Words

by John Inman

  Only after he had disappeared down the street did Milo remember he hadn’t given Logan his phone number.

  Chapter Two

  THE DAY after he met Logan Hunter, Milo rose early and donned pajamas—since he wore them to work in, not to sleep—and parked himself in his downstairs office to write. Milo’s house stood on a lushly wooded canyon that rolled off to the south. On a clear day it afforded him a terrific view from his bedroom window of the distant Mexican mountains. From a bank of living room windows on the other side of the house, he could see the San Diego city skyline, three miles west. The view from his office, however, was less engaging, which Milo considered a good thing since it afforded less distraction. Too bad some other distractions weren’t as avoidable. Properly stocked with a pot of coffee at his side, his workday began, as always, with Milo finding fault with everything he had written the day before. While beating himself up over that, he wasted a considerable amount of time wishing he could crank out pages like Stephen King, who, it was rumored, could jiggle a bowl of alphabet soup and come up with a novella and two short stories.

  At the moment, Milo was knee-deep in writing a thriller. His last book had been a comedy. Milo liked to mix things up when it came to plotlines. He guessed he was doing something right since his readers hadn’t deserted him yet.

  His office was a bit chilly this morning, so Milo tucked his bare toes under Spanky, his big fuzzy dog of indeterminate breed, boundless loyalty, and infinite laziness, who lay snoring at his feet, as obsequiously fawning as ever.

  While he wrote, Milo took occasional side trips to Facebook. He swore it would be the death of his career one day. Writers were always looking for an excuse not to write. Having Facebook a mouse-click away made dawdling a breeze. Unfortunately, most of his connections to the writing world—friends, reviewers, fellow authors, publishers, editors, readers, even a few morons who posted nothing but political crap and who had sneaked onto Milo’s friends list when he wasn’t looking—were maintained through social media. In Milo’s eyes, it was a necessary evil.

  Today his meandering path through Facebook, usually a total waste of time, but fun nevertheless, began with a surprise. A surprise that made Milo’s sleepy eyes crinkle with happiness as he sat there gaping at the screen and slurping his third cup of coffee.

  The surprise was a friend request from a certain BookHunter, reviewer of all things literary, or so he touted himself on his Facebook page.

  Milo accepted immediately, and not ten seconds later a private message came through.

  BookHunter: Good morning.

  Milo Cook: Good morning to you too. Did you get your apartment?

  BookHunter: I did indeed. Will be moving in shortly.

  Milo Cook: Congratulations! What part of town?

  BookHunter: Hillcrest.

  Milo Cook: Oh good. We’re practically neighbors.

  BookHunter: Great! Oops, gotta run. I’m sitting in my rental Ryder truck with all my possessions piled in the back, and the movers I hired have just shown up. I’m sad to report there’s not a cute one in the lot.

  Milo Cook: Some days nothing goes right. LOL.

  BookHunter: Ain’t that the truth. Later.

  Smiling, Milo closed out the message box. He spent an enjoyable few minutes in the newfound knowledge that he and Logan now had a way to communicate with each other. He spent a few more enjoyable minutes remembering how Logan had looked in tennis shorts.

  God, I really am a slut.

  Shaking himself back to reality, Milo clicked his way out of Facebook and once again tried to concentrate on his Work in Progress. He’d succeeded for perhaps an hour, baby-stepping his way a little deeper into his preconceived plot, when a beep proclaimed the arrival of an incoming email. He tapped his way there and found a note from a fellow writer from his publishing house, Winter Press. Her name was Lillian Damons, a romance writer. Mutual fans, she and Milo had met at a writers’ conference in Denver several years before. She was married to a book reviewer, Grace Connor. Milo had attended their wedding in Kansas City, where the two women now lived.

  Dear Milo,

  My heart is broken. Grace was murdered in New York City two weeks ago. She was strangled in her hotel room. They tell me it was most likely either a rape or a robbery gone wrong. I’ve been in shock ever since. I can’t stop crying. It took almost ten days for the NYPD to release her body. The funeral was held yesterday in Grace’s hometown of Roanoke. Her family was gracious to me as always, but we are all so crushed with grief we can’t accept it yet that Grace is gone. Maybe none of us ever will.

