Kill All Your Darlings

by David Bell

  Madeline shows concern as she listens. She’s nodding, encouraging me to keep talking. And it feels good, really good, to finally unburden myself of the secret I’ve been carrying around for the past eighteen months. Even if I am unburdening myself to the person most directly harmed by my actions.

  “It’s so hard to get a book published,” I say. “What are the chances for anyone? It was a whim. A Hail Mary play. But my agent loved the story. And within a few weeks, an editor loved it. And bought it. I kept telling myself to speak up, to tell them it wasn’t mine. But the train just kept gathering momentum and . . . I have to be honest . . . after everything that had gone wrong for me, after all my struggles with writing, to hear people saying such nice things felt really, really good.”

  I look at her, and she swallows some of her bourbon. The look on her face has shifted, from concern and understanding to something I can’t really read. Her eyes look flat and cold, pale marbles staring back at me.

  “I’m sorry, Madeline,” I say. “I really am.”

  She takes her time responding, and then says, “Don’t worry. I didn’t show up here without a plan for how you’ll make this all right.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CONNOR

  SPRING, TWO YEARS EARLIER

  I guzzled coffee in my kitchen. I was tired and had to get to class. And for a change, I wasn’t tired from drinking. Or because I’d been up all night, tossing and turning, missing Emily and Jake.

  It was because I was tired from reading Madeline’s thesis.

  She’d turned it in two days earlier, and I’d started reading it the day before after waking up in the grip of the mother of all hangovers. When I’d first started reading the book, my head thumping, my gorge rising and falling like waves on the sea, I worried I liked it so much because it was taking my mind off being sick from alcohol.

  But as the day went on, and as the story gripped me more and more, compelling me to turn the pages faster and faster, I knew—I knew—my reaction was a true one. Madeline had managed to write an outstanding novel—one about a young woman being murdered in a college town—the kind of thing most people never wrote in an entire lifetime of trying. Somehow she’d managed to do it at age twenty-two, during her senior year of college.

  I didn’t know whether to be jealous or proud.

  I went back and forth between both emotions. With a little shock thrown in. I’d never had an undergraduate student—or any student—write something so good. Had never imagined that an undergraduate at Commonwealth University in Kentucky would reach such heights at such a young age.

  I’d needed the coffee when I finished with showering and shaving. My hangover from the day before had faded. The familiar thumping in my head, the roiling in my guts, was over. I poured food into Grendel’s bowl and checked my phone. A missed call from one of my English Department colleagues, Lance Hoffman, which struck me as odd. Lance rarely called. He didn’t even like to text.

  “Why’s he calling?” I asked the empty kitchen.

  The dog gave me the side-eye, then bent to eat. Grendel moved in after Emily and Jake had been dead a year. My department chair, Preston White, rescued Grendel from the local shelter and then found out his youngest daughter was mildly allergic.

  “I think he’d be happy living with you,” Preston said when he showed up on my doorstep with a forty-pound bag of dog food, a leash, and a dish. “He needs a home. You need company.”

  I thought the allergy story was a dodge, a way to make the handing over of Grendel seem less like an act of charity and more like a necessity. But I didn’t argue. I needed to get outside myself. I needed to have something to care for. Someone to notice if I came home at night or not. But sometimes I saw the way Grendel looked at me. Was it possible for the dog to show pity? To judge me?

  At those times I would say, “Boy, you should have seen me in my prime. You should have seen me before the moon and the stars crash-landed on my head.”

  I finished the coffee, felt the tingling buzz as the caffeine perked me up. I unplugged the toaster and the coffeemaker, made sure Grendel had plenty of water. I’d see Lance on campus and could talk to him then. If I waited to leave, I’d miss out on prime parking. Whatever Lance wanted could wait.

  “You keep an eye on the place,” I said. “I’m going to be better from now on. The other night was a low point.”

  Grendel kept on eating. But he flapped his tail.

  I took it as affirmation of the decision to turn my life around.

  The front bell rang. Grendel barked three times in a row, food falling out of his mouth and onto the linoleum. I almost ignored the ringing and went out the back. I’d be late for class, and showing up late was no way to turn the page to the next chapter in my life. And for a change, I was eager to get to campus. I wanted to talk to Madeline, wanted to talk to her about the thesis. Hell, I wanted to pick her brain, writer to writer, and find out how the hell she had tapped into whatever current of inspiration she’d found and churned out that book.

  Where had it come from?

  But the ringing came again. Insistent. And nobody ever rang the bell.

  “Shit,” I said.

  Grendel barked again but stayed at the food bowl, eating away.

  I dashed to the front of the house. “All right, all right.”

  I expected someone selling something. Or the meter reader.

  When I opened the door and saw a woman in a suit with a uniformed cop by her side, my mind flashed back to a place it didn’t want to go.

  Three years earlier, on that very stoop. Two cops and a social worker, knocking on the door. I knew. As soon as I saw them, I knew something was horribly wrong. And everything flashed before my eyes—our wedding day, Jake’s birth, moving into the house in Gatewood just a ten-minute walk from campus.

