Curious about their true identity, Sasha continues to edit the manuscript from an unknown author…
It was the Boudray Building that first gave her pause.
The book was set in the present day, but there was a passage about the girls passing the Boudray Building on their way to the nightclub. It had been a famous Art Deco building, but structurally unsound with no feasible way to retrofit it. And so, amidst the protest of historical societies, it was torn down shortly after the girls went missing. Sasha knew this because she had written a piece on the history of the building for an internship at the Boston Globe a few years later.
It seemed strange to Sasha that the writer would use a reference that hadn’t existed for thirty years. As a proofreader, she was used to seeing the opposite; writers whose only frame of reference was the world as they knew it now. And so, they would pepper their fiction with anachronisms, references that didn’t exist yet in their setting. This was the opposite and she wondered why. Did a young author only do half of their research: Look up a landmark but not read the whole story? Perhaps KJ had meant to set the work in the correct time period, but someone advised them that period pieces were harder sells, and they had gotten sloppy on correcting the details? Or was this an older author, someone who had been there at the time and lived through it; and so, the city described on their page was the one always in their mind.
First the reference to ‘Bodies’ and now the old courthouse. Sasha was inclined to think an older writer. She smiled wryly to herself. “Older writer.” They may have just been forty-five. Jesus.
Whoever they were, it was their decision to keep the old building or not. Sasha flagged the reference with a note and a link: “FYI The real building was torn down in 1992. If this is set in the present day you may want to fictionalize the name? Your call, of course.”
Deciding that was as good a place as any to take a break, she hit save and stood up to stretch, noticing as she did that she had new emails. One was a response from KJ.
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