Chapter 17: Blank Pages

Nobody in the hall understood it at first.

A woman in the third row leaned over to her husband and whispered, and a chair creaked.

Mamie stood with her hand flat on the empty pages.

She bent toward the microphone, and it squealed, and she flinched.

"I was supposed to read you a new chapter tonight," she said.

Her voice came out thin and clear in the silence.

"These are the pages. I can't read them. There's nothing on them, because I can't write."

A low sound went through the rows.

On the aisle, Yvonne's smile did not change.

"I couldn't write chapter ten," Mamie said. "I couldn't write chapter one either."

"The pages I read at the Founders' Reading belong to Siri Lindqvist."

She said my name into the microphone, in front of four hundred people, and I felt it in my knees.

"I had them because I was her friend and I knew where she kept things."

"I read them because I was told nobody would check."

"Told by whom?" someone called from the back.

Mamie's eyes went to the aisle seat.

She looked at Yvonne.

Her mouth shook, and she did not say the name.

"By people I love," she said instead. "And I'm sorry."

Yvonne rose.

She did it gracefully, as she did everything, and walked up the center aisle with her emerald skirt moving around her ankles.

She climbed the three steps to the stage and put an arm around Mamie's shoulders.

"Oh, my darling," she said into the microphone. "Come away, come away."

She turned to the room with a face full of tender sorrow.

"This young woman has been hounded for a week by a disgraced reader and a bitter applicant."

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