Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, No. 6. Whole No. 784, December 2006

The Richard Parker Coincidence by Nancy Pickard

Nancy Pickard’s recent EQMM stories are making a splash! “There Is No Crime on Easter Island” (9-10/’05) is currently nominated for three awards for best short story: the Macavity, from Mystery Readers International; Deadly Pleasures magazine’s Barry Award; and the Bouchercon Convention’s Anthony Award. “The Book of Truth” (9-10/’06) will appear in a best-of-the-year anthology.

Lenore Lowery heard her husband let out a whoop of joy. Before she could even put her finger in her book and turn around to see what Charles was so excited about, she felt his presence behind her.

A heavy magazine landed with a plop on top of the novel in her lap.

“Charles! You could have made me lose my place.”

“I’ve found it, Lenore!”

“Found what?”

“Our place. Our boat. I can retire, and we can sail away, and you can read all the time for the rest of your life. It’s the perfect boat for us.”

“No boat is perfect for me,” she snapped, “and any boat will do for you. And which of these boats are you talking about, anyway?”

“Look at them!”

She felt him bend down over the back of the armchair she was sitting in, felt his face beside hers, smelled liver and onions on his breath, saw and felt the forefinger he jabbed into the pages of boat photos in the magazine on her lap. They had been married for five years, he a literature professor with a passion for Edgar Allan Poe and a dream of sailing around the world, and she his former student. The deep voice that still could thrill her when he read poetry to her now spoke enthusiastically at her shoulder, releasing another repellent cloud of liver and onions. She had never dreamed that her romantic professor could ever like something so icky and prosaic as that, much less want her to cook it for him once a week.

“Just look at the pictures, Lenore. You’ll recognize it the moment you spot it, as I did.”

Reluctantly, she perused the pages, knowing he wouldn’t give up until she found “it,” whatever it was—

Her heart sank.

“This one,” she said, putting her own right forefinger onto a particular black-and-white picture of a cabin cruiser. When Charles used the word “sail,” it was only in the generic sense of moving across water. In fact, he was a “stinkpot” sailor, a devotee of engines and speed, the bigger and faster, the better.

“It’s this one, isn’t it, Charles?”

It wasn’t the configuration or appointments of the boat in question that gave her the clue. It wasn’t that the boat for sale was a thirty-eight-foot cabin cruiser with a raised aft deck that allowed it a full master stateroom below decks. It wasn’t that it had a galley-down layout with wraparound salon windows and “excellent storage.” It wasn’t the GM6-71N diesel engines that let it cruise at sixteen to seventeen knots and reach a top speed of around twenty knots. It wasn’t the breathtaking price that was about equal to half of what they would get if they sold their home to buy this boat.

It was the name of this particular boat.

“The Nevermore,” she said, reading the word across the back of it, pronouncing it in a dirgelike tone that was appropriate to a certain poem by Edgar Allan Poe. To the original owners of this boat that name might have symbolized no more working for a living, or no more house payments, or who knew what? But to Charles Lowery it could only conjure up “The Raven,” Poe’s most famous poem, about a monstrous bird who kept yapping, Nevermore, nevermore, neverdamnmore.

“Yes!” Charles said, behind her. “We have to have it.”

“Just like you had to have me?”

“Lenore! I didn’t marry you for your name, for heaven’s sake.”

Another of Poe’s poems was called “Lenore,” about a woman who also made an appearance in “The Raven.”

“Yeah, well, you didn’t not marry me for it, either,” she grumbled.

“Whatever that means. Lenore, look at this beauty! We can be totally self-sufficient on it for weeks at a time. We can go anywhere we want to go. The South Seas. The Mediterranean. The Caribbean!”

“Anywhere you want to go, you mean. It makes me seasick just to look at it.”

“You know what motion sickness signifies psychologically, don’t you? The fear of losing control. You need to let go! There are some things you can’t control, my dear, no matter how hard you try.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“No, it all fits together,” he claimed, sounding happy about it. “It’s fate, and you can’t fight fate, Lenore. Just ask Edgar Allan Poe.”

“He’s dead.”

“Once I get you out on our boat, floating peacefully for days on end, reading all the novels you’ve ever wanted to read, you’ll relax and thank me.”

“I can read all the books I want to right here in this chair, Charles. This chair doesn’t get rained on. This chair doesn’t leave me sunburned and throwing up. This chair doesn’t rock back and forth.”

