“She paid my last semester’s tuition,” says someone who knew her as Maggie Littleton. This woman, who has asked not to be named, told me a story of how Meg—or Maggie—befriended her at a community college in Spokane, where the two were taking a web design course. Meg worked hard to keep her skills sharp, always learning, always growing. The effort paid off with fake websites, photoshopped magazine features, and photographs. “Maggie used to babysit my kids for free. She knew I was struggling to save enough money for my last semester. When I went to the financial aid office to beg for an extension on my tuition, they told me it had already been paid. Maggie paid it in full, right before she left town. Everything I have—my business, my home—I have because of her.”
This is the mark of a true con artist, when the people she leaves behind can know what she’s done and still want the best for her.
I seriously considered writing the story. I had no doubt I could pitch it to any major outlet and they’d jump on it—a five-part series, a podcast, a feature—but I couldn’t do it. I knew the male gaze would quickly simplify a story about a female con artist down to its most basic parts. As if the most notable thing about Meg was her X chromosomes and not her sharp mind, her incredible wit, her cool-as-steel nerves when boxed into a corner.
I couldn’t stop reading her notebooks. Studying them like a map. Seeing something new, some small notation in the margin I’d missed the first time. The more I read, the more I learned. How to relocate and remain mostly off the grid. How to alter your name and create a believable backstory that would stand up to scrutiny. And her Facebook profile and password, printed on the inside cover of journal number three, automatic entry into the many private groups she used to find her targets.
What I held in my hands was an instruction manual for how to do what she did—and how to do it well. Meg Williams, the person I spent ten years dreaming of finding, will still change my life. Just not in the way I thought.
Jenna connected me with a literary agent she knows, and I spoke with her last week. “Your early pages are great! Finish the novel and I’m certain I can sell it,” she’d told me.
I stand in the doorway to the office I once shared with Scott, remembering the way we used to work in companionable silence. I worried I’d regret letting him off the hook. But I also didn’t want to be the one to ruin his life, even though what he’d done could have ruined mine. Scott isn’t like the men Meg targeted. He’s not greedy or corrupt; he’s just an addict, doing what addicts do. A man who needs help, not revenge. I hear he’s doing well in an outpatient treatment center in Nevada, working security at a bank.
Ron Ashton lost the election by a landslide, and when it was revealed that nearly half his contribution to the homeless came from campaign donations, his base abandoned him and the FEC stepped in.
As for Meg, I imagine her somewhere warm. A lush property with a lot of space and even more privacy. The freedom to discover her own heart. Her own dreams.
I spend a lot of time wondering what Meg would think if she knew what I was about to do. Whether that was her intention all along.
The difference between justice and revenge comes down to who’s telling the story.
I lock the door and slip the keys into a padded envelope addressed to my landlord, dropping it in the outgoing mail tray on my way out.
***
It took me less than an hour to find him, living in Portland and working as a regional sales manager of a software company. It’ll take me about two days to drive there. I’m sure he meets a lot of people—faces and names blending together, making it difficult for him to remember mine from one night, ten years ago. I’ve already set up a place to live, utilities included, of course. Through Meg’s Facebook profile I’ve identified several people who might overlap with Nate’s new circle of friends.
Thanks to Meg, he’ll never see me coming.
Read on for a look at another novel by Julie Clark