Mary Dutta
Mary Dutta traded New England and a career as an English professor for a new life as a college admissions reader in the South. A member of Sisters In Crime National, Central Virginia, and Guppy Chapters, “Festival Finale” is her first fiction publication credit. Follow her on Twitter @Mary_Dutta.
Festival Finale
Mary Dutta
From a distance, Charles Attlee looked a lot like his author photo. Up close, he presented a faded, fortyish version of the twenty-something literary boy wonder of his press kit photo. Like a Dorian Gray in reverse. Hailey Fields had paused, momentarily uncertain, before approaching him at the airport and introducing herself as his chaperone for the book festival. Attlee resembled his younger self about as much as she resembled the acclaimed author she’d naively planned to become.
The book festival director had encouraged the local university’s MFA students to volunteer, stressing the unprecedented access to eminent authors that chaperoning would provide. An opportunity to receive advice, guidance, maybe even an introduction to a literary agent. Hailey had planned to network her way into the charmed circle of literary luminaries. Attlee, however, seemed to consider her more of a personal assistant than a colleague. He had handed her his messenger bag and sent her to fetch him a cup of coffee before they had even left the terminal.
He soon revealed her other role: captive audience for a ceaseless monologue on his breakout novel and subsequent accolades. When Attlee invited her to accompany him to his hotel room after checking in, Hailey had worried that she was in for a #MeToo moment, but she realized he just needed to continue the incessant stream of self-centered conversation. He had talked non-stop while he hung his clothes in the closet, laid out his toiletries on the sink counter, and put his laptop in the room’s safe.
“You know,” he said. “I always use the year I was a National Book Award finalist to set the code on the safe. I figure, what are the odds a hotel maid will know that? But then, one time, when I was delivering a keynote in Savannah,” he paused and touched a finger to his lip. “No, I lie, it was when I went to Denver to receive that prize. Anyway, I stopped for a haircut and it turned out the hairdresser was a big fan. So really, you never know.”
Hailey wondered why he couldn’t direct all his verbiage to the page and finally publish the second novel that he had never managed to produce. Once hotly anticipated, popular expectations for the book had long since cooled to when-hell-freezes-over. Had Charles Attlee shown any interest in her or her own writing problems Hailey could have shared her struggles completing her debut novel, two years in the writing and still not considered a viable MFA thesis by her alleged advisor. She had planned on benefitting from a lot more academic mentoring when she had taken out the massive student loan to fund her degree.
But Attlee ignored her and directed his attention out the hotel window, where he had spied a new audience in the throngs of book festival attendees in the plaza below. “Let’s go,” he said, handing Hailey his bag again and heading out without casting a backward glance to see if she was following.
Once outside, Hailey trailed him through the crowd and down the adjacent street. Despite his persistent efforts to make eye contact with every passerby toting a festival book bag, no one seemed to recognize him. When they reached a bookstore with a window display of book festival authors, Attlee flung open the door, forcing Hailey to grab it before it smacked her in the face. The author plunged inside. With a flourish, he plucked his book from the display, signed it, and returned it to the owner. Hailey didn’t tell him that the bookstore owner had confessed, in an interview in the local paper, that without a significant bump in sales from the festival she would be forced to shutter the store. Attlee didn’t know it, but his signed first edition was most likely headed for a going-out-of-business sale.
The author’s ego apparently satisfied at last, they returned to the hotel and the first of the panels on which he was to speak. Hailey spent the next two days accompanying him from panel to panel, listening to the same stories every time, the same stories he had told her, the same stories he told in every interview. The only time things got interesting was when an audience member refused to relinquish the microphone until he finished bashing the literary star system that kept a has-been like Attlee making the rounds at the expense of, in his telling, lesser known but superior writers like himself.
Hailey sympathized with the outraged questioner as a festival staffer wrestled the microphone away. Her MFA program had its own star, Jason, in whose shadow they all labored and who was living the life Hailey had planned for herself. Jason had a fellowship while Hailey was burdened by debt. Jason had an apartment with mountain views while Hailey had a decrepit space overlooking a yard choked with overgrown azaleas and cherry laurel. Jason had literary agents handing him their cards at the festival, while Hailey wandered from table to table in the bookseller area, wondering if she would languish unpublished forever.
Jason, of course, was chaperoning the festival headliner. As she sat clutching Attlee’s bag the morning of his final festival appearance, Hailey saw them sitting together, looking quite chummy. She wondered what her fellow student had been expected to do for his charge. Probably not place his lozenges and a bottle of water at the precise center of the podium and then run back to the hotel room to fetch a different tie ten minutes before he took the stage.
Hailey doubted that the headliner had planned to attend Attlee’s reading until the night before. How many years had the once-hot author been reading the same excerpts from that long-ago bestseller? But the previous evening, Attlee had stunned the crowd at a meet-the-authors event by announcing that he planned to read the first chapter of his newly completed, much anticipated second novel. The festival director had proposed a toast, and for one brief shining moment Jason, raising his water bottle, had looked at Hailey with genuine envy.
