In December of 2012, in order to do research for my novel, The River at Night, I embarked on a nine-day trip to the hinterlands of Northern Maine, the storied Allagash Wilderness which sprawls out over 5,000 square miles of rivers, lakes, and forest. The plan was to interview people who had decided to leave traditional society behind.

I didn’t know a soul up there, so I called the chambers of commerce in towns from Orono to New Sweden to Fort Kent, as far north and west as you can go until the road ends and the forest begins, which is just past a little town called Dickey.

Everyone I spoke to on the phone said: well, these folks don’t want to be contacted. That’s why they live off the grid…but I do know someone who knows someone…soon I was able to line up half a dozen interviews with people who had decided to disappear. Armed with a reluctant blessing from my husband and a backpack filled with power bars, warm clothes and mace, I took off on the twelve hour drive from my home in Massachusetts.

1) Billy

There wasn’t a lot of eye contact when I shook Billy’s hand on the shoulder of the road at the 101st mile marker on Route 1, just north of Caribou, Maine. Along with his horse, Freedom, Billy and I stood next to my car on the desolate highway, arranging the saddle so I could climb on behind him. A full bearded, gruff looking man in his mid-50s, Billy had agreed to an interview only if he could take me to his place on horseback, an hour’s journey through the Maine woods in winter. After we shook hands he asked me if I was still up for this; I said I was.

I got on the horse behind him, wondering about my sanity. Billy had been described to me as a family patriarch who said goodbye to society thirty years previous, decades before off-the-grid was a “thing.” As we rode, my arms around this stranger’s waist, he didn’t talk much except to say that his wife didn’t like him a whole lot these days, having borne him five children, each a home birth, something he had insisted upon and she dreaded. Our boy’s nearly three years old and she’s still pissed about it, he said. He turned around and grinned at me, adding, but hey, maybe she still likes me. She hasn’t left me yet.

We rode through the woods on a path only he knew, coming up on a ridge that looked down on an empty looking valley. I felt like I had entered another century when I walked onto his land. His log home was painted black, and I saw no one around, just some sheep and sad looking dogs. I fingered the small aerosol can of mace in my pocket, wondering if its time had come…but soon his wife came out to meet me; grey hair, grey-faced, grey man’s coat, smiling like she rarely did it. Billy showed me his vast collection of guns and knives, the smoking house where the meat hung, and the root cellar. His wife and two older daughters, one with a sixth finger, fixed me a lunch of eggs and bear meat, with some kind of wild potatoes. The younger kids played with plastic knives and guns. Billy told me he had enough food stocked to survive the end of the world, and that he had dug half a dozen bunkers in secret locations.

Before we left, he made me sign a piece of paper, the old fashioned carbon copy kind, that said I would not disclose any information about him, his family, or the location of his homestead. After I did so, he looked me in the eye long and hard, tore off and handed me my copy of the agreement, and swung back up on his horse.

We got back to my car just before dark.

2) Grace

Grace, along with her husband, Mike, had purchased a small plot of land deep in the woods near New Sweden, Maine, because they couldn’t afford to buy anything in their home state of Pennsylvania. Their home was a 10”x12” cabin that felt very solid and well thought-out, with a small cooking area that opened to a living area. A ladder led to a sleeping loft above.

I was very impressed by Grace’s story. She and Mike, both twenty-two years old, were determined to own their own home, somewhere, somehow, and live off whatever jobs they could find, however low paying. They had no interest in having any economic swing determine their home-owning destiny.

Grace was seven months pregnant, an eighteen-month-old girl toddling around her feet. She said that she and Mike wanted to add on another room when the baby came. Next to the cabin was a broken down trailer with three dogs inside barking nonstop; she said they used the dogs for hunting and for protection.

They’d shot a moose recently that had been hanging around literally just outside their door. The amount of meat was so overwhelming that they had to call in a neighbor (a dozen miles away) to help smoke and dry it. Mike worked as a janitor in a church in a small town an hour away; Grace taught English in a community college in the same town on alternate days. The place was neat as a pin. I asked about community and she said there wasn’t much. I could feel her loneliness, as well as her pride in what she and her husband had built. At least the place was warm and cozy, her baby fat-cheeked and healthy looking as she played with hand-carved toys. Their families had not approved of their decision to move away and start from nothing. The bible on the table was the only book I saw.

I asked if there was anything she would change and she seemed to think hard about that one. She said she could do without the wood spiders, also known as giant crab spiders, that lived in the freshly cut wood they’d used in their ceiling. The spiders weren’t poisonous, but they were loud…evidently they liked the night time too, because that’s when they emerged from the ceiling, just inches from their heads where they slept, sometimes waking the whole family. Mike regretted his use of untreated wood, but since it was winter, he couldn’t do anything about it until spring.

3) Ethan

Ethan met me in the parking lot of a local restaurant near Presque Isle with his truck, his favorite goat Shelby riding shotgun in the front seat, his dog Bananas in the back. I followed him in my car several miles on a dirt road into the woods until the road ended, and we got out. He untethered three more sheep from inside a wooden shack, instructing me to follow him into the forest on foot. The sheep were fascinated by my tires, licking at them, even biting them. He said they loved the salt, and shooed them away.

Ethan told me he was twenty-one, but he looked even younger to me. Since he refused to eat, wear, or use anything manmade (exceptions were his axe and gun), he wore only the garb he had hand-knitted: hat, sweatshirt, baggy pants, long johns, and — he informed me — knitted underwear. His belt was fashioned from a deer pelt and tibia for the buckle. He looked like a raggedy sort of elf.

After a mile or so of tramping through the woods on no discernable trail, we came upon a ten-by-eight foot log cabin, chinked with peat moss, that leaned seriously toward the east, like a badly planned layer cake. Smoke curled out of a chimney made of dryer vent tubing, suggesting some sort of comfort inside, however it was 15 degrees outside in full sunshine and not much warmer inside the cabin. Frozen deer hides hung like ghostly sails in the trees.

Ethan told me that he spent his days hunting for game: deer, wild turkey, and moose, (though he hadn’t come across one yet in the year he’d lived there,) foraging for wild potatoes, wild carrot, blueberries and thistle, and shoring up the chinks in the tiny log cabin he’d built by hand. He said he had no sense of smell, which made him extra concerned about what he ate, but he kept a huge dictionary of wild plants that he said was his bible. At night he read Thoreau, Kerouac and John Muir by candlelight while wolves howled literally outside his door. In one breath he told me how much he loved this wild life he was living — that he had always wanted to be alone like this — in the next he said he hoped his friends would want to join him someday, maybe set up a homestead on a neighboring piece of land.

