by Rachel Kane
“No, no, I’m not, I’m— What is it?”
“I already texted Micah, but… Oh, god, you’ll just have to look for yourself.”
I turned and looked at my desk. The laptop was still put away, the stack of papers in its place. Naked, and with a sense of vulnerability that could not be ignored, I walked over and pulled the computer off a shelf, and plugged it back in.
“Oh no,” I said, my heart sinking.
20
Alex
I stared at myself in the bathroom mirror.
You old dog. Look at you. What do you think you’re doing?
I grinned at my reflection. I couldn’t help it. I was happy.
Yeah, because you just fucked a guy a decade younger than you.
It wasn’t just that, and I wasn’t going to let my mind get me down. I mean, yes, fucking Cam was incredible. He was so damn sensitive, you could spend all day just looking at his face, looking at those little expressions he made, little moves of his eyebrows and lips as he went from thought to thought.
That was closer to the truth. It was Cam himself who made me happy. Complex, strange, vulnerable, beautiful… I’d never met anyone like him.
I ran some hot water in the sink, and did a quick washing-up.
Too bad the phone had interrupted us. But maybe that was a good thing. God only knows what I was about to say to him.
Let’s move in together, something stupid like that, knowing me. Always moving too fast, always jumping right over the personal boundaries.
No, no, it was too soon for that. I should just slow down. Enjoy his company. There was no rush, especially now that I was back to being shiftless and unemployed.
We could be together without worrying about the future, or what label we put on things.
So I promised myself that whatever I said when I walked out of this bathroom, it wasn’t going to be anything about us. No pushing it, no speeding things up. Maybe something simple, like deciding what to eat. Or looking up movie listings. I hadn’t been to a movie in ages.
That was an exciting idea. Isn’t that ridiculous? The traditional order of things was dinner, movie, then sex. But here we’d started with the sex, and I was getting all excited about sitting with Cam in a dark theater, eating popcorn, enjoying a show.
I walked out of the bathroom, ready to put the suggestion to Cam, when I saw him.
He was standing over his computer, still naked, his cock still hanging out in the open. I would have made a comment, would’ve made a lewd suggestion, except for the look on his face.
A look of horror…and resignation.
“What is it?” I asked, rushing over to him.
But of course I knew. Deep down, I already knew.
I will never CEASE and I will never DESIST, said the words on the screen.
“Oh shit,” I said.
My phone was buzzing. I’d put it on silent earlier. Now I grabbed it.
Texts from Micah.
Call me.
Alex r u there?
Need to talk.
I ignored it.
“What’s she talking about?” Cam said. “Alex, what does she mean?”
I groaned. “Micah was planning on sending her a cease and desist letter. Officially telling her to back off. One last warning before we get the court involved. I didn’t realize he was sending it today. He must have had a courier take it over.”
These THREATS mean nothing when the TRUTH is at stake, said the next Secret Reader post.
“Can’t we just go back to her house and take her computer away?” Cam asked. In any other circumstance I might have thought he was joking, making light of the situation. But I could hear in his voice that he was dead serious.
I pulled on my clothes as we watched the screen, and handed Cam his clothes as well.
They thought they could stop me. They hired LAWYERS and THUGS. But I will NOT be silenced, Cameron Car-LIAR. YOUR SINS WILL FIND YOU OUT.
“It’s just talk,” I said to Cam. “She’s just mad. She’s spinning her wheels. Trust me. This is almost over. She has nothing left but empty threats.”
Cam glanced back at the apartment door. “How do you know? She came to my house, Alex. She clearly knows something about me. Why won’t she just come out with it?”
I shook my head. “What’s there to know? She already released the most damning thing about you.”
Cam hesitated…and in that hesitation I felt a flicker of fear.
Is there something you’re not telling me?
But that was ridiculous. If I knew anything about Cam, it’s that I could trust him. He was one of the few people in the world I could trust. I felt that deep in my heart. I’d bared my deepest secret to him, and he had accepted it without judgment.
Don’t be suspicious. Don’t let this crazy woman’s words turn you away from Cam. That’s all part of her plan.
I put my arms around him, as much to reassure myself as him. “Trust me,” I said. “I’ve seen this a million times. She’s getting close to burn-out. The plagiarism charge didn’t go anywhere. She’ll say pretty much anything now…but nobody is going to care. Just you wait. When Micah gets a court order to back up the cease and desist letter, she’s going to stop. She’ll claim she was hacked, claim it was a side-effect of too much Ambien…whatever. She’s going to stop though.”
He leaned against me, and stared down at the screen. His body felt afraid. Stiff, taut, like he might bolt and run at any moment. “I’m not an angel, Alex. I haven’t lived some blameless, spotless life.”
“None of us have,” I said to him.
“What if she… I mean, I don’t know what she might have dug up, but what if…”
I squeezed him harder. “She won’t. This is a bluff.”
I knew Cam had his secrets. I would call him mysterious, except it wasn’t really like that. If anything, it was the opposite. He’d had a great tragedy in his past, and he’d gotten on with his life, and didn’t like to talk about his earlier years. Who cared? I didn’t need every detail of his biography to feel this way about him.
