The Twisted Thread (34 page)

“And the doubly honest answer is no, I am not committed to anyone, but I go to see a friend from Armitage in New York once in a while. I don't think that means I can't ask you for a falafel. But I would have to tell him first.”

Matt laughed and looked at her and said, “Could we make it dinner on a Friday night somewhere not in Armitage? After, of course, you've told your friend,” and she found herself surprised at how delighted the prospect of a long meal with the detective made her.

They walked back along the river to Ali's, where both of them had parked. “I miss the laundromat,” he said. “It had a
je ne sais quoi
of lint to it that just changed everything.”

“Me, too,” Madeline said, and they agreed that, once school settled down and he got back to work, they'd meet for a meal somewhere definitively out of town, maybe even all the way in Boston. She drove back to the school, through the iron gates, parked her scruffy car, and spent an incredibly productive afternoon and evening pulling together syllabi. Something changed as she was writing those course descriptions. She was concerned, she realized, not so much with making her students smarter as making them more scrupulously honest with the tools they had at hand, with the words and stories with which they surrounded themselves. It could matter what you did with language: it could help to turn you into someone real.

WHEN HE HAD SEEN
the backs of Madeline's calves at Ali's, Matt had felt as he had when he'd taken those quick plunges into the fierce Acadian water. Short of breath, quickened, and sharply, cleanly alive. He had no idea how much he had hoped to see her. It made him unbelievably happy that he had, for the moment, edged out the art teacher. Matt strode into the police station whistling. Whistling. He never did that. Joseph had said that the sound made screaming kids sound like Beethoven and that he could make a person wish for deafness. Barbara had said more kindly that his ear was off and he should really leave the music making to the professionals. His mother had said she loved it because once you heard the sound you knew it couldn't be anybody but Matt. But no one else shared this opinion, especially Vernon, who popped into the hall and looked at his partner. He stood there in his baggy jacket, chewing something that crunched loudly, probably a long stick of jicama. “I thought someone was torturing a cat,” he said, “but at least we could arrest him for that. Stop, please stop.” Then he looked more closely at Matt, swallowed, and said, “So what happened? You win Sox tickets? Get Christmas off this year?” Matt stopped whistling—the noise bothered even him—and found he couldn't stop smiling long enough to answer Vernon. “Nope,” he finally answered as he swung past his partner into their office. “Far better. I asked Madeline out and she said yes.” Turning in the threshold, Vernon threw his hands in the air and said, “Finally! A life!”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank everyone at Voice, in particular Sarah Landis and Barbara Jones, for their advocacy of my work and their support of this book as it took shape. Jennifer Rudolph Walsh and Claudia Ballard also have my gratitude. And I am very grateful to Jim Rutman for his good advice and assistance as the novel evolved.

A CONVERSATION WITH CHARLOTTE BACON

Q:
The Twisted Thread
is a departure from the tone of your previous work—what inspired you to write a mystery? How did the experience of writing it compare to your other books?

A: I am one of those omnivorous readers—milk cartons, circulars from Sears, Russian novels, comics—a habit that stems from early childhood. Every summer, my family went to our small house in upstate New York and spent long stretches of hot days lying in a field with some kind of book propped over our noses. Often, I read mysteries. Josephine Tey. Dick Francis. Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö. John le Carré. In college, I immersed myself in a different kind of literature and then began to write, propelled by an interest in character and the murky forces that inform even ordinary choices. But I still found myself drawn to mysteries, and when I was struggling with a long novel about three years ago, I let myself get distracted by an image that arrived unbidden one morning: a beautiful blond girl, dead on the floor of her dormitory. I then wrote the first one hundred pages of what became
The Twisted Thread
. Of all my work, I would say
The Twisted Thread
was the most fun to create, the easiest draft to turn to day after day.

Q: Did you attend a boarding school like Armitage Academy? How much, and what kind of research did you have to do to make the New England setting so authentic?

A: I did attend a boarding school in New England and have lived or worked at several others. I would say that it's a setting that I know quite intimately, and bringing it to life on the page didn't require a great deal of archival research. Even so, working with memories is its own variety of investigation. My own boarding school was the place where I worked hardest in my life and with the most earnest of intentions. I had wonderful teachers and friends and encountered none of the harassment that I depict in the novel. Creating darkness of motive and cruelty where I had not experienced it was the hardest part of writing
The Twisted Thread
.

Q: Do you identify with any of the characters in the book? Do you believe you would have investigated Claire's murder in the way Madeline does?

A: Well, my hair flies around like Madeline's, and I am a runner, though a slow one. She has my enjoyment of teaching and habit of spilling on herself, and I like Guinness, in moderation, of course. I am curious the way she is, too, but a lot older, and no, I don't think I would be brave enough to take on something as frightening and alien as a murder investigation. But what I love most about writing is the way it forces me to identify with all my characters. People have such various skills, habits, and interests. I identify with Porter's desire to create order and his love of his children. I understand Matt's ambivalence about privilege. I wish I had Jim's way with tools, and more of Kayla's practicality. On certain mornings without adequate coffee, I have Vernon's prickliness, or so my family says. And I know the struggle that Fred lives through, torn between a desire for a steady life and one devoted to making art. For me, characters can't come to life on the page without my willingness to see a shard of my own personality in them, no matter how vulnerable that makes me.

About the Author

CHARLOTTE BACON
graduated from Harvard University and received a Master of Fine Arts degree from Columbia University. Her published books include
A Private State, Lost Geography, There Is Room for You
, and
Split Estate
. Her debut collection of stories,
A Private State
, won the PEN/Hemingway Award for First Fiction in 1998. Bacon lives in Maine with her husband and three children.

www.CharlotteBacon.com

Copyright © 2011 Charlotte Bacon

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. For information address Hyperion, 114 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10011.

The Library of Congress has catalogued the original print edition of this book as follows:

Bacon, Charlotte
    The twisted thread / Charlotte Bacon.
        p. cm.
    ISBN 978-1-4013-4150-3
  1. Interns (Education)-Fiction. 2. High school students-Crimes against-Fiction. 3. Boarding schools-Fiction. 4. New England-Fiction. I. Title.
PS3552.A27T88 2011
813'.54-dc22

2011014350

eBook Edition ISBN: 978-1-4013-4271-5

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Cover design by Laura Klynstra
Cover photograph by Daniel Murtagh / Trevillion Images

First eBook Edition

Original paperback edition printed in the United States of America.

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