Chapter Eighteen
Eighteen
When I got back to my car, Tony was leaning against it, staring intently at his phone. I felt bad for not having thought to give him the keys. But it was a good ten degrees cooler in Gloucester than it had been in Boston, what with that ocean breeze. He seemed comfortable enough.
“Natalie Blythe isn’t Book Babe,” I said as I approached.
Tony didn’t look up from his phone. “How do you know?”
“I trust her,” I said. “And she has no reason to lie about it.”
He sighed heavily. “That sucks.”
“It is what it is. Anyway, I may have another lead.”
He still didn’t look at me. “That sucks, Greg,” he said, and it was only then that I noticed he had his earbuds in. “That really, really sucks. Kicking MJ when she’s down. Doesn’t she have better things to do?”
I moved into his line of vision and mouthed the words What is going on?
Tony glanced up at me. He mouthed Greg Scepter and pointed at his phone. He looked more serious than I’d ever seen him. It changed his whole face. “You can’t do that,” he said.
I asked what was going on again. He held up his index finger and turned away. “This is no way to treat your biggest-selling…No, of course not. I’d have heard from her if she’d seen…Please…Give her a cha— Two days. Okay? Hello?”
Tony yanked out his earbuds.
“What happened?” I said.
“I hate doing business with that guy,” he said.
I asked for a third time. “What happened?”
“He’s about to cut MJ loose,” he said. “I just begged him for two more days, but…well, you just heard it.”
“He didn’t say no.”
“That’s true,” he said. “Because he hung up on me.”
“I thought Evan said he could buy us some time.”
“Well, it’s different now.”
“Why?”
“Because of Leila fucking Donnelly.”
I frowned at him. “The author?”
“Scepter says she posted something.” He motioned me over and began tapping on his phone. “A video.”
I moved next to him. “I thought she wasn’t online.”
“She’s not on social media,” he said. “She’s reclusive. It’s part of her brand. But apparently she does have a website.”
How did someone go about branding herself as reclusive? I peered at the website on Tony’s screen—pale gray, with Leila Donnelly’s name at the top and two buttons: the books and the author. Typewriter font. I supposed that was how one did it.
He tapped the “author” button. At the top of the page was a headshot of Leila Donnelly.
She looked exactly the way I’d expected her to.
Young, waifish, and unsmiling. Long, dark, wavy hair parted in the middle.
Enormous sad eyes. No makeup. She wore a black tank top, and there was a small tattoo on her right shoulder.
A pink-and-white flower. She had a disgusted air about her—as though the very act of posing for a picture violated her personally.
Beneath the photo was her author bio. One sentence.
No capital letters: leila donnelly lives on the east coast of the united states.
“Where’s the video?” I said.
“Good question.”
But then Tony tapped the back arrow and we both saw it, at the bottom of the main page. A link that read: leila speaks.
It connected us to a YouTube video—a still of Leila staring down the camera in that same black tank top. “Jesus,” I said. The video had been posted at four p.m. today, and already it had more than five hundred thousand views. Tony’s finger hovered over the Play arrow. “Are you ready?” he said.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Me neither,” Tony said. But he hit play anyway.