Chapter 2
Alice
Alice looked from the man who couldn’t possibly be Anderson Holt to the summons and back again. “What is going on? We wrote a murder mystery. It’s fiction. There’s one of those disclaimers, ‘Any resemblance to any person, living or…’ you know.”
He walked toward the windows, scanning left to right. Fourteen minutes until bell time. “I’m guessing the storyline wasn’t your idea.”
“Uh, no.”
“Then how is your name on this?”
“Nika asked for my help.”
“And you met her how?”
“I run memoir-writing workshops for terminal cancer patients at the hospital and one day she came along, though she wanted to write a novel. She was new in town and alone and needed somewhere to live, and I had a spare room because… Anyway, I had a spare room.” Alice picked up her water bottle, suddenly parched.
It seemed like tiny pieces of her brain were breaking off and maneuvering into a new reality that hadn’t fully taken shape—the Terminator before he reassembled.
“So she moved in. As she got sicker, she asked me to help with the writing. It sounded like … fun. And then she died, so I finished it for her. A ghostwriter, really.”
“Well, she’s the ghost now,” he whispered, as if to himself. He crossed his arms, still watching outside. What was he looking for?
Thing was, Alice hadn’t invented Holt. Nika had.
Alice had fleshed him out, sure, but he’d been Nika’s creation—his direct, whip-smart speech, the fierce intelligence he wore lightly, the elite military training you caught a flash of every now and then, his idiosyncrasies, his (many) strengths, his fatal flaw, the enigmatic pain that shut him off from the world.
Then there was the easily ruffled caramel hair, the athleticism, the high, sun-kissed forehead that was prone to crinkling, like he was constantly trying to figure something out. Plus, the eyes, the height, the voice.
Put checkmarks next to all of that and it’d be a tick, tick, tick right down the page for the guy in front of her.
Alice realized she was still gripping her water bottle. Had she taken a drink? She gulped it, too quickly. “You’re saying our Anderson Hot…” She coughed, hitting her chest with her fist. “Anderson Holt is based on a real person?”
He didn’t seem to register her slip of the tongue, seemingly absorbed in the basketball game, though his faraway look suggested his mind was elsewhere. Then he snapped a quarter turn in a military way and perched on a student desk. “‘Based on’ is an understatement,” he said.
She might not believe him, except for the lawsuit.
She might not believe the lawsuit, except for him.
Maybe if she Googled this guy who was supposedly suing her…
She opened her laptop. Anderson Holt—or whoever he was, because this was all still some crazy-ass shit—leaned forward and snatched it from her desk.
Alice folded her arms. “I was just gonna find out if this guy suing me is for real. This Randolph Whoever.”
“He’s as real as me, but you know him as Robert Keller, your CIA deputy station chief. Your traitor.”
Alice hadn’t actually determined that the guy in front of her was real, but okay.
He typed something into his phone and held the screen where she could see it.
She reached for it, but he pulled it back with a slight grin.
An asymmetrical, flirty grin. Anderson Holt’s grin.
But plenty of people grinned like that. She gave him her best Montrose High seriously?
look. He relented and passed it over, but slipped behind her to read over her shoulder.
She straightened, uncomfortably aware of his outsized physical presence—and the stink of the coveralls.
Randolph Jeffson, according to his website, had majored in Russian studies at college and served as a Marine before being recruited to the CIA, where he’d spent twenty-two years working in the field before retiring just over a year ago with a Distinguished Career Intelligence Medal.
Alice bit her bottom lip. An exact fit for the character.
He looked about the right age in his photo.
He even matched their physical description—Nika’s description, which Alice had embellished—down to the angular cheekbones and thick silver hair: He had it trimmed every two weeks, lest its natural curl dare return.
The hair was the only thing in his life and his personality that wasn’t dead straight, from his face and his answers to his whiskey.
Which somehow gave you the sense he was hiding something.
There was no detail in the profile about what he’d done in the field or where he’d served, but that wasn’t unusual for the CIA. Except that this Robert Keller/Randolph Jeffson was now running for Congress.
“Okay,” she said, “I can guess why he could be peeved. So Nika might have used real people as inspiration for the characters. Novelists do it all the time. Maybe she found this exact profile and decided to base the character on it. What’s the big deal?”
