About the Author by John Colapinto

Author:John Colapinto [Colapinto, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature publishing, Psychological fiction, Manhattan (New York; N.Y.), Impostors and imposture, General, Psychological, Suspense, Bookstores, Fiction - Authorship, Roommates, Fiction, Bookstores - Employees, Murderers
ISBN: 9780060932176
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2002-07-10T23:00:00+00:00

9

Of all the cottages and houses in New Halcyon, none had as bleak a history as the one known, simply, as the Yellow House. Set on the very tip of Blueberry Point—a finger of land that extended into Lake Sylvan about five miles from town—the Yellow House had once been a cheerful place of distinctive canary-colored clapboard visible from virtually any vantage point on the lake. For years, the house had been owned by Charlie Blakeson, a poet and scholar who lived there with his wife, Marissa, also a poet, and their two beautiful sons, Skylar and Shane. Although this all long predated my arrival in New Halcyon, tales of the blissfully happy, bohemian Blakeson clan in their Yellow House were legend. The legend had, however, turned dark when Charlie was, in the mid-1970s, killed in a freak boating accident on the lake. Widowed Marissa, left with debts and a bit of a drinking problem, had been determined to live on, with her growing sons, in the Yellow House, but she had been unable to keep up with the repairs. In time, the place had become something of a Havishamian ruin, as Marissa and the boys had hung on there, trying to retain some of the magic of their former life. Then tragedy again struck. The first of Marissa’s sons, Skylar, died in a car wreck on Cliffwood Road; Shane passed on a year later, the victim of a bad dose of heroin. Marissa, inconsolable and broke, had moved in with an unmarried sister in Burlington, and put the Yellow House up for rent. The sorry state of the premises (the house had deteriorated badly over the previous twenty years of neglect), plus her rather steep asking price, had scared away all comers. That is, until Les happened along, seeking somewhere simply to “lay low.” She pronounced the place perfect. And why not? She was hardly a discerning renter, and it wasn’t her money that was paying for the place. She moved in on July 1.

Almost immediately, the town was buzzing with reports of the parties that rocked the Yellow House. The house lights, visible from the town, blazed every night into the gray dawn hours; hard-core death-metal music jackhammered from the front lawn, where huge bonfires often burned. The ordinarily quiet road that ran through the village came alive with cars, motorcycles, and pickups heading to Les’s place in an endless stream. At meetings of the Village Improvement Society, the little old ladies fussed and fretted over the unimaginable immoralities no doubt taking place there; the yuppies mumbled gravely about declining property values; the sundry other busybodies raised dark questions about how the young woman was paying the $800-a-month rent. “Do you suppose she’s selling drugs?” someone asked at one meeting. I naturally remained silent, since it was, of course, I who was funding those low-rent Gatsbyesque revels.

I had strictly forbidden the girl to make any direct contact with me, but it was impossible not to run into her, almost daily, in town.

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