“It must have been lonely.” Her voice was soft, her expression distant. “What did you do?”
“Watched movies. Read. Until the last year or so, wrote.” He saw her gaze flicker disturbingly, and he sighed. “No, Teryl, I didn’t read Simon Tremont’s books. I didn’t need to; I wrote the damned things. I didn’t get fixated on my favorite author. I didn’t delude myself into thinking that I was him.”
“Did you ever travel?”
“Only occasional trips into Denver.”
“Then how could you write all those books? One of Simon Tremont’s strengths is the atmosphere, the sense of place. If you never went to any of those places—”
“I didn’t say that,” he disagreed. “I said I didn’t do any traveling after I moved into the mountains. I spent the six years before that doing nothing but traveling. When I left home, I hitchhiked to the Texas coast and got a job delivering a boat to the Keys. From there I worked my way north. I spent some time in Georgia and North Carolina, in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, and I wound up in Maine. When I got tired of New England, I headed back south and didn’t stop until I’d hit Mexico. From there I went to New Orleans and settled down for a while, until I got the job on the freighter. You know what happened after that.”
“So the locations for all these stories were written from memory.”
“Memory, an occasional travel video, and a few calls to local tourism offices just to find out if anything in particular had changed since I was there. What can I say? I’m observant. I have a great eye for detail.” Sensing her disappointment, he smiled persuasively. “Isn’t that at least a little more satisfying than the answer that bastard gave you in New Orleans? I’ve actually camped out in Acadia National Park off the coast of Maine. I’ve gotten drunk in Key West. I’ve been damned near eaten alive by the mosquitoes in Okefenokee. I’ve been thrown in jail down in Mexico, and I’ve hiked the Appalachian Trail in North Carolina. I haven’t relied solely on travelogues or travel magazines, and I don’t believe imagination, understanding, and talent are enough to make up for actually experiencing a place.”
“I have to admit that when Simon said—”
He interrupted her again. “Do you have to call him that?”
The look she gave was drily admonishing. “I only know two names for him—John and Simon—and you insist that neither one belongs to him. That may be, but I still have to call him something, and since you’re John, he gets Simon by default.”
Her reasoning made sense… although he didn’t quite agree that the son of a bitch needed one of his names. Until they knew his real name, John could think of a number of names to call him that were perfectly appropriate. “All right,” he agreed grudgingly. “You can call him Simon for now. You have to admit what?”
“That I wondered about it when Simon said he hadn’t spent much time in New Orleans. The books make the city seem so real. Reading them truly is like being there. There’s a sense of intimacy to them that, maybe I’m being naïve, but I would have sworn could come only from intimate knowledge of the city, not from guidebooks or videotapes or phone conversations with people a thousand miles away.”
“Actually, Teryl, he didn’t say he hadn’t spent much time there.” When she started to protest, he raised one hand to silence her. “I was eavesdropping, remember? You commented that he must have spent a lot of time in the city, and he said, ‘You can learn an awful lot about a place without ever going there, Teryl.’ For all we know, that could have been his first visit.”
Settling against the high arm of the sofa, she rested her chin on her hands and glumly sighed. “What a disappointment if that’s true—if the books that introduced me to the city that could easily become my most favorite city in the world had been written from travelogues and magazines.”
By sheer will, he kept the frustration her remark aroused out of his voice when he replied. “There’s no reason to be disappointed. Your Simon didn’t write those books. I did. And in the time I lived there, I became intimately familiar with the place—at least, with my small corner of it, and that’s what I used in writing the Thibodeaux books.”
After one moment of silence extended into two, then three, he pressed the play button, and the movie began where it had left off. He didn’t turn his attention to it right away, though. First he fixed his gaze on Teryl. “I did write those books, Teryl,” he said quietly. “Someday… you’re going to believe me.”
