Mystery

Praise for

MYSTERY

and

PETER STRAUB’S

BLUE ROSE TRILOGY

“The near perfect mystery.… Has everything a classic whodunit should.… Full of intricate, engrossing, flesh-and-blood suspects and heroes.… Unexpected curves and potholes.… The title says it all.”

—Milwaukee Sentinel

“Murder, mayhem, mystery.… A complex and satisfying tale.… Compelling characters.… A pulse-pounding climax.”

—The Plain Dealer

“A tightly woven tale, crisply rendered, populated with well-drawn characters.”

—San Francisco Chronicle

“Marvelous.… Enormously satisfying.… Unashamedly designed to fascinate.”

—The Sacramento Bee

“The best of Peter Straub’s writing.”

—Houston Chronicle

“The characters are outstanding.… They are the story, enshrouded by a nightmare that never lifts. Peter Straub takes bold risks and he succeeds.”

—San Jose Mercury News

“Enormously entertaining and scary.… Rich, complex, dark, and tough to put down.”

—New York Daily News

For Lila Kalinich

and

For Ann Lauterbach

I need, therefore I imagine.

—CARLOS FUENTES

All human society is constructed on complicity in a great crime.

—FREUD, PETER GAY

Mill Walk does not exist on any map—let us acknowledge that at the beginning. Extending eastward off Puerto Rico like revisions to an incomplete sentence are the tiny Islas de Culebra and Vieques, in their turn followed by specks named St. Thomas, Tortola, St. John, Virgin Gorda, Anegada—the Virgin Islands—after which the little afterthoughts of Anguilla, St. Martin, St. Barthélemy, St. Eustatius, St. Kitts, Redondo, Montserrat, and Antigua begin to drip south; islands step along like rocks in a stream, Guadeloupe, Dominica, Martinique, St. Lucia, St. Vincent, Barbados, the almost infinitesimal Grenadines, and the little green bump of Grenada, an emerald the size of a doll’s fingernail—from there on, only blue-green sea all the way to Tobago and Trinidad, and after that you are in South America, another world. No more revisions and afterthoughts, but another point of view altogether.

In fact, another continent of feeling, one layer beneath the known.

On the island of Mill Walk, a small boy is fleeing down the basement stairs, in so great a hurry to escape the sounds of his mother’s screams that he has forgotten to close the door, and so the diminishing screams follow him, draining the air of oxygen. They make him feel hot and accused, though of an uncertain crime—perhaps only that he can do nothing to stop her screaming.