by Scott Carter
“What were you thinking? You could have burned the place down. Why would you do that? Why?”
The words are appropriately irrational, and her questions only make him want to question her back. Why didn’t you stop Dad from leaving? If Dad didn’t want a family, why was I born? If you love me so much, how come you send me to a man that medicates me?
He stares at the burned pages of his favourite books and breathes in the smell of their ashes, then he feels his mother grab his shoulders and steer him out of the bathroom and into the hall. He watches with envy the tears streaking down her face.
There is no sobbing, only liquid eyes that say everything for her. She hugs him tight and whispers that she is happy he is not burned, and he knows that she prays that his actions have a sane explanation.
Twenty-Eight
It’s not easy to admit his faults, but Barrett knows it is time to stop hoping someone finds the extortionist and to start searching more for himself. The real problem all this time, it occurs to him, was his emotional reaction to each letter. Fear, anger, self-pity. All of those feelings have blurred his reason. What he needs to do is get the letters to a fresh space, and as he moves the demands from the wall above his computer and tapes each one to the white wall across from his bed, he feels confident that if he looks long enough he’ll see a clue, commonalities, or a mistake. He stares determined when the phone’s buzzing rhythm cuts through the silence.
“Hello?”
“I need you to come over right away.” It’s Carol and she speaks so fast it almost comes out of her mouth as one word.
Her tone tells him to say yes without asking any questions. This clearly isn’t about yelling at him, or venting — this is urgent. Maybe Richard ran away, maybe he was in an accident, or maybe it’s financial trouble. Whatever the case, he knows to get there as fast as possible.
The smell of smoke makes him flex his nostrils as soon as he enters the apartment. Carol points him to the patio from the far end of the room and retreats into her bedroom. There’s only enough time to see her tired eyes and stressed brow before she’s gone. This is not Barrett’s scene. A month ago, he couldn’t have made up such a setting, and here he is standing in the reality. He moves through the apartment and steps onto the patio, where Richard sits on a deck chair with rusty legs. The air is cool, yet the boy wears only a T-shirt, exposing the smudged ash on his forearm.
Barrett takes a box of fries and a big-dog burger from a paper bag and sets them on a plastic stool beside Richard. He leans with his back on the railing and watches as the boy begins to pick at the fries.
“You almost burned down your bathroom,” he says, passing Richard a package of ketchup.
“It’s your fault.”
“My fault?”
“I told her my secret like you said, and she got upset. I told her my father left because I found him kissing another man in our apartment.”
Barrett looks at the kid and the pain in his eyes makes sense. “Jesus, I’m sorry you have to deal with that. I didn’t know that was your secret.” He arches his neck to the chipped paint on the overhang above them. “You did the right thing, though. Your mom deserves to know the truth.”
“No, I didn’t. I made her mad and I upset her. Mom’s right, you’re not a good guy.”
“Hey. Go easy. You know how much I like you.”
“You said we’d be friends forever, and you said you’d get me off this medication and now I’m not allowed to see you and I’ll be taking these drugs for the rest of my life.”
“Listen ...”
“Mom doesn’t want you here.”
“Your mother called me and asked me to come.”
“I don’t want you here.”
The boy’s words thicken the room’s air. Now that he knows Richard, now that he’s not in the haze of euphoric nights and hung-over mornings, he can’t lie to himself anymore. He can’t pretend that his last book is loosely based on Richard dealing with his father leaving the family, and he can’t rationalize that he was too busy to be there for the kid during the family’s time of need. This is a reality best framed in formal terms, and the reality is that he found out his sister’s husband left her, he needed a story for an upcoming deadline, and he used the stories of his nephew’s angst as fodder for his next bestseller without ever caring enough to even call the kid and feign interest in his pain. And now he’s worried enough about Richard that he would give his fortune to the extortionist if it could fix whatever made the kid light his bathtub on fire. The irony makes his eyes burn.
Barrett leaves the room to see Carol leaning against the living room wall. Her eyes look sore and her lips are chapped.
“Where are you going?” she says.
“He doesn’t want me here.”
“I was hoping he would talk with you.”
“We’ll give him some time. See how he feels tomorrow.”
He hugs her, and while she resists at first, her body needs the embrace.
“Call me if you need anything. And I mean anything.”
She nods, wipes at her eyes, and raises a hand in goodbye.
The kid’s rejection pricks at him as he leaves their apartment, heads for the street, and leans against a cement retaining wall. He wants to believe what he told his sister and that all Richard needs is some time, but the look of disappointment in the boy’s eyes warns otherwise. That was the look of someone who has been disappointed before, someone learning to expect to be let down, someone who will soon decide not to trust people.
He lights a cigarette with thoughts of his burned books in the tub and is wondering if he deserves to have every copy in print destroyed when the buzz of his cell demands his attention. He looks at the screen to see Crance’s number and a text that reads: I found what you want. Come see me.
