“So I want you to come clean with me now. Okay? You listening? What brought on the fight?”
The kid struggled to swallow. “He just attacked me.”
“How come?”
“All I did was defend myself. I swear,” he blubbered. “I didn’t want to fight him. It was a party.”
“Why’d he attack you?”
He shook his head.
“Now, that’s not true, is it, son? You know why he attacked you. So tell me. What caused your best friend to get mad enough to start beating up on you?”
Silence stretched out for about twenty seconds, then the kid mumbled a single word.
Hatch wasn’t sure he’d heard correctly, mainly because the first clap of thunder from the predicted storm rattled the small square window in his shack just as the boy spoke, and also because what he thought he heard the boy say was a strange answer to the question.
The officer must have thought so, too. He shook his head with misapprehension and leaned forward to hear better. “Come again? Speak up, son.”
The young man raised his head and took a swipe at his nose with the back of his hand. He cleared his throat. He blinked the officer into focus with his one functioning eye.
“Envy,” he said gruffly. “That’s what this is all about. Envy.”
P.M.E.
St. Anne Island, Georgia
February 2002
Chapter 1
“But there’s got to be.” Maris Matherly-Reed impatiently tapped her pencil against the notepad upon which she had doodled a series of triangles and a chain of loops. Below those she’d rough-sketched an idea for a book jacket.
“P.M.E., correct?”
“Correct.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, there’s no such listing. I double-checked.”
The idea for the book jacket—an autobiographical account of the author’s murky relationship with her stepsibling—had come to Maris while she was waiting for the directory assistance operator to locate the telephone number. A call that should have taken no more than a few seconds had stretched into several minutes.
“You don’t have a listing for P.M.E. in this area code?”
“In any area code,” the operator replied. “I’ve accessed the entire U.S.”
“Maybe it’s a business listing, not a residential.”
“I checked both.”
“Could it be an unlisted number?”
“It would appear with that designation. I don’t have anything under those initials, period. If you had a last name—”
“But I don’t.”
“Then I’m sorry.”
“Thank you for trying.”