New Decameron Ninety-Three: Pamela Sargent (Patreon)

"The Drowned Father," first published in Polyphony 6, Copyright 2006, 2015 

by Pamela Sargent

The airline had promised reimbursement for his ticket, but Lucas was still irritated as he boarded the bus. From here, it would take three hours to get to the airport in Norris, and he wouldn't be home until at least two in the morning, assuming that he could get a cab in any reasonable amount of time.

A quick glance around the bus's interior revealed worn seats. Lucas took a book from his carry-on, hoisted the bag into the overhead bin, then sat down. Maybe he would get lucky and have two bus seats all to himself.

People wrestled their luggage through the aisle and settled into the seats around him. Lucas was grateful that he had brought only a carry-on; most of his fellow passengers had looked extremely unhappy while being told that their checked-through baggage would catch up with them in a day or so. He flicked on one of the overhead lights and opened his book; if anyone sat next to him, he meant to look busy and avoid conversation. He had just reached the end of the novel's first chapter when the pilot announced that they would be landing in Alton instead of at the airport in Norris because of an engine problem, but not to worry, they would all be taken care of and after all their personal safety was what mattered to the airline.

A valise hit the seat next to him. Lucas looked up to see a slender blond woman in a dark blue blazer, then lowered his eyes to his book, ignoring her as she secured her bag overhead and slammed the bin's door shut. She sat down, fidgeted as she settled a large purse on her lap, then heaved a sigh.

"I don't have any luck with planes," the woman said. "Last time it was three hours late taking off and we had to sit there the whole time on the tarmac."

Lucas said nothing.

"Next time I'll drive, I don't care how long it takes. Beats going through all that airport security."

Lucas peered at her from the sides of his eyes, noted that her attractive face was fine-featured, with a model's prominent cheekbones, and that she had far too much eye makeup on, then returned to his book.

The bus trembled and growled as it rolled away from the airport. "Whatcha reading?" the woman asked.

He closed the book and turned it to show her the spine.

"All's Well," she said, reading the title, "by Mack Vernon." She let out a breath.

"I started reading his novels a couple of years ago," Lucas said. "A friend of mine loaned me the first book in his Loren Reynolds series, and I was hooked."

"That was Good Intentions," she said, surprising him by knowing the title of the first volume.

"That's it," Lucas said. "After that, I got Early To Bed and All's Well from an online book dealer, but even without the dust jackets, they cost me a pretty penny. This dealer has a paperback of Idle Hands, too, but he's asking a hundred dollars for it, which is kind of rich for my blood, even if Vernon may be one of the best suspense writers ever. I just hope I can find the rest of the series without having to pay a fortune."

"He only wrote seven of them," the woman said, "so you've only got four more to buy, and they can't all cost that much."

She was holding his interest in spite of himself. "You wouldn't happen to have any of his books, would you?" he asked.

"Afraid not. Once..." She fell silent and looked away.

He opened his book and tried to focus on the page.

"What do you think of Atlanta?" the woman asked, clearly intent on keeping their conversation going.

"I was in Sarasota. Atlanta was just where I changed flights."

"Down there looking for a job?"

"No," he replied. Old memories were coming back to him, of sitting in other buses and expounding on his own fictitious accomplishments.

Actually, I'm a writer, he would say to the passenger next to him when asked about what he did. He would make up titles, tell stories about working with editors who in real life had rejected everything he had ever submitted to them. Sometimes the other passenger, having only a vague idea of what writers did and inflated notions about the glamour of the literary life, wanted to hear elaborate tales of pending book contracts and trips to Manhattan and writers' workshops and book signings and speaking gigs and queries from Hollywood, until the life he had conjured up while traveling seemed more real to him than his actual life. If he talked it up enough, he had once thought, maybe it would someday become a reality; he might wake up one morning to find his writing done, and volumes of his published work sitting on his bookshelves.

"As a matter of fact, I'm retired," he said to the woman.

"You don't look anywhere near old enough to be retired," she said.

"I took early retirement." He had been practical, postponing his dream of writing for a steady job and a pension. Now, with his fixed but dependable income, he had all the time he could want to read and travel and tell himself that it still wasn't too late to go back and write, that lots of writers didn't get anywhere until their middle years, that he had been smart to make the choices he had, and that one of these days, now that he could afford it, he would sit down and write the stories that he knew he still had inside himself.

He lifted his book and held it closer to ward off any more discussion.

"I was visiting my sister in Decatur," the woman said. "My half-sister, actually. Mom got married again after she and my dad broke up."

Lucas peered at her over the book. She looked older than she had seemed at first; there were lines etched around her eyes and her mouth, and a bit too much fleshiness under her chin. About forty, he guessed, maybe even a little older.

