Final Draft by Shelley Burbank
Chapter Five
“Start anywhere. Don’t leave anything out. Sometimes the things that seem most irrelevant are the most important leads.”
Liv sat at her desk, digital recorder running, pen and legal pad in hand. Across from her, hunched into an office chair, Cooper Tedeschi jiggled one knee up and down. He swallowed and looked toward the door like he wanted to bolt. “I don’t know where to start.”
Liv leaned over the desk toward her cute and rumpled client. He looked more boyish today in his faded jeans, black T-shirt, and gray zippered hoodie. The dimple in his chin and the curly hair reminded her of a cherub. A glum cherub. “Look, Cooper. Don’t be nervous. I’m on your side, remember? You’re not on trial here.”
Cooper’s face flushed red. “How much is this going to cost me?”
“Nothing for a consultation, which this is. We can work the rest out later if I decide to take the case.” She tapped her pen on the legal pad. “Right now, just tell me what happened, as best as you can remember it. Start from when you were accepted into the MFA program at Longfellow College.”
“Okay. Thanks.” He swallowed. “Well, I was accepted two years ago into the program and started taking courses that September.” Cooper’s voice got stronger. “Two years of my life, wasted. I should have been graduating this August, but I was kicked out of the program in February, thanks to Mason Falwell and those spineless sycophants on the honor code committee and administration.”
Liv nodded. This was the wordsmith she remembered from the coat room at the Glitterati Ball. “Can you give me a list of the names of the people on the committee?”
“Sure.” Cooper bent down and handed her a document from the satchel near his chair. “These are the papers. All the names are on there.”
Liv smiled. Cooper was nervous, but he was prepared. That told her he was serious about the situation and thinking ahead to what she might ask. She liked that in a client. “Okay, go on. Mason Falwell was assigned to be your advisor?”
“No. I requested him.” Cooper grimaced. “Worst decision I ever made.”
“Tell me about the program. Did you have classes with Mason exclusively?”
“No,” Cooper said, shaking his head. “The first year I took graduate courses in literature, critique, and creative writing with a number of English Department professors. Last September, though, I began working on my graduate thesis—the novel—under Falwell’s tutelage.”
“Tutelage? I don’t understand.”
“The second year of the program is basically low-residency. A cohort of second-year students meets for three weeks at the beginning of the fall and spring semesters for workshops, readings, conferences, and one-on-one tutorials. After that, we’re expected to work independently on our own projects, sending chapters to our advisors and receiving their feedback.”
Liv jotted down a few notes. “Okay, continue.”
Cooper’s leg jiggled up and down. “Falwell mentored me on the novel. The work went quickly. I’d send him packets with three or four chapters every couple of weeks, and he’d either send them back or we would meet in his office to discuss the work.”
“Did you use intercampus mail or email?”
“The college’s email and document-sharing program called Long/Space.”
Liv took the information down and then looked up. “What was the title of your book?”
“The Eye of the Hours. It’s a hybrid, a cross between science fiction and fantasy.” Cooper’s voice was proud, truthful.
Liv pressed her lips together. Seemingly truthful, she reminded herself. Cooper could be delusional, believing Mason Falwell’s recent book was his own. She wondered if he’d had emotional or psychological problems in the past or a family history of schizophrenia. For now, she’d proceed as if he was mentally stable, but wrote “mental illness???” in the notebook and circled it a couple of times.
“What was Falwell’s reaction to your book?” she asked.
“Encouraging at first. Maybe a little hands-off. Sometimes even distracted. But he told me he saw a lot of himself in me and my writing.”
“That must have pleased you.”
“Yeah. I was psyched. Growing up, I practically inhaled every book the man wrote. I read and reread them. I had whole passages—pages—memorized. Ever since seventh grade when I stumbled across his first book, Rune in the Crossing, all I ever wanted was to be a writer like Mason Falwell.”
Cooper let out a bitter laugh. “I guess I succeeded. His name is going to be on my novel. I actually got what I asked for. I wrote Mason Falwell’s latest book. Only no one believes me. They think I’m crazy.”
“Is there any way you could be, uh, mixed up about this? Maybe it’s not your book that he sold. Is it possible he’d been writing his own novel all along?”
“No!” Cooper stood up and began to pace. “Why won’t anyone listen to what I’m saying? I sent my chapters to Falwell, he sent them back with suggestions and corrections, and then I rewrote the pages and saved them on Long/Space. By mid-December, the first draft was done, which meant that Falwell had a copy of the entire manuscript in his possession. I was supposed to polish it up this semester and submit the final draft as my graduate thesis. It would have been reviewed by the thesis committee over the summer so that I could receive my degree in August. I was still working on the edits when Falwell sent the manuscript to his publisher and signed a contract.”
“When did you discover this?” Liv kept her voice calm as she studied her potential client. Beneath the boyish good looks and charming dimple lurked an intensity that she suspected bordered on obsession.
“January.” Cooper sat down again. “The third week of January. We’d just started spring semester workshops when I saw the announcement on the English Department website. I was surprised because if Mason had been writing a new novel, I would have known it.”
“How’s that?”