Chapter Eleven
Pulling the key from the lock, Rebecca opened the front door of the Robertson Literary Agency and strolled inside, leaving her briefcase and handbag on Lena’s desk before turning back to close and relock the door. For a moment she simply stood there, enjoying the peace of the old house. Ordinarily, she used the back door, like the rest of the staff, but on Monday mornings, she always walked around to the front and climbed the steps to the broad porch. She always took a moment there to smell the fragrance of the flowers, to listen to the tinkle of the crystal wind chimes that hung from a gingerbread bracket, to admire the inviting picture of white wicker chairs separated by pots of bright red geraniums. She always took a moment to savor the sheer pleasure that all of this was hers, to marvel over how far she had come.
She had begun her career twenty-five years ago working for an agency in Manhattan, a big one that filled an entire floor of a high-rise office building. The offices had been purely functional and totally lacking in grace and charm. She had opened her agency in equally impersonal, charm-free quarters in a lower rent neighborhood a few miles away, always with the intention of someday moving to a place like this.
Someday had been a long time coming. After eleven years she still remembered the morning it had arrived in the form of an unsolicited manuscript from an unpublished writer in Denver. The mere size of it—some seven hundred pages—had been daunting, and if she’d had an assistant, she would have passed the thing on to her. But after five hard years on her own, it had still been a struggle just to make expenses. Hired help was a luxury she couldn’t yet afford.
She had sat down with the manuscript, intending to read a chapter, two at most. If it was like the majority of unsolicited work she received—unpublishable—that was a more than fair reading. If this unknown writer had a spark of genuine talent buried underneath the usual first book mistakes, two chapters was enough to find it. Hours later, she had left the office for home in a daze, overwhelmed by emotion and utterly astounded by her good fortune. She had carried the manuscript with her, clutched to her chest like some magical talisman with the power to change her life.
That was exactly what it had turned out to be. That extraordinary manuscript and the once-in-a-lifetime talent that had produced it had made both Rebecca and its author rich beyond their dreams. It had turned three relatively anonymous entities—the agency, Morgan-Wilkes Books, and John Smith—into major-league players.
And John had blindly picked her agency out of a book.
Such incredible good fortune.
Retrieving her briefcase and bag, she turned toward the back of the house and her private office. She liked coming in early Monday mornings so she could make this quiet, undisturbed walk through the business she had worked so hard to build. In another hour, her staff would be at their desks, the phones would be ringing, and there would be a dozen things for her to attend to, but for now, the place was all hers, and she had nothing to do but enjoy it.
When she reached the office before her own, she paused in the open door. She had arrived home from a dinner date with Paul Saturday evening to find Teryl’s message on her machine. It hadn’t been much of a message—a brief apology and a promise that she would make up the days she’d missed. Rebecca had assumed that her assistant was so unfamiliar with being unreliable that she hadn’t known exactly what to say. This morning Rebecca wasn’t quite sure what she was going to say. She would decide, she supposed, when she was face-to-face with Teryl, who would be, if she was back in her routine, the next one in.
Judging
by the looks of her office, she had already come in over the weekend, perhaps to get caught up. The disreputable chair that she loved so much was pushed off to the side, the pillows she kept neatly stacked on the window seat were scattered carelessly across the cushion, and a scrap of paper was caught underneath the chair’s wheel.
Rebecca bent to pick it up, recognizing it as part of a page torn from a book. That was odd. Teryl loved books. While she might bend the corner of a cheap paperback, if there was such a thing these days, to mark her place, she would never tear a page out.
With a shrug, Rebecca pushed the chair into its proper place, then bent to drop the paper into the wastebasket. What she saw there made her stiffen.
It took only a moment to retrieve the scraps and the book underneath them, only a moment longer to fit the ragged pieces of the title page back together. To Teryl, with best wishes, Simon Tremont.