Unless you’re wrong, and he’s hiding something else.
You know, there’s a point where automatic suspicion just becomes ridiculous. Just because David Fucking Black had kept serious secrets from me, didn’t mean everybody else in the world was. And honestly, wasn’t it fucked up that I would even have that kind of thought about Cam, who was practically shivering at this onslaught?
Some boyfriend I’m turning out to be. I can’t go five minutes without assuming my partner is involved in something bad.
Boyfriend? Partner?
I looked over at Cam. Was that what I was thinking about him? That we were…together?
Well, yes, you might recall the sex from a few minutes ago.
How strange. A boyfriend. Who would have ever thought?
I convinced him to go out. He really didn’t want to, but I think he needed to. Staying home and watching Secret Reader spin out more empty threats wasn’t going to help anybody.
To tell the truth, I thought getting out would be good for me, too. I had the strongest urge to call Micah and strategize what to do next.
Which I couldn’t do.
Because I was off the case.
That was going to take some getting used to…and, I thought, it would take some time to mend the rift between Micah and me. He really didn’t expect me to fall for Cam. Hell, I hadn’t expected it either.
“What about A Mind To Murder?” I asked, flipping through movie listings on my phone. “The review calls it a taut psychological thriller.”
“Gah, no,” said Cam, staring at the poster at the theater.
“But you like mysteries!”
“Thrillers aren’t mysteries!”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Of course they are.”
“Yeah, I probably don’t know anything about the subject, what with my livelihood involving writing mysteries,” he laughed. “Thrillers are about something must be done. Mysteries are about some
thing must be found out. Thrillers draw their suspense from the dramatic irony of—”
“Okay, okay, they’re different!” I said. “Please god, no literary lectures. What about Fool To Love You? It’s a ‘crowd-pleasing romantic comedy.’”
Cam pointed to one of the other posters. “Eli said The Horrors of Hacksaw House was pretty good. Although his taste is questionable.”
“Power Team IV: The Empowering, with all the superheroes?”
That’s how we ended up watching Boss Cat, a movie about a company whose CEO was kidnapped, and a scroungy alley cat had to take over and save the business. I think it was supposed to be a kids’ movie, but the theater was full of adults, laughing sarcastically at the cat.
“Is this funny?” I whispered to Cam.
“I don’t know…when the cat fell into the toilet, it was kind of funny?”
It didn’t matter, I guess. I wasn’t here for the movie, I was here to sit next to Cam in the dark and eat popcorn and be out of the house. Still, one could have hoped for a movie that would keep your attention, and not let your thoughts wander. I kept looking over at Cam, wondering if he was okay. I thought he would be. Eventually. Once Secret Reader wound down…but how long would that take?
After the movie (the cat ends up discovering the CEO has been held in the custodian’s closet all this time, and has to decide whether to free him or keep his job), we walked out into the darkness.
“That was certainly a movie,” I said weakly. “Of some kind.”
“Yes, it was. Ninety minutes of pictures on a screen,” said Cam. “It met all the criteria.”
I looked forward to criticizing the movie with him tonight. Over a late dinner. Somewhere seedy. I felt like going to a truck stop or something. I needed a greasy burger and fries.
“Cameron Carlyle!” said a voice behind us. “Cameron Car-liar!”
We both froze.
“We know all about you, liar!”
We turned. A woman was behind us, rushing up.
“I knew it, as soon as I saw you, I knew who you were!” she said.
“Do I know you?” Cam asked.
“No, but I know you. Trying to destroy that woman’s life! Sending your guards after her!”
I stepped between the woman and Cam. “Ma’am, you need to settle down.”
“Don’t you tell me to settle down! I read three of his mysteries! I have a right to speak!”
“Which one did you like best?” Cam asked.
I glared at him. Now was not the time for jokes. You have to handle the public very carefully. This happened to my clients all the time. It’s bad enough that people feel free to take pictures of their favorite stars, run up to them and ask them questions, beg for autographs and selfies…but when someone is having their reputation attacked, then random people on the street can smell the blood, and come in for the kill.
“Ma’am, step away now. Come on, Cam, let’s get to the car.”
“Is this one of your goons? Are you going to make him attack me, the way you attacked Secret Reader?”
Something…changed. It happened fast, like a wildfire catching from a tiny spark. I’d never seen Cam this angry. “What are you talking about?” he yelled. “Is everybody in this fucking town crazy?”
“Cam, don’t engage. Let’s go.”
“No, I’m not going anywhere. This is ridiculous. Who the hell do you think you are, lady? You don’t know me, none of you people do, yet you jump right into a fight you know nothing about—”
“How dare you curse at me!” she shouted, and now people were watching, I realized. The security guard was beginning to notice, and walk over. “You’re not going to destroy my career the way you did Wilkie Collins’!”
Cam shook his head. “What the fuck?”
“Secret Reader showed it all, the way you copied from his book! He hasn’t written a book since then! You stole his money, Cameron Car-Liar, and you need to confess and give it back!”