  And that spring morning, when a cop was there again, I knew. I tried to convince myself it was something simple. A misunderstanding. A parking ticket.

  But it wasn’t right.

  None of it was right.

  “Connor Nye?” the woman in the suit said.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked.

  There was an advantage to not being that close to anybody. Except Grendel. The cop couldn’t come to the door and tell me anyone else near and dear to me had died. There were no more bombshells to drop. No more family members to pick off. I tried to find comfort in that, but the thought only depressed me, dampened the good feelings I’d woken up with.

  The woman asked me if I knew a student by the name of Madeline O’Brien. And when I said yes, of course, I could tell she already knew the answer. And then she insisted on the two of them coming inside the house and talking to me about her.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Grendel came out and sniffed both of the cops’ shoes. The detective patted him on the head before she sat down and started asking questions.

  “When did you last see Madeline?” The woman in the suit told me her name was Alicia Bowman, a detective with the Gatewood police. She wore her strawberry blond hair pulled back off her face, and her eyes were a pale blue, a far cry from the grizzled, world-weary detectives I saw on TV.

  Why would she ask unless something was really wrong?

  Why would she need to ask a student’s professor when he had last seen her?

  “What is it?” I asked. The caffeine and the fear shot the words out of my mouth faster than I could think them. “Is she hurt? She’s in my advanced fiction-writing class. Can you tell me what’s going on?”

  Bowman waited a beat. “You haven’t heard?”

  “Heard what?”

  I looked around, seeking help. I looked at the uniformed cop, who sat impassively in the chair. I glanced at Grendel, who just beat his tail up and down.

  Bowman said, her voice as flat as the coffee table, “Madeline O’Brien is currently missing. She didn�
�t go to any of her classes yesterday. She didn’t go to her shift at the grocery store last night, which I understand is how she’s paying for school. Her mother can’t get ahold of her. No word to her friends. We’re trying to determine if anyone knows her whereabouts.”

  The room spun. The caffeine, the adrenaline. The news. Was that why Lance was calling?

  “Is it possible she just went away?” I asked. “Young people, college students, they can take off on a whim. I had a student once who stopped coming to class, and a year later he came back, and when I asked him where he’d been, he said surfing in California. Living in a tent.”

  “That does happen,” Bowman said. “It’s possible Madeline left on a whim. She had a rather nomadic life growing up. But given her dedication to her studies and the abruptness of her departure, we’re treating it as a disappearance.”

  “Damn,” I said. “I just saw her. . . .”

  “When?” Bowman asked.

  “Wednesday night. At Dubliners. The whole class went.”

  “Undergraduates?” Bowman asked.

  “It’s a class of seniors. They all had ID. Plenty of professors take their students out during the semester. I’m not the only one.”

  “What time did you leave Dubliners?”

  “Nine thirty. Maybe ten.”

  “And was Madeline still there?”

  “Well . . .”

  “Well, what, sir?”

  I saw where it was going.

  “I left. And then she left right after me. She was worried because I’d had too much to drink. She didn’t want me to drive.”

  “Did you?”

  “I walked. I’d walked to campus that morning because I knew I’d be drinking later.” I pointed to her right, in the direction of downtown and campus. “It’s not far,” I said, as though the cops wouldn’t know.

  “So did Madeline O’Brien walk you back here to your house?” Bowman asked.

  I froze. The words that once tumbled so freely out of my mouth backed up like cars jammed on a highway.

  I could only rip the Band-Aid of my drunkenness off and let the cops see the scab underneath.

  I knew Madeline had walked with me. I remembered that clearly. We crossed the square together. I could remember the fountain, still shut down and full of dead rustling leaves although spring had just arrived. We went two blocks up College Street, the night cool, my jacket pulled tight around me. My hands stuffed deep into my pockets because I had forgotten to bring gloves.

  We turned west on Eighth Street.

  I didn’t know if we talked. We must have. I couldn’t imagine we walked side by side, even on a cool night, without talking at all. I liked talking to Madeline. She acted more mature, more worldly, than any other student I knew.

  “So you don’t know what you might have talked about?” Bowman asked.

  “I have no idea. Maybe her thesis, since she just turned it in. Maybe how cold it was.”

  “This was just two nights ago, and you don’t remember what you talked about?” Bowman asked.

  “I was drunk,” I said.

  Two more blocks, and I saw my house. I’d left the porch lights on. I knew that. And through the alcoholic haze, I saw them burning. A beacon in the night.

  When Emily and Jacob were alive and I’d turn the corner either in my car or on foot, my heart lifted at the sight of those lights. They meant warmth. Safety.

  Home.

  The basketball hoop in the yard, Jake doing his homework at the kitchen table. Emily on the computer in the other room, working on a management consulting project for a local company.

  When I saw the lights with Madeline, I felt pretty certain I turned to her and told her that was my house. And that she didn’t have to keep walking with me, I could find my way from there.

  And we said good night.

  I think.

  “You think?” Bowman asked. “You need to be sure, Dr. Nye. A young woman is missing. Did you say good-bye on the street or not?”

