Puss in D.C. and Other Stories

by Pamela Sargent

  Lucas peered at her over the book. She looked older than she had seemed at first; there were lines etched around her eyes and her mouth, and a bit too much fleshiness under her chin. About forty, he guessed, maybe even a little older.

  At last he closed the book, leaned back against his seat, and closed his eyes, hoping that she would take the hint. He had finally kicked the habit of long discussions in transit with strangers; you never knew where they might lead. People unburdened themselves of confidences they probably wouldn’t have entrusted even to close friends, or simply made up stories, safe in the knowledge that they would probably never run into their fellow passengers again. He knew that game; playacting, that’s what it was, and maybe some amateur psychoanalysis, too. Maybe most of the dialogues he had engaged in on trains and during flights had been mostly lies on both sides.

  The woman said, “As a matter of fact, he was my father.”

  Lucas opened his eyes. “Who was your father?”

  “Mack Vernon.” She waved an arm at him. “The guy who wrote that book.”

  She had seen the name on the spine and decided to impress him with a fictitious father. That she knew the titles of a couple of books and that there were only seven volumes in the Loren Reynolds series didn’t prove anything.

  “Then do me a favor,” Lucas said. “Don’t tell me what happens in All’s Well. I’m only on the second chapter.”

  “I never read any of his stuff.”

  Sure, he thought. That was an easy way to cover herself, in case he wanted to discuss the earlier books. He suddenly decided to trip her up, show her that she couldn’t put one over on him. “Bet you appreciate all the money he made, though.”

  She offered him a lopsided smile. “He was almost always broke.”

  “Still, you must have been sorry when he died.”

  “He should have been more careful,” she said. “If he’d been anywhere else except that cabin, maybe somebody would have found him. He didn’t have to drown in that shallow little creek.”

  She knew that much, but then anybody who knew anything about his novels was likely to have known about that tragic accident. The tale of Mack Vernon’s untimely death after what had apparently been a difficult and financially challenged life was the first story Sam Wilton had told Lucas about the author, a tragic event that was still mourned by a devoted coterie of fans.

  Twenty years ago, after what had been a life of critical neglect and poor sales, the first of Mack Vernon’s Loren Reynolds novels had been optioned by a movie producer. Flush with money for the first time in his life, Vernon had bought a summer cabin in his beloved Adirondack Mountains, the setting for most of the Loren Reynolds books. Less than a month after he had moved into his remote refuge, two backpackers had found him lying face down in the stream near his isolated cabin, a broken whiskey bottle at his side. Maybe he had been celebrating his good fortune, and maybe it was just as well he hadn’t lived to see the screen version of Good Intentions, which Lucas had rented on videotape after reading the novel, much against his friend Sam’s advice. The middle-aged and somewhat grizzled freelance investigator Loren Reynolds had been transformed into a muscular young hunk, his storefront office that doubled as a used bookstore had become an antiquarian bookselling operation with a wealthy clientele, the small upstate New York town in which he lived had been transplanted to the northern California coast, and the production had been graced with the title of “Lethal Intentions,” entirely missing the point of all the titles in the series, which had been drawn from well-known old adages that also served as epigraphs for each novel. The whole cinematic mess had gone straight to video and had never been released in theaters. Had he not already been an admirer of the book, he would never have been able to sit through the movie.

  “He had no sense at all,” the woman continued, “especially about money. As soon as he brings in some serious cash, does he invest it? Does he do anything smart with his dough? Of course not. He goes and buys a cabin up in the woods. Doesn’t even occur to him that maybe he should put something away for a rainy day.”

  Maybe she was Mack Vernon’s daughter, but he still had his doubts. There had been no mention of children, or even a marriage, in any of the material about the author Sam had e-mailed to him over the past months, although that might not mean anything; Mack Vernon had gone out of his way to avoid publicity, leaving it to his steadily increasing numbers of posthumous readers to dig up the details of his life. Maybe the woman was planning to pass herself off as Mack Vernon’s only heir and therefore as someone entitled to any future income from his books. Given the reputation the Loren Reynolds series was rapidly acquiring, marked most recently by major pieces in the New York Times Book Review and the New Yorker, it was probably only a matter of time before some publisher bought up the rights to the books and reissued them in new editions. She might be rehearsing a scam on him.

  No, Lucas thought; that was the kind of story he might have concocted about this woman back when he had allowed his imagination to run rampant, when he was still trying to write. She was probably just entertaining herself, as he had done back in the days when he had regaled strangers on buses and trains with tales of his nonexistent publications. It was a good thing he had not followed Mack Vernon’s path in life, that he had listened to the parents who had told him to stop fooling around with his writing and finish college and settle down. His tedious years in a local office of the state tax department had left him with the security of a pension and the likelihood, given his good health and sound habits, of two or even three decades of leisure. He had not actually given up his dream of being a writer, but had only postponed it.

  She said, “He was just an accident waiting to happen.”

  Lucas closed his book. “Accidents can happen even when you’re careful,” he said, “and at least he missed the hash those movie people made of his book.”

