Andrew Wrangles has a decision to make. His best friend Sothum, a philosophical and financial genius, has just died and left him a choice in his will: ten million dollars or a sealed envelope.

Andrew’s wife Cheryl doesn’t see this as much of a choice. She wants Andrew to take the money, and what little patience she has for his speculating about what could be worth more than ten million dollars is wearing thin very quickly.

But as Andrew digs deeper into the secret life that Sothum lived, he finds more questions than answers. Does the envelope contain the fate of a vanished mutual friend? The answer to a terrible cosmic riddle? The confession to a crime? Is Sothum just playing a final private joke? Or has Andrew become a pawn in a game–a game that Sothum died playing against a bigger opponent than Andrew can imagine?

Monday	4-Jun	Live to Read
Tuesday	5-Jun	—
Wednesday	6-Jun	Ermilia
Thursday	7-Jun	Chronicles of Illusions
Friday	8-Jun	Reviewing Shelf
Saturday	9-Jun	—
Sunday	10-Jun	—
Monday	11-Jun	Candle Beam Book Blog
Tuesday	12-Jun	Soaring Dreams
Wednesday	13-Jun	—
Thursday	14-Jun	—
Friday	15-Jun	The Transformational Editor
Saturday	16-Jun	Books are Magic
Sunday	17-Jun	Me and Reading
Monday	18-Jun	Miraculous
Tuesday	19-Jun	Beck Valley Books
Wednesday	20-Jun	Books, Books, The Magical Fruit
Thursday	21-Jun	Turning the Pages
Friday	22-Jun	Sticking to the Story
		Alchemy of Scrawl
Saturday	23-Jun	Lissette E. Manning’s Blog
Sunday	24-Jun	The Trust Blog
Monday	25-Jun	My Life with Books & Boys
Tuesday	26-Jun	—
Wednesday	27-Jun	Sweeping the USA
Thursday	28-Jun	Bless their Hearts
Friday	29-Jun	My Devotional Thoughts
Saturday	30-Jun	The Graveyard Press
		Only God Can Make a Tree
		Write Panic Live
		Cabin Goddess
		Novel Publicity Twitterview

 

Edmund Jorgensen was born in Chicago. He studied classical languages and has maintained a love for all things Greek and Roman. He fell in love with his wife in Mexico; they now reside, happily but considerably more chilly, in Watertown, Massachusetts. Edmund is currently hard at work on his second book, a set of interconnected short stories.

Connect with Edmund on his website,  Facebook, Twitter or GoodReads.

The Law Offices of X, Y, and Z

By the time Buddy Johnston vanished, his humiliation had become so abject, and so public, that I don’t suppose many people would have been shocked if he had washed up one morning on the banks of the East River with rocks in his pockets and stones in his shoes. But after more than ten years of acquaintance—or friendship, as he and I both charitably called it—I knew Buddy too well to imagine that he could have committed suicide without leaving a note. A note at the very least, and more likely a tract, a manifesto, a complaint in the classical sense and quite possibly in classical meter. He was just the sort of man who could have begun composing a suicide note and so lost himself in admiration of his own prose style and depth of feeling, become so overwhelmed by the pathos of his own situation, that he forgot entirely he had intended to do away with himself. Then he would have published the note in The New Yorker with an introductory remark explaining how writing had “literally saved my life.”

During most of those years of friendship I would have laughed at the suggestion that I would someday feel sorry for Buddy, not only because he had so much that anyone would have envied—the moneyed family, two bestsellers, those famous affairs—but more importantly because I knew deep down that he was a closer friend to Sothum than I was, and someone whom Sothum considered almost an intellectual equal. But Buddy believed that merely by virtue of his being Buddy Johnston he deserved everything he had and more, and the strength of this belief made him unusually vulnerable to the vicissitudes of real life. This belief was the keystone of his model for all order in the world, for justice and rationality, and when fortune gave that stone a few good raps—the mean-spirited coverage of his breakup with Alyssa, the terrible reviews of his second book, the mocking movie adaptation of his first—the structures of Buddy’s ego threatened to come tumbling after.

Although I might have disputed the justice of Buddy’s success, I had no immediate doubts that he would be restored to it quickly. I was sure that he had only gone to ground for a while to lick his wounds and repair the esteem in which he held himself. He lacked neither the funds to support himself meanwhile nor the network of fellow celebrities to shelter him. One of these days he would emerge from another writer’s cabin in the woods clutching a new manuscript; or from some Eastern monastery, decked out in novitiate’s robes and claiming to have seen right through the false fame and fortune to which he would so eagerly return. His big bald head would glare again in the flashbulbs, and his next book—no doubt inspired by his brief experience as a pariah—would be trumpeted as a return to form. He would resume his trips to Boston to visit Sothum one or two weekends each month, and the three of us would again have early Sunday dinners at Huanchen America’s on Beacon Street before Buddy caught the shuttle back to New York. In short, all would return to normal.

But as the months went by Buddy didn’t emerge from a cabin or return from any meditative sojourn. He didn’t wash up on the banks of the Hudson either, or the Charles, or the Ganges. He didn’t turn up anywhere, though eventually there were quite a few people looking for him. There were publishers looking to give him money and tax men looking to take it away. There were journalists looking to scoop his story and women looking to tell him off or to console him. After a while there were detectives hot for evidence of foul play. And eventually I joined the search party myself, hoping against hope to disprove my growing suspicion that Sothum had somehow been involved in Buddy’s disappearance.