Cooper rubbed his palm on one knee, trying to stop the jiggling. “One thing I forgot to mention earlier. Last fall, Mason hired me to type up some of his unpublished papers—essays, short stories, stuff like that. He knew I needed the money, so it was kind of a favor. Or that’s what I thought. He paid me through the financial aid stipend I’d received.”
“Where did you do this work? At his office at Longfellow?”
Cooper shook his head. “No. At his home. He had a table set up in the library. I’d go over, and there’d be a stack of yellow legal pads beside the desktop computer. I’d put in a few hours, record the time, put a sticky note where I’d left off.”
“Was he there?”
“Not usually. Sometimes he’d wander in. His wife, Karie, was there all the time. She’d bring me tea or coffee, sometimes cookies if she was baking. We’d chat about books and Mason’s work. I liked her. She was nice. I thought she was a little lonely.”
Liv bit the end of her pen, made another note. “Okay.”
“After the news came out, I assumed the website got it wrong about it being a new novel. I figured he’d submitted those random pieces I’d typed up as a collection. It’s not unheard of for big-name authors to put out a collection of odds and ends like that.” He looked at Liv, eyes troubled.
“Makes sense. Go on.”
“The book was big news on campus because Falwell hadn’t published in over five years. In fact, in the few interviews he gave the past few years, he insisted he’d accomplished everything he set out to do as a writer. He said he’d brought all the stories into the world he was meant to and that he was going to devote the rest of his life to mentoring the next generation of writers.”
Cooper snorted. “What a joke. The old fart just couldn’t do it anymore. My guess is he had a major case of writer’s block.”
“Why would he take your work and pass it off as his own? He’d already said he was done writing. Nobody expected any more from him. This doesn’t make any sense.”
“Ha! You think? None of this makes any sense. The most unbelievable part is that he thought he’d get away with it.”
That wasn’t the most unbelievable part, Liv thought. She tapped her pen on the notepad and looked out the window. A few artists walked across the parking lot, bundles of printed fabric folded in their arms.
She turned back to Cooper. “Okay, so Falwell announces a new book deal, you figure it’s this collection of old essays and stories. When did you suspect it was actually your novel?”
“There was an article in the Press Herald the following Friday. It contained a brief synopsis of the plot and discussed the thematic elements. I almost dropped my laptop as I read it. I was shocked. It was so surreal. The article described the plot and characters of my book, Eye of the Hours. Only he’s changed the name to Hours of the Crossing.”
“Uh-huh.” Liv wrote down the two titles.
Cooper leaned forward, eyes intent. “Don’t you get it? It’s like a bookend to his first novel, Rune in the Crossing. That’s why everyone believes him! That and the fact that we write so similarly. I guess maybe I should have tried to develop my own style more, but I loved and read his work so much, it just became a part of me. Now his publisher and everyone at the college think I’m delusional, that I wanted to be Mason Falwell so badly that I believe I wrote his latest book.”
Cooper hunched in the chair, looking haunted and miserable. Liv sat back and chewed on the end of her pen. Something didn’t add up.
“Don’t you have copies of your work? A hard copy printed out? Files saved on a thumb drive?”
“Sure, but see, that’s why Falwell hired me to type up his old stories. I had access to Mason’s notebooks. He and Karie say I was hired to transcribe Falwell’s manuscript pages, and that’s how I know so much about the book. They’ve convinced everyone—the administration, the honor committee, the press—that I’m delusional. They say I copied Mason’s chapters after I typed them, changed them a little bit, and told everyone it was my work. But, Ms. Lively, I swear to you, Falwell is lying. He stole my plot, my ideas, my characters, my book. The only work of Mason’s that I typed were those unpublished pieces. Please believe me.”
Liv steeled herself. “I have to ask you this, Cooper. Have you ever been treated for mental illness?”
He froze. Then he looked down at the floor. “Yes. I suffered from clinical depression in high school and was hospitalized for a few months when I was sixteen.”
“Are you better now? Do you take medication?”
“I take antidepressants.” Cooper’s leg started bouncing again. “I see my psychiatrist every six months or so, but I handle things with exercise and meditation, as well. I’m not crazy.”
“Of course you’re not,” she said.
He looked up, face bleak. “I’d be lying if I said I haven’t had some suicidal thoughts lately. Getting kicked out of the graduate program, well, I just feel hopeless.”
“Understandable.”
“Maybe I should just let Falwell take credit for my work. I’m not even sure I can write anymore, anyway. Since this whole thing went down, I haven’t been able to come up with one creative idea. Every time I try to write something, I have a panic attack. It’s not good.”
A few seconds passed. The room was silent except for the muffled sounds of industrial machinery in the warehouse area. Liv tapped her pen and looked down at her notes. She wanted to help this boy, and the case appealed to her, mostly because it had nothing to do with cheating spouses, routine background checks, or insurance fraud. It was something much less ordinary.
A recognizable name in the literary world. A potentially huge plagiarism case. Best of all, a mighty distraction from her sorry excuse for a love life.
She smiled at Cooper. “Let’s not give up quite yet.”
His eyes lit up. “You’ll take the case?”
She extended her hand and they shook. “Yes, Mr. Tedeschi. I will.”