Pulling the chair back again, she sank down and studied the pieced-together message. On the day of Simon’s visit to the office, she had taken that copy of Masters of Ceremony from the bookcase up front and asked him to autograph it for Teryl. She had thought it might make up to her assistant at least a little for missing out on meeting the man she had so admired all of her adult life. Simon had been flattered by the request, had joked that it was the first autograph he’d ever signed and maybe if he wrote that as part of the message, it would be worth something someday. But he hadn’t written it. He had settled for a pretty generic sentiment. To Teryl, with best wishes, Simon Tremont.
After he had gone, Rebecca had left the book on Teryl’s desk, with a slip of paper sticking out to draw Teryl’s attention to the title page. Rebecca had been back in her office, on the phone with Simon’s editor at Morgan-Wilkes, when she’d heard Teryl’s delighted shriek. The girl had been thrilled, had assured Rebecca that she would treasure it forever.
And now she’d torn it to bits. Forever had lasted only a few months.
Had something happened with Simon in New Orleans? Had he been such a tremendous disappointment to Teryl that she’d lost all her admiration for the man and his work? Rebecca had to admit that he wasn’t exactly what she had expected after eleven years of working together. He was egotistical, but that wasn’t uncommon. In her experience, most writers had tremendous egos, offset by tremendous insecurities. He was arrogant, but that wasn’t an unusual trait in a rich and powerful man. What was unusual was the creepy feeling he gave her. As if he weren’t quite safe. As if he weren’t quite sane.
She had tried to tell herself that it was simply a reaction to his books; when it came to creepy and eerie, his were the best. But she knew plenty of other authors who wrote psychological thrillers or straight horror, nice, normal people whom she wouldn’t hesitate to invite to dinner. It wasn’t the books.
It was Simon himself.
Maybe Teryl had picked up on his peculiarities. Maybe she’d been turned off by his arrogance. Or maybe something else had happened. Maybe he had somehow been part of her decision to stay over in New Orleans. Maybe he’d made a pass at her or had made demands of her that she’d needed time to deal with. Or maybe… Maybe he was the mystery man Debra Jane Howell had been talking about. Granted, Sheila Callan had accompanied him from the hotel to the airport; in fact, she had flown as far as Charlotte with him. There they had separated, Simon making his connection to Richmond, Sheila continuing to New York. But maybe Simon’s connection hadn’t been to Richmond. Maybe he had simply turned around and flown back to New Orleans, where Teryl was waiting.
With a sigh, Rebecca slid the scraps of paper inside the book, then took it with her when she went to her own office. Teryl would be in soon, and she would find out then exactly what had happened last week. Until then, she wouldn’t let her imagination run wild.
John was in the kitchen drinking a cup of instant coffee when Teryl came down. She was dressed for work in her favorite dress—cool and comfortable, red linen, businesslike but stylish enough to make her feel pretty whenever she wore it. She had pulled her hair back and fastened it off her neck with a gold clasp, had put on her favorite gold jewelry and added a pair of heels. This morning, facing John now and Rebecca later, she felt the need for whatever confidence she could muster. Like a protective suit of armor, the clothing helped.
“You look nice.”
She accepted his compliment with a brief smile, thinking at the same time that he did, too. He was wearing his usual faded jeans, and the shirt this morning was a polo shirt in deep crimson. He looked better than nice. He looked damned good.
He offered her a cup of coffee, which she refused, and half of a toasted bagel spread with raspberry jam, which she accepted. Waiting until she took the first bite, he said, “I’ll take you to work today.”
She shook her head as she chewed; finally managing to swallow, she disagreed. “I’ll drive myself. You might get lost, and there’s no need for you to be out in rush hour traffic.”
“I have an excellent sense of direction. I know exactly how to get to your office and back.”
“I need my car. Sometimes I run errands for Rebecca, and she doesn’t like to let me use her car.”
