My Novel Drops Today. Read Chapter One.
ABSENCE is a book about cosmic mysteries, disaster bureaucracies, and never knowing what to believe...
Today is pub day for Absence: A Novel! I’m so excited for my fun, dark, twisty, speculative thriller to be out in the world. Five years ago, I sat down after a bike ride with a weird notion and wrote a scene that is now the first chapter. To celebrate, I’m sharing that beginning. It’s short and sweet. Enjoy!
Chapter One
“We were sitting right here, eating dinner, like always, and she just…” The husband held up a closed fist and then opened it, fingers splayed wide.
“Popped?” Harvey Ellis suggested.
“Yeah, exactly,” the husband agreed. “She disappeared into thin air, no time for goodbyes, no nothing. There was just that noise you hear, then gone. God—what am I going to do?”
The husband put his head in his hands, the shock apparently starting to metastasize into grief. Apparently.
Harvey looked around. He could see into the kitchen, the TV room, and down a dim hall. All shabby; furniture covered with magazines and dishes and dust. The dining room where they stood, on the other hand, was pristine. Floors scrubbed, table set with a fresh, white cloth. Picture of husband and missing wife smiling at him from the mantel.
“Well, Mr., uh” — Harvey checked his notes — “Bartholomew. My deepest condolences on your loss. If everything checks out, I’ll get the paperwork going, so the IRS can send you your remainder benefit.”
The husband nodded, but couldn’t help but ask, voice deadpan, “Checks out?”
“Yup,” Harvey said. He pulled out a boxy, handheld device, with buttons and a little gray screen. He unspooled a cord wrapped around an oblong metallic rod, connected the two. “Soon as this beeps, I’ll finish filling out your wife’s Certificate of Absence.”
“What is that thing?” the husband said, shying away as Harvey waved the rod over the dining table.
“This here’s bleeding-edge science. Out of Sweden, I think. An Ulbay Itshay Radiation Detector, they call it.” Harvey added a flourish to his waving. “Picks up the signature left in the cosmic microwave background whenever someone pops. Makes my job a lot easier, let me tell you!”
“Oh. How long does the signature last?”
There it was: regret, metastasizing into panic.
“When did you say your wife popped?”
The husband edged toward the kitchen, trying to look confused and absentminded. Harvey edged too. “A few hours at least. But, I don’t know… it could have been yesterday… I’ve been in such a state of shock…”
Harvey set his gizmo down on the table.
“No beep,” he said.
There was a flurry of motion—and violence. The husband dashed into the kitchen, maybe going for a back door or a steak knife. Harvey tackled him, and they both went down, hitting the floor with a painful thump. There they struggled, half wrestling, half striking and clawing. Harvey had the height; the husband had the weight. Harvey had a little training on how to handle hostile calls without a gun. The husband had desperation, which flared but burned out fast. For a moment, they were locked in a scrabbling stalemate. Then Harvey kicked out with one leg and found purchase on the plywood cabinetry. With that leverage, he flipped the husband over and cuffed his hands behind his back.
“You really should’ve cleaned the whole house,” Harvey said, panting. “One room sparkling while the rest are trashed? Dead giveaway that you’ve cleaned up blood spatter or drag marks. I know people have a poor opinion of Depop cops, but we aren’t that stupid. So, where’d you hide her body?”
The husband thrashed in the cuffs for a minute, then gave up, rested his red face on shiny linoleum.
“Buried,” he said, sounding empty. “Out in an abandoned field, two counties over. I made her a coffin and everything.”
“Wow, that’s love right there,” Harvey said.
“She prayed for it, every day!” The husband was crying now. “She believed in a Life After, and she was sure it was heaven. But years passed, and it just wouldn’t take her. I couldn’t bear to live like that, with her just… waiting, letting our life fall apart because she was sure it was almost her turn.”
“So, what, you figured you’d cut to the chase?”
The husband gave an angry sob. “If she was right about where we go, I saved her a lot of waiting. If she was wrong, I spared her from… whatever it is.”
“Spared her, huh?” Harvey almost laughed at the sad, twisted logic. “We’ll see if the judge sees it that way. Mr. Bartholomew, you’re under arrest for murder and for filing a fraudulent claim of Absentia. Anything you say can and will, blah blah blah. I hope you find spending the remainder of your time in jail more bearable than living with your wife.”
“Fuck you!” the husband spat. “You don’t know anything!”
“I know how to recognize a graphing calculator plugged into a vibrator,” Harvey said. “That’s more than you.”
The husband made a choking sort of noise that turned into a manic laugh.
“You like what you do? Like catching people up, feeling real smart? Running around figuring out who’s gone and who’s dead? You think it matters? We’ll all be one or the other soon enough. I just wanted to live what life I had left. What you do isn’t even living. So fuck. You. Fu—”
The husband shivered, and was suddenly gone. Air rushed in to fill the vacuum he left, sounding a huffing little pop. Harvey’s cuffs clattered to the floor.
Harvey stared at the cuffs, his heart pounding. He sat down at the husband’s clean-clothed table, feeling light and heavy at the same time. After a few minutes, he opened his notebook, tore out the Provisional Certificate of Absence he’d started for the wife, began filling out a new one for the husband.
“Well, shit,” he said eventually, to the empty dining room. “What are the odds?”
But the odds, Harvey knew, were getting better all the time.
Buy Absence: A Novel, Out Now!
You can get this book wherever books or ebooks are sold! Find it on Amazon, B&N, Bookshop.org, or ask your local bookstore to order you a copy.
There’s also an audiobook edition (Audible, Apple Books, Kobo), and — based on my own listening as well as the reviews flooding in at Goodreads — the narrator Dan John Miller does a great job.
Please tell your book-loving friends to check it out as well! Word of mouth is probably one of the biggest ways I choose books to read. Your support spreading the word would mean so much to me, and would do a lot to help the book have a successful pub day and week.
Finally, as a fan of libraries, I’d very much appreciate if folks could put in requests for their local branches to acquire a copy for everyone to enjoy.
Book Tour
More dates are in the works, but for now these are confirmed, including one tomorrow, if you are here in the Valley.
May 6, 7pm, Scottsdale @ The Poisoned Pen Bookstore w/ Chloe Jensen (watch the stream)
May 14, 6:30pm, Brooklyn @ Lofty Pigeon Books w/ Jinwoo Chong
May 18, 6pm, Middlebury, VT @ Vermont Book Shop w/ Becky Dayton
May 26, St. Louis, Left Bank Books w/ Scott Phillips
July 2, San Diego, Mysterious Galaxy w/ Jac Jemc
If you’re a bookstore, festival, or con and want me to come do an event with you, please contact Soho Press publicist Alex Wilcox (awillcox@sohopress.com). Same goes for press inquiries, interview requests, etc.