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so much for me without the feel of your support behind me.”
    He turns away and, shoving his hands deep into his pockets, walks across the room. I know he’s upset, but it’s a choice I had to make. Now he turns around and comes back to me. He’s understood. “You’re right,” he says, “it is your decision. You’re the expert. You wouldn’t tell me how to run my law practice, and I shouldn’t try to tell you your business. Johanna, I want to be behind you, you know that, but this damn thing makes me uneasy. It always has, right from the beginning when you first started with that creep. I don’t know why, but there’s always been something about your involvement with him that disturbs me. Who knows, maybe underneath it all I feel somehow threatened.”
    “By Avrum Maheely?”
    “Am I crazy?”
    “Completely. But my kind of crazy.” And I put my arms around his waist and hug him as hard as I can.
    “Hey! You got some grip there, kid,” he says, kissing my head. And together we walk off into the sunset—or down the hall anyway.
     
    I begin my novel the next day. There is no point in putting it off, not if I expect to finish it in ten months. When the need for more legwork arises I’ll simply have to interrupt the writing, but I must get started now. Neil thinks I ought to call it
A
Study in Terror,
but that sounds too schoolbookish to me. The best I can come up with so far is
Souls in Darkness;
not great, but for the time being that’s my working title. I’ve been organizing my notes for a couple of weeks now and have a fairly workable outline. I sit at my computer and more or less allow my mind to go blank. What I am waiting for, of course, is the telephone call telling me I have won the two-million-dollar lottery so that I will never have to write another word or work another day in my life. The phone, alas, is silent. With a mighty sigh, I begin.
     
     
Souls in Darkness
    (working title)
    by
    Johanna Morgan
Chapter One
     
    In the lush green of the Adirondack Mountains, deep in the shadows of Mount Marcy somewhere between the town of Tahawus and the Opalescent River, they had found an old abandoned summer cottage, the splintering gray wood smoky with dry rot, and a few unwanted acres of scrubby, dusty landscape. The house was more of a shack than a cottage, and the road that led up to it was badly rutted and overgrown. Long before they’d arrived, the electricity had been cut off, but there was fresh running water out back, and if you emptied a pail of it into the toilet it would flush. More important to them was the privacy the location afforded. Their nearest neighbors, more than a half mile to the south, were two elderly brothers who ran a small vegetable farm and kept to themselves. Additionally, the side roads off the highway were unpaved and dangerous so they were rarely surprised by uninvited visitors.
    In order to build the house originally, a large area immediately surrounding it had been cleared of trees, but the job had been sloppily done and the stubby trunks had never been dug up. Over the years, ugly, twisted branches had curled their way out of the stumps, giving the landscape a stunted deformity. Without the big trees for shelter the land was laid open to the biting winter winds that whipped down off the mountains and to the scorching summer sun.
    The only time the landscape lost any of its rawness was in the deep winter months when heavy snows rounded it gently under thick, clean mounds of smooth whiteness. But now, in the high, hot midday sun of late July, it was at its meanest.
    From the outside the house itself looked like a child’s first drawings, a perfect square with a pointed roof and an upright brick chimney complete with black smoke curling from its mouth. Below was the standard door, the usual two windows. The only thing wrong was its condition. It was run-down, dilapidated. It had broken windowpanes, a torn screen door, peeling paint. Its roof was badly in need of