by Karina Bliss
How could he not hire a woman with balls like that?
Zander slid into the seat beside her, nodding to the driver.
“It’s days like today,” Dimity grumbled without looking up from her organizer, “I wish I’d settled for lying on my back. At least I would have gotten some rest.”
“Darlin’, no woman rests in my bed.” Zander frowned as he glimpsed his schedule on the screen. “And if I’m the slave driver, how come you’re always cracking the whip?”
Dimity was smart, she was sassy and she took care of business allowing Zander to concentrate on the big picture of world domination.
The front passenger door opened and the van sank several inches as Luther got in, six three of solid muscle. He didn’t attempt to read Zander a lecture, which was precisely why he’d been promoted.
As the van pulled into traffic, Dimity brought Zander up to speed. “The interviewer, ‘Blackie’ Blackburn, is up-and-coming,” she said. “So he’ll probably throw in a few sensationalist questions for ratings.”
“I’m all for ratings.”
“Also some drama with Moss last night.” The lead guitarist was reveling in his newfound fame. “He was in a hot tub with a groupie, slipped and cracked his head on the rim. He went to Emergency, got five stitches and will be fine to play tonight.”
“Then we’ll let it go.”
At the outset, Zander had said he wouldn’t interfere with his protégés’ antics offstage unless they affected their on-stage performance. Still, he might suggest to Moss that he adopt a more wholesome vice, like ambition.
“We do have one fire to douse,” Dimity said as the van stopped for a red light. “Your publisher called. George told them you fired him yesterday.” George was the second music journalist the publishing house had supplied to help Zander write his memoir. “Max wants you to phone him immediately to discuss how this affects your November deadline.”
“He knows damn well I haven’t written a word. Did you contact Elizabeth Winston?” He’d employ his own damn writer.
“I did,” Dimity put her organizer aside. “She listened very politely, said, ‘Tell my brother he’s hilaaaarious’ and hung up on me.”
“What?”
“She thought I was a joke caller.”
“Get her on the phone.” Grabbing a chilled water from the cooler, Zander leaned against the leather headrest and laid the bottle against his throat.
“It’s ringing,” said Dimity, handing him her cell. He heard a foreign ring tone, then the line clicked.
“Hello?” he said in response to heavy breathing. Zander glanced at Dimity. “Does she moonlight as a phone sex oper—”
An infantile shriek pierced his eardrum and he thrust the cell away from his ear. “What the f—”
“Give it to me, Marshall,” hollered a girl’s voice.
There was the sound of a tussle, then another shriek, fading into the background. Dammit, if she had kids she wouldn’t be able to spend the next four months with him.
“Sophie Griffin speaking,” a child said with breathless officiousness. Zander returned the cell to his ear.
“I’m trying to reach the biographer Elizabeth Winston. Is this the right number?”
“Yes.”
He waited. And waited. “So can I talk to her?”
“Who’s speaking, please?”
For chrissake. “Zander Freedman.”
“Aunt Liz-a-bith,” the kid bellowed in his ear. “It’s Sandy Free something.”
One corner of his mouth lifted. “Pump up the pretour publicity in New Zealand,” he told Dimity. “The under-fives don’t know me.” Not Dr. Winston’s kids, then.
“Look, the joke’s gone far enough,” a woman said, exasperated. “It’s only funny the first—”
“It’s Zander Freedman,” he interrupted. “And if you don’t recognize my voice after the overexposure I’ve enjoyed over the past year, then we really do have nothing to say to each other.”
Silence.
“Hang on,” she said. “Sophie, you two can have a cookie from the jar. But only one each.” Even from the other side of the world, he heard the thunder of small feet. “So it’s true,” she said slowly. “You want me to ghostwrite your memoir?”
“Not exactly. You’ll share cover credit.”
There was a pause. “Mr. Freedman, you do know my three previous biographies have been of historical figures, don’t you?”
“And the Stonewall Jackson book won the history category in last year’s Pulitzer Prize and made you famous in literary circles. Wanna actually be famous, Dr. Winston?”
