“A ghostwriter?”
“Meg.” Asa’s voice lowered. I pictured his pale eyes narrowing. “You know as well as I do, it’s going to take a team to get this project to print in the amount of time we have. All this guy’s going to do is take your stuff and polish it. Make it shine. He’s not going to change anything. Just bump it up to the next level. His name is Ethan Saito; you can check him out. He worked on the Iceland books in the final stages. Melissa loves him.”
“I can’t have my mother finding out what we’re doing.”
“She won’t. He’s very discreet.”
“And no announcement in the trades.”
“Yes, but Meg, be realistic. She’s going to find out about this book sooner or later. You might want to think about how you want it to go down. Sometimes firing the first shot gives you the upper hand.”
Koa’s mower roared under my window, drowning out Asa’s voice.
“Anyway,” Asa said. “For now, you’re still under the—”
The call dropped. Even though I tried repeatedly, I couldn’t connect again.
KITTEN
—FROM CHAPTER 6
“The deer eat them. Indians ate them,” Kitten was saying.
She and Cappie were settled at the far end of the porch because the day had gotten too hot to play outside. Even the near-constant breeze seemed to have given up and died. Fay herself felt wrung out and listless. It was all she could do to drape herself on the wicker chaise and listen to the low hum of their chatter.
They’d been playing house contentedly on a large grass mat—arranging a collection of rocks and tree bark and dried locust shells into some order only they understood—when their conversation grew louder.
“No, they didn’t,” Cappie replied. “They ate corn and fish and other things. Things they grew.”
“And acorns too,” Kitten declared. “I read it.”
“Let’s play horse,” Cappie suggested.
“No,” Kitten said. There was that tone in her voice again, Fay thought with alarm—that certain whispery pitch that she had come to associate with bad things.
Ashley, Frances. Kitten. New York: Drake, Richards and Weems, 1976. Print.
Chapter Thirteen
I sat for hours in front of a blank white sheet of virtual paper on my laptop and managed to not type one single word. Not one damn word.
The Wi-Fi seemed to be humming along with no hitch, so I checked my email and all my social-media pages. Aurora had dashed off a quick message on one of them, telling me about her foray back into the dating world and asking where the hell I was. I typed a brief reply, giving her a cryptic explanation: I’ve finally decided to piss Frances off for good, Rors. I can’t talk about it yet, but it’s going to be big and bad. I’m going to need a friend.
A message pinged right back. You got it, doll. XOXO. Don’t stay gone too long.
In the kitchen, I found the makings of a sandwich and plucked an apple from a bowl of fruit on the table. I took the food back in my room and ate slowly, then lay down. I fell into a deep sleep, lulled by the sea breezes ruffling the curtains from the open balcony doors, then woke up feeling disoriented and inexplicably gloomy.
Outside, the sky swirled with storm clouds. I shut the doors and gulped a glass of water. I was wondering just how quickly I could book a flight from Brunswick or Jacksonville to San Francisco, to hang with Aurora, when there was a knock on my door.
“How’s it going?” Doro said. Her eyes wandered around the room, and I remembered my earlier plan to tidy up.
“Great,” I said.
“You need to get out of this room. Breathe some fresh air.”
“Oh, I was just—”
“Get dressed,” she said. So I threw on a clean tank top and a pair of baggy men’s chinos I’d found in Frances’s closet.
I followed Doro through the maze of corridors, landings, and twist-backs that deposited us at a side door. Esther was just bustling past with a duster and an armload of rags.
“Field trip,” Doro called to her. “You can do her room while we’re gone.”
“Oh, no,” I said. “I’ll handle that.”
“Absolutely not,” Doro said.
“You’re our guest,” Esther chimed in and vanished down the hallway.
The door opened to a porte cochere where one of the Jeeps was waiting. We took off, Doro taking a shortcut to the main road, then turning onto a smaller trail and plunging us into the woods. It was even darker than usual, storm clouds gathering overhead. Cooler too.
“Might get a little bumpy,” Doro shouted over the wind. “So hang on. I want to show you something.”
I grabbed the roll bar and closed my eyes. Asa was going to kill me if I didn’t deliver some chapters in the next couple of days. Or maybe he would just bypass me altogether and give the project to the ghostwriter. The two of them could bang out an unauthorized biography; people did it all the time.
In a sickening instant, I realized something: I needed Asa more than he needed me. This book was the only weapon I had in my arsenal. A chance, at last, to own my story. To tell what had happened to me, the way I wanted to tell it. How was I going to do it?
“Stop thinking about the book,” Doro said.
I looked at her in surprise. A couple of hanks of hair had come loose from her braid and were whipping in the air. She was smiling.
“You some kind of mind reader?” I said.
“No. Your face is just really . . . expressive, I guess. That’s what I’d be thinking about, if I was you.” She maneuvered around a hole in the road.
“I haven’t written much.” Actually, not a single thing.
“Oh, you’ve got a touch of writer’s block. Happens all the time, right? At least, that’s what I’ve heard.” She looked at her watch. “We’ve got about a half hour until sunset. But you have to promise me something.”
“Okay.”
“Don’t think about writing or your mother or the book until after the sun goes down.”
I growled in frustration. But I was smiling now too. A certain lightness had stolen over me. I was having fun. It should be unsettling, probably, how easy it was to be with Doro. How talking to her felt like talking to an old friend. Or maybe this was what it should feel like to talk to your mother. I smiled to myself. This place was sucking me in already.
“Close your eyes.” She stomped on the gas, and I felt us shoot up a slight rise, then level out. The Jeep ground to a halt. “Now open,” she said.
We were on a low ridge that overlooked a large, flat expanse. Soft mounds rippling, a pale-green-and-golden ocean. There were no trees, just tall waving grass and the pink-and-lavender sky above it.
And the smell . . .
The only way to describe it was that it smelled like the beginning of life—like you’d been hanging around that warm pond of Darwin’s when the light and heat and salt and whatever else sparked and formed the first living organism. The air was redolent with warm mud and brine—the birth and decay of a million different living creatures.