Jack of Spades by Joyce Carol Oates Read Free Book Online Page A

the hearing, Andrew—no need to call me. Just put this out of your mind entirely. I assure you—nothing will come of ‘C. W. Haider.’ We will bury her .”

7 A Kiss Before Killing
    “Andy, Julia is upset about something.”
    Irina spoke hesitantly. By her tone I understood that our youngest daughter’s distress had something to do with me and that Irina was being cautious in bringing the subject up to me as if—absurdly, and unfairly—she feared my reaction.
    It is very annoying to me when members of my own family approach me with caution. It is utterly baffling.
    “What? What is Julia upset about?”
    “A novel she read by someone who calls himself ‘Jack of Diamonds’—I think that’s the name. She says she thinks that this writer is someone who knows you, a mystery-writer friend of yours, and she thinks that the writer, whoever he is, used something that had happened to her in his novel.”
    “Wait, Irina. I don’t follow this. What are you saying?”
    It was the eve of the hearing. Sunday night, and less than twelve hours until nine o’clock Monday morning in the Hecate Municipal Courthouse.
    I had not told Irina, of course. My dear wife must be spared emotional upsets.
    My heart beat hard. Guilt, guilt.
    It is very hard to be a parent of integrity.
    “Julia will tell you herself, Andy. But she called me first, and she was crying. This awful ‘Jack of Diamonds’—”
    “Who? What?”
    “—a mystery writer who calls himself ‘Jack of Diamonds’—or maybe it’s ‘Jack of Hearts’—some sort of hard-boiled crime writer, definitely a misogynist, and a brute, like Mickey Spillane . . .”
    As if Irina had ever read a novel by Mickey Spillane!
    In my collection of first edition American mystery fiction there were a number of Spillane titles from the 1950s, purchased in secondhand bookstores; but no one in my family had touched these since we’d moved into Mill House and reshelved the books, I was sure.
    “Julia says there’s a scene in this ‘Jack of Hearts’ novel she just read that replicates almost exactly the time when she fell through that rotted pedestrian bridge in Battlefield Park, and might have been killed—except in the novel, the child was killed .”
    This was a melancholy memory! I would rather not have been reminded.
    Julia had been four years old. A lively, inquisitive little girl. We were living in Highland Park at this time, adjacent to New Brunswick; one day I took Julia to Battlefield Park a few miles away, and there (to my shame) I’d become distracted by taking notes, working on a scene in one of my novels, and Julia wandered off beside a creek following some quacking geese and without my noticing she climbed up onto a pedestrian bridge that was no longer in use; such a little girl, she had no trouble crawling through the blockade, laughing at how clever she was to slip away from Daddy though Daddy had told her not to wander off—Daddy had certainly warned her not to wander off . And suddenly then Julia’s little foot plunged through the rotted wood of the bridge. She screamed as part of the bridge collapsed, and she fell about twelve feet into the creek bed, her fall miraculously interrupted by underbrush so that she was unhurt except for scratches, bruises, and the trauma of the fall.
    “Julia says there’s a scene in this novel that is almost exactly like her accident, it’s even set in a place called ‘Battle Park’—not in New Jersey but upstate New York.”
    “A coincidence . . .”
    My voice was faint, quavering.
    Battle Park! How stupidly renamed, when the original had been Battlefield Park.
    “I told Julia, of course it’s just a coincidence. But it is strange and upsetting, isn’t it?”
    “I suppose it would be, if Julia takes it so personally. Is the little girl in the novel anything like her?”
    A strange question! Fortunately, Irina didn’t seem to notice.
    “Julia said that, in the novel, the little girl dies—her skull is broken in the