The job itself was a kind of hybrid of admissions officer, cruise director, and plant supervisor, but even cumulatively these were not particularly taxing. More onerous, of course, was the fact that he was required to be physically present at the Adlon during the daytime (and technically on call at night and on the weekends), but given the actual labor associated with most jobs, Jake tended to feel pretty fortunate. He was living frugally and saving money. He was still in the world of writing and writers (albeit farther than he had ever been from his own writerly ambitions). He was still able to work on his novel in progress (or he would be, if he had one), and in the meantime he could continue to nurture and mentor other writers, beginning writers, struggling writers, even writers like himself undergoing what might be called a mid-career retrenchment. As he had once long ago opined, in a cinder-block conference room on the old Ripley campus (which, last he’d heard, had been purchased by a company that did corporate retreats and conferences), this was merely what writers had always done for one another.

The Adlon, on this particular day, had six guest-writers, which meant that the center was only at about 20 percent capacity (though that was six people more than Jake imagined would choose to spend January in a snowbound latter-day spa town that hadn’t even had the good sense to turn into Saratoga Springs). Three of the guests were sisters in their sixties who were collaborating on a multigenerational family story, unsurprisingly based on their own family. Another was a vaguely menacing man who actually lived just south of Cooperstown, but drove to the hotel every morning, wrote all day, and left after dinner. There was a poet from Montreal—she didn’t say much, even when she was down for meals—and a guy who’d arrived a couple of days earlier from Southern California. (Why would any sane person leave Southern California in January to travel to upstate New York?) So far they were a quietly cooperative and nondramatic group, a far cry from some of the intramural insanity he’d personally witnessed at Ragdale and VCCA! The hotel itself was running as smoothly as a hundred-and-thirty-year-old building could be expected to run, and the Adlon’s pair of cooks, a mother and daughter from Cobleskill, were turning out very tasty meals, remarkable given the remoteness of the region in winter. And that morning, as far as Jake knew, the hours ahead promised nothing more than an opportunity to sit in his office behind the hotel’s former check-in desk and begin editing the fourth revision of a profoundly unthrilling thriller from a client in Milwaukee.

An ordinary day, in other words, in a life that was about to become a whole lot less ordinary.

CHAPTER SIX

What Terrible Thing

The guy from California made an appearance shortly after lunch, or at least after the lunch baskets had been taken upstairs and left by the doors of the writers’ rooms. He was a burly man in his late twenties with tattooed forearms and a kind of swept-aside chunk of hair that always fell back right away. He came storming into Jake’s little office behind the former check-in desk and set his basket down on Jake’s table.

“Well, this is crap.”

Jake looked up at him. He’d been deep in his client’s terrible thriller, a narrative so formulaic that he could have told you exactly what was going to happen, and in what order, even if this were the first time he was clawing his way through it, rather than the fourth.

“Lunch?”

“Crap. Some kind of brown meat. What is it, something you hit on the drive over here?”

Jake actually smiled. The roadkill of Schoharie County was indeed broad in its range.

“Do you not eat meat?”

“Oh, I eat meat. I don’t eat crap, though.”

Jake sat back in his chair. “I’m so sorry. Why don’t we go into the kitchen and we can talk to Patty and Nancy about what you like and don’t like. We can’t always guarantee a separate meal, but we want you to be happy. With only six of you in residence now, we should be able to tweak the menus.”

“This town is, like, pathetic. There’s nothing here.”

Well, now. In that, Jake’s Californian friend was rather decisively wrong. Sharon Springs’s glory days might have been in the late nineteenth century (Oscar Wilde himself had once lectured at the Pavilion Hotel), but recent years had brought a promising revival. The town’s flagship American Hotel had been restored to a certain degree of elegance, and a couple of surprisingly good restaurants had taken root on the tiny main street. Most important of all, a couple of men from Manhattan, involuntarily separated from their media jobs in the 2008 downturn, had bought a local farm, acquired a herd of goats, and commenced making cheese, soap, and, more importantly, a great big stir in the world well beyond Sharon Springs, New York. They’d written books, starred in their own reality television show, and opened a shop that would have been right at home on the main streets of East Hampton or Aspen, directly across from the American Hotel. That place was getting to be a bona fide tourist attraction. Though maybe not in January.

“Have you been out to explore? A lot of the writers go over to the Black Cat Café in the morning. The coffee there is great. And the food at the Bistro is excellent.”

“I’m paying you enough to be here, and to work on my book here. The coffee here should be great. And the food here shouldn’t be shit. I mean, would it kill you to do an avocado toast?”

Jake looked at him. In California, avocados might grow on trees—literally—in January, but he doubted this dude would approve of the rock-hard specimens down at the Cobleskill Price Chopper.

“Milk and cheese are kind of the main thing around here. Maybe you’ve noticed all the dairy farms?”

“I’m lactose intolerant.”

“Oh.” Jake frowned. “Did we know that? Is it on your forms?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t fill out any forms.”

The guy flipped back his thick hair. Again. And it fell forward into his eyes. Again. It made Jake think of something.

“Well, I hope you’ll write down some of the foods you’d be happy to see at meals. I wouldn’t count on good avocados up here, not at this time of year, but if there are dishes you like I’ll talk to Patty and Nancy. Unless you want to do that.”

“I want to write my book,” the guy said, so fiercely he might have been uttering a tagline in an adventure movie, something along the lines of You haven’t seen the last of me or Don’t underestimate what I’m capable of. “I came here to get this done, and I don’t want to be thinking about anything else. I don’t want to be listening to those three witches, cackling away all the time on the other side of my wall. I don’t want to have a bathroom with pipes that wake me up in the morning. And what’s with the fireplace in my bedroom I’m not allowed to have a fire in. I distinctly remember a fire in one of the rooms when I looked at your website. What the fuck is that?”

“That was the parlor fire,” Jake said. “We haven’t been cleared for fires in the rooms, unfortunately. But we light the parlor fire every afternoon, and I’d be happy to do it earlier if you’d like to work down there, or read. Everything we do here is to try and support our guest-writers, and see they have what they need to do their work. And of course to support one another, as writers.”

Jake thought, even as he said this, of all the times he had said it in the past, or said something like it, and when he’d said it the people he’d said it to always nodded in agreement, because they, too, were writers, and writers understood the power of their commonalities. That had always been true. Except for right this minute. And, now it dawned on him, one other time.

Then the guy folded his arms tightly across his chest and glared at Jake, and the final part of the connection snapped into place.

Evan Parker. From Ripley. The one with the story.

Now he understood why, throughout this encounter, his brain had felt like it was circling back on itself, why his thoughts had been looping around and around an as yet unspecified thing. No, he had never met this particular asshole until a couple of days ago, but did that mean he wasn’t familiar to Jake? He was familiar. Hugely familiar.

Not that he’d spent the past couple of years ruminating on that asshole, because what writer of any degree of professional success, not just Jake’s own—would want to dwell on a first-time writer who’d somehow managed to pull the lever on the slot machine of spectacular stories at exactly the right moment, with his very first dime, no less, sending an utterly unearned jackpot of success shuddering into his lap? Always, when Evan Parker came drifting through Jake’s thoughts, it was with the usual surge of envy, the usual bitterness at the unfairness of it all, and then the brief observation that the book itself had not yet—to his knowledge, and it would obviously have been to his knowledge—reached actual publication, which might have meant that Jake’s former student had underestimated his own ability to get the thing finished, but he took no great comfort in that. The story, as its author himself had pointed out, was a silver bullet, and whenever the book did emerge it would be successful, and its author also successful beyond his (or, more painfully, Jake’s) wildest dreams.