Passion (34 page)

The machine beeped, but it didn’t register with Teryl. She hadn’t thought ahead to what she would actually say to John’s sister
if she reached her. She couldn’t very well announce to the woman that her brother had gone around the bend and kidnapped an
innocent woman or blurt out that he was delusional and thought he was a famous author and needed psychiatric intervention
before the police were brought into the matter. She hadn’t prepared for actually talking to Janie at all, and before any words
popped into her head, the machine beeped a second time, stopping the tape.

Muttering a curse, she redialed the number, listened to the four rings and the message again, then cleared her throat. “Hi.
My name is Teryl Weaver, and I—I’m looking for the
Janie Smith whose brother John lives in—used to live in Rapid River, Colorado. If you’re the right one, I need to talk to
you as soon as possible. It’s really very important. If you’re not the right one, I’d really appreciate it if you would let
me know. Call me any time between nine and five, Monday through Friday.” She gave the agency number, briefly considered adding
her home number, then decided against it. If Janie Smith could verify John’s story, receiving her call at home was no problem.
But what if his story wasn’t true? What would he think when his sister, who would surely tell Teryl that it wasn’t true, called
her home? What would he do?

She hung up, then, just to satisfy her own curiosity, dialed the fifth number again. That J. Smith was Jennifer, and the seventh
and last one, a man, offered no name. He simply said he didn’t know a Janie Smith, then hung up in the middle of Teryl’s murmured
apology.

Now on to Colorado. Hoping that Rapid River shared Denver’s area code, she tried it first and was right. This time a friendlier
operator gave her the name of the county—Grant—and the number for the sheriff’s department. The sleepy-sounding young man
she spoke to told her no, he didn’t know anything about a recent house fire and that she needed to speak to the sheriff himself,
who wouldn’t be in until the next morning, and no, he couldn’t track him down for her for anything less than an emergency.
Wishing she could lie and say it was, she left her name and, again, the office number with him, then returned the phone to
the table, rolled onto her side, and stared moodily out the French doors.

Did it mean anything that the man hadn’t heard about the fire? Maybe he’d been on vacation, or maybe he simply wasn’t as well-informed
as a deputy or dispatcher for a county sheriff’s department should be. But either excuse was hard to believe. Rapid River
was a small town, and people in small towns were supposed to know everybody’s business. Heavens, house fires that totally
destroyed everything were news even in a city the size of Richmond. And John’s hadn’t been a simple fire. It had been arson,
if he was to be believed—arson
involving three bombs that were supposed to have killed him. How could anyone living in the area not know about it? How could
an employee of the law enforcement agency investigating it be ignorant of its occurrence?

She knew the answer to those questions, the logical, reasonable, rational answer. She didn’t want to face it, but she forced
herself to let it form, to put the words together into sentences in her head. Maybe the young man hadn’t heard anything because
nothing had happened. Maybe the tale was just another part of John’s story. Just another part of his fantasies.

Maybe it was just one more part of his delusions.

Afternoon passed quietly into evening. John saw little of Teryl, considering that they were spending all of their time in
a house so small that he wouldn’t have believed two people could share it without tripping over each other. She stayed in
her room, the door closed, the CD player kept busy. They had much the same taste in music, he’d noticed in the times he’d
passed by: Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, and Duke Ellington. They had similar taste in movies, too, he’d discovered in
the hours he’d spent alone with the television and VCR. Many of the old Hollywood greats that he’d lost in the fire were duplicated
in her private collection. It was one of those old movies from the fifties, a bittersweet romance, that he chose to pass the
time that evening, and it was the movie that finally lured Teryl back into his presence.

She came down the stairs and was on her way to the kitchen when she detoured into the living room. He glanced at her, standing
there in the doorway, but said nothing. If she wanted to ignore him and pretend he wasn’t there, the least he could do was
make it easy.

But this time she wasn’t ignoring him. She edged into the room, going to sit on the arm of the sofa, a fairly safe distance
from the chair where he was sprawled. “You like old movies?”

“I like her.” He gestured to the star whose face filled the screen in a tight shot. “She was a beautiful woman.”

“Hmm.” She slid down onto the cushion without taking her gaze from the television. “The camera certainly loved her.”

“Everyone loved her. She ranked right up there with Marilyn Monroe, Carole Lombard, and Grace Kelly. She was gorgeous and
incredibly talented. Too bad she quit so young.”

“Maybe she found something else she’d rather do.”

He looked at her again. “What else could possibly have compared to the fame, the money, and the adulation that came with being
a movie star back in the days when that was really special?”

“Gee, I don’t know. Maybe having a life of your own? Maybe getting married and having children? Maybe being able to gain ten
pounds or quit bleaching your hair without it being treated with the importance of a national scandal? Maybe being able to
go to the grocery store or to church or out to lunch without being mobbed by rabid fans?” She gave him a dry look. “You tell
me. Why
would
someone rich and famous choose anonymity over life under a very big microscope?”

He would like to take her question as a sign that she was leaning at least a little toward believing him. After all, John
Smith, some poor crazy schmuck who was, at best, delusional, would live anonymously because that was who he was, because he
had no claim to fame. On the other hand, the John Smith who had given life to Simon Tremont, legendary author and mysterious
millionaire, knew a few things about fame, adulation, and rabid fans.

But he didn’t believe her question was an indication of anything, other than the fact that after an afternoon and evening
of virtual silence, she was willing to talk to him again.

And after an afternoon and evening of her shunning, he was willing to settle for simple conversation. He was grateful for
it.

“I moved into the mountains because I thought that was the best place for me. I wasn’t doing well at dealing with the world,
and the world—or, at least, the people I knew in it—wasn’t dealing well with me.”