I tried to pry from him the real reasons for being out there. He said he came from a wealthy family in Portland, and that his father was doing everything he could to convince Ethan to pack it up…telling his son he could have the best of both worlds: a really beautiful home — with heat and electricity — but also live far from other people. Ethan had insisted that his father was totally missing the point, which was to live as man had lived before modern conveniences, in order to discover the essential self in the natural world.

I asked him if he ever got lonely. At first he said, no, then: sometimes, and admitted to driving to the town library on Saturdays to check his email and to buy a weekly box of Cinnamon Poptarts.

Erica Ferencik is a graduate of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Boston University.

Her work has appeared in Salon and The Boston Globe, as well as on National Public Radio. Find out more on her website EricaFerencik.com and follow her on Twitter @EricaFerencik.

The River At Night is available wherever books are sold.

Into the Woods and Off the Grid: Three Profiles was originally published in Fiction favorites on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

When I was thirteen years old I saw a sports report about this young American Olympic boxer from Louisville, named Cassius Clay, who told the interviewer that he was going to bring home the gold medal for the USA. The interviewer asked him, “You sound awfully confident, how do you know that for sure?” Cassius then said, “because I am the greatest light heavyweight champion in the US right now [Golden Gloves Champion], and after I win the gold medal for our country, I am going to win the heavyweight championship of the world title when I come back from Rome. Remember that I said that.”

And, I did. I remember thinking to myself, Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr, what a great name, I’ll remember him. Years later, when I knew him as Muhammad Ali, he would tell me that he loved his former name, he loved the sound of it. “And now, in the white corner, weighing in at 218 Lbs, from Louisville, Kentucky, The Heavyweight Champion of the World, Cassius Marcellus Clay Jr.” He said, “Doesn’t that just roll off your tongue?”

That was my introduction to Cassius Clay and I was mesmerized. I loved his energy, always up, always excited, always entertaining. My older brother and I were instant fans and we would listen to the fights on radio and then later watch them on TV We couldn’t get enough of Cassius Clay. I always thought that Cassius reminded me of Elvis They could reverse their roles. If Elvis were black, he would be Ali, if Ali were white, he would be Elvis. Whatever, my brother and I were big fans of both of these superstars as were millions of other young boys in America. Muhammad would tell me later that Elvis was the biggest star for him, even more than Aretha Franklin, James Brown, Chubby Checker. At fifteen he wanted to be Elvis.

After my brother and I watched the Fight of the Century, Ali vs Joe Frazier in Madison Square Garden in 1971, we thought that it was the most exciting public event ever — the Beatles, Elvis, the Stones, the NBA Championship Game, nothing matched the excitement of watching this fight. I never dreamed that one day I would be standing in front of Muhammad Ali’s front door in Chicago in 1975, just four years after the Fight of the Century, as nervous as can be, waiting for Muhammad Ali to open the door. I was trying to act calm and was wondering what should I call Muhammad Ali when I greeted him: Mr Ali, Muhammad, Champ, Ali? Then I froze, looking through the stained glass side windows on the door frame as I saw him, walking slowly down the stairs in his beautiful maroon and beige hooded terrycloth robe, looking royal. He opened the door and suddenly, I was looking into the eyes of the most beautiful man that I had ever seen. His golden brown skin with a perfect complexion simply glowed. I had never seen such a beautiful man in my life. I actually was stunned by his presence andjust at a loss for words. “Hi Mr. Ali, my name is Tim ……” He said, “I know who you are,” and turned back to the staircase. “Sit down.” He sat on the fourth stair and I sat next to him and so started the most remarkable friendship that anyone could hope for.

George Foreman gave me some advice when I asked him if I should write my own book about our friendship. He said, “the world needs to hear about your friendship with Ali. You will reveal the depth of Muhammad Ali’s character through the eyes of a good friend.”

I hope that the reader will experience just a fraction of the joy that I have experienced living this friendship. It has been a privilege being Muhammad Ali’s friend and I am honored to publish a book about this friendship.

Tim Shanahan is the author of Running with the Champ(Simon & Schuster, 2016), which is available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent.

“So this orphan walks into a bar,” Cole says, to make Riley laugh, although there is no more to it, just the one line. It is not a joke at all. He gives her his best Elvis look: blue eyes narrowed (eyelashes ridiculously long), head cocked slightly right and down, the merest rumor of a smile at one corner of his mouth. She is five, maybe six years older than he is, which is not quite twenty-one, but he has a fake ID she pretends to believe even though it is an obvious hack job.

He watches as she consoles another regular, listens attentively to a story of love gone wrong, the inability to find someone new, the futility of trying.

“You just haven’t met the right person,” Riley says. “But you will. You have so much to offer.”

In one month, Cole has heard these same words come from that beautiful mouth at least ten times before, spoken to at least ten different women with ten different ex-girlfriends. Well, sometimes the ex-girlfriends overlap; it’s sort of that kind of a bar.

An hour later, she is pouring a club soda for a customer just out of detox; one who is obviously hanging on by a weakening thread. “One day at a time,” Riley says, without apparent irony, and the woman repeats it.

“Yes,” she says.

Riley says, “Maybe a meeting?” Gently. No judgment. It’s that kind of bar too, sometimes. “I think there’s a two o’clock at St. Kevin’s.”

“You’re right, there is.” She downs her soda, squares her shoulders, and reaches across the bar for Riley’s hand. “You’re a doll, sweetheart. Thanks for saving my life, again.”

Riley pulls her hand away, picks the empty glass up and salutes with it. “You’re going to be fine.”

When the woman leaves, Riley sighs. “Whoa,” she says, and pours herself a shot.

“Everyone loves the bartender,” she tells Cole later. “It doesn’t matter who it is.”

It does matter, he thinks, but it is just like her to believe it doesn’t. It matters that she’s nice to people and doesn’t act like she’s something special just because she can reach the bottles without climbing over the bar. And she’s funny. And pretty, sometimes. She has that mouth; he loves watching it — the way it never seems to be able to stay still even when she isn’t talking. And he loves how she gives everyone a bunch of second chances, because she knows that human beings are flawed. He knows this because she has told him, but he is not supposed to tell anyone else.