At last he closed the book, leaned back against his seat, and closed his eyes, hoping that she would take the hint. He had finally kicked the habit of long discussions in transit with strangers; you never knew where they might lead. People unburdened themselves of confidences they probably wouldn't have entrusted even to close friends, or simply made up stories, safe in the knowledge that they would probably never run into their fellow passengers again. He knew that game; playacting, that's what it was, and maybe some amateur psychoanalysis, too. Maybe most of the dialogues he had engaged in on trains and during flights had been mostly lies on both sides.

The woman said, "As a matter of fact, he was my father."

Lucas opened his eyes. "Who was your father?"

"Mack Vernon." She waved an arm at him. "The guy who wrote that book."

She had seen the name on the spine and decided to impress him with a fictitious father. That she knew the titles of a couple of books and that there were only seven volumes in the Loren Reynolds series didn't prove anything.

"Then do me a favor," Lucas said. "Don't tell me what happens in All's Well. I'm only on the second chapter."

"I never read any of his stuff."

Sure, he thought. That was an easy way to cover herself, in case he wanted to discuss the earlier books. He suddenly decided to trip her up, show her that she couldn't put one over on him. "Bet you appreciate all the money he made, though."

She offered him a lopsided smile. "He was almost always broke."

"Still, you must have been sorry when he died."

"He should have been more careful," she said. "If he'd been anywhere else except that cabin, maybe somebody would have found him. He didn't have to drown in that shallow little creek."

She knew that much, but then anybody who knew anything about his novels was likely to have known about that tragic accident. The tale of Mack Vernon's untimely death after what had apparently been a difficult and financially challenged life was the first story Sam Wilton had told Lucas about the author, a tragic event that was still mourned by a devoted coterie of fans.

Twenty years ago, after what had been a life of critical neglect and poor sales, the first of Mack Vernon's Loren Reynolds novels had been optioned by a movie producer. Flush with money for the first time in his life, Vernon had bought a summer cabin in his beloved Adirondack Mountains, the setting for most of the Loren Reynolds books. Less than a month after he had moved into his remote refuge, two backpackers had found him lying face down in the stream near his isolated cabin, a broken whiskey bottle at his side. Maybe he had been celebrating his good fortune, and maybe it was just as well he hadn't lived to see the screen version of Good Intentions, which Lucas had rented on videotape after reading the novel, much against his friend Sam's advice. The middle-aged and somewhat grizzled freelance investigator Loren Reynolds had been transformed into a muscular young hunk, his storefront office that doubled as a used bookstore had become an antiquarian bookselling operation with a wealthy clientele, the small upstate New York town in which he lived had been transplanted to the northern California coast, and the production had been graced with the title of "Lethal Intentions," entirely missing the point of all the titles in the series, which had been drawn from well-known old adages that also served as epigraphs for each novel. The whole cinematic mess had gone straight to video and had never been released in theaters. Had he not already been an admirer of the book, he would never have been able to sit through the movie.

"He had no sense at all," the woman continued, "especially about money. As soon as he brings in some serious cash, does he invest it? Does he do anything smart with his dough? Of course not. He goes and buys a cabin up in the woods. Doesn't even occur to him that maybe he should put something away for a rainy day."

Maybe she was Mack Vernon's daughter, but he still had his doubts. There had been no mention of children, or even a marriage, in any of the material about the author Sam had e-mailed to him over the past months, although that might not mean anything; Mack Vernon had gone out of his way to avoid publicity, leaving it to his steadily increasing numbers of posthumous readers to dig up the details of his life. Maybe the woman was planning to pass herself off as Mack Vernon's only heir and therefore as someone entitled to any future income from his books. Given the reputation the Loren Reynolds series was rapidly acquiring, marked most recently by major pieces in the New York Times Book Review and the New Yorker, it was probably only a matter of time before some publisher bought up the rights to the books and reissued them in new editions. She might be rehearsing a scam on him.

No, Lucas thought; that was the kind of story he might have concocted about this woman back when he had allowed his imagination to run rampant, when he was still trying to write. She was probably just entertaining herself, as he had done back in the days when he had regaled strangers on buses and trains with tales of his nonexistent publications. It was a good thing he had not followed Mack Vernon's path in life, that he had listened to the parents who had told him to stop fooling around with his writing and finish college and settle down. His tedious years in a local office of the state tax department had left him with the security of a pension and the likelihood, given his good health and sound habits, of two or even three decades of leisure. He had not actually given up his dream of being a writer, but had only postponed it.

She said, "He was just an accident waiting to happen."

Lucas closed his book. "Accidents can happen even when you're careful," he said, "and at least he missed the hash those movie people made of his book."

"I heard that movie was a turkey."

"Just about unwatchable. I think it actually won some sort of award for being one of the worst movies ever made."

"So you know about my father. Didn't think there was hardly anybody around who still cared."

