I remain where I am, making myself count to three hundred. When he doesn’t return and nobody else comes, I crawl along the side of the building and emerge from the back of the hedge, in the rear lot near the dumpster, where I parked my car. Once I’m in it, with the doors locked, I strip off the pink wig and baseball cap and tuck them under my seat. I drink a whole literof water without stopping, since I am hellishly thirsty as well as nauseated. I open my glove box and take out the half a granola bar I found on a table at the travel oasis this morning, break off the exposed end in case there are germs, force myself to eat the rest. William’s tour and extracurriculars are expensive as well as exhausting.
I drive slowly through the lot, like any hotel guest leaving for home. I so wish that’s where I were going. It’s not that I have any great love for my sh*thole studio. It’s just a container for me to live in while I do what I have to do. But right now the idea of being there, in the air-conditioning, lights off, face-planting onto my own futon, seems like heaven.
It’s not going to happen. Sam Vetiver just had to push it by showing up today. Gosh damn her! I exit the lot, passing a Portsmouth, NH, sheriff’s car coming in. Lights off, naturally. They’ll take William’s statement, but there’s no emergency here.
In the way of most corporate chain hotels, this one is near an office park. I take the first turn I see and pull into a spot beneath a tree from which I can see the Marriott entrance and Sam Vetiver’s Jeep, yellow in the sun as a child’s rubber duckie. And William’s SUV, with its bike and roof racks and stupid Mary Oliver bumper sticker. There’s no way Sam Vetiver or William will be able to leave without my seeing them, and in the meantime, my only job is to stay awake, to watch and wait.
Chapter 9
Fort Constitution
“That,” said William, “was the Rabbit.”
They were driving—somewhere, Sam didn’t know where. William navigated through Portsmouth as if he had a destination in mind. He’d said very little since he’d returned to the Marriott lobby, limping like Captain Ahab, to confer with two of New Hampshire’s finest. Sam had sat nearby on a couch, eavesdropping-not-eavesdropping; William’s voice had grown so low with fury, it was hard to hear him. At one point, Sam had heard him growl,Yes, it’s all on record, which you’d know if you looked! Jesus Christ, I know she has to murder me in my sleep before you people take action, but at least do your basic job. Now he was grim-faced and less voluble than usual but calm. If this was William enraged, Sam could take it.
She’d been checking out his car as he drove—it was like seeing a man’s house for the first time; it told you so much. William’s car was the luxe but unflashy small SUV people drove when they had money but didn’t want to show off. It had a bike rack on the back, a Thule container on top, and a bumper sticker that readHonk if you’re letting the soft animal of your body love what it loves.Inside, it smelled of his cologne, and the interior was clean, no crumpled fast-food wrappers or crumbs, just William’s seersucker suits hanging from the dry-cleaning hook and a carton of breakfast bars on the back seat. Tour life, male version.
He stopped at a light and turned to Sam. He was wearing aviators, like every boy she’d gone to college with. “Thank you for coming to see me.”
“Thanks for having me. I hope it’s okay that it was the Darlings instead of a book event.”
“Very okay, if a little below your pay grade. But I apologize for the drama.”
“It’s not your fault,” said Sam. “I saw that woman before, at your Boston reading. She had curly blond hair then.”
“She has many different looks,” said William. “She keeps the wig industry in business. She’s been stalking me for years.”
“Seriously?”
“Dead serious. She comes to most of my readings. Tails me on the road. I strongly suspect she’s been to my house.”
“That’s horrible!” said Sam. “Can’t anyone do anything about it?” But she knew the answer. She’d grown up watching Lifetime Movie Network.
“No. It’s all on record, I’ve reported every incident. But she has to threaten or cause me bodily harm before I can get even a restraining order. And she’s too smart for that.”
“Who is she, do you know? What does she want?”
William turned onto a road paralleling the ocean. “What does any stalker want? As a beautiful woman, as an author, you must have been through this. You know.”
Sam nodded. For each book, she’d had readers send uncomfortably personal emails that, when she responded to say thanks, grew in length and intimacy. She’d learned to let her replies dwindle and wink out. But one recent gentleman had been persistent, flooding her in-box with commentary on her writing, analysis of the sexy passages, imaginings of what Sam had been thinking when she wrote them, descriptions of what they made him do. When she blocked his email, he’d popped up on social media, leaving paragraph-long comments on her posts and DMing photos of himself, naked, with her books. When she reported him, he started texting and calling—and Sam did not give out her number. The pièce de résistancewas when he mailed a nude sketch of Sam toher apartment, with a note saying he could be there in 4.52 hours if the traffic wasn’t bad. Sam never posted her address or identifying information of her home. She reported the incidents to the police, who of course could do nothing, and changed her locks.
“I did have a stalker,” Sam said. “But he faded away.”
“That’s a mercy,” said William. “And I’m sorry you had to go through it, though not surprised. I’ve come to think of it as a professional side effect: We invite readers into our imaginations in the most intimate way, invoke their strongest feelings... and then, when they close the cover of the book, it’s all over. The most fragile ones can’t handle it. They’ve formed what they think is a relationship.”
“Like the celebrity stalkers who confuse the actor with the role,” said Sam.
“Exactly. It could be considered a compliment, if it weren’t such an annoyance.”
“As long as that’s all this woman is,” Sam said.
William drove into a parking lot, passing one of the wooden National Parks signs Sam loved:Fort Constitution. “So far, yes. And it’s been years, so I don’t think she’s going to escalate. In fact, she might be getting better. She used to send emails... ”
Oh! thought Sam. She felt a small shock, as though she’d shuffled across the carpet and touched a light switch. She’d totally forgotten until now about the message she’d gotten via her website a few nights ago, from somebody named bibliogirl081569:
STAY THE F*CK AWAY FROM WILLIAM CORWYN. IF YOU KNOW WHAT’S GOOD FOR YOU.
At the time, Sam had been startled, then annoyed, then bemused. Whoever bibliogirl081569 was, she didn’t know it took a lot more than that to scare a writer. Sam had received far more profane emails from aggrieved readers. And she’d been kind of charmed by bibliogirl081569’s delicately skewed sensibilities, sending a threat but not wanting to spellout the curse word. Sam had filed the email in her Angry Randos file, spent an hour on William’s social media trying to spot bibliogirl081569 among his commenters, then given up. It had to be somebody from the Boston event, because that was the only time Sam and William had been publicly together, but that could be one of a hundred women. Someone with a crush and a violent way of expressing herself online. Now Sam thought: Probably the Rabbit.
