A Grant County Collection

by Karin Slaughter

  She asked, 'Do you want it back?'

  He kept his expression neutral. 'Do you want to give it back?'

  Sara looked at the ring, and thought about everything that had brought them to this place. As silly as it was, she knew what her wearing the ring would mean to Jeffrey, and to everyone else in Grant County.

  She said, 'I'll never take it off.'

  He smiled, and for the first time in what seemed like forever, Sara felt like things might eventually be okay.

  Jeffrey must have felt this, too, because he tried to tease, 'Maybe you should take it off if you're working in the yard.'

  'Hm,' she answered. 'Good point.'

  He rubbed her finger with his thumb. 'Or helping out your dad.'

  'I could wrap some masking tape around the band so it fits better.'

  He smiled, tugging the ring, pointing out that it was hardly in danger of falling off. 'You know what they say about big hands . . .' he began. When she did not answer, he finished, 'Big feet.'

  'Ha-ha,' she said, cupping his face in her hand. Before she knew what was happening, Sara had her arms around his neck, holding on to him as if her life depended on it. Whenever she let herself think about how close she had come to losing him, Sara felt a sort of desperation that made her chest ache.

  'It's okay,' he told her, though he seemed to be saying this more to himself. She could tell he was thinking about the thing that had brought them here in the first place.

  She forced herself to let go of him, asking, 'Are you ready?'

  He glanced back at the cemetery, squaring his shoulders as best as he could.

  Sara slid off the hood of the car, but he told her, 'No, I need to do this alone.'

  'You sure?'

  He nodded again, heading off toward the cemetery.

  Sara got into the car, leaving the door open so she would not suffocate in the heat. She looked at the ring, turning her hand so she could see the football on the side. Like all class rings, it was huge and hideous, yet right now she thought it was one of the most beautiful things she had ever seen.

  She looked up, watching Jeffrey make his way up the hill. He picked at the sling around his neck before taking it off and shoving it into his pocket.

  'Jeffrey,' she admonished, though of course he could not hear her. He did not hate the sling so much as the appearance of infirmity.

  He stopped at the corner of the cemetery where a small marble marker stood. She knew Jeffrey well enough to know he was thinking about Sylacauga marble and underground streams, cotton mills and sinkholes. She also knew that the thing he took from his pocket was a small gold locket.

  As she watched, Jeffrey used his bad hand to open the heart, taking one last look at the picture of Eric inside before leaving the keepsake on top of Julia's gravestone and walking back down the hill to Sara.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Sylacauga is a lovely small town located in central Alabama near the Cheaha Mountains. They have a full-time sheriff and police force and a population of around 12,000 folks who will probably read this book and wonder if I've ever been to the place. I assure you that I have, but please keep in mind that this is a work of fiction and I have taken great license with streets, buildings, and local landmarks just to make it easier on myself. Like many small towns, Sylacauga is a peculiar blend of friendly, good folks and a smattering of bad. You can find out more at Sylacauga.net. While you're on the web, you can also look up the name Billy Jack Gaither to see the darker side of small town life.

  This book has been a long time coming for me. When I first wrote Blindsighted, I knew that one day I would delve into Jeffrey and Sara's past, so in subsequent books, I left some clues for folks as a little reward for those who were paying attention. My sincere thanks to y'all for being there from the start and making it possible for me to keep doing what I love most: being a writer. I hear from a lot of readers through my website, KarinSlaughter.com, and try to answer all the mail I get as quickly as possible. Thank you all for your patience and support.

