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She tried to think of another way to start off, a way that would not put him on the defensive. Nothing he had done had anything to do with Horacio.

She was almost ready to do it, but in the pause he said, “That land's worth about thirty thousand an acre. In four more years, it'll be worth a lot more. We've really got it made, Tory!”

Rockets burst overhead and behind them the band began to play “Oh, Susannah.”

One day a white rose was waiting for Tory when she came back from the club.

So was her mother.

“I'm sorry,” Mrs. King said, “but the card fell out of the tissue paper, and I read it.”

The card said,
The last line of LITOC from your H.

LITOC stood for the novel by García Márquez.

“Well?” said Mrs. King. “What does it mean?”

“I'll have to look it up,” said Tory, who'd never have to look it up to remember it.

“You know what I'm asking you. What is this all about, dear? He calls himself ‘
Your
H.'?”

“When you were in love with that Lasher, what was it all about?” Tory asked.

“Tory, Richard Lasher was the son of the warden. He wasn't the son of someone inside. He was of our own kind, not an ethnic. He went to middle school and high school here, and we all knew the family.”

“I didn't ask you what Lasher was about. I asked you what
it
was about.”

Mrs. King drew a deep breath.

She sat down on her daughter's bed.

She said finally, “When did all this happen?”

“If you get her in trouble, your life will be ruined,” said Maria Vegas.

“I don't touch her.”

“Sure, and I'm that blonde Madonna from the MTV.”

“I don't. We're going away, Mama.”

“What does your father say?”

“To go. To marry her.”

“He said that?”

“He said when he fell in love and married it was the best thing of his life.”

His mother blushed and bit away a little smile. “There's more to come,” she said. “It's not over, tell him.”

“And he thanked me for bringing her there to meet him, for asking him his opinion.”

“What did he think, you'd leave your own father out?”

While she waits for him to come home this night, Mrs. King is thinking of things she has gone over and over in her head all day.

She thinks of the greeting card he always presents to her three times a year: on Valentine's Day, on their anniversary, and on her birthday. She finds one propped up against the water glass at her place, at the breakfast table. He is already at work by then, since they never eat together in the morning, and she immediately thanks him, telephoning his office to do so.

The cards are the big, mushy sort with words on them he would never dream of speaking.

She thinks, too, of his habit of telling her he feels like scratching an itch. It has become his way of saying that he's what Tory would call horny. Mrs. King hates that word, as well. Mrs. King thinks of it as wanting to make love, though that is not the most accurate description of what actually happens.

And Mrs. King remembers how surprised she used to be when she was with her girlfriends and they would admit to similar things going on in their lives. All of them did; all admitted it and laughed.

There was a warm camaraderie in the laughter, as though they all belonged to the same sorority … and one of them might say with a certain affectionate indignation, “Men!”

When she hears his car drive up, she steels herself. She tries to remember what Tory said to tell him: Vassar isn't the only college—New York City has several very fine ones, including Parsons School of Design, and Cooper Union, for artists. Tory does not expect any help from home, either. Both she and Horacio are going to find jobs in New York.

And Mrs. King is to try and make him understand that since Horacio came into her life, Tory realizes she did not love Drew that way at all. She was never in love with him. Drew was more like a best friend. No … Mrs. King decides to omit that description of Drew.

Wham!
—the slam of the Chrysler's door, and now he is on his way up the walk.

Mrs. King's heart is racing with an excitement she has not felt for ages and ages.

They had composed their own marriage vows.

They were very simple ones, ending with Tory saying, “We, Victoria and Horacio, will love each other forever.”

A pause for the exchange of rings.

Then it was Horacio's turn. “‘Forever, he said,'” which is the last line of
Love in the Time of Cholera.

THE GREEN KILLER

“B
e nice to him,” my father said. “He's your cousin, after all.”

“He takes my things.”

“Don't be silly, Alan. What of yours could Blaze possibly want? He has everything …
everything,
” my father added with a slight tone of disdain, for we all knew how spoiled my cousin was.

