Deaths Excellent Vacation

dirty details we need to know? Is there a string of broken hearts trailing back to Greenwich Village?”
    “There was somebody in New York before I moved down here, but she—I got a letter.”
    “We’ve all gotten those letters,” Brian said. “I keep a file.”
    “Too bad Jane Rossmire isn’t here anymore,” Kate said. “She had a thing for anguished writer types. You’d have liked her. You could have been all dark and brooding together.”
    “I’m not dark and brooding.”
    “My mistake.”
    “Hang on,” I said. “Jane Rossmire. Isn’t she the one who left? Didn’t I fill her job? Something to do with Thaddeus Whozits?”
    Brian and Kate exchanged a look. “Thaddeus Palgrave,” Brian said. “LifeSpan’s answer to Heathcliff.”
    “What’s the story there? Mr. Albamarle made it sound as if Palgrave had driven her off the premises with a pitchfork or something.”
    “Nobody really knows,” Kate said. “I mean, considering we’ve got a building full of researchers, there’s surprisingly little in the way of hard data on Palgrave. And nobody’s seen or heard from Jane in six months. I’ve tried calling. The phone is disconnected.”
    “I liked her a lot,” Brian said. “She’d seen the Ramones eight times. I made her a tape of Sham 69.”
    “They never should have assigned her to Palgrave,” Kate said.
    “I’m not following this,” I said. “What happened? Were they having a sidebar?”
    “I don’t think so.” Kate used her straw to poke at a clot of ice in her Diet Coke. “I think he just drove her insane. It happens to everybody who works with him, to some extent.”
    “He’s that difficult?”
    “Actually, he’s very polite and occasionally quite charming,” Brian said, “but impossible to figure out. He’s been here for more than ten years, but he has no friends. It’s understood that he has a degree from Oxford, which explains his weird, not-quite-English accent, and he did something at the Sorbonne for a while.”
    “Which accounts for the icy hauteur,” Kate said.
    “The man simply does not play well with others,” Brian agreed. “Nobody has ever seen him go out for lunch. Not once. He sits at his desk every day eating a tuna and avocado pita pocket, with his nose in a book.”
    “Maybe he’s just—”
    “Shy?” Kate gave a snort. “Is that what you were about to say, New Guy? No, Thaddeus Palgrave is not shy. He holds himself apart. He looks down his aquiline nose at the hoi polloi. Has he given you one of his off-the-cuff Latin witticisms yet?”
    “No, I haven’t even met the man.”
    Kate glanced at her watch. “Well, the moment is at hand. We have a paste-up at four o’clock. He’ll be there.” She stood up and brushed some crumbs off her lap.
    “What’s a paste-up?”
    “Just before a book goes to press, we have a meeting to review the galleys. All the pages get pinned up on the walls so everyone can take a last look.”
    “It’s really just an excuse to open a bottle of wine on a Friday,” Brian added. “Everyone stands around patting themselves on the back for a job well done.”
    “Everyone except Palgrave,” said Kate.
    “Yeah,” said Brian. “Everyone except Palgrave.”
     
     
    AT four o’clock I trailed into the corner conference room behind George Wegner, a thirty-year man who had started his career on the Russia desk of NewsBeat . More than a hundred layout pages were pinned to the cork walls, and as Brian had suggested, the air was heavy with selfcongratulation. Wegner spent twenty minutes earnestly telling me about the brief “bill of fare” sections he had written near the front of each chapter, teasing the contents and laying out the themes to come. “If it’s done right,” he told me, “the reader won’t even be aware of it. But it’s vital to the structure of the chapter. It gets the reader’s mind pointed in the proper direction. So, for instance, in the chapter just before Missionary Ridge, it was important to—”
    “ Bluff and genial? Can you possibly be serious, Mr. Wegner?”
    The voice caught me off guard. I turned to find Thaddeus Palgrave hovering at Wegner’s elbow, an expression of amused contempt playing over his features. I had never seen him up close before. He had a high, broad forehead and an underslung jaw, giving his head the appearance of an inverted pyramid. His dark blond hair was flecked with gray, but his face was taut and unlined, making his age hard to figure—no younger