She pushed herself up out of the chair in question, making her husband rear back to avoid knocking heads with her. The boating magazine fell to the carpet.

“Hey,” he objected. “You’ve made me lose my place.”

“Your place is exactly right,” Lenore said heatedly, turning around to glare at him. “This is all about you and what you want, and anything I want be damned. Talk about control freaks!” She started to stomp out of their living room.

“Where are you going?” he called after her.

“To my book club! If it’s liver and onions, it must be Thursday.”

“Oh, right. What bit of fluff are you reading this month?”

She whirled around and stuck the book out — in lieu of hurling it at him — so he could see the jacket.

“Life of Pi? Why are you reading a math book?”

It wasn’t a book about mathematics. It was a beautifully written, wildly imaginative, smart novel that also just happened to be at the top of the bestseller lists, not that he would ever know that, since he never recognized the worth of any novel written after nineteen hundred. “Because I’ve always been able to tell when things add up,” Lenore shot back at him as she departed the room. To herself, she added, “And when they don’t.”

The women at the book club that night all professed to love Life of Pi, which was a fantastical story about a boy trapped on a boat with a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker. Lenore laughed out loud the first time somebody said the name aloud. “It’s such a funny name for a tiger,” she said.

A few of the other women also laughed and shook their heads, sharing her puzzled amusement, but she noticed that others seemed to be looking at her... or at one another... with odd expressions, as if she had said something surprising or, worse, stupid. “What?” Lenore said, looking at the night’s discussion leader. They all sat on couches or chairs their hostess had pulled into a circle in her living room. The women’s laps held plates full of homemade molasses cookies and lemon-raspberry cake. Cups of coffee or tea sat on tables in front of them or beside them.

Each woman had a copy of the same book tucked nearby for ready reference.

“What did I say?” Lenore asked, her heart already beating faster.

The discussion leader smiled in the kind of pleased, condescending way that Lenore associated with people who worked at the university with Charles. “Why, Lenore! You mean to say your own husband is one of the world’s experts on Edgar Allan Poe and you don’t know that spooky story?”

With a sinking feeling, Lenore realized she had stepped in it again. It was one of those moments when she revealed her total ignorance and lack of interest in the passion that had made her husband better known than tenure ever would. It didn’t help that he had left his first wife, whom most of these women had known, to marry his undergraduate student, Lenore. The first wife shared his passion for Poe — or pretended to, Lenore thought — even going so far as to fashion a Poe costume for the great man to wear when he lectured on the greater man. Lectures and conventions still took Charles out of town many nights and weekends a year, though his second wife never accompanied him unless she just couldn’t think up a good enough excuse to avoid it. Sometimes Lenore wished Edgar Allan Poe were still alive so she could personally strangle him. Maybe she’d let a raven peck his eyes out.

“Which one?” she countered.

“Which one?” the discussion leader asked, with excessive politeness.

“Which spooky story?”

It wasn’t as if she didn’t know anything about Poe. She knew all about the raven and Lenore poems, after all, enough to know that Charles had taken “Nevermore” as a sign that they should buy the boat with that name. Charles was big on “signs.” When the “signs” were right, he did things; when they weren’t, he refused to do whatever it was they mysteriously portended. At first, that trait of Charles’s had seemed romantic to Lenore, especially when it pointed him toward her. Anymore, though, when it more often pointed him away from anything she wanted to do, it drove her crazy. “Your behavior is a sign of lunacy,” she liked to tell him. The other thing she knew about Poe was that if he was known for anything — besides being a hopeless addict and drunk — he was known for writing spooky stories. Attempting to wipe the smug smiles off certain faces, she said, “ ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’? ‘The Pit and the Pendulum’? ‘The Masque of the Red Death’?”

There, she thought, that ought to show them.

“Oh, it’s not only a story he wrote,” the discussion leader said, in a way that made Lenore flush with instant humiliation. “It’s the story of something spooky that really happened in regard to Poe. And,” she added with a mischievous smile for the others in the room who were in the know, “to the real Richard Parker. You should ask Charles about it.”

“Why don’t you just tell all of us who aren’t familiar with it,” Lenore said, with a smile so gracious it made her jaws ache.

“All right.” The discussion leader matched her smile for smile. “I will. As you no doubt know...” There was a slight pause. “...Poe wrote only one novel in his lifetime. It is called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket and it’s about four men who get marooned at sea. Three of them survive by killing and eating the other one. The name of the one they eat is... Richard Parker.”

