Read Laura Rider's Masterpiece for Free Online Page B

between them was obvious and implicit. She, by virtue of her interest in him, would
     ask questions that would showcase his expertise or his nobility or his wit. She would try to delve without being intrusive,
     in the hope that he would arrive at the truth of his experience, and he would honor her by being as lively and as fascinating
     as he knew how. There was no predicting how it all might go, how, for instance, the minute the on air sign flashed, a formerly
     talkative person might clam up, or a quiet one begin to jabber. Her job was to shape the interview, to keep the guest on track
     when necessary, to give the piece a flow when it was live so there was something of a narrative arc, and to manage the callers
     so that, without permitting them to rattle on, they felt heard.
    When she was upstairs in the office thinking about how to approach the brain-injured patient with his spaniels, Charlie Rider
     came to mind again. “
If I told you about the Silver People, you wouldn’t believe me
.” What had she said to him? “
You’d better get to work on your narrative skills
.” At dinner, Frank had said that in some quarters abduction stories were judged not by the verisimilitude of the details,
     but by the sincerity and emotional distress of the teller. Jenna couldn’t help wondering if Charlie was a capable raconteur.
     She wondered what he’d have to do to make her believe, if his own doubt would make the story more convincing, if confidence
     would work against him. Maybe Charlie had come through the riptides of her thoughts, bobbing between the cranial waves, bursting
     free, and washing up on Highway S. He was silver within, the shine glowing from his astral core. Astral core? She liked the
     sound of it, and she pictured what such a thing might be: the deep, clear wishing well of the soul.
    As she often did, she told herself that it had been a good move to come to Hartley, to leave the suburbs for this small farm
     surrounded by woods. She had grown tired of the women in particular in Fox Grove, tired of their fierce political correctness,
     the calcification of their righteousness, the competitive spirit of kitchen remodeling. She had once discovered a neighbor
     boy, a seven-year-old, sobbing in her scrubby bushes because on the occasion of his birthday his guests had been told to donate
     to their favorite cause rather than bring presents to the party. A donation to Greenpeace rather than a video game? What was
     wrong with the parents?
    Jenna had come to the point in her forty-six years when she would rather talk with a doe-eyed elf, someone with an astral
     core, than have to speak over the fence to Janey Slauson about full-spectrum compact fluorescent lightbulbs. Frank and Jenna’s
     only child, Vanessa, had made the best of a good school system in Fox Grove, and finally, after college, when the girl had
     gone off to get her doctorate, they’d moved fifty miles from the city. They had bought small energy-efficient cars not only
     because they believed in them, but to assuage their guilt about the commute, and to mitigate, as much as possible, the criticism
     of people like Janey Slauson.
    Jenna remembered Charlie saying to her about the bouncing globes, “They might be what you think they are.” Such an insolent
     alien! It would be difficult to do a measured show about UFOs, difficult to strike the right tone. She wouldn’t want it to
     turn into a free-for-all, the crazies jamming the phone lines with their testimonials, but she wouldn’t want them to be crushed,
     either, by the common sense and science of a psychologist and meteorologist. She’d done what she’d thought had been a respectful
     show about the community of Lily Dale, a place the spirits were said to favor. The show had been funny, in large part because
     the mediums she’d interviewed had had a sense of humor about their calling.
    Charlie Rider had wanted to tell her a secret involving the Silver People. He was out of his