Chapter 13
“Lucy, I’m here, we are officially closed for the day. Go on upstairs to the kitchen and make sure Amy is alright. Have a couple of cookies I’ll take of this.”
“You're not going out there.”
“Lucy, please go check on Amy, I want to make sure she is alright. I’ll lock up. Go on now, I can’t be worried about the both of you.”
“Don’t go out there Laura.”
“I’m calling my cousin right now to remove the army from my lawn, now you upstairs scoot.”
She finally went upstairs, I went over and opened the door and stepped out, and locked the bookstore. I limped up to the tent. I was putting on my very best frail old lady act. For the two FBI swat officers blocking my way. Why do swat teams dress in camo like they are going out into the woods to hunt for deer. It doesn’t make any sense. Now when they go out into the woods to arrest the nazi’s that’s when camo will come in handy.
But on Main St in Lake Placid it just looks out of place. I mean camo is so you can stay hidden but if there aren’t trees or large bushes, they just stand out like a sore thumb. The rich neighbors already think of us as the pinko hippies that are driving down property values. An FBI raid will have the neighbors at the next town council demanding the criminal writers be removed.
But if I get wind of that, then I’ll send all the book clubs we support to the council meeting to demand that the bookstore stays. Votes count more than money in Lake Placid. The rich neighbors can’t believe it. It doesn’t hurt that the mayor's wife is in one club and two of the council members are also in book clubs here at the store.
“Ma’am, this area is off limits.”
“This is my property officer, do you have a warrant? If you do, I'd like to see it. I believe that is my right, is it not?”
One of the men turned to the other and told him to go get the CO. That man paraded off and I stood looking at the other guard. Not saying anything. Eve had taught me well. Eve said you don’t say a word, it drives cops nuts because most people are nervously talking to them trying to make friends with the police. Just remain calm and quiet.
Still I couldn’t keep myself quiet when I saw the CO appear.
“Karl, now I know why you are interested in mysteries. I hope you are here to take Sven, somewhere more secure.”
“We are indeed. Did you really want to see the arrest warrant? Or would you rather hear why we had to wait to make the arrest.”
“I’d rather hear why you had to wait.”
“Very well, we had to get a search warrant for his home, vehicle and motel room and they all had to be executed at the same time just in case any of his accomplices were around. The pictures on the laptop were instrumental in getting the warrants, but we needed hard evidence before the arrest. The search warrants gave us what we needed. Sven has been producing and distributing illegal guns. We are fairly certain that the GPS data from his phone or his car’s GPS will give us the location of his accomplices. Thank you for dropping off the ghost gun at the police station, you have been a big help.”
“Not according to my cousin August. But thank you for saying that, you get a discount from now on whenever you shop here.”
“I couldn’t accept that, Laura, that could be construed as a bribe.”
“Construe it anyway you like Karl, you still get the discount, it’s not a bribe it’s a gratuity. The mailman never turns down his christmas gift, and he’s a fed too.”
Two swat men escorted a handcuffed Sven out of the tent, and stuck him in the back of an SUV. After that the rest of the swat team exited the tent. The SUV still blue lights flashing exited our driveway, on the way to Albany, the closest FBI office to Lake Placid. I went into the tent and grabbed Jade.
“I’d like to tell everyone what I know, do you object to them knowing the whole story? I’m sure it’s going to come out anyway.”
“No, go ahead Laura.”
I stuck my head inside the tent.
“I have to let everyone inside know that everything is alright, then I will be back to tell you the whole story. It may provide interesting fodder for your next novel, or an exciting true crime story.”
I went into the store to find Amy, Lucy, and Ezra standing behind the counter.
“That was the FBI, they arrested our bad guy, it’s all over and everyone is safe. Please let everyone know. I’ll tell you all the whole story at supper. Lucy you should stay for dinner you might find this interesting.”
Then I went back outside to reassure our guests that everything was alright. The reason I wanted to out Jade to the other writers was I wanted them to see that it was the outside authors that brought danger to our home. I don’t want Bianca’s Workshop idea hurt because a bad author had come to our door.
When I got to the tent the authors were flitting around the tent like a hive of angry bees. I went up to the podium and grabbed the mike. It got quiet when they realized that they were about to find out what had just happened.
