Free Unforced Error by Michael Bowen Page A

God, no.”
    â€œSteady,” Melissa said.
    â€œWhat’s up?” Rep asked.
    â€œHoney,” Melissa said to him, “this is one of those yours-not-to-reason-why situations, okay? I want you to go down to the bottom of the stairs, and if anyone starts to come up before Linda and I get back down, I want to know about it before they reach the second step.”
    â€œYas’m,” Rep said, clicking his heels and saluting. He headed for his post as Melissa stuck her tongue out at him.
    â€œAll right,” Melissa said then to Linda, “into the office. We need to find out if Peter could possibly have seen anything in there that would have tipped him off to your fling.”
Like Chelsea Tuttle’s
note, she thought but saw no point in mentioning. Yet.
    Linda showed Melissa into the large, open office space that Quinlan shared with Linda and other freelance editors when they worked on-site. Melissa was feverishly running through a set of rationalizations to justify opening and reading Tuttle’s note, but her scruples were wasted. No envelope sheltered the missive. No folds concealed its message.
    A letter-opener savagely pinned a typewritten page to the head-high top cushion on Quinlan’s leather desk chair. Even from ten feet away Melissa could read the words hand-printed in scarlet lipstick across the typescript: “NICE TRY,” followed by a suggestion of the twelve-letter word for
incestuous
son
. (A suggestion only, rather than the word itself, for asterisks had replaced all but the M, the F, and the Rs.) “CT” served for a signature.
    â€œThe bowdlerization seems anomalous in context,” Melissa murmured.
    â€œChelsea always has been fastidious about indecent language,” Linda explained earnestly. “She knows her demographic.”
    â€œIsn’t the letter opener a bit over the top?”
    â€œNot for Chelsea. Anything short of an Italian dagger with a jewel-encrusted hilt would strike her as the epitome of restraint.”
    Melissa leaned close enough to the letter to read its typewritten text aloud to Linda. “Dear Chelsea: I am delighted to confirm that Jackrabbit Press is prepared to make an offer for first-publication rights to your novel,
An Inescapable Courtesy
. Enclosed is a contract providing for an advance and royalties twenty percent better than our standard arrangement. As you will appreciate, a surrealistic, experimental novel involving intersecting narrative vectors linking the occupation of Japan after World War II with the birth of disco and the election of the first woman pope will represent a major departure for both you and Jackrabbit Press. Finding just the right marketing approach will be essential. I can only hope that you are as excited by this challenge as I am. I look forward to working together with you on this exhilarating project.”
    â€œIncredible,” Linda said.
    â€œIt seems to have aggravated Chelsea,” Melissa said, “but I don’t see anything in there that could have alerted Peter.”
    â€œThen it must have been something else,” Linda said despairingly as she sank into a chair and contributed a few gasping whimpers.
    Melissa chanced a sidelong glance to make sure Linda was in fact moving away from Quinlan’s desk. Something dull and metallic near the top of Quinlan’s desk blotter had caught her eye. She wanted to look more closely at it without drawing Linda’s attention to it. The five-second examination that she managed left her hollow-bellied. She saw a knuckle-sized chunk of bolt with the threads worn smooth. Three strands of chestnut hair tied around the object in a delicate bow served as decoration.
    As Melissa turned back to Linda and gazed at the rich chestnut mane that Melissa had always envied she remembered Jesse Davidovich’s throwaway comment about the newel capital—
threads stripped and the bolt’s sheared.
She didn’t have any