Death and the Lit Chick Read online

He rang off awhile later, Kimberlee having run out of special requests. Almost simultaneously, the door to the outer office swung open again.

  “That was Kimberlee, wasn’t it?” said Laurie. “She wouldn’t identify herself, but the bossy tone is unmistakable.”

  “Yes. She’s ready to dump Ninette and come over to the dark side.”

  “I suspected as much. You can tell her for me you can catch more flies with honey—”

  “Before I forget, call Dalmorton Castle, will you, and book her into the spa for these treatments.” He handed her the list. Laurie glanced at it and sniffed.

  “She doesn’t want much, does she?” Laurie tucked the list in her pocket and began tidying his desk, gathering files, tapping papers ruthlessly into line against the antique mahogany wood.

  “If you move that you know I’ll never find it again,” said Jay.

  “That’s what I’m here for, Jay. To find things for you.”

  Jay smiled absently. Laurie always made him think of the redoubtable Miss Lemon, Hercule Poirot’s fiercely competent secretary, foil to the well-meaning but dim Hastings. She placed a stack of papers before him.

  “Magretta’s late again with her rewrites. She’s getting worse, I think.”

  Jay was pulled back from a daydream of yachts, Caribbean beaches, and ski chalets in Val Claret. He sat up, shoving the stack of papers to one side.

  “Give her a few more weeks,” he said. “It doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”

  IV

  A few blocks to the west, Ninette Thomson was worried. Kimberlee Kalder, her megastar client, as she supposed they would say in Hollywood, was sending out all the well-known signs of a writer in flight to a new agent. Increasingly ludicrous demands—an espresso machine, for God’s sake—temper tantrums, insistence on impossible terms from her British and American publishers for her next book, overturning all the carefully negotiated—and extremely generous for an unknown author—terms of the contract Ninette had painstakingly organized for her. Demanding Ninette take the new book when it was ready to a larger publisher, despite a contract option that stipulated she could not do precisely that.

  Honestly, thought Ninette. It was worse than dealing with the commitment-phobic, hormone-blinded male. You always could tell when they had one foot out the door, headed for another woman’s bedroom, if you knew the signs. Which Ninette, fifty-four and the survivor of countless “summer” romances, felt certain she did.

  She stood, stretching the tension from her shoulders. She had to get home and pack for this castle fandango. Good of Easterbrook to include her, really, although she knew Kimberlee Kalder was the only reason. She, Ninette, certainly wouldn’t have been invited for the sake of a Winston Chatley or a Portia De’Ath. She turned away from the large, modern desk that stood in front of the floor-to-ceiling window in her office. More and more, Ninette had started working from home—less temptation to frequent the wine bars that way—but she remained reluctant to give up the fantastic view and, more importantly, the prestigious address of her London office. Sometimes the only indicator of a good agent that a writer had to go by was the address. But the expense! The expense would have driven her down and out long ago if that wonderful manuscript of Kimberlee Kalder’s hadn’t shown up in her slush pile two years ago.

  Wonderful, she reminded herself, meaning saleable, meaning marketable, meaning the only things that mattered in today’s publishing climate. Every day Ninette turned down manuscripts that were wonderful—wonderfully written, insightful, sad, funny, groundbreaking, heartbreaking, whatever. And not one of them met the blockbuster, plot-driven standards that were becoming the byword of the industry: less character, more plot.

  Fewer and fewer publishers were willing to take a chance on an unknown writer. But Ninette, after years in the business, could sense a best-selling winner, and had persuaded Easterbrook to take that chance on Kimberlee.

  The last truly fine writer she’d taken on, knowing for certain she’d never make a fortune, but not caring, had been Portia De’Ath, who was now selling at a decent little clip. Winston Chatley once fell into the same category …

  But it was Kimberlee, damn it all, who was paying the bills.

  Now the silly, greedy little twit thought she could do better. Imagined a different agent, a different publisher, would bring in even more than the ridiculously large amount the first book had brought her already.

  Kimberlee Kalder suddenly thought she didn’t need her, Ninette Thomson.

  Well, we’ll just see about that now, won’t we?