  There is a long list of people to thank this time around, but I have to narrow it down because sixty pages of acknowledgments would be a little too indulgent even for me. My agent Victoria Sanders, is a great friend and champion of my work. Meaghan Dowling and Kate Elton are the best editors a girl could ask for. Ron Beard, Richard Cable, Michael Dugdale, Jane Friedman, Brian Grogan, Cathy Hemming, Gail Rebuck, and Susan Sandon are my heroes. Faye Brewster, Elspeth Dougall, Rina Gill, Georgina Hawtrey-Woore, Vanessa Kerr, Mark 'Wolfie' McCallum, Richard Ogle, Tiffany Stans-field, Rob Waddington and Kate Watkins have my thanks for their generous support. Marilyn Edwards is one of my favorite writers and a certain CR has my undying gratitude for you know what. Speaking of initials, thanks to CF, LM, AL and KB. There are plenty more people to name, from the ladies in Scranton to the guys who drive the trucks, but space being what it is, please know you all have my sincere gratitude for the wonderful job you do.

  Dan Holod reviewed gun stuff so hopefully I won't get any letters this time. Yet again David Harper, MD came to the rescue, making Sara really sound like a doctor. Patricia Hawkins, Amy Place, and Debbie Hartsfield provided some interesting facts about Sylacauga, where they grew up, and I hope I managed to at least capture the flavor of the town through them. I toured a lot while writing this book, from London to Holland to France and back again. Thanks to my publishers The Busy Bee, Century and Grasset. Actually, thanks to all my foreign publishers. I had the great pleasure of meeting most of them during the London Bookfair, and I can honestly say I have some of the nicest publishers in the world.

  Fellow authors helped me keep my chin up. I won't name them here, but you can find most of them in Like a Charm, the serial novel I worked on while writing Indelible. Markus Wilhelm deserves special thanks, as does Harlan Coben, who is the only person on earth allowed to call me number two.

  Lastly, I've had Sara drive a BMW in every one of these books in the hopes that the nice folks over in Munich will thank me with a shiny new 330ci. No luck yet, but I'll keep trying. Likewise, Tom Jones and Shelby Lynne. Y'all don't call . . . y'all don't write . . .

  Read on for an exclusive interview with Karin Slaughter by bestselling author Mo Hayder . . .

  MO HAYDER is the author of Birdman and The Treatment, both of which feature Detective Inspector Jack Caffery. Her most recent novel Tokyo is set in 1990s Tokyo and Nanking in the 1930s, and features Grey who works as a hostess in a Japanese nightclub. All three books were Sunday Times bestsellers; The Treatment won the 2001 WH Smith Thumping Good Read Award; and Tokyo was shortlisted for the CWA Gold and Silver Daggers for Best Crime Novel, and the Ian Fleming Steel Dagger for Best Thriller in 2004.

  After leaving school at fifteen, Mo Hayder worked as a barmaid, security guard, film-maker, hostess in a Tokyo club, educational administrator and teacher of English as a foreign language in Asia. She has an MA in creative writing from Bath Spa University, where she now teaches.

  Birdman, The Treatment and Tokyo are all available as Bantam paperbacks.

  MH: Why did you decide to go back to the past with Indelible, your fourth book?

  KS: The moment I finished Blindsighted, I knew that I'd want to go back and explore how Jeffrey and Sara got together and what made their relationship tick. I had pretty much planned out the first four books in my head, and I hid little clues in the first three novels so that readers who paid attention from the beginning would be rewarded when they got to Indelible. I like how we start to see different layers of Sara in the fourth book, because that is what's so great about getting to know someone over a period of time. There are always secrets about characters that only the author knows, and this story was a great way for me to reveal some of them. It's sort of like the way you talk about Grey in the first part of Tokyo. On the surface, she seems like this very weak, changeable being, but underneath, she's a very strong woman. Even if your plots weren't as driven as they are, I think the tension you create with the mystery of character would keep me
reading.

  MH: Your planning shows. And you deal with series characters so successfully – they never seem stale. This is something I was sure I couldn't do because I was afraid I'd find it restricting, so I planned two books for my detective Jack Caffery then moved on to a stand-alone with Tokyo. You clearly don't feel the same restriction?