But he did take my things. Not things he wanted because he needed them, but little things like a seashell I'd saved and polished, an Indian head nickel I'd found
,
a lucky stone shaped like a star. Every time he came from New York City with his family for a visit, some little thing of mine was missing after they left.

We were expecting them for Thanksgiving that year. It was our turn to do the holiday dinner with all our relatives. Everyone would be crowded into our dining room with extra card tables brought up from the cellar, and all sorts of things borrowed from the next-door neighbors: folding chairs, extra serving platters, one of those giant coffee pots that could serve twenty … on and on.

It was better when it was their turn and everyone trooped into New York for a gala feast in their Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking Central Park. They had a doorman to welcome us, a cook to make the turkey dinner, maids to serve us.

Blaze's father was the CEO of Dunn Industry. My father was the principal of Middle Grove High School on Long Island. About the only thing the two brothers had in common was a son apiece: brilliant, dazzling Blaze Dunn, seventeen; and yours truly, Alan Dunn, sixteen, average.

But that was a Thanksgiving no one in the family would ever get to enjoy or forget. An accident on the Long Island Expressway caused the cherry black Mercedes to overturn, and my cousin Blaze was killed instantly.

I had mixed emotions the day months later when I was invited into New York to take what I wanted of Blaze's things.

Did I want to wear those cashmere sweaters and wool jackets and pants I'd always envied, with their Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein labels? The shoes—even the shoes fit me, British-made Brooks Brothers Church's. Suits from Paul Stuart. Even the torn jeans and salty denim jackets had a hyperelegant “preppy” tone.

Yes!

Yes, I wanted to have them! It would make up for all the times my stomach had turned over with envy when he walked into a room, and the niggling awareness always there that my cousin flaunted his riches before me with glee. And all the rest—his good looks (Blaze was almost beautiful with his tanned perfect face, long eyelashes, green eyes, shiny black hair); and of course he was a straight-A student. He was at ease in any social situation. More than at ease. He was an entertainer, a teller of stories, a boy who could make you listen and laugh. Golden. He was a golden boy. My own mother admitted it. Special, unique, a winner—all of those things I'd heard said about Blaze. Even the name, never mind it was his mother's maiden name. Blaze Dunn. I used to imagine one day I'd see it up on the marquee of some Broadway theater, or on a book cover, or at the bottom of a painting in the Museum of Modern Art. He'd wanted to be an actor, a writer, a painter. His only problem, he had always said, was deciding which talent to stress.

While I packed up garment bags full of his clothes, I pictured him leering down from that up above where we imagine the dead watching us. I thought of him smirking at the sight of me there in his room, imagined him saying, “It's the only way
you'd
ever luck out like this, Snail!” He used to call me that. Snail. It was because I'd take naps when he was visiting. I couldn't help it. I'd get exhausted by him. I'd curl up in my room and hope he'd be gone when I'd wake up. … He said snails slept a lot, too. He'd won a prize once for an essay he'd written about snails. He'd described how snails left a sticky discharge under them as they moved, and he claimed that because of it a snail could crawl along the edge of a razor without cutting itself. … He'd have the whole dining table enthralled while he repeated things like that from his prize-winning essays. And while I retreated to my room to sleep—that was when he took my things.

All right. He took my things; I took
his
things.

I thought I might feel weird wearing his clothes, and even my mother wondered if I'd be comfortable in them. It was my father who thundered, “Ridiculous! Take advantage of your advantages! It's an inheritance, of sorts. You don't turn down
money
that's left you!”

Not only did I not feel all that weird in Blaze's clothes, I began to take on a new confidence. I think I even walked with a new, sure step. I know I became more outgoing, you might even say more popular. Not dazzling, no, not able to hold a room spellbound while I tossed out some information about the habits of insects, but in my own little high-school world out on Long Island I wasn't the old average Alan Dunn plodding along anymore. That spring I got elected to the prom committee, which decides the theme for the big end-of-the-year dance, and I even found the courage to ask Courtney Sweet out.