When Barrett arrives at Crance’s place, the man is shirtless. He is professional athlete ripped with a single tattoo of a nail running the length of his right forearm. They shake hands and Crance pours a shot of green liquid into a shot glass with an open eye decorating the outside. He extends the drink.
“Wheatgrass?”
“No, thanks.”
Crance shoots the wheatgrass, winces, and slides his tongue across overly white teeth. “Sorry for the heat in here. My AC broke yesterday, and I’m still waiting on the repair man.”
Barrett looks at the half-dozen fans toggling around the room. His eyes drift to the series of computer monitors where Crance holds court. The closest shows surveillance footage of an abortion clinic, another has surveillance footage of a massage parlour, and the largest screen frames a software company.
“What’s going on here?” Barrett asks.
“You don’t want to know.” Crance downs another wheatgrass and spins his swivel chair toward Barrett. “Okay.” He rubs his eyes then raises his hands like a conductor. “The website you gave me is only ever accessed at one location. A library a few blocks from here. And there’s a pattern.” A man enters the software company on the centre screen, and Crance clicks away on the keyboard until the man’s image is larger and framed in red. Crance drags the image to a folder and returns his attention to Barrett.
“Every Tuesday between one and one fifteen, someone accesses the Once Upon a Hypocrite site from the west-branch library. You go there tomorrow and you’ll find who you’re looking for.”
Barrett counts nine hundred dollars as he removes the bills from his wallet, wishes he had a thousand, and sets it beside Crance.
“What’s this?” Crance asks.
“Gratitude.”
Crance waves him off. “You’re a friend of Sidney’s. You already paid too much.”
“I appreciate that. But for the problem you’re solving for me, you deserve more, and if it works out tomorrow, I’ll make sure you get it.”
Flashes of the extortion fill Barrett’s thoughts. The kids delivering the demands, the guilty faces of everyone he looks at these days, and the millions of dollars he’s lost. A library. He think
s of an impish, jealous reader, and then he imagines the kids delivering the demands again and isn’t sure what to think. Brouge is diabolical enough to use kids. Whatever the case, by one tomorrow he hopes to discover the extortionist’s identity.
He steps out of Crance’s place feeling hopeful for the first time since Don threatened him with Brouge, so he takes out his phone and keys in Rebecca’s number. She didn’t deserve to be the target of his paranoia, and he wants to make it up to her. The ease he felt during their conversation over dinner was rare. He’s used to having to be the entertainment, but she carried the conversation, and he wants to hear her voice so he can thank her for being so interesting. But she doesn’t answer. Voicemail responds on the fifth ring and the rare tone of her voice makes him anxious as he scrambles to think of something to say. He is about to speak when she answers.
“This better not be the window company. I asked you very nicely not to call again two days ago and not so nicely yesterday, so ...”
Her irreverence makes him wish he could take back the day he accused her of being the extortionist. He decides he needs to say something really charming but all he can manage is, “It’s Barrett.”
“Barrett?”
“Yeah, I ...”
The dial tone hurts more than anything she could have said. He hasn’t been rejected since the money started coming in. In fact, he hasn’t cared about being rejected since the money started coming in, and the sobriety of this side of the coin is startling.
He steps into his mansion, walks up the spiral staircase and sits gingerly on a couch in his office. Then it occurs to him that of all the things he enjoys about being rich, he likes the control the best. Control came with the first million, and since then everything’s come to him. Meetings, people, time, women, travel, peoples’ respect. He rises from the couch, moves to the computer and decides to control what he still can. And the words have never flowed so fluently. Ideas play out in his head like a movie, and the perfect adjective or simile seems to pour out of his fingertips as they glide over the keyboard, creating page after page. All of his angst, rage, and insecurity crystallize into the clearest communication he has ever produced. This is artistic euphoria, these are the moments writers daydream about, this is what gets a book published.
Twenty-Nine
Barrett wakes hungry for closure. If Crance is right and the extortionist will be at the library at one, then this nightmare could be over in a few hours, and the excitement of that possibility leaves him unable to focus on anything else. He showers, cooks some eggs and bacon that he can’t eat more than a few mouthfuls of, and flips through two newspapers, but it’s all just passing time until he can confront the extortionist. A part of him wants to tackle and beat this person for torturing him; to release the compounding frustration and prove that he is really the dominant one. But another part of him needs answers. How did he, she, or they find out he is Russell Niles? How did the extortionist find out that he isn’t being truthful about the charitable donations he claims on the website? In a world full of morally corrupt CEOs, actors, athletes, and politicians abusing their riches and power, why go to all this trouble to punish him?
He leaves his mansion at twelve fifteen so there is no chance he’ll be late, but a marathon for breast cancer makes driving in the downtown core impossible, so he parks the Audi six blocks from the library. He walks through the runners with a feeling of remorse. There they are sweating with pink ribbons pinned proud over their hearts, doing what they can to help people in need, and here he is with enough money to help fund a good run at any disease on the planet and he’s about to pop a cigarette in his mouth.
The first thing he notices about the West Branch library when he steps inside is that the computer section is full of users. Rows of people sit hunched over keyboards with their eyes locked on the screens. These computers draw a cross-section of society.
