"Oh, no," I said.
"No? Oh, of course not. Then the taxidermist would know, and you can't have a perfect crime if someone knows. Good point. The killer would have to kill the moose as well."
"Am I here to help you type … a Smith Dunham novel?"
"Well, you're not here to sit around and look pretty, though it certainly would help. Perhaps if you unbuttoned a few more buttons."
I shook my head. "I can't do this."
"Of course you can! A hundred words a minute. We'll take it slow at first. And no, you can't record the session and transcribe later. I need to see the words on the screen or they're not concrete."
I stared down at my hands. I'd done worse things for a paycheck-like the summer I'd worked at the meat-processor. My main duty was scooping up the floor meat to feed into a machine that made sausages.
That was it.
Smith Wittingham's perverted scenes and twisted ideas were just so much floor meat, and I'd scoop them up to make the sausages that were his bestselling novels.
After lunch, he showed me to my room, which was on the lower floor and the smallest of the three bedrooms in the cabin. I hung up my clothes and lay down on the double-sized bed with my tablet computer. My plan was to research my new boss and send some emails to let my friends and family know I had not been eaten by a moose. My tablet couldn't detect any wireless internet. Hadn't there been something in the contract about internet access? I should have read the thing.
I tried again to search for wireless connections, but found nothing.
Was this shit for real? No internet? Oh, no. No amount of pay was worth going two weeks without internet.
Smith knocked on my closed door. "Just so you know, there's no internet access here."
"I gathered that."
He chuckled. "If you don't mind, I'm ready to begin now. I have the first sentence in mind."
I grabbed a pillow from the bed and muffled a scream of despair.
Two weeks. How much worse could it get?
I took a moment to brush my hair in the little bathroom connected to my room, then emerged, ready to type. Smith Wittingham had already gone upstairs, to where I imagined the office was.
I found him in the largest bedroom, which had a great view of the trees and a pricy-looking ergonomic desk.
Smith waved me over to my new chair, one of those mesh things with a hundred levers.
"Not bad," I said of the chair, smiling over the first thing that had gone well.
His voice strong and sure, like a narrator, he said, "My client bowled me over at the door, the word 'moose' escaping from her luscious lips."
I froze in my chair. "What?"
"That's the first line. I know it's not great, but you have to start somewhere."
The computer was already on, with a blank document on the screen. He's messing with me, I thought, but I wasn't going to engage in his chicanery. I typed his words, verbatim.
I expected he would laugh and say the moose thing was just a joke, but he kept going. The woman in the story was breathless from an encounter in the woods with a moose. Stranger still, it sounded sexy the way he narrated the story, what with her bosom heaving and all.
As I typed, he paced the room behind me, his sock feet quiet on the thick carpet. I zoned out, focusing only on one word at a time, coming from a disembodied voice that moved around like sound effects on surround-sound speakers.
He used my moose, but at least the woman, Detective Dunham's new client, wasn't named Tori. She was Sheri, and she had waist-length red hair, unlike my own shoulder-length red hair. I had a bunch of freckles on the bridge of my nose, but she had a "smattering of delicious angel kisses." Her chest measurements were also more impressive than mine, and yes, he did describe her bra size. On the front page. I found it difficult to type while rolling my eyes, but I forged on. I kept up my pace, never falling behind his narration, for nearly two hours.
At the end of the second hour, Smith clapped his hands abruptly. "Tori! Time for a break."
"But … why did Sheri hire Detective Dunham instead of going directly to the police?"
I twirled around on my fancy chair to find a smug-looking Smith Wittingham, his face working hard to look even more self-satisfied.
"Gotcha," he said. "Good to know. I'm off to take a shower. You can join me if you like, or do whatever your heart fancies for the next two hours, then we'll reconvene."
My left eye twitched. Join him for a shower? He'd removed the light jacket he'd been wearing when I arrived, and wore only a tight-fitting T-shirt. The man either had good genes or spent some time at the gym-perhaps both. As I was watching him, he dropped to the carpet and started doing push-ups. "You should do something to get your heart rate up," he said between presses. "Increased blood flow is good for the brain, too. Maybe go outside and get that scary moose to chase you around."