The Accidental Bestseller (53 page)

A little over three weeks after her ill-fated appearance on
The Kristen Calder Show
, Faye Truett had had enough censure to last a lifetime. Her daughter refused to speak to her or allow her time with her granddaughter. Her husband, who seemed to have almost completely disappeared into the persona of Pastor Steve, came and went. But though they continued to live in the same house, sleep in the same bed, and sometimes even spoke to each other, they no longer communicated.

Faye, who had always prided herself on her ability to take action, couldn’t figure out what action to take.

For the first time in almost thirty years, she faced no deadlines and had nothing she needed to write. Her presence at the church she’d helped found was no longer welcomed. Even at Rainbow House, the volunteers and staff’s discomfort made her reluctant to spend time there.

More than anything Faye wanted to talk to Kendall and Mallory and Tanya, to talk about what had happened to them and what might happen next. But she was ashamed of all that she’d kept from them and felt lost in a morass of her own making.

She, who had always been so busy, now spent her days either pacing the confines of her home or walking in the Botanic Garden or along Lake Shore Drive. She’d never felt so alone or so unsure.

She was in the midst of one such walk that Wednesday when her cell phone rang. She’d almost stopped carrying it since almost everyone had stopped calling. When she flipped open the phone to check the caller ID and saw Sara’s number, she allowed herself to hope for reconciliation. But when she answered it wasn’t her daughter’s disapproving voice she heard. It was her granddaughter’s piping one.

“Gran Gran?” The five-year-old voice was wobbly and worried. “Where did you go? How come you never comed over to see me anymore?”

Faye stopped walking as she tried to get her breath; Becky’s hurt had sucked it right out of her.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Faye said. “I’m so glad to hear your voice.”

“But where are you?” the little girl asked plaintively. “I been missing you.” And then, “Don’t you love me anymore?”

“Oh, Becky, honey. Of course I do!” Faye swallowed back her tears, ashamed that she’d let things slide so far. Even in the midst of the standoff with Sara, she should not have allowed her granddaughter to feel abandoned. “I’ve just been . . . busy,” she said. “But I should have called to let you know.”

She paused, realizing that this was the first time the five-year-old had ever called on her own. “Where are you, sweetheart? Did somebody dial the phone for you?”

“The babysitter helped me,” Rebecca confided. “I showed her the ’mergency list with your number on it. But I don’t think I’m supposed to tell my mommy. She’s at yogurt class.”

There was a pause while the child apparently thought about this. “Is it lying if you
don’t
tell somebody you did something?”

This, of course, was the million-dollar question. For years Faye had wanted to believe the answer was
No.
That somehow her charitable ends justified her potentially objectionable means. That the sin of omission was smaller and more forgivable than that of an outright lie.

But that had been rationalization pure and simple, Faye thought, as she considered her response. A cowardly way of doing what she wanted to without facing the consequences.

And when she had finally told the truth, it was only because she’d felt compelled to protect Mallory and Kendall. Not out of any sense of moral necessity.

“You shouldn’t keep anything from your mommy, Becky. It’s OK to tell her we talked,” Faye said. “And I’ve missed you so much. I’m going to talk to your mommy, too. And you know what else?”

Faye’s mind began to move more nimbly, sorting through possible courses of action, considering and rejecting. “I’ll see you at church on Sunday. I’m going to come by your Sunday school class right after services so we can visit.”

“Do you promise, Gran Gran?” the little girl asked. “Will you really?”

“Absolutely positively,” Faye assured her granddaughter, incredibly relieved to have made a decision. It would take a veritable army to stop her. “I can’t wait to give you all the great big hugs I’ve been saving up for you.”

Faye hung up the phone and continued her walk as she sorted out the best way to do what she’d just committed to. One thing was for certain. She was finished hiding as if she’d committed some mortal sin.

Sara and her group had been after her to denounce what they still insisted on calling pornography and apologize for embarrassing the Clearview congregation. Even Steve seemed to want her to speak out. She’d avoided church these past weeks rather than give in to the pressure, but she was more than ready now to address the congregation.