“Okay, everyone if you just want to grab a seat, this will only take a few minutes then we can all go back to our writing sprints. This all started yesterday, when Jade brought me a laptop that she had stolen from Sven’s motel room.”
There were a few gasps, a little angry muttering.
“Let me assure you she had a very good reason to do so. Ethan, Jade's brother, has been missing for three months. After the police declined to help her in any way, she decided to investigate on her own. From some very impressive detective work she managed to isolate Sven as a person of interest. After some investigating into Sven she found out he has a fascist blog, I’ll get you all a link, one post that outlines his views has this quote “I hate trans people, gay people, Jewish people, and liberals, specifically in that order.” I am proud to have made the list, I mean you only hate people that you fear, right?”
There were some nods of assent, and a couple of yeah’s. They were beginning to get the picture that Sven was not a nice man.
“After Jade showed me his blog and told me about her missing brother, I agreed to help her. She had his laptop but it was password protected. So I bypassed the password protection so that Jade could examine the documents on the computer to see if Sven had any information about where her brother was. We found pictures of a neo-nazi group armed to the teeth, along with pictures of Sven holding ghost guns. I contacted my attorney immediately so that she could negotiate immunity for Jade for stealing the laptop and for myself for bypassing the protection. That bypass was only possible because Sven relied on his password to protect his data. My attorney took the laptop to the police and the ADA launched an investigation. We couldn’t let Sven know that anyone was on to him, or he might flee and destroy evidence. He really was here to try and find an agent, because he couldn’t find a publisher. He couldn’t find a publisher because his science fiction story was an Alt History where Hilter had won World War Two and now everything was good in the world. The FBI searched his home, motel and car and found the evidence they needed to arrest him. I’m sure a lot more information will be forthcoming if he takes the case to trial. Any questions?”
“What about that loud bang last night?” Flynn asked.
“It was a ghost gun, one of Sven’s nazi accomplices apparently took a shot at him.”
I wasn’t sure that I believed that. Those pictures on his laptop, the men looked very capable. Of course it could have been a fake it till you make it, arrogance but I don’t think so. Why else would they be in the woods if it was to play with their guns. The more you do anything, the better you get, if you put in any effort at all.
“How can you just bypass windows security? Are you some kind of hacker?” Luke inquired.
“No, not at all, Luke. Sven had set a password but what he hadn’t done was encrypt his drive. What happens when you encrypt a drive is that all the data on the drive will look scrambled, unreadable. The only person that can read it is the person who encrypted the drive. But when you set a password, without encrypting the drive, the only thing you accomplish is that someone trying to see your data can’t get into windows. So I just boot into Linux a different kind of operating system, mount the windows hard drive and I can look at every file on the drive. I can delete the windows operating system folder entirely making the laptop unable to boot without reinstalling the operating system. So if you are worried that someone might want to steal your files, your best bet is to encrypt the drive. But there are downsides to encryption, if you lose the encryption key. Your data is gone, scrambled and can’t be recovered. Personally I take a different approach, I have no top secret files so I don’t encrypt, instead I back up my important files daily to every computer on my personal network and also daily to Google Drive. Also all of my important files are written in markdown, that can be read in any program that can read text files. Every digital device that I know of can read text files, thus they can read markdown. My security isn’t to keep other people from reading my files, my security is that I know that my data will survive almost any disaster. Unless my house is blown up at the same time as Google's infrastructure. Sorry, I’m very serious about not losing any of my data, I worked hard to accumulate it, writing is hard work. End of rant, if any of you need help with any of this, please just let me know, I’d be happy to help you secure your computer and your data.”
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That little rant had put half of them to sleep and half instead of being terrified of the FBI army that had invaded, now were terrified that they would lose data. So win win. At dinner time I went through the whole thing again, including the security and backup spiel. Instead of a cloud like Google Drive I’d really rather upload my data to Anais computer and she could use mine for backup. That way some corporations don't have their hands on my data. I used to trust Google until they started cooperating with Trump, so I don’t want to do business with them anymore.
***
I had just taken a bite of hot apple pie alamode when Bianca asked if I wanted to talk about my e-Book publishing idea.
“Sure, I’d love to hear your thoughts on it Bianca.”
“I think you are going to have a hard time selling it to an author. Who might have spent up to a year working on a book, who might hate Anna’s Archive because it gave their books freely to big tech to train their AIs and they didn’t get a dime in return.”
