Passion

by Marilyn Pappano

  “You tell me,” she replied, just a hint of a challenge in her voice.

  He thought back over the years of correspondence that was now scattered in ashes over the mountains where he had lived. His contact with the agency had never been extensive. When he sent in a proposal for a new book, he had always gotten back a note saying that Rebecca had received it and would be in touch with Candace Baker at Morgan-Wilkes, who got her own copy from him. Between the proposal stage and the completed manuscript, there were more notes, one accompanying the contracts Rebecca sent in triplicate for him to sign and return, another accompanying the copy of the contract that eventually made its way back to him. If Candace wanted revisions either on the proposal or the manuscript, Rebecca sent him notes stating her own thoughts on the matter.

  She always sent him copies of the best-seller lists. In more years than he could remember, not a single week had gone by that he wasn’t on the New York Times list with one book or another; when a movie based on one of his books was released, it wasn’t unusual for him to have two, three, or four titles in the top ten at the same time. She also sent him reviews wherever they cropped up, along with holiday greetings and a card every year on the anniversary of the representation agreement they’d signed eleven years ago.

  The first few years there had also been frequent memos announcing changes in the agency—the move from New York City to Richmond, another move from their first Richmond address to the current one, and personnel changes. One assistant was out and another was in; then a year or six months or three months later, that assistant would be gone, too. Until she’d hired Teryl.

  “Four or five years,” he replied. “You were working there by the time the fourth Thibodeaux book came out.”

  She gave him one of those steady, measuring looks that made him want to squirm, but he didn’t give in to the urge. Instead, he simply looked back at her.

  “How do you know that?” she asked, her tone conversational.

  “Because you liked the book enough to say so when you forwarded some reviews. I’d always gotten plenty of feedback from Rebecca herself, but that was the first time one of her assistants had responded. Until then, I wasn’t sure her assistants even read any of the books she handled.” He glanced at her again. “I even remember some of their names. Caryl with a y and Gina and Mary Kay.”

  Teryl—with a y, he thought with a faint grin—looked very serious and just the slightest bit troubled. “I replaced Caryl. For the first six months I worked there, Rebecca was constantly calling me by her name.”

  He let a mile or so pass in silence before asking, “So what are your plans?”

  She gave him a blank look.

  “You said you have no ambition. You’re not interested in moving up and on. What are you interested in? Being Rebecca’s glorified receptionist and gofer for the rest of your life?”

  She was quiet so long that he thought she wasn’t going to answer. He wouldn’t blame her if she didn’t. Answers to a question like that could weigh heavily on the personal side, and, God knew, she didn’t have a reason to confide anything personal in him. Still, when he was about to give up and find some other direction to send the conversation in, she gave a faintly mocking laugh. “I always thought I would be like my mother. She worked for a while after she was married, but when I was born, she quit. She stayed home and took care of the kids. She was a full-time housewife and mother, a Little-League coach, a Girl Scout leader, a homeroom mother—for as many as five or six homerooms at a time. She went on class trips and was a volunteer for all the school plays and pageants. She baked cookies and sewed and taught us all how to throw a mean fastball. She and Daddy have always been the most popular parents in the neighborhood. They loved all the kids, and all the kids loved them.”

  “So you wanted to get married and devote the rest of your life to taking care of husband, home, and kids. Such a fifties idea for a nineties woman.” Her faint mocking was echoed in his voice, although he didn’t feel it, not really. It was more of a defense mechanism, he guessed, because the life she was describing sounded damned familiar—and as alien as life on another planet. His mother had been a full-time housewife and mother, too. She had also been a Scout leader—for Janie—and a homeroom mother—for Tom. She had gone on class trips and baked cookies, but she hadn’t loved all the kids in the neighborhood. Hell, she hadn’t even managed to love all the kids in the family.

  “True feminism is about choice,” she replied, a little defensive now herself. “I don’t have to want a career. I don’t have to try to prove that I’m equal to or better than the men in my chosen field. I don’t have to live up to someone else’s expectations. When I get married, if it’s financially possible, I can stay home and have a half dozen babies and take in a few dozen more the way Mama and Daddy have, and it’s no one’s business but mine and my husband’s.”

  That was something he could do for her, John acknowledged grimly. When this was over, if he survived it, he could repay her for her help by making it financially possible for her to take in all the parentless kids in the entire state of Virginia. He could make it possible for her to give countless children the sort of upbringing she’d had—the sort he hadn’t. He could make it work for her.

  And her husband, whoever the lucky bastard might be.

  He had never given any real thought to marriage. Back before Tom’s death, he’d been too young, had been having too good a time to consider settling down with one girl for the rest of his life. He hadn’t wanted to make a commitment in the present, much less one that extended until death. After Tom died, he had suddenly become too old. Spiritually, he had aged a century or two in a twenty-four-hour period. The good times had disappeared while he’d gone off searching for peace, for absolution; not finding that, he would have been grateful for the sweet release of death… or so he had thought.

  That was the real reason he’d started writing. He’d found himself at sea on that freighter, miserable and dying bit by bit inside while long hours of hard work kept his body stronger and healthier than ever. They had been somewhere in the Atlantic when he’d gone on deck one night for fresh air and a change from the depressing cramped quarters he called his own.

