For a while, Nancy employed a homeless person she had rescued from the streets to help with some of the housework, an African American man she had met through Grate Patrol, an organization Nancy had found time to initiate with Katherine Karr, to feed the city’s homeless. Through her work as a member of the Junior League of Washington, Nancy had become especially sensitive to the plight of those less fortunate than she. As a mother, she was interested in teaching Finny and the other students attending St. Patrick’s Episcopal Day School about the importance of helping others. Her idea was to bring food to the city’s homeless and encourage the young students to distribute the brown-bag meals of sandwiches and juice on their weekly trips to the areas in the inner city where the homeless slept. Not only did the children hand out the lunches; they also participated in preparing and packaging the meals, meeting at Nancy’s or Kathy’s house in the early morning to ready them for delivery.
The street people were so receptive to the children that they remained sober and clean in anticipation of their arrival. When the volunteers’ special van pulled up to the curb, they greeted the children warmly, sometimes regaling them with their woeful stories and always admonishing them to stay away from drugs and alcohol. The volunteer efforts continued year-round, but were especially appreciated on the holidays.
Money, or the lack of it, her friend Mary would learn, was a major theme in Nancy’s life and the most powerful motivation to becoming a published author. They often ate at local pizza parlors, and not the expensive restaurants of Nancy’s youth. Mary often wondered if Nancy’s house was so cold in wintertime, and so dimly lit, to cut down on utility bills. She knew the Akerses were very environmentally conscious, counting membership in organizations such as the Chesapeake Bay Fund among their affiliations. But she suspected that the frigid indoor climate had less to do with the ideology and more to do with saving pennies.
While her collaborator was not one for intimate, self-disclosing talk, Mary did pick up dribs and drabs about her friend’s early life as a child of privilege in Scarsdale. During their plotting sessions, Mary listened attentively when Nancy opened up with brief remembrances from her childhood and the problematic relationship that she had had with her mother. She learned that Roderick and Susan Richards had generously agreed to help their daughter with Finny’s private school tuition, but that their involvement with Nancy and her husband had diminished over the years. By the time the two women began to collaborate on writing projects, Nancy was barely speaking to her mother. Even visits from her oldest brother, with whom she had been very close during childhood, seemed to stir up anxiety in Nancy.
Although many of the problems that existed between Nancy and her mother stemmed from things that occurred during Nancy’s childhood years, their already strained relationship worsened after Nancy’s marriage to Jeremy.
Nancy did not speak much of her husband to her friend, but it was clear to Mary that she preferred not having him around. It was almost as if he got in her way, making irritating demands and interrupting her normal routine. On the rare occasions that Jeremy was at home during their writing sessions, he poked his head in to say a fast hello before disappearing to another part of the house. Mary sensed this enormous energy emanating from the forty-something man with the rugged good looks. She found his deep, resonant voice and Southern accent seductive, and noticed that in addition to his manly physique and chiseled features, he had a very forceful presence that made it almost impossible to look away from him when he entered the tiny first-floor office. Yet while he was always courtly and polite, there was something unsettling about Jeremy that stirred concern in Mary.
In a very short time, Nancy and Mary accomplished much more than simply developing a warm friendship. Remarkably, their combined energy led to the completion of their first manuscript in just three weeks. Both women were comfortable with the arrangement they agreed upon at the beginning of the collaboration, that Nancy’s contribution would be less than Mary’s. While both women participated in plotting the book, Nancy’s only other role was doing sporadic research and writing short sections to fill in the gaps, primarily descriptions of setting, which were Nancy’s real strength.
Mary, meanwhile, actually wrote the entire manuscript. Although they both held the copyright, In Your Wildest Dreams was published under a pseudonym, Mary Alice Kirk. The two women even created a biography for the “author,” combining bits and pieces of both their backgrounds.
Silhouette Books released the novel, which was just short of two hundred pages, in November of 1987. The story involved two single parents, Caroline Forrester, an attractive young health-education teacher and mother of a teen-aged boy, and Greg Lawton, the handsome father of a teen-aged girl, who becomes outraged about the sex-education “lessons” his daughter is learning in Caroline’s classroom. When Greg storms into school to protest, the attraction between him and Caroline is immediate and powerful. Soon, the two learn their own lessons about romance and love.
Rather than dedicating the book to their own love interests, Nancy and Mary dedicated In Your Wildest Dreams to their sons:
To Peter, Finny and David, beloved eggs, who with paper airplanes, buckets of crayfish, flies taped to windowpanes, and enough messy diapers to singlehandedly keep Pampers in business, make life so very interesting.
While the book’s publication was exciting, its production had been severely delayed. In addition, it was greatly overshadowed by an even more dramatic success: the publication of the first book that Nancy wrote alone. The Mayfair Season, released under the name Nancy Richards Akers, and written during her collaboration with Mary, was sold to Warner Books and debuted the same year. Despite the oddly coincidental timing of the books’ publication, 1987 marked the fulfillment of Nancy’s dreams. To show her appreciation to those who had helped her along the way, she wrote the following dedication:
To the memory of my grandfather, John Rehm, with my love. And in gratitude to Pam Regis, Kath Seidel, Myra Engers, Barbara Livingston, Diann Litvin, and Mary Kilchenstein, with my thanks.
