Twenty-eight
“What are you doing here?” Leila Donnelly said to Melanie Joan. “How did you find my home? Are you stalking me?”
Melanie Joan opened her mouth, then closed it again. In all the years I’d known her, this was the first time I’d ever seen her at a loss for words.
I found that completely understandable.
“Listen, this isn’t a great time.” Leila Donnelly said it dismissively, like we were a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses and she had no interest in the Good News.
I thought about what Evan Woodrow had said, about Book Babe being one of Leila Donnelly’s first champions, how she’d turned Donnelly into an “instant bestseller” with one five-star review.Like it or not,he’d said,that’s power.
It was something, all right.
“Sock puppet,” Melanie Joan said.
I had no idea what that meant.
Leila didn’t seem to know, either. “I said what I said, Melanie Joan. If you want to apologize to somebody, then apologize to Book Babe.”
Melanie Joan let out a mirthless laugh.
“I don’t have time for this,” Leila said. She started to close the door.
“Oh, I think you do.” I glared at her. “Book Babe.”
Leila’s eyes widened. She cleared her throat. Her cheeks flushed and her gaze dropped to the floor, a tiny vein popping out just between her eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said. And even though I’d always considered the reading of tells and body-language cues to be an even more unreliable science than polygraph testing, I knew a liar when I saw one. Swinging Dick’s intel was correct. Leila Donnelly was Book Babe. I’d have staked my life on it.
“She’s talking about you,” Melanie Joan said. “How you made up an online persona and gained followers so you could hype your own books and trash your competition.”
I turned to Melanie Joan. “Is that what a sock puppet is?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Wow, you learn something new every day,” I said.
“Well, you taught me about dis tracks, so now we’re even.”
Leila said, “I don’t know where you get your information, but—”
“We tracked Book Babe’s IP address, and it led us here,” I said. “Unless maybe it’s a housemate? You live alone?”
“None of your business.”
“I’m taking that as a yes.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“Your fans might not agree,” I said. “I mean, from what I gather, they started reading you in the first place because Book Babe said you were awesome. And if Book Babe isyou, well…”
Somewhere within her house, a young child started to scream.
“Don’t forget how she put a target on my back by posting a video in support of her own sock puppet,” Melanie Joan said.
“Yeah, I don’t think the readers will like that, either.”
The screams grew louder. Leila whirled around. “Tommy,be quiet!”
The screaming stopped.
