Page 57 of A Slow Fire Burning

The stuff of fiction! Miriam couldn’t help but laugh: Would Myerson try to wrangle a novel out of this mess? Perhaps she, Miriam,should try to wrangle a novel out of it. How would that be for a worm turning? For Miriam to takehislife story and use it as material, to twist it any way she liked, to rob him of his agency, of his words, his power.

Then again, there was perhaps an easier—and almost certainly more lucrative—way forward: What about a quick phone call to theDaily Mail? How much would they pay for the inside scoop on Theo Myerson? Quite a bit, she imagined, Myerson being precisely the sort of person—rich, clever, sophisticated, leftish, metropolitan-elite-made-decadent-flesh—that theDaily Mailloathed.

She finished her coffee and pottered down to her kitchen table, where she opened her laptop and had just begun to type “how to sell a story to the newspapers” into Google when there came a knock at the window. She looked up and very nearly fell off her stool. Myerson! Bent over on the towpath, peering through her cabin porthole.

Warily, she made her way out onto the back deck. Theo stood a few yards away, hands thrust into his pockets, expression glum. He’d aged since last she saw him, being led away by the police. Then he was still his portly, red-faced self; now he looked thinner, wrung out, hangdog. Miserable. Her heart twitched in her chest. She ought to be jumping for joy—wasn’t this what she wanted? To see him brought low, to see him suffering. Why on earth did she find herself feeling sorry for him?

“Look,” he said. “Enough’s enough. All right? I just... I’m sure you realize that I’m going through something.” He shrugged. “I can’t even put into words what I’m going through. Yes, I see the irony. In any case, the point is, I don’t want to get the police involved. I’ve had quite enough of them over the past month. Enough to last me a lifetime. However, if you continue to harass me, you really will leave me no choice.”

“I beg your pardon?Harassyou? I haven’t come anywhere near you, I—”

Theo sighed, an exhausted sound. He pulled from his inside jacket pocket a piece of paper, which, slowly and with great deliberation, he unfolded. He began to read from it in a flat voice, devoid of intonation. “Not responding to my letters is rude, it tells me you are very arrogant. That story wasn’t yours to tell, it was mine, you had no right to use it in the way you did. You should have to pay people for using their stories, you should have to ask permission. Who do you think you are to use my story... et cetera et cetera. There are half a dozen of them like that. Well, not quite like that, they started off as polite expressions of interest in my work, clearly designed to bait me into saying something about my inspiration for the story, but they quickly deteriorated. You get the gist. You know the gist. Youwrotethe gist. They’re postmarked Islington, Miriam, for God’s sake—I can see that you’ve tried to disguise who you are, but—”

Miriam gawped at him, mystified. “That isnotfrom me. Perhaps you stole someone else’s story? Perhaps you do it all the time.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

“It’s not from me!”

Theo took a step back, exhaling in one long, shuddering breath. “Is it money you want?” he asked her. “I mean, you say here,you should have to pay people, so is that it? How much would it take? How much would it take for you to just leave me...” His voice cracked and Miriam was horrified to feel tears spring to her eyes. “To just leave me alone?”

Miriam quickly wiped her face with her sleeve and climbed down off the boat. She held out her hand. “Could I see those, please?” she asked. Theo handed the pages over without question.

The paper was thin, of poor quality, the handwriting careful but childlike.

Myerson,

Why won’t you answer my letters? The problem with people like you is they think their above everyone. That story wasn’t yours to tell, it was mine. You had no right to use it in the way you did!!! You should have to pay people for using their stories. You should have to ask permission. Who do you think you are to use my story without asking. You didn’t even do a good job. The killer in the story is weak. How would a weak man do what he did? What would you know about it anyway. You didn’t show respect.

She was shaking her head. “This isn’t from me,” she said, turning the page over in her hand. “You can’t possibly think this is from me—this person is barely literate.”

She started on the next one.

The police took you away so maybe your not so much better than everyone else after all? Maybe I should talk to the police about you taking my story. There should be a fee at least but the thing that’s really bugging me is how you knew about Black River.

Miriam’s breath caught in her chest.

I will leave you alone and wont’ write anymore if you tell me how you knew about Black River.

Beneath her feet, the earth shifted.

She read the line out loud. “Tell me how you knew about Black River.”

“It’s a song,” Theo said. “It’s not a reference to the place, it’s—”

“I know what it is,” Miriam said. The world was turning black, the darkness closing in too fast for her to push it back. She opened her mouth but she could draw no air into her lungs; her muscles weren’t working, not her diaphragm nor the muscles in her legs or her arms. She was trembling violently, her vision gone almost altogether; the last thing she saw before she collapsed was Theo Myerson’s startled face.

“It was on in the car, on the radio. The song. I remember him fiddling with the tuner, he was trying to change the station, but Lorraine asked him not to. She was singing. She was singing, and she said, don’t you like this one? ‘Black River.’ ”

Myerson set a glass of water down on her bedside table and then stood awkwardly, looking down at her. It should have been embarrassing, Theo Myerson helping her up from where she’d collapsed on the towpath, the two of them shuffling like an old couple back to the boat, where he put her to bed, like a child. Like an invalid. Miriam would have been mortified if she’d been capable of feeling mortification, if she’d been capable of feeling anything other than a sort of bewildered terror. She lay on her back, her eyes trained on the wooden slats of the ceiling, trying to concentrate on her breathing, in and out, trying to concentrate on the here, on the now, but she couldn’t, not with him there.

“Who else did you show it to?” he asked. “Your... uh, yourmanuscript. Who else read it?”

“I never showed it to anyone else,” Miriam said. “Except for Laura Kilbride, but that was only very recently, and according to the newspapers she’s not in a fit state to write anyone any letters. I never showed it to anyone else.”

“That can’t be true! You showed it to a lawyer, didn’t you?” Theo said, towering over her, rubbing his big balding head. “You must have done! You showed it tomylawyer, certainly, when you made your, uh, your complaint.” He shifted from one foot to another. “Your claim.”

Miriam closed her eyes. “I didn’t send anyone the whole manuscript. I selected a number of pages, I pointed to various similarities. I never mentioned the singing, even though it was... even though it was perhaps the clearest evidence of yourtheft.” Theo grimaced. He looked as though he wanted to say something but thought better of it. “I didn’t want to mention her singing, I didn’t even want to think about it, about the last time I heard her voice like that, the last time I heard her happy, carefree. The last time I heard her unafraid.”

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