“Yet they are willing to let Amazon sell their book, right alongside AI generated books, we as a publishing company will guarantee that we won’t. How about this, we won’t use any distribution platform that the writer doesn’t want us too. Of course this will raise distribution costs, so instead of getting ninety two percent, the percentage will go down. The upside of using Anna’s Archive is if you’ve been hurt in the past by the platform, now you are getting something back, free hosting of your content. The publisher is taking more than nine times the amount of risk than the author, by the much lower percentage taken on each book. So if the author worked on it for a year and the publisher for a month, both are roughly the same risk, the author slightly more but for a much bigger reward. As the publisher, I could mitigate my risk by only accepting material that needs minimal editing or that I thought would be best seller material. But I’m not interested in mitigating my risk, I’m interested in getting the best possible books to the most people possible. Would you mind if I write this conversation up for a faq if we actually move forward with this?”
“Sure but why?”
“Well you are an author, who is thinking up objections that I expect any author might have. It’d be useful to write it up so that another author won’t have to ask the same questions. They might come up with new objections that would need to be added to faq later. Let me give you another reason why you should put your book onto Anna’s Archive. If your book is in the slightest bit popular on Amazon, then it will be uploaded to Anna’s anyway. By doing it yourself, you are acknowledging that fact, you are uploading your DRM free book. Like I said before, after ‘The End’ we attempt to guilt the reader into paying. But I’ve been thinking about it, on the dedication page, or the page following it, we put this text.
I, ‘authors name’ , have freely uploaded this DRM free eBook to ‘pirate site’ because I believe that people are good, that pirates are good. They recognize value and will reward the person that rewards them. I believe that my book will reward you, that’s why I don’t ask for any money until you finish the book. On the final page you’ll find a link where you can pay me and the cover artist for our work.”
This little piece of text tells the reader that the author thinks they have written something valuable. If the author doesn’t believe that his work is valuable, why should the reader? But what the author has to know is this. If they publish on Amazon and it’s good and popular, then it will get pirated, it will be DRM free. But what it won’t have is a little intro by the author or a way for the pirate to actually pay for the book if they want to.”
“Jesus, Laura, you make it sound like do it my way or else.”
“No, Bianca, I’m just pointing out that there is a large percentage of folks who won’t put DRM content into a shopping cart and pay for it, unless it is on physical media. A hard cover book has the best DRM in the world. The only way to break it is to scan it page by page, then use OCR on it then edit it. After you go through all of that work, you upload it to a pirate site so other people won’t have to go through all of that. That’s how the eBook market got started. Lot’s of people upload their favorite books after scanning and editing them. Not surprisingly it was almost all science fiction and fantasy, because it was tech nerds being tech nerds. You know more about business than anyone I know, isn’t it always difficult to change distribution models. I mean back in the fifties everyone had a milkman. Now they are rarer than honest politicians. But I’ll bet the dairies that made long term contracts with the supermarkets made out great with their profits. One big delivery a day instead of hundreds or thousands of tiny ones. It took a while for people to switch but they did.”
“Hmm, for someone who doesn’t like business, you sure seem to think up a lot of business ideas.”
“I’ll try it, I’m just finishing up a new romance and I haven’t shopped it to a publisher yet,” Emily said.
“Me too, Laura,” replied Clara.
“Alright thanks, I need you both to tell me how much you each made on your last book that was submitted to your regular publisher.
“I made four thousand and some odd dollars,” Em admitted.
“I made thirty six hundred, but why do you want to know that?” asked Clara
“I wanted to know for two reasons, first this is a completely risky experiment, so we have to know what success looks like, let's say that if we reach our goal which is matching or exceeding your last book's profit within six months of release, then we succeeded. Now you are both willing to risk your hard work on my belief that it will work. So Emily you’ll get a two thousand dollar advance, Clara you’ll get an eighteen hundred advance. But not a traditional publisher's advance. I don’t get any of my advance back until Em has profited four grand and thirty six hundred for Clara. I’ll take the risk that the book will out perform your last releases, this way if we don’t sell a single copy, you’ll only lose half. I really think we have something here and I fully expect to make all of my money back. But even if I only get half back I’d count this as a big success. But it is still a gamble, so think about it and if you decide yes, just push your file to my folder on the server.”
