The Accidental Bestseller (11 page)

Mallory waited for a response.

“No. Something’s wrong.”

The words flew between them. They were in agreement that someone needed to do something, but they weren’t sure what.

Faye typed. “I’ve got to finish this chapter, but I think I have Cal’s cell phone number somewhere. I’ll call him tonight.”

“Thanks,” Mallory typed, already feeling guilty for not offering and also envying Faye the matter-of-fact “I’ve got to finish this chapter.” That meant she’d actually managed to
start
one. “Keep me posted.”

“Will do.” Faye signed off and Mallory clicked back to Word. The screen was still blank.

She had had Cal’s number at some point, too, she thought, opening her desk drawer and beginning to paw through the jumble of business cards and scribbled contact info that she hadn’t yet put into her BlackBerry.

Her fingers moved nimbly through the odd items that filled the drawer: a photo loop, a business card from the firm Chris was with when they met, a masseuse she’d heard about and been meaning to try, a promotional pen with a writer’s name on it.

Maybe she could find Cal’s contact info and get it to Faye. And maybe she could organize this drawer while she was at it. The act of sorting and throwing out might free up her subconscious so that it could figure out the story she was working on.

As she rifled through and tossed things out, she realized that her desk was even messier than the drawer and she decided to tidy that, too. No wonder she couldn’t think straight with all this . . . turmoil around her. She didn’t need to panic or be afraid. She’d just give herself the rest of the morning to straighten up her office. First thing after lunch, she’d get right down to work.

Kendall was in her car heading north toward the one place that Calvin didn’t like and couldn’t touch: the home in the North Carolina mountains that her grandparents had left her.

No blond-haired real estate agents would be prancing up her front walk there. In that neck of the woods a person didn’t traipse onto another person’s land without expecting to meet up with the business end of a shotgun. She regretted how civilized they’d become; granny’s shotgun would have come in handy when Laura Wiles had come to call.

Kendall barely checked her speed as she merged onto Highway 85 at Spaghetti Junction and expertly changed lanes to avoid the slowpokes in the right-hand lanes. About an hour and a quarter into her drive she spotted the swell of foothills that heralded the beginning of the Blue Ridge chain. She passed the scenic overlook at Tallulah Gorge, where a member of the tightrope-walking Flying Wallendas had performed headstands as he crossed the gorge on wire, then continued along the two-lane highway toward Clayton, Georgia, where uncomfortable signs of progress reared their heads: a big boxy Walmart stood next to a shiny new Home Depot, their tar-topped parking lots rectangular slashes in the red clay landscape. The red dust of construction hung in the air and settled on the hood of her car.

At the new twenty-four-hour grocery store, she stopped and bought a haphazard mix of junk food and staples along with a case of assorted wines.

She was through the tiny towns of Mountain City and Dillard in a matter of minutes and then began to wind her way upward, the air cooling as she climbed. Kendall lowered the windows to allow the crisp mountain air to caress her cheeks and rifle her hair. Curtains of kudzu shrouded the landscape, looking much too vibrant for a vine bent on suffocation. To the right, the mountainside fell away in a dizzying drop, leaving vistas of air and sky and tree-topped mountains.

She breathed deeply, savoring the mixture of altitude-cooled air and sun-warmed earth as she passed over the seamless border between Georgia and North Carolina. Mountain laurel, rhododendrons, and fat blue hydrangeas spilled over stone walls and split-rail fences. It was hard to ignore the signs of new construction, but she did her best, focusing instead on the spill of water down a distant rock face, the sun-bleached clapboard of antique stores, and the home-hammered shelving and hand-lettered signs of on-your-honor vegetable stands. Around the next bend a lone horse grazed in an expanse of meadow. From somewhere beyond a cow lowed.

The old and the new did not always coexist happily or seamlessly here, but for Kendall there was still enough of the long-known to make the drive one of homecoming. And when she turned onto the unpaved road that continued to wind upward to her grandparents’ homestead, each tree and shrub seemed planted in order to point her way there.

The house itself was old and worn. It sat in the clearing, its last coat of gray paint long since faded. Two brick chimneys, one at each end of the house, poked up from its oft-patched roof. Two basement-level bedrooms and a bath crouched underneath, their large corner windows maximizing both light and view. Porches and decks shot off the one-story structure providing views, if not architectural symmetry, in almost every direction.

Up here there was no garbage pickup, no mail or newspaper delivery, and no local cable service. Kendall had whiled away her summers here, tending the flower and vegetable gardens with her grandmother, taking long rambling hikes with her grandfather, sitting wordless on one of many wood rockers with a book in her lap, her gaze lifting every so often to follow a hawk riding an updraft or to locate a distant peak of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

She was twenty-five when her grandparents died and left her the house along with the money to maintain it. She tried to share the house with her new husband, but Calvin never warmed to its rustic charm or understood the hold it had on her. He preferred the restaurants, shops, and golf farther north in Highlands, and once the kids were old enough, Kendall brought them instead—all three of them spending the two months of summer together with only occasional visits from Cal.