The security guard had reached us. “Is there a problem here?”
“Yes there’s a fucking problem here, Wilkie Collins has been dead for nearly a hundred and thirty fucking years!” Cam was practically frothing at the mouth, and I had to drag him away from the woman.
“I’ve got it handled,” I told the guard.
“You people need to leave the property,” the guard said.
“Don’t you dare lie to me! And don’t you touch me!” she yelled at the guard, pulling away from him. “I know my rights!”
“Take me home,” Cam said.
I said, “Look, let’s go get some food, we’ll calm down—”
“Please, Alex. Take me home.”
21
Cam
“After they died, I had a pretty severe depression. Well, I guess that’s normal, that’s grief, isn’t it?”
I watched myself on the screen. The video was playing in a small window, scratchy sound coming from the speakers. This was from a conference a few years ago, and the video clip had been posted by Secret Reader while we’d been gone.
“How has that influenced your writing?” asked the interviewer. “You’re known for cheerful, upbeat mysteries, but many readers have sensed a note of sadness to them. Miss Katie Clemmons seems like a lonely character, even with her friend Roger around.”
“You don’t need to watch that,” said Alex. He’d been somber since we’d left the theater. At least one of us was calm. I’d been a fucking nut in the car, yelling, pounding my fists against the door.
Still, once I’d calmed down, I realized…Alex had been protecting me again. He’d gotten right in between me and the crazy lady. That was an interesting feeling, wasn’t it, being protected like that? It was something you could almost get used to.
Except right now I wasn’t feeling all warm and fuzzy. We’d gotten home and I’d poured myself a stiff drink. I didn’t want to talk, and I think that made Alex a little uncomfortable. He felt like he needed to do something, but all I wanted right now was to be left alone.
Then I’d seen the little red dot, the notification on my screen that something new had been posted.
“As a kid, you put trauma into whatever context you already have, I think,” said the Cameron Carlyle of a few years ago. “I knew about detectives, I knew about mysteries. And I thought—this is really kind of sad—but I thought of my parents’ death as a case, something I could solve. Like, if I figured it out…”
“They would come back?” asked the interviewer.
I sipped my drink and watched myself nod on the screen.
“I’ve always thought it was that experience…not so much the fire, but my mindset afterward, that led me to writing mysteries. Hoping that if I just found enough clues, things would make sense.”
The video screen darkened.
Alex came and sat next to me, his own drink in hand. “Look, I just want to say, I really think this will be over soon. Maybe we need to get away for a while. Just skip town. Micah can handle all the strategy, and by the time we get back, you’ll be anonymous again.”
I clicked on the next video.
Another conference. Another interview.
“Some writers will tell us they were afraid to let their families know what they were writing,” said this new interviewer. “What about you?”
“Oh, my mom has always been my biggest fan,” I watched myself say. Big smile on my face. “She loves my books, except she’s always asking when Katie and Roger are going to get together.”
Laughter from the audience.
The video screen darkened.
A single word on the next post: LIAR.
I finished my drink and set the glass next to the keyboard. “Well,” I said.
Alex was staring at me. “Where did she find all this?”
“Oh, I don’t know, I did a lot of conferences back then. Trying to build up my name, find a readership, you know?”
“So there could be more out there.”
I shrugged. I felt so…numb. Li
ke none of this mattered at all. What a nice feeling, to have your lies paraded in front of thousands of people, and yet to feel nothing at all about it.
Maybe another drink, just to keep the numbness going.
What else had I said? Back then, nobody knew who I was. I didn’t keep close tabs on the stories I was telling, I just said whatever I thought the audience would like to hear.
There, that was a perfectly innocent explanation.
“I asked—”
“I know,” I said to Alex, pouring myself another drink. “I heard you. There could be more. Plenty more.”
He had his phone out, and was tapping a message. “I’m letting Micah know. He’s got to shut this down. He can talk to her internet service provider—”
“Alex, don’t.”
He looked up. “What?”
“Just…don’t. You can’t stop her. Don’t you realize that? She could drive over here right now and spray the word liar all over my building, and there would be nothing we could do.”
“You’re wrong. There’s plenty we can do. She’s making a mountain out of a molehill, but the public loves a show, they love the drama.”
“You saw the video. I’m a liar, after all.”
He shook his head. “Nonsense. You just got your story mixed up. Once we shut her down, everyone will forget about this.”
There could be so much more. I couldn’t say that, though. I couldn’t tell him. Not right now, not at the very beginning of what was growing between us. Tell him the truth?
Sinking onto the couch with my scotch, I sighed. The one thing—the only thing—that made this bearable, was knowing that Secret Reader didn’t know the real truth about me, the things I’d hidden away from everyone. All this interview nonsense, it was damaging, yes. And god, it hurt to watch, and to know that people like that theater lady were out there, just seething with hate for me. Two weeks ago they would’ve loved me.
But at least they didn’t know the truth.
Not the real story.
And Alex couldn’t either.
And if that made me a liar, Cameron Car-Liar…well, so be it. I glanced over at the computer.