"Oh, there's a lot more interest in his novels lately," Lucas said, "even a couple of articles about him. That's why my friend Sam had to loan me the first Reynolds book. He said I'd have a heck of a time finding it what with all the interest in the series. He just finished putting up a Mack Vernon Web site a little while ago, and he got so many hits during the first month that he had to get a new server."

"Really," the woman said.

"People keep asking when somebody's going to reissue his books." A puzzled look crossed the woman's face. "You know, bring his novels out in new editions now that he's getting more attention and so many people are trying to get copies. I can't believe that whoever his agent is now isn't trying to capitalize on it, that someone wouldn't have contacted you by now for permission to reprint them."

The puzzled expression was replaced by a glassy stare.

"You would be the one to contact, wouldn't you?" he asked. She shrugged. "Were you his only child?"

She looked past him to an invisible audience outside the window, as if hoping for a hint on how to answer a question that might be a trap. "Yeah."

"Then you'd be the heir to everything, wouldn't you? Unless your father left the rights to someone else. Maybe you ought to get after some information about his agent, let him know that there might be some kind of a book deal there."

"I don't know anything about that," she said.

"What about his papers, his contracts? What about--"

"Don't know anything about his papers," she interrupted. "He wasn't exactly the most organized guy in the world. All he left me was whatever else he was supposed to get paid for that movie, which turned out to be a big fat zero."

"What about that cabin he bought?" Lucas asked.

Her eyes narrowed. For a moment, she looked angry. "What about it?"

"That must have gone to you, too. Just about everybody who's a fan of his knows about that cabin, about how he'd wanted one all his life, a retreat just like the place Loren Reynolds had. Kind of ironic and sad that he didn't get to enjoy it that long."

"Had to sell it," she said, "but it was such a run-down old shack that I didn't get that much for it. And that was it. He'd spent everything else."

She seemed to have an answer for everything. According to his friend Sam, there had been recent rumors of a pending book deal for reissues of the Loren Reynolds novels, but nothing had come of that, and there was speculation that there had been problems in clearing the rights to the books. Vernon's original agent had died a few years ago, while the agent's former associate had opened up his own literary agency and taken on new partners before retiring himself. The cabin had been in a relatively inaccessible region of the Adirondacks, meaning that it probably wouldn't have attracted wealthy buyers looking for a summer place near a resort town. He couldn't find any holes in what the woman had said so far.

"You know," he said, "I could put you in touch with my friend. He's in touch with a lot of Mack Vernon fans, and even a couple of his former editors, so one of them's sure to know who's handling your father's books now. You could find out if there might be something coming to you. It could turn out to be a lot of money."

"Sure," she said. "Lots of zeroes."

"Look into it," Lucas said. "I mean, what have you got to lose?"

She looked away from him. She might be a fraud, as he suspected, or she might already know that she had no rights to any profits from her father's published work. Mack Vernon wouldn't be the first writer to die unexpectedly and leave his literary estate in a tangled mess, or to have signed his rights over to someone completely unprepared to handle them.

"You don't know what it was like," she said then. "He might have been around, but he was never there, not really. My friends used to ask me what it was like, having both my mom and my dad around the house all day, but most of the time it was like he wasn't really there. He'd go into his room, to his desk and his typewriter and his coffee pot and all his books, and he'd close the door. The only times he'd come out were for meals or to go to sleep or to get into an argument with Mom where they'd scream at each other because after a while the only way she could even get him to talk was to get into a fight with him, and when I came out of my bedroom he'd shout at me to go back to bed if I knew what was good for me. That was when he was home. Then he'd go off for a few days, or a couple of weeks, or even a month or more sometimes, and half the time Mom didn't even know where he was. Doing research, he'd say, but he always came home looking like he'd been on a bender."

Lucas made a noncommittal noise in his throat.

"I had to be really quiet when I got up, because he always slept late, and when I got home from school I had to tiptoe around and whisper and never knock on his door unless it was an absolute emergency and if any of my friends came over, I had to tell them to shut up and be quiet and not disturb him."

"He was probably just trying to concentrate on his work," Lucas said. "Distractions can really derail somebody who's writing, knock a particular phrase or idea right out of your head, even make you lose a whole day of work if you really get thrown off your stride."

"Anyway, that was before Mom went back to work because he just couldn't make enough, but then things got even worse, because then he was the only one there when I got home from school and I couldn't do anything. Couldn't watch TV, because it was in the room next to his. Couldn't bring any friends home because they'd make too much noise and then he'd come barging out and swear at everybody so pretty soon nobody came over because they all thought he was crazy. After that, the only time he'd say anything to me was when he'd open his door and yell at me to shut the hell up because he was trying to work. Nine times out of ten I had to go down the block to the deli to get some sandwiches or salads because Mom was too tired to make dinner when she got home and he couldn't be bothered to cook anything."

