Then again, there was perhaps an easier—and almost certainly more lucrative—way forward: What about a quick phone call to the Daily Mail? How much would they pay for the inside scoop on Theo Myerson? Quite a bit, she imagined, Myerson being precisely the sort of person—rich, clever, sophisticated, leftish, metropolitan-elite-made-decadent-flesh—that the Daily Mail loathed.
She finished her coffee and pottered down to her kitchen table, where she opened her laptop and had just begun to type “how to sell a story to the newspapers” into Google when there came a knock at the window. She looked up and very nearly fell off her stool. Myerson! Bent over on the towpath, peering through her cabin porthole.
Warily, she made her way out onto the back deck. Theo stood a few yards away, hands thrust into his pockets, expression glum. He’d aged since last she saw him, being led away by the police. Then he was still his portly, red-faced self; now he looked thinner, wrung out, hangdog. Miserable. Her heart twitched in her chest. She ought to be jumping for joy—wasn’t this what she wanted? To see him brought low, to see him suffering. Why on earth did she find herself feeling sorry for him?
“Look,” he said. “Enough’s enough. All right? I just . . . I’m sure you realize that I’m going through something.” He shrugged. “I can’t even put into words what I’m going through. Yes, I see the irony. In any case, the point is, I don’t want to get the police involved. I’ve had quite enough of them over the past month. Enough to last me a lifetime. However, if you continue to harass me, you really will leave me no choice.”
“I beg your pardon? Harass you? I haven’t come anywhere near you, I—”
Theo sighed, an exhausted sound. He pulled from his inside jacket pocket a piece of paper, which, slowly and with great deliberation, he unfolded. He began to read from it in a flat voice, devoid of intonation. “Not responding to my letters is rude, it tells me you are very arrogant. That story wasn’t yours to tell, it was mine, you had no right to use it in the way you did. You should have to pay people for using their stories, you should have to ask permission. Who do you think you are to use my story . . . et cetera et cetera. There are half a dozen of them like that. Well, not quite like that, they started off as polite expressions of interest in my work, clearly designed to bait me into saying something about my inspiration for the story, but they quickly deteriorated. You get the gist. You know the gist. You wrote the gist. They’re postmarked Islington, Miriam, for God’s sake—I can see that you’ve tried to disguise who you are, but—”
Miriam gawped at him, mystified. “That is not from me. Perhaps you stole someone else’s story? Perhaps you do it all the time.”
“Oh, for God’s sake.”
“It’s not from me!”
Theo took a step back, exhaling in one long, shuddering breath. “Is it money you want?” he asked her. “I mean, you say here, you should have to pay people, so is that it? How much would it take? How much would it take for you to just leave me . . .” His voice cracked and Miriam was horrified to feel tears spring to her eyes. “To just leave me alone?”
Miriam quickly wiped her face with her sleeve and climbed down off the boat. She held out her hand. “Could I see those, please?” she asked. Theo handed the pages over without question.
The paper was thin, of poor quality, the handwriting careful but childlike.
Myerson,
Why won’t you answer my letters? The problem with people like you is they think their above everyone. That story wasn’t yours to tell, it was mine. You had no right to use it in the way you did!!! You should have to pay people for using their stories. You should have to ask permission. Who do you think you are to use my story without asking. You didn’t even do a good job. The killer in the story is weak. How would a weak man do what he did? What would you know about it anyway. You didn’t show respect.
She was shaking her head. “This isn’t from me,” she said, turning the page over in her hand. “You can’t possibly think this is from me—this person is barely literate.”
She started on the next one.
The police took you away so maybe your not so much better than everyone else after all? Maybe I should talk to the police about you taking my story. There should be a fee at least but the thing that’s really bugging me is how you knew about Black River.
Miriam’s breath caught in her chest.
I will leave you alone and wont’ write anymore if you tell me how you knew about Black River.