Her laugh matched her voice, crisp as a green apple. “I don’t think I’d cope with the world knowing the color of my underwear.”
“White complements my perma-tan.” The Calvin Klein billboards had injected much-needed cash into his tour fund. “Okay, let me redefine fame in terms you’d appreciate. Imagine having your book read by more than a few thousand people.”
“This is your pitch, to insult me?” But her tone remained good-humored. She set her own worth; he appreciated that.
“Hell no. I’m a big fan.”
“Uh-huh. And you came across my books how?”
“I have an interest in military history and my Kiwi sister-in-law sent me a copy of A Fighting Faith for Christmas.”
“Now I get it. Rachel set me up.” They both worked at Auckland University.
“LightBrigade,” he said.
“You’re kidding me.”
Zander smiled. “I’m returning you to my assistant now. She’ll authorize a pass to the Auckland concert in two weeks. Let’s talk.”
Chapter Two
Ten minutes later, Elizabeth hung up the phone and laughed out loud. The kids came running, Sophie clutching the cookie jar. “Wha’ happened?”
“I fell into another dimension.”
Uncomprehending, Sophie giggled, her baby brother a couple of beats behind, cookie crumbs coating his drooly mouth. Kids were always open to glee; Elizabeth loved that about them. But not now, when she’d spent half an hour lulling them into calm with stories. She itched to reread her e-mail correspondence with LightBrigade but there wasn’t time.
“Sophie, you want to get the sand saucer while I clean up your brother? We need to get going.”
“Uh-huh.” Her niece’s fairy wings bounced as she ran to the dining room table.
Marshall squealed when Elizabeth cleaned his face with a damp washcloth—he was enamored with testing his vocal range. Lightly, she pinched one chubby cheek. “Can you believe a rock legend wants a lit chick to help write his memoir?”
He answered with another loud shriek.
“I know,” she agreed. “It’s insane.”
Since her book had won the $10,000 Pulitzer Prize for history—the only category open to a non-US citizen—many interesting things had happened.
She’d sold another thousand books, earning an extra three grand in royalties (pretax and post her agent’s fifteen percent).
US universities had expressed interest in her proposed lecture tour next year.
She’d appeared on breakfast TV, where she’d attempted to make Stonewall Jackson’s Protestant faith and its influence on his soldiering palatable to viewers shoveling down toast and cereal before racing into their day.
But this…
What Elizabeth knew of Rage’s front man she’d gleaned in the waiting rooms of doctors, dentists and hairdressers where she speed-read gossip magazines.
And he’d also been in the local news because New Zealand claimed him through his Kiwi mother, in the way of small countries eager for a bigger presence on the world stage.
Zander Freedman certainly had that.
In an interview about his upcoming birthday, he’d responded to the inevitable plastic surgery question with, “Hell yeah. When I die, I want my corpse so full of preservatives, in a thousand years archaeologists will say I was a pharaoh.”
“Do you think Pat will let us look
at Rollo in the box?” said Sophie.
Elizabeth came back to earth fast. “No, honey, and please don’t ask him.” The little girl held the sand saucer they’d spent the morning preparing. Petals nudged weeds in a mishmash of color.
“But I’ve seen dead birds before. Daddy let me hold one.”
Elizabeth crouched to eye level. “Yes, but Rollo was Pat’s pet—his special budgie friend—so it might make him sad to open the box.”
“Rollo was my friend too. He took seed out of my mouth.”
“And that’s why you’re invited to his funeral. But let Rollo rest in peace, okay?” A fairy wing had twisted out of shape, Elizabeth straightened it.
Sophie rolled her eyes. “Okaaay!”
Elizabeth’s last stop was the kitchen, where she plated the rock cakes her younger sister, Belle, had left cooling on the tray before she and husband Hayden left for the building site to paint. Elizabeth was housing them until their new home was finished, theoretically six weeks ago; but wet weather had delayed the project.
The cakes were still warm and when she covered them with cling wrap it fogged over. “Kids,” she called, “we’re ready to Rollo.” Stop it. But she was still buzzed by the call.
