David Guterson - Ed King

The Other

Our Lady of the Forest

East of the Mountains

Snow Falling on Cedars

Family Matters: Why Homeschooling Makes Sense

The Country Ahead of Us, the Country Behind

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright 2011 by David Guterson
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random
House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Alfred Music Publishing Co. Inc.: Excerpt from Do You Remember Walter? words and music by Raymond Douglas Davies, copyright 1969, copyright renewed by Davray Music Ltd. and ABKCO Music Inc., 85 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10003.
All rights on behalf of Davray Music Ltd. administered by Unichappell Music Inc.
All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Alfred Music Publishing Co. Inc.
Hal Leonard Corporation: Excerpt from Killer Queen, words and music by Freddie Mercury, copyright 1974, copyright renewed 2002 by Queen Music Ltd. All rights for the United States and Canada controlled and administered by Glenwood Music Corp. All rights for the world excluding the United States and Canada controlled and administered by EMI Music Publishing Ltd. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Guterson, David.
Ed King: a novel / David Guterson.
p. cm.
This is a Borzoi book.
eISBN: 978-0-307-70042-1
1. OrphansFiction. 2. Free will and determinationFiction. 3. Fate and fatalismFiction. 4. MillionairesFiction. 5. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS 3557. U 846 E 33 2011
813.54dc22 2011010255

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental.

The math problems referred to in have been culled from
Gordon Raisbecks Information Theory and from David Harels
Algorithmics: The Spirit of Computing.

Jacket photograph by Tim Ridley/Getty Images
Jacket design by Chip Kidd

v3.1

With gratitude to Fikso

KingCrank: Might have guessed it: King flew too high. Rule out mechanical failure. This was pilot error.

grizpilot: Im a pilot and can tell youtheres no defeating physics. Must have believed he was God.

pythiamist: What a coincidence. King goes down, queen disappears. Where do you get pilot error?

rudewakeup: Of course the conspiracy theorists tab queen as culprit. Oldest story in the world.

techtrappist: Shes dead, too. Theyve both been offed. By us or the Chinese. Take your pick.

candydark: Queen survives. Even thrives. I say so in no uncertain terms. techtrappistyoure wrong. She goes on.

pythiamist: I agree w/ candydark. Queen told her pilot to cruise to Carlisle without her. Then disappeared. She had a plan.

techtrappist: And what was that? Walk away from billions? Give me a break, pythiamist. Shes dead.

candydark: You must be a male, techtrappist. I smell dead-wrong male certainty every time you hit your Send key.

FiNancy: Speaking of walking away from billions, wish Id run, not walked, from their stock 12 days back!!!

KingCrank: Pythias toast.

FiNancy: I agree: history.

shanghairoller: Deal with it, folks. Just deal with the facts. Pythias not coming back.

In 1962, Walter Cousins made the biggest mistake of his life: he slept with the au pair for a month. She was an English exchange student named Diane Burroughs, and he was an actuary at Piersall-Crane, Inc., whose wife had suffered a nervous breakdown that summer. Diane had been in his house for less than a weekmothering his kids, cleaning, making mealswhen he noticed a new word intruding on his assessment of her. Here I am, thought Walter, an actuary, a guy who weighs risk for a living, and now, because Im infatuated with the wrong personbecause Im smitten by an eighteen-year-oldIm using the word fate.

Diane had been peddled to Walter, by an office temp familiar with her current host family, as a nice girl from the U.K. who needs work to extend her visa. Walter, who at thirty-four had never left North America, thought au pair sounded pretentiousYou mean babysitter, he told the temp. Immediately regretting his provincialism, he added, I could also go with nanny. The temps comeback was sharp. She was younger than he was, wore formidable boots, and had an air of immunity to an office flirt like Walter. No, definitely, its au pair, she said. Shes here on a visa. Shes from out of the country. If you take her on, you become her host father, and you give her an allowance for whatever she does for youchild care or housework or whatever.

Au pair it was, then. Walter took down the phone number, called Dianes host mother, then spoke to the girl herself. In no position to be pickyhe needed help yesterdayhe hired Diane on the telephone. This is hard to explain, he explained, but my wifes hospitalized.

Back came the sort of English inflections he couldnt help but be charmed by. In hospital, she said. I do hope it isnt serious.

No, he said, but meanwhile theres the kids. Four and three. Barry and Tina. Out of diapers, but still, theyre tricky to corral.

Then allow me just a smidgen of shameful self-promotion. What you need is an English au pair, sir, adept with a rodeo rope.

I think you mean lasso.

A lass with a lasso, then, for when theyre mucking about starkers.