The Tidewater Sisters: Postlude to The Prayer Box

by Lisa Wingate

  “The search and rescue made for great publicity for the project, though, even if that was one seriously bone-cold night in the woods,” I finished, and my coworkers laughed —all except Roger. I’d forgotten until now that he was working for a competitor during that bidding war. I’d beaten him out.

  He sidled close again as the meeting broke up. “I’ve never quite forgiven you for that Tom Brandon deal. That was sheer brilliance.”

  “Oh, come on, Roger. You know it’s not often that I actually win one of our little battles.” It was the usual love-hate interplay. In a competitive business, colleagues tend to be like siblings who can’t stand one another half the time and play nice the other half.

  Roger pulled me into a momentary shoulder hug. “It all worked out. Losing that deal was what convinced me to pursue more fiction.”

  Quick little stab-stab there. Oh, that hurt. He knew I’d always had stories in my blood —that fiction was my real dream —but when you’re successful in one arena and you’ve got bills to pay, it’s hard to take a chance on foreign territory.

  Roger caught me stealing a glance at the slush pile. “Fascinating, isn’t it?” His breath brushed across my ear, minty fresh. Too close for comfort.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Stay away from Slush Mountain. It’s the old man’s masterpiece.” A quick warning, and then he was gone.

  I considered waiting around for a chance to casually tell the boss how thrilled I was to be here, but he and Hollis were enwrapped in conversation at the end of the table, so I gathered my things and started toward the door.

  “North Carolina,” George Vida said just before I reached the exit. I stopped short, turned around.

  The boss had paused to look at me, but Hollis was still sifting through papers, seeming slightly frustrated by the delay.

  A thick, stubby, old-man finger crooked in my direction. “That’s what I was hearing.” He tapped the side of his face. “Reporter’s ear. I can usually pick up accents. I remember now. You’re a Clemson grad. It was somewhere in the paperwork, or Hollis may have mentioned it.”

  “Must have been in the paperwork,” Hollis contributed dryly.

  The boss smiled at me, his round cheeks lifting into an expression that reminded me of Vito Corleone in The Godfather. “You North Carolina girls should find some time to catch up. There are no memories like those of the old home place.” Still smiling, he returned to his paperwork, not noticing that neither Hollis nor I jumped on the home place conversation.

  Somehow, I had a feeling we wouldn’t be sitting down for a sweet-tea-and-magnolia chat anytime soon.

  CHAPTER 2

  From my first day in New York, when I’d arrived to a graduate school fellowship, a part-time editorial assistant’s job, and no place to live, I’d loved the feel of early morning. There’s something special about the city as the night people fade into their lairs and the streets wake to a new day. Shopkeepers open storefronts and breakfast carts roll to sidewalks, smoothie stands offering cornucopias of fresh fruit, yogurt, and protein powders.

  Jamie eyed me suspiciously as we walked together from the subway and emerged onto the street, then ducked into a bagelry to grab the usual.

  “You look ridiculously happy,” she assessed on the way out, taking a sip of the protein smoothie she would drink exactly one-fourth of before dropping it into a trash can —her form of calorie counting. As fashion editor for an upscale glossy, she had to look good. Today, her mid-thigh dress, trendy boots, and swing coat formed a perfect autumn-in-New-York ensemble. She’d managed a cross between Audrey Hepburn and a Paris runway model.

  “Sorry,” I said, but I wasn’t really. So far, other than the pub board cell phone gaffe, my first week at Vida House had gone phenomenally well. I’d worked like a banshee, catching up on reading for next Monday’s meeting, and I had disseminated my updated contact information to various literary agents who consistently brought good projects my way. New proposals were beginning to come in. George Vida might have been both an enigma and a dinosaur in the industry, but the house had a reputation for finding manuscripts that had been flying under the radar, then developing those properties into the next big thing. My contacts were excited about the move.

