Kill All Your Darlings

by David Bell

  I know Preston is right.

  I know I should go to the police and explain what I wanted from Zach.

  I know I should call Diana and let her protect me. And explain that I didn’t write the book.

  I will.

  But it’s not his choice when to do it. It’s mine.

  I’m happy to be able to stretch my legs. I squeeze through the fence—thankful that of all the things I’ve done, I’ve at least managed to stay trim—and head in the direction of the familiar headstone with one name chiseled across the top: nye. I know that below Emily’s and Jake’s names, as well as their dates of birth and—exact same—dates of death, an empty space remains for me to be added.

  For the first six months after they died, I couldn’t come out here without completely losing control of my emotions. For the next year or year and a half, it was hit-and-miss. Sometimes I sobbed. Sometimes I felt like shit. Sometimes I managed to summon a happy memory—Jake’s first bike ride, a trip we all took to the Grand Canyon, Emily’s thirtieth birthday party—and I would drive away from the cemetery feeling better.

  The past few years I’ve found the visits mostly comforting. I always thought the notion of burying someone, of paying a ton of money to put someone in the ground with a rock over their head, was silly. But when it happened to my family, I got it.

  The wind has eased. I checked the weather earlier and saw we’re in for a warming spell. I can already feel the temperature climbing a bit, and I hope like hell it continues, because I didn’t move to southern Kentucky expecting to be cold all winter.

  I stop about thirty yards from our headstone and see its outline at the top of the little hill. I wait while my eyes slowly adjust to the dark. I’m about to move forward when I notice a lump to my left, about twenty feet away.

  I squint. It looks like a large animal—a dog? a deer?—has curled up and gone to sleep. But the animal doesn’t stir as I approach, hasn’t dashed away as I would expect.

  Maybe it’s simply part of the landscaping. The maintenance crew takes good care of the property, and from time to time they plant new grass or a tree.

  My heart thumps a steady beat. My fingertips are cold. Stinging.

  “Scat,” I say. If it’s an animal, it will go.

  But the lump remains, still and steady. I feel like a child, spooked by a pile of clothes in the corner of my bedroom. For weeks after Emily and Jake died, I slept with every light on in the house, trying to bring myself comfort and security. I imagine my early-rising neighbors saw them and knew what I was doing. A grown man sleeping with all the lights on.

  Speaking of light . . .

  I slide my phone out of my back pocket. I activate the flashlight, which illuminates a bright cone around me. It shows the brown grass, scattered twigs, a fake flower petal blown here off someone’s bouquet.

  I move forward slowly. I lift the phone, shifting the light away from my feet toward the lump in front of me. At the edge of the cone, I see a pile of debris. Twigs and leaves that the landscaping crew has gathered from around the cemetery grounds and mounded until they can come and cart them away.

  I almost laugh out loud.

  I spooked myself over a pile of yard waste. That’s how on edge I am.

  My breathing starts to calm, and I lower the phone. But as I lower it, I see something—

  No, I think. No. I’m imagining things again.

  But I lift the phone and aim the light at the edge of the pile of debris. And I see my mind hasn’t been playing tricks on me. It’s really there. . . .

  A brown boot and, above it, a ragged cuff at the end of a pant leg. Sticking out of the pile.

  My heart goes into a higher gear.

  My hand trembles, and I concentrate to hold the phone. A homeless person? Someone seeking refuge in the cemetery?

  I will myself forward, taking two more steps.

  “Hey,” I say. “Hey! Wake up! Get up!”

  But the pile doesn’t move. The person—body—doesn’t move.

  I bend down, use my free hand to move the debris aside. I work faster and faster, moving frantically.

  I aim the light and see more. A red winter coat thrown open. A torso. The sweater wet and sticky with blood. I brush more aside. Revealing more.

  I run the light up the body—because that’s all it can be, given the amount of blood. A body.

  The light catches the red hair, the owlish glasses.