  “I heard that movie was a turkey.”

  “Just about unwatchable. I think it actually won some sort of award for being one of the worst movies ever made.”

  “So you know about my father. Didn’t think there was hardly anybody around who still cared.”

  “Oh, there’s a lot more interest in his novels lately,” Lucas said, “even a couple of articles about him. That’s why my friend Sam had to loan me the first Reynolds book. He said I’d have a heck of a time finding it what with all the interest in the series. He just finished putting up a Mack Vernon Web site a little while ago, and he got so many hits during the first month that he had to get a new server.”

  “Really,” the woman said.

  “People keep asking when somebody’s going to reissue his books.” A puzzled look crossed the woman’s face. “You know, bring his novels out in new editions now that he’s getting more attention and so many people are trying to get copies. I can’t believe that whoever his agent is now isn’t trying to capitalize on it, that someone wouldn’t have contacted you by now for permission to reprint them.”

  The puzzled expression was replaced by a glassy stare.

  “You would be the one to contact, wouldn’t you?” he asked. She shrugged. “Were you his only child?”

  She looked past him to an invisible audience outside the window, as if hoping for a hint on how to answer a question that might be a trap. “Yeah.”

  “Then you’d be the heir to everything, wouldn’t you? Unless your father left the rights to someone else. Maybe you ought to get after some information about his agent, let him know that there might be some kind of a book deal there.”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” she said.

  “What about his papers, his contracts? What about—”

  “Don’t know anything about his papers,” she interrupted. “He wasn’t exactly the most organized guy in the world. All he left me was whatever else he was supposed to get paid for that movie, which turned out to be a big fat zero.”
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  “What about that cabin he bought?” Lucas asked.

  Her eyes narrowed. For a moment, she looked angry. “What about it?”

  “That must have gone to you, too. Just about everybody who’s a fan of his knows about that cabin, about how he’d wanted one all his life, a retreat just like the place Loren Reynolds had. Kind of ironic and sad that he didn’t get to enjoy it that long.”

  “Had to sell it,” she said, “but it was such a run-down old shack that I didn’t get that much for it. And that was it. He’d spent everything else.”

  She seemed to have an answer for everything. According to his friend Sam, there had been recent rumors of a pending book deal for reissues of the Loren Reynolds novels, but nothing had come of that, and there was speculation that there had been problems in clearing the rights to the books. Vernon’s original agent had died a few years ago, while the agent’s former associate had opened up his own literary agency and taken on new partners before retiring himself. The cabin had been in a relatively inaccessible region of the Adirondacks, meaning that it probably wouldn’t have attracted wealthy buyers looking for a summer place near a resort town. He couldn’t find any holes in what the woman had said so far.

  “You know,” he said, “I could put you in touch with my friend. He’s in touch with a lot of Mack Vernon fans, and even a couple of his former editors, so one of them’s sure to know who’s handling your father’s books now. You could find out if there might be something coming to you. It could turn out to be a lot of money.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Lots of zeroes.”

  “Look into it,” Lucas said. “I mean, what have you got to lose?”

  She looked away from him. She might be a fraud, as he suspected, or she might already know that she had no rights to any profits from her father’s published work. Mack Vernon wouldn’t be the first writer to die unexpectedly and leave his literary estate in a tangled mess, or to have signed his rights over to someone completely unprepared to handle them.

  “You don’t know what it was like,” she said then. “He might have been around, but he was never there, not really. My friends used to ask me what it was like, having both my mom and my dad around the house all day, but most of the time it was like he wasn’t really there. He’d go into his room, to his desk and his typewriter and his coffee pot and all his books, and he’d close the door. The only times he’d come out were for meals or to go to sleep or to get into an argument with Mom where they’d scream at each other because after a while the only way she could even get him to talk was to get into a fight with him, and when I came out of my bedroom he’d shout at me to go back to bed if I knew what was good for me. That was when he was home. Then he’d go off for a few days, or a couple of weeks, or even a month or more sometimes, and half the time Mom didn’t even know where he was. Doing research, he’d say, but he always came home looking like he’d been on a bender.”

  Lucas made a noncommittal noise in his throat.

  “I had to be really quiet when I got up, because he always slept late, and when I got home from school I had to tiptoe around and whisper and never knock on his door unless it was an absolute emergency and if any of my friends came over, I had to tell them to shut up and be quiet and not disturb him.”

  “He was probably just trying to concentrate on his work,” Lucas said. “Distractions can really derail somebody who’s writing, knock a particular phrase or idea right out of your head, even make you lose a whole day of work if you really get thrown off your stride.”

  “Anyway, that was before Mom went back to work because he just couldn’t make enough, but then things got even worse, because then he was the only one there when I got home from school and I couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t watch TV, because it was in the room next to his. Couldn’t bring any friends home because they’d make too much noise and then he’d come barging out and swear at everybody so pretty soon nobody came over because they all thought he was crazy. After that, the only time he’d say anything to me was when he’d open his door and yell at me to shut the hell up because he was trying to work. Nine times out of ten I had to go down the block to the deli to get some sandwiches or salads because Mom was too tired to make dinner when she got home and he couldn’t be bothered to cook anything.”

