So sure, some of it was luck. The rest was talent. A lot of it. Tragedy had followed my family around enough to make sure I had plenty of demons to pull from. And I was a damn good writer.
Hence the huge first advance.
And a bigger second.
And third.
And so on.
Because I didn’t choke after the success of my first novel, like a lot of authors did. I got better. Sure, that seemed cocky, but I didn’t really care.
Emily had my first book, Skeletons of Summer, Dead Doves, and my most recent, Blackened Roses, among her collection. My own favorites. The first, a story of a young girl murdered by an uncle after he assaulted her, and she navigates the underworld deftly enough to talk to his son and convince him to kill his father and then every other child molester he could find.
The second was about the apocalypse. My ode to The Stand in a way. But instead of the flu, it was a disease that brought out the true, violent natures of all the people on earth. Spoiler alert: everyone destroyed each other.
The third was about a woman who moves to a small town that she later finds out worships the Devil. Initially, she tries to do something about this. Sacrificing of virgins and committing vile acts was wrong. But then she got sucked in, sick of pretending she was a good person. So, she joined in on worshipping Satan.
Happy Ever After.
I got so much hate mail from that one, my agent had a bodyguard following me for two weeks because she was worried I might die before I could produce another book.
I didn’t die.
Much to her delight.
Though I still hadn’t produced the book.
Which was why I was here. In a dead woman’s house, looking at her worn copies of my books, surrounded by her things and my own doubts.
Instead of thinking about the book I was meant to write, I put my own back and snatched an old Stephen King, poured myself a glass of wine, and snuggled into a chair. It counted as research, right?
Chapter 3
“She screamed at first. The knife cut through her flesh easily, blood flowed happily. But she still screamed. Later, she lost the energy to scream. I missed it.”
I was contemplating trying to cut my own hair when my phone buzzed. Wasn’t that what people did in the midst of some kind of personal crisis, breakup, or trauma? They hacked off their hair with blunt scissors and it worked perfectly as a metaphor in movies but I wasn’t sure it would do the same thing out here in the real world.
If this little cottage, with its earth tones, boho rugs, dreamy tubs, and a murder scene was the real world. It was my real world. For now.
The contemplation of all of this took long enough to send the call to voicemail, as I had intended. Wasn’t that also what people did in the midst of crisis? Shut out anyone and everyone in their life that actually gave a shit about them?
Sure, the list of people that actually, genuinely, gave a shit about me—the real me—was pretty fucking short so it wasn’t going to take much effort to shut them out.
Then I’d just have all the people who loved me for who they thought I was. Who would love me until someone better came along, they out grew me, or they died. A cheery thought.
For now, I put down the idea of cutting my hair. I put down the phone.
I did not pick up the laptop.
Katy answered later in the day.
She’d probably been performing surgery, or writing some article to be put in a medical journal that thousands of students would cite for their Ivy League school essays.
“All I’ve had to eat today is wilted kale, dark chocolate, and I ran out of Argentinian wine before lunch,” I said by greeting.
“Sounds healthy.” She was not concerned about me. She was only half-listening, which was good for Katy. She never did just one thing at a time. Unless she had a scalpel in her hand. Then she was all there. But the rest of the time? Her brain was focusing on the number of germs on the surfaces around her, why they hadn’t invented a sleep replacement, or how she was going to get chief of surgery. Minor emotional breakdowns and writer’s block didn’t really make it on her radar.
“I can’t write anything,” I said, staring at the laptop and trying not to let the blank page stare at me. Which, of course, was impossible. It stared at me in my fucking dreams.
“And this is a surprise?” Katy asked, her voice not warm, concerned, but not impatient either. She was giving me more attention now. For someone who only read medical textbooks, articles on the latest pandemics awaiting civilization, and whatever medical journals cited new studies on productivity, she still gave me respect for my craft. She didn’t understand creativity. No logic to it. But she respected mine.
“Well, yes,” I said. “I’m away from all distractions, I’ve—”
“Run away from all your problems?” she finished for me.
I scowled out the window. The lake was calm. Sky was blue, which was a trick since it was chilly as all Heaven out there. I’d tried stepping out with my morning glass of wine, wearing underwear and nothing else, and quickly scampered back indoors. I did like the cold, normally. But my nerves were too exposed right now.
“Jesus, Katy,” I muttered. Again, normally such an unfeeling cold response would’ve been as welcome as a chilly morning, but my skin was paper thin right now.
“What did you expect me to say?” Katy asked, her attention waning back to halfway. And now, a little impatient. “Join in on your pity party or lie to you to make you feel better about yourself? No, that’s not my style and that’s not what you need.”
“What do I need then, Dr. Sanders?” I asked her with a bite to my voice.
Yes, my best—read, only—friend was a doctor. No, not just a doctor. But a fricking neurosurgeon. So, she repaired people’s brains on the daily and I fucked them up even more.
The thing about surgeons is while their wit might be as sharp as the scalpel they cut into flesh with, they are blunt in every other area of their life. Katy did not have time to care for people’s feelings. She couldn’t. As someone who dealt with death, illness, and trauma every day, she couldn’t care about the people she treated. Well, she did, she wasn’t a psychopath—I didn’t think—but she couldn’t invest in them. Their families. Because she was already trying to focus on cutting into their skull without damaging their brain, trying to diagnose shit, deal with hospital politics, insurance problems, all of this done on roughly three hours of sleep on average. There simply wasn’t room, even in a brain surgeon’s brain, for care.
Which was why we were friends.
We weren’t bullshit Sex and the City toxicity and blathering on about how being single was ruining our lives. We were focusing on important things. She was the much more serious, slightly more well-adjusted, version of myself. And she was smart enough to cut into someone’s brain and not kill them.
“You need to get over yourself,” Katy said into the phone.
“That’s not new information.” I sighed.
“Yes, but you have no distractions now. You went there to finish a book, right?”
Start a book, technically. I may have fudged to her and everyone else—most importantly, my agent—that it was halfway done.
“Right.”
“And it’s not coming to you,” she continued.