  I recoil, stumble backward, and fall onto my ass on the little hillside.

  “Oh, God, oh, God. Fuck fuck fuck.”

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  I pass the light over Madeline and nearly drop it when it reaches her face, shows her unseeing eyes behind the glasses.

  “Oh, God.”

  I extend my hand, place it against her neck. The skin is cold and not just because of the temperature in the air. She’s gone.

  I move the light down her body to the large bloodstain. I see no weapon, but it looks like she’s been stabbed.

  And why did this happen here?

  What was Madeline doing here?

  Someone killed her here and tried to hide the body.

  My mind can’t grasp any answers. I lift the phone. I need to call someone, need to report this to the police. I’m about to dial when I stop myself.

  I can’t do it while I’m here. Not unless I want to be arrested. And accused of her murder.

  I’m likely to be accused anyway, given the location of her body. Given the suspicion that has already fallen on me about Sophia. I’ll call the police—but only as I’m driving away.

  But before I stand up to go, I lean forward over Madeline’s body, looking for the manuscript she took from my house. The manuscript that can blow up my life.

  I shine the light over her coat and on the ground around her. I don’t see it. I even risk patting her jacket, avoiding the sticky blood, hoping to feel that lump of papers. I hunch over and look around, my phone light guiding me. But I don’t see it. And I don’t want to stay.

  Which means whoever killed her—Zach?—has the manuscript now.

  “Shit.”

  I push myself to my feet and back away, down the hill. And I move as quickly as I can through the darkened cemetery. I squeeze back through the fence and climb into the car.

  I drive away and find a pay phone, where I anonymously report what I’ve seen.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  REBECCA

  PRESENT

  The alarm rings at seven thirty. Rebecca bolts up like someone stuck her with a pin.

  She fumbles around on the nightstand, trying to find her phone, trying to shut it off. It feels like the alarm is inside her head, emanating from a place deep inside her skull. It’s so loud, it hurts.

  “Stop, stop.”

  Someone thumps against the wall from Mikaila’s room. It has to be Mikaila, since Steven is usually too polite to do something like that. Mikaila is the nervy one, the type to say something.

  Rebecca grabs the phone, shuts the noise off. Sweet relief. She feels like her eardrums have been punctured, like blood must be cascading down the sides of her head.

  “Stop being overly dramatic,” she says to herself.

  She checks the phone. Seven thirty-one. Ugh.

  The bed is a mess, papers spread all over the sheets and comforter. Last night, Rebecca started reading the manuscript that landed on her doorstep, the one with no name or return address. The one about the two women who are friends—and then the friendship is threatened because one woman might be cheating with the other woman’s husband. While it isn’t exactly her style—she prefers Jane Austen or maybe Dickens over contemporary novels—the pages flew by faster than she could turn them. It felt like the book was covered with glue and the pages stuck to her hands, leaving her unable to put it aside. She read and read until she fel
l asleep with the book covering her like a blanket. She slept like homeless people who covered themselves with newspapers in order to stay warm. She barely stirred during the night, didn’t even get up to pee.

  But duty calls. In addition to her job at the library, she also tutors at the writing center one morning a week, and it’s this morning. She needs to dress and get to campus, and she dreads the thought of the January cold that is unseasonable for Kentucky and seems to be eternal.

  No time for a shower, so she brushes her teeth and then pulls her hair back into a ponytail and splashes what passes for hot water in their apartment onto her face. When she emerges from the bathroom, Mikaila’s lithe body is leaning against the wall of the hallway, her mouth open in a tremendous feline yawn.

  “Becca, you know I’m a light sleeper and a really sensitive person. If I don’t sleep enough, my anxiety really goes into overdrive. We have to do something about that alarm. You set it too loud.”

  “I’m sorry. I’ll remember tonight.”

  “Steven and I are so tired. We were watching a documentary about nine eleven last night. Did you know the government set charges inside the Pentagon? That’s why it exploded. It was totally an inside job.”