She dropped it dramatically, as if they’d all gasp, but Lenore didn’t quite get it.

“That’s where the author of this book...” She held up her copy of Life of Pi. “...got his name for the tiger? Because he was a man-eater?”

The discussion leader’s laugh was a delighted trill that sent a vicious electrical charge through Lenore’s stomach, which was already upset from the liver and onions. “Oh, that’s only half of the story! That’s not even the spookiest part, Lenore. Almost fifty years later... this is true!.. four men got marooned at sea and three of them survived by eating the fourth one, and his name was... Richard Parker!”

“No!” somebody else exclaimed. “That didn’t really happen!”

Lenore was pleased that someone else was willing to look dumb.

“Oh yes, it did,” the discussion leader said. “You can check the newspapers of the day. It caused quite a stir on its own, but you can imagine the excitement when somebody made the connection between the real-life event and Poe’s novel from fifty years earlier. And ever since then, there have been reports of strange and terrible things happening to anybody with the name Richard Parker. For instance...” She checked her notes. Their discussion leaders were expected to research the books and authors they discussed. “There was another ship that went down, in eighteen forty-six. There were deaths and cannibalism aboard, and one of the victims was a man named Richard Parker.”

This time, several women did gasp.

“Well, that settles it,” Lenore said.

“Settles what?” one of the university women said.

“Settles an argument that I’m having with Charles! He wants to buy a boat and retire on it and sail around the world, and I don’t want to.”

Too late, she realized she had stepped in it yet again. From the looks on several faces she could see that she had once again proved herself to be an insufficient spouse for the great Poe expert: Not only was she ignorant of his field of expertise, but she was also so selfish that she wouldn’t let him take his dream retirement. She knew what they were thinking: His first wife would never have been so mean.

For just an instant, Lenore got a glimpse of herself that made her wonder if she might actually be as selfish as other people thought she was. She quickly sloughed off that thought, however. She wasn’t the selfish one, he was! Maybe she had stopped supporting his obsessions, but hadn’t he done the same to her interests? Once he had waxed enthusiastic about the possibility that she might one day teach at the university, but where was all that cheerleading now?

Lenore sulked silently for the rest of the evening, even though she really loved the book they were discussing. She wasn’t a dunce, she told herself. If they hadn’t squashed her, she could have talked about it as brilliantly as any of them were doing all around her now.

Just as he often did, Edgar Allan Poe had managed to step into her life and mess it up.

As she sat barely listening to the lively discussion of Life of Pi by Yann Martel, she thought about her own existence, which had somehow mysteriously turned into keeping house for Charles. She vowed to herself that was going to end; she would go back to class, she would finish her dissertation. Well, start it, at least. But to do any of that, she was going to have to keep Charles off that boat. And that meant she was going to have to be more subtle, subtle enough so that when her husband changed his mind about his retirement, everybody would believe it was entirely his decision and that she had not stood in his way at all.

“What are you doing up there, Lenore?”

She whirled around, after quickly pushing back into the bookshelf a copy of Poe’s only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. “Oh! You startled me, Charles.” She was up on a library ladder and she held out her right hand so he could guide her back down to the carpet where he stood staring at her.

“Not as much as you startled me by looking at my Poe books.”

His tone was wryly amused, but also a little sad, she thought.

“Oh, Charles.” Upon reaching the floor, Lenore wrapped her arms around him and gave her husband the warmest hug he had received from her in a long while. “I’m an idiot, and I’m so sorry.” She pulled away just enough to be able to look into his face. “I resist everything you love to do. I make fun of things that are important to you. I don’t know why I do it, but I have realized I do, and I’m not going to do that anymore. I love you. I want to share your interests. I want to enjoy Poe as much as you do.”

His face was softening, his eyes were damp as he gazed into her own.

Lenore gave him a loving, apologetic smile. “And if other people can take Dramamine, or wear a patch for seasickness, then so can I.”

“Lenore...!”

She placed a finger gently against his lips.

“Shh. Don’t say anything. Just try to forgive me.”

He pulled her tightly to him, but she forced herself back away from him again so that she could look up sincerely into his face one more time. “I looked at that magazine again, Charles. It’s a beautiful boat. I think we ought to go look at it as soon as possible, before somebody else beats us to it.”

