Two Days Gone (Ryan DeMarco Mystery #1)(102)
She kept her mouth tight but he could hear her breathing now, the sibilance of controlled inhalations. He believed too that he could hear her heart beating, a soft thrumming in the night.
He touched her cheek. Its warmth startled him and drove a long splinter of heat through his chest. “Good-bye, sweetheart,” he told her. “I’m sorry for all the pain.”
He walked away then and struggled against the urge to look back. If he looked back and she was still standing there, he would return to her. But he did not look back after he had climbed into the car and he did not look back as he drove away.
A few minutes later, on the interstate and heading south, with no music playing and the only sounds the hum of metal speeding over concrete through the chill black air, he pulled to the side of the road and sat with his foot on the brake as he tried to catch his breath.
When his breath finally slowed, he reached for the pack of antiseptic baby wipes in the console, took one out, and cleaned his palms, then wiped each finger one by one. Then he crumpled up the little towel and tossed it to the floor. He stared into the darkness ahead.
Then, acting on impulse, he pulled his cell phone from his pocket. About that rain check… he typed, and hit Send, and sat waiting.
And just when he began to wish he could pull the text back, erase it, go home and be alone, and live alone with all his misery just as he deserved, his screen lit up with Jayme Matson’s text: Saturday night. Bring flowers. Wear a jacket and tie. You’re taking me to the most expensive restaurant in town. Try not to be an ass.
Twenty seconds later, he pulled back onto the highway and brought his vehicle up to speed. Only then did he give in to the need to take a long look in the rearview mirror. Behind him, the lights of Erie appeared to be underwater now, a twinkling city sinking into an indigo sea.
Reading Group Guide
1. The character of Thomas Huston, a writer, was named as an homage to Hemingway and his novel Islands in the Stream, whose main character is Thomas Hudson, a painter. Can you discern any other Hemingway influences in Two Days Gone?
2. The novel is divided into four sections, just as Thomas Huston’s novel-in-progress was intended to be. Why did Silvis structure Two Days Gone this way?
3. Are there any other ways in which Two Days Gone parallels Thomas Huston’s proposed novel D?
4. Many of the characters in Silvis’s novels are, as the Washington Times noted of his first mystery, “extraordinarily literate.” Is it necessary to be familiar with all the literary allusions in Two Days Gone to be engaged by the novel?
5. At what point did you become certain of Huston’s innocence or guilt?
6. Silvis has said that one of the themes of this novel is what happens to men when they lack, in Thomas Huston’s words, “the annealing effect of women.” Did the absence of a prominent female character detract from your enjoyment of this novel?
7. What other themes and motifs do you see at work in this novel?
8. Hemingway wrote that a story’s end must be inevitable but unpredictable. Does the ending of Two Days Gone achieve those qualities?
9. In a review of Silvis’s novel The Boy Who Shoots Crows, New York Times bestselling author John Lescroart wrote that “Randall Silvis gets to the hearts and souls of his characters like few other, if any, novelists.” Did the author succeed in getting to the hearts and souls of his major characters in Two Days Gone?
10. Randall Silvis tells his writing students that the two most important pages in a story are the first and the last. He says, “The first page brings the reader in, and the last page brings the reader back.” Does Two Days Gone succeed in doing that?
A Conversation with the Author
What are your influences as a writer?
There are many. More, probably, than I’m even aware of. I’ll start with my next-door neighbor when I was a boy, Sara McNaughton. I have no idea how old she was when I was little, but she looked ancient to me, a small, shriveled, hunched over, and hooked-nosed spinster—very Wicked Witch of the West–like, for those who chose to see her that way, as did most of the older boys in the village, especially when an errant softball flew into her yard, was grabbed by her, and was tossed under her porch. Summer or winter she wore long gingham dresses and a wide-brimmed sunbonnet. She lived in a tiny white cottage with an ivy-covered front porch, almost never had visitors, and seldom volunteered to talk to anybody. She had no television, maybe no radio, and, as far as I could tell, spent her days baking bread, making jams, gardening, and tossing errant balls under her porch.
For some reason I found myself knocking on her door nearly every day, especially before I was old enough for school. She would look out at me and scowl through her screen, and I would ask, “Got any jelly bread?” She always did. Thick, yeasty, crusty, homemade bread spread with homemade strawberry or plum preserves. And we would sit at her little kitchen table playing Old Maid until my mother started calling for me.
When I was seven or so, Sara gave me my first hardcover book. An illustrated copy of The Swiss Family Robinson. I can still see the bright greens and yellows of the cover art. I felt like a millionaire. And I was hooked. Sara and books and jelly bread. To a lonely little boy in a hardscrabble village, they were the closest thing to comfort and salvation I had back then.
Later there was Hemingway with his deceptive simplicity and masterful subtext. Faulkner with his lush prolixity and steamy, shadow-shrouded settings. Garcia Marquez with his ghosts and bedraggled angels and his startling, idiosyncratic way of seeing a world that seemed so like my own.