God help her, he was the man she’d fallen in love with.
A knock sounded at her door, but she didn’t call out an invitation. She wasn’t ready to be disturbed yet. She wanted to simply sit here, absorb what she’d read, what she’d discovered, and think. Feel. Understand. Regret.
But the knock at her door was Rebecca, who wasn’t turned away by something so minor as a closed door. After a second series of raps, she opened the door and invited herself inside, taking a seat on the padded bench. “Preoccupied?” she asked, adjusting a pillow behind her back.
“Hmm.”
“With business?”
Teryl gripped the pad a little tighter. “As a matter of fact, yes.”
“Want to discuss it?”
She hesitated. John had asked only for her opinion. He hadn’t given her permission to show the pages to someone else. Still, how could he object to Rebecca seeing it? From the very beginning, she’d been the first person to ever see his work. She was his agent, even if she didn’t realize it at the moment. She’d handled all of his books and there was a good chance she would sell this one, too… once she was convinced that he had the right to write about these characters. If he could be convinced to stay with her.
After a moment, she flipped the blank pages over, then offered the pad to her boss. “Read this first.”
It took Rebecca four pages, maybe five, to recognize the female character, who bore no name in those first pages. Teryl suspected that John had simply intended to write about some anonymous character, a woman who, after a lifetime of normalcy, regained consciousness following an accident to find herself blessed—or cursed—with the gift of a healing touch. He had realized only later that the woman wasn’t anonymous at all; she was Liane Thibodeaux.
Teryl had recognized her within two paragraphs, but then, she’d always been partial to Liane. Her first night in New Orleans, when she’d gone to the French Quarter to wander about alone, she’d been unable to shake the feeling that if she could only find the right street, turn the right corner, or walk into the right shop, she would find Liane there, painting her portraits or talking with her brothers or simply roaming the city where she’d been born. She was that real to Teryl.
When Rebecca did realize what she was reading, the muscles in her jaw tightened and a frown wrinkled her forehead. Teryl had to give her credit for not stopping right then and pointing out that this character was the property of Simon Tremont, that whoever had written this had no right to appropriate her for his own purposes. That would come, Teryl was sure, but Rebecca continued reading.
When she finished, she closed the pad but didn’t return it. “I’m impressed.” After a moment, she hesitantly asked, “You didn’t write… ?”
Teryl shook her head.
“May I ask who did?”
“The man I met in New Orleans.” Teryl laced her fingers together to hide her uneasiness. “I misled you yesterday when I said I might see him again. The truth is he’s here in Richmond. He came back from New Orleans with me, and he’s been staying at my house. He wrote that this week.”
There was another long moment of silence. “He’s very good. Obviously he’s a big fan of Simon Tremont. The style is very similar.”
It was much more than similar, Teryl thought. It was identical.
Then came the warning. “But you know he can’t use these characters. They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but this sort of copying comes much closer to infringement. He can’t simply take Simon’s characters from the earlier books and use them.”
Teryl didn’t respond to that.
“Has he been published before?”
“Yes. Twelve books. But not under his own name.”
Still more silence. No doubt Rebecca was remembering their conversation from yesterday. Wouldn’t it be interesting, Teryl had asked, if the John Smith who came into the office, the one who did the interview in New Orleans, wasn’t the same John Smith who created Simon Tremont? No doubt she was wanting to ask, And what is his own name? No doubt she was reluctant to hear the answer.
“Is he looking for representation? Is that why you have this?” She didn’t give Teryl a chance to reply. “Naturally, I’d want to read more of his work. I would want to see that he can sustain the quality for the length of an entire book, but I would be willing to talk to him, if that’s what you want.”
“That’s not what this is about, Rebecca. He already has an agent.” Drawing a deep breath, she launched into her explanation. “I met John in New Orleans. He had driven down from Colorado for the Tremont interview. He told me a very interesting story about how someone had found out all the details of his life, how this person had assumed his identity, taken over his career, moved into his life. I thought it was crazy. I thought he was crazy. But I was wrong. He’s not crazy, and he’s not lying. He is Simon Tremont.”
“Which makes our Simon Tremont an impostor. A fraud.” Rebecca smiled broadly and, laying the pad aside, started to rise from the bench. “Nice joke, Teryl. Funny. Now, we have real work to attend to, so—”
“It’s not a joke, Rebecca. Listen to me, please.” She waited until her boss sank down again. “I admit it sounds outrageous. I didn’t believe it myself in the beginning. But, Rebecca, John knows everything about Tremont. He knows the terms and figures from every contract Tremont’s signed. He knows the details of your association with Tremont. He knows the names of the assistants who worked for you before me. He’s seen all the correspondence between this office and Tremont. He knows all the negotiations on Tremont’s behalf between this office and Morgan-Wilkes. Rebecca, he knows things about Tremont’s career that I didn’t know.”
