Terns of Endearment

by Donna Andrews

  I made a mental note to see if we could postpone the second fight scene if the power and water weren’t on by tomorrow. Because while doing it had been fun, I really wanted to follow it with a long soapy shower and a spell of sipping a cold beverage in an air-conditioned room, none of which was possible at the moment.

  Not something I could fix.

  “Since Rose Noire hasn’t returned, I’m going in search of Léonie myself,” I said.

  “I plan to see if I can arrange something like a seawater bath for the boys and me,” Michael said. “If I can find a bucket and a really long rope, we can put on our swimsuits, go down to deck one, and take turns soaking each other.”

  “Good plan. I might join you later.”

  “If I see Léonie, I’ll try to keep her from leaving and call you,” he said. “By which I mean the low-tech version of calling—I’ll stick my head over the side of the ship and yell your name, and if that doesn’t work I’ll send the boys to look for you.”

  We were really going to appreciate our cell phones when we got back on land.

  Before leaving the front of deck five, I peered over all the railings to see who or what was there to be seen. Nothing much except for Horace, searching the open deck area in the bow of deck two. On the back deck, Mother and Aunt Penelope were sipping their tea. They appeared to be thumbing through a stack of decorating magazines, occasionally showing each other something of interest. I fled before they could try to suck me in. No sign of Léonie.

  She wasn’t in the Starlight Lounge on the fourth floor, either. Or in the small library lounge, also on the fourth floor, which turned out to be an actual library, complete with books, just a few doors down from our staterooms. The writers were there—at least the three of them who weren’t out snooping with Dad. They looked rather downcast—even Janet, who had been over the moon a few minutes before when we’d finished the fight scene. And they seemed to be without their various electronic devices, which was odd. Or maybe not—perhaps they’d left them up on deck six to charge and come down here to get some work done. They were all huddled around a table, each holding a sheaf of papers.

  Before I could say anything, Angie bounced in.

  “Hey, you guys,” Angie said. “You’d never guess what—what’s wrong? You all look as if someone died. Someone else that we actually care about,” she added.

  I suddenly had an idea what might be wrong.

  “Does this mood of gloom have anything to do with the neuro-linguistic text identification project?” I asked. “Or is Delaney still working on that?”

  “The what?” Angie asked.

  “Delaney, Meg’s brother’s fiancée has a program that’s supposed to tell you who wrote something,” Tish explained. “You feed in stuff you know various people have written and then you feed in an unidentified manuscript and it tells you which of those people, if any, wrote it.”

  “That sounds interesting.” Angie looked puzzled.

  “The preliminary results weren’t quite what we hoped they’d be,” Tish said.

  “Rather unsettling,” Kate said.

  “Downright depressing,” Tish said,

  “Actually, the preliminary results were fabulous,” Kate said. “We fed in a whole bunch of emails we had in our computers, and then we started giving Delaney manuscripts without telling her who’d written them, and she pegged us every time. She even spotted that Tish and I had collaborated on that time-travel novella, the one that had a Regency story and a modern-day one.”

  “But then we gave her Nancy’s last manuscript, and according to the program, Desiree wrote it.” Tish looked grim. “It was a near-perfect match for Desiree’s last ten books.”

  Chapter 18

  Yikes. I didn’t envy Delaney, having to break the news to the writers that their dead friend had been a plagiarist.

  “Maybe her program isn’t as good as she thinks it is,” Janet said. “No offense, Meg, but I don’t believe Nancy was a plagiarist.”

  “I’m not surprised at her results,” Angie said.

  “You’re not?” Tish exclaimed.

  “I’m flabbergasted,” Kate said.

  Janet just shook her head. And they were all staring at Angie as if she’d committed high treason. I suppose from the group’s point of view she had.

  “Do you really think Nancy—”

  “Let me explain.” Angie held up her hand. “I know something you don’t. Nancy swore me to secrecy. And maybe I should have told the rest of you about this a long time ago, but … well, she made me promise not to. And after she died, it seemed kind of academic. And besides, I thought it could still cause problems. Legal problems for her estate. Or maybe even problems for me—Desiree was always pretty litigious. But now…” She hesitated, as if still uncertain whether to break her promise to her dead friend.