He stroked her hair, then cupped her face with his hands. “Lenore, you don’t really think I married you because you have the name of Poe’s romantic heroine, do you? She was doomed, after all, and dead! I married you because I fell in love with you. Your name was just the sign — in neon — that you were truly the right woman for me, like seeing the Nevermore tells me it’s the right boat for us. Your name only told me that we are destined to be together. It didn’t make me fall in love with you. I was so in love with you, I would have married you no matter what your name was. You do know that?”

“Of course I do, darling.”

“I can’t tell you how much this means to me, Lenore. Just to see you in here, showing an interest in my books! And you know what? Our first trip on the boat, we could sail to that Poe conference in the Bahamas.”

Lenore ducked her head into his chest again and muttered, “Nevermore.”

“What, sweetheart?”

“The name of our new boat, dearest. The Nevermore.”

On their way out to inspect the boat two days later, they hit every red light between their home and the yacht club where the Nevermore was docked.

“You’re sure this isn’t a sign, Charles,” Lenore gently teased him, “that we should stop and think about this before we make such a big investment?”

He smiled over at her, looking happier than she had seen him look in months.

“Not on your life,” he said, just as a light turned green. “It’s a sign that nothing can stop us now.”

“You even wore the correct shoes, Lenore!”

Standing beside her on the dock, with the Nevermore rocking gently in front of them, Charles smiled down at her feet in pleased approval. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d even know not to wear hard soles on a boat.” His words took on a teasing tone. “Are you sure it’s not just an accident that you have on those tennis shoes?”

“Right,” she said, teasing him back. “You know how many pairs of sneakers I keep in my closet.” The answer to that was none. “It was strictly an accident that I went out this morning and shopped until I found these.”

They both stared down at the cute little navy-blue canvas-backed shoes with the rubber soles. She’d been reading up about more than Poe. She’d also boned up about life at sea, learning, among other things, that it was considered the height of vulgarity to endanger precious wooden boat decks with shoes that might mar them, not to mention the fact that it was dangerous to wear slippery footwear on wet, rocking decks. Lenore intended to wear her new blue tennies, with their grip soles, to the next meeting of the book club, so they’d ask her where and why she got them and she would get a chance to tell the story of the marvelous sacrifice she was willing to make for love.

Charles inhaled deeply.

“Don’t you just love the scent of salt air, Lenore?”

She eyed a dead fish carcass that was floating at the waterline and bumping up against the side of “their” boat.

“Refreshing,” she said, with a finger under her nose.

“Did you take your Dramamine?”

She eyed the constantly moving boat. “I took two.”

As if escorting his queen onto her yacht, Charles offered his hand to help her cross from dock to deck without falling into the water.

“Cute little kitchen,” Lenore said, looking around it.

“On a boat it’s called a galley,” the sales agent told her.

“I knew that,” Lenore said, and smiled so charmingly that both he and her husband smiled back at her.

“Do you think you could cook in here?” Charles asked her.

“I don’t see why not,” she said. “It’s got everything. A stove, oven, refrigerator, freezer, even a garbage disposal and a trash compactor.” Leonore picked up a roundish purple and white object from a woven basket on the counter and began to toss it lightly from her left hand to her right hand and back again. “Just like home.”

“What’s that?” the sales agent asked, nodding his head at her “ball.”

“This?” Lenore stopped tossing it and held it up for the men to see more clearly. “It’s a turnip. Haven’t you ever seen a turnip before?”

The agent laughed. “I guess not.”

But Charles didn’t laugh.

Lenore saw that he was staring at the turnip with his mouth slightly open, as if he could take a bite of it.

“Is something the matter, Charles?”

He briefly hesitated, but then smiled — not at her, but at the vegetable. “Why, no. Definitely not.”

She gently placed the turnip back into the basket. “All signs still ‘go,’ darling?”

“They certainly are.”

“Do you want to see the cabins?” the agent asked them.

“We do,” Lenore said, with a happy lilt in her voice.

They moved into the master stateroom, where Charles and Lenore tested the built-in double bed by sitting on either side of it. At Lenore’s suggestion, the sales agent had withdrawn discreetly to allow them some time alone together in the cabin where they might soon be sleeping while at sea.

“Look at this, Charles,” she said, picking up a paperback book that sat on top of the bedside table on her side. “You said I could read to my heart’s content if we lived on a boat. I guess somebody else likes to read novels, too.”

He held out his hand to take the little book that she handed him.

She saw him read its title and heard his slight intake of breath when he saw it was Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey. Ignoring that, Lenore picked up a second book on the bedside table and said, “I’ve never heard of either of these authors, have you?” She handed him the second one. “How would you pronounce that name anyway? Mig-Non?”

