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CHAPTER 13
1
It was seven forty-five on the evening of May 18, 1961. The light of a long Texas dusk lay across my
backyard. The window was open, and the curtains fluttered in a mild breeze. On the radio, Troy
Shondell was singing “This Time.” I was sitting in what had been the little house’s second bedroom
and was now my study. The desk was a cast-off from the high school. It had one short leg, which I had
shimmed. The typewriter was a Webster portable. I was revising the first hundred and fifty or so
pages of my novel, The Murder Place, mostly because Mimi Corcoran kept pestering me to read it, and
Mimi, I had discovered, was the sort of person you could put off with excuses for only so long. The
work was actually going well. I’d had no problem turning Derry into the fictional town of Dawson in
my first draft, and turning Dawson into Dallas was even easier. I had started making the changes only
so the work-in-progress would support my cover story when I finally let Mimi read it, but now the
changes seemed both vital and inevitable. It seemed the book had wanted to be about Dallas all along.
The doorbell rang. I put a paperweight on the manuscript pages so they wouldn’t blow around, and
went to see who my visitor was. I remember all of this very clearly: the dancing curtains, the smooth
river stone paperweight, “This Time” playing on the radio, the long light of Texas evening, which I
had come to love. I should remember it. It was when I stopped living in the past and just starting
living.
I opened the door and Michael Coslaw stood there. He was weeping. “I can’t, Mr. Amberson,” he
said. “I just can’t.”
“Well, come in, Mike,” I said. “Let’s talk about it.”
2
I wasn’t surprised to see him. I had been in charge of Lisbon High’s little Drama Department for five
years before running away to the Era of Universal Smoking, and I’d seen plenty of stage fright in those
years. Directing teenage actors is like juggling jars of nitroglycerine: exhilarating and dangerous. I’ve
seen girls who were quick studies and beautifully natural in rehearsal freeze up completely onstage;
I’ve seen nerdy little guys blossom and seem to grow a foot taller the first time they utter a line that
gets a laugh from an audience. I’ve directed dedicated plodders and the occasional kid who showed a
spark of talent. But I’d never had a kid like Mike Coslaw. I suspect there are high school and college
faculty who’ve been working dramatics all their lives and never had a kid like him.
Mimi Corcoran really did run Denholm Consolidated High School, and it was she who coaxed me
into taking over the junior-senior play when Alfie Norton, the math teacher who had been doing it for
years, was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and moved to Houston for treatments. I tried to
refuse on the grounds that I was still doing research in Dallas, but I wasn’t going there very much in
the winter and early spring of 1961. Mimi knew it, because whenever Deke needed an English sub
during that half of the school year, I was usually available. When it came to Dallas, I was basically
marking time. Lee was still in Minsk, soon to marry Marina Prusakova, the girl in the red dress and
white shoes.
“You’ve got plenty of time on your hands,” Mimi had said. Her own hands were fisted on her