  V

  Winston Chatley was having tea with his mother in their narrow row house in a small, hidden mews in Chelsea. The fashionable part of Chelsea had grown up around them, leaving them stranded like shipwrecked survivors clinging to a valuable piece of real estate they couldn’t afford to sell. Winston thought of them as on an island of desperation surrounded by a sea of clamoring, mobile-phone chatting yuppies.

  Where would we move? Winston would ask his mother when the subject arose.

  Somewhere smaller, in the country, Mrs. Chatley would reply, in her increasingly vague way.

  You need to be near the best treatment available, not stuck in some backwash village, Winston would say. Besides, I like the city.

  We’ll manage, then.

  They had had the identical conversation so often it amounted to a comforting ritual. For his mother, Winston suspected it was just that.

  Winston worried he’d need home care for her eventually. For him the best thing—maybe the only good thing—about being a writer was that he was home most days. But she was fast reaching the stage where she’d have burned the house down if he didn’t watch her constantly. What really needed to happen was for Winston to sell the house, use the proceeds to put her in a home, and use whatever was left over to buy that remote country cottage.

  The idea had never seriously settled on him and would have horrified him if it had. This house was all she knew of home, of warm familiarity. It would kill her to be moved.

  And so they circled around the topic. But today, his mother reverted to another familiar line of questioning.

  “So, how is the new book coming?”

  If there is one question a writer fears more than any other, it is that, for the answer calls upon more skills of invention and creativity than the actual writing of any book.

  She beamed at him in anticipation of his answer. That Winston was an ugly man, combining the worst features of Abraham Lincoln and Boris Karloff into a homely, yet surprisingly engaging whole, she had never really noticed. She loved Winston with all the devotion and sublime lack of awareness of a golden retriever nursing an orphaned bloodhound pup. She herself was beautiful and never seemed to see the craggy, bumpy planes of Winston’s face. It didn’t matter: He was hers.

  “It’s fine,” he said at last. “The first fifty pages are really quite good, I think.” He neglected to mention he had been stuck at page fifty-one for perhaps the last three months, and was growing more certain those pages would soon join the ever-growing pile of fifty-page beginnings in his bottom desk drawer.

  “Do you think Ninette Thomson is really doing the best job for you?” Mrs. Chatley asked, with one of the stunning reversions to her old self that kept him alive in hope for her condition. “I keep reading in those publishing magazines of yours about this Jay person.”

  “Jay Fforde?” Winston asked. Did she seriously think that was an option? Jay was far out of Winston’s league, a star agent dwelling amongst the Lotus Eaters of Hollywood and Pinewood. Winston had a realistic enough assessment of his gifts to recognize that they didn’t translate well to the cinematic.

  “I couldn’t leave Ninette, mother. After all these years, it wouldn’t be right,” he said. “More tea?”

  VI

  Joan Elksworthy said, “I’m surprised you didn’t just stay in Edinburgh with the conference so near, Rachel.”

  The two friends were splashing out on afternoon tea at Fortnum & Mason’s—a rare, guilty indulgence. They had seen each other seldom in the decades since they’d been girls at school together. Rachel had married a Church of Scotland minister, Joan an American who had carried her off to Washington, D.C. When she left the brief marriage, she retained the name and remained in the United States—moving to Santa Fe to write her crime stories. The only sign she was sometimes homesick was that she chose to set all her books in the west of Scotland.

  “Didn’t I say? I had to fly up to London to stay with my daughter’s infants. She’s got legs, you know,” said Rachel.

  Joan interpreted this correctly to mean Rachel’s daughter was again having trouble with her legs. Varicose veins, most likely, from the three stone of extra weight she carried around since the twins arrived, but Joan would have stabbed herself with one of the tearoom’s lovely pudding forks before saying so.

  “I see. You had to come down, did you?” she said.

  Rachel Twalley smiled. “Can I help it if they’re the world’s most beautiful—not to mention gifted and intelligent—grandchildren?” A waiter approached to verify they had enough hot water in the pot, then glided soundlessly away. Rachel looked around her at the white tablecloths and glittering glassware, sank further back in her plush chair, and sighed. This, indeed, was the life.

  “I’ll be taking the train Thursday to Edinburgh,” Joan said. “Should we arrange to travel together then?”

  Rachel shook her head.

  “Can’t. I have to head back straightaway—even though most of the work for the conference is done. I’ll never volunteer for this sort of thing again, I can tell you that. What with the program, registration, sponsorships, coordinating everything with the hotel—getting volunteers for all that is well nigh impossible these days. Then there’s
all the usual internecine squabbling. I should have known: The village fête last time took years off my life.”

  “I wish you were staying with us at Dalmorton Castle,” said Joan. “We could’ve treated ourselves to the mud cure, you and I.”

  “I wish, too. I’ve always wanted to wallow in mud—in a manner of speaking. But I have to be on the ground at the Luxor, rallying the troops, who only lurch into action when someone is keeping an eye on them. I must say, it was jolly nice of your publisher to arrange all this for you. I’ve heard Dalmorton is such a lovely place.”

  “It’s all in lieu of bigger advances, you watch. I can’t imagine why I’m included, to tell you the truth. Kimberlee Kalder is all that’s on Lord Easterbrook’s mind these days.”

  “Humph,” said Rachel. “I don’t care if I never hear the name again.”

  Joan smiled. “The cozy mystery is dead, haven’t you heard?” She waved an imaginary (pink) flag. “Long live Chick Lit.”

  “I tried to read that thing of hers,” Rachel said, adding hastily, “I didn’t buy it, never fear, I got it from the library. It was just absurd. Pink, and silly. ‘Will he call, or won’t he?’ Romance via mobile and e-mail.” She sniffed. “Not the way things were in my day. And what is it with the shoes, anyway? If I’d spent that kind of money on shoes my Harry’d have shown me the door tout de suite and no mistake, minister’s wife or no. As for plot—the whole thing seemed more an excuse to skewer people she didn’t like. Which seemed to be everyone.”

  “But you read the whole thing,” said Joan. It was a gentle question. Why shouldn’t Rachel have read the whole thing? She’d have been nearly alone among the women—and many of the men—of the English-speaking nations had she not.

  Rachel, crinkling her face apologetically, admitted, “They are sort of like chocolates, those books. Actually, more like swallowing a box of licorice all-sorts. But I do try to move with the times. I don’t exactly approve, mind.”

  “Well, if there’s one thing these books do prove,” said Joan, “it’s that men haven’t improved one bit since we were girls.”

  Rachel nodded somberly. “Have you met Kimberlee Kalder?”

  “Once.”

  “Really? And what’s she like?”

  Joan hesitated, toying with her butter knife. It went against her grain to disparage a fellow author. In the latest incident, Joan’s American publisher had approached Kimberlee about writing a blurb for the back cover of Joan’s latest book—since Joan had been instrumental in bringing Kimberlee to the attention of the Americans. But Kimberlee had flat-out refused. As the publisher reported later, Kimberlee’s exact words were, “There’s nothing in it for me, so why in hell should I?”

  “What is Kimberlee Kalder like, you ask?” Joan looked straight at Rachel. “Pure poison.”

  VII

  Lord Easterbrook sat at his desk, staring at a spreadsheet on his monitor, scrolling back and forth with his computer mouse to read the numbers in the outer columns. He accidentally struck the wrong key and the whole thing disappeared. He let out a bellow that set the eighteenth-century glass rattling in the windowpanes.

  His youthful assistant, well-used to these technical emergencies, came rushing in—a pretty girl in her mid-twenties, dressed in black and white. A no-nonsense type whose crisp demeanor nicely kept Easterbrook’s querulousness at bay. She’d become adept at coping whenever he threw his toys out of the pram. Now she deftly tapped at Easterbrook’s keyboard until the vanished document reappeared.

  “Haven’t I told you then?” she said. “Stay away from that delete key and you’ll be fine.”

  “I was never near the blasted delete key. Print the infernal thing out for me, will you? On good old-fashioned paper. Oh, and tell my wife I’ll be late.”

