Page 50 of Rock Paper Scissors
“Henry had a thing about the number three and the color black. A lot of his novels were set in Blackdown or Blacksand… I think there may have been a Blackwater too…”
“You never mentioned that before.”
“I didn’t realize there was a connection until now. But Henry can’t have sent this email—he doesn’tdoemails, or the internet, doesn’t even have a mobile phone. He thinks they cause cancer.Thought.”
For a moment, I think Adam might cry.
I put my hand on his shoulder, “I’m sorry, I know how much you—”
“I’m fine. He hadn’t even been in touch since…”
Adam trails off and stares into space.
“What is it?” I ask.
“I hadn’t heard anything from or about him since last September, when his latest agent sent me a copy of his latest book. Luckily, this agent approves of screen adaptations, not like Henry’s first one. He’s a nice guy, we even joked about how Henry wasn’t speaking tohimeither, but the author had still sent his manuscript, three days before his deadline, wrapped in brown paper and tied with string just like usual.”
“So?”
“The headstone outside says he died two years ago. Dead people can’t write novels or send them to their agents.”
It takes me a few seconds to process this latest piece of information. “Are you saying that you think heisn’treally dead?”
“I don’t know what to think anymore.”
“Did he have any family? Surely someone would have known if he passed away. One of my old foster parents died last year, do you remember? Charlie, the guy who worked at the supermarket all his life, and always brought home free food that was about to go off. I hadn’t spoken to him for over a decade, but I still knew when he died. Henry Winter is a world-famous author; we would have read about his death in the newspapers or—”
Adam shakes his head. “There was nobody. He was a self-confessed hermit, and liked living his life that way… most of the time. Whenever he drank too much whiskey, Henry would get all teary-eyed about not having any children—nobody to look after his books when he was gone. That’s all he really cared about: the books. The man was stoic as a tree at all other times.”
“Well, someone must have been helping him. Henry was no spring chicken if he was born in 1937,” I say.
Adam’s eyes narrow. “That’s an odd detail to remember.”
“Not really. It was written on the headstone and Amelia Earhart went missing in 1937. I was named after her. Don’t you remember why you were called what you were? I think names are important.”
Adam stares at me as though my IQ has dropped to a dangerously low level. “Henry Winter didn’t have any children; he didn’t have any family at all. I think the only person he had left in his life other than his agent was me, and we weren’t even on speaking terms when he died…”
His voice wobbles and he looks away.
“The headstone outside said ‘Father of one.’ Someone had that made, and someone buried him. He couldn’t have donethatby himself.”
The way Adam looks at me scares me a little. It’s hard not to say the wrong thing when nothing feels right. I sometimes think that his inability to recognize other people’s faces might make it harder for him to control the expressions on his own. The well-worn frown has gone, and it’s almost like he is… smiling. It vanishes as quickly as it appeared.
“We should get out of here while it’s still light,” he says, adopting a serious face once more to match his tone.
“What about Bob?”
“We’ll find a police station, explain the situation, and ask them to help.”
“The car is snowed in. The roads look dangerous—”
“I’m sure we can dig it out. I’d feel safer out there than I would do staying here for another night, wouldn’t you?”
He opens the door to the walk-in larder where we saw the wall of tools when we arrived. The industrial-sized chest freezer hums an eerie soundtrack, and I avoid looking at the trapdoor to the crypt. I’d rather forget what happened down there.
“Are you going to chop our way out?” I ask when Adam takes an axe off the wall.
“No, I just think having something for self-defense might not be a bad idea,” he replies, taking a shovel down off a rusty hook with his other hand.
