Karin Slaughter - A Faint Cold Fear

“Will I see you around?”

He shrugged, noncommittal. “I don’t know, Lena. I’m trying real hard to change here.”

She looked at her hands, feeling like a monster. “Yeah.”

“I want to have something with you,” he said. “But not like that.”

“Sure.”

“You could move somewhere and start over.” He waited before saying, “Maybe when I find a transfer, we could go together?”

“I can’t leave here,” she told him, knowing he would never understand. Ethan had left his family and his way of life without looking back. Lena could never do that to Sibyl.

He said, “If you change your mind . . .”

“Nan will be back soon,” she told him. “You’d better go.”

“All right,” Ethan nodded, understanding. “I’ll see you around, right?”

Lena did not answer.

He gave her back her own question. “Will I see you around?”

His words hung in the air like fog. She let herself look at him, taking in his baggy jeans and black T-shirt, his chipped tooth and his blue, blue eyes.

“Yeah,” she said. “See you around.”

He pulled the door to, the latch not catching. Lena stood up, dragging a chair over to the door and propping it under the knob to keep it closed. She would never be able to do that again without thinking of Richard Carter.

She walked to the bathroom. Her reflection in the mirror over the sink was a little better now. The bruises around her neck were turning greenish yellow, and the cut under her eye was already scabbing over.

“Lena?” Nan said. She heard the door hit against the chair as Nan tried to open it.

“Just a minute,” Lena said, opening the medicine cabinet. She jiggled the bottom board loose and pulled out her pocketknife. Traces of blood were still on the handle, but the rain had washed most of it away. When she opened the blade, she saw that the tip had broken off. With some regret Lena realized that she would never be able to keep it.

The chair under the door popped against the knob again. Nan’s voice was filled with concern. “Lena?”

“On my way,” Lena called. She closed the blade with a snap, tucking it into her back pocket as she went to let Nan in.

Acknowledgments

The first thing I always read in a book is the acknowledgments, and I hate when there is a long list of people I don’t know being thanked for stuff that has nothing to do with me. Having written three books now, I understand why these lists are necessary. I know you can’t put pearls on a pig, but the following folks have gone above and beyond the call of duty promoting the Grant County series here and abroad, and I am eternally grateful for all of their hard work.

At Morrow/Harper: George Bick, Jane Friedman, Lisa Gallagher, Kim Gombar, Kristen Green, Brian Grogan, Cathy Hemming, Libby Jordan, Rebecca Keiper, Michael Morris, Michael Morrison, Juliette Shapland, Virginia Stanley, Debbie Stier, Eric Svenson, Charlie Trachtenbarg, Rome Quezada, and Colleen Winters.

At Random House UK: Ron Beard, Faye Brewster, Richard Cable, Alex Hippisley-Cox, Vanessa Kerr, Mark McCallum, Susan Sandon, and Tiffany Stansfield.

There are countless others, and my apologies for leaving anyone out.

My agent, Victoria Sanders, inspires me to reach great heights. Editors Meaghan Dowling and Kate Elton are the Dynamic Duo. I consider it a gift that we all work so well together. Dr. David Harper, Patrice Iacovoni, and Damien van Carrapiett helped me keep the medical passages as true to life as you can be when you’re writing fiction. Cantor Isaac Goodfriend wrote “Shalom” for me in twenty different languages. Beth and Jeff at CincinnatiMedia.com are two of the best, most authoritative author Website designers/administrators around. Jamey Locastro answered some very frank questions about never you mind. Rob Hueter talked to me about Glocks and took me shooting. Remington.com has a killer online tutorial about shotgun safety that kept me entertained for hours. Speaking of which, special thanks to online friends whose Siren song pulls me away from work. Please stop. I am begging you.

Fellow authors VM, FM, LL, JH, EC, and EM deserve many thanks for listening to me whine. (You were listening, right?) My daddy has always supported me, and not just with no-interest loans. Judy Jordan is the best mother and friend I could ask for. Billie Bennett, my ninth-grade English teacher, deserves all the praise she’ll allow—which is never enough.

On a more personal note, thanks to the Boss, Diane, Cubby, Pat, Cathy, and Deb for making New York not such a horrible place to visit these last few times. Y’all just don’t know.

Lastly, to D.A.—I could as soon forget you as my existence.

E-Book Extra

Criminal Minds: Laura Lippman Interviews Karin Slaughter

Laura Lippman is the award-winning author of the Tess Monaghan mystery series (available from HarperCollins e-books), including In a Strange City and The Last Place . Just prior to the publication of Karin Slaughter’s third Grant County novel, A Faint Cold Fear , Laura and Karin got together to discuss crime, fiction, sex, chick lit, and the state of women’s fiction in general.

Laura Lippman: Blindsighted , Kisscut , and now A Faint Cold Fear . How is it that you seem to title your books so easily? They practically had to put me under hypnosis to get The Last Place out of me, and I haven’t a clue what my next book will be called.

Karin Slaughter:I cannot write anything until I get a title for the project. The title is what makes the book or the story real to me. With Blindsighted , I knew that Lena would have a blind sister, and I knew that the rapist would hide in plain sight. “Kisscut” is a printing term for scoring something without cutting all the way through, and I heard the word almost every day when I was in the sign business. I really like that word — there’s something sexy and dangerous about it, especially the way it fleshes out in the book. So, again, the story worked its way back from the title.

A Faint Cold Fear comes from a scene in Romeo and Juliet . Juliet is about to take the potion that will make her seem dead, and she says, “I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins, / That almost freezes up the heat of life. . .” This works well on several levels as far as A Faint Cold Fear is concerned. Lena is a person who survives rather than lives her life — you could say she is dead and she doesn’t know it. Jeffrey and Sara are the star-crossed lovers. In Kisscut , they start to find out that their relationship the second time around is harder to navigate. In A Faint Cold Fear , they see that their moral compasses are not always pointing in the same direction.

Laura Lippman:How are your characters changing as the series moves forward? Do your characters ever surprise you?

Karin Slaughter:When I first started thinking about Jeffrey and Sara and Lena, I had specific plans about where they would be at the end of the third book. During the writing of A Faint Cold Fear they were all at different points from what I had originally imagined. I think when you’re working on a character it’s very much like meeting someone new. Early on, you make assumptions about them and their personalities, but then you get to know them better and realize there’s more there than meets the eye.

The one character who has constantly surprised me is Lena. All along, I wanted her to be a certain way, and she’s defied that vision at every point. I suppose that feeds into her personality, because she’s a very contrary person. There is a very important scene she has with Hank toward the end of Kisscut that took place without any planning on my part. I remember sitting at the keyboard when it was finished and just thinking, “Whoa, where did that come from?”