Death's Savage Passion Read Online Free

“That’s why Miss Samson over there has enough money to buy New Jersey.”
    “Nobody in their right mind,” Amelia said, “wants to buy New Jersey.”
    “If I had enough money to buy New Jersey, I’d wait out the market until people were buying what I want to write,” Verna said. She waved her cigarette holder in the air. “Two years ago I got a divorce—from a psychiatrist, yet—and I turned down the alimony, I turned down the property settlement, I walked away with my nose in the air. I’m a romance writer, right? Now look at me.”
    “You’re hardly starving,” Dana said.
    Sarah English was frowning in concentration. “Men are all right,” she said, “but they just aren’t enough. I mean, there are men in Holbrook. And what would be the use of marrying the world’s handsomest and richest man if you were just going to live like every other housewife in Holbrook?”
    “That doesn’t make any sense,” Verna said. “The point about housewives in Holbrook is they don’t have any money.”
    “The point about housewives in Holbrook,” Marilou Saunders said, “is they don’t have any sex.”
    “The point about housewives in Holbrook is that they’re housewives,” Sarah said. Her voice positively rang. This she was sure of. “I used to read about Miss McKenna in the papers,” she gave me an adoring look. I wondered how long it was going to take to talk her out of that “Miss.” “I used to think what an exciting life she had, mixed up in murders, and helping the police, and writing books, and living in New York, and having a lover—”
    I nearly choked on my Perrier. Sarah had found out Nick was my lover from the newspapers? My mother, charity queen of Fairfield County, was going to kill me.
    “I wanted to have a life just like that,” Sarah was saying, “as different from Holbrook as possible and nothing like a housewife. I mean, you have to admit, housewives don’t get to do anything. Even if they like being housewives, it has to get boring.”
    “I was a housewife once,” Amelia said. “I wouldn’t say it was boring.”
    “You couldn’t say it was pleasant, either,” I reminded her.
    “You should see the book I’m working on now,” Sarah said. “My heroine’s pulling off a diamond heist and she’s got a good reason for it and it’s exciting. It’s something different. Of course, there’s sex in it, they make you put sex in it, but I think most people are like me and skip those parts. I mean, nobody believes that stuff.”
    “I do,” Phoebe said. She looked wistful. She had built her reputation on the hottest sex scenes in the business (“good parts” as they’re known among the fans). She was addicted to the self-help section of the Fifth Avenue Barnes & Noble.
    Amelia had built her reputation on syrupy sixty-thousand-word tracts (one a week for the past thirty years), all of which ended with the closing of the wedding-night bedroom door. She thought Sarah was right on the mark.
    “Miss English has a point,” she said. “Men have never been a tenth as good as we hoped or a hundredth as good as they think they are.”
    Verna Train looked depressed.

THREE
    I MADE IT HOME earlier than the rest of them. They wanted to do a round of bars—a singles place on the West Side outfitted entirely in pink, a chrome and stained-glass hockey pub (East Side) where all the tables were miniature aquariums filled with yellow-striped tropical fish, a blues place in the Forties where the waiters wore bow-tie earrings and Little Orphan Annie decoder rings. Phoebe, who is president of the American Writers of Romance, was deep in conversation with Dana about returns accounting and warranty clauses. Caroline was showing her molded crystal paperweight around for the sixth time. Verna was morose. Sarah wanted to see more of New York. Amelia had a serious gin gleam in her eye. When Amelia gets a serious gin gleam, she can lay waste to Gordon’s principal warehouse. I had had three double