Passion (50 page)

“Well?”

“Nice. Very nice.” She returned the pages to the folder, then spread her napkin over her lap. “Interesting characters, strong
mood. You’ve captured the futility of the man’s feelings for Eliza very well.” She offered him a confident smile. “It’s your
usual outstanding job.”

Her words satisfied him, damned near made him preen, and they weren’t really lies, she assured herself. The chapters
were
nicely done. They were intense, the atmosphere creepy, the menace building from the very first scene. The story was just
different
. There was a mean-spiritedness to it that she’d never seen in a Tremont book. He didn’t
like
the character of Eliza Byrd. He was taking pleasure in setting her up for the fate that was to befall her.

Still, the writing was
good
, and the readers would like it… probably. And it
was
just the first few chapters. By the
time he finished the outline and showed it to her again, it would be much farther along in development. Eliza and the unnamed
man would be more fully fleshed out, and all the emotion, all the understanding and the skill that had made him a master of
characterization would be in place.

“I didn’t expect you to be working again so soon. I thought that, after the way you pushed so hard on
Resurrection
, you would take off at least a few months, maybe even a year, before starting again.”

He shrugged her off. “I don’t need time off. I figure I’ll have enough of this ready to show to Candace by the end of the
week. I want this one to come out as soon after
Resurrection
as possible.”

“Morgan-Wilkes will be thrilled.” She infused her smile with all the warmth she could muster—a tremendous amount, considering
that simply being near him made her cold. “You know, with all the Tremont successes, they really
are
the house that Jack built.”

Simon gave her a disinterested look. “Jack who?”

Her smile began slipping, and nothing, damn it, nothing she could do could stop it. Needing a drink to clear her throat, she
reached for her glass, but her hand was unsteady. Instead, she clasped her hands together in her lap and concentrated on keeping
her voice even, level, and empty of panic. “You know, Jack is a nickname for John. And there’s that old kids’ rhyme about
this is the house that Jack built, and publishers are often referred to as…”

He was looking at her, his brown eyes blank, as if he had no idea in the world what she was rambling on about. Trailing off
in mid-sentence, she called up the best smile she could manage, but it felt much more like a nervous twitch. “Never mind.
It was a bad joke.”

Somehow she made it through the rest of the meal, paid the bill, and stood to say good-bye. On impulse, she reached for the
manuscript pages. “Can I keep these? I’d like to read over them again.”

Still seated, Simon shrugged. “That’s why I brought them—so you’d have a copy.”

Not for her approval, not for her opinion, just so she
would have a copy. Rebecca curled her fingers tightly around them. “It’s been a pleasure, Simon.”

He gave her a long, disarming, gazing-right-through-her look, then smiled. It was a chilling thing to see. “Let’s do it again.
But next time, call ahead. A week’s notice should be sufficient.” Then, with a dismissive gesture, he turned back to the wine
he was finishing.

Leaving him there at the table, she walked stiffly and quickly through the dining room and outside to her Mercedes. She didn’t
even notice the rain that dampened her hair and ran down the jacket of her suit. Locked inside the car, she dropped the folder
on the seat, disliking even the feel of it in her hand. She started the engine, turned the air conditioner on, then reached
for a tissue from the box in the other seat to pat her face dry. Her hands were trembling, making the thin paper flutter,
and her heart was thudding painfully in her chest.

The man in the restaurant, the man she knew as Simon Tremont—the man to whom she had recently sent a check of John Smith/Simon
Tremont’s money with more zeroes on it than she cared to count—acted as if he’d never heard her little joke before. Even with
her explanation, he hadn’t understood it. It hadn’t been the least bit familiar to him.

But Teryl’s John had known it. He had understood it perfectly.

Could Teryl be right? she wondered, dreading such a possibility so badly that she felt sick with it. Could he be the real
Simon Tremont? Could that man in the restaurant right now be a fraud?

Taking a few breaths, she calmed herself. She needed a clear head to sort this out. No panic, no fear—at least, none yet.
Not until she was convinced there was reason to fear.