Lucas kept his face still, trying to think of how to stem her flow of recriminations.

"After a while," she said, "he was staying in his room almost all the time, I think he was even sleeping in there sometimes. Mom would come home and bang on the door and start yelling at him to come out and that if he weren't such a lazy bum he could make enough so she wouldn't have to go back to her shitty job. And he wouldn't come out. He wouldn't even tell her to go away. He'd just stay in there while she screamed and pounded on the door."

Lucas was now having more trouble believing that her tales might be entirely fictitious. She didn't seem like someone creative enough to invent such a detailed story, and there was an undercurrent of rage in her voice that was setting off all his mental alarm bells. He shrank back in his seat, almost afraid to look at her.

"So about a year and a half after Mom went back to work, she came home and got out our suitcases and packed my stuff and said she'd been sneaking her own stuff out of the house for a couple of weeks already because she'd rented an apartment and that was where we were going to live from now on. So we took everything out to the car and he didn't even come out to see what we were doing. That was when I was twelve. Mom got a divorce a year later, and a year after that she married my stepdad. Not that he paid much attention to me, either, but at least he paid the bills."

"Guess you had it tough," Lucas said, not knowing what else to say.

"Trouble with Joe--that's my stepdad--the thing is, he was pretty good to my mom, and my sister could wrap him around her little finger, but I was just kind of in the way as far as he was concerned, I mean, I wasn't his kid. And my father didn't care, he didn't even bother to ask for custody, not that I would have wanted to live with him anyway, but he could have tried."

Maybe some enterprising fan of Mack Vernon's had already found out about any marriage, divorce, and daughter. Not that it mattered; by the time he discovered whether or not there might be any truth to her story, they would long since have gone their separate ways.

"He didn't bother with visitation, either," she said. "He could have had me every other weekend and for two months in the summer, but he never asked for me, and he even stopped making phone calls, not that he ever had much to talk about except what book he was working on and how everything was going to pay off for him someday. He never paid any attention to me when I was around, so I sure as hell can't be surprised that he ignored me after Mom and I moved out."

"I guess not," Lucas said as she took a deep breath.

"He tried to make it up to me later, when I was out of school and working. I was waitressing at a coffee shop, and he'd come in and buy a cup of coffee and try to talk to me during my break, or he'd catch me outside when I was leaving and take me out to dinner somewhere, so we could sit there while he went on and on about how he was different now and he'd make it up to me and what a lousy father he'd been and how bad he felt about everything."

"Then he was sorry," Lucas said.

"Oh, he was sorry, all right, when it was too late to matter, when he couldn't do anything for me anyway. Just about the last time I heard from him, he called me up to tell me about Good Intentions selling to the movies, about how he was going to get a place in the mountains and I could come up to visit, as if I'd have time to hang around with him in some ratty old shack in the woods where he'd just ignore me or go on and on about his goddamn books. He wasn't really that sorry. Everything was always all about him in the end."

"Well." Lucas cleared his throat. "Could you excuse me for a minute?" He leaned forward in his seat, feeling that he had to get away from her torrent, if only for a few moments. "Have to use the rest room."

She nodded, got out of her seat, and stood aside. He set down his book and slipped past her, then stumbled to the back of the bus.

The rest room, he saw with relief, was empty. He went inside, secured the door, sat down on the closed toilet seat, then took a few deep breaths, wishing that he had never taken the copy of All's Well out of his carry-on. He might have been getting some much-needed rest by now instead of listening to a stranger complain about her life.

"You aren't really that sorry." Terri had said that to him, just after announcing that she wanted a divorce. "You won't notice anything different when I'm gone, you never paid any attention to me anyway." Lucas hadn't tried to stop her from leaving, largely because he had realized even then, hurt and humiliated as he had felt at the time, that there was some truth to his wife's statement. He had known even then that he preferred his own company to that of anyone else. That was part of what he thought of as his writer's temperament, standing a bit aside, being an onlooker to life, needing enough solitude to be able to hear his own thoughts. He still had that kind of temperament even now, and he treasured it.

Mack Vernon had clearly shared some of that emotional distance from those around him, along with a need to retreat from others; there was something of that quality in his character Loren Reynolds. Lucas congratulated himself again for having extricated himself from a marriage that had been a mistake and not weighing himself down with other obligations. Mack Vernon probably shouldn't have had any children, either, but whatever his faults, he had apparently regretted his actions. Surely by now his daughter should have been able to take some pride in his work, in the novels that might finally secure his place among the masters of suspense, perhaps even among America's major literary figures. That accomplishment surely outweighed anything else he might have owed to his embittered daughter.

If, he told himself, there was any truth to her story.

