“Nobody’s writing was ever as good as his. It was not good, period. He was very charming about it—at first. The iron fist in the velvet glove. He would begin with praise, citing a real skill or talent or pleasing turn of phrase the author had. Then he would cut that person down. Mercilessly. A sword to the ankles. The things he called the stories! Jejune. Perfervid. Execrable. As flavorless as overmasticated gum. A sleeping potion he wished were deadly. A literary lobotomy. On and on.”
“That’s awful,” said Sam through numb lips.
“Yes. He had a flair for the dramatic as well. Once he threw a storyinto the center of the room and did thehopakon it. Another time, he made one into a paper airplane and sailed it out the window. He set one of my pieces on fire with a Zippo and burned it in the wastebasket. He made people cry. One woman had a nervous breakdown and left the program altogether.”
“Oh my God,” said Sam. “Why didn’t anyone stop it? What were the teachers doing?”
“Smirking, mostly,” said Zahra. “Sitting with their arms crossed. They said it prepared us for the real world, that as cruel as we were to each other, it was only a fraction as nasty as reviewers would be, or readers. That if we didn’t have a thick skin, we ought not to be writers.”
Sam nodded. She’d heard the same thing from her own workshop leaders. And unlike in the program, when people hit writers in the real world, in the papers or online, the writers were in the stocks. They couldn’t punch back.
Zahra had turned to look out the window at the sullen white sky, her face contemplative. “I had a theory,” she said, “that William was especially ruthless because he feared he had no real story. He was a copycat, you see. Each piece he brought in was different, and it was derivative of someone else: Hemingway, Faulkner, Carver, Joyce. William’s first novel, that fluke published while he was still in college,The Girl on the Mountain, even the critics said it was just like Carson McCullers. But here at Harrington he could not get away with this. Our instructors called him out. Said he had to find his own voice. I thought perhaps he had none, that he was zero at the core. But then.” She shrugged. “I guess he found his voice after all. And it was feminine. He has done quite well with it. Better than well. Good for him.”
She turned from the window, set her lid back on her quinoa bowl, and smiled at Sam, who had been sitting quietly, collating all this information. There was a question she needed to ask.
“If you don’t mind,” Sam said, “did you know William’s fiancée? Becky Bowman? She was in your cohort, too, right?”
Zahra closed her eyes briefly. “Yes. A tragedy.”
“What was she like?”
Zahra sighed. “If I tell you, you must promise to keep it confidential. Nobody must know what I am about to say.”
Sam cleared her throat. It was so dry in here. “I promise.”
“Some of us thought it strange.”
Sam leaned forward. “What was strange?”
“Their engagement, to start.” Zahra took a sip of her tea. “William was such a ladies’ man. The kids today would call him a player, or worse. He slept with anything that moved—as long as she was attractive.” She gestured to Sam, as if in proof. “His tastes have not changed. The exception was Becky. She was not, and forgive me for speaking ill of the dead, a pretty girl. She was very sweet...”
Sam thought of Cyndi hunched in her booth in Salem, her shy and hopeful smile.
“But so quiet. Long hair, drugstore glasses, dressed like a PE teacher. Very shy. She wrote about love and sat in the corners. We called her Mouse.”
Sam winced.
“I know. I am ashamed now.” Zahratsked her tongue at herself. “She seemed to blossom, initially, under William’s attention. But then she became even more quiet and withdrawn. By our second year, when they had been together a few months, it was as though she had been erased. We thought perhaps drugs? Alcohol? She was a ghost. And then, a month or so after their engagement...” She shook her head. “I’m sure he told you the story.”
“He mentioned it, yes,” Sam said. She twisted her own new ring. It was loose on her finger. Her throat ached.
“We wondered,” said Zahra, “if he had something to do with it.”
“With her—death?” Sam asked, voice cracking on the last word.
“Yes. Perhaps. It sounds ridiculous now, an outrageous accusation. But you must remember we were students of creative writing, with feverish imaginations we were flexing overtime, on a rural campus with not much else to do. And the boyfriend is always the first suspect, is henot? Excuse me, the fiancé. Even if the death is a suicide. The college investigated, of course, and the police. William came up clean. But for a few months we speculated, particularly the mystery and thriller writers among us. What stumped us, and put an end to our macabre parlor game, was that we could come up with no motive. The difficulty of staging a suicide aside, what would his motive have been?”
Sam shook her head. She couldn’t speak.
“It was a cruel pastime,” said Zahra. “Really, I am a little surprised to look back and see how catty I was at that age. We all were. It was not fair to William. As harsh as he had been with us in workshop, he was devastated by Becky’s death. He wrote that blockbuster novel for her, and I read he founded a support group in her name? That he still runs?”
“The Darlings,” Sam whispered, realizing that William had not held a Darlings meeting since she’d moved in. Like her workshop, they had disappeared.
“Yes. The Darlings. That tracks. That was what he called Becky. His Darling. We thought he was being ironic.” Zahra sighed. “However extreme our theories, I still wonder whether we persisted with them because we caught a whiff of truth. That although William did not cause Becky’s death outright, he contributed to it by bullying and belittling her. Denigrating her behind closed doors. None of us thought to ask, to make sure she was all right. Nowadays we would call him a narcissist. But then, we did not have that language. We knew only that he was a charismatic bully who had chosen, for his own reasons, an introverted woman. We thought their pairing very strange and left it at that.”
Zahra’s phone chimed, and she rose. “I must go to my next meeting. If I’ve upset you, you are welcome to stay here and collect your thoughts. You are welcome to stay anyway.”
Sam rose too. “No, I’m fine,” she said. “I’d better go. I have a long drive back.”