  “Well, stop it, okay? You’re making me depressed about my own life.” Only a best friend can be that honest and get away with it. Jamie and I had been close since the NYU years. I knew all about the disintegrating conditions at her workplace. With the rise of e-publishing and fashion blogging, her future at the magazine was a massive question mark.

  “Sorry. I’ll try to look appropriately glum. But it is Friday.” I heard something in the last word of the sentence. The faintest stretching of the i in Friday. The hint of an Appalachian twang I thought I’d expunged years ago.

  I’d been listening since George Vida’s startling observation. It bothered me that he’d picked up on it so quickly. Had anyone else over the years? Maybe just not said anything?

  I could’ve asked Jamie, but that would have opened the door between the two worlds that I had worked all my adult life to separate. Between before and after.

  The great thing about moving far from the place that began you is that it’s a chance to rewrite your history, wrinkle up and throw away entire pages of the past and pretend that they never were.

  “I’m happy for you,” she promised, tossing the rest of her smoothie in a trash can as we stopped in front of her building. “I am, really, Jen. I can’t wait for you to discover the next book that goes crazy wild. When it debuts on the Times list, I’m going to buy a hundred copies of the newspaper and send them to that wicked ex-boss of yours. Along with a hundred copies of the book. I will never forgive her for taking so much of the credit on the Tom Brandon thing after you brought it in.”

  I hugged her, still clinging to my smoothie, which I intended to consume to the fullest before finally slurping the bottom dry. I’d learned early in life not to waste food. “You’re such a brute, but I love you. Try to have a great day, okay?”

  “Do my best. Catch a show this weekend?”

  “I’ve got a date with a pile of proposals and manuscripts. You wouldn’t believe how much paper they still shuffle around that place. George Vida doesn’t think you can really get the feel from e-material. It’s primeval, but in a nice way. My desk came with a stapler that looks like it’s been knocking around the building since about 1920. And I have a three-hole punch. I haven’t been close to one of those since high school English class, I think.”

  Jamie rolled her eyes. “Okay, okay. Now, you’re just making me jealous. Once you get all settled in there, you have got to sneak me in and show me the famous slush pile. Is it true that Vida found the stuff stuck in the corner of the basement and had it moved to the board room?”

  “That’s what Roger tells me. And it’s George Vida, sort of like all one name —just so you’ll have it right when you come to visit.”

  Jamie walked backward up the steps of her building, her bottom lip pooching into a frown. “I’d stay away from Roger, if I were you. He’s always had a thing for you, you know?”

  “Pppfff! Roger’s got a thing for anyone under fifty in a skirt.”

  We shared the look of rueful understanding that passes between single girls in the city, equally unlucky in love. All of a sudden, Jamie was deeply bothered by that. Maybe it was crossing the big three-oh mark, or maybe it was all the magazine stories about wedding fashions, or perhaps her sister’s recent engagement, but she had it in mind lately. When Jamie finally did plan a wedding, it would be a gorgeous, lavish affair filled with loved ones and paid for by the bride’s family. That kind of thing was as far from possible for me as the earth from the moon. If you know something isn’t going to happen, it’s easier to just arrange your life so there’s no need for it. The secret to happiness is to love where you are, and it’s hard not to love autumn in New York, especially when you’ve finally landed your dream job.

  I was floating about six inch
es off the ground when I walked into Vida House. So far, I’d felt that way every day as I scanned my key card at the front door and circumvented the reception desk, still empty this early in the morning. Beyond the lobby, I walked down the marble entry hall past rows of office doors and oodles of cover art from books that had made careers and started hot trends that were quickly chased by a horde of scrambling copycats. Rounding the corner, humming under my breath and in full stride, I slid across the tile like an ice-skater, did a YouTube-worthy scramble, and caught myself on a half-height partition in the customer service area, barely saving my smoothie.

  “That’s wet, sha.” Russell, the cleaning guy, emerged from a nearby office, pushing a mop bucket. Russell and I had become acquainted over the past few days. He was at least six and a half feet tall, lamppost thin, and not entirely pleased to have someone disturbing his usual morning routine by coming in so early. He’d been cleaning the building since the sixties and had an apartment in the basement, so it was definitely his domain.