  “It’s all right.” Kate’s tone was soothing.

  “Just spill it.” Tish’s tone was anything but soothing, but it seemed to help Angie make up her mind.

  “Nancy was ghostwriting for Desiree.” Angie’s gaze darted back and forth as she tried to judge the effects of her words.

  The writers were speechless. Well, only for thirty seconds or so, but that’s a long time to be speechless, and I got the impression that being speechless wasn’t something that happened to writers very often.

  “So she wasn’t blocked after all,” Kate exclaimed.

  “Or at least only blocked on her own work,” Tish suggested.

  “She wasn’t the least bit blocked,” Angie said. “Desiree had her on a six-book-a-year treadmill.”

  From the way they reacted, with groans and grimaces and eye rolls, I assumed this was a punishing schedule.

  “Wait—Nancy was the one writing the Fiefdoms of the Were-Knights series?” Janet asked.

  “Fiefdoms of the Were-Knights?” I echoed.

  “I always said Desiree didn’t think of that series idea herself,” Tish said to Kate.

  “Was I arguing with you?” Kate said.

  “Of course, I assumed her publisher had thought it up,” Tish went on.

  “No, the whole series was Nancy’s idea,” Angie said. “And she did all the writing. I’m not even sure Desiree bothered reading them after the first few. If you read all the interviews she’s done about the series, you’ll notice she doesn’t give a whole lot of concrete details.”

  “I can’t tell you how relieved I am,” Janet said. “I’ve been secretly devouring the Were-Knight series ever since it started. I picked up the first one so I could make fun of it, and I was hooked.”

  “Are we having confession time now?” Tish asked. “Because yeah, those books have become one of my major guilty pleasures, too.”

  “I wanted to hate them,” Kate said. “I really did. I wanted them to be as awful as Desiree was, so I could blame her comeback on slick marketing and gullible readers.”

  “I think everyone in the romance world felt the same way,” Angie said.

  “Okay, this is an interesting question,” Janet said. “Which is worse—when someone you really like writes awful books, or when the author of a fabulous book turns out to be a horrible human being?”

  “Oooh, good question,” Tish said. “I think—”

  “Let’s stick to the subject for the moment,” Kate said. “Why didn’t Nancy tell us she was ghostwriting for Desiree?”

  “She wanted to.” Angie looked sad. “But Desiree had her under such a draconian non-disclosure agreement that she was terrified to.”

  “We’d have kept her secret,” Tish said.

  “You’d have tried,” Angie said. “But would you have been able to keep from snickering or rolling your eyes when Desiree strutted around taking all the credit? I know I couldn’t have. But I never go to romance conventions—the rest of you do.”

  They all fell silent. Digesting what they’d just learned, no doubt. I was doing the same thing. Apparently Desiree wasn’t the utter has-been they’d made her seem. She was a former has-been
with a booming second career, thanks to a hot new series. A series they all enjoyed. Maybe a series whose success they all envied. Would it make them happier to know that the books they admired were written by a friend rather than an enemy? Or would they beat themselves up about not realizing Nancy had written the Were-Knight books, and not doing anything more to help her escape the trap she was in? And perhaps more important, what light did this revelation shed on Desiree’s suicide—or murder? Angie knew that Desiree had abused and exploited their friend, which made her a much more plausible suspect in my book. In spite of their obvious dislike of Desiree, the other writers didn’t seem to have the same compelling motive. It might be maddening to know that someone you considered a horrible human being was writing books you enjoyed, but I didn’t quite see that as a motive for murder. But maybe writers’ minds worked differently. And for that matter what if one—or several—of them had been feigning surprise at Angie’s revelation? We only had their word for it that Nancy hadn’t confided in them, too.

  Probably a good idea to get them talking again. See what else I could learn.