Rebecca was staring at her, dismay darkening her face. “You brought him here, didn’t you? You opened the records to him. You let a stranger—a crazy, insane stranger who was making outrageous claims—have access to Simon Tremont’s files. Teryl, how could you? How could you jeopardize us like that? You know those records are confidential! You know you have no right showing any part of them to anyone!” Rising to her feet, she paced to the bookshelves, found herself face-to-face with a whole shelf of Tremont titles, then turned to Teryl again. “Damn it, do you know what you’ve done? If Simon finds out about this—the real Simon—he’ll probably leave the agency and be perfectly justified in doing so! You might have cost us our biggest client!”
“He’s not the real Simon,” Teryl said defensively. “He’s an impostor.”
“Well, that ‘impostor’ wrote the single best book I’ve ever read in my life! Explain that, Teryl.”
Resurrection. Everything kept coming back to that damned book. Teryl stood up and slipped her shoes on, just so she wouldn’t feel at such a physical disadvantage, then folded her arms across her chest. “I can’t explain it. Simon—the impostor Simon—somehow got hold of John’s outline. He somehow learned to write like John.”
Rebecca’s response was sharp with anger and sarcasm. “Oh, I see. He somehow got hold of an outline that fewer than a half dozen people had ever seen, and he somehow learned to write like one of the best authors in the world, and he somehow managed to write the book that even that best author couldn’t finish.” She paused to let those words sink in, then shook her head in dismay. “Teryl, I’m disappointed in you. I thought you were smarter than this. I thought you were more professional than this. I cannot believe you are so enamored of this man that you would help him try to defraud my agency.”
“It has nothing to do with my feelings for him,” she protested. “When I agreed to help him, I wasn’t trying to prove that he is Simon. I thought I could prove that he wasn’t… but I couldn’t. He knew too much. He knew everything.”
“If he’s Simon Tremont, then he can prove it. He can bring in his copies of all the contracts Simon has signed over the years. He can show me his royalty statements, his correspondence, his fan mail, all the records he’s collected in the last eleven years.” Rebecca waited a moment, then went on. “He can’t d
o that, can he? He can’t show me his contracts or anything else because he doesn’t have them. Because he’s not Simon.”
“His house burned down over a week ago. Everything was destroyed.”
“How convenient,” Rebecca said snidely.
“The fire was caused by bombs. About the time your Simon decided to go public, someone blew up John’s house in Colorado while he was inside. Someone tried to kill him.” The look her boss was giving her made Teryl want to squirm. She rushed on before the other woman could say anything. “I spoke to the sheriff there, Rebecca. He has no doubt that the intent was murder and that John was the intended victim.”
“And does he also believe that my Simon Tremont was responsible? Does he believe that your John is the real Tremont?”
Teryl looked away, unwilling to answer.
“So what does the sheriff actually know? That someone blew up a house. Unless he has witnesses, who’s to say that John was inside at the time? Who’s to say that the intent was murder? Maybe John’s intent was that it look like attempted murder.”
“He was injured. His arm was lacerated.”
“Ah, but he wasn’t killed. He was inside a house that was ripped apart by bombs, and yet he survived with only a minor injury. He must be an extremely lucky man.”
“He has other proof,” Teryl said, stubbornly continuing. “All those checks you sent John Smith in the last eleven years went into his bank accounts. They were all sent to him. They were all signed by him. If he’s not the real Simon Tremont, how did he get the money? How did the checks wind up going to him and not to your Simon?”
“You’ve seen this proof?”
“No,” she admitted reluctantly. “He doesn’t have it yet. The bank is sending him a statement, an affidavit. He should have it tomorrow.”
Rebecca’s smile was chilly. “Unless, of course, it gets lost in the mail. And, unfortunately, for some reason, the bank won’t be able to duplicate it. Who knows? Maybe the branch where his records are kept will be blown up by bombs.” Her manner turned scornful. “You have no reason to believe that such proof even exists.”
She was wrong, Teryl thought. She had every reason to believe.
Returning to her desk, she sat down, then tried another tack. “The only events in Simon’s career that John is unaware of are the things that have happened in the last four months. Do you realize what’s significant about that? It was four months ago that the Simon we know sent us a change of address. Four months ago that he moved to the Richmond area. Four months ago that he gave us a phone number and began conducting business for the very first time in his career the way people normally do.”
Teryl broke off to take a few deep breaths, to calm herself before going on. “John is more familiar with the first eleven years of Simon Tremont’s career than you and I are, but he knows nothing about the last four months—not about the correspondence, the phone calls, the visit to the office. After eleven years of abiding by his own very strict rule that the only contact he would have with us or Morgan-Wilkes was by mail, that he would do no promotion, no interviews, that he wouldn’t sign even one autograph, within the last four months, your Simon suddenly decided that he wanted to meet us. He wanted to talk to us. He wanted to do interviews and book signings and meet fans. He wanted to give up the privacy that he treasured so very much and live in the public eye. He wanted to bask in the adulation.”
“So he’s tired of privacy,” Rebecca said stiffly. “He watches TV. He reads. He sees other big-name authors being treated like stars, and he wants a little of that for himself. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
“You’ve corresponded with John for eleven years. When you met Simon, was he what you expected? After spending thirty minutes with him, did you find yourself wondering how in the hell that man could have written these books?”
