Mr. Murder

nothing physical."
        He smiled ruefully. "It's so comforting to have a psychologist in the house."
        "Well, it could be psychological."
        "Somehow, it doesn't help that maybe I'm just crazy."
        "Not crazy. Stressed."
        "Ah, yes, stress. The twentieth-century excuse, the favorite of goldbrickers filing fake disability claims, politicians trying to explain why they were drunk in a motel with naked teenage girls-" She let go of him, turned away, angry. She wasn't upset with Marty, exactly, but with God or fate or whatever force had suddenly brought turbulent currents into their smoothly flowing lives.
        She started toward the desk to get her glass of wine before she remembered she had already drunk it. She turned to Marty again.
        "All right… except when Charlotte was so sick that time, you've always been about as stressed out as a clam. But maybe you're just a secret worrier. And lately, you've had a lot of pressures."
        "I have?" he asked, raising his eyebrows.
        "The deadline on this book is tighter than usual."
        "But I've still got three months, and I think I'll need one."
        "All the new career expectations-your publisher and agent and everyone in the business watching you in a different way now."
        The paperback reprints of his two most recent novels had placed on the New York Times bestseller list, each for eight weeks. He had not yet enjoyed a hardcover bestseller, but that new level of success seemed imminent with the release of his new novel in January.
        The sudden sales growth was exciting but also daunting. Though Marty wanted a larger audience, he also was determined not to tailor his writing to have wider appeal and thereby lose what made his books fresh.
        He knew he was in danger of unconsciously modifying his work, so lately he was being unusually hard on himself, even though he had always been his own toughest critic and had always revised each page of a story as many as twenty and thirty times.
        "Then there's People magazine," she said.
        "That's not stressful. It's over and done with."
        A writer for People had come to the house a few weeks ago, and a photographer followed two days later for a ten-hour shoot. Marty being Marty, he liked them and they liked him, although first he had desperately resisted his publisher's entreaties to do the piece.
        Given his friendly relationship with the People people, he had no reason to think the article would be negative, but even favorable publicity usually made him feel cheap and grasping. To him, the books were what mattered, not the person who wrote them, and he did not want to be, as he put it, "the Madonna of the mystery novel, posing nude in a library with a snake in my teeth to hype sales."
        "It's not over and done with," Paige disagreed. The issue with the article about Marty would not hit the newsstands until Monday. "I know you're dreading it."
        He sighed. "I don't want to be"
        "Madonna with a snake in your teeth.
        I know, baby. What I'm saying is, you're more stressed about the magazine than you realize."
        "Stressed enough to black out for seven minutes?"
        "Sure. Why not? I'll bet that's what the doctor will say."
        Marty looked skeptical.
        Paige moved into his arms again. "Everything's been going so well for us lately, almost too well. There's a tendency to get a little superstitious about it. But we worked hard, we earned all of this.
        Nothing's going to go wrong. You hear me?"
        "I hear you," he said, holding her close.
        "Nothing's going to go wrong," she repeated. "Nothing."
        After midnight.
        The neighborhood boasts big lots, and the large houses are set far back from the front property lines. Huge trees, so ancient they seem almost to have acquired nascent intelligence, stand sentinel along the streets, watching over the prosperous residents, autumn stripped black limbs bristling like high-tech antennae, gathering information beyond the brick and stone walls.
        The killer parks around the corner from the house in which his work awaits. He walks the rest of the way, softly humming a cheery tune of his own creation, acting as if he has trod these sidewalks ten thousand times before.
        Furtive behavior is always noticed and, when noticed, inevitably raises an alarm. On the other hand, a man acting boldly and