“Why did you buy it?”
“I needed somewhere to live. It showed up on my Google search.” I shrugged my shoulders as I was keying in my pin.
“You’re not afraid?” she asked.
I tucked my credit card away. “Of the fact that the most expensive bottle of wine you have in store is less than twenty dollars and was made in Argentina?” I joked. “Deathly.”
Okay, it wasn’t that much of a joke because that really did scare me. I was a vino snob. Everything else, I wasn’t much worried about labels. Heck I loved a designer pair of shoes as much as the next hot-blooded Manhattanite. But I was also happy to wear a ten-dollar pair too.
Wine. Wine was my weakness. I loved a thick, full-bodied and comforting red that made everything warm around the edges and complemented a bloody steak.
I was not going to be getting an eighty-dollar steak or a three-hundred-dollar bottle of red here and I realized what an asshole I was acting about it. I couldn’t stop myself. If I was honest, I was kind of an asshole. Not a “sugar and spice and everything nice” kind of gal. I was prickly. Sour. Cold. It was part and parcel of being an author that wrote about death, decomposition, and everything evil.
Plus, in New York, I carried it off well enough because everyone was an asshole there.
Here, in this tiny town, in this tiny store, everyone was kind, and as it happened, concerned. And, judging by the confused look on the cashier’s face, without a sense of humor for great sarcasm.
“Afraid of what?” I asked her, sighing.
She leaned forward, her eyes darting sideways as if she might’ve missed someone in the store that had no place to hide. “Of ghosts,” she whispered, as if the spirits were hard of hearing.
I did my best to smile at her, though I feared it was tight and a little arrogant. “No, I’m not scared of ghosts. Ghosts are my homies.”
She stared at me blankly, obviously not getting my humor and obviously still not recognizing me. Which wasn’t that inconceivable. I was pretty well-known, as authors went. Well-known enough to get recognized at airports, supermarkets, drugstores. Pretty much all the places where people did not want to be approached by strangers.
Luckily, my “brand” relied on me being standoffish, rude, and the littlest bit evil, so I didn’t smile sweetly for the selfies or engage in small talk.
But this girl clearly didn’t know who I was—I was choosing to ignore the vanity inside of me, causing me the slightest bit of rage toward her and self-hatred toward myself that this teenage girl in the middle of nowhere didn’t know me.
That was my problem.
I hated being known but I was terrified of being anonymous.
“You know, it’s not scientifically accurate to say that lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place,” I said, not disguising the annoyance in my tone. “A lightning strike is a discharge of energy that is so strong it breaks through ionized air. This creates a bolt that travels from a cloud down to the ground. This is a quick process. Thirty milliseconds or less. And lightning reverberates. So, it will happen again in quick succession. So, you see, when your naked eyes see one lightning strike, it’s really several that we’re not sharp enough to see. Beyond that, lightning can strike the same place in a different storm, days or centuries later. Therefore the phrase itself is little more than redundant. But it works well in social situations.”
The girl was looking more than a little slack-jawed, with boredom or confusion, I wasn’t sure. It didn’t really matter to me.
“Emily Andrews was murdered,” I said.
That brought her back, the way I said it. Harsh. Like a slap. She certainly flinched like I’d struck her.
“Her killer wasn’t caught. Not many leads.” Kind of a lie, since I had my own suspicions, but it didn’t matter right this moment. “Unfortunate and tragic as it is, he or she is not likely to come back to the scene of the crime on the off-chance a strange woman is living in the same house. So, I’m likely safer than I would’ve been anywhere else there hasn’t been a murder.”
She blinked rapidly at me, not catching enough of the conversation to shoot me a bitchy glare I was sure she was capable of.
I took my opportunity to take my bags and leave, hoping my reputation stayed with her, and would hopefully spread around town. My gaze touched the bar as I was getting into the car. I had a moment where I seriously considered walking back in, and taking the bartender up on what I guessed was probably the best offer I was going to get in this town.
It took me the entire drive home to decide whether I made a mistake or held on to my dignity and worst case—you know, if he was indeed the person that murdered Emily—kept my organs inside my body.
When I got back inside the cute cabin was when I realized I did indeed make a mistake taking the moral high road.
Because the only thing that waited for me here was cheap wine and a laptop that stared harder than even the most sultry of bartenders.
By the time I got back to the cottage—I couldn’t quite call it home in my own head yet, even though it somehow already did—it was getting dark and my stomach was growling.
The kale and tuna salad I had for dinner was sad, barely edible. I had no cooking skills that didn’t include calling a restaurant to make reservations. And, of late, I hadn’t been doing that; I would text my assistant and get her to make the reservations.
Ugh. It was a good thing I got out of New York when I did.
I was becoming one of the assholes who treated her assistant like their own personal butler and thought far too much of who I was. My social media following, my NYT bestseller status, and my bank account seemed to give me the permission to act like an entitled bitch.
I would learn to cook.
At some point.
For now, there was cheap wine and a brand-new environment.
Not just that, this environment was full of artifacts and memories of a dead woman. I loved snooping through people’s things. I loved the feeling of wrongness that came with invading their privacy, looking for dark and shameful secrets, maybe to make me feel better about all of my dark and shameful secrets.
Whatever it was, this was my dream situation. I got to look as much as I wanted without fear of getting killed and this woman was the victim of a grisly murder that was currently unsolved.
I examined her bookshelves.
People said a lot about themselves with what books they owned. And sure, many people knew that. Which was why a lot of wannabe literary types shoved first editions of the classics artfully on their shelves in perfect condition. But the thing was, books weren’t meant to be in perfect condition. They were meant to be worn. Marked by your dirty fingers hastily turning the page. Maybe a little water-stained from when you dropped it in the bath and had to rescue it. Dog-eared pages—I knew as an author I shouldn’t condone this, but I didn’t believe in bookmarks. I believed in damaging your books your own way. The author had already damaged them by writing them. Because that’s what books were, a compilation of someone’s trauma. They do not want you to treat their creation with care, reverence. They want you to devour it with a ravenous, violent hunger, without thoughts of what it will look like on the shelf, only the marks it will leave on your soul.
So, I always judged the people with the perfect collection of “great American novels” or the British classics, the books that carved themselves out of centuries. I disdained those people, sickened by this whole slew of elites who considered themselves experts on literature merely because they followed the flock.