Maybe there wasn't. Vernon's protagonist Loren Reynolds was a loner, as were so many fictional detectives, but his relationship with his adult daughter Frani was portrayed as warm and affectionate. Frani hadn't put in much of an appearance in the first two novels, but she had already been on her way to visit her father in the first chapter of All's Well, and the New Yorker article Lucas had read had hinted that Frani Reynolds played a major role in the last two books of the series. Not that he would make the mistake of confusing an author's fiction with the actual events of his life; Vernon might have been writing about what he hoped his own relationship with his daughter might have been, depicting the kind of parental bond he had failed to forge in his own life.

Lucas frowned. The article in the New Yorker, like everything else written about Mack Vernon, had mentioned how little was known about the author except that he had been born in Buffalo, dropped out of college during his sophomore year, been constantly short of money, lived most of his life in upstate New York, been a heavy drinker if not an alcoholic, and had in midlife lived with three different women, all of whom were reluctant to talk about him, for varying lengths of time. Somehow Lucas found it hard to believe that a writer for that magazine, with all of its resources, wouldn't have been able to dig up information about a daughter, if there was one.

He forced himself to stand up and leave the rest room. The woman, he noticed, had moved to his seat; as he came closer, he saw that she was sitting there with his copy of All's Well propped against the purse on her lap. Her hands were hooked around the book like claws, one hand at the top and the other on the bottom, as if she were about to tear the book in two.

She started as he sat down; the fierce look in her dark eyes faded. "Okay if I sit by the window?" she asked politely.

"Fine," he replied, wanting to grab the book from her.

"We can switch back later if you want." She handed the book to him. "He dedicated this one to me, as if that was going to make any difference. I remember when he first showed it to me. It says, 'To Lindy: may it all end well for you.'"

Lucas opened the book to the dedication page, which he had only glanced at before. "Ah, yes."

"I didn't even know what it meant. 'May it all end well for you.' What kind of thing is that to write to a little kid?"

"Maybe he thought you'd appreciate it when you were older," Lucas said. "Look at it this way, Lindy. You had a major American writer dedicate a book to you." 

"Don't call me Lindy." He could barely hear her voice above the bus's motor; her face had grown pale. "I hated that name, my name's Rosalind, but he always called me Lindy. I'd tell him to stop it and he would and then he'd forget. I must have told him a hundred times to call me Rosalind, but he didn't listen. He never listened. And then he has to go and put Lindy in that goddamn dedication."

Lucas said. "I won't call you Lindy." He attempted another smile. "It's just the opposite with me. My name's Lucas, but I always tell people to call me Luke."

"He didn't listen. Didn't care what I wanted to be called."

She would ruin the pleasure he took in the work of Mack Vernon; pretty soon, he wouldn't be able to pick up a Loren Reynolds novel without recalling her harsh words and hoarse voice. He could almost hate her for that, for spoiling something he had come to value so much.

"Look, your father might have had his faults," Lucas said, "and I won't try to justify his behavior, but you could still be proud of him, couldn't you? It's got to be some consolation that he did his work and there are more and more readers who admire it. You're not the only person who has issues with your father, but at least yours actually accomplished something." He tried to keep his tone light, but exasperation had crept into his voice. "Maybe he just had to save whatever was best in him for his readers. More and more people are finding out how good a writer he was, and if that doesn't mean anything to you, think about what kind of money you might get for new editions of his work. Maybe I could help you out. There are ways to find out who's representing him now."

If her estrangement from her father had left her unaware of what might be coming to her, he would be doing her a big favor. Far more important, he would be making Mack Vernon's work available to all the readers desperately seeking the increasingly hard to find copies of the Loren Reynolds series. Vernon had left her the cabin and whatever he might have been owed for "Lethal Intentions," so chances were that he had left her the rights to the novels as well. Sam would just about bust a gut if Lucas could put him in contact with Vernon's daughter, and once they found out who represented the books...he might get something out of this encounter after all.

His thoughts were racing ahead of him. There might even be a finder's fee of some kind, although just helping to get the novels back into print would be enough of a reward in itself. It might even be enough to inspire him to get back to his own writing. He could begin by writing an appreciation of Mack Vernon for Sam's Web site; better yet, he could write about Lindy--or Rosalind--and her early life with her father. That kind of human interest piece would be a natural for a major magazine, especially if it ended with Rosalind finally forgiving her father for the pain he had caused.

"Think about it," he continued. "Readers all over the country would be grateful to you, and you can't tell what might happen later on. With new editions out, there'd be even more interest in your father's writing. Somebody might even decide to make another movie from one of his books, something truer to what he wrote."

She turned away and pressed one hand against the window, as if trying to escape from the bus.

"I can give you my card," he said, "and then--"

"I don't need your card," she said without turning around. "I can't do anything about his goddamn books."