He brings her presents: strawberries, pizza, Valium, flowers he’s picked out of someone’s yard. When he brings the Valium, she says, “How did you know my favorite color is blue?” She cuts one in half, chases it down with a beer. She picks the toppings off the pizza and feeds the crust to a dog someone’s tied to a parking meter out front. The flowers go in a chimney glass, set on the bar by the beer taps. Customers ask where they came from. “My new boyfriend,” she says, and laughs. Cole watches her mouth when she does it.

He plays songs on the jukebox for her when he can tell she’s starting to wear down. Songs like “Brown Eyed Girl.” Even though it is not one of her very favorites, when he plays it he knows that she knows it is for her, even though her eyes are green, like his mother’s eyes were, the way he remembers them. The Van Morrison song she really loves is “Jackie Wilson Said (I’m in Heaven When You Smile).” He sings the chorus to her, and often she will smile when he does, and this is what they do: flirt harmlessly, avoiding any complication, any chance of collateral damage.

The orphan joke is on him: he really is an orphan, his parents dead of a car wreck in the California desert east of Barstow, where the Mojave begins, and doesn’t end again (as far as his mother was concerned) until Albuquerque. She kept a diary, and in it she hated, with a steadfast determination, the desert; envisioned breaking down and having to walk until their knees buckled, the sun so bright and hot it filled the sky, with only a narrow, pale-blue band of not-sun just at the horizon. She imagined their skulls bleaching alongside cow skulls and scaly armadillo skeletons, and she didn’t like it at all. But there was contract work at Los Alamos, and a couple of times a year they had to go. When the station wagon rolled, Cole was thrown clear. He was six, and still dreams sometimes of sliding face-first through the sand, hands out in front of him, like a runner trying to touch third base before the throw comes wicked hard and fast from the outfield.

“Did I ever tell you,” he says, bouncing a quarter, in some trick manner, off the wooden floor and snatching it out of the air on its way back up, “that I was named after John Coltrane?” He knows, since he’d been in the bar last night with her until past closing, that she has a hangover, and he is hoping to maybe distract her from it. He doesn’t get hangovers. Not really. She has told him it is because he is young. “Just wait,” she says. “You’ll get yours too.” But he doesn’t expect to live long enough to be old enough for that. Does not count on it at any rate.

“Only about a hundred times,” she says, smiling with that mouth. She stacks just-washed glasses on the stainless-steel drain board and dries her hands on the white bar towel she pulls from her back pocket. Takes two more aspirin and washes them down with Kahlua-laced coffee. She’ll be cured — or drunk again — by the end of her shift, but she’ll keep it together; like always. Almost always. At least more often than not.

“How about the one — ”

“Where your heart was turned around backward when you were born?”

“Yes. That one. Did I ever tell you that one?”

“No,” she says, coming around the bar to sit next to him and listen. “Tell me the story about your heart.”

Marian Palaia was born in Riverside, California, and grew up there and in Washington, DC. She lives in San Francisco and has also lived in Montana, Hong Kong, Ho Chi Minh City, and Nepal, where she was a Peace Corps volunteer. Marian has also been a truck driver, a bartender, and a logger. Her first novel, The Given World, will be available in paperback April 5, 2016.

Reprinted with permission of Simon & Schuster and the author. For more information visit marianpalaia.com.

Excerpted from Why They Run the Way They Do: Stories by Susan Perabo

The object in question unspooled from the upstairs bathroom wastebasket as I was going about my Thursday morning duties of emptying the trash. The object in question had been tightly wound in maybe five feet of toilet paper, a tiny, pee-soaked babushka with a plastic grip, a truth-telling window, and a minus-sign face.

“What the fuck?” I said. Which is not the way I usually talk, even to myself. That’s how surprised I was.

My sister, Lizzie, and I shared a two-story town house in a quiet and well kept “town house community” on the edge of the suburbs. We had finally finally finally finally finally finally realized our dream of being left alone to play Scrabble for the rest of our lives. Not only were there no men in the picture, but there was no chance of men, no dreams of men, no fears of men, hardly even the mention of men, but for the occasional fond recollection of our long-dead father, or the ongoing young Harrison Ford vs. old Harrison Ford argument. We were done with men, and it was officially Scrabble time. But then there was this, this thing, in the wastebasket.

That afternoon I played “BABY” off her B, with the Y on a double letter score. We were sitting at the kitchen table and it was pouring rain outside, a furious, driving rain, a killer of picnics. I watched Lizzie closely, but she didn’t miss a beat, just revised the total under my name. She was forty-three years old, so the chances of her being pregnant didn’t seem great. But you never know. “Life finds a way,” a famous scientist once said, right before the dinosaurs took over all operations at Jurassic Park. Not that I’m comparing my sister to a gender-switching frog. My sister is lovely. She has long jet-black hair and her skin is flawless. Her students regularly fall in love with her. She is five years older than me but looks five years younger.

We had been living together in the town house for about ten months, having both within the space of a year extracted ourselves with the jaws of life from awful marriages, hers an eleven-year boozy carnival ride, mine a six-year house arrest fostering angry, unadoptable dogs. Between us we had exactly zero kids. We also had zero parents and zero other siblings. We had some aunts and uncles and cousins. We each had some good friends. We had steady jobs; we were both spinster teachers now. She taught ninth grade English at a prestigious private school; I taught eleventh grade civics at a sparkling mega high school that looked like a shopping mall. It was mid-June and we had two glorious months of summer in front of us, nonstop Scrabble and Netflix and iced coffee, except for in-service days and workshops and all the other summer hoop jumping required of us to continue raking in those huge paychecks in return for our thirteen-hour days the other ten months of the year.

“So I have to ask,” I said, flipping over my newly drawn letters, two Cs and a J. Useless.

She peered at me over her half glasses. They were a recent addition and she looked like a 1950s librarian, which I mentioned whenever I got the chance. She even wore them on a thick silver chain around her neck. “What?”

I chickened out at the last second. “Are you checking your math?”

She leveled the look that made it clear she would not dignify the question with an answer. “One-sixty-four, one-twenty-six.”

“Okay,” I said. “If you’re sure.”