Marshall tottered in. Balancing the plate in one hand, she picked him up. He made a grab for her grandmother’s amethyst beads and she shook her shoulder-length hair forward to hide the matching clip-on earrings, already numbing her lobes.
Rollo, rest his budgie soul, had gone head-bobbin’ crazy every time he’d seen them, which was why she’d worn them with her funeral outfit, a modestly-cut black dress and ballet flats suitable for grass.
Elizabeth followed her niece to her elderly neighbor’s front door.
Of course she’d refuse Zander Freedman’s offer.
She was an academic specializing in historic wars of independence. In her leisure time, she wrote historical biographies of morally complex, intelligent people. She wasn’t remotely interested in an egotistical rock showman whose profound utterances included, “Life’s like a line of coke. Best taken in one hit.”
Both kids took turns pressing the bell and eventually they heard a shuffle down the hall and the door opened. Patrick Malone was a small Irishman, hoar-frosted with age and as lean as the greyhounds he used to train. In his lined face, with its tufted gray brows, his deep-set blue eyes startled because they were as bright and clear as a baby’s.
Ill-fitting dentures made his mouth appear slightly concave and he wore a felt Fedora of a deep mossy green decorated with three mallard feathers. His ears, large for his narrow face, were slightly pointed. “Leprechaun blood,” he told children.
“Well, well,” he said, looking at Sophie. “Tis a fairy princess come to Rollo’s funeral.”
Sophie, suddenly shy, held out the sand saucer, her free thumb stealing to her mouth.
“Thank you, my darlin’.” Pat accepted the soggy sand saucer as carefully as the crown jewels. “We’ll put it on his grave.”
“Where’s Butterball?” At four and three-quarters, Sophie was deeply interested in the consequences of bad behavior.
“In the doghouse,” Patrick said solemnly.
“But she’s a cat.”
“I was speaking metaphorically, muirnin. She’s shut in the laundry, contemplating her sins.” He reached out to touch Marshall’s cheek, but the toddler remained intent on Elizabeth’s beads. “We can’t have the perpetrator of the crime running loose through the proceedings.”
“Because she kilt Rollo?”
Hands full, Elizabeth nudged her ghoulish niece with her hip as a reminder to be kind.
“She was only doing what came natural,” Pat said, “but she’d never have caught him if the bell hadn’t fallen off her collar and me not noticing. However, blame won’t bring Rollo back, so you must give Butterball a pat when we let her out after the service. You look beautiful, Elizabeth. Rollo would have appreciated the effort.”
“That’s what I thought,” she said.
He was sad for all his Irish whimsy, sad and old and the house behind him gloomy and dark with the smell of newspapers kept too long.
“Come in,” he invited. “We’ll get the service underway.”
In procession they passed through the long narrow hallway to the rear garden. En route Elizabeth deposited the rock cakes in the kitchen, noting at a glance the mugs and crystal tumblers unwashed in the sink, a tea towel over them for her benefit. No plates or cutlery to suggest he was eating. The bread bin was empty, so was the fruit bowl. She’d grocery shop for him later.
He’d been her neighbor for two years and Friday nights they drank Irish whiskey together and talked of wars and his dead wife, and when Elizabeth’s family tried to set her up on dates she’d say, “I already have a boyfriend,” which delighted him.
She’d spent five years abroad, in the States and England, and in her absence her siblings had launched into marriage and mortgages. Having witnessed their domestic dramas, it mystified Elizabeth that they were so set on her joining their ranks. Her family was now down to the dregs and scrapings of their single male acquaintances in the faint hope that someone would “stick”.
Elizabeth didn’t want to be stuck.
Rollo’s shoe box casket and a Bible sat on a bench next to the vegetable garden, recently cleared for autumn.
Pat gave Sophie a gardening trowel and she dropped to her haunches and dug the grave next to the silverbeet, her fairy wings bobbing as she worked. Her baby brother grabbed clutches of dirt and threw them until Elizabeth distracted him with a box of clothes pegs.
She sat on the wooden bench beside Pat. “Are we too much for you?” she asked quietly.