  “Um . . . well . . .”

  “The shit these professors don’t teach us.”

  “Can I ask you something, Mikaila? You know that package I got yesterday, the one on the porch with my name on it?”

  “What? Oh, yeah. That. What was it? Did you order something?”

  “It’s a book.”

  “Oh. Snooze.”

  “Did you see the person who left it here?” Rebecca asks.

  Mikaila yawns again, her T-shirt riding up, exposing her navel. She closes her eyes like she might fall asleep leaning against the wall.

  “Mikaila?”

  “I don’t know, Becca. So many questions so early in the morning.”

  “So you didn’t see anyone?”

  She sighs. “I don’t know. I told you the package was already sitting there when we walked up. It could have been there all day. I had a really early class at eleven yesterday, so I was gone for a while.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  Mikaila reaches out and starts moving Rebecca’s hair around. “You’d be so pretty with a better haircut, Becca. Maybe some bolder color? Liven up this brown. I can take you to the place I go. It’s only, like, two hundred dollars.”

  “Two hundred?”

  “Oh, and yeah . . . Steven’s going to be staying here for a few days. He forgot to pay his heating bill, so the landlord shut it off. Can you believe that? So there’s no heat at his place. You don’t mind if he crashes here.”

  Mikaila slips into the bathroom without waiting for a response.

  Rebecca doesn’t have time to offer one. She’s running late. And she knows Mikaila wouldn’t listen anyway. She dresses in her room—jeans, a sweatshirt, boots. She thinks about bringing the pages of the book with her to read on the bus or during any downtime she has at the writing center, but decides against it. She fears losing some of the pages, since they were just floating around loose, and she could look forward to reading more when she comes home this evening. As she pulls on her coat and steps out into the cold, she pictures the scene playing itself out in reverse in seven hours or so. Rebecca entering the apartment, heading to her room, slipping under the covers, and then reading the rest. Mikaila and Steven could swing from the chandeliers for all she cares, so long as she holds a good book in her hands. And this one is very, very good. . . .

  And the more she thinks about the book, the more familiar it sounds. The bus rumbles toward campus and the low set of buildings—none more than three stories high—that makes up Gatewood’s downtown. The air brakes hiss at every stop, the door letting in a rush of cold air as passengers climb on and off. That book—the one from the porch. It kind of sounds like the one Dr. Nye wrote and talked about at the library a few nights ago.

  At his book launch, Nye told the crowd he wasn’t going to read from the book. He said he found that boring, and he hoped he wouldn’t test the audience’s patience or put them all to sleep. People laughed, but Rebecca agreed. A few times a year, the English Department brought poets and fiction writers to campus to give readings, and some of them read in such a monotone voice, they killed the energy and mood in the room faster than a gas leak. When Nye said he wouldn’t read, Rebecca didn’t laugh, but inside, she breathed a sigh of relief. She would have hated to see a professor she liked give a disastrous performance onstage.

  But Nye talked about the book. He summarized the plot and told the crowd what had inspired it and how long it took him to write it, all the nerdy shoptalk Rebecca loves to hear. And the book he described sounded a lot like the one that landed on her doorstep. In Nye’s book and in the handwritten one she is reading, a young woman gets murdered in a town very much like Gatewood. Rebecca thought it was just a coincidence. After all, she doesn’t read a lot of thrillers, but she spends a lot of time in bookstores and online. She knows how many books these days tell stories of women getting knocked off in various gruesome ways by various people—boyfriends, husbands, lovers, doctors, therapists, serial killers. Just like the books she prefers always seem to deal with an inheritance or a will or a lost love, thrillers plow their own fertile and murderous ground over and over. But this one isn’t just a thriller. It’s about the friendship between the two women, the way they confide in each other. And help each other. Until the man starts to ruin everything . . .