What evidence did John Smith have to prove that he was Simon? None that she could see. Teryl had admitted that the paperwork—all
the records that eleven years of writing as a business would have generated—had supposedly been destroyed by an explosion.
As far as she could tell, all he had was his claim, an extraordinary knowledge of Simon’s career,
familiarity with her inside joke, and an uncanny ability to mimic Simon’s writing style.

There was surely some logical explanation for the knowledge. He probably knew the real Tremont, had probably been friends
or neighbors with him, had probably been in and out of his house up there in Colorado. He had probably sneaked peeks at Simon’s
work, at Simon’s mail. As for the writing, any reasonably talented author could, with practice, successfully mimic another
author’s style. The write-like Hemingway and Faulkner contests held each year proved that.

And what evidence did Simon have? He was also certainly knowledgeable about Tremont’s career. Presumably he had all the paperwork
that John couldn’t produce at home in his office. Granted, he hadn’t been familiar with her silly little joke, but if he hadn’t
understood it or thought it funny in the first place, it was perfectly logical that he would have forgotten it by now.

And he had the biggest, most important proof of all:
Resurrection.
No one disputed that he’d written it, not Teryl, not even her John. There was no doubt in anyone’s mind that only Simon Tremont
could have written that book and no doubt in anyone’s mind that the man in the restaurant was the one who wrote it. Therefore,
he
had
to be Tremont.

With
Resurrection
on his side, there was no reason to debate. No reason to doubt. Not that damnable joke that still bothered her. Not the fact
that John certainly fitted her image of Simon Tremont far better than the real Simon did. Not the fact that, in comparing
John’s pages about Liane Thibodeaux and Simon’s pages about Eliza Byrd, John’s writing felt much more like Simon’s than Simon’s
did.

Simon wrote
Resurrection.
He wrote the best book she’d ever read, and that made him the winner. Her trust, her support, and her agency were behind
him.

All the way.

Simon sat at the table, his fingers curled around the stem of his wineglass, and stared moodily out the window at the parking
lot beyond. More than five minutes had passed since
Rebecca had left the restaurant, and yet she still sat out there in her big expensive car. She couldn’t be waiting for the
rain to stop; any fool could see that wasn’t going to happen for a long time. She could be rereading his partial, but somehow
he didn’t think so. She seemed to simply be sitting there.

Why?

He tossed down the last of his wine, then pushed his chair back with a scrape. This trip into town had certainly been a waste
of time that would have been much better spent at his computer. When she had called this morning insisting that he meet her
for lunch—
insisting,
he’d thought at the time with some amazement; didn’t she realize that no one insisted anything of Simon Tremont?—he had thought
something important was up. He had expected to be given schedules for his next talk show appearances, to be informed of new
and more impressive requests for his presence. He had expected to hear how Barbara Walters and Larry King had wheeled and
dealed to win him for their shows, had thought
People
might want him on the cover, had considered a preliminary discussion for the major cross-country or international book tours
that were inevitable before the end of the year.

Instead Rebecca had wanted nothing. She had wasted his time for
nothing.
Vague talk about discussing the future and making plans—neither of which they’d done—a little lukewarm praise for
Eliza Byrd,
a joke too dumb to be deserving of the name, and small talk.
Nothing.

Walking out the door, he stood for a moment underneath the canopy that sheltered the entrance. The Mercedes was gone now.
Maybe she had seen him leave the table. Maybe she hadn’t wanted him to see her sitting out here.

She had gotten weird after reading the chapters. Had she recognized Teryl in Eliza? Maybe he should have changed the description.
Maybe he shouldn’t have written her as a dead ringer for Teryl, but he found the process easier that way—when he could call
a real person to mind, when he could borrow looks, mannerisms, voices, attitudes. Besides, it was so much fun planning Eliza’s
demise and seeing it in his head happening to Teryl—imagining the fear coming into those big brown eyes, disfiguring that
soft creamy skin,
crushing that slender, delicate throat, and, ultimately, watching the life drain out of that deceptively sweet, allusively
innocent face.