“No, it’s important to celebrate life when you’re burying your dead. Thank you for bringing them.” In the sun, his hands seemed transparent, the blue veins tangled labyrinths. “I’m almost as heartbroken over that bird as I was over my dear wife,” he added. “Am I pathetic, Elizabeth?”
“No, Pat,” she covered his fingers with hers. “You’d had him what…ten years?”
“Eleven. He was due to pass over, but not like this.” He swallowed convulsively.
She’d heard her neighbor’s cries of distress yesterday morning and run over, then had to turn the hose on the cat before Butterball released the bird’s body. The old man had been trembling and distraught.
“Done it.” Sophie stood, the sequins on her wings a shower of sunlit sparkles.
Gently, Pat placed Rollo’s casket in the hole, then everyone took turns throwing a trowel of earth. Sophie patted the grave flat and jammed a stick cross behind the sand saucer.
Elizabeth read a Bible verse and they sang “All Creatures Great and Small,” while Marshall chewed solemnly on a clothes peg.
“How will you know not to plant stuff over Rollo?” Sophie asked.
“Well darlin’, I will plant over him. Better compost to compost than ashes to ashes, I’m thinking, and there’s no need to stop being useful simply because you’re dead. He’ll grow a fine crop of broad beans over the next few months.”
“What a shame we humans have too many heavy metals to be useful in the same way,” Elizabeth commented. Growing up a minister’s daughter made her comfortable with death’s varied rituals.
“You’d best scatter mine at sea then, when the time comes,” Pat said.
“Not for a while yet, though, Pat.” In his company, she always picked up his Irish lilt. “For you, heaven can wait.”
* * *
It wasn’t until Marshall was napping and Sophie sat glued to a Dora the Explorer DVD that Elizabeth had time to search her e-mails.
Her correspondence with LightBrigade had begun six months earlier with a thoughtful compliment on her book, and evolved into an ongoing conversation on how eighteenth-century figures utilized religious faith in war.
LightBrigade’s arguments were muscular, provocative and challenging and she enjoyed the parries and feints of their online encounters.
After rereading their correspondence, she googled images of Zander Freedman. Shoulder-length blond hair razor-cut for a just-got-out-of-your-bed effect. The gold stubble on his strong jaw framed a beautiful mouth—collagen enhanced? Verging on forty, he passed as early thirties—Botox?—except for very light-blue eyes whose cynical expression suggested they’d done the rinse and repeat cycle in life’s washing machine once too often. A physique stolen from a professional athlete. Definitely body work. And in every picture he wore the mantle of unconscious arrogance that came from being rock royalty for nearly two decades.
She paused on a black-and-white shot of his face with only his eyes left in color. Something about the composition—angel face and demon-blue irises—both attracted and repelled. Was that the photographer’s intention? Elizabeth met that mocking gaze and thought, there’s nothing this man wouldn’t say…wouldn’t do.
Reconciling LightBrigade’s comments with Zander Freedman was impossible. Was that why he’d mentioned the link, to arouse her curiosity for a meet?
Elizabeth did a mental calculation—nine thirty p.m. in New York—and texted her agent.
Zander Freedman wants a lit biogr 2 assist with memoir. Has asked me.
Ha…luv it Franny replied a few minutes later.
Serious.
!!!! But no!… Right?
Elizabeth sharpened some pencils on her desk.
Five minutes later her cell rang. “Honey,” said a New York twang. “You have gravitas and he’s all helium.”
“Except for that voice, Franny.”
“Yeah, he can sing, but the guy’s a fame junkie. Instead of letting one of the world’s greatest rock bands rest in peace, he reforms Rage with a bunch of twenty-somethings. He should have changed the band’s name to Men To Boys.”
Frances Lamb was not only a great agent, but a fifty-something rock chick. “And there’s nothing the original band members can do about it because the brand’s his,” she continued. “Zander’s brother collapsed onstage with alcohol poisoning and nearly died, so what does the insensitive bastard do? Negotiates with a liquor company to use their greatest hit to score an ad campaign. Fortunately, the deal fell through. No real fan of Rage—and I’m one of their biggest—considers this latest incarnation anything but a tacky money-maker.”