Tomorrow Wendell (White Dragon Black) (36 page)

“Hmmm, interesting working title,” he murmured.

“Relative Evil,” Elaina said, sitting in the chair across from Max’s desk. “It fits the story very well, so I don’t want it changed.”

He bobbed his head back a little. That was a first for his boss. He’d changed practically every other author’s titles since he started working for her six years ago. Max looked at the author’s name in the header.

“I thought this was Claire Abney’s manuscript.”

“It is.”

Max glanced at Elaina’s grinning red lips. “Then who is Ryan Albert Williams?”

“That’s Claire.”

His shock must’ve shown in his face.

“I know,” Elaina said. “I called her this morning—”

“You called her?” Max asked, interrupting her. She usually corresponded with her authors by email. Everything was electronic.

“Yes, I actually picked up my phone and spoke to a very shocked young woman. I had to tell her my name twice before she understood who I was.”

“Did you tell her that in using a pseudonym, she’d lose her established followers?” Max took another look at the query letter that went along with the submission. “What genre is it?” He quickly read. “It’s a suspense? But she writes romance. She’ll be starting all over. Doesn’t she understand that?”

Elaina took a slow sip of her coffee. She waited for him to finish his rant.

He wasn’t finished.

“And it’s written under a man’s name. How is she going to do book signings?” Max looked at the computer screen again. “Not doing book signings will hamper sales—what good is publishing her book going to do our company? What good will it do for Claire?”

He sat back—angry with not only his boss for accepting a book with a pseudonym, and out of the author’s genre with her knowing all the obvious pitfalls, but at Claire for taking several large steps backward in her career.

“We’ll have the standard book signings. Don’t worry,” Elaina said, nodding.

“How? Is Claire going to dress up in a man’s suit and glue on a mustache?” He remembered her picture again. “I guarantee it won’t work.”

“No, I’m putting you in charge of not only editing this perfect manuscript, but finding an appropriate and willing man to be a substitute for Claire Abney. We’ll pay him to do a month’s worth of book signings around the state, like any new author would get.” Elaina set her mug down on the small table next to her chair. “Really, for a first book, there shouldn’t be that much of a demand for her, um, for
his
attention after that. All of the other marketing Claire can handle through
Ryan’s
author’s webpage and blog she’s set up for him already.”

She stood up. “I’ll be happy to sell a few thousand, and so will Claire. From what she said on the phone this morning, writing this story was more cathartic for her than anything else. But it’s a good story—very creepy, and you know I like creepy in a suspense.”

Max turned back to the computer after Elaina closed his door, leaving him alone.

He spent the rest of the day reading Claire’s manuscript—a story of Joseph, a young man whose fifty-nine-year-old widowed father married Linda, a woman thirty years his junior. The father died within a year of an apparent stroke leaving the woman a wealthy widow. She moved in with Joseph’s older brother and his sympathetic, very pregnant wife.

Soon after the baby was born, it died, presumably of sudden infant death syndrome, and Joseph’s uncertainty about his otherwise healthy father’s death had grown to include his tiny nephew’s death as well. When the young mother, distraught over losing her baby, supposedly overdosed on prescription pills and died, Joseph’s suspicions mounted. He drove to the stepmother’s last known home, a small town in a neighboring state to find answers.

With the help of a local and very beautiful female private investigator, they gathered incriminating evidence of a previous husband’s accidental death against the stepmother. Joseph heard voices—saw shadows that disappeared when he blinked.

When a dark truck hit the duo following a lead off the road, they crashed into a muddy field. The truck sped away. They climbed out and discovered elongated mounds of dirt and rocks littering an area. When they found a human skull half-buried in the dirt behind an abandoned old house that reportedly had belonged to Linda’s family, his suspicions of murder solidified into sickening fact.

News of his brother’s sudden illness reached him. Joseph and the investigator raced to convince local law enforcement of her guilt before the stepmother killed again.

Elaina was right. The story even creeped Max out, too.