“Mignon Eberhart,” her husband said, pronouncing it “Minyon.”

He drew out the word as if it held some secret meaning for him.

“Never heard of her,” Lenore said briskly. “What’s the name of it? Fair Warning? Maybe I’ll get to read a whole lot of things I’ve never heard of before, starting with Edgar Allan, of course.”

“Poe, yes!” Suddenly Charles threw the books down and flung himself off the bed. Looking excited, he turned toward his wife. “You feel it, too! Oh my God, Lenore! This really is fate. This is unbelievable. The portents couldn’t be clearer if somebody had painted a sign to this boat that said ‘Buy Me.’” When he saw that she looked uncomprehending, he said, “Sweetheart, have I ever told you about the only novel that Edgar ever wrote?” Seeming to assume that either he hadn’t or she wouldn’t remember, he said, “It was called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Pym, Lenore! Just like the title of that book.”

Together they stared at Miss Pym Disposes.

“Really? That’s a bit of a coincidence, I guess.”

“Coincidence nothing, it’s a sign, and it’s not even the only one.”

“What do you mean?”

“This other book?” He picked up the one by the author with the difficult first name. “By Mignon Eberhart? Lenore, Poe’s novel was about a ship that sank and three of the survivors ate the fourth one. Almost fifty years later a real ship sank and three marooned survivors ate the fourth. The name of Poe’s fictional victim was Richard Parker and that was also the name of the real man who got eaten!”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not. And you’ll never guess, but the name of that real ship was... the Mignonette!”

“Charles, stop. I already told you I’m ready and willing to buy this boat with you. You don’t have to make up stories about signs to convince me.”

“I’m not making anything up. It’s all true. Lenore, this boat is meant for us.”

“You’re really not making these things up?”

Solemnly, he shook his head.

“Well, this is amazing,” she said, getting up slowly from the bed. “And I think you’re right. Maybe I’m not the great believer in signs that you are, but even I have to admit that this is just too much of a coincidence for it to mean anything else.”

Her husband let out a sigh of relief. “I’m so glad you see it that way, too.”

Lenore walked around the bed until she could embrace him. “Of course I do. You always tell me to pay attention to meaningful coincidences, and these are just too obvious to ignore.”

“Shall we go find the agent and put in an offer?”

Lenore grinned at him. “Let’s do it!”

“And, Lenore?”

“Yes?”

“I haven’t even told you the funniest coincidence. When the Mignonette sank, the only food they had to eat was... a turnip.”

Lenore’s eyes widened in astonishment.

“A turnip!” she said, as if she had just fallen off the back of a truck full of them.

On their way out of the galley she said, “Before we make our offer, let’s take one more look around our boat, Charles.”

They ran their hands over the lovely teak wood of the cabinets.

Lenore ran the water in the double sink in the galley while Charles sat in the captain’s chair and turned the wheel back and forth. They opened the cabinets and marveled at the tidy display of canned goods they saw. Laughing, Lenore walked over to the refrigerator, where a white board was attached to the door, with an erasable writing marker tied to it. She picked up the marker and said playfully, “Let’s make our first grocery list for the boat, Charles.”

Playing along, he walked over to her and looked at the scribbling that was already on the board. The current owners appeared to have jotted down some of their recent boat expenses, complete with costs of each item.

“Eighteen dollars and thirty-eight cents for a sirloin steak?” Lenore said. “Good grief, where do they shop for groceries, Neiman Marcus?”

She turned, laughing, to face Charles.

“Charles?”

He was staring at the numbers written on the little board, his face gone white.

“Charles, what’s wrong?”

Stiffly, as if he had suddenly turned into a robot, her husband lifted his right arm and pointed his forefinger. “Eighteen thirty-eight,” he said.

“Yes. I know, it’s a lot for a steak.”

He lowered his finger to the next item. “Eighteen eighty-four.”

“Even more for the second steak.”

“No.” Looking sad and worried, he gazed into her eyes. “Lenore, we can’t buy this boat. In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if we should be thinking of going to sea at all.”

“What?”

“These dates, Lenore...”

“Dates? They’re prices of meat, Charles.”

“Not to me, they’re not, they’re dates. Eighteen thirty-eight was the date of the publication of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Eighteen eighty-four was the date when the book came true.”

“Oh my God, Charles.” Lenore’s hands went to her lips to cover her gasp.

She turned and stared up at him, wide-eyed. “You don’t think... you don’t think it could happen to us, do you?”