Lucas was again thinking that she was a fraud, that she was just stringing him along. She probably knew just enough about Mack Vernon to add a few convincing details to her lies, and if her anger seemed genuine, that might be only because her real father had resembled the Mack Vernon she had described. She might only be using a dead man whom she had never known to fill a role in her own personal psychodrama.

He sat there for a while, clutching his book, but apparently she had nothing more to say. Maybe he would be able to get some rest after all.

He closed his eyes and drifted as the bus rumbled on through the night. Usually, if he put his mind to it, he could fall asleep just about anywhere, but he remained conscious of the woman next to him; he sensed the tension in her, the anger, a bitterness about her life that apparently ran so deep that she could not even carry on a conversation with a stranger without spewing her resentments.

"Some ratty old shack in the woods." That was what she called the modest refuge Mack Vernon had found for so brief a time, and now Lucas found himself growing increasingly angry with her for being so quick to slander Vernon's reputation and insult the sanctuary of a man she might not even have known, just for the sake of putting one over on a stranger. She claimed to have inherited Mack Vernon's cabin, an easy enough story to make up, as his only surviving child probably would have inherited the place even if he had left no will; but she had also claimed that there had been no more money coming to her in payment for the movie rights to Good Intentions. She could not conceivably have known that unless someone had informed her of that fact.

His eyes shot open. Then she had to have been lying from the start, because anyone who would know enough to tell Mack Vernon's daughter what was owed or not owed for film rights either had to be an agent or someone, perhaps Vernon's lawyer, who would be able to put the daughter in touch with any agent. All of which meant that the woman's claim of not knowing anything about the writer's agent or his papers was probably the only truthful part of her story. She didn't know anything about his literary estate because she had never known Mack Vernon at all, and had picked up what she did know second-hand.

Lucas felt confused and disappointed; his fantasy of revealing a previously unknown daughter of Mack Vernon to the world had abruptly evaporated. But at least he could congratulate himself for not being completely taken in.

He suddenly wanted to get back at her for her deception. Mack Vernon, who had written so movingly and profoundly about a man struggling to help and protect other people even while longing to retreat from them, deserved no less.

"You know," he said, "I wasn't telling you everything before, when I told you I was retired. I mean, I am retired, but I have another profession, so to speak. I've had a few short stories published, and I've been working on a novel, now that there's time enough to write it, and a couple of major agents are thinking of taking me on as a client."

She shifted in her seat, then turned toward him. "Oh, really?"

"Usually I keep that to myself. I don't care to have everybody know all the details of my life. But I can make an exception for you, given who you are."

"So you are a writer," she said.

"Well, yeah, even if I haven't been at it that long, and if I can do half as well as your father, I'll consider myself lucky. It may sound like bragging, but frankly I think what I'm writing now has bestseller potential, and if I'm successful enough, I'm going to do everything I can to get Mack Vernon as much attention as possible. In fact, my real ambition is to write the kind of fiction he might have written."

She stared at him, unblinking.

"It's hard to measure up to his standard," he said, "but that's what I'm aiming for, nothing less than to be the literary heir of Mack Vernon."

He went on to mention an upcoming nonexistent piece that the New York Times Book Review had commissioned from him, then recycled a few other lies about editors and sojourns in Manhattan that he had tested on fellow travelers years ago. She listened without interrupting, without even fidgeting; maybe she had already guessed that he had caught on to her deception.

"So that's it," she said when he was finished. "You think Mack Vernon's such a big deal because you want to be just like him."

He had to give her credit for keeping up her front. "That's why you really ought to take my card," he said, "and let me know if you want me to help put you in touch with his agent." He reached into the front pocket of his jacket for his wallet and removed one of his cards with a flourish.

She gazed at him without speaking.

He thrust the card at her. "Take it."

She took it from him with two fingers, stared at it for a few seconds, then opened her purse and dropped the card inside. Maybe she was already thinking of all the money that might have been hers if she had actually been Mack Vernon's daughter.

"Look," he said, "I don't want to force any help on you, but do let me know if you want me to try to locate your dad's agent. Even if there's some kind of problem with the rights, he should be able to straighten it out, especially with all that's at stake."

"All the money, you mean."

"Not just the money," Lucas said, "but the chance to bring a lot more attention to the work of such an important writer. You might become pretty important yourself. I wouldn't be surprised if you had people contacting you for interviews as soon as they find out about you."

"Money's the one thing I don't have to worry about any more. Maybe my marriages didn't work out, but at least my exes were a lot smarter about money than my father ever was. And I kind of like to keep my business to myself, too, so I'm not interested in any interviews, either."

"Suit yourself," he said, "but sooner or later, somebody's going to do something about getting those books back into print. And if his agent and his lawyer can't figure out how to do it, eventually some fan of Mack Vernon's is just going to scan all the books and put them in electronic formats and post them on the Internet and dare somebody to come and sue him. Normally I wouldn't approve of that, but if it's the only way to make his work available to more readers..."