She beat me roughly 80 percent of the time — the 20 percent of games I managed to win were due to dumb luck drawing of stellar letter combinations and, very occasionally, if she had a really bad sinus headache. I was no slouch, but it had always been understood by everyone that Lizzie was smarter than me, that Lizzie fell under the category of creepy smart. This had never bothered me, even as a child, because I always felt like being creepy smart was a burden, a lumpy rucksack of encyclopedias you had to carry around with you wherever you went, something that people would know about you the instant you opened your mouth. I didn’t particularly want people knowing anything about me the instant I opened my mouth.

Excerpted from Why They Run the Way They Do (Simon & Schuster, 2016), by Susan Perabo, which is available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent.

CHAPTER 1

SAN FRANCISCO, 7:05 A.M.

The phone call came far too early to herald anything good.

“Feel like taking a ride?” Detective Frank Renna asked when I picked up.

“Got to get Jenny ready for school soon and I have a high-end client coming into the shop first thing today. She’s eager to drop big money on an Oribe tea bowl.”

Oribe was a sometimes-brilliant Japanese ceramic style named after Furuta Oribe, a sixteenth-century tea master and samurai. I sold the distinctive green-and-white pieces and other Japanese antiques out of my shop on Lombard, west of Van Ness.

“Nice to see you making headway on the diplomatic front,” Renna said, “but move it to the back burner and pack your daughter off. This is important. We’re heading out to Napa.”

“Are we now?”

“Yeah. There’s a Japanese kid we need to see. He doesn’t speak English.”

“So put a phone to his ear and I’ll talk to him. No reason we need to drag ourselves out to wine country.”

“Kid’s gone into shock and he’s babbling. He’s driving the local badges up a wall.”

Renna was a lieutenant with the San Francisco Police Department, and a friend. He’d been instrumental in getting me a consulting job with the SFPD as their local Japan expert, which last came into play with an incident in Japantown. But I wasn’t on call and received no retainer. Our arrangement was on a case-by-case basis, clearly a detail that seemed to have slipped Renna’s mind.

“Isn’t there a Japanese speaker closer to Napa?” I asked.

“None in their department and they don’t have anyone on file. That’s why they need you.”

“How do they know the kid’s Japanese?”

“Because that’s what his father was.”

“Was?”

“Yeah. There’s a body, too.”

* * *

Ten minutes after Renna’s call, I was waiting outside in the morning fog, ungloved hands snug in the pockets of a down jacket.

I watched brief shafts of faint red light penetrate the fog. Heard the sound of a car engine approaching. Saw, finally, a boxy vehicle emerge out of the cottony whiteness and ease to the curb. Renna had arrived in a dusty unmarked SFPD car that looked exactly like a dusty unmarked SFPD car.

The passenger-side window buzzed down.

“You’re doing a good imitation of something the cat wouldn’t drag in,” my friend said.

“I was up until seven talking to Tokyo,” I said. “Finalizing details for the shows. Fell into bed five minutes before you woke me.”

The mayor of San Francisco had launched a Pacific Rim Friendship Program to improve the city’s relations with its Asian neighbors, and Japan was up first. I’d rebuffed City Hall’s first two advances to be their liaison, accepting with reluctance only after the big man himself called to press me into service.

“Coffee up,” Renna said, passing over a cup of Peet’s dark roast as I collapsed into the front seat. “It’s all downhill from here.”

He urged the vehicle back on to the road. “You get Jenny off to school?”

“Neighbor upstairs will drive her.”

“Client take it well?”

“Wife said her husband would be furious, but we rescheduled for later today, so I squeaked by. Listen, I get the babbling kid bit, but why are we on the road? It’s Napa, not SF.”

As was his habit, Renna rolled imaginary marbles from cheek to cheek while he considered the question. “A Napa bigwig rang our dear mayor and he rang the chief.”

“So this is another favor for City Hall?” I said, wondering if they weren’t pushing the boundaries.

“Not even close. The mayor hoards his political capital. He called my boss. I’m under orders. You’re doing this for me. Since Japantown, everyone thinks I’m your goddamn social secretary.”

“I could live with that,” I said.

“You do recall we’re cruising over marshlands soon, right?”

Overhead, a sign announced our approach to the Golden Gate access road. Our route took us over the bridge into Marin County. We’d pass the monied Marin communities of Mill Valley and San Rafael, cross the reedy marshes edging the upper fringe of the San Francisco Bay, then head north to Napa.

“Yeah, so?”

“You piss me off, I’ll toss you into the muck and you won’t be living with anything. You’ll be lucky if your bones surface in a decade or two.”

“Probably less painful.”

The lieutenant grunted. “Hard to argue that.”

I took a sip of the coffee. A hearty Italian roast rolled over my tongue. It cut through the early morning chill, but made not the slightest dent in my exhaustion.

“I’ve got to close my eyes for a minute,” I said. “Can you handle the drive alone?”

“Sure. One thing first, though. Napa guys sent you a present.”

“Am I going to like it?”

“Wouldn’t think so.”

He stretched a finger toward the face of his Smartphone anchored in a dashboard cradle, but before he could tap the screen, my mobile buzzed.

An unknown number. “Hold on a sec,” I said, then into my phone: “Hello?”

“Is this Jim Brodie?”

“Yes.”

“Sean Navin. We haven’t met yet but you’re on my black list.”

That was a first.

Before I could reply, Navin said, “You canceled on us this morning. No one does that to me.”

“Sarah already rescheduled.”

“I’m cancelling it.”

“I normally don’t — “

“Save the excuses. I’m sending my wife to one of your competitors.”

I closed my eyes. There goes the Oribe tea bowl commission I sorely needed. The loss was going to hurt.

“Sorry to hear that,” I said. “As I explained to Sarah, it’s an emergency.”

“Time is money, Brodie. You play fast and loose with my time, I spend my greenbacks elsewhere.”

In his voice I heard none of the goodwill I’d earned over the last couple of years. Quality art from my shop decorated his home. Some of the rarities I’d tracked down in distant corners of Japan.

“I regret it happened, Sean. If there was any way around cancelling our appointment, believe me I would have found it.”

“You made a bad decision and it’s gonna cost you.”

“So you’ve told me. Do what you have to do,” I said and disconnected.

So much for squeaking by. His wife was a valued customer, but mind games from an overbearing husband I didn’t need. Life was too short.