  Nye said in class once that every writer has only one story to tell—and if they’re lucky and have a career, they get to tell it over and over. Was that as true of Jane Austen as the mysterious author of the book on her stoop?

  The bus rattles up College Street. It’s close to full, students packed in next to one another in their bulky coats, trying to text and scroll through their phones with gloves on. The bus stops a block from campus, at the edge of downtown, and Rebecca stands up, tugging her bag over her shoulder. She knows she shouldn’t do it, she knows she needs to hustle, but she also knows she won’t survive the day without coffee. And she has just enough time to run into Troy’s and grab something she can bring into the writing center with her. Troy’s is a little pricey but also locally owned. Sometimes she thinks she works in the writing center so she can buy Troy’s coffee on the way in.

  She exits by the rear door, stepping down onto the sidewalk, which is stained by the rock salt that has been thrown everywhere. She hates winter because it’s just so dirty. Everything stained and gray and cold. She turns left, starting for Troy’s, when she hears her name.

  She looks back toward the bus. Has she forgotten something? Her wallet? Her keys? She’s done it before and then had to pay for new credit cards, a new student ID, a new key. But no one on the bus knows her name, and a quick check of her pockets tells her everything feels like it’s in place.

  She hears her name again. She looks around.

  People pass back and forth in front of her. Not just students but also faculty and people on their way to jobs downtown—lawyers, cops, business owners.

  Is she hearing things? Thinking she’s heard her name twice when she hasn’t?

  Then there is no mistaking it—someone almost shouts her name.

  “Rebecca.”

  She jerks her head to the right. An alley runs along the side of Troy’s, leading to the small parking lot in back. Someone stands there in the entrance to the alley, and when she looks that way, he beckons her over.

  “Come on,” he says. “Over here.”

  And it all seems so weird because she’s just been thinking about him and his book and his talk at the library.

  And she doesn’t have time to wonder why Dr. Nye is calling to her like he doesn’t want anyone to know he’s in the alley next to Troy’s.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CONNOR />
  PRESENT

  Rebecca finally hears me and starts over, even though she looks suspicious.

  She wears a wool hat pulled low on her forehead, and her eyes look out from under it like she thinks I might bite. I step back, relieved to be out of the exposed opening to the alley.

  “Dr. Nye? Is everything okay?”

  I’m far enough back so no one walking by can see me. The kid looks at me like I’m nuts, but I also benefit from teaching in an English Department. Everyone seems eccentric or odd or flat-out crazy—the students grow used to it and at most roll their eyes behind our backs when we behave like lunatics.

  “Everything’s . . . okay,” I say. “I didn’t want to talk in Troy’s. It’s so crowded this time of morning.”

  “Did you want to talk to me?” she asks, pointing at her chest with a gloved hand.

  “I do,” I say.

  “Did you know I’d be here?”

  “I figured a lot of people pass through Troy’s in the morning. And you always have a Troy’s cup with you in class. Do you have a minute?”

  “Well, I’m on my way—”

  “It’ll be quick.”

  She half shrugs, accepts she’s stuck talking to me. Maybe out of pity, maybe out of simple curiosity. She steps forward, close enough to hear me over the passing cars and chattering pedestrians.

  Rebecca looks me over, letting her eyes trail from the top of my head on down. I must look like hell. I spent the rest of the night driving around after I called the police, stopping a couple of times at twenty-four-hour fast-food drive-throughs for a hamburger or a cup of coffee. Around four o’clock, my eyelids grew as heavy as manhole covers, and I drove out behind the football stadium at the far edge of campus, back to where the parking lot meets a stand of trees. I found a spot there and closed my eyes, locking the doors in case the same person who killed Madeline was following me. I managed to fall asleep in the driver’s seat for a couple of hours, then woke up with a sore neck and a full bladder, but the sleep helped. I intend to get in touch with Diana, allow her to help me. But I need Rebecca to do something for me as well.