The only magic denied me by my inheritance seemed to be whatever it would take to propel me from being an average student with grades slipping down too often into Cs and Ds, up into Blaze's A and A-plus status. My newfound confidence had swept me into a social whirl that was affecting my studies. I was almost flunking science.

When I finally unpacked a few boxes of books and trivia that Blaze's mother had set aside for me, I found my seashell, my Indian head nickel, and my lucky stone. … And other things: a thin gold girl's bracelet, a silver key ring from Tiffany, initials H. J. K. A school ring of some sort with a ruby stone. A medal with two golf clubs crossed on its face. A lot of little things like that … and then a small red leather notebook the size of a playing card.

In very tiny writing inside, Blaze had listed initials, dates, and objects this way:

A.D. December 25 Shell

H.K. March 5 Key ring

A.D. November 28 Indian nickel

He had filled several pages.

Obviously, I had not been the only one whose things Blaze had swiped. It was nothing personal.

As I flipped the pages, I saw more tiny writing in the back of the notebook.

A sentence saying:
“Everything
is
sweetened by risk.”

Another:
“Old burglars never die, they just steal away. (Ha! Ha!)”

And:
“I dare, you don't. I have, you won't.”

Even today I wonder why I never told anyone about this. It was not because I wanted to protect Blaze or to leave the glorified memories of him undisturbed. I suppose it comes down to what I found at the bottom of one of the boxes.

The snail essay was there, and there was a paper written entirely in French. There was a composition describing a summer he had spent on the Cape, probably one of those “What I Did Last Summer” assignments unimaginative teachers give at the beginning of fall terms. … I did not bother to read beyond the opening sentences, which were “The Cape has always bored me to death for everyone goes there to have fun, clones with their golf clubs, tennis rackets, and volleyballs! There are no surprises on the Cape, no mysteries, no danger.”

None of it interested me until I found “The Green Killer.” It was an essay with an A-plus marked on it, and handwriting saying, “As usual, Blaze, you excel!”

The title made it sound like a Stephen King fantasy, but the essay was a description of an ordinary praying mantis … a neat and gory picture of the sharp spikes on his long legs that shot out, dug into an insect, and snap went his head!

“You think it is praying,”
Blaze had written,
“but it is waiting to kill!”

My heart began pounding as I read, not because of any blood-thirsty instinct in me, but because an essay for science was due, and here was
my
chance to excel!

Blaze had gone to a private school in New York that demanded students handwrite their essays, so I carefully copied the essay into my computer, making a little bargain with Blaze's ghost as I printed it out:
I will not tell on you in return for borrowing your handiwork. Fair is fair. Your golden reputation will stay untarnished, while my sad showing in science will be enhanced through you.

“The Green Killer” was an enormous hit! Mr. Van Fleet, our teacher, read it aloud, while I sat there beaming in Blaze's torn Polo jeans and light blue cashmere sweater. Nothing of mine had ever been read in class before. I had never received an A.

After class, Mr. Van Fleet informed me that he was entering the essay in a statewide science contest, and he congratulated me, adding, “You've changed, Alan. I don't mean just this essay—but
you
. Your personality. We've all noticed it.” Then he gave me a friendly punch, and grinned slyly. “Maybe Courtney Sweet has inspired you.

And she was waiting for me by my locker, looking all over my face as she smiled at me, purring her congratulations.

Ah, Blaze,
I thought,
finally, my dear cousin, you're my boy … and your secret
is
safe with me. That's our deal.

Shortly after my essay was sent off to the science competition, Mr. Van Fleet asked me to stay after class again.

“Everyone,” he said, “was impressed with ‘The Green Killer,' Alan. Everyone agreed it was remarkable.”

“Thank you,” I said, unbuttoning my Ralph Lauren blazer, breathing a sigh of pleasure, rocking back and forth in my Church's loafers.

“And why not?” Mr. Van Fleet continued. “It was copied word for word from an essay written by Isaac Asimov. One of the judges spotted it immediately.”

So Blaze was Blaze—even dead he'd managed to take something from me once again.