Men, women, Chinese, black, white, Indian, teenagers, and even one guy who must be eighty doing his best to shield people from watching him look at pictures of scantily clad women. A quick scan of the first row reveals only the usual surfers. News sites, sports sites, YouTube, video games. The second row is a bust too. A few people check their email and a few others peck away at school reports and resumes. He starts down the third aisle when he stops at a boy around twelve looking at the Once Upon a Hypocrite site. The boy has long hair and is dressed in oversized clothes. Barrett’s fingers tingle. He puts a hand over the boy’s, which is on the mouse.
“You like this site, huh?”
The boy looks back with startled eyes. “What?”
“I’ll give you clever points for the title but I can’t approve of the content.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Who put you up to this?”
“What?”
“The site.”
“I just saw some lady looking at it a couple of minutes ago and it looked cool.”
“What lady?”
“Her.”
The boy points down the aisle at Carol, who’s walking toward them when she notices Barrett and the boy pointing and turns. Her image magnifies until from Barrett’s perspective, his sister’s eyes fill the room.
“Carol?”
She hustles to exit the library but Barrett runs after her, and just as she reaches the lobby, he grabs her arm.
“What the fuck is going on?”
She shrugs off his grasp and looks straight at him. Her eyes are tired and her face is drained, but he can’t fully read her. All he can manage is to look at her with disbelief.
“You did this?”
She nods, expressionless. No smirk, no sadness. And that lack of response intensifies his fury.
“How did you find out?”
There is no guilt in her eyes, and her tone makes it clear she is as angry at him as he is at her. “I didn’t intend to.”
“What do you mean you didn’t intend to? You extorted me.”
“I was planning an intervention and started following you to figure out where best to have it.”
“An intervention?”
“That’s right. I wasn’t going to go bed another night wondering if you were driving drunk or overdosing. And the few times I year I do see you, I hoped to do so without you hung-over or coming down.”
“I don’t need an intervention.”
“You got one of sorts, didn’t you?”
He shakes his head and clenches his teeth so hard, it feels like they might crumble.
“I followed you to the beach one day and I saw you writing. It’s certainly not what I expected.
“And then you tore a page out of a journal, ripped it in half, threw one crumpled piece into the garbage and punted the other balled up one onto the sand. I waited until you left, took the two pieces and taped them together, and when I saw it was a story about Mil Bennett I was in shock. I mean, I didn’t know for sure you were Russell Niles, but it was possible, and I freaked because Richard is obsessed with the books and the thought that you wrote them all fucked up was just so wrong, and then it hit me that that the latest book was about a kid being abandoned by his father, and I wanted to strangle you. I mean how fucking dare you do that to any child, let alone your nephew?”
“How dare I? You’re extorting your brother?” An elderly woman walks past, and Barrett pauses for a moment until she’s gone and leans in closer. “All this from a piece of writing you found on the beach?”
“That just made me curious, but then I remembered that you said Sidney is an agent, and it was as easy as going on Google to find out he’s Russell Niles’s agent. So I followed you two and saw you go into your publishers. That pretty much solidified you were Russell Niles. But to be sure, I came up with the extortion plan, knowing that if you never responded then maybe this was all a coincidence, but if you did respond, then there would be no doubt that you are Russell Niles.”
The details stun him. He listens to her talk and can’t stop thinking that she was onc
e a little kid he had to help feed.
“I wasn’t sure what to threaten you with,” she says. “The debauchery was obvious, and it wasn’t hard to catch you in the act, but I needed something that tied you to the books, so I examined every detail of your life I could find until I discovered your connection to Blast energy drink.
“Their allegations of child labour gave me leverage, but I still needed enough proof to scare you into action. Tracing your taxes would show payments from Greystone that only the author of the Russell Niles books could receive, but taxes aren’t public record. The payments would also be visible on your bank records, but I couldn’t get a teller to risk their job for the grand I could offer. But then I went to the Library of Congress and searched the copyright. I wasn’t surprised that your name wasn’t on the document, because I figured your publisher would warn you that it’s a public record, but what I saw was your mistake. That’s when I saw that the copyright was under Sanford Corbett.”
“Was Richard involved in this?”
“Of course not. I wanted you to spend some time with him, to be his uncle. I didn’t expect him to get so close to you.”
“What about all the kids delivering the demands?”
“They were random kids I paid. I was hoping they would have an emotional impact, make you think about your responsibilities as an author.”
Barrett paces and runs through the extortion’s demands. “You paid an underage woman to sleep with me?”
“She’s not underage, you just had to be paranoid enough to believe she was. She’s a third-year university student. I only paid her to kiss you — she did the rest on her own.”
Every cell in Barrett’s body needs nicotine. He gestures to the door with his pack. “Let’s go outside.”
Carol sits on a bench in front of a garden box of green bushes, but Barrett needs to stay on his feet. A few deep inhales give him renewed energy.
“I’m your brother. How could you do this to me?”