  KS: I wish I could take credit for the planning, but it's one of those times when your brain manages to pull off something really tricky without you really being aware of it happening. I just feel like I really know Lena, Jeffrey and Sara, so it's a very natural thing for me to write about them. That being said, my next book after Faithless is a stand-alone called Triptych, and it's been good for me to have a break out of Grant County. The setting is urban and gritty – downtown Atlanta – and I'm having a lot of fun being in a new place with new characters, some of whom will eventually end up in the Grant County series.

  I have to say, though, that I think you're selling yourself short with Jack. There's no way that the last chapter of The Treatment ends his story. There are scenes from that book that have stuck with me even after all these years. Don't you get a lot of letters and emails from fans asking when you'll go back to him?

  MH: Um – yes. Alarmingly so. Some people get quite angry that I've left Caffery on what they think is meant to be a cliff-hanger. No Misery scenarios yet, but a lot of readers find it hard to accept that the ending wasn't designed to usher in a sequel. However, I left him exactly where I wanted to leave him – maybe I'm crazy but I thought it was a much more poignant and telling point in his life. And like you with Triptych (great title BTW), I found moving to a new setting in Tokyo very liberating. I knew I wanted to do something different, so it wasn't just the setting I changed but the structure: particularly the switch to two first person narratives, which was a huge challenge. I remember saying to you after reading Indelible that we'd both written novels with very similar structures in that there were two narratives in two timescales, the earlier one not seeming initially to have much to do with the latter, until the two come together in the closing scenes. As I was reading Indelible it didn't even dawn on me that what was happening to Jeffery and Sara in Sylacauga would have any impact on the hostage situation, so you obviously did the juggling act to perfection. How did you pull it off?

  KS: Okay, first, I wouldn't characterize all those letters I wrote to you as 'angry'. I was just curious about Jack. That kind of talk makes me understand why Kathy Bates's character snapped.

  Anyway . . . thanks for saying I pulled it off in Indelible. This was another case of my brain being smart without me knowing how. Originally, I assumed I'd write the Sylacauga part first then go back and do the present-day narration, then blend them together afterwards. It didn't work out that way – I ended up writing the book in a very straightforward manner, juggling both plots in my head as I moved from chapter to chapter. That I could manage to juggle all of this in my head at the same time is surprising considering I often forget the punch lines to jokes as I'm telling them. Do you find that you have better focus where your books are concerned than you do in your real life? Because I have to say that the thing you pulled off best in Tokyo is what I like to think of as a writer's contract with the reader: you have the ability to make me trust you implicitly. I know when I read one of your books that no matter which direction the story takes, it's for a reason that will be made clear by the end. As I know that you got lost in Atlanta traffic the one time you came here, your ability to suspend my disbelief about direction says a lot.

  MH: Yeah, and thanks for the gallant offer to come out and help. Actually, far from being lost I was simply bogged down in your APPALLING beltway system. I knew where I was going. But as I had time (lots of it) to sit and admire your beautiful city from the parking lot a.k.a. 1-285, it crossed my mind that there's a tendency to set crime novels in big, very cosmopolitan cities: it's certainly the backdrop I've used in the past (South London, Tokyo). But you've chosen a very small town setting. I wonder if that's what makes the series so powerful, what makes the menace really hit you between the eyes, the juxtaposition of the horror with sleepy little Heartsdale? Is it like the world you grew up in, or where you live now? Because if the answer is yes, then statistically it's all over for you. If not now then next week, next month, next year . . .

  KS: I grew up in a small town, but I did what most folks do as soon as I was old enough – moved to the big city. In my case, that was Atlanta. It seems to me that in America, all the 'interesting' crimes happen in towns of 30,000 people or less. Atlanta, which is statistically one of the most violent cities in America, has its share of shootings, but usually it's for your average stupid reasons: drugs, gangs, robberies gone wrong. Kids killing parents, paedophiles hiding in the woodshed, pregnant women hacked to death in their sleep . . . this sort of thing is happening in small town America. If I were a serial killer, I'd certainly look for a place to hide where people don't lock their doors. And you're right about a small town setting being an unexpected place for violence. It makes what happens that much more horrifying. Walking through Atlanta, I'm much more alert to my surroundings than I am when I'm taking a stroll in downtown Blue Ridge, which is a very small community in the North Georgia mountains. That feeling of safety is something we all want – unfortunately, it is just a feeling. Bad things happen everywhere. For instance, you'll see about six churches per person up in Blue Ridge, and folks have signs with the Ten Commandments posted in their yards, but then you read the local paper and find out that one of the largest methamphetamine labs in the state was busted that weekend and Hazmat was called in and sixteen people were arrested. I love that dichotomy.

