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repeatedly do.
    Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.
     
    She nodded in silent agreement. She’d become good at being alone. She’d be damned if she’d let anyone change that.
    Still, she checked her phone one more time. No new calls. Perversely disappointed, she slammed the phone back onto the cabinet, then attacked the body bag with a deep anger bordering on lunacy. Dust enveloping her as it flew from the bag into the still morning air, she kicked and punched until she was exhausted, her muscles quivering from exertion. She put one palm on the bag, steadying it as she gasped for air. She eyed the phone and scowled before beginning a second round of attack.

Chapter Nine
     
    I don’t know why they didn’t want me. Mama always said it was because they loved their career best and I would have come in a distant second. A distant second. As if I was even in the running.
    I stared out across Sawyer Lake, my mind rehashing Mama’s anger last night. She’d been drinking again and I really hated that. She got mean when she drank bourbon…or anything else, for that matter. Any alcohol. She would go on and on about how everyone had betrayed her and how I always had to be hidden from sight. That we had to be so careful. That we could never be seen together.
    If people found out about me then the woman would never pay more money. As if she ever would anyway. I think she figured out of sight, out of mind. Maybe it would be best to tell everyone about it. Get it all out in the open.
    I wondered sometimes if Mama was just making excuses because she didn’t like the way I looked. Or how I acted.
    I sighed and shifted my position. Sawyer Lake was one of the few freshwater lakes in Schuyler Point, and Mama and me used to come here once in a while when I was little. But only during times when no one else was there. Today the little lake beach was peppered with fat little families, mommies, daddies and pudgy, whiny-faced children. I hated all of them.
    Last Tuesday the beach had been deserted and I had been bad. Bad like Mama didn’t want me to be bad. I had been over to Lucy’s house. She had given me vodka and then painted my face like hers so that my eyes were black all around and my eyelashes thick and heavy with mascara. She left for work but since I had that day off, I’d come out here.
    No one knew about it, but that day I had put three of my little glass bottles in the trunk.
    I loved my little bottles. They were just beer bottles that I kept down in the basement. Every now and then I would go down there, usually when Mama was at work, and I would carefully fill them with lots of saltpeter and fertilizer, bought at Anderson’s Hardware, and then top them off with kerosene from the heater tank. Sometimes, depending on where the bottles would go, I would add some pebbles or pieces of broken glass. Usually I fixed the fuses in with white paraffin, but I had used red candle wax on these because we were out of paraffin.
    The ones I had used Tuesday held broken glass. I had just wanted to kill fish, that was all, and I had, a ton of them, but when the little Koffman girl had run up on the beach, bleeding, earlier today…well, that was just gravy.

Chapter Ten
     
    Marya settled in quickly at the
Schuyler Times
. She pitched in as a runner that first hectic day, doing whatever hack job was necessary to get the second section of the paper together. The next day was pretty much the same as everyone worked to finish off the front section, and Carol Say, the pregnant receptionist, introduced her to her new co-workers.
    The staff was larger than she had expected, two staff writers besides herself and about a half dozen or so additional employees.
    Marvin Torn, who covered the political beat, wore a tie and a three-piece suit to work and was meticulously groomed. Dallas Myerson, a tiny slip of a lady, very proper, handled the social and activities beat. Marya was going to be the paper’s feature reporter, an assignment which