“I think the universe is trying to tell us something.” He grabbed her shoulders and turned her around until she was facing the outer door. “It’s too much. It’s too many coincidences about something too awful to contemplate. The names of those books, the turnip, those seemed benign, but this feels... malevolent, Lenore. This is a warning. And think of all those stoplights!”

“But you said—”

“I was fooling myself about their meaning, Lenore. Red means stop in any language, and certainly in the language of symbols and signs. They were already trying to tell me something and I wasn’t listening. My God, I could have endangered both of our lives. I should have stopped before we even got here.”

He was half shoving her, half pulling her off the boat and back up onto the deck outside.

“No!” Charles shouted at the sales agent when the man stepped toward them smiling. The smile faded fast. “We don’t want it!”

Almost before she knew what had happened, Lenore found herself back on dry, steady land again, with her new blue tennis shoes planted on terra firma. She thought about letting disappointed tears well up in her eyes, but decided not to push her luck. She slipped her hands inside of Charles’s hands, looked up at him, and said, “I want what you want, and if you think this boat is bad luck for us, well, I trust your instincts. And I know that you and I will be happy together anywhere we are, even back in our own home.”

Charles leaned over and gratefully, lovingly kissed her lips.

“Thank you,” he said. “For saying yes. And thank you for saying no.”

They walked arm-in-arm back to where his car waited in the parking lot.

“I’ve got a class to teach,” he said. “I’ll take you home first.”

“No, you won’t; that’s completely out of your way and you don’t have enough time to do it, anyway. I’ll just take a cab.” She had a bookstore in mind where she wanted to make a stop and pick up a copy of the book for next month’s meeting.

Charles waited with her for the taxi to arrive, and then he ushered her into its backseat.

“I guess it wasn’t meant to be, darling,” she told him.

“No, one must never argue with fate,” he said, and then kissed her.

Well, she had argued with fate and she had won, Lenore thought, feeling triumphant as she leaned back against the taxi’s seat. There would be no boat in her future, thank God. No vomiting over railings, no peeling, sunburned skin, no weathering of storms out in the open sea. She could curl up at home studying and reading, and live contentedly for all the years of Charles’s retirement, while he puttered about at his Poe nonsense.

When the taxi driver peeled away from the dock fast, jerking her from one side of the cab to the other, she had a moment of doubt about his skill as a driver, but it was quickly forgotten as they sped away and she began to reminisce about the delicious... and only... hour she had spent on a boat with her husband. It was not, however, the only hour she had ever spent on a boat. On that boat. Just that morning, she had made a preview inspection, telling the sales agent that she knew just the right things to scatter about the cabin to convince her husband to purchase this boat that he so dearly wanted to buy.

And so she had dropped a turnip here, placed a couple of paperbacks there, all based on her study of the Poe story and her forays into old bookshops and other stores. Why, Charles hadn’t even noticed some of the best “signs” she’d left for him... a painting of Nantucket, and the souvenirs from England and Australia, which had been the destinations of the real ship that went down.

She did think that the turnip was her most inspired “sign.”

Knowing Charles, she had suspected there would come a tipping point at which too many signs began to mean bad news instead of good, especially considering that the stories they pointed to were so tragic and grim. She had no way of knowing it would be the telltale dates that did it, the ones she had cleverly — if she did think so herself — camouflaged as grocery prices. She just knew it would be one of them, once they all piled up on him. It had never been a completely sure thing, her plan.

But it had worked, oh my, had it ever worked well.

Alone in the backseat, imagining many years of sprawling on her sofa at home, reading and analyzing delicious popular novels, Lenore Lowery smiled. The cabdriver, seeing her smile in his rearview mirror and taking it as meant for himself, grinned back at her.

At the moment of taking his eyes off the road, his hands jerked the wheel.

In the instant after that, when he turned around to speak to her, she opened her mouth to shout, “Look where you’re driving!” But between the time she started to yell and the time when he looked back at the road, a second car had pulled out of a side street in front of her taxi and smashed through the door where she sat.

Horrified, she had only a split second to flash on Charles’s familiar warning against tampering with fate.

Red lights! her brain screamed. They warned you to STOP!

As the impact hurled her across the backseat, her terrified brain registered the last thing she ever saw. On the back of the seat, right in front of her frightened eyes, was the driver’s ID card with his name spelled out in bold black letters: Richard Parker.

Copyright © 2006 Nancy Pickard