Page 59 of Death on Riddle Road

“From the top and bottom teeth.Horses, donkeys, and asses do it.It’s called the Flehmen lip curl or Flehmen response.I slowed the video way down to catch it.She also has a slight case of duck lips and then compounds it by pursing them, segueing from the duck face pose to the fish gape pose to the scrunch face pose.”

“The...?What?”

“Don’t you keep up with selfie pose trends?”

She wasn’t kidding.I spend half my time saying or thinking,Who?when other people talk about celebrities, but Kit always knows.

“No.”

“I researched selfie poses for a character.”Of course she did.“But when I found the Flehmen lip curl done by a donkey, I knew I had the right expression for that character.”

“Not a hero, I suspect.”

She chuckled.“Definitely not a hero, except in his own mind.”

My antenna went up.“You think Dova—?”

“I’m not saying that.The expressioncanreflect the character.But the expression doesn’tmakethe character.Speaking of characters—”

“Let’s not.”

“Sheila—”

“I’m really tired, Kit.Clara got me up early this morning and she’s threatening the same tomorrow.”

That was some kind of record, me interrupting her twice in a row.And then a pause before she spoke.

“Okay.For now.But promise you’ll open the manuscript right now.”

“Kit—”

“Open it.”The world was back in order, with her interrupting me.“Look at it.Talk to you later.”

And she ended the call.

I downloaded the attachments she’d sent, but didn’t open them.Yet.

I opened my manuscript.

And stared at the screen with far too few words on it to make a real story.

I thought about Kit naming her bookAbandon All.It was her inside joke about publishing and literary critiques valuing anything that was depressing.

I remembered her telling me, “Publishing, as practiced by the known companies, is incapable of selling books to true readers, the ones who dearly love books, who have personal relationships with books.It can only sell an image to the unimaginative who pick up a book now and then because that’s what everyone else is doing.For those people it’s about buying the book, not about living inside it.”

“But then why sellAbandon All?If it’s your best work—”

“Oh, it’s not.Not to me.But it’s a nice fat pitch that New York publishing could hit out of the ballpark.Besides, it was my one crack at the kind of money New York publishers can rake in with a certain book and if they do things right, which I made sure they do.Because they can sell the heck out of that image when they’re handed the material to work with, including therightauthor.That’s where you came in.”

Have I mentioned Aunt Kit leapt at the chance to publish independently and more recently to sell directly to readers?She positively chortled as she cut out a chunk of middle people between the readers and herself.

Truly, chortled.

I’d read the word chortled, of course, but don’t believe I’d ever heard someone do it before then.

For me to do the same thing, I had to have a complete story.

And that meant I needed to write another word.Then another.And another.