  “Yes, sir.” And the young woman went to do as she was told. Her great-gran was the same way: She’d never quite resigned herself to any invention introduced since the telephone, and even that she thought was full of “rays,” whatever that meant.

  Left alone five minutes later, Lord Easterbrook perused the rescued document, now safely consigned to paper. On the mend, he thought, on the mend. Like Scholastic before J. K. Rowling came along, his was a tiny press, its prestige and respectability owing more to longevity than anything like profitability. Who, after all, would expect to turn anything like a real profit on a house specializing in crime novels?

  Rumor had long had it in the City that Easterbrook simply kept Deadly Dagger Press on as a rich man’s hobby. Like those fools knew anything, he thought. But then, Kimberlee Kalder had come along, rising from the submission pile like—well, like Venus rising from the sea. That his assistant, not he, had recognized the potential at once was something he often conveniently forgot. Thanks to Kimberlee, silly name and all, Dagger was, to continue the metaphor, afloat.

  Not that Easterbrook had ever actually read Kimberlee’s book. The balance sheets were the only required reading on his night table.

  But what the deuce was taking the girl so long with the next manuscript? he wondered now. It’s not as if she were writing Pride and Prejudice, for God’s sake. The last time they’d spoken on the phone she’d been decidedly cagey about that. “Wasn’t quite ready,” she’d said. “A bit more of a rewrite on the end, I think,” she’d said.

  It was balderdash, of course. She was out shopping for a new agent, and a new publisher, if the rumors from the publishing trenches were true. Which was why he’d had the sudden inspiration for this pre-conference gathering, and the little award to keep her happy. A chance to talk with her in person.

  The personal touch, yes, that’s what was needed.

  He looked at the figures, mostly black now instead of red.

  Leave Dagger, would she, and break her contract? Well, we’d just see about that.

  If the personal touch didn’t work, there were always other means.

  VIII

  In a beautiful flat high above the Thames, Magretta Sincock stared at the screen of her own computer with none of the complacency of Lord Easterbrook, just across the water in his counting house. She reread the e-mail several times, blinking in disbelief. Perhaps it was spam, a cruel hoax? But the return e-mail address indicated clearly enough it was from Ludwig’s, her American publisher. And the body of the e-mail said clearly enough that regrettably, they would not be picking up the American rights to her next manuscript. But they wished her well in her future endeavors.

  Well, that at least was something, after thirty bloody years, thought Magretta. That well wishing certainly made all the difference.

  They were dropping her by e-mail. Not in person, saving someone the airfare to London. Not even with the minor expense of letterhead and airmail postage. They were dropping her. Her.

  After a very long while, Magretta got up from her desk and walked to the French doors of her aerie. Barely feeling the blast of cold, she stood looking down at the brown river, churning up a whitish foam as it eternally snaked its way through London. Anyone looking up from the ships below would have thought they were seeing a large tropical bird perched on the balcony, bedecked in an array of green plumage. Magretta’s large red crest of hair would have added to the illusion.

  The conference in Edinburgh, to which she had so been looking forward, she now viewed with dread. They would all know, all her fellow scribes, everyone connected with this wretched industry. Probably knew before she herself was sent that miserable e-mail, bad news traveling faster in the publishing world than in any other. She’d have to call her agent.

  But he should have called me. Jay must have known this was coming. This was all his fault. If he’d kept his mind on his job …

  Still, she had to go show the flag, since Lord Easterbrook had invited her. She at least could still count on her British publisher.

  Couldn’t she?

  IX

  St. Germaine’s had been in existence so long it was the one restaurant everyone in Cambridge, rich and poor alike, had heard of. The ruder the maître d’, the wider grew its fame, and the more wealthy patrons schemed and plotted to secure a reservation.

  There were exceptions to the reservation rules, but only the owner, Mr. Garoute, knew what they were. Solving the murder by poisoning of the restaurant’s sous-chef and thus saving St. Germaine’s from certain financial ruin was clearly top of his list. Mr. G. always, therefore, held a table open for DCI Arthur St. Just, knowing the unpredictable schedule of the Inspector, and he always greeted him with rapturous cries of joy—cries that would have astounded his business competitors, who only saw Mr. G.’s flintier side.