Renna glanced my way. He’d pieced together enough of the conversation to know that I was going to pay for this morning’s excursion.

“I’d pegged you for more diplomatic,” he said.

“Husband kept twisting the knife. Got a feeling he was enjoying it.”

“A lot of those types around.”

“Yeah. Too bad. His wife was a regular. You were saying?”

“A present from the Napa boys.” Renna punched the Smartphone screen. A recording began.

“Can you tell us your name, son?” a clearly annoyed adult male voice said.

“Mondai attara Jimu Burodi-san ni denwa shite kudasai. Mondai attara Jimu Burodi-san ni denwa shite kudasai. Mondai attara Jimu Burodi-san ni denwa — “

“We hear you, kid,” the man said through what sounded like gritted teeth. Then: “I’m telling you, Dick. That’s all the little guy’s said since we got here.”

Dick gave it a shot. “Hi’ya son. I’m Officer Richard Kendall. Can you give us your name? Just your name?”

“Mondai attara Jimu Burodi-san ni denwa shite kudasai. Mondai attara — “

“See? Repeat loop,” the first man said.

“Considering the circumstances, can’t say I blame him.”

The dispatch ended and Renna said, “Still want to close your eyes?”

“Got to.”

“Sweet dreams.”

They were anything but.

In the recording, the babbling kid had been asking for me.

Excerpted from Pacific Burn (Simon & Schuster, 2016), by Barry Lancet, which is available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent.

an excerpt from the novel by T. R. Richmond

My name is Alice. I Could leave it there. I know what I mean by that. I’m me, Alice Salmon. Tall, average-looking, big feet, hair that goes wavy at the mere mention of water, a bit of a worry bear. A massive music fan, a proper bookworm, loves being outdoors, though dies at the sight of a spider. Mostly it’s Alice, people call me, although occasionally I’m Al or Aly or Lissa, the last one of which for the record I hate. When I was a kid I used to have squillions of nicknames like Ali Baba and Ice and, my favorite of all, especially when my dad called me it, Ace. My uncle calls me Celia, which is an anagram of Alice, although I get the word “anagram” muddled up with “anachronism.” “That’s what I am,” my dad always says if anyone says “anachronism,” although the word “dad” is actually a palindrome. I learnt that yesterday. I like knowing this stuff, even if my best friend Megan says I sound as if I’ve swallowed a dictionary. It’s not that I like showing off, but you’ve got to if you’re going to study English. If I get the grades, I’d love to go to Exeter or Liverpool, but as long as it’s a long way from Corby I don’t mind, although wherever you go, there are probably people trying to get away from there. I’ll be honest, I can’t wait to move out; my mum’s constantly poking her nose into my business. She reckons it’s because she cares, but it’s not fair it’s me who suffers because she’s paranoid. I obviously put that last line in after she read this and she’ll never see it because I’m bound not to win. Maybe what’s in my name is the music I like (have listened to “Dancing in the Moonlight” about 400 times today) or the TV I watch (you’re looking at the world’s biggest Dawson fan) or my friends or the diary I keep? Maybe it’s the bits of all of that stuff I can remember, which isn’t much because my memory’s lousy. Perhaps it’s my family? My mum and dad and brother who used to called me “a lice” or “Mice” or “Malice” as if it was the funniest joke ever cracked in the history of the world. Maybe it’ll be my kids, not that I’m going to have any, no thank you: all that yuck and puke and poo. I haven’t even got a boyfriend, although if Mr. DiCaprio is reading this, I am free on Friday… “You’ll change your mind,” Mum says about the babies, but she said that about asparagus and I haven’t. Perhaps it’s the things I plan to do, like travel, or the nicest thing I’ve already done, which hands down was that day’s volunteering at the deaf place (can you see my halo shining?), or possibly the worst (no way am I fessing up to that!). I could tell you about my best day ever. That’s a toughie; maybe it was when Meg and I went to see Enrique Iglesias or I met J. K. Rowling or my gramps took me on that surprise birthday picnic, but the thing about “ever” is that it only takes you up to now, and tomorrow can be better, so I ought to talk about “so far” rather than “ever.” There again, sometimes you can explain what an object is by pretending not to talk about it (I’ve just googled that: it’s “apophasis”), so maybe what’s in my name are the things I could be doing instead of this, like my maths homework or taking Mr. Woof for a walk. I used to wish more famous people were called Alice. Not, like, mega-famous, because then whenever anyone said it, it would be them who everyone thought of — like if you’re called Britney or Cherie — but semi-famous. There’s Alice Cooper, but he’s a man and that’s not even his real name. There’s Alice in Wonderland, too, which used to get quoted at me a lot, stuff like being curiouser and curiouser, though my favorite line was always the one about not being able to explain yourself because it’s not actually yourself you see, even if I never understood it. I suppose I am what I’m writing here, too, which might be rubbish. I asked my mum to read this — only to check the spelling — and she said it was great, even if the first and last lines did make me sound like an alcoholic, but that’s just how she interpreted it. Mum said there were a few bits I should reconsider, but there’s no point submitting it if it’s lies, although I did agree to knock out the textspeak and swearwords and there were lots of them in the first draft (this is the seventh!). I also use too many brackets and exclamation marks but they’re staying in, otherwise (again) this wouldn’t be me.

“At times it terrifies me how much we are alike,” Mum said after she read it. Well, she’s not the only one. Some days, even though she tries to hide it, she mopes around the house like the world’s about to end. (Yes, this line went in after she vetted it, too — talk about the thought police!) Dad reckons I must have been dropped on my head as a baby, because me and him have hardly anything in common, although we both love salmon, which is funny, because you could say that makes us cannibals. My name is Alice Salmon. Five words out of my 1,000. I hope I’m more than 200 times those five words. Even if not now, I hope one day I will be. I will finish this now and stand up and ask myself who I am. I do that a lot. I’ll look in the mirror. Reassure myself, scare myself, like myself, hate myself. My name is Alice Salmon.

Excerpted from What She Left (Simon & Schuster, 2016), by T. R. Richmond, which is available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent.

an excerpt from Where We Belong

Maybe you did it today. You asked yourself: What the hell am I doing in this job…in this relationship…in this city?

Most of us go there. We float around in the half-empty glass, gaze out into the world of possibilities, and wonder:

Is it too late to do that thing that made me so happy when I was little?

