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And then, from the kitchen, the sound of something shattering.

Followed by a bone-chilling scream.

Jeremy sprang to his feet and went to the kitchen doorway to investigate.

His mother, father, and sister were crowded around the sink, Glynis in the middle, holding her hand over some dishes that had been left there to soak.

On the floor by their feet, the shattered remains of a glass.

Blood was dripping furiously from Glynis’s hand.

“My God!” Jeremy’s mother shrieked. “Call an ambulance!”

Jeremy’s father said there was no time for that, he would wrap the detached finger in a cloth with ice cubes around it and drive Glynis to the hospital and maybe they could reattach it and how in the hell did this happen anyway and then Jeremy’s parents were yelling at each other while Glynis continued to wail.

Jeremy went back into the living room.

He found the Bratz doll. The right hand was missing, as if neatly cut off with a pair of shears. After a brief search, he found the hand between two of the metal ties that supported the train. He tucked the tiny hand deep into the pocket of his jeans.

Once the locomotive and cars were back on the track, Jeremy set the throttle to a nice, steady speed, got on the floor again, propped up on his elbows, head resting in his hands, and watched the train go around and around and around and around.

Chuffchuffchuffchuffchuffchuff

Part I

Annie

One

“I think I need to get out of the city for a while,” Annie Blunt said, taking a long sip of her cocktail.

“Like, what, a vacation?” asked Finnegan Sproule, glancing about for a waiter. He could see that Annie was nearly ready for another drink.

Annie shook her head, her long, frizzy, weeping-willow hair swaying across her shoulders. “A change of scene. A month, two months, maybe. Part of the summer, for sure. I’d pack us up and go today, but I don’t want to pull Charlie out of school before the end of the year. Someplace out in the country. A small town, I don’t know.”

“But you’d come back, in September.”

She shrugged. “We find someplace we like, we could stay there.”

“You’ve always lived in New York.” Finnegan smiled. “You’ll go nuts in a small town. Where will you get bagels?”

“We’ll eat Wonder Bread. It’s wonderful with peanut butter. There’s a world beyond Manhattan, you know.”

Finnegan appeared thoughtful. “Actually, I’m not sure there is. Sure, it can get so hot in the summer your shoes stick to the pavement. But come fall, when the leaves in Central Park start to change?”

“A reporter was waiting for me when I came out of my building this morning.”

He frowned. “Shit.”

“Said she was fromVanity Fair. She’d emailed me a few times andI hadn’t answered, so she decided on the personal ambush. Wanted to know if there’d ever be another book.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her fuck off, that’s what I told her.”

“There’ve been some stories in the trades, speculating,” Finnegan said.

“Let them speculate. It’s nobody’s business.”