Page 78 of The Writer

“It’s about Layla!” Danielle roars, raising the hammer in a murderous rage. “By now, you should know this isn’t about some stupid writing group. It’s abouther. Everything has always been about her.”

“You knew Layla?” I stare at Danielle’s face, trying to understand. Danielle and Layla exist in two different lives, the one I lived before my roommate’s death, and the one after. How could the two of them have ever intersected?

“She was my best friend,” she says. “And she died because of you. All these years later, you still can’t give her the attention she deserves.”

“I don’t understand.” At first, I’m not sure if the words are spoken or merely thought. Confusion and fear mingle, making a mess of my mind. All I can piece together is that Marley is wounded, Danielle is holding a hammer and this all somehow relates back to Layla.

“I didn’t know you were friends,” I say. “I don’t remember you?—”

“You wouldn’t! I wasn’t friends withyou,” she says. “Layla was my best friend all through high school. We went to different colleges and grew apart. You think she was only your friend, but she was mine first. And you just left her.”

“What happened to Layla was a tragedy,” I say. “If I knew what was going to happen, I never would have left.”

“Woulda. Coulda. Shoulda. People like you are just as bad as the monsters out there. You pretend to be someone’s friend, and then abandon them when they need you most. Imagine what that night was like for Layla.”

“I do all the time.”

I think of the fear, the sense of abandonment she must have felt. Only recently, I expressed all those emotions in the story I wrote.The Mistake.If there’s anything I could take back, it would be my actions the night she died.

“What you’re doing now makes no sense,” I say. “Killing those people had nothing to do with Layla.”

“It was that awful story. The moment I read it, I knew. You didn’t even care enough to change her name. For a while, I thought I’d gotten control over my anger, but when I read that, it all came rushing back. I needed to punish you for what you did, and what better way than to use your own words against you?”

On the ground, Marley starts to tremble. She’s alive, but when she wakes and sees the situation, her terror will renew. I worry for her safety, and mine, too. No one can predict what Danielle might do next.

“This didn’t start with my story,” I say, desperate for more answers. “What about the other two men? Brandon, the man bludgeoned to death in an alley. And Rudy, who was strangled and left at a playground. Just like in the stories from group.”

“Oh. Those.” The nonchalant way she responds sends shivers down my spine. “In the years after Layla died, I struggled. I kept replaying that night repeatedly. Seeing her sitting at that bar, talking tohim. If she hadn’t been so focused on some guy, she’d still be alive today.

“I was able to keep my anger under control while I was in school. When you have a heavy class load, you don’t have time to feel anything, even grief. I think that’s why I was able to control it for so many years. No choice.

“Once I got a job, it’s like I finally settled into what my adult life was. What my life without Layla was. For the first time since she died, I’d go out into the world, and I really felt her loss. She’d never be with me again, and every time I saw a group of girls together or guys alone at the bar, I felt her absence.

“Writing helped. I wrote stories to try to process what I was feeling, just like you said you did withThe Mistake, but this anger inside kept growing, getting out of control. It wasn’t long after I’d written that first story, I went out to a bar, and saw Brandon.”

“Marley’s brother,” I say, my heart hurting for her, even though she can’t hear.

“Never knew that tidbit,” Danielle says, taking a look at Marley on the ground. “He looks like Michael Massey, did you ever notice? When I saw him at the bar, I watched him half the night, thinking of how much he resembled the man who’d been with Layla. The story I’d written was fresh in my mind, and I kept thinking, this guy would make the perfect victim.

“I don’t know what came over me. It’s like I couldn’t tell the difference between what was real and what was fake, betweenthe past and the present. I followed the guy out of the bar, retracing the similar path the victim would have taken in my story. He cut down an alley to take a piss. Disgusting little creep. Before I knew it, I had a two by four in my hands and I was bashing him over the head with it.”

“You murdered an innocent man,” I say.

“But I wasn’t attacking Brandon, don’t you see? In my mind I was attackinghim. The man who took Layla from me.”

“What about the second murder?”

“After that, it’s like I had this urge inside, but at the same time, there was this other voice in my head. The real me, telling me that if I wasn’t careful, I’d end up in jail, no better than Michael Massey. For a while, that was enough. Then, April shared that story about the cheating husband during Mystery Maidens. I get so disgusted thinking of all the pathetic men out there who walk over us women, like it’s their birthright. The story stuck with me for a while.

“Not long after, I went to a bar and struck a conversation with some guy. Rudy. I could see the tan line of the wedding ring on his hand, knew he was a scumbag, just like the character in her story.

“When we left together, he thought he was going to get laid. We ended up at the park not far from where he lived. He started unbuckling his pants. I used his own belt to strangle him to death.”

I struggle to shake away the images in my mind. It’s important to keep Danielle talking. I have to understand why she did all of this. Any of it. “And then you just stopped?”

“You came to me. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been keeping tabs on you for years, of course. Sending you the black hearts whenever I thought you needed a reminder of what you’d done. Out of all the lawyers in Whitaker, you show up at my doorstep asking for help.”

“A black heart is what lost me that job in the first place,” I remind her.

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