FADE by Cormier Robert

Author:Cormier, Robert [Cormier, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Delacorte Books for Young Readers
Published: 2009-01-21T05:00:00+00:00

Stunned, I sank to the floor. After a while, I began to read, swiftly, with no pauses, from the opening paragraph when the photograph was taken in Canada to those last sad words that told of Bernard's death.

Time passed. I didn't know how long. I wished fervently that I smoked or drank or did drugs. Because I needed desperately to do something. I made my way to the living room unaware of my passage through the rooms. I gobbled up a few Godiva chocolates without tasting them and felt slightly sickish.

My God. I had stumbled across a posthumous unpublished manuscript by one of the country's most famous writers, secretly kept here by his agent. And now I was part of the secret.

That's what you get for snooping, Susan baby. Maybe this will cure you of that rotten habit.

My conscience talking.

The big problem: What do I do now?

As it turned out, I did not have to do anything. Meredith came into the apartment that evening, windblown, tossed her wide-brimmed straw hat on the table in the foyer, looked at me, looked away, looked again, and said: “You found it, didn't you?”

I began to stammer apologies, didn't know what to do with my hands or legs.

“Please, Susan, no apologies,” Meredith said. “Maybe I wanted you to find it. I could have tucked it away in a better, less accessible place. Down at the office in the big old safe there. Let me soak awhile—I'm beat—and then we'll talk.”

Later, sitting across from each other, the box with the manuscript on the coffee table, Meredith said: “Paul told me once that a writer is allowed one major coincidence in a novel. Maybe that applies in real life too. Anyway, my coincidence is this—the day I received your letter asking about the internship was the day I was brought Paul's manuscript….”

“Where did it come from? Where has it been all these years?” I asked.

“It was sent to me by an attorney in Monument. Lionel Duschenes, an old-timer. He said that Paul personally delivered the manuscript to him a few weeks before his death back in 1967 with instructions to hold it until 1988 and then deliver it to me.” She leaned back, closing her eyes. “Poor Paul. Never seemed happy. Always haunted by—something. I had a special place in my heart for him. Bruises in Paradise, his first novel, was also the first novel I sold as an agent. Both of us starting out together, me, the shy young thing from Kansas and Paul, the shy writer from New England….”

She opened her eyes, they glistened—tears?

“Why are you so troubled, Meredith?” I asked.

“The manuscript troubles me, Susan. I can't get it out of my mind. Is it …” She paused, the question left unasked. “You've read it. Tell me what you think.”

“Well, first of all, it's only a fragment. Incomplete. But I was very moved by it …”

Meredith was as still as the crystal paperweight, shaped like a fawn, on the table next to the manuscript.

Warming

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