Could what matters most to me finally be the center of my life?

Can I really trust this yearning voice in my head and longing in my heart?

What we’re really asking ourselves…from the gut….is: Do I feel like I’m where I belong?

Lots of us are asking. Over the last decade, twenty-five times as many life coaches are on duty around the world. More and more of us feel it is indeed okay to admit to ourselves — and to someone else — that we feel like we don’t belong…in our careers, our relationships, our overall daily existence. And, we’re confused about how much control we have in making our lives better, and ideally, the best we can imagine.

Certainly, pinpointing exactly where you belong — where happiness awaits — is tricky.

When you’re young, it’s difficult to know what will make you happy. When you’re older, you finally know what makes you happy, but it’s complicated to redirect your many-pronged life. Plus, the head and the heart are such different decision makers. Often, one of the two is a sucker for distractions, excuses, and doubt.

The reaction is interesting when you share with someone the concept of this book. There is a tilt of the head. You can almost hear the mental wheels begin to turn: Holy cow, I’m not even close to being where I belong in my life right now. The topic is uncomfortable for some. For others, there is affirmation; a chance to acknowledge their inner compass is indeed pointed in the right direction. Well…yes. I am where I belong!

I’ve known for a long time where I belong, and yet I’m on the slow track to arriving there. I belong with kids; little kids who need guidance and love. Growing up, I thought I’d become a second grade teacher, but in college, journalism caught my eye and has kept me interested for nearly three decades. I also grew up hoping to one day get married and have three children. That plan, well, had some unexpected snags — divorce, illness, and now, my age. Still, I’ll get there…to the place where what brings me the most joy brings joy to others, too. I’m thinking a summer camp for underprivileged kids. I can teach them, enjoy their silliness, and hit the pillow knowing I spent the day doing that which has delighted my head and heart for so long.

This book is my way of confirming — maybe even to myself — that it’s possible, no matter when, to create a life that’s both fun and rewarding. In the pages ahead, you’ll meet the extraordinary people who are the proof. These wide-ranging stories offer us all hope that it’s never too late, or early, to identify that which brings us joy and peace. Some recognize it early in life — as early as grammar school — others need five decades. In this book, you’ll experience what it’s like for people to not only realize they’re on the wrong path, but also that — yikes! — a leap of faith is the only way to get from Point A to Point Belong.

One story features a young girl who faced a vast chasm between her big dream and the small factory town where she grew up. Burdened by discouraging words and an impoverished upbringing, she worked hard and smart to courageously pursue what she knew she was meant to do. Regret was not an option.

Another story explores the delicate dance of relationship and marriage. When a husband created and followed a fork in the road to pursue personal happiness, his wife felt like their agreed-upon life plan had been knifed in the process. What happened to ‘us’ and ‘we’? Their journey to feel content as individuals and as a team is compelling.

There is also a story of hope. If you’ve ever felt that something’s missing in your life, but you have no idea what it is, perhaps take a look back over your shoulder. A man in his fifties did and saw something he never thought he wanted. That second look changed his world, and now he and his wife work to improve lives around the world.

You’ll also read the story of a woman who, in her thirties, found both love and her place in community. The unique neighborhood she happened upon in life was rich in ways that the mansion she grew up in could never provide. She was finally ‘home.’

Tucked in between these intriguing stories will be lovely little offerings from names you know; superstars in their fields. What you may not know is that they, too, had fish-out-of-water phases in their lives. Before the sparkle of celebrity, there were grey clouds of frustration and worry. What did it feel like before the road to success revealed itself? How did big fish change directions mid stream? Each will identify the guideposts that led to a place of peace and fulfillment.

And so, please read on. These four words will lead the way:

Should

Would

Could

Did.

If you don’t like how things are, change it. You’re not a tree. You have the ability to totally transform every area in your life — and it all begins with your very own power of choice. Jim Rohn

Excerpted from Where We Belong (Simon & Schuster, 2016), by Hoda Kotb, which is available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent.

an excerpt from the novel by Christopher Buckley

Basel, 1517

Dismas might have purchased the finger bone of the Apostle Thomas, but there was something not quite right about the man offering it for sale.

For one, the asking price was far too low. A relic of the finger that had probed the spear wound in Christ’s side after his resurrection would fetch as much as forty or fifty gulden. And he was asking only fifteen. More troubling was the absence of fragrant odor when Dismas held it to his nostrils. A genuine relic was always pleasant to the nose. Finally, there was the variety of items the fellow had for sale: the tongue (entire) of St. Anthony of Padua; an ampulla of the Virgin’s breast milk; a stone from the scala santa, the steps of Pilate’s palace; a few pieces of straw from the sacra cunabulum, the holy manger in Bethlehem; and shavings from the chains of St. Peter. A suspiciously vast array of goods.

Experience inclined Dismas to trust more in dealers who concentrated in specific fields. Say, relics of the Diocletian persecution. Or brandea, items that had been in physical contact with the Holy Family. Relics of St. Anne, mother of the Virgin, a category right now in huge demand.

Most revealing of all: when Dismas thanked the man and turned to leave, he immediately lowered the price to five gulden. One saw more and more of this disgraceful behavior these days at the Basel Relic Fair.

Dismas stood in the market square in front of the new town hall with its marvelous polychrome arcades. His glance swept over the expanse, humming with commerce. There must be over three hundred exhibitors.

He noted with amusement two adjoining booths, each advertising thorns from the Crown of Thorns. Unfortunate placement. But there were so many exhibitors these days. Space was tight. Placards and banners flapped in the late afternoon breeze. One advertised a Mandylion, another a sudarium, another a foot (whole) of the Magdalene. There was always a surcharge for an entire appendage.

On the north side of the square, by the fish market, appropriately enough, was this year’s most talked-about piece: an entire boat avouched to have belonged to St. Peter in his pre-apostle Galilean fishing days.

Owing to his status in the relic community, Dismas had been given a preview. The asking price, three thousand gulden, was of course preposterous, even if it were authentic, which Dismas highly doubted. To the consternation of its seller, Dismas crawled underneath with a magnifying glass. There he found wormholes of the type made by saltwater worms.

Dusting himself off, he gave the fellow a look of rebuke. Odd, wasn’t it — saltwater worm damage, in a freshwater fishing vessel?

