"Where are you sitting?" Shelley asked.
"Right over here. Don't you want to go up and unpack?"
"I'd rather gawk with you for a while."
While they watched the front desk, chatting about what fun the conference was going to be, a rather heavy, terribly overdressed young woman came in. She and the man with her were wearing cowboy hats and flashy western clothing and lots of turquoise jewelry.
"Probably country-western singers performing somewhere in Chicago, don't you think?" Shelley asked. "Nobody dresses that way for no reason."
"Maybe. Or maybe they're just rubes come to the Big City for the first time."
"I'm going to ask who they are," Shelley said. "Watch my purse," she added as she strode off.
"Excuse me," a voice said from in back of Jane.
Jane, startled, stood up and turned. "You're Ms. Felicity Roane, aren't you? I was hoping to meet you."
"I noticed you as I came into the hotel," Ms. Roane said, sitting down in the third chair in the grouping. "I'm always looking at people on planes reading, hoping to see them reading one of my books. The only time I did, I made a fool of myself. The woman was right across the aisle and I said it was so nice to see her reading that book. She just looked at me blankly and said that it was the only one in the airport with a nice cover. She clearly didn't recognize me," she said with alaugh. "I told her I wrote the book she was reading and she said, 'Of course you did.' I didn't know if she meant it or thought I was crazy.
"But I spotted you reading my most recent paperback," she went on, "and thought I'd give it another try. Would you like it autographed?"
"Oh, yes please, Ms. Roane," Jane said while she fished the book back out of her purse.
"Please, don't call me Ms. Roane," she said with a smile. "These mystery conferences are really casual. Everybody calls me Felicity. And old friends call me by my real name. Freddy for Fredricka. Feel free to call me anything that starts with F, except the F-word, and I answer." She took the book and got a pen out of her bag. "And you are…?"
"Jane Jeffry. And the woman approaching us is my next-door neighbor Shelley Nowack."
"Jane Jeffry is a good name. You're sure you didn't make it up? Are you a writer or reader or both?"
"Both," Jane admitted. "So far unpublished though. I came here to learn tips on how to market my book."
Shelley had returned and introductions followed.
"That's what everybody who wants to crack the shell should do," Felicity went on. "And what about you, Shelley?"
"I have no writing aspirations, though I read a lot," Shelley said. "I'm just along to help out Jane.
I'm planning to go to different lectures to take notes because she can't be in two or three places at one time."
"Shelley isn't quite telling the truth," Jane said with a laugh. "She writes the best letters of complaint you can imagine."
"A skill I wish I had," Felicity said. "Where are you ladies from?" she said, signing the book with a flourish of green ink.
"Only a few blocks away," Shelley said. "Would you sign another one for me later?"
"I'd be delighted. Have you had breakfast yet? I'm starving. Will you join me? Just give me ten minutes to change out of my airplane garb and fix my hair."
Jane was thrilled but refrained from gushing. "We'd like that."
When Felicity was out of earshot, Shelley said, "This is astonishing. John at the front desk said those cowboy people checked in as part of this conference. And there was another odd thing I overheard. That Zac person who's been lurking near the desk went up to the woman and young man checking in. He gave a paperback book to her, saying, 'Sophie, you must read this.' "
"That's sort of strange," Jane said, still preoccupied with how very nice Felicity Roane had turned out to be.
Felicity met them at the door of the hotel restaurant shortly. Now she looked a lot more like the photo on the back of her books.
When they'd ordered, Felicity said, "Have you seen any of the others arrive? I'm a bit early. I always like to get rid of the airplane hair and rest up my white knuckles before I go into author mode."
"I saw Zac Zebra," Jane said. "There's no mistaking him." She studied Felicity as she spoke. The author had put her hair up in a twist at the back and was wearing freshly pressed tan slacks and a pink blouse. A lovely soft scarf draped over her shoulder was held in place with a pretty gold pin.