  I couldn’t lie. Not to the cops.

  And if Madeline was really missing—and in danger—then they needed to know everything they could possibly learn about what she’d been doing.

  I had seen those porch lights. I pointed them out to her. I told her she could go on, that I’d be just fine the rest of the way.

  I don’t know what Madeline said. I don’t remember anything else I said.

  Had she come all the way to the door? Inside the door?

  Had she been in the house with me?

  “I don’t know, Detective,” I said. “I just don’t remember. I can’t even be sure about the part I just told you that seems kind of clear.”

  Bowman tapped her fingers, which were long and elegant, against her thigh.

  “That’s all there is, Dr. Nye?” she asked.

  “That’s all. I hope it helps.”

  “Oh, it helps,” Bowman said. “As far as we can tell, that makes you the last person to see Madeline O’Brien alive before she disappeared.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  CONNOR

  PRESENT

  Madeline finishes her bourbon.

  She crosses the kitchen, brushing right against me, and I move out of the way so she can reach the bottle of Rowan’s and pour a refill. She takes her time, her movements slow and deliberate. The bottle clinks against the rim of the glass. The liquid chugs. She’s drawing out the moment, making me wait as long as possible before she speaks.

  She finally turns around and leans back against the counter with the half-filled glass in her hand. I’ve scooted over to the kitchen table and stand next to it. Waiting.

  “I get it,” she says. “I do. Grief can drive people crazy. Especially when it’s sudden and unexplained. My dad died when I was three. I barely remember him, but I do remember when he died. I just walked around the house, crying and crying. Saying his name. ‘Daddy, Daddy.’ I’m twenty-four now, and isn’t it weird I can remember the feeling of loss more than I remember the man?”

  “It’s sad,” I say. “I’m sorry. Maybe that’s why the emotions are so real in the book. Your book. When your character Lilly remembers her family and childhood, the way her father died, I think the reader feels so much empathy for her. It came from a real place.”

  “And from you,” she says. “That’s why everyone is going to love the book. They’ll hear your sad story about your wife and fifteen-year-old son dying and associate it with the characters. That’s why it’s smart you’ve talked about your tragedy on social media and in interviews online. People love to know the story behind the story. You should tell everyone what you told me—about sneaking into the cemetery at night. That’s a great detail.”

  “I still do that sometimes, but I didn’t want to talk about those things. I didn’t want to use my loss to make money.”

  “But you did it anyway.”

  “I know it’s crass, but I want the book to sell.”

  “Well, let’s hope it does.” Madeline’s glass clinks against the counter when she puts it down. “I can’t really resurface right now. It would be very, very complicated if I did. Dangerous, I would say. I think it’s a risk for me to be in this town.”

  “Madeline, if you think someone wants to hurt you, then you should go to the police. Tell them the truth. Give them names. They can protect you.”

  She shakes her head, arms crossed. “You’re so silly, aren’t you? The successful middle-aged white man who naturally thinks if you go to the police, they’ll help you with all your problems. Of course they’ll believe you. Of course they’ll take your side. Why wouldn’t the good old police help the good old man? Right? Isn’t that what always happens? A man can get away with whatever he wants. I’ve seen the police up close before. When I was a kid. They don’t help.”

  “Okay,” I say. “Then tell me what I can d
o.”

  “It’s easy, really. A simple transaction. You give me all the money from the book, and I won’t tell everyone you plagiarized it. Cash, of course. No checks. I know you had to give fifteen percent to your agent. And there are taxes and shit. Just give me the rest, since I actually wrote the book, and we’re even. When the time comes, I’ll write another book. And so can you. No one will know the real truth about this one.”

  I ignore the part about me writing another book. Whether she meant it as a dig or as a statement of fact, I can’t bear to dwell on it. I just don’t know if I can ever write anything else. If the past five years have taught me anything, it’s that I may lack what it takes to finish a project I start.

  As for the money . . .

  “I can’t do that, Madeline,” I say. “This novel is my New York debut, and I didn’t get paid that much for it. People always think authors make a ton of money, but I really didn’t get a big advance.”

  “I grew up without money,” she says. “I mean . . . nothing. So any amount will sound like a lot to me. Three or four digits is a windfall.”

  “I didn’t grow up with money either.”

  “You grew up with more than I did,” she says. “If your parents kept the lights on, you had more than me.”

  “The money is spent,” I say. “Yes, I got an okay amount, more than I ever thought I’d get for a book, but I also owed a lot of people. I had a student loan from graduate school. When I got my PhD, I was married, and Jake was a kid. We had to borrow so we could eat. And since Emily died, I’d let things go on the house. She always kept an eye on those things. I neglected everything. The roof had a leak. The car was dying. Like an idiot, we didn’t have life insurance, which really would have helped. Look.” I point to the other room. “Just last year, Grendel had a tumor on his kidney. He needed surgery. Three thousand bucks. I had to do it. I couldn’t let him go. I couldn’t be alone. The money . . . it’s pretty much spent.”