LITMIR.BIZ

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middle of his neatly clipped beard. Byron grinned. He was getting pretty good at this! Now if Henry had been in the office in person instead of in the form of an eight-by-ten glossy publicity photo, Byron would have been a happy man. Only that morning Henry had called to notify him that he’d just signed a mega-deal with a big New York publisher.

      “For what?” Byron had demanded.

      “A technothriller.”

      “What, do you have a dastardly villain threatening to blow up the world with a toaster? You don’t know anything about advanced technology. Henry, for God’s sake, you haven’t even figured out the telegraph yet.”

      “Research, my boy. Research.”

      Pierce & Rothchilde didn’t publish technothrillers. Its specialties were expensive-to-produce coffee-table books, mostly about art, geography and history, and so-called literary fiction. Some of the latter was deadly stuff. Byron found Henry’s books depressing as hell.

      Technothrillers. From a man who’d been utterly defeated by the locks on Byron’s sports car. “How does one exit from this contraption?” he’d asked.

      Now he was calling himself Hank Murrow and planning to make a bloody fortune. Probably had shaved his beard, burned his tweeds, packed his pipe away in mothballs and taken his golden retriever to the pound.

      “I wonder how much the fink’s really getting.”

      Byron aimed another dart. Henry—Hank—had said seven figures, but Byron didn’t believe him. He’d yet to meet a writer who didn’t lie about money.

      A quiet tap on his solid mahogany door forced him to fold his fingers around the stem of the dart and not throw it. He really wanted to. Henry had offered to send him a copy of his completed manuscript. Byron had declined. “It’ll be more fun,” Henry had said, “than anything that’ll cross your desk this year.” A comment all the more irritating for its probable truth. Byron had wished the turncoat well and gotten out his darts.

      Without so much as a by-your-leave from him, Fanny Redbacker strode into his office. Trying to catch him throwing darts, no doubt. She regularly made it clear that she didn’t think her new boss was any match for her old boss, the venerable Thorton Pierce. Byron considered that good news. His grandfather, whose father had cofounded Pierce & Rothchilde in 1894, had been a brilliant, scrawny old snob of a workaholic. He’d vowed never to retire and hadn’t. He’d died in that very office, behind that very desk, five years ago. Byron, although just thirty-eight, had no intention of suffering a similar fate.

      “Yes, Mrs. Redbacker?” he said, trying to sound like the head of one of the country’s most prestigious publishing houses.

      Mrs. Redbacker, of course, knew better. Stepping forward, she placed an envelope on his desk. Byron saw her eyes cut over to Henry Murrow’s dart-riddled face. Her mouth drew into a straight line of disapproval.

      “It’s tacked to a cork dartboard,” Byron said. “I didn’t get a mark on the wood paneling.”

      “What if you’d missed?”

      “I never miss.”

      She inhaled. “The letter’s a personal one addressed to you and Mrs. Forrester.” Meaning his mother. Byron wasn’t married. Mrs. Redbacker added pointedly, “The postmark is Tyler, Wisconsin.”

      Byron almost stabbed his hand with the dart, so completely did her words catch him off guard. Regaining his composure, he set the thing on his desk. Fanny Redbacker sighed, but didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. It had been three months, and Byron still wasn’t Thorton Pierce. He didn’t even look like him. Where his cultured, imperious grandfather had been sandy-haired and blue-eyed and somewhat washed out in appearance, Byron took after the Forresters. He was tall, if not as tall as the Pierces, and thick-boned and dark, his hair and eyes as dark as his father’s had been. For a while everyone had thought that despite his rough-and-ready looks Byron would step neatly into his grandfather’s hand-tooled oxfords.

      But that was before he’d ventured to Tyler, Wisconsin, three years ago. After that trip, all bets were off.

      “Thank you, Mrs. Redbacker.”

      She retreated without comment.

      Byron had forgotten his annoyance with Henry Murrow. Now all he could think about was the letter on his desk. It was addressed to Mr. Byron Forrester and Mrs. Ann Forrester, c/o Pierce & Rothchilde, Publishers. At a guess, the handwriting looked feminine. It certainly wasn’t Cliff’s.

      “Oh, God,” Byron breathed.

      Something had happened to Cliff, and now here was the letter informing his younger brother and mother of the bad news.

      Nora… Nora Gates had found out who Byron was and had decided to write.

      Not a chance. The letter wasn’t big enough to hold a bomb. And the scrawl was too undisciplined for precise, would-be spinster Eleanora Gates, owner of Gates Department Store in downtown Tyler, Wisconsin. She was the last person Byron wanted to think about now.

      He tore open the envelope.

      Inside was a simple printed card inviting him and his mother to the wedding of Clifton Pierce Forrester and Mary Elizabeth Baron the Saturday after this in Tyler.

      A letter bomb would have surprised Byron less.

      There was a note attached.

      Cliff’s doing great and I know he wants to see you both. Please come. I think it would be best if you just showed up, don’t you?

      Liza

      A hoax? This Liza character had neglected to provide a return address or a phone number, and the invitation didn’t request a reply. The wedding was to take place at the Fellowship Lutheran Church. To find out more, presumably, Byron would have to head to Wisconsin.

      Was that what Liza Baron wanted?

      Who the hell was she?

      Was Cliff getting married?

      At a guess, Byron thought, his brother didn’t know that Miss Liza Baron had fired off an invitation to the sedate Providence offices of Pierce & Rothchilde, Publishers.

      Byron leaned back in his leather chair and closed his eyes.

      Tyler, Wisconsin.

      A thousand miles away and three years later and he could still feel the warm sun of a Midwest August on his face. He could see the corn standing tall in the rolling fields outside Tyler and the crowd gathered in the town square for a summer band concert. He could hear old Ellie Gates calling out the winner of the quilt raffle, to raise money for repairing the town clock. First prize was a hand-stitched quilt of intersecting circles. Byron later learned that its design was called Wisconsin Wedding, a variation on the traditional wedding ring design created by Tyler’s own quilting ladies.

      And he could hear her laugh. Nora’s laugh. It wasn’t her fake spinsterish laugh he heard, but the laugh that was soft and free, unrestrained by the peculiar myths that dominated her life.

      He’d gone to Tyler once and had almost destroyed Nora Gates. He’d almost destroyed himself. And his brother. How could he go back?

      Please come….

      Byron had waited for years to be invited back into his older brother’s life. There’d been Vietnam, Cambodia, a hospital in the Philippines, sporadic attempts at normality. And then nothing. For five years, nothing.

      Now this strange invitation—out of the blue—to his brother’s wedding.

      A woman named Alyssa Baron had helped the burned-out recluse make a home at an abandoned lodge on a lake outside town. Was Liza Baron her daughter?

      So many questions, Byron thought.

      And so many dangers. Too many, perhaps.

      He picked up his last dart. If he or his mother—or both—just showed up in Tyler after all

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