And yet, the messenger that was “[email protected]” had not made his move on the open battlefields of Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram, or been netted by a Google alert. This guy hadn’t gone public at all; instead, he’d opted for the more private transom provided on Jake’s website. Was there some implicit negotiation here: Deal with me now, by this single vector, or deal with me later, everywhere? Or was it a shot across his private bow, a warning to brace for some imminent Battle of Trafalgar?

Jake had known, from that first moment in the back of the car to the Seattle airport, that this was no random message, and TalentedTom was no jealous novelist or disappointed reader or even troubled advocate of the Alpha Centaura/orange peel (or comparable!) origin story of his famous novel. Many years earlier, the adjective “talented” had been bound in eternal, indelible symbiosis to the name “Tom” by one Patricia Highsmith, forever augmenting its meaning to include a certain form of self-preservation and extreme lack of regard for others. That particular talented Tom had also happened to be a murderer. And what was his surname?

Ripley.

As in: Ripley. Where he and Evan Parker had so fatefully crossed paths.

The message was violently clear: whoever TalentedTom was, he knew. And he wanted Jake to know that he knew. And he wanted Jake to know that he meant business.

The person was a single click of the Return button away, but the notion of opening that aperture between the two of them was fraught with danger. Responding meant that Jake was afraid, that he took the accusation seriously, that TalentedTom, whoever he was, deserved the dignity of recognition. And showing even a tiny portion of himself to this malevolent stranger frightened Jake more than the diffuse and horrible notion of what might come next.

So, once again, he did not respond. Instead, he shakily consigned this second communiqué to the same place its predecessor was languishing, a folder on his laptop he’d labeled “Trolls.” (This had in fact been established fully six months earlier, and already housed a few dozen illiterate attacks on Crib, no fewer than three of which accused him of being a member of the “Deep State,” and a handful of emails from someone in Texas that referenced the “blood-brain barrier,” which Jake had evidently crossed, or which had been crossed within him—the messages were, by their very nature, confounding.) But even as he did this he knew it was its own pointless gesture; the TalentedTom communications were different. Whoever he was, this person had managed to become, in the blink of an eye, among the most significant in Jake’s life. And certainly the most terrifying.

Within minutes of receiving this second message Jake had powered off his phone, unplugged his router, and assumed a fetal position on the grubby couch he’d been hauling around since college, and there he remained for the following four days, working his way through a dozen cupcakes from Magnolia on Bleecker Street (some of them, at least, had healthy green icing) and the congratulatory bottle of Jameson that Matilda had sent after the film sale. There were, in these blurry hours, interludes of blissful numbness in which he actually forgot what was happening, but many more of sheer anguish during which he parsed and projected the many ways in which it could all be about to unfold: the various humiliations awaiting him, the revulsion of every single person he’d ever known, envied, felt superior to, had a crush on, or—lately—been in business with. At certain moments, and as if to usher in the inevitable and at least get it over with, he composed his own media campaign of punishing self-accusations, declaiming his crimes to the world. At other points he wrote himself long and rambling speeches of justification, and even longer and more rambling apologies. None of it even made a dent in his whirling, howling terror.

When Jake did, finally, surface, it wasn’t because he’d managed to achieve some perspective or make anything resembling a plan; it was because he’d finished the whiskey and the cupcakes and developed a strong suspicion that the bad new smell he’d lately become aware of was coming from inside the apartment. After he’d opened a window, cleared the dishes away, and hauled himself through the shower, he reconnected his phone and laptop to the world and found a dozen increasingly concerned texts from his parents, a faux-cheerful email from Matilda, inquiring (again!) about the new book, and over two hundred additional messages requiring serious attention, including a third from [email protected]:

I know you stole your “novel” and I know who you stole it from.

For some reason, that “novel” just put him over the edge.

He added it to the Trolls folder. Then, bowing to the inevitable, he made a new folder, just for the three TalentedTom messages. After a moment, he named it Ripley.

With great effort, he returned to the world beyond his own computer and phone and head, and forced himself to acknowledge some of the other things—some of them very nice things—that were also happening, more or less concurrently. Crib had recaptured the number one slot on the paperback bestseller list, thanks to the broadcast of his book club interview with Oprah Winfrey, and Jake had appeared on the cover of the October Poets & Writers (not exactly a periodical on the order of People or Vanity Fair, okay, but this had been a pipe dream of his all the way back to his Wesleyan days). He’d also received an invitation from Bouchercon to do a keynote speech, and he was being updated about an entire English tour organized around the Hay-on-Wye festival.

All good. All good.

And then there was Anna Williams of Seattle, and that was more than good.

Within days of their meeting, he and Anna had settled into what even Jake could not deny was a warm way of communicating with each other, and with the exception of that four-day sojourn on the couch with the cupcakes and the Jameson they’d been in at least daily contact via text. Jake now knew much more about Anna’s daily life in West Seattle, her challenges (small and not-small) at KBIK, the avocado plant she struggled to keep alive in her kitchen window, her nickname for her boss, Randy Johnson, and the personal mantra she’d received from her favorite communications professor at the University of Washington: Nobody else gets to live your life. He knew that she really wanted to get a cat, but her landlord wouldn’t permit it, and that she ate salmon at least four times a week, and that she secretly preferred what came out of her ancient Mr. Coffee machine to anything she could get in Seattle’s rarefied temples to java. He knew that she seemed to care as much about the Jake Bonner who predated the advent of Crib as she did about his current, weirdly bold-faced existence. That meant everything. That was the game changer.

He cleaned up his apartment. He began rewarding himself with a daily Skype call to Seattle: Anna on her front porch, himself at his living room window overlooking Abingdon Square. She started to read the novels he recommended. He started to try the wines she liked. He went back to work on his new novel and put in a solid month of focused effort, which brought him tantalizingly close to a finished first draft. Good things upon good things.

And then, toward the end of October, another message came through the JacobFinchBonner website:

What will Oprah say when she finds out about you? At least James Frey had the decency to steal from himself.

He opened the new folder on his laptop and added this to the others. A few days later, there was a fifth:

I’m on Twitter now. Thought you’d like to know. @TalentedTom

He went to look, and indeed there was a new account, but no actual tweets yet. It had the generic egg for a profile picture and a grand total of zero followers. Its profile bio consisted of one word: Writer.

He had been letting the clock run out without even attempting to identify his opponent. That had not been a good decision. TalentedTom, he suspected, was preparing to enter a new phase, and Jake had no time left to waste.

CHAPTER TWELVE

I’m Nobody. Who Are You?

Evan Parker was dead: to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that. Jake had seen the death notice three years earlier. He had even perused an online memorial page, which, though not terribly well populated, did contain the reminiscences of a dozen people who’d known Parker, and they, certainly, seemed to be under the impression that he was dead. It was a simple matter to find that page again, and he wasn’t at all surprised to see that there had been no additional entries to the memorial since his last visit: