The Accidental Bestseller (9 page)

There was a long silence, and then with obvious reluctance, Steve withdrew his hand and pillowed it with the other beneath his head. “Right,” he said, as Faye pushed the sheet aside and stood, smoothing her nightgown back down. “Me, too. I’ve got to be at the church for a meeting at 9:00 A.M. And I’m doing a radio sermon at noon.”

Despite his reasonable tone, Faye could tell that her refusal had irritated him. He had the same wounded air the children used to get when she criticized their dishwashing technique, or lack thereof. Or refused to take them somewhere they’d asked to go.

She padded away from him toward the bathroom aware that her rear view was a whole lot “fuller” than it had once been. For a brief moment she wondered if she should have just gone ahead and given in. After all, he was, as he sometimes liked to put it, one of God’s quarterbacks. There were probably scores of religious groupies just dying to give their all for the team.

Faye turned in the bathroom doorway to find him still studying her from bed and a part of her acknowledged that she should probably be grateful that her husband still found her desirable. But Faye didn’t like the idea of feeling obligated. And she really disliked the fact that he didn’t know who Kendall was and that he seemed to see her writing as something that might please his parishioners or benefit his ministry rather than something marvelous that she alone had created.

Shampooing her hair, she tried to picture where Kendall was and what she was doing at that exact moment, but she kept drawing a great big blank. Faye wrapped her dripping hair in a towel and wiped steam from the mirror so that she could apply her makeup and dry her hair.

She could hear Steve moving around the bedroom, getting ready. The phone rang and the sound of his murmuring reached her though she couldn’t make out the words. It was barely 7:00 A.M. and already she could feel him slipping into full Pastor Steve mode. Drawers opened and closed and she imagined him cradling the phone against one shoulder while he tied his tie and strategized with one of his personal assistants.

But Faye’s thoughts were already circling back to Kendall. She’d left numerous messages and while she’d tried to give her friend some space, enough was enough. If she had to, she’d get on a plane and fly down to Atlanta.

But first she’d check in with Mallory and Tanya. Surely someone had heard from Kendall by now.

7

I’m not saying all publishers have to be literary, but
some
interest in books would help.

—A. N. WILSON

 

 

 

The offices of Scarsdale Publishing occupied all ten floors of a glass and limestone skyscraper on West Thirty-sixth between Fifth and Sixth Avenues midway between the Empire State Building and the New York Public Library.

The massive marble lobby, like the rest of the building, had been built to impress. A burled walnut security desk sat exactly in the center of the space, elegantly blocking access to the bank of elevators behind it. The wall to the left was dotted with elaborately framed portraits of the publishing house’s most famous authors. On the right Plexiglas-topped pedestals displayed first editions of those authors’ releases dating back to Scarsdale’s inception in 1922.

Scarsdale’s beginnings as a family-owned company whose fortunes were built on western dime novels and true confession romances were well documented, but the company had been gobbled up early in the cannibalization of New York publishing and had changed hands too many times to count. It was now owned by the media conglomerate American Amalgamated and was operated by people who knew a lot more about the cost of paper and the color of the ink on the bottom line than the art of publishing.

An uneasy truce existed between the editorial and business sides, but the days of buying a book based solely on literary merit or an editor’s gut reaction were long gone.

Lacy Samuels was blissfully unaware of all of this on the Friday morning following her conversation with Kendall Aims. Lanky and somewhat awkward, Lacy had deciphered her first written word at the age of four and had spent the last eighteen years inhaling every one she encountered, from ad copy on cereal boxes to leather-bound editions of the classics.

Having graduated at the top of her class at Smith, she took her English degree very seriously. Despite her worship of the written word, she had recognized early on that she was not a writer herself, but was certain that her destiny was to discover and nurture into print the next Great American Novel.

Toward this end, in between the grunt work and coffee runs, she had begun to work her way through the mounds of unsolicited manuscripts, referred to as the slush pile, that she had originally believed would yield at least one undiscovered gem that might propel her out of the bottom of Scarsdale’s editorial heap. Unfortunately, despite six months of concerted effort, she’d barely made a dent in the constantly replenishing piles that littered the editorial offices and had been forced to concede that the quality of the work, even to her inexperienced eye, was appalling.

Which was why she had been so excited when Jane Jensen had assigned her to work with Kendall Aims, who as a mul tipublished author should provide a much speedier and more enjoyable route to an editorship.

Except, of course, for Kendall’s worrisome reaction to her call.

Lacy sat at her desk, worrying her lip, trying to figure out whether or not she should bring this up with her boss. On the one hand, she didn’t want to give up the opportunity to prove herself editorially; on the other, she didn’t want to be foisted on an author who didn’t want to work with her. She was still debating her best course of action when her phone rang and Jane called her into her office.

Jane Jensen’s dark hair was held back with a black-and-white polka-dotted headband that looked much too perky for the rest of her. She wore a generic black top and pants that did nothing to disguise or enhance her chunky figure, and she wore neither makeup nor jewelry. Lacy, who was not exactly a fashion diva herself, felt downright trendy beside her. If she didn’t care about her job so deeply, she would have been on the line to the people at
What Not to Wear
to nominate her boss for a fashion intervention.

“Good morning,” Lacy said, as she entered Jane’s corner office and came to a stop across from her desk.

“Maybe,” Jane Jensen replied. “The jury’s still out on that.”

Lacy smiled weakly; she’d discovered the hard way that no response was expected to her boss’s sarcasm.

