Now he was free again.
He stepped out of the cab, overtipped the driver (he was becoming a celebrity again), and hurried into the studio. He went straight to his office, stowed his carry-on bag in the closet, and sat down at his desk.
The stack of paper was huge, as was the pile of pink phone messages. Hed forgotten how much the phone rang when you were somebody. Theyd promised him a secretary to handle all this office grunt work--that was a given. He couldnt go around answering his own phone anymore, and when the fan mail started coming in, hed need someone to do that for him, too.
He didnt look forward to training another secretary. It took weeks, sometimes months, to teach someone your likes and dislikes, your quirks and demands. Interviewing, reading resumes, choosing the right candidate.
What he really needed was an assistant. Someone to train his secretary as well as to help him formulate questions for the athlete interviews. There was a lot of research involved in looking smart off-the-cuff.
The writers and producers were doing that, of course, but Warren had his own assistant producer, and Jack had noticed that Warren got the lions share of the good questions.
Jack picked up a pen and began making a list. His assistant would have to be bright, ambitious, dedicated, intelligent. Someone like . . . Sally.
Why hadnt he thought of it before? She had the experience. They had worked well together in Portland, and she was a tiger behind the scenes. She tracked down every nuance of a story. Shed be a real addition to the show. As it was, all the producers and writers were male. A young woman who loved sports would shake up the perspective a bit. And shed make sure Jack looked good.
Shed do it, too. He had no doubt about that. Sally was a woman with big dreams and tall ambitions. A chance to be a production assistant for a network show in the Big Apple would really charge her batteries.
This was business, pure and simple. That hed been attracted to her didnt matter. Hed always be tempted by some young woman; that was hardwired in his DNA, as much a part of him as blue eyes and blond hair. Hed been tempted plenty of times in the past fifteen years--and even more recently--but he hadnt fallen out of the old marriage bed even once. Those days were behind him.
This was strictly business.
Unable to sleep, Elizabeth put on one of the thick terry-cloth robes that Anita had placed in the guest room closet and went quietly downstairs. The old house creaked and moaned at her progress. The wind against the windowpanes sounded like a cat scratching to be let in.
She didnt doubt that the house knew its master had gone on, but this place had weathered the storms of death for a long, long time. The first Rhodes had come to this land long before the Civil War, one of the working-class poor of England who dared to dream of a better life. Hed crossed the sea as an indentured servant and been sold at auction to a farmer in nearby Russellville. Hed worked hard, married well, and planted the seeds of a dynasty.
In the darkened kitchen, she made herself a cup of tea and stood at the sink, staring out at the backyard. Moonlight tipped the dead black branches with pearlescent color. Thin clouds scudded across the breezy sky; they created a shifting pattern of light on the garden.
She tightened the belt on her robe and went outside. The screen door banged shut behind her. The wind suddenly died down. An almost preternatural silence fell.
She shivered, though not only from the cold. It felt as if shed been summoned out here, perhaps by the memory of their night out here at Christmas.
"Daddy?" she whispered, feeling both silly and hopeful.
There was no answer, no Hollywood moaning or ghostly apparition. No tall man dressed in a flannel shirt and twill pants standing beside her.
She stepped down onto the brick path that bisected and outlined the garden. The thin slippers she wore protected her feet from the cold as she walked past the perfectly shaped boxwood hedges. Here and there, shaped camellia bushes stood above the squared hedge, their glossy green leaves a stark contrast to all the brownness.
This had once been her special place, and now she was a stranger to it. So many times in her youth, especially on long summer nights when the heat made sleep impossible, shed come out here. Alone and searching. In the winter, shed scoured the leaf-blackened beds for signs of spring. A patch of lime green moss, a seed pod that had sprouted.
What shed really been looking for, of course, was her mother, and here, amid the flowers shed tended so carefully, Elizabeth had thought she felt her mamas spirit.
Shed always tried to picture her mama in the garden, maybe thinning the daffodils or trimming the roses, but all shed ever seen of her mother were black-and-white photographs, and even those had been scarce. Most of the pictures had been portrait shots--wedding, graduations, that sort of thing. They left Elizabeth with a vague, colorless image of a pretty young woman who always looked perfect but never laughed or spoke.
Elizabeth knelt at the edge of the rose bed. Damp black earth ground itself into the plush fabric beneath her knees.
The bare, grayish brown rosebushes cast shadows on the darkened earth. Moonlight gave them an eerie look, like twisted hands from an ancient reptile, each finger thickened by age and studded with huge thorns.
Behind her, she heard the sound of a door creaking open and clicking closed, then the rhythm of footsteps on the brick path.
"Hey, Anita," she said without turning around.
"Its amazin to think that those rosesll be bloomin in just a few months. "
"I was just thinking the same thing. "
When she was little, Elizabeth had often cried when her mamas favorite flowers wilted and died. Now, though, as a woman full grown, she understood the importance of rest. It was the very bleakness of winter that made spring possible. She wished such a thing could be true for housewives whod lost their way, that instead of wasting a life, you could be hibernating, gathering strength for the coming spring.
A breeze kicked up, sent a few dry, brittle leaves skittering across the path. "I tended those roses by hand all these years. I never let a gardener near em. "