Wild Orchids Page 6

  I spent a couple of evenings copying titles, authors, and dates of some of the resource books that were still in my father’s bedroom bookcase, made a couple of color copies of Miss Lane (she didn’t marry until after her uncle was out of office), and wrote a whopping good chapter from what I remembered of what my father had told me.

  Instead of showing the chapter to old Professor Hartshorn and getting it torn apart with criticism, I put his name on it as the author, and mailed it to the university president with a note saying he (Professor Hartshorn) wanted to show him (the prez) what he was working on.

  I wasn’t prepared for what followed. I’d heard that Hartshorn was a good history teacher and that’s why he was allowed to stay at the university. But good as he was, the man hadn’t published and it was rumored that at last he was going to be fired.

  After the president received the chapter, he was wild with excitement. He came running to Professor Hartshorn’s office, chapter in hand, shouting, “This is brilliant. Totally brilliant. You must read this at the next faculty meeting. And here people were saying you weren’t actually writing anything.”

  I was working in the back room, but I have to say that Professor Hartshorn fell into step with it all. He said, “Miss Maxwell, I seem to have misplaced my copy of the chapter of my book that I wrote.” If the university president heard anything odd in the word emphasis in that sentence, he didn’t let on. I slapped a copy of the twenty-five page chapter on the professor’s desk, didn’t look at either man, and went back into the other room.

  A few minutes later Professor Hartshorn called me back into his office. “Tell me, Miss Maxwell, when did my publishing house say this book must be finished?”

  “Three years,” I said. I needed a job, and three years was as long as I’d ever stayed anywhere. This was, of course, before I met Kirk and decided to stay in one place for the rest of my life.

  “Isn’t that a long time?” the president asked, looking at Hartshorn and ignoring that I, a mere student, was standing there.

  “Obscure subject,” Hartshorn said, frowning at being bothered. “Difficult to research. Now go away, Henry, and let me get back to work.”

  Smiling, happy that he wasn’t going to have to fire an institution like Professor Hartshorn, the president left. I waited for the blast to come from the professor. But it didn’t happen. Without looking at me, he picked up my chapter, handed it back to me, and said, “Chapter every three months. And write lots about Harriet Lane’s bosom.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, and went back to work. For the next two years, every three months, I’d go through my father’s books and write twenty-five pages about the golden hair, violet eyes, and voluptuous figure of Miss Harriet Lane.

  At the end of the second year, as a joke, I got Jennifer’s mother to help me make a period costume to Miss Lane’s measurements (please don’t ask me how my father got hold of her vital statistics, but fanatics have ways) in violet silk with pink piping. I’d bought a dressmaker’s dummy at a yard sale and with the help of cotton batting—a lot of cotton—Jennifer’s mom and I managed to re-create Miss Lane’s famous bosom. Jennifer, Heather, and I carried the dressed mannequin into Professor Hartshorn’s office at six A.M. one Monday morning so it was there when the professor arrived.

  But he said nothing about the headless person that took up the entire corner of his small office. A week went by, and he still said nothing. I was quite disappointed—until Saturday morning, that is. I went through the drive-in at my bank to deposit my paycheck as usual when the teller—a friend of mine—said, “Congratulations.”

  “On what?” I asked.

  “Your raise. And you’ve made a mistake on the deposit slip. I’ll fix it for you but you’ll have to initial it.”

  That’s when I found out that the darling old coot had given me a twenty-five percent raise. All for Harriet Lane’s magnificent bosom.

  But, now, in just three weeks I was going to get married and quit work. For a while, I planned to read, take photos, and have lunch with the girls. I’d had a paying job since I was fourteen years old and now, at twenty-six, I was looking forward to some time off.

  But that was all before I went to the party at Jennifer’s house and met Ford Newcombe.

  Kirk took more than a minute. In fact he took more than thirty minutes. He was deep in conference with the eldest Handley son, the one who handled all the family investments so the father could play golf. Of course everyone in town knew that Mrs. Handley was the one who actually controlled the money, but the sons put on a show.

  I was standing by myself, sipping my rum and Coke, and thinking about how I was looking forward to changing my life. I’d become bored by my job with Professor Hartshorn. It wasn’t as creative as I’d hoped it would be, and there was no place to advance to. I hadn’t yet told Kirk, but I was hoping to eventually open a little business of my own. My dream was to have a small home portrait studio where I could take natural light photos of people, something that I could someday put into a book. All I needed was some time off so I could use my savings and what my father had left me to set up my business. I wanted a home business so if I had kids…

  “He’s asking for you,” Heather whispered into my ear.

  I glanced at Kirk, but he was still head to head with the oldest Handley son.

  “No, not him,” Heather said. “Him.”

  She nodded toward Ford Newcombe who was standing by the window, drink in hand, and listening to Miss Donnelly. Instantly, I felt sorry for him. Miss Donnelly wrote the bulletin for the local Methodist church so she told people she was a “published writer.” No doubt she thought she was Ford Newcombe’s equal.

  “Go on,” Heather said, pushing me in the small of my back.

  But I didn’t move. There isn’t much of me, but what there is, is muscle. “Heather,” I said calmly, “you’ve lost your mind. That man is not ‘asking’ for me.”

  “Yes, he is. He asked Jennifer’s mom about fifty questions about you, who you are, where you work, everything. I think he has the hots for you.”

  “Better not tell Kirk or there’ll be a duel.”

  Heather didn’t laugh. “Look on the bright side. Once he gets to know you, he’ll throw you out.”

  Heather, too, had a sharp tongue.

  “Go on,” she said, pushing harder. “See what the man wants.”

  Truthfully, I felt I owed him an apology, and besides, who can pass up time with a celebrity? I could tell my grandkids, et cetera.

