Thumbprints

by Pamela Sargent

  But Dechen Thorsten’s triumph was especially grating. There I was, with four published novels and a book of nonfiction pieces under my belt, having to work in a place where those of my books that weren’t out of print had to be special-ordered whenever a customer deigned to show an interest in them, while Thorsten, at the age of twenty-two, had captured the praise of legions of reviewers and the hearts of millions of readers with his first book. Nailing well over a million-dollar advance for his second book, which would have been his first novel, hadn’t exactly endeared him to me, either.

  But such musings were unkind, considering Thorsten’s fate. He had died at the age of twenty-seven, struck down by a ruptured aneurysm while leaving his agent’s office. The agent, Andrew Wilde, had made a brief public statement to the New York Times mourning the premature loss of such a “towering talent”; Thorsten’s publisher had arranged a memorial service in Manhattan. Most of Dechen Thorsten’s fans were convinced that his final resting place would be among the Himalayas that had formed the backdrop for his memoir, and I, having seen no news about any burial arrangements, had assumed the same. The long-awaited novel had never been completed, which had only burnished Thorsten’s legend; some people in publishing, perhaps ungraciously, assumed that he had never even begun to write it.

  “What made you think somebody had disturbed the grave?” I asked Todd.

  “Some patches of grass didn’t look right. The cemetery puts the grass down right after the grave’s been filled in, and I could tell that some squares had been pulled up and then laid down again.”

  I was already wondering why anybody would be digging around Dechen Thorsten’s grave. The whole idea of disturbing anybody’s grave gave me the creeps; I had never been a big fan of cemeteries.

  “You told me that only his agent and you know he’s buried here,” I said. “Could his agent have told anybody else?”

  Todd shook his head. “I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have said anything. Andrew just about admitted that having some mystery about the grave’s actual location had given the sales of Dechen’s book a shot in the arm. And if the secret does get out, he’s thinking of taking advantage of that to announce and publicize his plans for Dechen’s next ... Dechen’s last book.” He wiped at his eyes.

  “So he finished the novel,” I said, surprised.

  “Oh, this isn’t the novel. Andrew never saw a page of that. But he did find some stuff in Dechen’s apartment in Manhattan, a few hardcopy manuscripts and files on his laptop. He says that he can get a book out of them if he throws in a few of Dechen’s published articles and a couple of his longer interviews.”

  Andrew Wilde, I thought, was not a man to let any opportunity pass to nail down his agent’s commission. He might even be able to cobble together a book that would sell well enough to justify a hefty advance, since Dechen Thorsten’s fans would be only too aware that nothing more would be forthcoming from him. The untimely deaths of authors had firmed up the bottom lines of publishers often enough before.

  “I still don’t know why you called me,” I said. “What do you want me to do, write a story about this? You’d be doing me a big favor. It wouldn’t hurt for me to be the first with the news about where Dechen Thorsten is buried.”

  “Oh, no.” He waved his hands at me. “When I do decide to go public, you’ll be the first to get the word, but right now–”

  I suddenly felt sorry for Todd, and not just because he had been so recently bereaved and was now the only surviving member of his eccentric immediate family. He had been living in Wilsey for three years before I moved there to cut down on my expenses while trying to build what I once thought of as a writing career and which now seemed more like a very long detour that had led me far away from life’s progressively more pressing practicalities. Todd had secured a reputation around town as a funeral director who was a good guy, who encouraged the families of his recently departed clientele to consider what kinds of memorials they wanted rather than what would be more profitable for Todd and his business. He was a member of the local Chamber of Commerce, coached Little League during the summers, and had a wife who worked part-time as a realtor and a son who was the star of his middle school soccer team. He was so relentlessly conventional that it had been a shock to everyone to discover that he was the brother of the appealingly loony Dechen Thorsten.

  It’s true that Todd was only intermittently mentioned in his brother’s memoir, given that he was fourteen years older and had been reared by his grandparents in Minnesota while his parents were engaged in their countercultural Himalayan adventures with Dechen. By living where he did, Todd had also escaped having to dwell among people who might have picked up a distorted impression of him from his younger brother’s writings. Most people in Wilsey, a decidedly nonliterary town, had probably never cracked the spine of A Towering Work of Everest and Brilliance, which they had most likely purchased at Barnes & Noble only because of Dechen’s frequent appearances on TV with the likes of Katie Couric, Larry King, Diane Sawyer, Jon Stewart, David Letterman, and Conan O’Brien.

  It was those TV appearances, rather than the book, that had turned Todd into a victim of his brother’s reflected glory. People who had once easily accepted his prosaic presence among them had begun to wonder if Todd was really what he seemed, and why the close relative of a celebrity, who presumably had more glamorous options available to him, had taken up residence in such an ordinary place as Wilsey, which had been abandoned by the only famous figure the town had ever produced, the Pulitzer Prize-winning Cormac O’Malley.

  “Actually, I asked you to meet me,” Todd continued, “because you’re a writer yourself, and I need to ask you about a couple of things.”