How they were going to feel about what she had to say was something else altogether.

43

—E. M. FORSTER

 

 

 

Mallory was sick to death of posting apologies all over the Internet and blogging about her thoughts and feelings to anyone who owned a computer. She was even sicker of pacing the brownstone and fending off the quiet.

She hated not talking to Kendall, Tanya, and Faye. And she especially hated how much she missed Chris. But no matter how many times she picked up the phone and started to punch in his number, she couldn’t seem to actually place a call.

At first, after her “outing” on
The Kristen Calder Show
, Mallory had been too frightened to think clearly. She’d been afraid that her readers would desert her in droves. That her publisher would drop her. That somehow admitting to her pathetic past and to a burnout so severe that she’d actually plagiarized herself would blot out everything she’d achieved and erase her from the bestseller lists as if she had never existed.

For a time it had looked as if all of her fears might be realized. Readers were angry and not shy about saying so and her sales numbers dropped sharply for the first time in a decade. Her publisher was not happy with her and there were more legal questions at this point than answers. But ultimately her nightmare of losing “everything” as she had after her parents’ suicides, had proven to be just that—only a nightmare.

It was only now, when she was certain she was not going to be out on the street, that she’d discovered the facet of her nightmare that didn’t fade in the light of day; she was alone. Horribly alone. And this time it wasn’t because the people she loved had deserted her, but because they felt unloved and deserted
by
her.

Like the owner of a sinking boat who’d been so fixated on the teak trim and polished chrome that she overlooked the gaping hole in her vessel’s hull, Mallory had spent so much time and energy striving for financial security that she’d overlooked what mattered most. Or rather the
people
who mattered most.

She’d heard that Chris was back in New York, but she hadn’t heard from him. She didn’t even know where he was staying.

She also knew that Faye’s and Tanya’s contracts had been terminated and that Scarsdale was planning to take
Sticks and Stones
off the shelves because of the legal wrangling between their publishers. Mallory would have given anything to talk with her friends, but she could still see the shock on their faces when they’d discovered she wasn’t who she’d said she was. And her own shock over Faye’s revelations.

When they’d needed each other most, rather than circling the wagons as they always had in the past, they’d turned on each other. How did a friendship survive that?

Mallory didn’t know. In fact she was afraid she didn’t know anything that mattered anymore. She’d rebuilt her life once before with hard, grueling work writing book after book, presenting herself as she wanted to be until she became it, making appearance after appearance.

But always she’d held her real self back. She’d given to her husband and her friends, but not of her
self
. Even when she’d been trying to help Kendall, she’d been frantically trying to get over a writer’s block that she couldn’t admit to. She’d accepted Chris’s love and attention as her due and then doled out the bare minimum of herself in return. No wonder he’d given up on her.

Mallory walked into Chris’s closet searching for her husband, but only bits and pieces of him remained. His absence taunted her and she missed him with a fierceness that she couldn’t push aside.

It was there amid the unnecessary articles of clothing that Chris had left behind that Mallory realized there was no room for pride in the great emptiness yawning inside of her. If she loved her husband and her friends then she needed to demonstrate that love by offering her true self. Whether they accepted what she presented would be up to them.

Hurrying into the bedroom Mallory picked up the phone and placed a call to Patricia Gilmore. When she had her agent on the line, she explained that she was planning a month’s vacation followed by major changes in her writing schedule. Then she instructed her to contact Zoe at Partridge and Portman as well as P&P’s legal department. There had to be a way to salvage
Sticks and Stones
so that all of its authors could benefit from it. She charged her agent with finding a way to make this happen then placed another call to Lacy Samuels to try to get a sense of how things were playing out at Scarsdale.

Relieved to be taking action, Mallory dialed her travel agent next, explaining what she had in mind and asking that the tickets be messengered to her later that afternoon. And then before she could lose her nerve, she called Chris’s secretary and scheduled a lunch appointment with her husband for the following day.

