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effective.
    “I was looking at this letter when you arrived,” he went on, smiling, to signal that it belonged to that category bound instantly for the trash. “It struck me as amusing—in an end-of the-American-Empire kind of way.”
    Pauline’s eyes twinkled in anticipation.
    “It’s from a man, Scooter Reece, in Atlanta. A so-called marketing entrepreneur. He suggests I travel around the country preaching what he calls the gospel of Daughter. Ten thousand per speech—guaranteed. As a nondenominational lay minister, I won’t pay taxes on any monies brought in through my ministry. Scooter will get this house listed as our parish—no more pesky property taxes. We’d have to cough up 60 percent to Scooter,but he’s a man with ideas, including a special limited edition American Girl Maddy doll. Do we go for it?”
    Pauline’s eyes sparkled with mirth. Just to be sure, she blinked twice, in quick succession.
    “Thought so,” he said with mock disappointment. He tossed the letter onto the pile reserved for the trash. “I knew your integrity would ruin everything!”
    Maddy ran into the kitchen and climbed onto Jasper’s lap.
    “Hey, don’t get too comfy,” he warned. “Nap time in five minutes.”
    Deepti brought over to the table a tray laden with a teapot and cup for Jasper. He pushed the pile of letters aside. “So,” he asked Pauline, “did you have a good day?”
    She blinked once. She waited a beat, then blinked again, asking the question back to him.
    “Not bad,” he said. “I’m still trying to start this new Bannister. But I’m not getting anywhere. By now I should have an entire outline.”
    “Mr. Jasper,” said Deepti sternly as she poured him a cup of tea. “It is too soon for a new book, with all the excitement over your memoir. The
Tovah
show. All this mail to answer. You must take a break.”
    Jasper smiled across the table at Pauline, whose eyes glinted in response. “You’re right, Deepti—very sage advice,” he said. “But you know the saying about the devil and idle hands.”
    “What kind of hands?” Maddy piped up.
    Jasper explained that unless you keep busy, you start doingbad things. “For instance, not getting ready for your nap.” He lowered her to the floor and playfully swatted her bottom. “Go forth,” he said.
    She ran off down the adjoining hallway, shouting, “Come and tuck me in! And bring Mom!”
    “In a minute,” he called after her. He turned to Deepti, who was fussily laying out cookies on a small plate. “Please, Deepti,” he said. “Take your break.”
    She thanked him, finished with the cookies and then repaired, as she did every day at this time, to the guesthouse out back to phone her daughter, an undergraduate at Brown University.
    Jasper again took up the subject of his stalled Bannister mystery with Pauline. “I’ve actually drawn up a list of possible crimes and solutions and characters,” he said. “But everything feels so familiar.” Serial killers, rapists, forgers, counterfeiters, kidnappers—he’d done it all before, sometimes more than once. He needed a fresh crime, something that would stretch Bannister’s powers of detection, and Jasper’s powers of invention. “Maybe we could talk about this tonight, after dinner?”
    Pauline blinked.
    It was amazing to Jasper how helpful Pauline could still be with his writing. They had met, fifteen years ago, when she was an assistant to Maxwell Smythe, his first editor at Crucible. She had been one of the earliest and most enthusiastic champions of his Bannister series, and after four years, with the unexpected death, by heart attack, of Smythe, she had taken it over, vastly improving it in all aspects. They had, as a natural outgrowthof their work together (her desk at Crucible strewn with marked-up manuscript pages and half-full Chinese food cartons, or having a post-work drink in one of the old-fashioned bars on Third Avenue), fallen in love and, in their fifth year together as