Immediately after the manuscript for In Your Wildest Dreams was completed, the two women got to work on another collaboration. Their second book was the story of a ten-year relationship between Laurel and Nathan, who marry despite a built-in conflict: Nathan’s insistence upon pursuing a career in the military that prevents Laurel from setting down roots and having the family of her dreams. The heroine’s dilemma is complicated by the fact that her father was a military man, dragging her from place to place during her childhood. Ultimately, the couple’s marriage ends in divorce, but the sudden death of Nathan’s uncle brings them back together again. The couple goes on to heal the wounds of the past, finally reuniting in marriage.
The second collaboration between Nancy and Mary did not go as smoothly as the first. Once again the women met for plotting sessions, and together they embarked on the research. They met regularly at Mary’s home in Baltimore, kicking around ideas with a tape recorder running.
In this effort, as in their first collaboration, Nancy did not participate in the actual writing of the book, although she did play a greater role in the researching of the story. Mary, in turn, checked in with Nancy often to let her know how she was progressing with the manuscript, as she was writing the book entirely on her own.
When Nancy read the finished product, she regretfully told Mary of her disappointment with the story. In between apologies, she explained that she found the book boring. Hearing that her writing partner was dissatisfied with her work devastated Mary, who was inwardly quite emotional and sensitive. But the fact that Nancy kept apologizing allowed Mary not to take the criticism to heart. Obligingly she began a second draft. But when Nancy announced that she hated the second version as well, Mary grew impatient. She went through the manuscript page by page, studying the markings Nancy had made. She was astounded to find that Nancy had discarded every section in which one of the characters was experiencing internal machinations, wrestling with emotional confl
icts in the way most troubled people do.
Uncertain of how to interpret Nancy’s criticism, Mary sent the manuscript off to both the editor and the agent representing the two authors. They both loved it. Mary was relieved, but not really surprised that the publishing professionals confirmed what she already knew, that the backbone of a romance novel is the development of a relationship between the hero and the heroine, and the climax is the resolution of the conflict that persists in keeping them apart.
The finished product, minus Nancy’s suggested changes, was entitled Promises and released in 1988 as a Silhouette Special Edition paperback. The series featured other realistic stories of intense romance. Although Nancy remained unhappy with the book, her name still appeared on the copyright. But at her own suggestion, the two did not split the royalties 60–40 the way they had on their first collaboration. Instead, Nancy settled for considerably less.
Besides, Nancy had two major preoccupations of her own. One was the release and publication of The Mayfair Season. The second was much more personal: learning that she was pregnant with her second child.
For years, she had been talking about her desire to have another child, and was beginning to lose hope when she learned that she would become a mother for a second time. Being a parent to a house full of children had always been Nancy’s greatest desire. She had once confided to Mary how sorry she was that she had not been able to increase the size of her family. Nancy’s hopes were shared by her son, Finny, who had religiously asked his parents for a baby brother or sister every Christmas since he was able to speak.
While Nancy’s career as a writer had certainly had its ups and downs, her success with motherhood had never been less than stellar. She treasured her times with Finny, and was constantly creating innovative methods to broaden his perspective and educate him about the world. She read him sophisticated stories as a way of expanding his experience, and after they moved to Washington, took him on regular visits to the museums lining the city’s famous mall.
For fun, every Halloween Nancy designed elaborate costumes for her and her son, sewing together a variety of fabrics to which she glued glitter and beads. Excitedly, she created characters for Finny, and then patterned ghoulish outfits—witches and goblins—that she wore to the delight of her son and his young friends. Her face painted with theatrical makeup, she accompanied the children as they rang doorbells and shouted, “Trick or Treat!”
News that Nancy was pregnant had Finny ecstatic, and he excitedly counted the days until he could meet and play with his new sibling. But his mother’s pregnancy was troublesome. Her entire body swelled from all the water she was retaining, and she gained more than seventy pounds. For a woman as concerned with her appearance as she had always been, the ballooning reflection in the mirror was devastating to her. Keeping up with her regular schedule of mothering and writing became increasingly difficult.
On April 5, 1988, Nancy gave birth to Saier William Zeb Davis Akers. The birth of her second boy was as traumatic as the pregnancy, with the long, difficult labor ending in a C-section. In selecting a name for their new son, Nancy and Jeremy followed the same path they had chosen when they had named Finny: using the names of the Confederate colonels and generals among Jeremy’s family members and people he admired who had fought against the Union in the Civil War.
Adding a new baby to the mix meant added expenses for the family, and less time for Nancy to work on her manuscripts. The advance she and Mary had received for Promises had been barely enough to cover the cost of her family’s food and electric bills. The total advance and royalties for the two collaborations was in the area of $32,000 including royalties earned over several years. With a monthly rental payment in excess of $2,000, coupled with household expenses and Finny’s private school, even the monies she received from The Mayfair Season and her second Regency, A Season Abroad, also released in 1988, did not boost Nancy’s income to a satisfactory level.
