Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 010111 by Dell Magazines

Author:Dell Magazines
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Dell Magazines
Published: 2011-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

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Fiction

THE ADVENT REUNION

By Andrew Klavan

Art by Jason Eckhardt

This new story began life in 2009 as an online performance piece (a video) rather than as prose fiction. The author has rewritten it for the page and created a fine Christmas ghost story. Andrew Klavan is well known for his internationally bestselling crime novels, which include True Crime, filmed by Clint Eastwood, and Don’t Say A Word, starring Michael Douglas. He’s been nominated for the MWA’s Edgar Award five times and has won it twice.

---1. Ghost Hunter---

I’ve wanted to tell this story for a long time. It began when I was a young man, during my junior year at Harvard.

To come, as I had come, from a crumbling house on a sandy lane in a dying town just west of nowhere to the aged brick and history, high culture and customs of one of the most prestigious universities in the country was a daunting journey for so inexperienced a boy. I spent my first year holed up in my room, buried in my books, working on my writing. Only after a very unpleasant summer break at home did I return to school determined to make friends.

I soon fell in with an aspiring composer named Jonathan Wilson and, through Jonathan, I found myself part of a little clique of brilliant artsy types—brilliant in our own minds, anyway. Among this group was a girl named Amanda Zane. She was blond and willowy and had a dreamy, wistful quality about her. She wrote songs and played guitar and sang. Her voice was high and clear and sweet, with a sad, yearning tone that just grabbed me by the heart. I was crazy about her pretty much on sight and, for some reason, she seemed to like me as well. We became a couple within the clique. It was the first truly happy time in my life.

No wonder that, as the Christmas break approached, I began to dread the thought of going home again. And when Jonathan came up with an alternative, I was delighted. His parents had decided to spend the holidays in Hawaii. Their house in rural upstate New York was going to be empty. Jonathan invited our little gang to spend Christmas there with him. Five of us accepted the invitation, David, Lucy, Rosemary, Amanda, and I.

It was, it turned out, a perfect setting for Christmas. The house was enormous, stone and stately. It sat in a little valley with hills of forest on every side, everything white with snow as far as the eye could see. When we first arrived, we tried to behave with our usual pseudo-sophisticated pseudo-detachment but the spirit of the season very quickly overwhelmed us. Within an hour of tumbling through the front door, we were laughing and shouting like the excited children we were. We found decorations in the attic and spread them all about the house. We found sleds in the garage and raced each other down the slopes. We cut down a large pine tree at the edge of the forest, tied it up with stout ropes, and dragged it home over the snow.

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