He honestly didn’t think Rebecca could have made the connection between her assistant and doomed Eliza. Her mind didn’t work
that way. She was a bright woman—he wouldn’t have her for an agent if she weren’t—but she didn’t have even a fraction of his
complexity. So maybe it hadn’t been the chapters that had made her edgy. What had come after? A comment that she’d thought
he would take some time off. He’d said the partial would soon be ready to send to Morgan-Wilkes, and she’d made her dumb remark.
You know, with all the Tremont successes, they really
are
the house that Jack built.
She had watched him, waiting for a response, and then she had gone into that edgy explanation before finally, awkwardly letting
it drop mid-sentence.

They really
are
the house that Jack built.
A private joke? Something she’d shared only with John Smith?

He swore out loud, viciously enough to make a passing customer shrink away. That had to be it. The bitch had been testing
him. Something—or some
one
, damn Teryl to hell—had aroused Rebecca’s suspicions, and so she had called him, demanding that he meet her for lunch, pulling
him away from his work, all so she could test him with her stupid little inside joke.

And he had failed her test. He had acted as if he’d never heard it before—which, of course, he hadn’t—and hadn’t been interested
enough to even understand it.

John Smith didn’t matter. He was as good as dead. Teryl’s suspicions didn’t matter, either, because she was going to die with
Smith. As for the younger sister who was the sum total of Smith’s personal life, she didn’t present much of a threat. Like
Teryl, all she knew was what her deranged brother had told her. Like Teryl, if she became a problem, she would be dead.

Rebecca Robertson, though, was another matter. He couldn’t afford for her to doubt him. He couldn’t afford for her to get
skeptical, to start looking into his background and
maybe, like that slut Teryl, start spreading her doubts around.

He had planned to wait for the right time to tie up all the loose ends, but already he had waited too long. If only he had
known sooner that he had failed in Colorado. If only he had waited around that dreary little town to be sure that John Smith
had died. If only he hadn’t been so goddamned sure of himself, of his plan, of his infallibility.

He would take care of them tonight. By midnight his two biggest problems would be out of his life forever, and no one would
suspect him—with the possible exception of Debra Jane, but he could handle her; he’d been doing it for nine years. If the
police looked hard enough, they would find the stores where he would, this afternoon, buy the necessary supplies; they would
find the credit card receipts in John Smith’s name, would get the clerks’ vague descriptions that closely matched Smith’s,
and they would find out about the strange fire in Colorado recently. It would be such a tragedy, a young woman murdered by
the mysterious stranger she had picked up on a trip, but then, these were the nineties. What did a woman expect when she acted
without discretion, with such careless disregard for her safety?

There would be questions, of course. The cops might discover that the house in Colorado had belonged to Simon Tremont, and
they might question him. They would be intrigued by the coincidences: that this man claiming to be John Smith had been at
the scene when Simon’s house was destroyed, that Smith had gone to New Orleans when Simon was there, that there he’d met up
with Teryl, who just happened to be Simon’s agent’s assistant, that Teryl’s house was destroyed—and both Teryl’s and her mystery
lover’s lives ended—in the same manner that the Colorado house was destroyed.

Simon would have his answers ready. Yes, he’d recently lost his house in Colorado to fire. Yes, he had moved away more than
four months ago. No, he hadn’t sold the house; he’d intended to return for vacations. No, he hadn’t given anyone permission
to use the place. No, he didn’t know anyone matching this man’s description.

He would see to it that Debra Jane’s answers were ready, too. She would tell them how she’d met the stranger, how secretive
and furtive he’d been. She would tell them how he had controlled Teryl, how her foster sister had had bruises from where he’d
tied her up, how he had introduced her to sick, kinky sex games.

He would also make sure that Rebecca had the right answers. They would paint a picture of a mysterious, secretive, deceptive
man who had become obsessed with the author he idolized, how he had broken into and destroyed his idol’s home, how he had
made his way to the city where Simon was appearing for the first time ever, how he had insinuated himself with Teryl, who
had some connection to Simon, and had then made his way to the city where Simon now lived. They would show his obsession,
his sickness, his derangement, and the cops would close the case.