  “Sorry.” I backtracked across the freshly mopped floor, my pumps leaving little tracks in the sheen of water. “You’d think I would’ve learned to watch by now.”

  He lifted the mop from the dingy bucket and plopped it into the wringer. “I got it. Boss man don’ like his flo’ track up at the beginnin’ a the day. Like a clean start.” His slow Southern drawl ran in direct contrast to the three quick, efficient swipes that cleared the floor. Russell was a hard person to read. I hadn’t quite decided if he liked his job here or liked me, or if he was simply resigned to both as a reality of life.

  I wanted Russell to like me. He seemed like a guy with a story, and I’d always been fascinated by stories. That was the first thing Wilda Culp had noticed about me all those years ago, after she caught me pilfering from her orchard. To pay back the damage, I became her Wednesday help around the old family farm she’d moved home to after retiring from Clemson and taking up writing full-time. She’d noticed immediately that I understood the lure of a good story. Sometimes a world that doesn’t exist is the only escape from the one that does.

  Russell’s silvery eyes narrowed, age wrinkles squeezing in. He was an interesting man to look at, his skin a warm brown, his cheeks burnished to a lighter color with an almost-unnatural shine, like the face of a carving lovingly touched many times by the hand of its maker.

  “Guess you betta get’a work, sha.” Leaning on his mop handle, he sidestepped to let me by, his gaze ricocheting across the open area toward the semicircle of soft light shining from George Vida’s office. No matter how late I stayed at work or how early I came in, George Vida was always there, occupying his space. Amazingly, nothing went out of Vida House that hadn’t traveled through his hands.

  That scared me a little, as I contemplated acquiring new manuscripts here. What if I got it wrong? What if my instincts ran counter to the big boss’s liking?

  A woman must be confident! Wilda’s gruff reminder was the snap of a rubber band. A quick, sharp rebuke. When the negative comes against her, she must B-E-A-T. Be, expand, arise, triumph. Be all that she was designed to be. Expand her vision of what is possible. Arise from every challenge stronger than before. Triumph over her own insecurity. This is what I always told my students.

  You, Jennia Beth Gibbs, have greatness in you if you want it.

  I felt Russell watching me as I continued down the hall and slipped into my office at the end, where new editors began their careers, no matter how many years of prior experience they brought to the job. At Vida House, you started at the bottom and worked your way up. It wasn’t so bad, really. Being at the fringe of the nonfiction hall meant having a corner space. My office was in a three-sided turret, which made it quirky and interesting. Even though the skyscraper next door blocked both the sunshine and the view, I liked the place.

  The fluorescent light flickered stubbornly overhead when I flipped the switch, the room bright, then dark, then bright, then dark.

  “Oh, come on.” I slipped off the burnt-orange silk coat I loved during the fall months. It would’ve been an indulgence, given the designer label, but it had been a gift from Jamie, a bribe to get me to stand in for a last-minute magazine shoot, in which she promised I would be carrying an umbrella, and no one would know who I was. Please, please, please, I need mid-length dark hair, and skinny legs, and you can have the coat afterward. My short modeling career was worth it. I treasured the coat, partially because the color called up memories of my favorite sugar maple tree growing up, the one I often climbed as a hiding place. The coat was a secret reminder of the Blue Ridge, a small piece that wasn’t painful to relive.

  The overhead fixture clicked softly, teasing me. I tried the switch again. Up. Down. Up. Down. No luck. Finally there was no choice but to surrender and use the ancient gooseneck lamp that had come with the desk. The lamp’s cast-iron base was rusty, and the built-in inkwell was of no use, but I liked it all the same. It hovered like an all-seeing eye and gave the place a feeling of journalistic authenticity. I imagined it hunched above a reporter, monitoring the progress of stories about the spread of Hitler’s forces or the first words spoken on the moon or the sad sight of little John-John Kennedy saluting his father’s coffin.