It was said that an opera wasn’t over until the fat lady sang. For Mallory a love story wasn’t over until the hero and heroine professed their love and agreed to live “happily ever after.”

Lacy Samuels sat in Jane Jensen’s empty office wondering if she should call a shaman or a priest to rid the space of any evil remnants of the editor’s personality that might remain.

She’d been sent to clean out and box up the detritus of Jane’s sixteen years at Scarsdale so that the space could be made ready for Hannah Sutcliff, who had laid claim to it as well as Jane’s biggest authors.

With an empty box on a chair next to her, Lacy began to sort through Jane Jensen’s things, realizing as she did so that she was looking for an explanation for her former boss’s hostility and disdain.

She handled things as little as possible, partly because they’d been Jane’s and partly because she couldn’t shake the irrational fear that Jane was somehow going to storm into the office, see what Lacy was doing, and find a way to punish her for it.

Despite Hannah and Cash’s assurances that this was impossible and that Jane was no doubt out interviewing for new jobs right this very minute, Lacy’s fight-or-flight instinct was primed and ready to kick in.

The top of the desk yielded little in the way of clues. A chipped coffee mug stuffed with pens and pencils, an electric cup warmer, several yellow pads with Jane’s aggressive scrawl across the pages, and a mostly dead plant that had bent itself in half trying to reach the light went into the box without examination.

Then Lacy pulled open the top drawer of Jane Jensen’s desk.

For a time it was a simple matter of sorting: supplies like paper clips and sticky pads and red pencils stayed here, anything that looked remotely personal went into the box—though there wasn’t a lot of that. There were no mementos, no personal photos, not even ones taken with the well-known authors Jane had edited. Lacy found only in-house memos and phone lists and production schedules along with crumpled wrappers and miscellany.

As she handled Jane’s things, she continued to look for clues as to why a talented editor would so despise writers that she edited. Or why she had made everyone around her so miserable. Even serial killers began with a clean slate. Jane Jensen must have had her reasons.

Taking a break from the desk, Lacy turned to the shelves that held books Jane had edited over the last few years. Because she’d been an executive editor, they were mostly recent releases by Scarsdale’s best-known names. Lacy handled their books reverently and felt the thrill of being a part of the publishing process. She was now an assistant editor and she could hardly wait to take the diamond of the author’s work and help to polish it to an even more startling brilliance.

On a bottom shelf, Lacy found several copies of
Sticks and Stones
and she felt the elation coupled with frustration that she experienced whenever she confronted the tangled mess of claims and counterclaims now twined around the book. The book was still climbing the
New York Times
list despite, or more likely because of, Kristen Calder’s “outing” of its authors. Lacy knew there was still talk of pulling it from the shelves due to the disputes over ownership. But it seemed a terrible waste to Lacy to lose such a huge moneymaker.

In her heart she believed there must be a way to satisfy the claimants without pulling the book. Mallory St. James’s call made Lacy even keener to figure out a way to do it. But whenever she brought up the idea, both Cash and Hannah accused her of wishful thinking. But wasn’t it wishful thinking and determination that had seen the book published in the first place? Why couldn’t the same outside-the-box thinking help keep it on the shelves?

Lacy was still musing about this possibility when she came across the dog-eared manuscript crammed into the very back of a bottom desk drawer.
One Life, One Dream
was scrawled across the title page in an oversized old-fashioned font. The author’s name appeared beneath it. Lacy’s hands stilled as she read the name, Jana Johansen, clearly a pseudonym for “she who should not be named.” The cover letter attached to the title page was dated 1983, right about the time Jane had come to Scarsdale.

Curious now, Lacy began to leaf through the manuscript pages, reading a paragraph here and there, skimming from scene to scene. She grimaced when she hit a reference to the hero’s “throbbing male member.” But there were also passages that betrayed Jane’s attempts to be literary. Overall, Lacy thought, it wasn’t bad, certainly not as bad as the submissions Jane had foisted on her. Parts of it were even good, just not good enough.