“So you can call—”
After those phone calls yesterday—one checking out his story, the other seeking his sister’s help in getting rid of him and getting help for him—she felt guilty asking for his trust, but she interrupted him to do just that. “Except for that first night when I tried to escape, I haven’t done a thing to make you suspicious. I’ve been good. I’ve talked to strangers without asking for help. I’ve talked to D.J. and my mother without hinting that there was something weird going on. I’ve let you move into my house, and I’ve gone through confidential records with you. I’ve cooperated as much as I possibly could. I’ve trusted you, John. Now you’ve got to trust me.”
He stood motionless for a long time. How long had it been, she wondered, since he’d trusted anyone, even himself? How long since he’d let anyone get close enough that trust had even become an issue? Years, she would bet. About seventeen of them.
She couldn’t blame him for being reluctant now. In the last five days they hadn’t been more than a hallway and a stairway apart. Now she was asking to travel halfway across the city alone. Of course, in those hours apart here in the house, she could have called for help at any time, but he’d still held the trump card: her. She could have called the police, and they would have come, but she still would have been John’s hostage. If she called the cops today, she would be miles away, safely out of his reach, when they came.
Didn’t he see that it wasn’t any easier for her to trust him? He had kidnapped her, for heaven’s sake, had taken her against her will on a cross-country journey, had tied her to the bed every night they were on the road. But she had come to believe that he wouldn’t hurt her. She had learned to trust him.
But she had more faith to give, she suspected, and gave it more easily than he ever would. His parents and that damnable accident had seen to that.
When he finally spoke, his misgivings were clear in his voice. “All right. You can go alone. Just don’t…”
Don’t let me down, he had whispered in her ear before leaving her alone with D.J. Sunday morning. As soft as his voice had been, she’d heard the pleading that had underlaid the soft words. She heard it now, unspoken between them. “I won’t,” she promised. For a moment, she held his gaze, seeing no sign of the trust he was offering so reluctantly. With a sign, she stopped looking for it. “What are you going to do today?”
“Get in touch with my bank.”
She nodded once in acknowledgment, then opened the junk drawer next to the refrigerator and sorted through its contents until she found what she was looking for. She offered him the key, crossing the few feet necessary to lay it in his palm. “Here’s my extra key in case you need to go out. I get off at five, and I’ll be home shortly after that. If you need to call, the number—”
“I know the number.”
It was an honest assu
mption that he wouldn’t. Whether he was Simon Tremont or just a deluded impostor, he’d had no occasion to ever call the agency. It was only fair to expect him not to know the number.
“I usually go to lunch about noon. Why don’t I come home and bring some sandwiches?”
His smile was very faint, practically nonexistent, when he nodded.
Taking her keys from the basket, she said good-bye and left. She walked quickly to her car, parked beside the Blazer, and climbed in, backing out as she adjusted the air-conditioning vents, the stereo, and the mirrors.
Since she’d awakened nearly two hours ago, she had resisted thinking about Rebecca, but now she couldn’t avoid the nagging worries. The idea of facing her boss after the stunt Rebecca thought she had pulled last week made her muscles clench and stirred more than a few butterflies in her stomach. Rebecca would surely be disappointed in her. Would she also be angry? Unforgiving? Quietly censuring? Would she fire Teryl?
That would be the worst possible outcome. Teryl might downplay the importance of her job to others, but she loved it. It was the best use she could make of her English degree; she liked the others in the office; she admired and respected her boss. She enjoyed talking to and occasionally meeting the authors the agency represented, and she liked reading their books. She especially liked discovering new authors in the manuscripts sent to Rebecca for consideration. It was a tremendously satisfying feeling to read and like a brand-new author’s work, to recommend him or her to Rebecca or one of the others, and, a year or two later, to see that book on the shelves at the local bookstores.
She loved her job. She didn’t know what she would do if she lost it.
Maybe she would help John prove that he was Simon Tremont, and he would be so grateful that he would reward her in some outrageous fashion. Maybe he would hire her as his assistant or secretary. She could answer mail, do research, run errands, and make coffee for him as easily as she did it for Rebecca.
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