  “I didn’t know romance writers wrote series,” I said aloud. “Or should that be serieses? Anyway, I thought the whole point of a romance was that the hero and the heroine got together in the last chapter and lived happily ever after, making every book a one of a kind.”

  “The term is stand-alone,” Tish said. “That used to be the case, but then we romance writers noticed how great the series concept was for mystery and speculative-fiction authors. Look what a big deal it was every time a new Harry Potter book came out, or the latest Sue Grafton—everyone preordered it or ran out to buy it the first day it was released. Doesn’t work quite as spectacularly for less well-known authors, but still—it helps.”

  “It’s the reason TV networks like a series,” Janet said. “If people like it they keep coming back for more.”

  “So you drag the romance out over several books?” I was still puzzled.

  “No, it’s more like in the first book of a series, the heroine meets her Mr. Right, and then in the second book her next youngest sister meets her Mr. Right. Given a sufficiently large family, you can keep it going for quite a while.”

  “Or the Mr. Rights are all brothers, or all the characters live in the same small town, or work for the same company, or someone who’s an interesting secondary character in book one is the main character in book two.”

  “So this is the new thing in romance?” I asked.

  “Not really,” Tish said.

  “Nora Roberts has been doing it for years,” Janet said.

  “Decades,” Tish corrected. “You don’t read much romance, do you?”

  Tish was smiling, so I didn’t think I needed to lie.

  “My dad’s always shoving mysteries at me,” I said. “I can’t even begin to keep up with his must-reads. With two kids in middle school…”

  “We’ll give you a reading list so you can catch up later,” Kate said. “If, as I suspect, you haven’t touched a romance since you were a teenager you’ll be surprised at how they’ve changed. It’s not just about boy meets girl—it’s about women having agency, in their lives and their relationships. And—”

  “Getting back to Desiree’s series,” Tish interrupted.

  “Which was really Nancy’s series,” Angie pointed out.

  “The series we now know Nancy was ghostwriting for Desiree.” Tish nodded to Angie. “It revolved around a kingdom with a sort of brotherhood of knights, unabashedly modeled after the Knights of the Round Table. Only they were all were-creatures of one kind or another.”

  “Not just werewolves?” I asked.

  “No, an amazing variety of were-creatures. The first one was a werewolf. After that she had a weretiger, I think. Or maybe it was a werelion. And a werebear.”

  “Nancy actually thought it was a really silly idea and couldn’t possibly run all that long,” Angie said. “She said she was expecting three, maybe four books. By the time she had done six or seven books the were-creatures were getting a little far-fetched.”

  “The werepanther wasn’t bad,” Janet put in. “Or the werehorse.”

  “The wereshark was actually pretty cool,” Kate said.

  “But after more than twenty books, Nancy was running out of animals that she could have her knights change into and still maintain some plausibility as dashing alpha male protagonists.” Angie shook her head. “I kept telling her to come up with a killer idea that would only work using one of the animals she’d already used and get Desiree to talk the publisher into letting her start repeating.”

  “To tell the truth, I couldn’t believe how long she’d kept it going,” Tish said. “Makes a lot more sense now that I know it was Nancy who made readers swoon over heroes who turned into badgers and rhinoceroses and coyotes when the going got tough.”

  “Okay, now it makes more sense,” I said, half to myself.

  “What makes more sense?” Kate asked.

  “If Desiree and Nancy hardly knew each other, then there would be almost no way for one of them to plagiarize the other’s manuscript,” I said. “But if Nancy was ghostwriting for Desiree, I can think of all sorts of ways. I mean, manuscripts had to go back and forth somehow. They could have gone to each other’s houses. One of them could have given the other a flash drive, not realizing that she’d accidentally left a draft on it. Or sent an email with a file attached to the wrong address.”

  “Nancy wouldn’t plagiarize.” Janet shook her head, but her expression was anxious, as if she was beginning to wonder if her faith in Nancy was misplaced.

  “Maybe Nancy didn’t,” I said. “Maybe Desiree did.”

  “Stole Nancy’s manuscript?” I could see they were starting to like the idea.

  “What if Nancy had told Desiree she wanted to stop ghostwriting,” I said, “and Desiree didn’t want to let her go?”

  “No ‘what if’ needed,” Angie said. “That happened.”

  “So while that was happening, what if Desiree got her hands on a copy of Nancy’s manuscript and sent it to her agent and her publisher before Nancy submitted it?”

  “That I can believe.” Tish looked grim.

  “And maybe it gets worse,” I said. “What if the publisher had access to a program like the one Delaney was running? They’d get the same results we did—the new manuscript and the Were-Knights series were written by the same person.”

  “Only they’d think that person is Desiree,” Kate murmured.

  “Desiree killed her,” Janet exclaimed.

  “Not outright, surely,” Kate murmured.

  “Drove her to suicide,” Janet insisted.

  “I doubt if she meant to,” Tish said. “Why would she kill the goose that was laying all those golden eggs for her? She probably thought once she torpedoed the new series, Nancy would go back to ghostwriting.”

  “Maybe she didn’t mean to drive Nancy to suicide, but she did,” Janet said.

  “Or maybe she did mean to,” Kate said.

  “Or maybe it wasn’t really suicide,” Angie said quietly. “What if Nancy found out what Desiree had done and threatened to make it public? Threatened to say the hell with the non-disclosure and tell the world that Desiree had stolen her manuscript. Desiree wouldn’t kill the goose that laid the golden eggs—unless the goose made it plain that from now on she was keeping the eggs for herself. Maybe we should talk to the police. Tell them everything we know and get them to reopen the case.”

  “What’s the use?” Kate asked. “Desiree’s dead, too.”

  “But if she killed Nancy…” Janet protested.

  “First things first,” I said. “Let’s test this new theory. You mentioned feeding some of your emails into Delaney’s system. Did you feed in any of Nancy’s or Desiree’s?”

  “We didn’t do any of Nancy’s,” Janet said. “We only did Desiree’s recent books. And I don’t think any of us would have any emails from Desiree.”

  “No, not enough
to be useful,” Kate said,

  “Wait—what about the discussion lists?” Angie said. “Doesn’t she post on some of them?”

  “Yes, and we might have some in our mailboxes,” Kate said.

  “I don’t,” Tish grumbled. “I read and delete.”

  “Fortunately I’m not nearly so organized,” Kate said, “I need to take my computer up to Delaney anyway. I was going to wait until I was a little less depressed over the results she gave us. But now that we know we just didn’t dig deep enough—I’ll go get it and take it up to her.”

  “And we didn’t do any of Nancy’s old books,” Janet said. “From before the so-called block.”

  “Or Desiree’s old books,” Tish added. “Ones she wrote herself. Or had ghostwritten by somebody other than Nancy.”

  “Of course, I’m not sure any of us would have any of Desiree’s old books,” Kate said. “Not one of the subgenres I usually read.”

  “I’ve got some of her old books in my e-reader,” Tish announced. “From when I was doing that column for the newsletter on really awful sentences that had actually appeared in published books. Desiree was a gold mine for that. Let’s go get your computer and my e-reader.”

  The two of them hurried out.

  “Perhaps we should warn Delaney that we’re descending upon her for round two,” Janet suggested.

  “She won’t mind,” I said. “She revels in this kind of stuff.”

  “We might need to apologize a bit for doubting her,” Janet said.

  So Janet, Angie, and I headed toward the stairway and trudged up to deck six.

  Chapter 19

  Delaney and Rob were still there, surrounded by a small delta of Delaney’s equipment. Grandfather and Caroline were drinking pseudo iced tea, tending their own chargers, and watching Wim and Guillermo photographing things. Or maybe the two photographers were just scanning their surroundings with the giant mutant zoom lenses in the vain hope of finding something worth photographing. All I could see in any direction was the far-off horizon. Janet went over to begin looking through her laptop for items that might be of use. Angie and I joined Rob and Delaney.