Then who? Billie Fischer? It was a refreshing new thought. Billie was a jealous writer who labored to produce a single short story. She was poisonous toward both Eva and Timson. Julia even glanced at Austen. Could he have slipped away while she’d been sleeping? Absurd. Billie, though . . .
Julia’s brief hopes collapsed. “But there’s Eva’s initial.” She pulled out the bottom sheet to show Jerome. “Scratched on this page. You can see it if you hold it up to the light.”
He angled it over his head. Even in the weak light from the alley, the sharply pointed E was clear. “That’s her writing,” he said.
A queasy pressure tingled under Julia’s jaw. “It’s also the pattern on her hip,” she said. “Those five dots.”
Jerome nodded glumly. “I never thought of that as her initial.”
“Did she ever talk about it?”
“Not really. I think some drunk bastard did it. She only said he never bothered her again, so I figured he was long out of the picture. Monster.”
Julia recoiled. No wonder Eva would cover it up. Monster was right. She laid down her handbag, grasped the table edge, and breathed through her mouth, afraid she might gag. Confirmation of her scratched initial meant Eva did have the manuscript. Julia couldn’t bear to say it aloud or to repeat the implication.
“Eva did not kill that bastard Timson.” Jerome rejected the unspoken fear through gritted teeth. “I’d swear my life on it. She would not. She could not. No.”
“Then someone gave her the manuscript.” It was the only remaining possibility.
“Who? And how? Wallace is the only person who knows where she is.”
A conspiracy? The killer had taken the manuscript and then persuaded Wallace to pass it along to Eva. That led into thickets so absurd and mind tangling that Julia couldn’t begin to consider it.
The roll of her thoughts and the room’s terrible smell were almost too much for her. She couldn’t be sick. She had to think.
Beneath Jerome’s questions was a plea. She saw in his eyes the same look she’d seen so briefly in Eva’s eyes. Hopeless yet hopeful. Damned and innocent.
She locked her knees and gulped small breaths. Think, Julia.
A tiny light began to blink in her mind’s murk.
She waved away Austen’s effort to steer her toward the cot. If she kept her head down, breathed through her mouth . . .
The blink steadied to a light, a pinprick but a light. What if she was looking at things backward? Maybe a premise or two needed to be reversed. Would that make a difference, shed enough light to navigate by?
She began with the question of why Eva—or whoever—was sending the pages. “This can’t be about getting the manuscript out to be published,” she said, between pants of steadying air. “If it were, she’d send the whole thing, and straight to Goldsmith. Or at least sections, in order and from the beginning.”
Both men merely nodded, as if any sound might frighten away the fragile speculation.
“So there must be significance in the selections.” She gestured for Austen to repeat for Jerome her description of the excerpt Duveen had received.
“That’s from my first novel too,” Jerome said. “Byron’s more or less based on me.”
Clarity dawned like a puff of cool air on Julia’s throat. “But this last page is different,” she said. “The one where she scratched her initial. It’s from the rape scene that made Timson so angry. So we need to ask. Did that really happen? Did Timson actually rape her?”
Jerome’s bony chest swelled, and his shoulders arched back. For a moment Julia feared he was angry, but it was merely a great sigh. “God,” he breathed. “I wish I knew.”
“If it’s true, it might justify his murder,” Austen said.
Jerome’s expression flickered. “No such thing as self-defense, not when they think a Negro’s killed a white man.”
“But it must be significant if she marked this page,” Julia said, cautiously raising her head. The worst of the nausea had subsided.
“She’d only say the story was from long ago,” Jerome said. “I don’t even know if it’s true, much less if it happened to Eva. It could easily be some backstage legend. She didn’t like to talk about it—who would?—but Pablo begged her to include it, so we did.”
He lifted the page. “Maybe she marked this sheet to say it did happen, and to her. Maybe this was her way of signing it, of signing this whole nightmare.” His voice cracked at the bleak thought. “Dear God. Like a confession.”
Holding it high, toward the light, he turned it front to back, side to side, as if coaxing the shadowy initial to speak.
It did.
Its message surged through Julia. It sparked from her heels to her scalp, spooking every hair along the way. She nearly lunged for the page. Her hands trembled as she positioned it for the men—sideways.
“This is Eva’s writing, but it’s not her initial. Look.” Julia traced her finger along the now-horizontal figure. “It could just as easily be a W.”
“Good God.” “Christ almighty.” Both men registered the significance.
“Wallace,” Julia said. A second realization dawned as she stared at the pattern. “The scars on her hip could form a W, not an E.” She remembered Wallace’s penchant for monograms on his beautiful possessions: his cuff links, his crystal, his ranks of leather document cases. One knee buckled as her mind caught up with the implications. Wallace. His voice in her ear, his warm hand confidently riding her hip, his droll amusement beneath half-lowered eyes: in so many ways he had stirred her heart, her desires. She felt sick again, as if the charming, considerate Wallace she knew had morphed before her eyes into something malign.
“Wallace,” Jerome repeated, outpacing her horrified deductions. “If he gave her that scar, maybe he’s the rapist she wrote about. A club owner,