  I know you loved Grace, so I wanted to let you know. I pray they’ll catch the monster who did this, but so far the homicide detective in charge of the case tells me they don’t have many leads.

  What a cruel planet this world has become. My beloved Grace had heart disease too, you know. She must have been so frightened at the end. My own heart is broken now too.

  Stay safe, darling friend.

  Lillian

  Milo stared at the screen for the longest time as he read and reread Lillian’s heartbreaking email. Finally he answered with an email of his own, extending the proper shock, empathy, sorrow, commiseration. Saying all the right words, denoting all the proper emotions.

  And all the while he typed, a worm of guilt chewed through him. Guilt because in truth, Milo had not loved Grace Connor at all. He associated with her only because she was Lillian’s wife, and Lillian was a friend. They shared a history, Milo and Lillian. Working for the same publisher. Attending conferences. Traveling once to Germany together for the Frankfurt Book Fair, the largest annual gathering of writers and publishers in the world. They had even cowritten a short story for one of their publisher’s anthologies.

  There was no such history with Grace, nor had Milo ever wanted there to be.

  Almost without thinking, Milo signed his email with its empty platitudes and insincere expressions of comfort and sent it off. While it whizzed silently away through the ether, his true thoughts were not on Lillian’s grief at all, but on Grace. On some of the reviews she had written. On the enemies she had made by being less than gracious with her criticisms of certain writers. Grace was not a popular reviewer with authors. She often took a hard stance on those writers whose skills she found wanting. Her words could be mocking, belittling, even bordering on cruel. Under a threadbare guise of humor and clever wordplay, she could rip a writer’s fragile ego to the quick, and often did, seemingly for the sheer enjoyment of it. In fact, there had been a mean streak in her reviews that had discouraged more than one new writer from ever publishing again.

  Milo had never wished her ill because of it, but there were certainly times when he felt she had gone too far. Yet even Milo knew his thoughts on her passing were tempered by the fact that she had never pointed her wicked pen at him or his own books. Not so for many in the writing community, Milo suspected. There were a few writers out there, he didn’t doubt for a minute, who were hoisting a drink or two to Grace’s untimely, and in their eyes, well-deserved demise.

  Yet it had not been Grace’s reviews that got her killed. Fate had done that. Wrong place, wrong time. Or maybe it was karma. And if there was a touch of justice involved, it was not up to Milo to decide. Still, there was no denying that in his eyes, a kinder victim would have warranted greater grief.

  The coldness of that realization caused Milo to slump in his desk chair and close his eyes. Lillian was right. It was a cruel planet indeed. Even Milo wasn’t immune to its lure.

  THERE HAD always been a streak of social anxiety nibbling away at Milo’s psyche. Simple duties that most writers take for granted were a bit of a chore for him. Book signings, readings, writers’ conventions—all took a toll, jarring his composure and frazzling his nerves, but he had learned over the years to cope with his frailties. Most of his friends, in fact, would probably be surprised to learn he suffered from social anxiety at all.

  Actually, large groups for Milo were less intimidating
than smaller ones. Take tonight, for instance.

  The South Park Reading Club had extended an invitation to Milo and two other local authors to attend their monthly meeting and perhaps do a short reading and answer a few questions for the members, all of whom were fans, the invitation stated.

  Milo had accepted, of course. After all, these readers lived in his own neighborhood. He couldn’t very well blow them off. Still, he had to concentrate on not breaking into a cold sweat or finding a thousand other ways to make a fool of himself. And so far he had succeeded.

  In fact, with the reading of an excerpt from his latest Work in Progress behind him—he had been slated as the last to read, which didn’t help his nerves any—the worst was now over. The small crowd, perhaps twenty people in all, were kindly attentive, clearly grateful Milo had deigned to grace them with his presence, and the cheese dip was especially good, which didn’t hurt either. The group appeared to take in all extremes of the social spectrum, from the moneyed to the not so moneyed, from young to old to in-between. As always, it was their devotion to reading that brought them together. Social status had nothing to do with it. This was one aspect of book lovers that always gave Milo hope for the human species. For the sake of a simple tale on paper or in pixels, people could overlook their differences and come together as one to share a common passion.