The sky was dark outside by the time Max finished reading and had scrolled back to the beginning of the manuscript. He’d even missed lunch. Meredith would be so proud he’d broken his boring routine. Predictable? Hmm . . . He could do something that would take him out of that realm of predictable and safe.

Max smiled as he went to his photo files and scrolled to one of his own pictures. Yeah, he could use a good dose of adventure, and what better way than to pretend that he was an author for a month, doing book signings. Maybe he’d even get to meet Claire Abney in person. His heart did a flip, thinking about seeing her face-to-face. They could do a business dinner.

He decided to start what little edits the story needed tonight after he grabbed something at the deli on his way home. He forwarded
Relative Evil
to his personal email address, hit send, and closed down his computer.

The excitement in his chest was different than he’d felt in the past year. He was actually involved in one of Claire Abney’s stories in a way he’d never been before, almost involved with her—somehow.

Two

2 months later

Beginning of November

Phoenix, Arizona

I waited until the UPS man had retreated back to his truck before I swung the front door open to get at the box he had left on the steps. I couldn’t wait to see my new book in person. To actually touch that first copy made all the work worthwhile.

From start to finished copy, it only took six months, an amazing time frame in the world of publishing, but my publisher had a hole in production and needed a suspense—my manuscript was ready at the right time. My first book took six months to write. Then it took another year of submitting before finding a home with Moonwriting Publishing, and then another six months after that before actually being able to hold a hardbound book in my hand.

Of course I knew what
Relative Evil
’s cover would look like. I even had some amount of pull into the final look. There were no surprises there. I flipped to the back inside cover to read the thoroughly made-up biography of my pseudonym, Ryan Albert Williams, but didn’t get past the man’s picture.

I was handsome— uh,
he
was handsome, much better looking than what I ever had expected. In my mind, I envisioned him having dark hair—nearly black, not wavy blond that fell to his collar. The publisher’s vision of Ryan had blue eyes, not the chocolate brown eyes that I had planned.

I was glad to see that he was at least clean-shaven and looked physically fit, and near my age, maybe a little older. Yeah, he was very handsome.

I wondered who he was—the man pretending he wrote about my dysfunctional family. He had a warm, caring smile. I felt like I knew him. Or maybe I felt like I wanted to get to know him. But how? A smile crept onto my lips. I was scheduled for another round of signings for
Love Reignited
up in Utah next month, where my publisher’s main office was located.

I was sure the first round of signings for
Relative Evil
would still be going on during that time. I could get the signing schedule from Max Chase, my editor, and show up with a copy of my book and have the faux Ryan sign it. It would be so fun. Besides, I enjoyed talking with Max. Over the past couple of months since I started revisions on
Relative Evil
, we’d been emailing each other practically every day. If I were daring enough, I might even drop by his office and ask him out to lunch. It would be a first—asking a man out instead of waiting for him to ask me. It would probably be a good idea to find out if he was single.

Until then, I’d need to start promoting my new website under Ryan Albert Williams’ name. Since the book was officially for sale, and I had his picture, I could really start marketing. How could my day get any better?

~*~

My day got worse. The back tires lost traction and slipped on the wet pavement. I held my breath and turned the steering wheel into the slide. I didn’t even think about it before reacting. That little response kept my new Jeep, and me, from spinning out and smashing against the street curb. Stupid rain. I shifted into four-wheel drive high and pressed the accelerator down again. Should’ve done it sooner, but I’d been in a hurry.

St. Joseph’s Hospital was only twenty miles across Phoenix from my apartment, but I’d been at Costco in Avondale doing a book signing for
Love Reignited
when Adelaide had sobbed pitifully into the phone. I’d barely understood what she’d said—except the words “heart attack” and “dying.”

I didn’t believe her.

My dad had had his leg broken, then his cast removed only to have another “accident” and broken his arm, and then dislocated his shoulder, all in separate incidents. At that point, I was seriously frightened that my half-baked idea about Adelaide being ill with Munchhausen Syndrome by Proxy wasn’t just a fantastic theory.

