On the last page of Pen’s scanned manuscript ofThe Girl on the Mountain—written in loopy cursive on what looked like three-ring binder paper—was a note from William. Sam recognized his handwriting, tiny antlike all-caps script that was all but indecipherable unless you pressed your face right up next to the paper and squinted hard:
DEAR PEN.
I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU’RE GONE. I THOUGHT I’D SEE SIGNS OF YOU, THAT YOU MIGHT VISIT ME IN DREAMS, BUT YOU HAVE ABANDONED ME. WHY? ARE YOU STILL ANGRY WITH ME? IT’S SO CRUEL.
I WANTED TO TELL YOU THAT I’VE DECIDED TO PUBLISH YOUR BOOK. THE STORY WILL ALWAYS BE PURE YOU. BUT I’LL HAVE TO DRESS UP THE LANGUAGE. MY FINESSE WILL BE NECESSARY TO GET IT OVER THE PUBLISHING THRESHOLD.
I’M SURE IN TIME YOU’LL FORGIVE ME. PLEASE SEND ME A SIGN.
LOVE ALWAYS,
WILLIAM.
“She had a quarrel with her brother,” Sam said. “Yeah, I bet. I’m so sorry, Pen.”
She closed Pen’s file and was about to click out ofBookswhen she noticed two more folders. Sam sucked in a sharp breath. One was labeledWench, and in it, typed in bolded red on Amelie’s manuscript forThe Pirate Queen, was the worddiscard.
The final folder was labeledLove. On their original correspondence, which was the only writing Sam had shared with William, he’d writtenPending.
Sam closed all the folders. She was crying from rage and fear but only faintly aware of it. She opened William’s email. Nothing happened, justthe spinning wheel of death. Of course. The power was out. The computer was functioning on its own battery, and there was no Wi-Fi. Sam opened her phone to use it as a hot spot. It was at 11 percent. “Fuck,” Sam said. But it worked. She keyed in her phone network name and password, and William’s mailbox appeared on the screen, loading with agonizing slowness. His computer was also running on fumes, 9 percent battery. Sam addressed an email to Mireille and Patricia, cc’ing herself, and attached all theBooksfolders. “Come on, come on,” she said.
Her hands were shaking too hard to type, so she dictated a text to Drishti:COMING HOME SOONER THAN EXPECTED, LOL LOL LOL!The phone was unhappy about sending the message while it was also uploading William’s bulky files, but finally Sam heard the little swish. “Thank God,” she said.All the Lambent Souls,Medusa, andThe Space Between Worldshad uploaded; nowYou Never Said Goodbyewas at bat. A warning popped up on the laptop screen:Your battery is at 5%! Charge now or your work will be lost!
“Come on,” Sam said. “You can do it.” She could practically feel the others standing around her in the dark, a ghostly phalanx. Marta and Becky and Eleni and Kaelynn and Cyndi and Pen. A holy host of writers. The Darlings.
Your battery is at 2%! Place into charger immediately!
There was a sound from above like nothing Sam had ever heard before, a moan like the call of a mastodon, and then a CRASH! that shook the house. She looked up, terrified—it must have been a tree, coming through one of the glass walls?—then back at the screen.The Girl on the Mountainwas uploading, with painful slowness.
“Simone?”
“No,” Sam said. “Please God no.”
William’s footsteps pounded overhead. “Simone, where are you? Are you all right?”
He would go to their bedroom first, look for her there. Now was Sam’s chance. She could slip up the basement steps to the couch in the den, say she’d been too scared to sleep upstairs alone.
But her phone. Without the hot spot, the Wi-Fi would not work. Without the Wi-Fi, the books and proof of William’s murderous appropriation would not get out. And Sam didn’t dare hope the hot spot would work from upstairs. She couldn’t leave it to chance.
She heard William running back down. Descending.
“Simone,” he called. The basement door opened. “I know you’re down there. I know you’re in my study, Simone.”
“Please,” Sam said to the uploading file. “Please please please.”
Your power is at 1%!
Sam looked at her phone. It had died.
She turned to face the study door, terrified, trying to brace for whatever was coming at her. William had murdered all his darlings and taken their books. Now it was Sam’s turn.
The Rabbit
I hear William coming down the stairs like FEE FI FO FUM and realize I’ve played this all wrong. I wanted to give Sam Vetiver a chance to look at the manuscripts and connect the dots and then text her:I’m here, I’m on your side, pretend you don’t know and after the storm we’ll go to the police.Because I didn’t want her to scream and alert William. Because if I snuck up behind her without warning, she would. And because if she didn’t see the evidence first with her own eyes, she wouldn’t believe me. That was the mistake I made before. With all the other women. I provided no proof.
I did try to warn them. I tried so many times. As soon as I figured out what William had done to Becky, I went to the police. I tookYou Never Said Goodbyeto my local precinct and slapped it down on a detective’s desk and said,Hey, this guy put the woo on my friend and stole her book and killed her and wrote it himself. And they said,Do you have evidence?and I said,Maybe? I’ll try to get more, but meanwhile she told me the story and now here it is and she’s dead, you should at least look into it, and they said,Okay, we’ll check it out, and anyone who’s ever watched TV knew this was a kiss-off and sure enough, as I left, I heard one detective say,That one’s been bingeing too much CSI.
I went back to the Harrington group on social and asked if anyone else had known about Becky’s book, but of course nobody had, since they hadn’t been friends with her until after she was dead. She was distant from her family and had no sibs, which I later figured out was a qualifier for William’s women. And she’d been single until William put a ring on it. I had noidea where she might have written down any of her ideas, if she did. There was no proof. I’d hit a dead end, and now I knew why they called it that.