  Yes, so far the night was going swimmingly.

  Then the Q and A began.

  The first question out of the crowd came from a small woman with thick glasses and tightly permed graying hair. She looked like someone’s grandmother. An ace at baking cookies, no doubt, and doling out endless reams of advice, all the while aiming a gimlet eye at friends and strangers alike.

  That gimlet eye came into play now, as she cast a probing glance at each of the three authors sitting huddled on the sofa side by side with plates of goodies in their laps. The way food and utensils instantly froze in midair suggested the question clearly came as a shock to all of them.

  “I wonder if each of you would give us an opinion concerning the recent murder of Grace Connor, taking into account that a goodly part of the writing community is not exactly heartbroken by her death.”

  Milo was holding a plate of cheese and crackers. One of the crackers was in his mouth at the time. He hastily chewed it up and swallowed it down as he noted the surprising lack of empathy in the old woman’s eyes when she spoke of Grace’s murder.

  Happily, it was Juliet Karnes, the author on his right, who chose to answer first. She was a pinched, tweedy woman in her high seventies, if she was a day, who wrote sex scenes in her het romances that curled even Milo’s hair. The very idea that she knew what a sex act was seemed fantastical at best. The fact that she sat sipping periodically from a silver flask and cussed like a sailor seemed a little out of character as well.

  “Are they fucking not?” she asked coolly. “I mean, heartbroken by what happened?”

  The old lady who posed the question gave a disapproving tut, whether at the question or the cursing Milo couldn’t be sure. “Goodness me, it’s all over social media. Excerpts of her many—shall we say—ungracious reviews. Unkind words she wrote about this book and that, lambasting one writer after another. Don’t you have an opinion on her passing? A host of your fellow authors certainly do.”

  For the tenth time that evening, Miss Karnes tucked her flask back in her jacket pocket and smiled, not unlike a shark who’s just spotted a lone swimmer with yummy-looking thighs. “Most writers know that reviews don’t matter. And I for one refuse to garner news by trolling Facebook, or personal blogs, or any of a hundred other social media sites. It’s all bullshit. I’ll admit Grace Connor was a bitch, but I’m still not sure she deserved what happened to her. And I think it’s a little premature to expound on the idea it was her reviews that got her killed. Did the killer drop an unfinished manuscript behind at the murder scene? I’m sorry, dear lady, but you seem to be talking out of your ass.”

  A few snickers could be heard, but the woman who posed the question merely muttered, “Well, I never!” Making a noble effort to unruffle her feathers, she turned to the second writer for his opinion, leaving Milo once again, it seemed, last on the program.

  The second guest was Adrian Strange, a sci-fi writer with a fair backlist of science fiction novels on his Amazon profile, but who had never really seen much financial success from his work. Milo knew him as a prolific writer who had at one time turned out two or three books a year. After once reading a couple of his books, Milo felt Adrian Strange would do better at the money end of the game if he concentrated more on quality in his writing and a little less on quantity. Strange was a skinny, gangly man in his late thirties, not bad-looking but not really handsome either, whose long legs were at the moment tucked under the coffee table in front of him because there was simply no other place for him to put them. He was balancing a mound of food on his lap that practically overran the plate. Obviously, Mr. Strange wasn’t one to pass up a free meal. Maybe his less-than-stellar royalty checks had something to do with that.

  At the moment, he was chewing a sausage, but he didn’t let that stop him. “I’m a firm believer in karma. People reap what they sow in this business. A slight, an unkind word, a cruel review, will come back and bite you one way or another. Grace Connor was a snake, and every once in a while a snake will slither across the wrong foot and get its head chopped off by a farmer with a hoe. As far as I’m concerned, the writing world is better off without her.”