“The big deal is that this book gives a detailed and credible account of a murder that the U.S. authorities—and the Russians—would very much like solved.” He was speaking over her shoulder in a way that was just as disconcerting as when he’d stared at her like he was digging into her brain.
“A murder that certain people in influential places are now liking me for, thanks to you and Nika. Which, as you can imagine, puts me in a tight spot.”
“We totally made up the murder, it didn’t really—” Alice’s cheeks tingled, suddenly cold.
“Wait, are you talking about that American diplomat who was killed in Moscow? The one that was all over the news, like, eighteen months ago? But he wasn’t the CIA station chief, like the victim in the book.
Wasn’t that guy some low-level diplomat? ”
“That was his cover,” the guy said, wandering back to the other side of the desk. “The government can’t publicly admit what his real job was. But yeah, that’s the murder you describe in your book.”
“I mean, I figured Nika was inspired by that case when she plotted the story, but—”
“Inspired? She supplied certain links in the chain of events that people have been looking for ever since it happened. But then Nika wasn’t as ‘gray and unremarkable’ as she made herself seem on the page.
Why did she go and publish a tell-all book under her real name but invent half the details—and why did she dump me in it? ”
“Hold up. Are you saying that this was Nika’s own story? Nika was Galina, the heroine? This all happened to her?”
He slowly shook his head, as if it was Alice who wasn’t making sense. What had the woman who’d served the papers said? You’re really not keeping up.
No, I damn well am not.
“You’re telling me that my tenant was a former Russian spy?”
“For the CIA, yes. For me. I was her handler. Like the book says.”
And with that the world tipped. This was it—the moment she lost her grip on reality and slid down a chute into a parallel universe.
She planted a hand on her desk. How was her desk even still here—papers, water bottle, hole punch—all the same as they’d been mere minutes ago when her biggest concern was whether to take her espresso single or double, and even then the answer was obvious?
“I don’t believe it,” she declared, in one last attempt to retain her sanity.
“Believe it.”
“I just thought she had a good imagination and had read too many Robert Ludlum novels. So you’re suggesting our book is—what—her memoir? If that were true, why would she lie to me, and tell me it was fiction?”
“She signed a non-disclosure agreement, a condition of her exfil to the U.S. Maybe once she knew she was dying, she figured it was safe enough to put her real name on it. It’d get far more attention that way.”
“So you’re serious about being Anderson Holt? This isn’t a prank?”
“Serious. As. Hell,” he said, his eyes locked on hers. The skin around them flinched, like he’d gotten a sudden headache. “You know, I always had my doubts about Randolph, but Nika thought I was a murderer?”
Alice swallowed. “No, she didn’t. And as far as I know she didn’t think Rober— Randolph—was a traitor, either.”
“It’s right here in chapter twenty-five.” He tapped the phone.
“Noooo. See, most of the book was her story, down to the word. But toward the end, she was so weak, so confused. She was frantically trying to tell me her big plan for the ending, but she’d go off on tangents about characters who weren’t even in the book.
And she’d start talking in Russian and I had to remind her to speak English.
When I couldn’t be with her during chemo, she would dictate her thoughts—she became obsessive about it, she’d dictate for hours—but when I got the recordings transcribed, they didn’t make sense, they were all over the place and yo-yoing between the languages.
Even when I was sitting by her hospital bed, I had a harder and harder time getting her to focus, getting anything intelligible out of her, though she insisted we keep going.
It seemed to be the only thing keeping her …
alive.” Alice drove a hand into her hair, a sense of panic rising up her chest. “But, oh wow, those people were in the book? She wasn’t babbling, she was inadvertently using real names instead of character names—however real any of the names were, since half the people would have used aliases. I am so confused.”
“Alice, to be absolutely clear,” he said, in that overly patient tone people used when they were losing patience, “Nika didn’t tell you I killed him?”
“No.” Alice let her hair spring back, stood and walked to the window.
She followed the path of the basketball as it bounced, flew, bounced, flew…
“I realized I’d have to finish the book myself.
She’d been so passionate about getting the story out there—I didn’t want to let her down.
I added a bunch of stuff, including the ending. ”