Christietown (31 page)

I know of no other experience which confers so much grace as loving and being loved by one person
.

That’s what it said, the note Agatha wrote to Archie, the
note Archie claimed to have destroyed, the note that Ian had

given to me for safekeeping.

Bull’s-eye.

The words hit me like a knife to the heart.

I looked down at the beautiful ring Gambino had given me, and thought about the wedding we were supposed to have, the one I’d postponed without so much as asking him.

I know of no other experience which confers so much grace as loving and being loved by one person
.

Loving and being loved by one person.

If you don’t get it right the first time, you might get another chance.

Some people take it, others run from it.

Sitting there alone on my living room couch, the early morning sun streaming in through the window, I wondered, not for the first time, if I was the kind of person who took it, or the kind of person who ran.

Thank you, again, to my friends and family, who never seem to mind when I crib a line or two from them.

Thanks are also due to my brilliant editor, Carolyn Marino, who bears no relationship whatsoever to Cece’s editor, Sally; and to the agent extraordinaire, Sandra Dijkstra. Samantha Hagerbaumer of HarperCollins is a delight to work with; ditto Taryn Fagerness and Elise Capron at the Dijkstra Agency.

The literature on the Queen of Crime is vast. Agatha Christie’s autobiography proved invaluable, as did the biog
raphies by Janet Morgan and Gillian Gill, and Anne Hart’s charming
The Life and Times of Miss Jane Marple
. In researching Agatha’s disappearance, I consulted a variety of works, fiction and nonfiction, including Carole Owens’s
The Lost Days of Agatha Christie
, Kathleen Tynan’s
Agatha
, and finally, Jared Cade’s
Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days
, to which I am greatly indebted. Cade’s meticulous research and psycho
logical insights provided the basis of my own reconstruction
of what Agatha might have been thinking during those fateful days in 1926.

My daughters started off indulging me and wound up Christie fans; my husband is more the hard-boiled type, but he lived and breathed Miss Marple for a solid year. Who could ask for anything more?

Susan Kandel is a former art critic for the
Los Angeles Times
. She has taught at New York University and UCLA, and served as the editor of the international journal
artext
. She lives with her family in West Hollywood, California.

www.susankandel.com

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Cover design by Barbara Levin
e
Cover illustration by Paul Oakley/Bernstein & Andriulli, Inc
.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

CHRISTIETOWN. Copyright © 2007 by Susan Kandel. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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