Her boss looked away and refused to answer, but Teryl didn’t need an answer. Just yesterday, Rebecca had described Simon as a pompous, egotistical ass who was nauseatingly full of himself. No one, no one, who had read and enjoyed Simon Tremont’s work ever could have imagined describing him that way. No one could have dreamed that he would be anything less than wonderful.
Turning to her desk, Teryl found a piece of paper and offered it to her boss. “John wrote this right here in this office Sunday. Take it to the file room and compare it to the signatures on the contracts.”
“I suppose you’ve already compared it while you were letting him go through the files.”
“I did compare it. It’s identical. And I didn’t let him go through anything. I asked him questions and he answered them. He never saw any of the papers.”
Rebecca accepted the slip of paper and glanced down at the two signatures, but she didn’t really look. Because she didn’t want to see, Teryl knew. She didn’t want to recognize the signature. “This is crazy, Teryl.”
“I know.”
“You expect me to believe that some unknown writer out there can teach himself to write like Simon Tremont. Do you know how much talent that would take? How much discipline and dedication? How much obsession?”
Teryl nodded.
“If this man is that talented, why does he need to become Tremont? Why not publish under his own name? Why not earn his own recognition, his own fame and fortune?”
“You just said it would take obsession. Certain types of people do tend to get obsessed with the stars, with the legends. Sometimes they stalk them. Sometimes they kill them. Sometimes they want to be them. I think this man started out as a fan. I think he admired Tremont’s work, and then he became obsessed. I think he wanted to write like Tremont, to be like Tremont. Now he’s become Tremont.”
Rebecca glanced at the signature again. “I don’t believe our Simon is obsessed with anything but himself. I don’t believe he’s crazy. Unlikable, yes. A disappointment, absolutely. Self-centered, narcissistic, and egomaniacal, undeniably. But not crazy. Not insane. And not a fraud.” With a cool, controlled smile, she folded the paper in half. “It’s an interesting proposal, Teryl, but that’s all it is. It has no basis in fact. You have no proof, and your John has no proof because there is none. He’s the one who’s become obsessed with his favorite author. He’s the one wanting to become Simon Tremont, and he’s seduced you into helping him. Watch out for him, Teryl. He could be a dangerous man, and I’d hate to see you get hurt.”
With that, she walked out of the office and closed the door.
Rebecca forced herself to walk slowly down the hall. At least this conversation explained why Teryl had destroyed the autograph in Masters of Ceremony. She believed that the man they knew as Simon wasn’t, and she was offended by the idea of owning a forgery signed by a man impersonating her idol. The girl was a fool.
As she turned the corner at the end of the hall, she unfolded the paper she carried and looked—really looked this time—at the signature. She would compare it to the contracts, just for her own peace of mind, but she didn’t need to. She’d seen it often enough over the years. She recognized it. But it didn’t prove anything. Forgeries weren’t uncommon. Learning to copy someone’s signature was far, far easier than learning to copy someone’s writing style. As for learning to copy someone’s talent… that was damned near impossible.
But what if… She didn’t want to face the possibility, but she forced herself to put it into words. What if, by some bizarre, incredible, remote chance, Teryl was right? What if her John was Simon Tremont? What if the man who lived here in town and was passing himself off as the great Tremont was a fraud?
She couldn’t afford for him to be a fraud—in more ways than one. After withholding her fifteen percent commission from Tremont’s last royalty check, she had forwarded the remainder to the man. It wasn’t the largest single check Tremont had ever earned, but, as Teryl had pointed out yesterday, every Tremont check was a small fortune.
But even that would be surpassed by the cost to her reputation. How highly would her clients think of her when they discovered that
she had released a client’s money to the wrong man? She would undoubtedly lose a number of them if Teryl’s John truly was Simon Tremont. The damage to her reputation and her name would be irreparable. The agency, this business that she had devoted herself to, that she had sacrificed much of her life and even her marriage to, would never recover from such a scandal.
She would be destroyed.
At the end of the hall, she walked into the file room, then closed the door behind her. For a moment, she simply stood there, signature in hand, not wanting to look and compare, not needing the doubt. Then, with a strengthening breath, she pulled one of Simon’s contracts from the drawer and held the papers side by side. As she remembered, the signature matched. But it didn’t prove a thing, she reassured herself.
Not a damned thing.
Teryl was halfway home from work that afternoon when she got caught in traffic. Ordinarily, she didn’t mind waiting; she was used to it. She listened to her favorite tapes or, if it was really stop-and-go, as opposed to the usual tortoise crawl, she read short articles in one of the magazines scattered around the car. Today, though, her air conditioner had chosen to stop working. She was hot and sweaty, and she was anxious to get home. She was anxious to see John.
After an eternity she finally turned onto the street where she lived. It was quiet there, and cool. Giant live oaks lined both sides of the street, and only an occasional shaft of sunlight was powerful enough to cut through the dense web of branches and leaves to touch the street. Slowing, she passed two young girls riding bikes, a collie who sat at the curb every day waiting for his master to arrive home, and a parked blue sedan; then she turned into the brick drive of the Grayson estate.
Her pretty little house looked the same as always, but it felt different. It seemed to be adapting to John, she thought fancifully as she followed the drive around to the back. Instead of being just her house, her home, it was now also his.
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