Catapulted back into relevance, Attlee had held court for the rest of the evening, basking in the spotlight he had wrenched from the headliner and sending Hailey back to the bar for repeated refills. The new book, he promised, was a complete departure from his earlier work. And no one had seen it—not his agent, not his editor. “In the words of a fellow Bard,” he declared, “‘we few, we happy few’ will share in a critical moment of modern literary history here at the book festival.”
In light of Attlee’s announcement and the festival’s immediate, ferocious social media marketing, the next morning’s reading was moved from a meeting room to the hotel’s main ballroom. An anticipatory buzz greeted the festival director’s hastily rewritten author introduction, swelling into enthusiastic applause when Attlee stood to speak.
The author approached the podium and placed a manila folder on it, smiling out over the capacity crowd. As he opened the folder, a frisson of excitement ran through the ballroom. Attlee picked up his bottle of water, twisted it open, tilted his head back, and drank. Seconds later, he staggered back from the podium and collapsed. The festival director charged back onto the stage and knelt beside the author, who had gone into convulsions. “Is there a doctor here?” she shouted.
The room rapidly descended into pandemonium. Three people, presumably medical personnel, rushed forward. Hailey fought her way through the crowd to join them, passing Jason on the way. He was headed for the nearest exit with a protective arm around the headliner, as if author collapse might be contagious. Hailey made it to the stage and stood next to the podium, still clutching Attlee’s bag, as though her responsibilities involved chaperoning him all the way into the next world if need be. People all around pulled out cell phones, some calling 911, some filming. By now, Attlee was shielded from view by the three people hovering over him, desperately attempting to keep him alive.
Within minutes, the crowd parted to allow stretcher-bearing EMTs to reach the stage, and moments later to transport Charles Attlee to a waiting ambulance and down the street to the medical center. The author was dead on arrival.
The festival director and Hailey wai
ted in the hotel manager’s office for the police. An officer entered and took a seat opposite them. He walked them through the morning’s events and Attlee’s entire time at the festival. The director described the author party the night before and the incident with the angry audience member at the panel. Beyond those two events she had not actually spent much time with the dead man. She deflected most questions to Hailey, who had been with the author almost constantly and, it appeared, had been the last person to speak to him before his death.
“I don’t think I can be much help,” Hailey said. “The last thing he said to me was, ‘Please go get my blue tie.’” Although he had not actually said “please.” Ever.
The director asked if the police had found a manila folder anywhere on the podium or the stage, explaining about Attlee’s revelation of his new novel. The officer shook his head.
“It was such a zoo,” said Hailey. “Anyone could have taken it.”
“I need to find those pages,” the director said. “And I need to get out there and do some damage control.” The police officer agreed to let her go for the time being, leaving Hailey alone to answer questions.
“Mr. Attlee seems to have collapsed due to whatever he drank from that water bottle,” said the police officer. “The bottle you apparently put on the podium.”
Hailey stared at him. “I…I mean, I don’t…”
“Where did you get that water, Ms. Fields?”
“The shelf under the podium,” she said. “The festival staff stocked all the podiums with water bottles. I just reached under and grabbed one.”
“We’ll confirm that,” said the officer. “Now, would you be able to describe the man who caused the scene at the panel yesterday?” he asked.
“Definitely,” said Hailey, “he accosted Charles Attlee again later that day.”
“Accosted how?”
“We were in the plaza outside the hotel,” Hailey said, “and the man came up and confronted Mr. Attlee about having him kicked out of the panel. He actually shoved him and said he’d pay for trying to silence other writers.”
The officer made a note. “Did you witness anyone else confronting Mr. Attlee?”
“No, that was the only problem,” said Hailey. “He had a nice interaction with the woman who owns that failing bookstore down the street. He signed a book for her. She’s probably planning to sell it for a lot of money now, since it was the last thing he signed before he died. Maybe she can even save her store.”
The officer made another note.
“Other than that, he didn’t interact with a lot of people,” Hailey said. “People didn’t really seem to recognize him. He said…” She trailed off. “I feel bad telling you things he told me in confidence.”
“Anything you tell us could help us find out what caused his death.”
Hailey nodded. “Well, he said he felt like a failure, like his moment was over a long time ago and he was kidding himself that he was ever going to write that second book he had planned to publish.”
“But the festival director said that he was planning to read from his new novel this morning.”
“I wondered about that,” said Hailey. “He really did seem depressed. And he hadn’t said anything about a new book before last night. Maybe he was saving the news for his big announcement at the party, or maybe…” she trailed off again.
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe there was no new book,” she said. “Maybe he just wanted to enjoy one last moment in the literary limelight. He knew he couldn’t deliver the book, so he pretended he was about to produce it and then staged his death.”
“You think he committed suicide?”
“I don’t know,” said Hailey. “But now that he’s dead people will always wonder what happened to the manuscript he claimed he had. The great novel that was never published will forever be the great novel that was never found. Maybe it was his way of writing a happy ending to the sad story of his failed career.”
“Interesting theory,” the officer said, scribbling more notes.
“Well, I have his bag,” said Hailey, handing it over, “and there’s no manuscript in it.”
