The Accomplice

The Accomplice

I heard the silver-gray sedan from a quarter mile off, coming up through the Milton morning.

At eight o'clock exactly, Michael swung it into the gravel yard.

Fog was still coming off the Hudson, thick enough to sit in the crowns of the red maples and stay there.

Michael got out. He didn't touch the horn, and he didn't put out the cigarette.

He carried a paper bag with two coffees in it and a thick brick-red folder with the archive stamp of the New York newspaper library on the cover.

He pushed the door open and walked in. No knock. No hello.

We had been in it together 20 years, back from when neither of us was anybody in publishing. I was 46. We sat across from each other at the rough wood table in a kitchen the damp had gotten into.

The kitchen hadn't changed in 20 years: paint blistered off the walls in sheets, a green line of damp along the baseboards, and the dull yellow light of a fall morning coming through the dirty glass and picking out every line in both our faces.

Michael kept his coat on. He set the two coffees down and pushed the folder across to me.

He looked at me the way he looked at the other side of a negotiation, and whatever was behind it had been collecting for years.

"I want the truth, James,"

Michael said, and he set each word down by itself, slowly.

"I spent last night in the archive going through 20 years of your career line by line."

"Don't give me the writer's voice and another story about art. Tell me what is going on with your books."

There was a strip of masking tape down the spine of the folder, with a date on it in his handwriting. The date was three days old. I turned the folder square to the edge of the table and left the tape alone.

I looked at the steam coming off the coffee and left the cup where it was. I had been sick around two in the morning and hadn't eaten since.

I had nothing ready. The version of me that had written seven novels came apart under that look, and there was nothing under it.

I gave it up. For the first time in front of an actual person, I let go of all of it.

I started talking. My voice came out rough and kept breaking. I told him the whole thing, flat, with nothing taken off it.

I told him about the dead end after the first books, when the dreams with the blood in them stopped coming and left me an empty head and the certainty that the business was about to be finished with me.

I told him about the winter night the first manuscript arrived, signed GhostInk, sent by email and then through a platform called Black Ink. I told him the price: $15,000 for that first one, $30,000 for every one after it.

I told him I had bought the last six novels that way, put my own name on the covers, and pulled $165,000 out of our savings to do it.

To make him believe it, I got up and took him down to the basement under the floor, where the air was all wet paper and mold.

I pulled the wood chair over and laid it out on the table for him: the printed emails, every one of them in order, and the screenshots of the Black Ink chat window with the timestamps still in the corner.

Forty-one printouts. The rubber band around them had gone hard in the damp and broke in my hand when I pulled it off, and I put the pieces in my shirt pocket. Michael read standing, with his hands behind his back, and never touched a page.

I told him about the threats, about Emily, about what Kessler had said to me. Kessler was 78 and ran something called the Hudson Valley Cognitive Foundation.

And I told him about the drive the afternoon before, out to Blackwood, where I stood on the sidewalk and watched Mia, 11 years old, in the flesh, living in the house with the peeling paint, with what was coming to her already written down. I told him I couldn't account for why the 22 pages of my unfinished eighth book lined up with what GhostInk had sent, only that they lined up, and that something connected the two.

When I stopped, the basement went quiet. The only sound left was the dehumidifier in the corner, cycling on... off... on...

I was ready for him to come apart at me.

I expected the finger in my face, the word plagiarist, two decades of being made a fool of. I put my back against the wall and waited to get hit.

He didn't.

He stood in the middle of the basement without moving, and the color went out of his face. Then he turned around and walked back up to the kitchen one step at a time.

When he sat down in the wood chair, the whole size of him went down with it. He took a cigarette out of his coat pocket and got the lighter going on the third try.

"I've had doubts since the second book, James..."

Michael said it low, through the smoke.

His voice came apart in pieces. There was no forgiveness anywhere in it. He had just taken his own mask off, and he was the one holding it.

"Fourteen years ago. The day you handed me the manuscript for The Watcher in the Dark."

I looked at him.

"You— what did you just say?"

"In that manuscript you wrote up the killing of a young woman out on the Hudson flats,"

Michael said. He made one dry sound that didn't get all the way to a laugh, with his eyes on the lit end of the cigarette.

"The victim's name in the draft you first handed me... was Elizabeth Hale. That's the name of a cousin of a woman I used to work with."

"She was 18. She was killed in 1998, and the state never got anywhere with it."

He stopped. When he came back his voice had closed up on him.

"The police that year never released the broken bracelet or the copper-plated cut on her neck. Both of them are in your manuscript, and they're exact."

I started to say something.

"Michael..."

"I went into the newspaper archive that same week,"

Michael said, and he brought his eyes up. They were red all the way through.

"I knew you couldn't have invented that detail. I knew you had a source somewhere you weren't going to tell me about."

"And do you know what I did about it, James?"

He stopped, took a swallow of coffee that had gone cold, and what came out next was about money and nothing else.

"I acted like I hadn't seen it."

"I told you, nicely, to change the name to Sarah so nobody could sue us. Then I took that manuscript to auction with every big house in New York."

"Why? Because that week I had just put a deposit on a $2 million house in Connecticut."

"Because my older daughter was starting at Columbia and that runs to six figures a year. Because the commission off one of your books kept my wife and me living in Manhattan like people who had never once done the math."

He smoked it down to the filter and kept holding it. The saucer between us was my mother's, one of four, with a hairline crack running under the glaze from the rim to the center. He tapped into it twice and missed both times, and the ash went on the table.

He put his head down into both hands and stayed there.

"I needed the money, James."

"You were the thing that paid for all of it. Every time you handed me a new manuscript with something in it nobody should have known, I told myself the same sentence. He's working from real files. Let it go."

"I kept my own eyes shut and my own ears shut for 20 years so I could keep taking that money."

The kitchen went quiet.

We sat looking at each other across the moldy table. Neither of us was the victim here.

We had both sold whatever we had for a name on a cover, for the light that came with it, and for money we knew where it came from.