Now she carried in her groceries and her overnight bag and dropped them on the kitchen floor. In a burst of energy, she went from room to room, throwing open windows and removing dustcovers from the furniture. She carried the outdoor furniture from the screened porch out to the back deck and plopped down into a chair so that she could prop her legs up on the deck railing. The trickle of a distant waterfall carried on the wind and there was a tinkling of wind chimes outside the master bedroom.

The stillness both filled and surrounded her, muffling, if not halting, the litany of fears and disappointments that had been running nonstop through her head. She wasn’t fooled. The panic wasn’t completely gone. It lay coiled inside her, ready to rear its diamond-shaped head and strike at the slightest provocation.

But for the moment she was in the one place she felt safe calling home and once she pulled herself together—please, God, let that happen soon—all she had to do was write a book. And find an attorney. And get a divorce. And explain it to her children. And . . . No, she couldn’t think about any of that right now.

Because right now she was going to sit on this deck where her grandmother once shelled peas and her children had swung lazily in the old rope hammock and do absolutely nothing. That was all she had to do. Just sit right here and breathe.

For as long as she felt like it.

Kendall inhaled then exhaled. And then she repeated the exercise, drawing the fresh piney air deep into her lungs. And then, with the steady drone of insects as background, she closed her eyes and tilted her face up to the late afternoon sun and let the breeze sweep over her skin.

An hour and a half after their conversation, Faye received an e-mail from Mallory with nothing but Calvin Aims’s name and cell phone number in it. She printed it out and left it sitting in her printer tray while she finished the chapter she was on and roughed out notes for the next.

She’d offered to help because she was worried about Kendall, but she wasn’t looking forward to speaking to her friend’s husband. The few times she’d met him, he’d struck her as self-important and self-centered. His support of Kendall’s writing career had been totally monetary, and he’d managed to get in plenty of digs about her disappointing earning power when he’d finally understood how little most midlist writers earned.

Some markets were more lucrative than others, but the publishing business was very cyclical; what was hot one year might be over the next. There were paranormal writers who couldn’t get arrested five years ago, who were riding the crest today. The same had happened to historicals, comedies, chick lit, mystery. If it had been popular, it also had not. And a writer couldn’t necessarily change her voice or style, simply to fit the current market.

She worked steadily through the afternoon and then broke at about 4:00 P.M. to see what could be organized for dinner. The freezer bulged with carefully labeled Tupperware and disposable containers undoubtedly delivered by female parishioners convinced that Pastor Steve might starve to death without a wife to cook for him for two and a half days. Never mind that he had a married daughter who lived less than a mile away. Or opposable thumbs completely capable of removing plastic wrap and operating a microwave.

Faye selected a tuna noodle casserole, a loaf of crusty cheese bread, and a rectangular container labeled, “Maybelle’s marvelous marbled brownies.” After all the food she’d consumed in New York this weekend, she was not about to quibble over a few extra calories now.

She had no doubt that if she ever disappeared for more than a day or two, the women of the congregation would be lined up to provide Steve with much more than casseroles and home-baked desserts, but she chastised herself for the uncharitable thought.

Tonight it was just the two of them for dinner—an unusual and welcome occurrence. Tomorrow Faye would babysit their granddaughter, Rebecca, while their daughter, Sara, took her yoga class and did her Saturday afternoon stint in the church resale shop. Sunday was largely spent at church, though Faye sometimes got up very early to work before she had to leave for the morning service. Every once in a while when she was on deadline, she worked the entire Sunday, not out of disregard for the day of rest, but because she believed in a God who understood the importance of meeting one’s deadlines and commitments. And who, she hoped, would also understand the lengths a woman might go to in order to protect and support her family.

Faye set the casserole and brownies out on the counter to defrost and went out into the garden to cut flowers for the center of the table. She was arranging them into a cut-glass vase when the phone rang. Answering, she was delighted to hear her granddaughter on the line. “Hello, Gran Gran,” Rebecca singsonged into Faye’s ear. “Mom tole me you were back from France.”

Faye smiled. “That’s con
ference
, Becky. France is a country in Europe.”

The five-year-old’s voice dissolved into a giggle. “I see Egypt, I see France, I see Gran Gran’s under—”

Sara’s voice replaced that of her daughter. “Rebecca Simmons, how many times have I told you to think before you speak?”

“But . . .”

“I’m sorry, Mother. I don’t know what’s gotten into her lately.” Sara lowered her voice. “I think it’s that Lowry girl she’s gotten friendly with. She does not get enough supervision in my mind.”

“Oh?” Faye put the upper oven on preheat and unwrapped the casserole. The brownies looked good even in their frozen state.

“I let Rebecca play there last Saturday afternoon while you were in New York. And when I picked her up at five in the afternoon, her mother was lying around in her bathrobe reading one of those trashy romance novels.” Her voice went even lower. “The kind with S-E-X in it and a bare-chested man on the cover.” It was clear Sara was completely scandalized.

Faye frowned at the disapproval in her daughter’s voice. Faye had always thought of motherhood as a softening experience, but becoming a parent had turned Sara from mildly opinionated into downright judgmental, a change in her daughter that Faye wasn’t sure how to address.

“I know how to spell, Mama.” Becky’s voice piped up in the background. “I learned it on
Sesame Street
!” And then, “Why are you whispering about the number six?”