  Lucas kept his face still, trying to think of how to stem her flow of recriminations.

  “After a while,” she said, “he was staying in his room almost all the time, I think he was even sleeping in there sometimes. Mom would come home and bang on the door and start yelling at him to come out and that if he weren’t such a lazy bum he could make enough so she wouldn’t have to go back to her shitty job. And he wouldn’t come out. He wouldn’t even tell her to go away. He’d just stay in there while she screamed and pounded on the door.”

  Lucas was now having more trouble believing that her tales might be entirely fictitious. She didn’t seem like someone creative enough to invent such a detailed story, and there was an undercurrent of rage in her voice that was setting off all his mental alarm bells. He shrank back in his seat, almost afraid to look at her.

  “So about a year and a half after Mom went back to work, she came home and got out our suitcases and packed my stuff and said she’d been sneaking her own stuff out of the house for a couple of weeks already because she’d rented an apartment and that was where we were going to live from now on. So we took everything out to the car and he didn’t even come out to see what we were doing. That was when I was twelve. Mom got a divorce a year later, and a year after that she married my stepdad. Not that he paid much attention to me, either, but at least he paid the bills.”

  “Guess you had it tough,” Lucas said, not knowing what else to say.

  “Trouble with Joe—that’s my stepdad—the thing is, he was pretty good to my mom, and my sister could wrap him around her little finger, but I was just kind of in the way as far as he was concerned, I mean, I wasn’t his kid. And my father didn’t care, he didn’t even bother to ask for custody, not that I would have wanted to live with him anyway, but he could have tried.”

  Maybe some enterprising fan of Mack Vernon’s had already found out about any marriage, divorce, and daughter. Not that it mattered; by the time he discovered whether or not there might be any truth to her story, they would long since have gone their separate ways.

  “He didn’t bother with visitation, either,” she said. “He could have had me every other weekend and for two months in the summer, but he never asked for me, and he even stopped making phone calls, not that he ever had much to talk about except what book he was working on and how everything was going to pay off for him someday. He never paid any attention to me when I was around, so I sure as hell can’t be surprised that he ignored me after Mom and I moved out.”

  “I guess not,” Lucas said as she took a deep breath.

  “He tried to make it up to me later, when I was out of school and working. I was waitressing at a coffee shop, and he’d come in and buy a cup of coffee and try to talk to me during my break, or he’d catch me outside when I was leaving and take me out to dinner somewhere, so we could sit there while he went on and on about how he was different now and he’d make it up to me and what a lousy father he’d been and how bad he felt about everything.”

  “Then he was sorry,” Lucas said.

  “Oh, he was sorry, all right, when it was too late to matter, when he couldn’t do anything for me anyway. Just about the last time I heard from him, he called me up to tell me about Good Intentions selling to the movies, about how he was going to get a place in the mountains and I could come up to visit, as if I’d have time to hang around with him in some ratty old shack in the woods where he’d just ignore me or go on and on about his goddamn books. He wasn’t really that sorry. Everything was always all about him in the end.”

  “Well.” Lucas cleared his throat. “Could you excuse me for a minute?” He leaned forwa
rd in his seat, feeling that he had to get away from her torrent, if only for a few moments. “Have to use the rest room.”

  She nodded, got out of her seat, and stood aside. He set down his book and slipped past her, then stumbled to the back of the bus.

  The rest room, he saw with relief, was empty. He went inside, secured the door, sat down on the closed toilet seat, then took a few deep breaths, wishing that he had never taken the copy of All’s Well out of his carry-on. He might have been getting some much-needed rest by now instead of listening to a stranger complain about her life.

  “You aren’t really that sorry.” Terri had said that to him, just after announcing that she wanted a divorce. “You won’t notice anything different when I’m gone, you never paid any attention to me anyway.” Lucas hadn’t tried to stop her from leaving, largely because he had realized even then, hurt and humiliated as he had felt at the time, that there was some truth to his wife’s statement. He had known even then that he preferred his own company to that of anyone else. That was part of what he thought of as his writer’s temperament, standing a bit aside, being an onlooker to life, needing enough solitude to be able to hear his own thoughts. He still had that kind of temperament even now, and he treasured it.

  Mack Vernon had clearly shared some of that emotional distance from those around him, along with a need to retreat from others; there was something of that quality in his character Loren Reynolds. Lucas congratulated himself again for having extricated himself from a marriage that had been a mistake and not weighing himself down with other obligations. Mack Vernon probably shouldn’t have had any children, either, but whatever his faults, he had apparently regretted his actions. Surely by now his daughter should have been able to take some pride in his work, in the novels that might finally secure his place among the masters of suspense, perhaps even among America’s major literary figures. That accomplishment surely outweighed anything else he might have owed to his embittered daughter.