About the Author by John Colapinto

governor bearing a stay of execution) that Mr. Quadratic was sick, and that your test was postponed until Monday? And that, furthermore, you had a “free study period”? Oh, the expanding sense of wonder and relief, the ripening elation, the dawning sense that God loved you after all, that life was, indeed, Good and Beautiful!
    Such ecstasy of disaster averted was, maybe, one one-millionth of the joy I felt that morning as I guided my Celica down Janet Greene’s hill to the main road, then (for the sheer joy-riding hell of it) up a street that branched off opposite the Snak Shak—up above the town, up into the green hills that opened out before me. I rolled down my window and hooted into the rushing wind. I stomped the pedal to the floor, and my Celica swooshed to the top of a grade as if it might launch into the air the way cars do in cop dramas. But no cop was chasing me! No sirree. I was free, free, free! I had committed no transgression worse than stealing the fat FedEx carton that bounced now like a baby (the Lindbergh baby, I guess) on the passenger seat beside me. As for the Blond family’s noticing, in its final moments in the Greene house, that a piece of the chaotically piled mail was missing, the chances of that were so remote as to be nonexistent.
    Euphoria, however, cannot be sustained indefinitely. As I guided my Celica over the road, my mood cooled from uncontrolled exultation to a mere inward glow of serenity that finally permitted the first practical consideration to bob to the surface of my brain. Where, exactly, to dispose of my little kidnap victim?
    Coming up on my right was an abandoned tractor trail that nibbled its way into an overgrown field. I slowed, turned off, then crept my car along the path, which cut through the lacy grass like a sunburned part in hair. Ahead, the path disappeared, dipping over a ridge. I nosed the car over the brow, then parked it some way down the grade, where it could not be seen from the highway. I got out with the carton, sat on the grass, and opened the package. On top was the original of Stewart’s letter to Janet Greene (“I hope you will read the enclosed manuscript . . .”). I whisked this horrible thing away. Staring me in the face was a still more horrible object: the carbon copy of Stewart’s title page, each letter cloudier and smudgier than on the original that I had burned in Fort Tryon Park, but still perfectly legible:
     
Almost Like Suicide
A Novel by
Stewart Church
     
    I scrunched this obscene page into a ball, then used the dashboard cigarette lighter to set it aflame. Twenty minutes later, Janet Greene’s copy of the novel no longer existed. Packing dirt over the heap of ashes, I experienced not only a pang of déjà vu but also a feeling that I was stuffing stubborn Stewart back into the earth where he belonged. And it was funny: not until I had reconsigned him to his final resting place was I able fully to relax and, finally, absorb the world around me. What a world!
    Cupped in the valley below me was blue Lake Sylvan, with New Halcyon clustered at its tip. To my right, the lake’s shining flank widened and stretched away into the distance, melting into a line of rounded blue hills beyond which was an actual chain of mountains, their conical summits fading into the sky. I could not remember when my eyes, geared to New York’s cramped perspectives, had last set themselves on such infinite focus. Never, certainly, had I seen a landscape of such overwhelming, almost supernatural, beauty. I don’t know how long I stood trying to drink in that view, trying to answer the subtle riddle it seemed to pose. Perhaps an hour. And in that hour, on that silent ridge overlooking paradise, I knew pure peace—a peace untroubled by the thought that, as with those high school math tests, disaster averted is often simply disaster postponed.
     
5
     
    A combination of mountain air and emotional relief had awakened my appetite. Back in town, I stopped at