"Zac must go to every mystery conference in the country," Felicity said. "He's an unforgivable show-off with that crazy hair. He claims to have written several books under a pseudonym, but I don't believe that. For one thing, nobody's really named Zac Zebra, are they?"
"I hope not," Shelley put in. "Do you already know all the other guest speakers? Do you do this a lot?"
"I know most of them. But not, thank goodness, the E-Pubbed Wonder."
"Who is that?"
"I've forgotten her name. Deliberately, I fear. She posted a book on the Internet. She's quoted as saying her wonderful husband sold his pickup truck to fund the publication of it."
"People pay for being published?" Shelley said with horror.
"Some do," Felicity said. "I've never heard of
any of them actually making back the money though, until this hick turned up. She had the nerve to send it to Sophie Smith."
"Who's Sophie Smith?" Shelley asked.
Jane knew the answer but let Felicity reply.
"The toughest old editor in the business. She's called other names I won't repeat because they're obscene. Most of us have had her at one point or another. To our sorrow. She has a reputation for buying up anybody she can get her hands on and just splatting their books against a wall to see who sticks. Once every couple of years, she fires upward of two dozen who haven't flogged their book sufficiently to live up to her sales expectations. I was one of those. Not only once, but twice." She admitted this with a wry smile.
Jane was liking Felicity more and more as she went on. She had the same self-deprecating sense of humor that showed in her books. She could criticize others with abandon, but also make fun of her own mistakes just as could her heroines.
"What did this Sophie think of the e-pubbed book?" Shelley asked.
"She loved it and so did that assistant of hers, Corwin. Rumor is, she paid a fortune for it. It's apparently told in two alternating viewpoints, chapter by chapter. Sophie must have thought that was a truly original thing to do. I don't think Sophie has ever read anything that wasn't by one of her own writers or she'd have known better."
"Is it still on the Internet?" Jane asked.
Felicity shrugged. "I don't know. I never looked for it. Other writers I know thought it was awful. Pretentious. A sort of conflicting quest for both characters. Lots of misspelled words. And those who read clear through it said the ending stunk. The two viewpoint characters had never even heard about each other until they met in the last chapter, and it was apparently a very boring meeting. Of course, this all might be just sour grapes. All of this gossip came from the struggling mid-list writers like me who are beating their fingers to a pulp to keep up."
"Mid-list?" Jane said. "But you've had a lot of bestsellers."
Felicity laughed. "If you claw your way onto the bottom of the one hundred and fifty books on the USA Today list, your publisher can call you a bestseller. But I have a good many readers who genuinely like the books and keep on buying them. And most of them are still in print, so I consider myself very lucky."
"Aren't there other authors who have self-published their work, which eventually led them into real publishing?" Jane asked. "I've heard of a few, but don't remember who they were."
"Neither do I," Felicity said. "But I do recall that a few of them became really big names and made tons of money."
Five
Over their last cup of coffee, Shelley asked Felicity about the other guest speakers. Glancing down at the brochure she'd received in the mail, she asked, "What about this man Chester Griffith? He's a bookseller, it
says."
"That's a very modest bio. He's a lot more than a bookseller," Felicity said. "He's the antidote to Zac Zebra, for one thing. Zac is a macho pig who only gives good reviews to tough-guy books. On the rare occasions Zac critiques a book by a woman, he's vicious. His favorite phrase is 'powder puff mysteries.' And he claims to read ten or twelve books a day. Which is ridiculous. If you've read the book he's reviewing, you can tell that he only reads the back-cover copy and imagines what the book is about. He mixes up characters with each other and he's notorious for giving away the endings, with men and women both."
She sighed. "I'm sorry I'm ranting. To answer your question, Chester Griffith is an intelligent gentleman though he doesn't mince words. He
makes no bones about saying that women writers are superior at their craft. He's practically memorized all the Golden Age female mystery writers' output. He's the world's expert on Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, and several less-well-known women. He's researched their lives as well. He's a good speaker.
