Flowers in a Dumpster (30 page)

“No, I think I’m fed up. Now, I’ve got work to do, so if you don’t mind.”

“And what if I do?” Vanessa said, refusing to back down. She still felt the fear, but she would not give in to it. She was a strong woman whose own mother had taught her to stand up for herself. “What if I do mind? This is my computer, too. What if I want to stay up all night in the
Grey’s Anatomy
chatroom?”

Rich crossed to the desk, shook a cigarette out of a near-empty pack, and lit up. Having him this close, looking at her with that gleam of contempt, made her knees feel weak, but Vanessa locked them in place and stood her ground.

“What is it?” Richard said, blowing a foul cloud of smoke directly into his wife’s face. “You obviously want to talk about something, so let’s get it over with so I can get you the fuck out of my hair. What do you want to talk about now?”

“Mace Hunter.”

Richard flinched, the cigarette drooping in his lips for a second, then said, “What about him?”

“Is that his real name?”

“Of course it’s his real name.” Richard seemed flustered all of a sudden, as if this line of questioning had thrown him off track. “What kind of stupid question is that?”

“Well, is that the name he publishes under or does he use a pseudonym?”

“Where are you going with this, Ness?”

Vanessa took a deep breath and said, “I decided to look Mace up on the Internet, see what I could find out about him, and I—”

“You did what?” Richard shouted, his sudden nervousness evaporating in the heat of rage. “You snooping little whore, what gives you the right to go sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong?”

“What gives me the right?” Vanessa countered, stoking the fires of her own rage. “You are inviting a stranger into this house, and you think I don’t have the right to find out everything I can about him? Well, excuse me, but if I’m going to have that man under our roof, I want to know as much as I can.”

“He’s my friend; that’s all you need to know.”

“Richard, listen to me. Whoever this Mace Hunter is, he’s a phony.”

“Get out of here,” Richard said, sitting down in front of the computer and opening the file for his novel. “I don’t want to look at your face right now.”

“Richard, please listen. He told you he had been published in
Dark Corner of the Mind
, but I went to their website and looked up the contents of every issue for the past four years. They have never published any story by a Mace Hunter. I also looked up some of the smaller publications you told me he’d been published in—
Shadows
,
Out of the Deep
,
Galaxy Explorer
,
Shaman, Last Rites
—and I couldn’t find anything by Mace Hunter. I went back years.”

Richard put his hands over his ears as if trying to block out his wife’s words. “Stop it! Why are you doing this?”

“Richard, you have to hear this,” Vanessa said, grabbing her husband’s hands and prying them away from the sides of his head. “Mace has been lying to you all this time. I don’t know what game he’s playing, but he’s not who he claims to be.”

“Shut up!” Richard said, shooting to his feet. He knocked the chair back and it clattered to the floor. He grabbed Vanessa by the arms, squeezing hard, and shook her like a maraca. “Don’t talk about Mace that way, don’t you dare say one more fucking thing against him! I won’t have you badmouthing him. He’s all I’ve got.”

Vanessa looked pleadingly into her husband’s eyes, searching for some sign that the man she’d fallen in love with was still in there somewhere. “Rich,” she said, trying to pull out of his grip, “he’s not all you’ve got.”

“Oh yeah? What else do I have?”

“You have me.”

For a second, Ness saw the old Richard resurface. She was sure of it, but then he roared and shoved her to the side. She collided with the side of a large, wooden bookcase and went down on her knees, a few thick hardbacks pelting her as they fell from the shelves.

“I think it’s best if I take a walk,” Richard said, his voice eerily calm and inflectionless. “I need some time away from you.”

“Richard, I’m begging you—”

“I suggest you don’t say anymore. You’d do anything to turn me against Mace, but it’s not going to work. He’s coming for a visit, and he’s free to stay as long as he wants. You can either accept it or pack your fucking bags.”

Vanessa felt her anger rising back to the surface like a bloated corpse from a watery grave. She grabbed a shelf and pulled herself to her feet. Her gaze had steel in it as she said, “You can’t kick me out. This is my house, too. And I don’t want that lying son of a bitch here.”

“I’ll be back later,” Richard said, turning away from her. “I’ll give you time to come to your senses and we’ll talk about it later.”

“Do you hear me, Richard? I’m not going to change my mind. I don’t want that bastard in this house.”

Richard said nothing more, simply left the room. Vanessa heard him go out the front door, and distantly she heard his car crank and drive off down the block. She suddenly felt too weak to stand. She grabbed the edge of the desk to keep from crumpling in a puddle on the floor again. She couldn’t deny any more how afraid she was, afraid of her husband and afraid
for
him.

Reaching a decision, she absently wiped the tears from her eyes and righted the toppled chair. She settled down in front of the computer, opened up Internet Explorer. She had to find something concrete, some definite proof that Mace Hunter was a fake, something she could show her husband and he could not deny. Where to start?

A metaphorical light bulb blinked over Vanessa’s head and she opened up the ‘Favorites,’ running down the list of websites she and her husband frequently visited. Richard said he had met Mace on a message board, and there it was. Vanessa clicked on the link,
www.bookaholics.com
. The site offered many different options for discussing books. There was a reviews section where people could post and read reviews of various books, a message board, and a live chatroom. There were currently three chatters online, according to the site. Vanessa figured this would be her best shot.

She had no idea what Richard’s User ID was, so she quickly created her own profile, using the name SmallNess. She entered the chat room and was immediately greeted.

BookMan:
Howdy SmallNess.

Literary_Queen:
You must be new to the board. I don’t recall seeing you here before.

SmallNess:
Yes, this is my first time here.

