hose years when we could have known each other, but James kept us apart.”
“James,” Arleen said softly, lifting her eyebrows at Matt. Now Bailey referred to her late husband as “James,” not “Jimmie.”
Matt put his arms around Bailey to comfort her, but he was smiling. At last, with the discovery of the truth, Bailey had been able to put James Manville behind her. She’d seen the good of him and the bad of him, and she was finally able to see him as a person. Her love for James Manville was no longer current. Now it was a memory.
“I think we can figure something out,” Matt had whispered into her hair. Ten minutes later, he and Patsy had come up with the idea of dressing all the women involved in the Mulberry Tree Preserving Company in identical black veils and all of them attending Martha’s funeral.
And now Bailey placed three white roses on Martha’s coffin. One for Martha, one for Frank, and one for James, the boy who’d been “born” on that awful day in August.
Arleen put her hand on Bailey’s arm. “Let’s go home,” she whispered through her veil.
“Yes,” Bailey said. “Let’s go home.”
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I can’t say that I liked her very much, but she was the most interesting person I’d met in years. Best of all, I thought she could do the job and that she’d make no emotional demands on me. I needed some way to get back into writing, but since I hadn’t found the road yet, I thought Jackie Maxwell and her devil story might send me in the right direction.
I’d read the gossip magazines and the Internet, so I knew people were saying that Pat had written my books. How she would have laughed to hear that! I’d also heard that my writing was linked to her and once she died, I couldn’t do it anymore.
That was closer to the truth, because none of my books were fiction. They were fiction enough that my uncles and cousins couldn’t sue me, but, basically, they were the truth. “Distorted truth” as Pat said. As she’d pointed out on that long ago, happy day, I’d had enough bad in my life to write many books. I’d written about every rotten thing that had ever been done to me.
But the truth that no one knew, not anyone at my publishing house or any friend, was that I’d written myself dry long before Pat died. The only book that was left in me was the one about Pat, and I was years and years and years away from being able to write that one.
In the six years since her death, I’d wandered around the country, moving the few belongings I still owned from one house to another. I’d settle into a community, look around and listen to see if anything sparked my appetite, and hope to find a reason to start writing again.
But nothing interested me. Now and then my publishing house would reissue some old book of mine, or put my few novellas into one book so it looked as though I was still publishing, but most people knew I wasn’t. When I typed my name onto the Internet, I found three groups that were discussing my death. They listed “facts” that they believed were proof that I’d taken my own life the day my wife died.
The latest town I’d moved to was supposed to have great weather, but I hadn’t seen it. It was also supposed to be “charming,” but I didn’t find it to be so. I’m not sure why I didn’t move out the day after I moved in, except that I was tired. I was tired . . . not tired of living so much as tired of being brain-dead. I felt like those women who go through college, then get married and pop out three kids right away. They went from brain-overuse to not using their brains at all. I guess that’s where I was. In six years I’d had a few brief affairs, but since I compared every woman to Pat, I’d found each one wanting.
About a year ago, I’d read something—I was a voracious, eclectic reader in those six years—about a witch that haunted some old house somewhere and it had sparked a tiny interest in me. I began to think about putting together a collection of true stories about ghosts or witches in America. Every state has those poorly written, locally printed books about regional ghosts, so I thought about collecting the books, doing masses of research, and publishing an anthology. A sort of Ghosts of the U.S. kind of thing.
Anyway, doing the research appealed to me. All I needed was an assistant. But it turned out to be nearly impossible to find someone who was really useful.
Did I have a knack for finding losers? Was it something in me that attracted them? Several of the women seemed to be living in a romantic novel. They seemed to believe that I’d hired them because I wanted to marry them and share all my worldly goods with them. I got rid of those women fast.
Then I went through the ones who wanted everything spelled out for them. They wanted what they called a “job description.” I gave in to one of them and spent an hour and a half of my life writing the thing. Two hours later, when I told her I wanted her to go to the grocery for me, she said, “That’s not my job,” and I fired her.
Some of them I fired and some of them quit. Truthfully, I think that all of them had an ideal in their minds of what it would be like to work for a best-selling author and I didn’t live up to what they expected.
From my viewpoint, not one of them could follow an idea. They were like robots and would do what I told them to—as long as it didn’t interfere with their “job description”—but they didn’t take the initiative. And, too, many of them used their brains only for trying to seduce me to an altar. Free sex I would have taken, but it was “community property” that I saw in their eyes.
Just before I was to move yet again—to where I had no idea—I was having lunch with the president of the local university, and he said, “You ought to get an assistant like ol’ Professor Hartshorn has. She’s writing a book for him.”
I wasn’t much interested in what he was saying because I’d already scheduled the movers for next week, but I was being polite so I said, “What kind of book?”
He chuckled. “It’s about Harriet Lane, with a great many passages about her violet eyes and her magnificent bosom.”