In doing research, I’d combed the Internet, studying that mental illness. I had interviewed two different local psychiatrists, both of whom had different points of view on treating the same illness, something I couldn’t understand. But one consistent element throughout all my research was that the patient needed to be needed, and drank up the praise that came from taking care of that sick or injured person. He or she would go as far as making or keeping that person sick or injured in order not to lose that feeling. By the time I had finished the last chapter, I had no doubt Adelaide fit that neurotic profile. But would Dad believe me if I told him what I suspected about his wife? That I
did
doubt.

I took the entrance ramp to the I-10 freeway and stomped on the gas. “It’s okay, he’s okay,” I whispered, trying to convince myself Adelaide hadn’t killed him this time. Dad had always been healthy. It couldn’t be a heart attack. It must’ve been something else.

An old-fashioned ring-tone echoed loudly. I reached for my cell phone with one hand without taking my eyes off the taillights of the cars in front of me. With a click of my thumb, I answered without checking who called.

“Hello?”

“Claire! Why aren’t you here at Costco?” Brianna, my best friend asked. “There are several people looking at your books.”

“Bria—” I glanced over my shoulder and merged into the next lane. “Dad’s in the ER.”

“Your stepmother broke his neck this time?”

Brianna knew my theory about Adelaide. “She isn’t my stepmother. She’s my dad’s wife. I was twenty-five when they ran off together. I hardly needed a mother then.” I shook her head at the slow truck in front of me. “And, no, she told me Dad had a heart attack this time.”

She gasped again, just as loudly. “Can she give him a heart attack?”

I merged over into the next lane and accelerated around the truck. “From what I’ve learned doing research on Munchhausen Syndrome by Proxy, taking care of a sick person is just as mentally satisfying as taking care of an injured one when you have people looking at you as a hero for being so self-sacrificing. And you know how many times Adelaide’s been told she’s such a good wife? She needs to be needed. That’s her sick life.”

“Oh, I bet Adelaide will be taking control over everything in your dad’s life with this stunt.”

I sighed. “
If
it was her doing. Maybe all these falls have taken a toll on his heart, and he’s really . . .” —tears burned my throat when I thought about my dad lying in the hospital— “d—dying.” The taillights blurred. Blinking rapidly cleared my vision, but it pushed the tears down my cheeks.

“When are you going to tell your brothers about your new book you wrote? I saw it on Amazon this morning.”

My heartbeat quickened, stopping my tears.. Fear was a great motivator for many things. Brianna was in my writer’s critique group, and she’d said the story disturbed her so badly she had had nightmares. I took that as a compliment—in a sad sort of way.

“I don’t ever plan on telling them about it. You know that already, or I wouldn’t have written it under a pseudonym. Besides, my dad would never believe me, and neither would Neil. Jarrod doesn’t even want to talk about it—he made that clear the last time I tried to discuss it with him.” I squeezed the steering wheel tighter. “Dad would hate me for thinking Adelaide could hurt him intentionally. He loves her.”

“Claire, you don’t think that maybe one of your three siblings might read it out of curiosity and recognize their dad and step—uh, Adelaide?”

I snorted a very unladylike laugh. “I don’t really think anybody will buy this book anymore than my two previous books.” I stopped laughing when I had to admit a sad fact. “I barely make enough from writing to earn gas money, certainly not enough to close my editing service.” I lowered my voice and said, “Although that would be super if I could.”

“I heard that,” Brianna said. “I agree, but unless you find that certain niche and write a bestseller, you should be happy just writing. I am.”

I let a smile touch my lips. Brianna, a stay-at-home mom, had another chapter to go before she would finish writing her first book—a romance. She was one of only five people in my writer’s group who knew my secret—six, if I counted her publisher, but Bria would go down fighting for me.

“I gotta go. I’m coming up on my turnoff.” I glanced over her shoulder before merging into the exit lane. “I’ll call you later, okay?”

“Do you want me to sit in your chair and sell some of your books?”

“Oh, Brianna! Would you?”

“Sure, no problem. Did you sign any?”