"Makes no difference to me."

"But it will." He wondered if he could needle her enough for her to admit that she had been lying. "Even that would be enough to call more attention to your father. I really don't think you can stop it. He's too good a writer to stay buried for long."

She was staring straight ahead; the small hands on top of her purse were fists.

"So you might as well let me see what I can find out about his agent and what might be done. At this point, I'm about ready to try to contact the agent myself."

"Go ahead," she said in a tiny voice.

"Maybe I will." Not that it would matter; by the time he proved her story was false, she would have disappeared into whatever kind of life she led.  

"I'll tell you what the hardest part was," she said. "He didn't need anybody. Maybe he'd use them for a while, but he didn't really need them. He didn't need my mother, and he sure as hell didn't need me. Think of what that's like, knowing when you're a little kid that your father wouldn't even notice if you went and dropped off the face of the earth."

Lucas said, "Must have been tough." He folded his arms across his chest and closed his eyes.

"He lived for himself," she added, "all the time. Those books of his, that's all he cared about."

"I'm sorry," he said, like a ghost come back to haunt her. 

"There was no him, never any of him." She shifted in her seat, and he knew that she felt trapped, wanting to escape him.

#

Lucas had stolen some sleep by the time he got off the bus. The small Norris airport, as he had expected, was nearly empty. A uniformed representative of the airline, a round chirpy woman, was there to greet those who had missed connecting flights. Most of the passengers trailed after her while Lucas strode in the other direction, toward the main entrance.

He did not see the small blond woman anywhere now. She had still been in her seat when he left the bus, her face turned toward the window. Maybe she was feeling embarrassed about their conversation, about her attempt to pass herself off as the daughter of Mack Vernon.

He hurried through the glassy doors of the entrance to find that there were no taxis outside. Lucas sighed and went back indoors, sat down in one of the seats near the entrance, and fumbled in his pocket for his cell phone.

"Waiting for somebody?"

He looked up to see the blond woman. "No," he replied. "I have to call a cab."

She stepped closer to him, peered down at him with narrowed eyes, then set down her small suitcase. "I could give you a lift."

"You live in Norris?"

"No, up in Bayley, but I didn't want to fly out of there on one of those dinky little planes."

"You sure it isn't too much trouble?" Lucas asked. "It'll take you at least an hour to get to Bayley from here."

"It doesn't matter. I'm not in any rush." She seemed another person now.

"That's awfully kind of you." He was beginning to feel a bit guilty about trying to expose her lies. "My place isn't that far, it shouldn't take longer than twenty minutes or so."

"Then come on," she said as if they had just met.

#

Her SUV was parked near the airport entrance. It took them only a few minutes to get to the nearest highway. "You can stay on Route 8," Lucas told her, "until exit 5, and my house is only a few blocks from there."

She did not reply. She had been silent during the short walk to the car and hadn't spoken since then.

"I really do appreciate this," he said.

"I had to take this road anyway. It's not just for your convenience." There was a sharper edge to her voice. "Maybe you should have just parked your car at the airport."

"Believe it or not, it's considerably cheaper to pay for a cab than to park a car there for a few days." The lights above the guard rail on his right streaked past as the car picked up speed; he wanted to tell her to slow down.

She said, "There's something I didn't tell you before."

So now she was going to admit that she was lying, he thought, and wondered why. Maybe she wanted to become better acquainted with him, and figured that she would now have to reveal her deception. Well, he didn't want to get to know her better; he didn't want to know her at all. It had taken him long enough to get his life exactly the way he wanted it, without other people trying to make claims on him. Right now all he wanted to do was get home and crawl into bed with his copy of All's Well.

"What I didn't tell you," she continued, "is that I already heard from my father's agent. About four or five months ago, I got a call from the lawyer who handled everything when my father died, said he had a hell of a time finding me, maybe because of all the name changes. I mean, I used my stepdad's last name until I got married, and I'm still using my third ex's name because I didn't want the hassle of changing it back, so it took him a while. He said this agent really wanted to talk to me, so I said, sure, I'd give him a call, thinking maybe some money finally came in for that movie."

Lucas glanced at her, amazed that she was still weaving her fabric of lies. He almost had to admire her for keeping the game going.

