Kevin's truck was a 1998 Ford F-150. It needed new brakes. It ran fine otherwise. His dad said, "You oughta learn to trade. See what things are worth." Kevin said okay, which is what he says when someone tells him to do something and he doesn't care enough to argue.He drove the truck to his coworker Brian's house. Brian's cousin needed to sell a delivery van. Higher mileage than Kevin's truck but it had a cargo area and a sliding door and Kevin figured he could fix the brakes himself. He'd...

ACT I The churchyard stood between North Street and the harbor, a narrow ribbon of consecrated earth where the dead of Boston's Irish quarter were laid to rest. Sister Mary Clare moved along the gravel paths with her rosary beads passing through her fingers, each bead a small stone of devotion she rolled toward some unknown shore. She was twenty-six years old, born in County Mayo, brought to Boston when she was seven, and she had worn the habit for nine years now. Nine years of prayer, of...

The federals came at dawn on a Tuesday in October 1924. Esther Blackwood knew they were coming—she'd seen the Ford sedans idling at the crossroads for three days, men in overcoats who didn't drive but waited, waited, waited like hounds before the hunt. What she hadn't anticipated was the speed. The raid took eleven minutes from the first kick to the last stilling of a bootleg still. Eleven minutes to lose three years of work, two partners, and one boy—sixteen years old, named Billy, who took...

## Act I: The Descent (20%) The wind howled across the Yorkshire moors like a wounded thing, rattling the broken panes of the small cottage. Eleanor Crawford stirred the meager fire with a stick of rotting wood. Her mother, Agnes, lay on the straw mattress, her breathing shallow and ragged. "Mother," Eleanor whispered, "I'll find something. Anything." The pantry held nothing but a crust of bread and a jar of pickled onions. It had been like this for months since the lord evicted them from...

## Act I: The Descent (20%) The rain fell on Manhattan like a curse, turning the streets of the Polish enclave into rivers of mud and despair. Anna Kowalski pulled her shawl tighter and quickened her pace. The tenement building behind her stood five stories tall, its walls crumbling, its windows broken. "Anna!" her mother's voice came from the apartment window. "Come home, girl!" She descended the creaky stairs to the apartment. Mrs. Kowalski sat by the single stove, her face lined with...

Robert Cummings sat at his desk and looked at the stack of manuscripts in front of him. Twenty-three biography proposals. Twenty-three lives, twenty-three stories, twenty-three chances to decide who got remembered and who got forgotten.He was fifty-two years old and he had spent the last twenty years doing exactly this: sitting at a desk in a Manhattan office building, reading other people's life stories, and deciding which ones were worth printing.He worked for Cummings Media, the largest...

The first call came at 6:47 AM. Lorraine West was still in bed—she'd been up since 3:00 AM, watching the street below her apartment from the fire escape, counting headlights, counting footsteps, counting the moments between one threat and the next. The phone rang and she let it ring four times before answering, because answering too quickly made you look guilty and answering too slowly made you look careless, and four was the sweet spot. "Ms. West?" A man's voice. Professional. Not...

The four mules were old but sound. Zech knew them — knew which one favored the left hoof, which one stopped for every fence post within reach, which one would stand perfectly still if you scratched behind the ears the way his great-grandfather used to scratch them.He was twenty-three and the mules were the last thing his great-grandfather had left him that wasn't tied up in a lawsuit. The Beauregard family name was worth about as much as Monopoly money at this point, but the mules were real,...

I've been watching the Ashfords from this porch for forty-seven years. Forty-seven years of the same stretch of Long Island Shore — dunes, beach, the water always moving, always leaving, never asking permission.Julian first sailed into my sight in the summer of 1920. He was twenty years old, standing on the deck of a twenty-two-foot sloop his father had given him, and he had that particular look that young men have when they think the ocean belongs to them.I told him so, once. Just that. "The...

March 12 I have been keeping a journal for three weeks now. Not because I have become a man of letters. I have become a man with nowhere else to direct his attention. Music stopped being something I made and started being something I used to get through bar gigs and forgotten piano lessons. Now the instrument sits in the corner of my apartment like a piece of furniture I forgot existed. The guitar case is still closed. The piano keys haven't been struck by anything but dust. So I walk. That...

The woman who walked into my office had hair the colour of rust and eyes the colour of something that had been crying recently. She wore a black dress that cost more than my annual rent and shoes that had never walked on broken glass. She was everything Los Angeles pretended to be and was not. "I need you to find my husband," she said. I lit a cigarette. "That's what everyone says." "My husband is Frank DeLuca. He's a detective with the LAPD. He disappeared three days ago." I exhaled smoke...

The salon on Stephansplatz was not, technically, a gambling house. It was a "social club," as Isabella Novak told the customs officials when they asked about the collection of diamond-studded roulette wheels and stacks of五百 franc notes that occupied the basement of the Palazzo Harms. The Palazzo was a noble building—three stories of stucco and wrought iron, with windows that looked over the square and a door that bore a brass plaque reading simply: SALON NOVAK. Isabella wore the name like a...