"He also likes what he calls 'the Modern Golden Age' writers. Emma Lathem, Dorothy Simpson, Gwendolyn Butler, and Ruth Rendell's Wexford novels as well. With the exception of Christie's Miss Marple, all of these women wrote about male protagonists with a sensibility that's missing from tough-guy books."
"I'm going to like this man," Jane said. "The names you've mentioned are nearly all of my favorites. I've reread many of them."
"But Zac Zebra says all these women's male protagonists are wimps, if not downright homosexual."
"You're kidding?" Jane asked with disgust.
"I've heard him say it to whole groups of fans, many of whom walk out on his speeches," Felicity said.
"Why do the people who plan the conferences agree to let him take the podium?" Shelley asked.
"Most of them, I suspect, think he spices up a conference," Felicity said. "I myself think he's a pollutant of the usual goodwill between readers and writers."
"What about Taylor Kensington?" Shelleyasked, again consulting her brochure. "Should one of us go to her talk? It says she writes two different series and one of them has an historical setting."
"Taylor Kensington is a delightful woman," Felicity said. "Very funny, very low-key. One of my best friends in the business. She's a trooper who has helped a lot of aspiring writers. I like her suspects, her settings, her plots, which are so well researched, but…"
"But what?" Jane asked. She'd recently read one of Kensington's novels and hadn't liked the ending.
"She writes heroines who, at the end, stupidly go out in the middle of the night all alone to investigate suspects. In every one of her books, the woman is nearly killed for being suddenly so dumb," Felicity explained.
Jane said, "I've only read one of her books and that's exactly what happened at the end. The character seemed so smart all the way through, and then went out to a deserted construction site at four in the morning to meet a stranger who tried to kill her. I wanted to slap her silly."
"I'll jot her name down to avoid reading, nice as she might be," Shelley said, scribbling a note on her brochure.
"Who is this Miss Mystery?" Jane said, still perusing the most recent mailing. "I'd never heard of her and she's the only one without a picture."
"Oh dear. I didn't know she was coming," Fe-
licity said with slight alarm. "I should have read the last bulletin they sent. She has an Internet site where she critiques women's fiction. She slaughters the work of newbies and e-pubs. She also puts her saber through the guts of the most successful, genuinely bestselling women writers. Struggling mid-list authors are her cup of tea. I should be grateful, I suppose, being among that group. But I'm not. She's a lot like Zac in that she merely skims the book and mostly misses the whole point of the work. I think it's a power thing. I've actually seen a couple of paperback originals who cite her in the blurbs."
"Blurbs?" Shelley queried.
"You know, those 'I love So-and-So's characters. They're so vibrant.' Signed by a well-known author."
"Blurbs. I'll have to remember that. I'm a sucker for them," Shelley admitted. "If someone I recognize and like to read says something nice on the cover, I'll buy the book."
"That's the point of blurbs," Felicity said. "And it's usually a good guide to book shopping. Avoid the book if it's blurbed by Miss Mystery though."
"Why isn't there a picture of her?" Shelley persisted.
"Because she comes to conferences under her own name and chums up with authors to acquire the dirt on other authors. Nobody knows who she really is."
"That's sneaky," Jane said. "So why is she even listed in the brochure?"
"To warn the authors that she's around, I suppose," Felicity replied.
After the waiter had interrupted to give them their bill, Shelley said, "I'd guess somebody recognizes her."
"Why?" Felicity asked.
"Because if I were to tell some stranger some deep secret of Jane's — which I'd never do, needless to say — and later saw her report it on her website, I'd remember who I'd spilled the beans to."
Felicity stared at Shelley with astonishment. "Of course!" She made a head-slapping motion. "You're right. Some people must know who they blabbed to and about. But they don't dare admit
it."
"Rest assured," Jane said, "neither of us is Miss Mystery."
Felicity grinned. "You promise?"
"Girl Scout's honor," Jane said, raising her hand.