They both agreed to push their files to the server tonight, when I had another thought. I hated that ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ that gave rich people a huge tax cut and the rest of us a tiny one. But tips aren’t taxable anymore. Money freely given.
“I just had another thought, Bianca, you are the financial wizard. There are two ways to go here I think. If we don’t put an exact price on the page and ask instead for a tip. The money that comes in up to twenty five thousand dollars would be tax free. Em, Clara if either of you would like to take a chance on the tip, I’ll advance you the whole goal amount. Then we would have a small amount of data to work with moving forward.”
“Laura, if the tip ebook generates eighty eight percent of the goal, it will in actuality have tied it, by not having to pay the federal income tax on the book it would make the book profit twelve percent higher. But some of us don’t pay any taxes anyway because we are below the fourteen thousand five hundred dollar poverty line. The only reason we do live as well as we all live is because of the collective. One power bill instead of eight, one water bill. All those bills have minimums so we avoid all of that, one large property tax bill versus eight medium sized ones. The only writer that the tip ebook would benefit would be the writer who makes more than poverty line income.”
“Yeah that makes sense, thanks Bianca.”
I went back to my room, wrote up the faq, word for word. Thanks, eidetic memory, then I got notifications when two files hit my folder on the server. I was excited to get back to editing something again. I hope that I haven’t steered my friends wrong. At least I can minimize the financial risk for each of them.
I went to bed early after reading a little more of Audrey’s book. I didn’t want to read too much of it before bed because I felt that it was such a page turner it’d keep me awake, and it was also so tragic I would rail against the injustice of it all. It wasn’t just that she was almost killed wandering out into the road. Now that she was out of the coma, the attempted rapist wanted to kill her, to keep her quiet. Vicky couldn’t get out of bed, two legs broken in multiple places three surgeries so far. She was so vulnerable, the drugs made her pain manageable but also left her drowsy and compliant. Then her nightmares began, was it the opioids or was it the attempted rapist out in the hallway.
***
Amy was shocked to see me at eight am.
“Laura, what are you doing up so early?”
“Lot’s to do, I’ll be alone all day in the store and we have the mystery book club tonight. I’m reading Audrey’s first novel. I want to finish it before the book club meets. I don't want the ending spoiled for me. Willow should be here between nine thirty and ten so come on down and say hello.”
“Text me when she arrives will you?”
“Sure, Amy.”
I grabbed a handful of chocolate chip cookies, a cup of tea and Audrey’s book and headed to the reading nook. It was a beautiful mid July day. I wish that I could go to Zoe’s store and load up Urge with books but I know that the four young people will get more done, then three of them and I would. Vicky finally realized that she was in danger. I thought that would ease the tension, it just seemed to ramp it up higher. My tea had gone cold, forgotten. The cookies still sat untouched on the coffee table.
I almost screeched when Lucy startled me, to be fair, Lucy looked like she was about to scream as well.
“Laura, what are you doing?”
“I’m trying to finish Audrey’s book before the book club. With you gone all day, I’ll actually have to do work today. Why did I ever agree to this, it’s already cutting into my reading time.”
“You agreed because it was Willows and her father’s dream, and you are a nice person, even if you are a bit obsessive about reading.”
Just then we heard a familiar honking. Willow and Urge were here. I texted Amy and Lucy and I went outside to greet my new partner. Willow jumped off the bus and of course hugged us both, then she saw Amy and ran over and hugged her as well.
“Laura, I had Phoebe draw up a contract for us, before I pick up the books we each have to sign it, then we’ll be real partners. Do you have a pen?”
I was a little disappointed, I didn’t really think that we needed a contract. I even told Eve that we didn’t need one. I thought just a hug or a handshake would be enough. But I told her if she wanted one to bring it with her and I’d sign it so I will.
“Sure, I have pens inside. Bring the contract so we can sign it on the counter, Amy and Lucy can witness it. I think we need witnesses to make it legal. I’m surprised that a yippie even knows how to draw up a contract.”
“Well you know Phoebe, she is multitalented. She’ll be here on Friday night, hopefully you’ll have a bed for her?”
“Yes, definitely no problem.”
Willow dug through her canvas bag, and pulled out a scrolled parchment, she unrolled it on the counter. It read.
Willow and Laura Partners Forever agree to be excellent to each other.
THen there was a space on the bottom with room for both of us to sign. I thought I might cry so instead, I quickly grabbed a pen and signed.