  Hundreds of miles from land, his world had consisted of only the ship, the stars, and the ocean. The water had beckoned him, had drawn him. It wouldn’t be a bad way to go, the waves had whispered against the hull. Just slip over the side, swim away from the ship to avoid the huge propellers, then float off to oblivion. Soon he would grow tired. Soon, instead of riding the waves as he’d done for much of his life, he would sink beneath them. With each breath water would replace the oxygen in his lungs, and in a very short time it would bring him peace. As long as he didn’t panic, as long as he didn’t struggle, it wouldn’t turn nasty. And why would he struggle? For him, living was the struggle. Surviving the nights, when he was haunted by dreams of his sins and his failures, was a struggle. Waking up every morning, facing another bright sunny day when his brother would never see a sunrise again, getting out of bed and walking away from it when his sister would never walk again—those were struggles.

  Knowing that he was utterly alone in the world, utterly unloved… That was a struggle.

  Dying would be easy.

  Only it hadn’t been.

  He had tried. Looking back now, he could see that he’d been trying from the moment he’d held Tom’s lifeless body. He’d taken on risky jobs and made every reckless mistake he could. He’d tried to drink himself into the ground. A time or two he had picked fights that had gotten him beaten senseless. That night on the ship he had gone so far as to climb over the thick cables that served as a railing. The freighter had been loaded with cargo bound for the Port of New Orleans, so it rode low in the water. It would have been as easy as diving into a pool, and he’d been doing that since he was five years old.

  He had tried that night to put himself out of the misery his life had become, had stood there leaning over the water, nothing holding him ba
ck but his left hand, wrapped tightly around the cable. His brain had given the order to release it, to let go and dive into the blessed dark water, but his fingers had refused to obey. He had stood there one minute, three, five, ten, and then he had climbed back to the deckside of the lines. He had gone below, wanting to put a few thoughts in writing, and had scrounged up some paper and a pen.

  Before the night was over, those few thoughts had filled half of a legal pad. By the time they reached port and he’d collected his pay and headed off for Colorado, he’d had the makings of a book. He had discovered that he had a talent for writing—he, who had failed at virtually everything he’d ever tried. More importantly, it made him feel good.

  Not being able to write, on the other hand, had brought back all the misery, although this time without the self-destructive tendencies. He had no desire to die—not today, not next week, and sure as hell not so some deceitful, manipulative bastard could claim everything he had worked for.

  As they drove across a bridge, Teryl spoke again, echoing the question he’d asked her only a few miles back. “What are your plans?”

  He didn’t think he had any long-term plans beyond staying alive, certainly nothing like hers. He wasn’t likely to get married, wasn’t likely to meet any woman who thought he was worth spending the rest of her life with. He wasn’t sure he was a decent candidate for fatherhood, either, not with the example his own father had set for him. He would rather live alone the rest of his life than make an innocent kid feel the way his parents had made him feel.

  When he didn’t answer right away, she clarified her question. “When we get to Richmond…”

  Of course. She was interested only in his plans for the immediate future. She didn’t care what he might be doing five years or ten or twenty from now, because she wouldn’t be around to know. “I’m going to prove to you that everything I’ve said was true,” he replied, wrapping his fingers tighter around the steering wheel.

  “And how are you going to do that?” She was using that cautious tone of voice again, the let’s-not-upset-the-crazy-man-and-make-him-do-something-rash voice. Christ, how he hated it!

  “You have access to Rebecca’s files. I can tell you Simon Tremont’s career in detail, and you can verify it. I can tell you things that no one but Simon, Rebecca, and the people at Morgan-Wilkes could possibly know. I can give you figures and dates. I can tell you which clauses Rebecca negotiated in which contracts. I can tell you what changed between the proposal and the final manuscript of each book and whose idea it was—Rebecca’s or Candace’s or mine. I can tell you everything Rebecca has on Simon Tremont.” He glanced at her. “Will that be enough to convince you?”

  Miles passed as Teryl stared out the window, looking for an answer to his question. She wanted to say yes, and not just to pacify him, not so he would stay calm and not lose his temper. Some part of her wanted to believe him. She wanted to believe that this was a lucid, rational man to whom crazy, irrational things were happening.

  In the beginning, she had been one hundred percent convinced that he was insane, but since then, he had created a few doubts, and he had the potential if she took him into the agency—if she went through the records with him, if he could do everything he’d just claimed he could—to create many more. But would it be enough to convince her?

  “I don’t know,” she replied honestly. “I’d like to believe you—”

  “Why? Because you think it’s your best chance for getting out of this alive?”

  She looked at him. He was watching the road and the traffic ahead, so all she got was his profile, but it was enough. Enough to see how tense he was. Enough to know that his jaw must ache from being clenched so tightly. Enough to notice all over again—damn her eyes—how handsome he was. “Are you going to kill me if I don’t believe you?” she asked, keeping her voice even through sheer will.

  He scowled and tightened his hold on the steering wheel a few degrees more. “Of course not. You know that.”