  When Ford Newcombe saw me, he looked as though I were his life raft. “There you are,” he said loudly, over Miss Donnelly’s head. “I have those papers you wanted to see, but we need to look at them outside.”

  That made no sense since it was pitch dark outside. “Sure,” I said just as loud. “Let’s go.” I followed him outside—trailed by Jennifer, Autumn, Heather, and Ashley.

  He got all the way to the little waist-high fence that surrounds the big deck behind Jennifer’s parents’ house before he turned around to look at me, and when he did, his eyes widened.

  I knew what he was seeing even before I turned. I had been used. All of them were dying to meet him, and dying to ask him questions he’d probably answered a million times.

  Stepping back, I let them have him. After all, for all I knew the man loved having four pretty young women bombard him with questions and shy smiles. I looked back through the glass doors to see if Kirk was finished yet, but he was still yakking away, so I stood to the side and played with the straw in my watery drink.

  It wasn’t until Ashley asked, “What are you working on now?” that I began to listen. The answer to “Do you write with a typewriter, a computer, or by hand?” held no interest for me.

  “It’s a true story,” he said.

  That made me look at him sharply. Okay, so I admit it. I’ve read every word Ford Newcombe has written and a lot of what’s been written about him, so I knew that, more or less, everything he’s written has been a “true story.�
�� When he said something that was a given, was he just trying not to give out any information?

  “A true story about what?” Autumn asked, and I could see Newcombe’s face soften. Sometimes I wondered what it would be like to live behind Autumn’s face and have people melt whenever they looked at me.

  “It’s a sort of ghost-witch story,” he said, still not giving away anything.

  “Ah, like the Blair Witch,” Heather said.

  “No, not exactly,” Newcombe said, and I could tell he was offended by Heather’s remark. She made him sound like he was jumping on a bandwagon—or, worse, planning to plagiarize.

  “You should tell him your devil story,” Autumn said to me, but before I could reply, Jennifer said, “Jackie used to terrify us all with her story about something that happened in North Carolina about a hundred years ago.”

  Newcombe smiled in what I thought was a patronizing way. “That’s when all the good stories took place,” he said, looking at me. “Go on, tell me.”

  I didn’t like his smug attitude. It was as though he was bestowing permission on me. “It’s just a folktale I heard when I was a kid,” I said, smiling over my glass.

  But my friends wouldn’t let up.

  “Go ahead, Jackie, tell it,” Ashley said.

  Heather poked me in the ribs. “Tell it!”

  Jennifer narrowed her eyes at me to let me know that I should do this. For my friends. To be “supportive.”

  “Please,” Autumn said softly. “Please.”

  When I looked up at Newcombe, he was watching me with interest, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. I couldn’t tell if he was just being polite or if he really wanted to hear my story.

  Whatever, I didn’t want to make a fool of myself again so I said, “It’s nothing really, just a story I heard a long time ago.”

  “It actually happened,” Heather said.

  “Maybe,” I said quickly. “I think it did. Maybe.”

  “So what’s the story?” Newcombe asked, staring at me.

  I took a breath. “It’s simple, really. A woman loved a man the townspeople said was the devil, so they killed her. They piled stones on her chest until she died.” After I finished, I could see that my friends were disappointed.

  Heather spoke first. “Jackie usually tells the story so well that she gives us goose bumps.”

  Autumn said, “I think Jackie should be a writer.”

  That’s when I dropped my glass on the deck, sending shards onto everyone’s stocking-clad legs, and we all went rushing inside to assess the damage.

  I left the bathroom first and seconds later, Kirk came to tell me that he was sorry but he had to leave. “Business. You understand, don’t you, Pumpkin?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Give me a ride home?”

  “Can’t,” he answered, turning back to the oldest Handley son, and they left the house.

  I stood there for a few minutes, not wanting to face the others who were still in the bathroom.

  “So why didn’t you want me to hear the full version of the story?” asked a voice behind me. Him.

  I wasn’t going to lie. “It’s just that you must get a lot of people telling you they have a story that would make a great book so would you please help them get a publisher?”

  “An agent.”

  I didn’t know what he meant.

  “People want an agent first. They think that agents can get a writer more money.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I don’t know about that because I don’t want to write and, even if I did, I’m not the kind of person who would impose myself on you.”

  He looked down at his drink, which was as iceless as mine had been. “About the devil story, it sounds interesting. Did you really hear it when you were a kid? Or did you make it up?”

  “Probably half and half,” I answered. “The truth is that I was so young when my mother told me the story that I may have taken poetic license over the years. I don’t know what I remember and what I’ve added to it.”

  “Your mother told you the story only once?” he asked.

  “My parents separated when I was very young and I grew up living with my father. My mother was killed in a car wreck about a year after they separated.” I looked away, not wanting to tell him any more about my personal life.

  After looking at me for a moment, he drained his glass. “Honestly, I am looking for an assistant. Sure you wouldn’t be interested?”

  This time I smiled graciously. “Thanks for the offer but no thanks. I’m getting married in three weeks, then I’m going to…” I couldn’t very well tell my plans to this stranger when I hadn’t yet dropped them on my fiancé, so I shrugged.

  He gave me a little smile. “Okay, but if you change your mind…”

  “I’ll just follow the Trail of Tears.” Oh, Lord. I’d done it again. I clamped my hand over my big mouth and looked at him in horror. I couldn’t even get “sorry” to come out.

  A couple of times he started to say something, but he didn’t. Quietly, he set his drink glass down on a table, then left the house.

  I bet he wouldn’t be going to any more parties in our small town. And my friends were going to kill me.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Ford

  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 abo
ut 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?”