Their discussion was suddenly cut short when a couple came through the door of the restaurant. It was the country-western pair Jane and Shelley had seen entering the hotel. The woman looked around and shouted a sort of yodeling greeting of "Yippee! I reckon y'all are the mystery writers," she said, raising her hefty arms as if embracing the whole room. Her turquoise and silver jewelry jangled.
Heads turned with annoyance.
"I'm Vernetta Strausmann, and this is my everlovin' hubby, Gaylord. Pleased to meetcha, y'all."
She glanced around the room and spotted Felicity and screeched, "Omigod! It's Felicity Roane! You're my favorite author!"
Dragging along Gaylord, who looked both proud and embarrassed, she galloped over to their table. She all but jerked the chair out from under Jane.
"Here, honey, let me grab this chair. You set yourself down over in that one. I gotta hug my favorite writing gal."
Jane grabbed the bottom of her chair and held her ground. Felicity had her arms extended, palms out, to stave off the hug. She was blushing at being singled out so outrageously in public.
"I'm sorry, but I'm having a chat with friends. Maybe we could meet later," Felicity said coldly.
"Pretty wimpy friends, it looks like," Vernetta said, her expression turning mean, her eyes going piggy, and her already strident voice becoming even louder.
"They're my friends and you aren't," Felicity said firmly.
"Who'da thought you were such a bitch!" Vernetta screamed, looking around the restaurant to make sure everyone was listening. "You're just jealous of me because I'm gonna make a lot more money than you'll ever see. C'mon, Gaylord."
She stomped out. Gaylord leaned toward thetable and said, "Miss Roane, I'm surely sorry 'bout this. She don't always mean what she says. It's what she says is 'artistic privilege.' "
Felicity was obviously having trouble suppressing tears of rage.
"What a terrible woman," she said in a shaking voice.
Six
Somebody in the restaurant clapped a couple of times, and most of the other patrons joined in. "You go, girl!" one woman said, raising a fist to Felicity and grinning.
Felicity relaxed a little and waved back. "I need another jolt of coffee," she said under her breath.
"Why don't you come up to our room for it," Shelley asked. "There's anything there you'd like to drink."
"Let me take care of the bill first," Felicity said.
"No, you won't. Not after you told us so many interesting things," Jane said. "We'll take care of yo
urs."
"Nope," Felicity insisted. "My cost is tax-deductible."
She hailed a waiter to pick up the bill, and during the slight delay, several of the other diners came over and asked who that awful woman was. Or who Felicity was. Several who weren't even attending the conference had heard of her
and asked if her books were for sale and could they catch her later to have them signed.
As Felicity scrawled her real name on the credit card slip and put the card back in her purse, she said to Jane and Shelley, "Who'd have thought that scene would have paid off so well?"
They strolled through the lobby and looked over the registration booth, which was just opening up for business. They each were given a canvas bag full of goodies, including a complete booklet giving the times and rooms where each session would be held and extensive bios of the speakers; free books by writers who were attending; pens with authors' web sites; bookmarks with lists of the author's books; and even a tiny pink-and-white box of peppermints from one writer. Jane and Shelley studied the booklet. It was much more complete than any of the materials they had received earlier.
"Jane!" Shelley exclaimed, "turn to page four. It's a picture of Mel."
"Good grief. He didn't tell me he was a speaker. How sneaky," Jane said.
"Who is Mel?" Felicity asked.
"Jane's honey," Shelley said.
"Damned good-looking man," Felicity said.
Jane flipped to a page at the back and said, "Wow! There are agents and editors here that you can see and talk to privately for fifteen minutes," Jane said. "I had no idea. Which would be a good one, Felicity?"
"Let's take it up with us and look it over," Felicity responded.
Felicity was frankly astonished at the suite Jane and Shelley were staying in. Shelley had to explain, with enormous modesty, that her husband had invested in the hotel and that part of the deal was having the suite be available to his family or friends when it wasn't otherwise booked.
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