“She’s the nothing! I’ve proven it already.”
“How? By killing make-believe people?”
“They’re flesh and blood. They must be flesh and blood. I made her cardboard characters flesh and blood. I transformed them and breathed life into them. A true writer must embody the characters she creates. Must live inside them. Occupy them. Think and speak and feel as they do.”
“But you embodied and you killed DeLano’s characters.”
“My characters! Mine. I made them mine, because I’m better. I showed her I’m better.”
She tapped her fisted hands on the table like beating a drum. Passion flushed the thin, sallow face.
“The villain is the key. The villain is the core. Anybody can write the expected, write the trite and tidy good overcomes evil. I showed her how much more creative, more real, more fascinating it is when evil triumphs. Why does Dark always win? Because DeLano has no real imagination, because she refuses to take creative risks. I showed her.”
“You didn’t kill three people on the pages of a book. Three actual people are dead. People you selected only because they fit the fictional profile created by another writer.”
“A hack,” Smith said dismissively. “I made them real.”
“You made them dead.”
“Art demands sacrifice.”
The fire burned hot now so Eve saw the fanatic. Saw Strongbow. She saw the rage, and the horrible pride the mousy Ann Smith concealed.
“How did you select Pryor Carridine’s surrogate for sacrifice?”
“It’s basic research to a serious writer. To write, you have to experience. I learned that. I’ll admit Blaine DeLano taught me that. I risked everything to come to New York, to give up the ordinary, the comfortable, and strive.”
“Your mother’s shop in Wilmington,” Eve prompted.
“My mother.” Smith sneered. “She was no mother to me. Did she ever encourage me to be more? No, it was always, ‘Control your temper, Ann. Stop daydreaming, Ann.’ She wanted me to sew for the rest of my life! ‘Make a good living,’ she’d say. And never, never believed in my dreams. A hobby. She called my writing a hobby!”
“She left her shop, her business, in your hands.”
“I didn’t want it. It only paid the bills, only trapped me inside the ordinary. Doing the ordinary while I wrote? I barely slept for months. Months. Years. It blurs.”
“You left the business, came to New York.”
“Blaine told me to.”
“She told you to come to New York?” Eve qualified.
“Yes, yes. She encouraged me to dream, and that’s the same thing. I loved her for that. I believed in her, I thought she believed in me, so I risked everything. I worked for hours to pay the rent while my mind wrote and wrote and wrote.”
The hard light in her eyes softened as she pressed both hands to her heart. “Coming home to take those scenes, those characters, out of my head and putting them on the page were the happiest hours of my life. I often wrote through the night, then went back to Dobb’s or took a side job so I could support my true art.
“You can’t know the joy, the thrill, the satisfaction in the soul of finishing a book, that labor of sweat and blood and love.”
The rage snapped back. “And what did she do when I sent her that labor of sweat and blood and love? She rejected me.”
“That stung.”
“It cut me to the quick. I was so angry, so disillusioned, so wounded. She was my mentor, my friend, my teacher, and she put lawyers between us? Agents and lawyers prevented her from reading my book? I tried to understand, to forgive. I tried. And then …”
She lived in it now, Eve noted. Smith lived in that murky world where reality and fiction blurred. And while she did, she had to tell her story.
“Sudden Dark,” Eve prompted. “You read Sudden Dark.”
“And I saw what she’d done, how she’d used and betrayed me. I trusted her and she murdered that trust. She killed my innocence. She crushed my dreams.”