The dealer cleared his throat and said, well, see, the boat had been briefly anchored in the Mediterranean, at Joppa, before, er, being taken aboard ship for Marseilles.

“Um. Well, thanks for letting me have a look.”

A shame, Dismas thought, for what a splendid centerpiece it would make in the courtyard of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Or the cathedral cloister at Mainz. Someone would buy it, perhaps a recently-ennobled Bohemian, who’d paint it in garish colors and put it in his moat. In time he’d grow bored of it and allow his children to reenact famous sea battles in it. And finally it would rot and sink, and the nobleman would say that he’d always had his doubts about it.

Excerpted from The Relic Master (Simon & Schuster, 2015), by Christopher Buckley, which is available for purchase from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and your local independent.

An excerpt from the novel The Dogs of Littlefield

No one was very surprised when the signs began appearing in Baldwin Park. For years people had been letting their dogs run free in the meadow to the west of the elementary school without attracting much notice; but once an authorized off-leash “dog park” was proposed and a petition presented to the Littlefield Board of Aldermen, fierce arguments erupted over whose rights to the park should be upheld, and the town broke into factions: those who loved dogs and those who did not, at least not in the park.

At first the signs were polite reminders to dog owners to curb and pick up after their dogs. PLEASE RESPECT THE PARK, they read. Or THE PARK IS FOR ALL OF US. But as the off-leash proposal gained support among the aldermen, several of whom owned dogs them- selves, the signs became more pointed. On St. Patrick’s Day, a sign was posted on a telephone pole at the frontier of the elementary school playground where wood chips gave way to grass and dog-walking parents often congregated after escorting their children to school. Printed in blue ink on the kind of thin, flexible cardboard that comes slipped inside of men’s dress shirts, it read:

Pick up

after Your Dog.

Aren’t You Ashamed

that You Don’t?

This sign created a small uproar among the parents, who objected to its tone, and it was taken down by the custodian. Then, on March 21, according to the “Crime Watch” column in the Littlefield Gazette, an unidentified man threatened to shoot an unleashed dog for colliding with his bicycle while he was riding in the park; the dog owner reported this threat to the police. The man had dark facial hair, “scruffy” was her actual term, and was between eighteen and twenty-five years of age. A description, she acknowledged, that fit half the young men in Littlefield. Not long after the collision between dog and cyclist, another sign appeared overnight on a telephone pole, this one at the eastern edge of the park, bordering Endicott Road. On the back of a brown paper shopping bag, in large crude black letters, was written:

Leash Your

Beast

Or Else

It was also quickly taken down, though not before being seen by two gardeners, several dog walkers, and a woman out jogging.

— —

A week later the aldermen voted to postpone discussions of the dog park proposal until an independent task force could conduct a site review, and for a while the controversy quieted.

Soccer season resumed in mid-April, and once again whole families sat together in the park, wearing sweaters and baseball hats and fleece lap blankets against the chilly morning air, cheering from folding nylon chairs on the sidelines, mist rising from the grass at their feet, some holding dogs tightly on leashes while children flew back and forth across the damp green field, hair backlit by the low morning sun.

On weekend afternoons as the weather warmed, families strolled down Brooks Street with ice-cream cones from the Dairy Barn. Soft-hipped mothers wearing large dark sunglasses stopped to exchange greetings and to share mild mutinous jokes about driving to Manhattan one of these days instead of doing the three o’clock school pickup. Elderly women from Avalon Towers wandered past in turtlenecks and boiled-wool jackets and elastic-waisted slacks, holding on to each other’s thin arms, shaking their heads at flocks of flamingo-like girls, clad in black leggings and oversize hooded sweatshirts, texting each other in front of Walgreens. Now and then the trolley rumbled to a stop at the old fieldstone station. People stepped onto or off the platform, and then the trolley rumbled on again. Almost always a dog was tied by its leash to a parking meter outside the Dairy Barn or the Bake Shoppe or the Tavern, looking hopefully at passersby, or cringingly, or indifferently, but as much a part of those busy village afternoons as anybody else.

The Dogs of Littlefield, by Suzanne Berne, is available online and at your favorite bookstore.

Excerpt from Jeanine Pirro’s bestseller He Killed Them All: Robert Durst and My Quest for Justice

I heard from Jarecki again in 2011, when I was in Chicago doing my syndicated courtroom show for Warner Bros. He reached me by phone and asked me to participate in The Jinx, a documentary he was making about the case.

He had some set.

I said, “Why would I participate? You didn’t play me so well in the Ryan Gosling movie.”

But I liked Andrew and I agreed to meet him for lunch or breakfast. He always came off as sincere, low-key, no big deal, an “I’m not going to harm anybody” kind of guy. He told me how the documentary project came about, that Durst himself volunteered to be interviewed after seeing All Good Things. Why would Jarecki devote more time, money, and effort to make another movie about the case? He’d been on it for five years already. If he hadn’t lost interest or gotten frustrated by now, he might be a lifer, like Cody and me. We would never stop looking at Durst until justice was served.

But I said no. I was busy and I still didn’t see what good it would do for the case or for me personally.

Andrew wore down my reluctance over a two-year period. Lots of email exchanges and lunches. He seemed to be passionate about the subject matter, with decent intentions.

When he came to my office one Saturday, we caught up, and, again, he made his pitch. “The documentary will be about right and wrong in the criminal-justice system,” he said. “We might be in totally different fields, but we’re focused on the same thing — justice, the truth, and settling scores.” Jarecki reminded me of his previous documentary, Capturing the Friedmans, about a family that was destroyed by false accusations of child abuse run amok. “Whether it’s Capturing the Friedmans or the Durst case, my goal is about getting to the truth,” he said.

He seemed to be pruriently fascinated by the investigations, but I also thought he had a strong sense of right and wrong. I realized that Andrew and I were on the same side, that there might be a benefit to participating in this documentary after all.

My “no” changed to “maybe.”

A few months later, we were having lunch at the St. Regis in New York. Andrew said, “I want you to see something.” Jarecki took his iPad out of his cross-body-strap messenger bag and cued up a short video.

He gave me the tablet and I pushed play. It was Chip Lewis, one of Durst’s lawyers in Galveston. Lewis said, “It was very easy for us to make her the enemy. We created this mythical creature — Jeanine Pirro. And we took liberty with how directly she was involved in the pursuit of Bob. That message played well. The jury ate that one up.”