Not anymore, anyway. Hailey had pocketed the flash drive containing the manuscript and had already changed the author’s name on it to her own. She planned to show it to her advisor Monday morning. And she had removed Charles Attlee’s laptop from the hotel safe when she had gone back to retrieve his tie. She would dispose of it as soon as she left the hotel, along with the folder she had snatched from the podium in the chaos following Attlee’s collapse. She was sorry no one would ever know her own greatest work of fiction, the convincing tale she had told the police of a desperate bookseller, an envious author, and a despondent writer who still took the time to confide in a young MFA student. Just as no one would ever know that an English major had managed to extract cyanide from a cherry laurel bush in her yard, and that she had shown the forethought to retrieve a water bottle with the ambitious Jason’s fingerprints to refill with poisoned water and plant on the speaker’s podium.
Charles Attlee’s best-laid plans for his literary rebirth had come to naught. But he had told the truth. The book festival would see its critical moment of modern literary history. Only Hailey Fields would be the one telling the story, complete with her own happy ending.
Just like she had always planned.
Lesley A. Diehl
Lesley A. Diehl retired from her life as a professor of psychology and reclaimed her country roots by moving to a small cottage in the Butternut River Valley in Upstate New York. In the winter she migrates to old Florida—cowboys, scrub palmetto, and open fields of grazing cattle. The author of several mystery series, mystery novels, and short stories, Lesley is a member of Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime National, and Guppy Chapter. Find her at lesleyadiehl.com.
Lunch Break
Lesley A. Diehl
“If my old lady sent that crap in my lunch box, she’d be wearing my fist in her eye.” Ralph watched Ben fold back a corner of his sandwich, look at the contents and grimace.
“Peanut butter and jelly. Not so bad. Anyway, Myra didn’t make it. I did.” Ben took a large bite out of the white bread and washed it down with a slug of coffee from his thermos. He coughed as the dry bread and peanut butter stuck in his throat and gulped more coffee to dislodge the lump.
The two men sat in the only shade available on the site, their legs stretched out in front of them, backs against the trunk of a gnarled and bedraggled live oak, accidentally left standing when the ground was leveled by the bulldozer. The roar of an earth mover several lots over obliterated their words for a moment. Ralph reached into his jeans pocket and extracted a wrinkled handkerchief. He wiped his forehead. “God, I hate August in Florida, especially here. At least on the coast you get a breeze off the ocean. Here you get the smells from the swamp.”
The coast. Ben remembered the coast well. His three-bedroom house in Vero Beach, his job with Data Com as an electrical engineer. And his wife. Back then she fancied herself somewhat of a gourmet cook. Now she spent her time watching television in their rented singlewide, sucking up as much junk food as he would bring home to her.
“Myra’s got some heart problems. She can’t get around too well, so I do most of the shopping and make my own lunch,” Ben said. Why was he defending her to Ralph? Because Ralph expressed out loud what Ben felt in his heart. Times were tough. Why couldn’t Myra buck up and help him out?
“Sorry, old boy.” Ralph munched on his roast beef. The horseradish sauce oozed out of the bread and ran down his hand. “Want some?”
“Naw.” Ben shook his head, although if he were to be honest, he’d like to grab the sandwich away from his co-worker, shove it into his mouth and slug down the icy cold lemonade in Ralph’s thermos.
Ben thought back to life before he lost his job. He never saved a penny of his more than adequate salary. Why should he? Who would predict he’d lose his job and find himself living in a trailer
in the middle of a scrub palmetto field forty miles from the coast? He was lucky to find this job, part-time roofer. No benefits, no health insurance, and Myra’s medical bills were crippling them. Last week the doctor said she might need heart surgery. Where the hell were they going to get the money for that?
“She’s taking her health issues really hard. She just sits in front of the television all day and half the night. Doesn’t move.”
“What’s the doc say? Wouldn’t she be better if she dieted and got some exercise?”
“She’s too depressed. He put her on antidepressants. We’re waiting for them to work.” Ben crumpled up his sandwich wrap and stuffed it into his lunch box.
“You know, buddy, this isn’t just about her. What about your needs? Give any thought to asking Helen out for a little fun? She likes you.”
Helen was the waitress at the bar Ralph and Ben stopped at for a beer some days after work. One beer for Ben. More for Ralph.
“I’m married, man, and I take my vows seriously. C’mon. Back to work.” That should shut up Ralph. Yet Ben couldn’t get the thought of Helen out of his mind the rest of the afternoon.
“I’m home, honey, and I’ve got your bananas.” Ben set his lunch pail on the kitchen table where he found his wife, her face shiny with sweat. “It’s hot in here. Why don’t you have the air conditioner on?”
She looked up at him, spoon in midair, something brown and syrupy running off the side of it. “Because you obviously forgot to pay the electric bill. You need to get a better job. And why are you so late getting here? I was forced to eat all this ice cream and chocolate syrup without the bananas. How can you have a banana split without bananas?” Her voice rose in pitch and volume, then broke, and she dropped her spoon onto to the table. Myra’s chins quivered as tears joined the sweat running down her cheeks. Her cries stopped abruptly as she reached for the bananas in Ben’s hands. “Grab that other half gallon of ice cream out of the freezer, would ya?”
The Best Laid Plans Page 14