“Like someone was dragging something across the floor.”
“Interesting.”
“It’s interesting now,” Melanie Joan said. “But I didn’t think so then. Anyway, it stopped when I rang the bell.”
“What did you do?”
“I was so frustrated and angry, I just started yelling at Leila Donnelly through the door,” she said. “I told her I didn’t appreciate what she’d said to me, and that at least I put effort into my books. At least they didn’t read like a million other pieces of trash out there, filled with sexist tropes. I told her that she’s the hack. Not me. And I told her I had proof.”
“Proof?” I said.
“Thebook,” Melanie Joan said. “All the highlights. On the way there, I’d written a key on the title page—the meaning behind each color.”
It was more of a visual aid than proof. But that wasn’t the part I was concerned about. “So your handwriting was in that book.”
“Yes.”
“And you left it at her house.”
“Yes,” she said. “Leila Donnelly wouldn’t answer, so I put it on her doorstep. Another stupid, impulsive thing to do.”
“Melanie Joan,” I said. “Were you ever inside the house?”
“No.”
“You swear you are telling me the truth?”
“I swear on everything and everyone that’s ever been important to me,” she said.
“When I came back twenty minutes later, she was still on the front porch,” Charles said.
“What did you do next?”
Charles said he’d taken Melanie Joan to the Whiskey Rocks Bar and Rodeo steakhouse in Dudley, Massachusetts. She drank. He ordered a Coke and kept her company.
“I had a couple gin and tonics,” Melanie Joan said. “I was very, very depressed.”
“Why?”
“I just kept repeating the whole scene in my mind. Yelling at her through her door. Screaming, really. The desperation in my voice. The fact that she didn’t respond, even to tell me to leave. I just felt so…inconsequential. I talked to Charles about it. I told him that instead of going to Leila’s with that book, I should have started planning a new life for myself. Leave the writing to the Leila Donnellys of the world, you know? He had a clearer head than me since he was the designated driver, but he seemed to understand what was bothering me so much. He thought, too, that maybe it was time for me to hang it up.”
“That isn’t true,” Charles said.
“You even said—”
“Sleep it off. That’s what I said. Nothang it up. That’s two different things.”
“So you weren’t inside the house,” I said.
Melanie Joan looked at me. “Why do you keep asking that?”
“Because the book was inside the house, Melanie Joan. The police found it next to Leila’s body.”
Melanie Joan gawked at me.
“Jesus,” Charles said.
“So…at some point, someone must have opened that door and taken the book inside,” Melanie Joan said.