  I was flattered that he would even refer to me as a writer. Almost everybody else I knew in town thought of me as “that stringer for the Wilsey Gazette” or “the gal who used to work at the Barnes & Noble.”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “What do you know about Andrew Wilde?” he asked.

  “Not a whole lot,” I said. My knowledge of Andrew Wilde had been gleaned largely from the pages of People, Vanity Fair, and Publishers Weekly. Originally from Britain, he had come to New York City over two decades ago, with a client list that included several celebrated British writers. He had then taken on a number of promising American authors, allegedly stealing a few of them from their previous agents by promising them better deals with fatter advances and major promotion and then delivering on his promises. He had ditched his British wife after embarking on a brief but publicity-rich affair with the glamorous and gorgeous Patrice Dunn, who had just dumped the fourth of her husbands and added another multimillion-dollar settlement to her considerable assets. He was now rumored to be involved with Araminta “Minty” Arban, another literary agent with extremely lucrative clients. In short, Andrew Wilde was the kind of agent who would consider midlist me well beneath his notice.

  My own agent, Rob Saperstein, couldn’t stand Andrew Wilde, whom he called unscrupulous, but that was par for the course. Most of the agents in New York apparently loathed Wilde. The publishers, who considered him much too greedy, weren’t crazy about dealing with him, either, although given his list of famous clients, they had little choice. That other agents would think of Wilde as “unscrupulous” and that publishers, of all people, would term him “greedy” only demonstrates, I suppose, how well Andrew Wilde had mastered the skills needed for success in the publishing business.

  “When Dechen passed on,” Todd said, “Andrew Wilde was the first one to call me. He told me that it was my brother’s wish to keep his final resting place a secret, and I didn’t have any reason to doubt it. The fact is that Andrew probably got to know Dechen a lot better than I ever did, given that we never were that close.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, at my lack of any other sentiment to express.

  “That has its advantages, not being close.” Todd looked away from me. “I never really knew Dechen well enough to miss him now that he’
s gone. But I did know that he wanted to be cremated because he mentioned it to me on the phone not long ago. Anyway, Andrew said that he’d get a mortician in the city to take care of the body so that all I’d have to concern myself with was the burial. It was quite a surprise when he arrived here. I was expecting an urn, and what I got was a hearse with one of the most expensive caskets on the market.”

  “So what did you say?” I asked.

  “I told him that I’d always assumed my brother wanted cremation, he even wrote about that in his book, but Andrew assured me that he’d changed his mind. He even had the papers with him to prove it, Dechen’s will and a document drawn up by a lawyer that specified embalming and even the kind of casket he wanted for his remains.” Todd sighed. “So I had no reason to object, even though it seemed odd that he would go from wanting cremation and scattered ashes to choosing to be embalmed and laid out in a costly casket.”

  I shrugged. “People change their minds sometimes.”

  “I wonder if Andrew talked him into it. He looks like the kind of guy who’d want a top-of-the-line funeral for himself. That’s why I wanted to ask you what you know about him.”

  “He’s a lot higher on the publishing food chain than I am,” I replied. “My agent can’t stand him, which seems to be the general consensus among people in the business. He’s stolen a number of hot literary prospects from the agents that once represented them and he’s hit up the publishers for such outrageous advances and terms that it’s no wonder they can’t make any money.”

  “He doesn’t sound like the kind of person Dechen would have wanted as his agent.”

  “Unfortunately, he’s exactly the kind of agent most writers would give their right arms for.” I didn’t want to mention the story my agent had passed on to me, namely that Andrew had stolen Dechen from another agent who had taken on the inexperienced young writer solely because she had faith in his book, that Andrew had gone on to kill the modest book deal that the other agent had already negotiated for A Towering Work of Everest and Brilliance, and had then taken his new client to a bigger publishing house with much fanfare.

  “He sounds untrustworthy,” Todd said.

  “Oh, you can trust him as long as you’ve got something on paper. So I’ve heard, anyway.”

  Todd looked somewhat reassured. “That’s good to hear, because Andrew’s the executor of Dechen’s estate and I’m the only heir. Apparently I’ll have a fair amount of money coming to me from time to time.”

  “Well, if you ever have any questions about any of Andrew’s financial statements, I’ll be glad to take a look at them for you.” Knowing Todd, he would insist on paying me for any time I spent perusing the documents, and I had reached that stage in my life where I grabbed freelance work of any kind wherever I could find it.

  “Thanks, Shanna.”

  If anybody deserved a good chunk of change, it was Todd, who I had no doubt would put the money to good use in aiding his favorite charities, sending his son to a fine college, and subsidizing a funeral business that, given his scruples and sensitivity, probably wasn’t all that profitable.

  “And let me know,” I continued, “when you want to break the story about exactly where your brother’s, er, resting, and I’ll keep quiet about it until then.”

  “It may be a while, since I just about promised Andrew I’d wait until he tells me I can go ahead with any announcement.” That meant, unfortunately, that Andrew Wilde was likely to tip the New York Times to the story first, but maybe I could beat them into print at the Gazette. “There is one thing that puzzles me,” Todd continued.