Scout:
Well, welcome to our humble little board. We were discussing the latest by Tom Clancy, if you want to join in.

SmallNess:
Thanks, but I was actually checking things out. My husband comes on here a lot.

BookMan:
Who’s your husband?

SmallNess:
Richard Small.

Literary_Queen:
Doesn’t ring a bell. What’s his screen name?

SmallNess:
I’m actually not sure.

Scout:
Well, there are many regulars who come on here.

SmallNess:
Do any of you know Mace Hunter?

BookMan:
Oh yeah, we certainly know Mace. His handle is WriteStuff.

Scout:
He used to come on here all the time, but we haven’t seen much of him in the past few months.

Literary_Queen:
Which is a blessing, you ask me. I for one can’t stand that pretentious asshole.

SmallNess:
Yes, that certainly sounds like Mace to me.

BookMan:
He can definitely be overbearing. Made quite a few enemies on this board. I think he’s on more than a few people’s Ignore List, if you know what I mean.

Literary_Queen:
Acts like he’s better than everyone else. He can’t accept that some people don’t agree with every single one of his opinions. If someone contradicts him, he gets all adolescent and starts in with the name-calling and insults.

Scout:
Well, I’m not the guy’s biggest fan either, but you have to admit, he is one hell of a writer.

BookMan:
I’ll give you that one.

SmallNess:
You’ve read his work?

BookMan:
Yeah, he posted a few of his short stories on here earlier in the year. Said he was desperate for some feedback.

Literary_Queen:
I was rather fond of that one story he wrote about the married couple, ‘And This Too Shall Pass.’

Vanessa leaned back in the chair, staring at the words on the screen as if they were in a foreign language. ‘And This Too Shall Pass’ was Richard’s story, but apparently Mace Hunter was taking credit for it. Was that the bastard’s game? Stealing her husband’s work and passing it off as his own? It made sense in a way, but . . .

But wait. BookMan said Mace had posted the story earlier in the year, and Rich and Mace had not started their correspondence until a few months ago. How could he have stolen Richard’s story and posted it online before they’d started trading stories? Unless, was it possible that Richard was the plagiarist? That he’d read Mace’s story on the board and stolen it? There was a time when Vanessa would have considered that possibility preposterous, but Richard had been behaving so erratically lately that she could no longer discount it.

Exiting the chatroom, Vanessa began exploring the rest of the site. She discovered that she could look up specific member profiles by their User IDs. She typed in ‘WriteStuff’ and hit enter. She drummed her fingers on the desktop as her request was processed. It took only five seconds, but patience was a virtue no longer in her repertoire. Finally Mace’s profile appeared onscreen.

NAME:
Mace Hunter

LOCATION:
Seattle, Washington

GENDER:
Male

AGE:
42

STATS:
6’3”, 180 lbs., eyes dark as sin, hair the color of midnight

PROFESSION:
Writer

MARITAL STATUS:
Divorced (quite happily)

PERSONAL QUOTE:
“When life hands you lemons, rub the bitter juice into your scars until you become immune to the pain.”

“What kind of personal quote is that?” Vanessa mumbled out loud. It was ridiculously macho, and yet oddly familiar. As was the “eyes dark as sin, hair the color of midnight” reference in his stats. It was like something she may have once read in a—

Vanessa gasped as the connection that had eluded her the other day was finally made. The revelation crashed down on her like a cartoon anvil, but she shook her head as if to deny it. It couldn’t be. It didn’t make sense. Yet it made perfect sense in a warped sort of way.

She pushed away from the desk and hurried downstairs to the hall closet. It was piled high with boxes, the junk they had no use for but could not bring themselves to throw out. She rummaged around, heedlessly tossing items out into the hallway, until she found the box of Richard’s college momentous. She dug through the contents, pushing aside Rich’s cap and gown, yearbooks, playbills, and there in the bottom she found a stack of magazines.
Reflections
, the school’s literary journal.

Vanessa sat Indian-style on the floor, flipping quickly through the magazines, looking for Richard’s work. Halfway through the third one, she found what she was searching for. It was a short story of Richard’s that she had forgotten about, entitled ‘Hunter’s Prey.’ The main character was Mace Hunter, a 42-year-old writer from Seattle, Washington. In the first paragraph he was described as having “eyes dark as sin, hair the color of midnight.” Near the end of the first page, he tells his ex-wife, “When life hands you lemons, rub the bitter juice into your scars until you become immune to the pain.”

Vanessa’s mind was a chaotic whirlpool of confusion. Mace Hunter, her husband’s new best friend and confidant, was a product of Richard’s own imagination. He had been thought up over a decade and a half ago.

But that was impossible. Mace Hunter had to be real; Richard had been exchanging emails with him for months now. If Mace didn’t exist, that would mean Rich had been handling both sides of the correspondence, writing back and forth to himself as if he were two different people. Why would he do something like that? Was he so desperate for encouragement and understanding that he’d invented a source for it, convincing himself this other person was real?

Clutching the magazine in her hands, Ness hurried back upstairs to the computer room. She typed in
www.coolmail.com
and was directed to the Log In page. For User ID she put “mhunter” then tabbed down to the password. The cursor blinked on and off at her like a winking eye. She thought for a moment then typed in “August5,” her and Richard’s wedding anniversary and the password for their shared email account. An angry red message appeared, informing her that the password was incorrect.

Vanessa tried everything she could think of—Rich’s mother’s maiden name, his birth date, her birth date, his social security number, the name of his first pet—all to no avail. Running out of ideas, Vanessa leaned back and tried to clear her mind, hoping the obvious would come to her if she made room for it. Her eyes wandered to the literary journal, lying crumpled beside the keyboard.