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By Root 1543 0

produce the sizzle that Rodney Aronson said was required. The cousins-as-brothers angle was possible. Reading, however, Zed found that his thoughts were dominated by Old Testament tales, which took him into the land of biblical allusion and metaphor, where he could ill afford to wander. But if the truth were told, it was difficult to read what he’d uncovered in his interviews with all the principal characters without thinking of Cain and Abel, my brother’s keeper, burnt offerings of the fruits of one’s labour, and being pleasing or not-so-pleasing to whoever was standing in place of God in the story, which would probably be Lord Fairclough, Baron of Ireleth. And if one truly wanted to be biblical about things, the Peer could be Isaac, faced with Esau and Jacob and their battling birthrights to contend with, although how anyone on earth could have mistaken the skin of a dead lamb— or whatever it had been— for hairy arms had always been way, way beyond Zed’s willingness to believe. The whole idea of birthrights, however, drove Zed deeper into his notes to see if he had any information about who actually stood to inherit what, should something untoward happen to Lord Fairclough, in addition to who stood to run Fairclough Industries should the baron meet an untimely end.

Now that would be a story, wouldn’t it? Bernard Fairclough mysteriously… what? Dies or disappears, let’s say. He falls down the stairs, becomes incapacitated, has a stroke, or whatever. A little digging turns over the fact that days before his untimely end or whatever it was, he’s met with his solicitor and… what? A new will is drawn up, his intentions as to the family business are made crystal clear, lifetime settlements are made, language is inserted into his will, his trust, his papers, as to— what would it be?— an indication of an inheritance, a declaration of someone’s disinheritance, a revelation of… what? The son is not his actual son. The nephew is not his actual nephew. There’s a second family in the Hebrides, there’s a mad and deformed elder sibling long hidden in the attic, the cellar, the boathouse. There’s something explosive. Something kapow. Something sexy.

Of course, the problem was that, if Zed wanted to admit the entire truth of the matter, the only remotely sexy thing about his story of Nicholas Fairclough’s ninth life was the man’s wife, and she was sexy in spades. He hadn’t wanted to make too much of that fact in his meeting with Rodney Aronson because he’d been fairly certain of Rodney’s reaction, which would have come from the photograph-her-tits school of thought. Zed had kept fairly mum on the topic of the wife because she’d wished to remain in the background, but now he wondered if there was something about her that he might explore. He went to that set of notes and saw that words like caramba and yikes had indicated his initial reaction upon laying his eyes on her. He’d even nonsensically written South American Siren by way of describing her, every inch of her a w-o-m-a-n demanding notice from an m-a-n. If Eve had looked remotely like Alatea Fairclough, Zedekiah had concluded at the end of their only interview, it was no wonder Adam took the apple. The only question was why he hadn’t eaten the whole damn crop and the tree as well. So… Was she the story? The sex? The sizzle? She was stunning in all the right ways, but how did one turn stunning into story? “She’s the reason I’m alive today,” says the husband, but so what? Run a picture of her and any bloke whose parts are in working order is going to know why Nicholas Fairclough took the cure. Besides, she had nothing to say beyond “What Nick’s done, he’s done himself. I’m his wife but I’m not important in his real story.”

Had that been a hint? Zed wondered. His real story. Was there more to uncover? He thought he’d dug, but perhaps he’d been too smitten with the subject of his piece. And perhaps he’d been too smitten with his subject because he wanted to believe such things were possible: redemption, salvation, turning one’s life around, finding true love…

Perhaps that was the line