“You want me to write a tell-all?”
“I want you to tell the world how Frances Ashley, everybody’s favorite author, made your childhood a living hell. How she ignored you, emotionally abused you, and sent you off to the four corners of the globe so she didn’t have to be a mother.”
I didn’t know why—maybe it was the combination of little sleep, the shock of dealing with Edgar, and now Asa’s words—but I realized I wasn’t going to be able to keep standing much longer. I dropped into the chair.
“No,” I said. “Absolutely not.”
“Just give me a minute.”
“No.” I looked at him. He was staring at me like he knew things—secrets. I felt a tingling along my right thumb.
“You’re wondering how I know. Everybody knows, Meg. I mean, everybody who’s been around you and Frances.”
I held up my hand. “Trust me, nobody cares. Frances as a villain is not a narrative her adoring public is interested in.”
“I think you’re wrong.”
“I think you’re suicidal,” I said.
Because if Frances Ashley could hear you right now, she would bury you.
“You’re afraid,” he said. “I get that.”
I stared at him. This guy had no idea what he was up against. She would ruin his career. But me? It would end things for good. She would never speak to me again. I felt something twinge inside me—fear spiked with anticipation. The way you feel right before you climb onto a terrifying roller coaster. Or bungee jump off a bridge.
Asa pushed back in his chair. Turned toward the window.
“You’re probably wise to be hesitant.” His voice had taken on a reflective timbre. “Writing this book would effectively end your relationship. And in a very public way. You’d have to be prepared for that. Figure out what it means to be you without her.”
“I know who I am,” I said.
But it was a lie. He was right. I never saw myself without a ghostly image of Frances superimposed over me.
“Okay,” he said mildly. “I just meant perhaps it wouldn’t be such a bad thing. A clean break. Rip off the Band-Aid. So you can move on to real things.”
He was talking about Omnia again, I guessed. The job I’d been offered and turned down. But Omnia wasn’t the only nonprofit. There were hundreds of other charities and other opportunities in cities all over the world. Other girls I might be able to teach. I’d never considered it, going someplace new and starting over. Not with my mother looming over my life like an unexorcised demon.
“Mid six figures,” he said again and then sucked in a long breath. Stroked what would’ve been a beard if he had a teaspoon of testosterone. “Which, I realize, means nothing to you. Although, if she cut you off, it wouldn’t hurt to have a little cushion. But this is about more than the money. This book is way bigger than just your story.”
“You said it was my memoir.” The scared-excited roller-coaster feeling was surging through me. It was making me feel seriously nauseated.
“Right. It is. It’s totally your story. But it’s also someone else’s.” His eyes glittered. He was loving this, the rush of the pitch.
“When Frances was just a nineteen-year-old kid, working at a little rat-trap hotel on an island off the coast of Georgia, she met a little girl. She met her and she stole that little girl’s life—and the life of the girl’s father too. Frances made up lies about innocent people so she could become rich and famous.”
I deflated. “Oh. Okay. You’re talking about Kitten.”
He looked positively manic now. “You’re goddamn right I’m talking about Kitten. And how your mother blamed that little girl—a real, flesh-and-blood little girl named Dorothy Kitchens—for another child’s murder.”
He was covering old ground—the murder of Kim Baker, the little girl who’d been found dead in the marsh the summer my mother lived on Bonny Island. Old ground, old news.
“Listen to me,” I said, slowly, deliberately. “Kitten isn’t actually a real person. She’s a composite. And Kim Baker’s murder was completely unrelated to my mother, Dorothy Kitchens, or anything else in her book. Kitten is entirely a work of fiction.” The words spilled out by rote, practiced and glib, the way they had spilled from Frances’s mouth every single time any reporter or friend or fan had broached the subject. But Asa wasn’t buying it.
“Kitten is definitely a real person. As real as you or me. You said her name—Dorothy Kitchens—and she still lives on Bonny Island, off the coast of Georgia.”
“Stop.” I held up my hand.
“Her father owned the hotel—”
“Asa—”
“—and she took it over in—”
“Stop!”
He stopped, and I fixed him with a condescending smirk.
“I know all this, Asa. Everybody who’s been alive in the last decade knows about Dorothy Kitchens, as well as Kim Baker, the unfortunate child whose mother”—I stressed the word—“killed her. It’s all been reported on, speculated over, done to death.” I stood. “It’s not a story, not to reasonable-minded adults. It’s a conspiracy theory for pathetic, purposeless souls who have no meaning in their lives.”
Eerie, how much I was sounding like Frances. So dismissive and haughty. Only she loved the Kitty Cultists and would’ve never dared insult them. They kept her in business.
Asa stood and came around the desk. “I’m not a Kitty Cultist, if that’s what you think, not even close. But Kitten is absolutely a real person, and what happened on that island was real too, at least part of it. I’m not saying that Dorothy Kitchens killed Kim Baker. I’m just saying that Frances took some very real facts, a very real tragedy, and twisted it.”
“And from what I hear, Dorothy Kitchens has been cashing in on it ever since.”
“You know there was an incident.” His eyes fastened onto me. “In the early ’90s, fourteen years after the book was published. One of the Cultists, a guest at the hotel, attacked Dorothy. Dorothy’s father, William Kitchens, filed a lawsuit against your mother, saying it was her fault.”
I blinked. “Attacked her? Like, how?”
He shrugged. “No one really knows, except William Kitchens and Dorothy. And your mother.”
My head had started to feel too heavy for my neck. And it was pounding. I really needed to go to bed. Just sleep for twelve hours. He kept talking, though, his voice like an electric drill in my brain.
“Then, all of sudden, like less than a year later, out of the blue, Kitchens dropped it. Supposedly. There’s nothing official on the Internet. No news stories. Nothing.”
“Well, my mother’s had her share of legal troubles, and she has a crackerjack team of lawyers.”
He smiled. “Doesn’t it strike you as odd that Kitchens dropped the lawsuit but nobody knows what really happened? Not the Cultists, not a tabloid reporter? There’s got to be a reason for that, don’t you agree?”