  “What’s that?”

  “Dechen’s casket had one rather odd feature, sliding panels on one side. That seemed both extravagant and useless.”

  I shrugged. That Andrew Wilde would have gone in for the most expensive and extravagant coffin for his client, even one with sliding panels, didn’t surprise me at all.

  A week after my meeting with Todd, I learned that a gravedigger who worked for the Peaceful Glade Memorial Park had been picked up by the police for being drunk and disorderly. The only reason I even noticed this insignificant story, buried as it was in the back pages of the Gazette’s local news section, was that the man had apparently been ranting to the police about being hired to dig up a body, an offense that he admitted to only because the officer booking him had found almost two thousand dollars in cash in the gravedigger’s wallet, and naturally wanted to know where such a large sum had come from.

  The gravedigger claimed that he had been hired to dig up the grave in secret. He did not know why the man who hired him had wanted the grave dug up, or who the man was, and had been too occupied with being a lookout to pay any attention to what the stranger was doing near the coffin. The casket, he insisted, had been returned to its proper place and the grave carefully filled in. No charge was brought against him for this offense, either because the police didn’t believe him or because there was no evidence apart from a suspiciously fat wad of cash.

  I immediately thought of Todd’s conviction that his brother’s grave had been disturbed, and thought of following up on the story, but a short item noting the gravedigger’s death appeared in the Gazette only two days later. He had been released the day after his arrest, only to be found dead less than twelve hours later, having apparently fallen out of one of his apartment’s windows while drunk. No one seemed overly concerned about his fate. I certainly wasn’t, being preoccupied as usual with my writing and the last week of a course I was teaching at the local community college. The college was cutting back on its part-time faculty, meaning that my first semester working there was probably going to be my last.

  Two months after my conversation with Todd, Publishers Weekly broke the news about Dechen Thorsten’s last book. The million-dollar advance for his proposed novel would be applied to the book of odds and ends Andrew Wilde was assembling, and Wilde had even managed to negotiate a bigger share of the foreign rights for his late client’s estate. There were no revelations about Dechen’s grave, so either Wilde was saving that for a future publicity release, or else he had decided that continued secrecy might be more lucrative.

  It crossed my mind momentarily to go public with the story anyway, but I couldn’t break my promise to Todd. It was also possible that a renewed interest in his brother might lead to a literary endeavor on Todd’s part, perhaps a memoir of his own to supplement A Towering Work of Everest and Brilliance, and for that he would need a ghostwriter. I played with that idea for a couple of days, thinking of how I might broach the subject to Todd, until another major loss to the world of letters made news.

  That was the death of Mona Dart, who had made such a splash with her first novel, A Hidden History, almost a decade earlier. I readily recalled setting up the display of trade paperback copies of A Hidden History at the Barnes & Noble and asking myself how an extremely lengthy book about a group of Sarah Lawrence students written by an Alabama girl who owed a bit too much of her literary style to William Faulkner had ever become such a big bestseller. Now I wondered at Andrew Wilde’s string of bad luck, with another one of his most famous clients dying prematurely.

  “Oh, the word is that he’s devastated,” my agent told me over the phone; Rob had called with the news about an hour after I had picked it up online. “Mona was only thirty-nine, and I’m convinced her best work lay ahead of her.” Rob, along with others in literary circles, had been quite taken with Mona Dart’s Southern charm, which she had effectively employed in interviews during which she had said almost nothing truly insightful about herself or her writing. “It’s sad to think of all her novels that won’t be written now – it’s a real loss to American literature.”

  I had my doubts about that, given that ten years had elapsed between the publication of A Hidden History and Dart’s second novel, Small Comrade, which had come out only a few months before and hadn’t done nearly as well as expected, even after years of readers champing at the bit for another book from the elusive Mo
na Dart. Given the mixed critical reception for Small Comrade and its disappointing sales, Dart and her publisher might even have had trouble pumping up enough enthusiasm for a third book, especially if another decade might pass before its publication.

  “Everybody knew Mona was a bad driver,” Rob continued, which was news to me, given my own marginal existence on the edges of literary social life. “Her editor told me that he wouldn’t get into a car with her if she was behind the wheel. But she insisted on driving everywhere, even in Manhattan, where a car’s a liability at best.”

  “The story I saw about her didn’t have much in the way of details,” I said, “except that she went off the road somewhere between Birmingham and Montgomery.”

  “That’s about all there is to tell. She was speeding, a state trooper went after her to pull her over, but she didn’t slow down even when he turned on his siren, just kept barreling along in her Escalade until she went around a sharp curve and her car flipped over. Apparently the roof was crushed and she died instantly.”

  “I suppose she’ll be buried in Alabama,” I murmured. Mona Dart had kept a second home in that state even after her success had enabled her to finance an apartment in Manhattan.

  “I suppose so,” Rob said. “Wilde’s handling the funeral arrangements, and I heard he got down to her home in Birmingham a day after the crash.”