He brought it up to her that night, at dinner, over enchiladas and Spanish rice that Elena had left them, with a salad Eric had added to the meal.
“I saw your English teacher at school today,” he said casually, as they dug into the cheese and chicken enchiladas that were their favorite, with homemade tortillas.
“Mr. Farber?” She looked surprised. “Why?” She had no idea of the furor her innocent short story had caused. And her father laughed in answer.
“Because they think I’m fostering some kind of dangerous atmosphere in our home, if you can write about a murder like that. That’s one hell of a fantastic story, Al. How did you come up with it?” She was beaming at his praise, and her father was bursting with pride.
“I used the book you told me about last week as inspiration, but I made up all the details, threw in all the gore I could think of about the murder, but tried to make it as real as possible. I tried to keep it very short and surprise you at the end.”
“Well, it’s dynamite. You had me hooked right from the beginning, and you did surprise me. I think you have real talent.” There was nothing soft or namby-pamby about it. And it wasn’t a “cozy” detective story by any means. “If you work at it, I think you’re going to be one hell of a terrific writer one day. I am so impressed!” They talked about it for the rest of the meal, and she told her father about another idea she had.
“I think you ought to keep those stories at home from now on. Don’t waste them on your English classes. Let’s talk about them here. And write gentler things for Mr. Farber before he has me put in jail.” He was laughing as he said it, so she wasn’t worried. She was still surprised that her teacher had dragged her father to school. But she was thrilled that her father loved her story.
With Eric’s encouragement, Alex tried to write at home every day, and she turned out some very interesting, powerful short stories. Her father would critique them, and she would rework them until she thought she had them just right. Her father saved them in a folder, and when the folder was full, he put them in a binder. At the end of a year, they had more than fifty of them. Some were better than others, but all of them had a remarkably adult and distinctive style, with surprise endings that most of the time even Eric couldn’t guess. She had a definite knack. He began to steer her reading to the crime thrillers and detective stories he liked to read, so she could learn from the style of famous writers such as Dashiell Hammett, David Morrell, Michael Crichton, and even Georges Simenon translations. Alex started spending weekends reading adult mystery books, and then creating her own work.
And on her twelfth birthday, Eric came home with a special gift for her. It was a Smith Corona portable typewriter, in perfect condition, and he taught her how to use it. She was typing with all ten fingers within two weeks and she loved the machine.
“A lot of famous mystery writers use old typewriters. It’s part of the mystique,” he told her. She considered the gift from her father a rare prize, and when she had a friend over from school one day, she showed it to her. Her friend Becky thought it was weird.
“What do you do with that?”
“I play around with it on the weekends,” she said offhandedly.
“It looks like an antique,” Becky said dismissively. Alex didn’t tell her she wrote her stories on it, the more complicated the better, and that her father helped her do it. It was their secret, and she thought some of them were pretty good. And they were so much fun to write.
They had three binders of them by her thirteenth birthday, and her father took her to a mystery writers’ conference called Bouchercon as a surprise. It was a meeting that happened every year in a different city, attended by mystery writers of all genres. Alex listened raptly to several lectures, and wrote a brilliant story afterward. Her father was so proud of what she’d written that he wanted to get the stories published in a mystery writers’ magazine, and they were discussing which ones to submit when her father looked at her strangely, and for just the flicker of an instant, he acted as though he didn’t recognize her.
“Who are you anyway?” he said in a loud voice that didn’t sound like his own. “Are you one of the neighbors’ children? What are you doing in my house?” She stared at him in amazement, and a moment later he seemed normal again, and looked around the room as though he had just returned from somewhere else.
“Are you okay, Dad?” He had frightened her for a moment, and he brushed it off and laughed.
“I’m fine. I was just trying to scare you. You can put that in a story,” he said and went to get a drink of water.
“Don’t scare me like that again. It was creepy.”
It happened again a few weeks later when they went to a baseball game. The Red Sox were playing the Yankees, the score was six to three, and it was an unusually hot day. Eric turned to Alex halfway through the game with a blank look and asked her who was playing. “The Yankees and the Orioles?”
“Are you kidding? It’s the Red Sox and the Yankees.” A moment later he was back again, but his mind had gone blank for a minute, and this time she had seen it clearly. He acted like it was nothing and when she asked him about it later, he said it was the heat.
Then it happened at work. He came out of his office with a vague look and asked his secretary what she was doing there on the weekend. She didn’t know what to say. Afterward when she saw him in his office, she decided it was a joke. He was fine.
It occurred half a dozen times over the next few months, and when he asked Elena who she was and what she was doing there one day when he came home from work, he realized that something terrifying was happening to him. He made an appointment with his doctor, explained the symptoms to him, that for several minutes his mind would go blank and he wouldn’t remember where he was, who the people were around him, and sometimes even his own name. It was as though he couldn’t think for a few minutes, and the power lines were down in his brain. He was afraid he had a brain tumor, and his physician was concerned, and referred him to a neurologist, who sent him for brain scans and tests.