Finally one afternoon, in William’s fourth printing, I couldn’t stand it anymore. I snuck a copy from the Hottest Summer Reads table, not like anyone would miss it, and took it to the storeroom with my lunch, even though we weren’t supposed to bring food in there. I didn’t want to be in the break room or around any of the other staff when I read it, in case I had a reaction. Nobody at my store knew my history with William, or Harrington, and I wanted to keep it that way.
So I got myself settled on a box of new middle-grade books with my ham sandwich and my milk and I opened the novel.You Never Said Goodbye. From the very first sentence I understood why it was so popular, a worldwide phenomenon. It was so, so good.
And it was so, so familiar.
The language might have been all William, never a regular word when a hundred-dollar one would do.
But the story was pure Becky Bowman.
It was exactly the story she’d told me that night on Porcupine Rock, on her birthday. And we’d talked about it some after that.
I couldn’t believe it. I got hot all over, then cold, then jumped up. I kicked my milk by mistake, and it spilled across the floor.
I raced to the nearest computer and frantically tapped out an email to Becky, using the last address I had for her.Did you readYou Never Said Goodbye, William’s new novel? You HAVE to. It’s your book!
I felt so jumpy and sick the rest of the day that I almost said I was ill and went home. But I’d never done that, so instead I just surreptitiously turned all of William’s books face down and checked my email every half hour.
There was nothing. Not that day or the next. I tried again, several times. I was surprised. Becky and I hadn’t been in touch since I’d run away from the program, but we’d been on good terms before that, so even if she’d been mad at me for leaving without, well, saying goodbye, she still would’ve written back. I thought.
On the night of the third day, in my sh*thole studio, I bit the bullet and looked up Becky’s profile on social media. What I saw there made me run to my bathroom and throw up my mac and cheese.
Becky was dead.
Her whole wall was plastered with condolences from our cohort.We miss you, Becky. Thinking of you, Becky.Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “One Art,” about all the things a person can lose in life. Where were all these people when she was alive, crying on the floor after they’d stomped her story?
The sad messages went back almost three years. She’d been dead that long, and I hadn’t known.
Maybe even worse than being dead, she’d been engaged. To William.
Her profile photo showed the two of them, William hugging her from behind as Becky extended her hand toward whoever was taking the photo. There was a big joehonking diamond on her ring finger. She was grinning in a way I’d never seen, and I saw she was pretty after all. I’d give anything to have a smile like that.
I clicked on that photo and saw all the congratulatory messages.Bravo, you two! Congrats! Happiest literary couple since Scotty and Zelda!The Shakespeare poem aboutLet me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment.
The date of that photo was three years before.
So Becky and William had gotten engaged the spring after I left the program, right after winter break, from what I could tell.
By that summer, she was dead.
Two and a half years later, about the amount of time it would take for a speedy writer to turn an outline into a manuscript and for a publisher to fast-track a manuscript into a book, William’s first international sensation came out.
Almost thirty years and three more monster bestselling novels later and here we are, and the code that cracked William’s laptop was not his book birthdays after all. It was a death date. I started with poor dead Becky’s, but it wasn’t hers. It was that last girl, Cyndi, the most recent one, the sweet little cuckoo-bird with all the cats.
The door opens at the top of the steps, and I fade back until I see it’s Sam Vetiver, not William, creeping down. She’s holding on to the railing to distribute her weight so her feet won’t creak on the wooden steps, even though the storm is howling. Extra cautious. Atta girl. At the bottom she glances in my direction, but maybe she’s just looking over her shoulder, scanning the dark basement. Then she goes into the study, where the only light in the house comes from the laptop’s open screen.
Chapter 37
End Matter
Sam had, of course, never seen William’s screensaver. It turned out to be a photo of himself, laughing at the lectern of some conference—or awards ceremony, or fundraiser? Whatever the occasion, it was a big one, because behind William there was another, much larger William on a Jumbotron. In his seersucker. Mic in one hand, one of his books in the other.
Which interested Sam much more than his screen backdrop. William’s novels.Werethey his? Whatever entity had summoned her to the basement somehow knew of Sam’s curiosity in this matter. This had much larger and more disturbing implications, but Sam didn’t have time to think about them right now. Whoever had opened the laptop probably didn’t mean to harm Sam, or it would have happened already. Even if it was the Rabbit. So Sam decided to think.
The important thing was that the passcode bar was gone, and Sam had full access. William’s desktop was, like his study, pathologically neat. There were two folders: one markedThe Clowderand the other labeledBooks. Sam frowned. What the hell was a clowder? She clicked on that one first.
From the widow’s walk Mindy could see the tiny winks of anniversary candles, flashlights, and phone screens in the dark, like little sparksof souls released. They processed along the base of Gallows Hill and moved out toward Proctor’s Ledge. What made Mindy shudder was the knowledge of how in Margaret’s day, it would have been actual torches, flooding the Salem streets like a river as they paraded her toward her death: the good townsfolk rejoicing or at least enjoying the spectacle of the burning of Mindy’s own blood, her great-ancestor. Margaret Scott, the witch.**
** note to self: William, you dolt, don’t forget to change name!
