Page 106 - Just Deserts
P. 106

Stiff Competition

          “Initial  sales  of  the  book  were  brisk,  confirming  the  publisher’s
        expectations and the public’s enthusiastic interest in the gimmick. A
        week passed without a winner in the contest; then ten days; then two
        weeks.  And  still  the  book  sold  in  the  hundreds  of  thousands  of
        copies.  A  few  skeptics  began  to  wonder  if  any  of  the  books  were
        printed with the winning message.  And then,” she paused for effect,
        “disaster struck.”
          “This is the emergency clinic in Point Blank, Idaho.” The flashing
        red light on a fire department rescue vehicle highlighted the image of
        a small-town medical facility. “Here, on a fateful night fifteen days
        after  ‘Stiff Competition’ went on sale, a homeless person,  a drifter
        named  Thurston Furd,  came  to the hospital complaining of severe
        cramps and difficulty breathing. His blood was tested and found to
        contain unusually high levels of arsenic trioxide. Furd’s life was not in
        danger, but the personnel began quizzing him to find out where and
        how he had been poisoned. He could provide no explanation, but a
        copy of the Orpimenter novel was found in his rucksack; the scratch-
        off material had been removed, uncovering the winning message—
        the first to appear anywhere.”
          “The  emergency  room  doctor,  realizing  the  value  of  the  book,
        became suspicious. He sent for the police and a forensic specialist.
        They wondered if someone else had tried to kill Thurston Furd to
        claim the prize money. But the police investigation turned up a quite
        different explanation: the book itself was poisoned. Traces of arsenic
        were  found  in  the  remaining  fragments  of  scratch-off  coating.  But
        hundreds of thousands of people had been scratching off the material
        for  weeks,  with  no  ill  effects.  It  seemed  to  be  only  on  Thurston
        Furd’s winning copy. And, like the victims in the novel, learning the
        secret could have cost him his life.”
          The video returned to Ms. Glotz in Manhattan.
          “When  the  news  of  the  near-tragedy  came  out,  there  was
        pandemonium.  Emergency  phone  lines  were  jammed  with  callers
        who had just scratched off the coating. Bookstores were forced to
        close while ‘Stiff Competition’ was removed from the shelves and all
        traces of the promotional displays taken down or destroyed. The next
        day,  at  a  hastily-organized  press  conference,  a  spokesperson  for
        LibrAries Press denied that the publishing house had anything to do
                                       105
   101   102   103   104   105   106   107   108   109   110   111