Hal cracks and asks, “What do you want?”
“What makes you think I want anything?”
“Everybody wants something.”
“True enough. Why don’t you use your writer’s acumen and make a guess at what I’m after?”
Hal reaches into his drawer and my belly tightens. He withdraws a short wedge of cash. Maybe five hundred dollars. Silly money, for him. He nudges it over to my side of the desk. I don’t take it. Our eyes meet again, our gazes clashing with such violence that I can almost see sparks flying.
I can’t hurt him, and he knows it. I can only inconvenience him a bit. I already have. Some of the freshman girls weren’t looking at him quite as perkily after I finished my story. I’ve pulled a brick from his ivory tower. That’s all it takes to start the whole thing falling down around his ears. Words have power. Rumors and suspicions can destroy a man. His hand dangles in the drawer.
“Pick a number,” he says.
“No,” I say. “I’ve got a better idea.”
“Such as?”
“For you, as my trusted mentor, to introduce me to your agent and some of your Hollywood contacts.”
I’ve got the manuscript for my latest novel in my backpack. I pull it out and hand it to him. He looks at me with some surprise, but not much. He reads the first sentence, the first paragraph, the first page. Then he grins, and the grin grows wider until it’s a beaming smile, and then he starts to chuckle, and that becomes wild and resentful laughter.
He’s frightened. He might be the most terrified man I’ve ever met, because he’s got the most to lose.
I wonder what that’s like.
“Congratulations,” he tells me, beaming. “You’ve won!”
The next day, in front of the class, Hal presents me with the three signed books, the movie tickets, and a colorful certificate suitable for framing that he printed out which declares me the winner of the First Annual Chadwick Creative Arts Competition. My classmates are astonished, stunned into silence, and sit in their seats clapping sluggishly. Fruggy Fred’s jaw hangs practically to the desk. Jerry the Jock begins to cry. So does Woody Wright. So does Eloise. The rest fume and glower.
I bow and make a little speech about how proud and grateful I am to Hal and my fellow students, who inspired me to greatness.
Hal’s word is good. His agent calls that very afternoon and says he loves my novel. It shows great emotional resonance, he says. The publishing world moves rapid fire. Hollywood is even quicker. By the end of the weekend Hal’s agent — my agent — has secured a three-book deal and managed to swing a sizeable film option with a major studio. He calls me baby and talks money. This is going to be a hell of a ride, baby, you’re aiming for the top. He says a number and the number is so high that it’s barely conceivable to me. I hold the phone to my chest, listening for my heartbeat, but there’s nothing except the tinny voice of the agent going, Baby, baby.
I whisper, “Thank you, Pandora.”
I drive over to the Moore house.
I can hear her parents arguing upstairs. Beth’s name erupts from deep in her father’s chest. It’s a prayer, a hymn, and a curse. He could be dying on his deathbed, crying out one last time. I climb the porch steps, knock at the front door, and wait. No one answers. I knock and wait again. Her father rips open the door and stands there in all his anger and pain, his face mottled, lips twisted. His daughter’s been missing for more than two weeks.
“What the hell do you want?” he asks. His voice is loud but full of cracks, as if his very next word will shatter like defective crystal.
I say nothing. I hand him my story. My name’s not on it, but I feel like I’m giving over my life’s accomplishment. He’ll recognize the characters. He’s trained to be suspicious of everyone and everything, and his daughter is missing. He looks like he’s about to throw the pages back at me but something in my eyes stops him. He frowns and a black vein throbs in the center of his forehead.
He begins reading the first sentence of my tale. His wife eases up beside him and cocks her head at me. I think I might be crying. I can’t be sure until tears flick across the lenses of my glasses. I walk away while Beth’s old man shouts for me to stop. I stumble up the sidewalk blindly.
Six days later, on the front page, Beth’s father seems almost serene compared to how he looked that evening on his porch. His expression is one of controlled rage and semi-satisfaction. Hal is being led away by the sheriff, who grips Hal tightly on the shoulder. Beth’s cell-phone bill has been recovered. The cops cracked her text messages. She had a lot to say about Professor Chadwick and the way he made her feel. The things he whispered. The caresses in the night. She wants to know when he’ll marry her. She wants to know what they’ll name the baby.
I watch the news. He’s a little disheveled but it only adds to his looks, giving him a sense of wildness. He claims not to know where she is. He says that she visited him in the early hours of the morning more than a week ago and left a couple of hours later. He swears he didn’t hurt her.
They book him on a couple of trumped-up charges. Really, they have nothing, except possibly inappropriate behavior between a teacher and a student. Beth was eighteen. They can’t hold him for long. He’s got top-notch lawyers. The cops want to go through his yard with methane probes but Hal’s attorneys are way ahead of the curve and block the police at every turn. He’ll be out in a day or two. He’ll be done at the college, but what does Hal care? He can give back and pay forward in a lot of other ways, at a lot of other universities.
No one knows where Beth is.
I can afford a much better apartment now, but I don’t want to move. I wait here in the dim corner of the room, standing at the window, and stare into Mrs. Manfreddi’s dark backyard. She still curses her tomatoes, but maybe not as much lately. The work continues. The fence is almost finished, the ground leveled. The moonlight pools across the soil, silver on black, and it makes me want to run out there and dive and go swimming.
Hal’s career is still riding high, but not as high as it had been. The agent wants a new book from me as soon as possible.
I sweat over the manual typewriter, taking the time to discover my muse. She’s fickle. She’s shy and hides when I call to her. She embraces me when I least expect it. I provide her with whatever it is she needs.
Pandora waits with me in the darkness. I am a red ruin. The great literature of my life is the absence of the woman I love. I’ll never heal. I’ll never leave. She’ll haunt and hate me forever. She’ll warm me on the bitterly cold nights. I miss Beth.
In my stories I write about the truth of love: its pain, its dulcet desolation, and the void it often brings with it.
Copyright © 2012 by Tom Piccirilli
Lost Cause
by N. J. Cooper
Natasha Cooper began writing fiction after ten years as a publishing executive. Her first books were historical novels but she soon turned to crime fiction, where her best-known creation to date is barrister Trish Maguire. Several years ago the London author launched a new series starring forensic psychologist Karen Taylor, and for those books she has signed herself N.J. Cooper. The third Karen Taylor novel, Face of the Devil, was published in June. The previous title in the series, No Escape, appeared in the U.S. in 2009 as a Pocket Books paperback.
