Peter Straub - Blue Rose 2 Mystery  

Praise for
MYSTERY
and
PETER STRAUBS
BLUE ROSE TRILOGY

The near perfect mystery. Has everything a classic whodunit should. Full of intricate, engrossing, flesh-and-blood suspects and heroes. Unexpected curves and potholes. The title says it all.

Milwaukee Sentinel

Murder, mayhem, mystery. A complex and satisfying tale. Compelling characters. A pulse-pounding climax.

The Plain Dealer

A tightly woven tale, crisply rendered, populated with well-drawn characters.

San Francisco Chronicle

Marvelous. Enormously satisfying. Unashamedly designed to fascinate.

The Sacramento Bee

The best of Peter Straubs writing.

Houston Chronicle

The characters are outstanding. They are the story, enshrouded by a nightmare that never lifts. Peter Straub takes bold risks and he succeeds.

San Jose Mercury News

Enormously entertaining and scary. Rich, complex, dark, and tough to put down.

New York Daily News

FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, JANUARY 2010

Copyright 1990 by Seafront Corporation

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Anchor Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in the United States in hardcover by E.P. Dutton, a division of Penguin Group (USA), Inc., New York, in 1990.

Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Straub, Peter, 1943
Mystery / Peter Straub. 1st Anchor Books ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-77396-8
I. Title.
PS3569.T6914M97 2010
813.54dc22
2009033226

www.anchorbooks.com

v3.1

For Lila Kalinich
and
For Ann Lauterbach

Mill Walk does not exist on any maplet us acknowledge that at the beginning. Extending eastward off Puerto Rico like revisions to an incomplete sentence are the tiny Islas de Culebra and Vieques, in their turn followed by specks named St. Thomas, Tortola, St. John, Virgin Gorda, Anegadathe Virgin Islandsafter which the little afterthoughts of Anguilla, St. Martin, St. Barthlemy, St. Eustatius, St. Kitts, Redondo, Montserrat, and Antigua begin to drip south; islands step along like rocks in a stream, Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Barbados, the almost infinitesimal Grenadines, and the little green bump of Grenada, an emerald the size of a dolls fingernailfrom there on, only blue-green sea all the way to Tobago and Trinidad, and after that you are in South America, another world. No more revisions and afterthoughts, but another point of view altogether.

In fact, another continent of feeling, one layer beneath the known.

On the island of Mill Walk, a small boy is fleeing down thebasement stairs, in so great a hurry to escape the sounds of his mothers screams that he has forgotten to close the door, and so the diminishing screams follow him, draining the air of oxygen. They make him feel hot and accused, though of an uncertain crimeperhaps only that he can do nothing to stop her screaming.

He hits the bottom stair and jumps down on the concrete floor, claps his hands over his ears, and runs between a shabby green couch and a wooden rocking chair to the heavy, scarred workbench which stands against the wall. Like the furniture, the workbench is his fathers: despite all the toolsscrewdrivers and hammers, rasps and files and tin cans full of nails, C-clamps and pliers, a jigsaw and a coping saw, a gimlet and a chisel and a plane, stacks of sandpapernothing is ever created or repaired at this bench. A thick layer of dust covers everything. The boy runs beneath the bench and puts his back to the wall. Experimentally, he takes his hands from his ears. One moment of quiet lengthens into another. He can breathe. The basement is cool and silent. He sits down on the concrete and leans against the grey block of the wall and closes his eyes.

The world remains cool, dark, and silent.

He opens his eyes again and sees a cardboard box, half-hidden in the gloom beneath the bench. This, too, is covered with a thick grey blanket of dust. All around the boy are the tracks of his passagelines and erasures, commas and exclamation points, words written in an unknown language. He slides toward the box through the fuzz of dust, opens the lid, and sees that, although it is nearly empty, down at its bottom rests a small stack of old newspapers. He reaches in and lifts the topmost newspaper and squints at the banner of the headline. Though he is not yet in the first-grade, the boy can read, and the headline contains a half-familiar name. JEANINE THIELMAN FOUND IN LAKE .

One of their neighbors is named Thielman, but the first name, Jeanine, is as mysterious as found in lake. The next newspaper in the stack also has a banner headline. LOCAL MAN CHARGED WITH THIELMAN MURDER . The next paper down, the last, announces MYSTERY RESOLVED IN TRAGEDY . Of these four words, the boy understands only in. The boy unfolds this issue of the paper and spreads it out before him. He sees the wordShadow, the words wife, children. None of the people in the photographs are people he knows.

Then he spreads out all the newspapers and sees a picture of a woman who looks something like his mother. She would like to see this picture, he thinks: he could give her the present of these interesting old newspapers he found beneath the workbench.

He clumsily gathers up the newspapers in his arms and walks out from beneath the bench and through the furniture. A section of pages slips away and splashes onto the floor, but he does not stoop to pick it up. The boy climbs the basement stairs into the warmer upper air, comes out into the kitchen, and walks through it to the hallway.

His mother stands in her blue nightgown, looking at him. Her hair is wild, and her eyes are somewhere else, like eyes that have rolled all the way over in her head and only seem to look out. Did you hear me?

He shakes his head.

You didnt hear your name?

He comes toward her, saying, I was in the basementlook at what I foundfor you

She floats toward him in her blue nightgown and wild hair. You dont have to hide from me.

His mother snatches away his present, already not a present but a terrible mistake, and more pages slither onto the floor. She holds up one of the sections of the newspaper. The boy sees her face go into itself the way her eyes had gone into themselves, as if she has been struck by some invisible but present demon, and she wobbles away toward the kitchen, the newspaper dripping from her hands. A laugh that is not a laugh but an inside-out scream flies out of her mouth. She lands in a chair and puts her face in her hands