  On the other hand, what I've found with Triptych is that it's very freeing to have Atlanta as a backdrop and all the resources that entails. Was it conscious on your part to write about crime in an urban setting? I made up Grant County in my head, so I'm the only person who knows where everything is. Are you ever worried you'll have Jack take a left on a one-way street and bring down the wrath of all of London? I've been very nervous about writing about Atlanta, even though I've lived here for almost fifteen years. I know I'm going to make a mistake, it's just a matter of how many people notice.

  MH: I know what you mean: I'd lived in Tokyo for two years and made copious notes before I wrote a book about it, but I was still insecure enough to put in the acknowledgements an apology to the city for the liberties I'd taken with its geography. For Birdman and The Treatment I knew that corner of London pretty well so I wasn't too worried – although I did get one very miffed reader complaining that the plot in Birdman was completely implausible because there were no houses big enough in that part of Greenwich to accommodate Hartveld's unseemly behaviour with corpses. The fact that said reader went on to enumerate six points in the narrative where I was sending him coded love messages did nothing to assuage my mortification at getting a detail wrong.

  But I think the larger point you're making is that in this genre details have to be really authentic – so you surprise me when you say you made it all up. I'd always had you down as someone who did exhaustive research. What about all the police procedural passages – you didn't make those up, did you?

  KS: I do a ton of research, but I'm sure you've found that for every book or article you read, maybe .01% actually ends up in your finished story. I do make a great deal up, mostly because following every rule in the book is pretty boring. For instance, in any police-involved shooting, the officer is immediately taken off duty until there is a full investigation, but A Faint Cold Fear would've been pretty boring if Jeffrey's parts showed him sitting around in his underwear all week watching the Discovery Channel. I will say that I think it's very important to know the rules, because then you can break them in such a way that keeps it realistic for the reader. A good case in point is Sara's medical knowledge. I have a lovely doctor who helps me with those things, but if I followed every step for, say, intubating someone, that would take about three pages to show properly an
d it would seriously slow down the story.

  I don't know if you've found this, but thriller readers tend to be a very savvy bunch, and if you try to trick them too much, they'll just close the book (or load their guns, as the case may be). I understand getting upset when a detail is wrong. I love Eric Garcia's books – he writes about dinosaurs living among us, only they wear human disguises. His main character is a crime-solving Raptor name Vincent. So, in one of the books, Vincent was talking about how he passed out from a basil overdose (don't ask) on the Emory University football field in Atlanta. Emory is an egghead school (Sara's alma mater) and does not have a football team. So, this really stopped me in the book until I thought, 'Wait, you'll buy that he's a dinosaur in a human suit, going around solving crimes and standing up to the dino mafia, but not the football field thing?' I guess it's all a matter of suspension of disbelief. No author can get everything right, but I understand when something in your own back yard is misrepresented. What puzzles me is why folks get so angry.

  When you lived in Tokyo, was it specifically to research the book? Or did you just take notes because you knew one day this was a story you'd have to write? I think the whole idea of escorts is fascinating and very foreign to Americans. The whole idea of 'renting' someone for non-sexual companionship is not a part of our culture. Maybe it goes to our growing sense of entitlement. I have a friend who used to be a stripper as well as a prostitute, and she hates men because of the ones she came into contact with during that part of her life. I write a little bit about that in Faithless when Lena and Jeffrey go to a strip club looking for information. Did you find yourself feeling that sort of hate, or did taking the sex out of it make a difference?