  Someone’s been messing with things on my desk.

  The thought wound past my momentary romance with the gooseneck lamp. I squinted at the arrangement of things. The next three reads in my queue, which I always stacked and placed just left of center at the end of the day, were dead center now. The pencil I had left lying atop them had rolled onto the desk.

  Who would’ve come in here overnight? Russell, maybe . . . cleaning?

  Nothing else seemed out of place.

  And then I noticed it. Another detail that hadn’t been the same yesterday. A brown craft-paper envelope, the crease along its edge sun-washed white as if it had been sitting long near a window. It rested on the corner of my desk, slightly cockeyed. The department admin hadn’t put any fresh material in my in-box or on the credenza by the door. Had someone left the packet here accidentally while passing through my office? Who? And passing through my office for what reason? My little cubby wasn’t on the way to anywhere.

  The envelope was crisp to the touch. The upper corner had been torn off at some time in the past. No return address. Dust clung along the feathered edge so that it drew a jagged brown line against the paper peeking through from beneath. The underlying sheet was aquamarine, a vibrant color beside the brown. The juxtaposition made me stop, admire the random art of everyday life.

  Inside, the small stack of pages had yellowed around the edges, but the aquamarine cover sheet was bright. A handwritten swirl of ink lay just beyond my thumb.

  An odd sixth sense tightened the corridors of curiosity in my brain, brought a wariness that warned me to leave the papers inside. The postmark —what I could read of it —said June 7, 1993.

  Was this thing from George Vida’s famous slush pile? The one nobody was supposed to touch?

  Outside my door, the building was silent, yet I had the eerie feeling of being watched. Leaving the envelope on the desk, I walked down the hall, checking for signs of life in the other offices —a coat hanging over a chair, a fresh cup of coffee, a pair of comfortable tennis shoes tucked in a corner after a coworker changed into heels.

  Nothing.

  Who would take part of Slush Mountain and leave it in my office? Why?

  A mistake? Hazing the new girl? Or was someone trying to —I hated to even think it —set me up? Had I made an enemy here without realizing it? Maybe a colleague was insecure about the new addition to the team? Publishing could be a cutthroat business. . . .

  Was this a test to see if I could be trusted? To see if I’d return the envelope to its place or look at the contents?

  Not this girl. I had plenty to do without toying with a loaded weapon. Whatever this was, it belonged in the war room, and the time to take it there was now, while the office was empty. No one would be the wiser. In the future, I
’d watch my back, just in case. If this was a joke, the joke would be on somebody else once the package was quietly returned to its original resting place.

  In under a minute, I was out the door with the forbidden fruit innocuously tucked in a folder. Unfortunately, Roger was just around the corner at the coffee credenza, preparing his morning mug of brew.

  “At it early again?” He smiled, toasting me with his cup and seeming amiable enough. “You’re making the rest of us look bad, you know.”

  “You’re here too.” I tried to sound casual, but I felt like I had a package bomb squeezed to my chest. I just wanted to get rid of it before it blew.

  Yet in the back of my mind, there was that bit of aquamarine paper, the swirl of ink, the niggle of curiosity . . .

  “I have an author and an agent coming in for an early meeting in the boardroom,” Roger offered.

  Was it my imagination, or was he casting an eye toward the folder in my double-armed embrace? Maybe I looked guilty. Or maybe he knew what was inside. Maybe he’d put it on my desk.

  “Well, have a good meeting, then.” I turned on my heel and headed back to my office. My trip to Slush Mountain would have to wait.

  The folder seemed to grow heavier and hotter as I walked down the hall. A part of me was saying, Just tuck it in the desk drawer where no one will see it, then return it after they all leave this evening. But another part of me, the part that had led me around more than one blind corner in my life, was saying, Well, if you’re stuck with the thing for a while, why not take a peek?

  That whisper of mischief, the one my father and the men of Lane’s Hill Church of the Brethren Saints had so vehemently tried to beat out of me as a child, always brought about one of two things: incredible adventure or unmitigated disaster.