“What did he look like?”
“A real creep.” She smirks. “The kind of guy who’d sneak up on you in a dark alley and tell you what a pretty mouth you have.”
“What did he want?” Sammie asks, puzzled. She doesn’t have a clue who’d show up here looking for her. Or who even knows she’s here.
“I guess there’s so many men hunting you down you can’t keep track of them,” Kelly says. “And I bet all these guys have wives or girlfriends.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re so full of it. You should get down off your high horse before you fall and hurt yourself.”
Sammie pushes past the girl to get out, gritting her teeth and resisting the urge to clap her hands over her ears because the girl is still talking. She isn’t crying, she’s not the crying type, but she’s angry, and it’s a few minutes before her hands stop shaking.
*
When she leaves work she heads downtown, weaves through the afternoon traffic, and slips into a parking lot, where she has to buy a ticket from a machine and stick it on her dashboard so she won’t get towed. She walks quickly up a side alley to Sixteenth Street, where the lampposts are wrapped in twinkling white lights and the pedestrian shuttles are running nonstop. It is crowded on the street, people swarming past, going home from work or to work from home, doing some holiday shopping, grabbing an early dinner. The country is supposed to be in a recession, but you’d never know it here.
It’s cold, but it’s not far to where she wants to go. She ducks inside, and the gold bell above the door jangles merrily. The bookstore is warm and well lit, and she stands just inside it for a moment, rubbing her hands together. She hasn’t been in this building for a long time, not since Seever’s trial, when she was invited to read some of her work, excerpts from the book she’d been writing on Seever, bits that hadn’t made it into the paper but she’d squirreled away instead. Back then everyone had assumed she’d be announcing a book any moment, and the back room of the Tattered Cover had been completely packed with folding chairs, standing room only, the people were crowded in at the corners, their heads tilted as they strained to hear her read. She’d been flushed, nervous, and she’d forgotten to pee before starting, so all she could think about was her hot, heavy bladder throbbing against the bottom of her belly, but it’d gone well; there’d been plenty of applause and later a few people had asked for her autograph on copies of the Post, above her byline. But then, before Sammie’s head had been able to stop spinning from it all, that other book about Seever was published, written by two guys who’d never even been to Colorado, who’d done some searching online and wrote a few hundred pages. And they’d referenced her articles, for God’s sake, they’d ripped off her material and got away with it, and then it was over; no one wanted another book about Seever then, especially not with all those kids going missing out east, and a string of murders in Florida. Jacky Seever was big news then, but he wasn’t the only news, and the public was hungry for some new piece of gore to snack on. The book about Seever, she thinks, the one not written by her, was the beginning of the end, but at least it didn’t sell well. It wasn’t made into a movie, thank God. So it isn’t all bad.
She walks through the bookstore, the old wooden floorboards creaking under her shoes. The thin green carpet is bunched up in some places, so she has to be careful not to trip. But it’s the books she’s looking at, the endless shelves of them, going from the floor all the way up to the ceiling in some places. It makes her dizzy, all these words together in one place, it always has, even when she was a kid and would visit the public library during the summer, and their air conditioning would be cranked and the water fountain icy cold, but she’d still be sweating and almost ill, because it was all so overwhelming. But in this store she knows exactly where she’s going, she does this every time she comes in, but now it feels like it means something more, now that she might have a chance. She goes to the corner where the nonfiction is kept, and she runs her fingers along the spines until she finds the exact spot where her book about Seever would be sitting. Should be sitting. Will be. She worms her pointer finger in between two books she’s never read and holds it there, feels the spot where she’s supposed to be, where she’s going to be.