Her expression turned somber. “You mean because of the accident.”

The accident
. She made it sound so simple, so blameless, so damned
accidental
and therefore undeserving of guilt.
He
had a tendency to think of it in harsher terms, such as the day he killed his brother and crippled his sister. The day his
own life should have ended. The day he destroyed his family and his future.

Lately he’d discovered that he wanted a future. He wanted it a lot.

“Yeah,” he agreed at last. “Because of the accident.” Picking up the remote control, he stopped the tape, then muted the volume.
“I’m the luckiest bastard in the world. I walked away from a wreck that, by rights, should have left me as dead as Tom, and
I didn’t have a scratch. I spent six years drinking too much, looking for ways to die, living as dangerously as I could, and
nothing ever happened. I made it through school by the skin of my teeth and was about to flunk out of college because I was
too damned stupid, and a few years later I lucked into a career that has earned me more money than I can spend in the next
fifty years. I’m damned lucky… and my life is still the pits. Moving into the mountains was both my salvation and my punishment.
I couldn’t hurt anyone up there, and no one could hurt me.”

“It must have been lonely.” Her voice was soft, her expression distant. “What did you do?”

“Watched movies. Read. Until the last year or so, wrote.” He saw her gaze flicker disturbingly, and he sighed. “No, Teryl,
I didn’t read Simon Tremont’s books. I didn’t need to; I
wrote
the damned things. I didn’t get fixated on my favorite author. I didn’t delude myself into thinking that I
was
him.”

“Did you ever travel?”

“Only occasional trips into Denver.”

“Then how could you write all those books? One of Simon Tremont’s strengths is the atmosphere, the sense of place. If you
never went to any of those places—”

“I didn’t say that,” he disagreed. “I said I didn’t do any traveling after I moved into the mountains. I spent the six years
before that doing nothing but traveling. When I left
home, I hitchhiked to the Texas coast and got a job delivering a boat to the Keys. From there I worked my way north. I spent
some time in Georgia and North Carolina, in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, and I wound up in Maine. When I got tired
of New England, I headed back south and didn’t stop until I’d hit Mexico. From there I went to New Orleans and settled down
for a while, until I got the job on the freighter. You know what happened after that.”

“So the locations for all these stories were written from memory.”

“Memory, an occasional travel video, and a few calls to local tourism offices just to find out if anything in particular had
changed since I was there. What can I say? I’m observant. I have a great eye for detail.” Sensing her disappointment, he smiled
persuasively. “Isn’t that at least a little more satisfying than the answer that bastard gave you in New Orleans? I’ve actually
camped out in Acadia National Park off the coast of Maine. I’ve gotten drunk in Key West. I’ve been damned near eaten alive
by the mosquitoes in Okefenokee. I’ve been thrown in jail down in Mexico, and I’ve hiked the Appalachian Trail in North Carolina.
I
haven’t
relied solely on travelogues or travel magazines, and I don’t believe imagination, understanding, and talent are enough to
make up for actually experiencing a place.”

“I have to admit that when Simon said—”

He interrupted her again. “Do you have to call him that?”

The look she gave was drily admonishing. “I only know two names for him—John and Simon—and you insist that neither one belongs
to him. That may be, but I still have to call him
something
, and since you’re John, he gets Simon by default.”

Her reasoning made sense… although he didn’t quite agree that the son of a bitch needed one of
his
names. Until they knew his real name, John could think of a number of names to call him that were perfectly appropriate.
“All right,” he agreed grudgingly. “You can call him Simon for now. You have to admit what?”

“That I wondered about it when Simon said he hadn’t spent much time in New Orleans. The books make the city
seem so real. Reading them truly is like being there. There’s a sense of intimacy to them that, maybe I’m being naïve, but
I would have sworn could come only from intimate knowledge of the city, not from guidebooks or videotapes or phone conversations
with people a thousand miles away.”

“Actually, Teryl, he didn’t say he hadn’t spent much time there.” When she started to protest, he raised one hand to silence
her. “I was eavesdropping, remember? You commented that he must have spent a lot of time in the city, and he said, ‘You can
learn an awful lot about a place without ever going there, Teryl.’ For all we know, that could have been his first visit.”

Settling against the high arm of the sofa, she rested her chin on her hands and glumly sighed. “What a disappointment if that’s
true—if the books that introduced me to the city that could easily become my most favorite city in the world had been written
from travelogues and magazines.”

By sheer will, he kept the frustration her remark aroused out of his voice when he replied. “There’s no reason to be disappointed.
Your Simon didn’t write those books. I did. And in the time I lived there, I became intimately familiar with the place—at
least, with my small corner of it, and that’s what I used in writing the Thibodeaux books.”

After one moment of silence extended into two, then three, he pressed the play button, and the movie began where it had left
off. He didn’t turn his attention to it right away, though. First he fixed his gaze on Teryl. “I did write those books, Teryl,”
he said quietly. “Someday… you’re going to believe me.”

P
ulling the key from the lock, Rebecca opened the front door of the Robertson Literary Agency and strolled inside, leaving
her briefcase and handbag on Lena’s desk before turning back to close and relock the door. For a moment she simply stood there,
enjoying the peace of the old house. Ordinarily, she used the back door, like the rest of the staff, but on Monday mornings,
she always walked around to the front and climbed the steps to the broad porch. She always took a moment there to smell the
fragrance of the flowers, to listen to the tinkle of the crystal wind chimes that hung from a gingerbread bracket, to admire
the inviting picture of white wicker chairs separated by pots of bright red geraniums. She always took a moment to savor the
sheer pleasure that all of this was hers, to marvel over how far she had come.