  He had been speaking to the room at large, but now Adrian focused his attention on the spinster lady who asked the question. “You ask if I think her death was a direct result of her cruel touch in reviewing people’s work. My answer is yes. And even if it wasn’t, the result is the same. She got what she deserved.”

  With that, he smiled acidly and poked another sausage into his mouth.

  Milo honestly couldn’t believe what he was hearing. When expectant eyes at long last turned to him, he set his plate aside. He had suddenly lost his appetite. He stared down at his hands for a moment while the entire South Park Reading Club sat around, gazing at him expectantly, clearly waiting for his opinion. All except for Adrian Strange, who was forking up potato salad like the end of days was coming, and he intended to go out with a full stomach.

  Milo cleared his throat. Hoping he wouldn’t piss off the entire room, he chose to center his response on the lady who started the conversation. Perhaps that way the collateral damage would be minimal.

  “What happened to Grace Connor was terrible. I don’t think it’s fair to hint that hordes of people were delighted to see her go. She was tough with her reviews, I’ll admit. But she was also expansive with her praise. She didn’t hate everything she read, after all. She never panned any of my books, at least.”

  Adrian Strange mumbled something incoherent under his breath, and Juliet Karnes bit back a sarcastic giggle while nipping at her flask again. For the first time, Milo noticed she had only three untouched radishes on her plate. No wonder she looked emaciated.

  The old lady who posed the question was not to be swayed. “But her homosexual lover is a colleague and friend of yours. Perhaps if that were not the case, she might have gone after your second book, which in my opinion had a few plot holes big enough to drive a truck through that should have been remedied in the editing phase.”

  “Touché,” Miss Karnes mumbled, clearly having fun now.

  Milo laughed too. He noticed the hostess of the evening’s activities looked immensely grateful when he did. Clearly she already thought the conversation was getting out of hand, and the last thing she wanted to do was offend the guests of honor, although in Milo’s opinion most of the offending had been done by the guests, not the hostess. She cast a homicidal glance at the old spinster, and Milo wondered if his interrogator would find herself suddenly deleted from the mailing list for future club events.

  Again, Milo focused his attention on the woman with the Coke-bottle glasses. “As it happens, you
’re right. I am a friend and colleague of Lillian Damons. But she and Grace were not simply homosexual lovers, as you put it. They were legally married wives to each other. I attended their wedding. And for my part, I considered Grace as much a friend as Lillian.” This was a fib, but Milo didn’t figure anyone in this room needed to know that. “It’s almost as if you are accusing Grace of being murdered because of her reviews.”

  “And why not?” the bespectacled woman countered. “She ruined more than one writing career, I’ve heard. Who’s to say one of those people didn’t go after her for a little revenge?”

  This time it was Adrian Strange who tried to stifle a chuckle, although Milo noticed he didn’t try very hard.

  Milo gazed at the woman with a far less charitable eye than he had before, and frankly, he was getting a little fed up with his fellow guests of honor as well. It took a goodly amount of willpower not to speak rudely to the lot of them. But in the end, he was saved by a rather hastily contrived question from the other side of the room concerning points of view in writing. Grateful to get off the subject of poor Grace, he turned away to address the speaker, while the woman who blamed Grace for her own murder muttered “Harrumph” loudly enough for Milo to hear, which was clearly her intention.

  Milo orated for three minutes on omniscient and limited omniscient viewpoints, which the questioner had specifically targeted. All the while he spoke, he grew more disconcerted by the heartless way the woman with the bad perm and thick glasses had referred to Lillian’s wife. He was none too pleased with the response of his two fellow writers either, but since it was the spinster who started it all, he decided to cast his final opinion on the matter at her. So the moment he finished the viewpoint lecture—and he could tell he should probably wrap it up by the glassy-eyed looks on his listeners’ faces—he turned back to the woman. She was still looking shortchanged by Milo’s answer and was soothing her frustrations by stuffing her face with chips and salsa. Milo surprised her so by redirecting his attention back to her, a glob of salsa slid off her chip and landed in her lap.