  Oddly enough, she did know. She honestly believed that he wasn’t going to hurt her. If that had been his intention, he’d had plenty of chances in the last four days. He could have killed her at any time, could have dumped her body anywhere along the hundreds of miles of highway they’d traveled and driven away. Because they weren’t supposed to even know each other, no one ever would have connected him to her. It would have been a perfect crime.

  But the only crime he was interested in was the one he insisted the fraudulent Simon Tremont had cooked up, and it was far from perfect. If everything John said was true, Simon had made a major mistake in not making certain his victim died in the explosion. If she had been in Simon’s place, she would have planned for the remote possibility that John might escape. She would have been tucked away behind some cover up there in the mountains with a high-powered rifle and a scope, and the instant she saw him come out the window, she would have shot him, then somehow maneuvered the body back inside for the flames to at least partially dispose of.

  The trail of her thoughts made her shiver. She didn’t like thinking about murders, attempted or otherwise. It was too grisly a subject for playing would-have, should-have.

  “When I get home, I’ll call Rebecca,” she said. “I’ll see if I’ve overestimated her opinion of me and if I still have a job, and I’ll arrange to introduce you to her. She can go through the files with you. She can recommend a good hotel, too, and…” Her voice trailed off. He was giving her a curiously still look. She knew long before he started to speak exactly what he was going to say. She was even prepared for the apology in his voice.

  “It doesn’t end that easily, Teryl. Rebecca isn’t going to help me. She’ll be even more skeptical than you are, and she’s got a lot to lose if I’m telling the truth. It wouldn’t do much for her reputation if it came out that she released a client’s royalties to a total stranger simply on his claim that he was the client. She’s worked a long time to make a name for herself. She would sacrifice anything—including me—to protect it.”

  She would like to dispute that, but she wasn’t sure she could. Rebecca’s reputation did mean a lot to her. The agency was the center of her life. It came before all else. Even her marriage had placed a sorry second after business in her priorities. She had survived the breakup of the marriage, but Teryl wasn’t sure she could survive the breakup of the agency.

  “You may be right about Rebecca. But she’s the one who can help you, not me. I have no power. I have no authority. I don’t—”

  “You have her respect,” he interrupted. “If you tell her that something’s wrong with this whole Tremont situation, she’ll listen to you. She may not agree, but she’ll hear you out, where she would probably simply throw me out.”

  “But I can’t tell her that something’s wrong.”

  “You can after I convince you.”

  Teryl thought—but wisely didn’t say—that, short of getting the man she knew as Simon to admit that he was a fake, there wasn’t anything she could think of offhand that could totally convince her.

  “All right,” she said, shifting restlessly. “Let’s say we go through the files and you know all the particulars of Simon’s career. I know all the details of my mother’s life, but that doesn’t make me her.”

  Once again he scowled. “That’s different. You know your mother; you’re her only natural-born child; you lived more than half of your life with her. Of course you know everything. But I don’t know the man who says he’s me. Before Tuesday afternoon at the TV station, I’d never laid eyes on him.”

  Maybe, she thought. Or maybe not.

  “You don’t believe that, either.” He muttered a bitter curse. “What do you think, Teryl? That I did somehow know him? Maybe we were neighbors or old buddies, or maybe I worked for him. Maybe that’s how I learned so much about him. Or maybe I broke into his house and stole his records so I could familiarize myself with every aspect of his career. Maybe that’s how I learned so much about him. And then maybe I burned m
y own house and sliced open my arm to explain why I have no proof of my identity, and then I followed him to New Orleans. Wouldn’t that have been a little foolish—risking being seen there by him?”

  “You didn’t risk that, though,” she pointed out in a soft, hesitant murmur. “You didn’t come into the studio until just before the interview started, you stayed in the shadows, and you left the minute it was over. The next morning you were in the hotel lobby while he and I were talking. You were watching us, but you never came close enough to be seen. You never got close to him, never got close enough for him to notice you.”

  His expression darkened. Had he expected her to not notice his disappearing act Tuesday afternoon? Had he thought she would write off both that and the reappearing act Wednesday morning as just coincidence or the luck of timing?

  “You’re right,” he said at last. “I did want to avoid being seen by him. The man was in my house, for God’s sake! He tried to kill me! There were photographs in the house, pictures of me with my brother and sister. I didn’t know if he’d seen them, if he had taken the time to nose around before or after he rigged the bombs, but I wasn’t taking any chances. If he had seen them, then he would have been able to recognize me; you saw for yourself that I haven’t changed a whole lot in the last seventeen years. And if he did recognize me there in New Orleans when he thought I was dead… It wasn’t a situation I wanted to deal with just yet. I want proof before I confront him.”

  His explanation made sense, she admitted; then she choked back a derisive laugh. Nothing in this whole mess made sense. Absolutely nothing.

  As they drove into the city of Richmond, the relief she had expected to feel was noticeably missing. She had kidded herself into thinking everything would be all right when she got home, that she would be safe and free, that John Smith would no longer be a part of her life, that his claims would no longer concern her. But it wouldn’t end that easily, he’d warned.