I couldn’t believe my eyes and ears. He actually said, in no uncertain terms, that they knowingly played fast and loose with the truth about me in court. Why would he admit it? He must really think that he’s a bulletproof superstar and that revealing their strategic deception would bring him to the next level or something. I would be ashamed if I perpetuated a fraud in a courtroom. Lewis acted proud of it.

“Son of a bitch.”

That was it. Jarecki knew the Lewis clip would make my blood boil.

“Maybe” changed to “hell yes!” I said, “I’m in.”

The only stipulation was that I could speak to no one about the project.

Gagged again, but I had no problem agreeing this time. I didn’t discuss The Jinx with anyone, not even Cody, who I knew was also participating in it.

My son, Alex, was upset that I was cooperating with the man who’d been so wrong about me in his previous effort. “After what Jarecki did to you in All Good Things? How could you ever work with him?”

I said, “He’s evolved on it.”

“He’s just going to make money on the case again.”

Many people have made money on Robert Durst (none more than his legal team). He was a cottage industry. For the record, I have been asked many times over the years to write a book about my involvement in the case, and always refused. Until Episode Five, I didn’t see the point of writing a book, because Kathie’s story didn’t have a satisfying conclusion.

I said to Alex, “This case has been a thorn in my side for more than a decade, and if this documentary sheds more light on the Kathie Durst case, I’m happy to be a part of it.”

In advance of my taping, Andrew sent me a three-page list of questions. It was well organized and thorough, starting with my personal background (“Where did you grow up?” “What was your path to becoming the DA?”) and moving into Kathie’s missing-persons case and our investigation into it.

He specifically asked, “New York City case versus Westchester case?” I got an inkling that Jarecki truly understood the issue. He must have seen the original files and deduced for himself that the original investigation by the NYPD had been botched.

One question on the list made me groan: “How did all the media affect the case?” Part of me wanted to talk about how the media leaks jeopardized the case and how DeGuerin had played the media like a fiddle, but I didn’t.

Regarding the Susan Berman murder, he had the question, “Did you think it was at all connected to Bob and Kathie?”

Uh, yeah!

In the section of questions about the Galveston trial, he included, “What did you think about Bob’s choice to use your investigation as part of his defense? [Pirro’s name doesn’t show up in the press until after Susan’s murder, so Bob’s story isn’t true.]”

Wow. He figured it out. He actually read those papers. It proved to me that by adding that revelation to the show, Jarecki and Smerling were sticking with the facts and ditching the fiction this time around. The last question on their list was, “Were you surprised that Bob reached out to us about telling ‘his side’ of the story? Bob has much to lose. Knowing something about him, can you imagine why he might do that?”

Why indeed?

Robert Durst is a narcissist. He believes the world revolves around him, and he simply couldn’t resist putting his stamp on Jarecki’s interpretation of the case. He is frustratingly slippery, always one step ahead of being caught. He’s the kind of guy who loved to dance on that edge. He clearly got off on it. I believe he agreed to do The Jinx so he could feel superior, smugly smarter than Jarecki and Smerling, and that he’d get to put one over on the viewing audience. Or maybe he did want the truth to come out. On some level, it was possible that he wanted the world to know how he’d gotten away with murder. O. J. Simpson, another egomaniac, wrote a book called If I Did It, trying to get credit but take no responsibility. It was to be his last act. Maybe the playacting Durst had learned in Texas convinced him he could con the world as well.

We taped my interview in the fall of 2013. Jarecki, Smerling, and a crew came to my house and set up in the morning. Filming took place in the library. I was asked to sit in my big burgundy leather club chair even though I was wearing a red-orange dress. Apparently, the light was good in the library. Jarecki sat across from me, conversation style. He knew every fact, every detail, every aspect of the case. He kept a three-ring binder on his lap, his bible of the case, and flipped through it as we talked. The tone was polite, professional, and efficient. There was never a glitch or tense moment throughout the day. There were no egos involved. It went very smoothly. By midafternoon, they packed up their equipment and left. Start to finish, it took six hours.

I believe I was one of the last people interviewed on camera. Of course, Durst’s second interview was the very last one recorded. Jarecki organized his schedule just as I would have, starting on the outside, learning the facts, and slowly working his way in, peeling that onion to the core.

The questions they’d sent and my prepared answers weren’t nearly as important to them as catching on film my raw reaction to things Durst had told them. They asked me plenty, and we discussed all the facts about the case, including the defense strategy. But I could tell they were really waiting for the right moment to show me something, or tell me new bits of information they’d unearthed.

At the very end of the interview, Jarecki handed me a copy of the cadaver letter, which I already knew by heart. Then he handed me another paper and said, “Take a look at this.” It was the envelope addressed to Susan on Durst’s Wall Street stationery that Sareb Kaufman found in a box of his mom’s things.

But I didn’t know that at the time. I asked, “Where did you get this?”

Jarecki just shook his head and said nothing.

I looked at the envelope.

It took a second for me to react. I read it and said, “Beverley,” noticing the misspelling. Then I studied the envelope for a second longer, saw the handwriting similarities, and said, “Son of a bitch!”

In my head, thoughts were exploding. “Oh, my God! Here it is. All these years. Here it is. We can prove it now. We can convict him now. He did it. Of course, he killed her, too.”

I’m sure my thought process was very similar to Robert Durst’s experience of seeing the two Beverleys side by side, both of us quietly contemplating what we were looking at. I felt hot all over, flushed and glowing.

Durst’s blood must have run ice cold.

Holding the envelope was like being lost in the desert and then suddenly seeing an oasis in front of you.

I’d thought I’d found a few oases before with the Durst case. But they were mirages. The two Beverleys were not a mirage. They were the ocean.

When I looked up at Jarecki and Smerling, they were looking at me intensely, and then with slight grins, probably because they knew they had gotten a genuine reaction they could use in the film. I looked at these two guys and thought to myself, Oh, my God. They did it. They got him.

And then another thought struck me. God, would I love to try that case.

Jeanine Pirro is the former DA and county court judge of Westchester County. She is an Emmy Award winner, a legal analyst for Fox News, and the host of Justice with Judge Jeanine. He Killed Them All is available wherever books, audiobooks, and e-books are sold.