Her husband’s announcement the following year that he had been offered a new, higher-paying job could not have been better timed. Jeremy suddenly had an opportunity to work as an executive for a private international company that provided environmental consulting services to U.S. and foreign corporations. The offer meant a significant increase from his current government salary as well as a high profile position in the private sector.
Jeremy’s new job as Director of Corporate Services for Kroll Environmental Services in Washington, DC, required traveling all over the United States. His role was to supervise investigative teams at hazardous waste sites, to reconstruct site histories, and to identify the character and source of waste contained in the site. He was also expected to oversee allocation projects at the sites in which contributing parties were assigned liability based upon their individual percentages of waste volume toxicity, and supervise witness and asset searches. His duties extended to acting as liaison between corporate clients and local and federal regulatory agencies.
Unlike his job with the Justice Department, where he spent a good deal of time in the courtroom trying cases against violators of the EPA’s statutes, he was now working for the corporations he had once prosecuted, helping them to troubleshoot potential problems. As supervisor, he partook in the ongoing investigation of suspected Superfund sites with an eye to identifying all the parties who were responsible, in order to allocate the liability fairly.
In spite of his significantly larger paycheck, Jeremy still expected Nancy to contribute to the household expenses. Friends observed that whenever he got his hands on some extra money he would spend it on himself, purchasing a new kayak, exercise equipment, or some other self-indulgence. It was a responsibility that Nancy did not seem to mind, but one that she felt increasingly anxious about fulfilling, since taking care of Finny and the new baby was so demanding. But with Jeremy out of the house and on the road for much of the month, she found herself adjusting to the life of a single mother, setting her own time schedules, and managing to mother the kids, get the meals served, and continue her writing.
While she was somewhat overwhelmed, she nevertheless liked the feeling of freedom that Jeremy’s travels afforded her. Able to work whenever she wanted, and clear of the responsibility of keeping the kind of neat house he liked, she could devote all of her free hours to her writing pursuits. But the balance she happily achieved in her work and her personal life was short-lived.
When Zeb was only six months old, Nancy became pregnant again. And this pregnancy was even more demanding than before. Once again, she ballooned up, gaining massive amounts of weight and severely retaining water. The pregnancy also ended in a C-section.
Grierson Isabelle Virginia Akers was born on August 10, 1989. While the period following Nancy’s last pregnancy had been enjoyable, this time was extremely stressful. Experiencing two difficult pregnancies in a row had depleted her physically, and taking care of two infants and an older child virtually on her own exacted an emotional toll on Nancy.
With so much on her plate, and her husband on the road for weeks, sometimes months, at a time, she had little time to socialize with the friends she had made through the Washington Romance Writers. Yet, every so often, one of the women would hear about a calamity in Nancy’s life and call or visit to lend a sympathetic ear. Kathleen Karr learned that the family Macaw had bitten off a piece of young Isabelle’s finger, and Mary heard from their mutual agent, Adele Leone, that Nancy had been rushed to the hospital with some kind of systemic infection.
To help her through the ordeal, Nancy employed various high school girls to act as nannies for her children after school, and continued to use the services of the young man she had hired to clean her large house. In addition to tidying, Ulysses, the man Nancy had found through the Grate Patrol, lifted the mood of the house as he sang his way through the cleaning chores—at one point he had even earned part of his living singing songs on street corners to passers-by. Not only was he a wonderful housekeeper, he had a riotous sense of humor, and a flair for the dramati
c.
But things continued to deteriorate. Soon after Isabelle’s first birthday, Jeremy announced that he intended to quit his job and start his own consulting firm. As one of only a handful of people trained in his field of environmental law, he was certain that going out on his own would provide him with a greater income, and more control over his hours.
His new company, Environmental Strategies Management, was a consulting firm that combined legal, investigative, scientific, and technical know-how on a broad range of services, including responsible-party identification and asset searches, reconstruction site histories, environmental audits and assessments, cost allocations, and public-relations services. Jeremy was the company’s chief executive and planned to operate out of the family’s house.
Soon after Jeremy’s old housemate Don Boswell heard that his friend was planning to venture out on his own, he extended him an invitation to join the law firm he founded in Palm Beach, Florida. It would be an easy move for Jeremy because he was already a member of the Florida Bar as a result of his work with the State Attorney’s Office. Jeremy accepted Don’s offer, and Don added his name to the firm’s letterhead. Yet, their partnership never really got off the ground. Jeremy met with Don and prospective clients during his trips to Florida, but he was so busy with his environmental consulting firm that he never seemed to have the time to give the new alliance the attention that Don had hoped.
But Don kept the partnership in place, figuring that Jeremy would eventually find the time to devote to the venture. He had remained in close contact with the Akers family since they had left Florida and moved back to Washington in 1983. He stopped in for dinner whenever he was in town on business, and kept the lines of communication open with thirty-minute conference calls between himself, Jeremy, and Nancy at least once every other month.
Fatal Romance: A True Story of Obsession and Murder Page 14