
    It is not the terror of split skulls, spilled blood, death. It is the humdrum terror of ordinary life.
    Did I say that I had a happy childhood? In interviews, this is so.
    It is often the case that an only child has a happy childhood because there are no rivals for his parents’ love.
    North of Harbourton is rolling farmland, beautiful countryside bordering Mill Brook and long the property of wealthy landowners, multi-millionaire retired businessmen and politicians. For those of us who grew up in Harbourton it was a romantic dream to someday buy one of the old country estates along Mill Brook.
    But—can we afford it ? Irina asked.
    We can afford it, darling! I promise you.
    We spent more than a year renovating the eighteenth-century farmhouse with its small rooms, slanted plank floors, and unnervingly steep, narrow staircases. The original cellar was earthen-floored, with an oppressive, low ceiling; many of the windows were ill-fitting, and the house was prohibitively expensive to heat. We added rooms, we built a guest wing. In a room adjacent to the living room, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, I began to collect favorite books of mine in their earliest editions, when I could find them: American mystery and detective fiction of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s; a miscellany of pulp magazines containing “weird tales” of H. P. Lovecraft; first or early editions of books by Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James, Robert W. Chambers, Richard Matheson; ghost stories by Henry James and Edith Wharton; science fiction of a philosophical nature by Isaac Asimov, Philip K. Dick, J. G. Ballard; a solid wall of mid- and late-twentieth-century contemporaries from A to Z, through Barker, King, Le Guin, Morrow, Straub . . .
    My writing room, which has been featured in the New York Times Style Magazine as well as in New Jersey Life, is on the second floor of the farmhouse, in an extension built over the garage (formerly a stable). This light-filled room has skylights and windows overlooking a grassy decline to a large pond on which waterfowl—(mallards, Canada geese, swans)—languidly paddle. Beyond is a deciduous forest, which is part of our property; beyond that, just visible from my study, the gray-blue curve of Mill Brook. At a draftsman’s table in this room I compose my novels on a computer, working with hand-scrawled notes; on the wall beside the table I affix maps, plot outlines, hand-drawn likenesses of my “characters,” chronological lists. For I am a meticulous plotter of mysteries—even those readers who dislike my novels for their inevitable upbeat endings have to concede that no one plots mystery novels more conscientiously than Andrew Rush.
    On a windowsill facing the draftsman’s table are my magical talismans—family pictures, my Edgar first novel award, mementos and good-luck charms.
    In a small refrigerator, quick-energy supplies: orange juice, almond-yogurt bar, Diet Coke, white wine.
    I am so happy here.
    Here is my soul.
    You will not dare separate me from my soul.
    On the farther side of the room facing a smaller window is a smaller table, reputedly an antique, curiously scarred as if with a penknife, bought from a local Mill Brook Valley dealer. It is on this table that I compose my “Jack of Spades” novels first by hand, on yellow legal paper; then, when I have accumulated several chapters, I bring the material to the draftsman’s table to type into the computer.
    File: J.S .
    Writing as “Jack of Spades,” I write very quickly, and rarely glance back. Unlike “Andrew J. Rush,” I don’t plot carefully at all—I scarcely think in terms of plot .
    One thing happens, and then another.
    And another.
    And then—there’s a (nasty) surprise.
    Writing as “Jack of Spades” I rarely write before midnight. When the rest of the house is darkened. When I am totally alone, and not likely to be interrupted. When the tartest of white wines won’t do the trick and a few