“Call Stephanie Ranson—you’ll find her name on the agent list—and tell her I’m looking for something with at least a touch of paranormal to fill in the slot Sandra Adams was slated for.” Sandra Adams was a first-time author Jane had bought who’d been unable to revise her manuscript on time. “She owes me for this whole fiasco. Tell her I expect to see something by Monday.

“Then get hold of somebody in the art department and find out what happened to that new cover we were promised.”

“I’m not sure anyone is in the art department today,” Lacy said, as she scribbled Jane’s directions on her pad. During the summer, Fridays were hit or miss as everyone seemed to work fewer hours. “Aren’t they taking off—”

“I didn’t ask for an attendance report,” Jane snapped. “Just find somebody. Call somebody’s assistant and tell them I need that cover
now
. I don’t care what you have to do, just take care of it.”

Lacy nodded and added the note to her growing list.

“Call Picata,” Jane said, naming a nearby Italian restaurant that was so heavily frequented by Scarsdale employees that it was referred to as the Scarsdale cafeteria, “and make a lunch reservation for two under my name. Carolyn Sinclair is in town and I’m meeting her there at one.” The day Jane had stolen Carolyn Sinclair from another publishing house was the happiest Lacy had ever seen her. To say that Jane was competitive was like saying there were a few Starbucks in New York City. Jane had practically done a happy dance on the top of her desk when Sinclair’s agent had pronounced the deal done.

Some day, Lacy thought, she’d have big name authors and her own corner office. And when she did, she intended to treat her assistants a lot more gently than Jane Jensen. The only people Jane treated well were those a lot higher up on the food chain.

“I want you to type that memo for Brenda Tinsley about the sales catalogue.” Brenda, the associate publisher at Scarsdale, was a tall, terse woman who was way up there on Lacy’s personal intimidate-o-meter. As the second in command to the publisher, Brenda was often referred to as “the hand of God.”

“Find Kara in publicity and tell her I want a copy of the stops on Carolyn’s book tour to take with me to lunch. Then ask her to make a call to Carolyn’s agent. We need to do a little stroking here and I can’t do it all by myself.”

Lacy made the required notes, wondering how in the world she was supposed to find all these people when the building felt as quiet as a tomb. If she reached anybody any more senior than herself today it would be a miracle.

She suspected that once Jane left for lunch she wouldn’t be seen again until Monday. Lacy waffled once again about whether to bring up her conversation with Kendall Aims or leave it for next week. Deep down, she felt the author’s reaction was an important piece of information, but her boss’s reactions were often difficult to predict. Occasionally she was friendly and approachable, sharing with Lacy the knowledge acquired over her two decades in the business. More often she resorted to sarcasm or shrieked like a fishwife. Lacy had heard more than one staffer mutter about Jane not taking her meds or needing to get her dosage right, but she’d never known if this was idle gossip or a simple statement of fact.

Jane looked up from her desk. “That’s all for now,” she said, with all the emotion one would use to shoo off a fly. “I’ll probably have a few more things for you before I leave for lunch.”

Lacy didn’t move, still unsure.

“What? What is it?” Jane’s dark eyes signaled her impatience. It didn’t look like she was about to engage in a teaching moment.

“I, um.” Lacy looked for the right words, but couldn’t find them. She already regretted not leaving the moment she was dismissed. “I, um, spoke to Kendall Aims yesterday like you told me to.”

Jane just continued to stare at her as if she couldn’t imagine why they were discussing this. Lacy fervently wished they weren’t.

“And, um, she didn’t seem too happy to hear from me.” She shifted nervously from foot to foot. “I had the impression she was surprised to be working with me. I, uh, think she would have preferred someone more senior.”

Jane’s mouth tightened with displeasure. “Is that right?” She stood and came around her desk then leaned back against it in a casual pose not at all in keeping with the ramrod tightness of her body. “As far as I’m concerned, Kendall Aims is a mediocre midlist author who needs to be happy with whomever
I
assign her.”

Lacy noted the jangle of emotion that always seemed a tad too close to Jane Jensen’s surface and knew better than to comment. She stood completely still, much as you might freeze if you stumbled across a snake coiled to strike.

“This is your opportunity to show me what you can do,” Jane said. “I suggest you make the most of it.”

Lacy licked her dry lips, but it was the only movement she allowed herself.

“If you’re smart,” Jane continued, “you won’t waste a drop of energy worrying about the Kendall Aimses of this world. I guarantee you she’s sitting in her white columned McMan sion down in Atlanta right now pounding out this manuscript just as easily as you or I could go downstairs and hail a cab.”

This sounded somewhat unlikely to Lacy, who had a great deal of respect for anyone who could produce a four-hundred-plus-page manuscript on a regular basis, but again, she knew better than to comment.

“Do you understand?”

Lacy didn’t, not really. But she nodded her head as if she did and forced herself to make eye contact with the woman across from her.

When she was certain Jane was finished speaking, Lacy prepared to leave. As she did so, she noticed a row of Kendall Aims’s titles on a lower shelf of her boss’s bookshelf. This time the internal debate over whether to speak was briefer.

“Maybe I should read some of her work so I can be familiar with her style,” Lacy said. “Do you mind?”

“Fine.” With almost complete indifference, Jane waved her toward the bookcase. “Take them. She’s all yours now.” Jane watched as Lacy gathered the paperbacks and balanced them against her chest to carry back to her cubicle. “But I wouldn’t get too attached.”

Kendall was definitely at her desk, but she was not, alas, pounding out a novel. Or much of anything else except a rousing game of FreeCell. Then Tetris. Then Minesweeper.

She had intended to bury herself in her writing and had hoped to get chapter one roughed out, but the day was almost gone and other than her page and chapter headings the screen was completely blank.