"So I called him, and he went on and on about how there was all this interest in my father's stuff and people calling him a literary treasure and publishers wanting to bring out the Loren Reynolds books again and even a book of his short stories and luckily they still had all the copies in the files from his old agent, the books and stories and contracts, but they needed my permission because he'd signed everything over to me. I didn't know what he was talking about. I mean, I knew my dad had done what he said, signed everything over to me, but I didn't know all the details about his contracts and all of that. So I told him I didn't know anything about it and he said I didn't have to know, all I had to do was sign what he sent me and he'd make sure everything was in order and if I had any questions about anything, I could run them past my own lawyer. 'Yeah, well, you let me know,' I told him, and then I hung up, figuring that was the last time I'd hear from him, but he called back a week later and said he just about had an agreement nailed down and there'd be a good chunk of change in it for me. And that was when I told him I didn't give a shit, that I wouldn't sign anything no matter how much money there was, that as far as I was concerned he could take all my dad's stuff and burn it."

That rant rang true. Lucas took a breath. "But...but why?" he managed to say.

"I told you why, on the bus. I told you. You just weren't listening, because you're just like him, another guy who doesn't listen to anybody. So the agent calls me back a week later, and I say I'm still not interested and frankly I have my doubts about all these people being so hot after his stuff. And that was it, I thought, but he keeps bugging me, keeps calling me up and leaving messages on my machine until I finally have to go visit my sister just to get the hell away from him. And now you tell me the same things he did, about all these people wanting to read my dad's books and that there's articles about him and how you want to be just like him. Well, don't bother trying. You're him already. Been him a long time."

Exit 5 was coming up. He wanted to tell her to get into the right lane or she'd miss the ramp, but was afraid to speak. The car suddenly swerved to the right, throwing him to the side; his shoulder strap tightened against his neck.

"You know what he did after he got that shack in the mountains?" she continued as they sped down the narrow ramp of the exit. "He called me up and said I should come up there to see him, as if I'd want to hang around that place while he ignored me or went on and on about his books, and then he said he had something to give me, to make up for being such a shitty father. And you know what he was going to give me, what my great big present was going to be?"

"No," Lucas croaked as the car bounced over a speed bump onto the road that led to his house. His body tensed; he felt melded to his seat. She was still driving too fast, especially in this neighborhood of small houses and narrow serpentine streets. He wanted to tell her to slow down, but the words would not come.

"His books," she said. "That's what he wanted to give me, a set of his books, he was going to autograph them all and then I'd have my own freakin' first editions of the Loren Reynolds series."

She paused. Lucas rushed to fill the silence. "Hope you still have them," he said anxiously as the row of books flashed in his imagination. "They'd be worth a lot now." The car screeched to a sudden stop, whipping his body toward the windshield, then throwing him backward. He sat there, gulping air, afraid to move.

"That's all you care about, isn't it," she whispered, "him and his books. He said he wanted me to have them and that maybe someday I'd read them and then maybe I'd understand him because he'd put so much of himself into them, and before I can even say anything, he hangs up on me. And that was the last time I ever talked to him. He never listened to me, and then he goes and falls into that stupid river and drowns. I never got a chance to tell him what I thought, and when I'm finally ready to tell him, he goes and dies on me."

Lucas was silent.

"All he cared about was himself and being alone and writing his goddamn books." Her voice was rising. "He didn't care about me, all he cared about was making himself feel better by giving me his books, as if that was going to make any difference. And you're just like him."

He fumbled at his seat belt. "Look, thanks for the ride." He struggled for breath, afraid that she would hit the accelerator again. "It's close enough to my home, I can walk from here."

"You're just like him," she repeated. "All he cared about was his books. Well, I don't care how much that agent can get, I won't sign anything he sends me, not ever. You won't see me with a bunch of people who only want to talk to me because of my father. You and all those people who think he's so great will just have to get along without his books."

He tried to open the door, heard a click, then pushed his unlocked door open. He swung his legs over the side of the seat. His feet hit the ground hard as he slipped out of the car; he nearly fell to the pavement.

"Don't forget your suitcase," she shouted after him. The rage in her voice stabbed at him. He opened the other door and pulled his bag from the back seat. "You're just like him, you got what you needed from me and now you're going to run off to be alone with your writing and your books." She was screaming now; a light went on in one of the houses that lined the road. "You ought to thank me, you know."

"I did--"

"Not for the ride, for the story. That's all anything is to you, stuff you put into a story. Isn't it? That's all this is to you, something you can write about. Go ahead, write whatever you want, I don't care. He's dead, and sooner or later all those people who think he's so great will forget all about him and his books."

"You're wrong!" he shouted.

"Hah!" she screamed at him, happy in her revenge.

But in time they would forget, he thought. Other writers would come along to distract Mack Vernon's fans. Lucas slammed the car door shut, grabbed his bag, and jumped back just in time as the car lurched forward. He stood alone in the darkened street as she fled from the drowned father who had eluded her.

************************************************************

They sit in silence for a moment. "I guess sometimes writers aren't good people," Maya says. She skritches the cat, who purrs.

He nods as if he has some experience of this himself. "If you want to come into my book, then you need to know that before you decide," he says.

"That was such a powerful story," she says. "And the daughter, Rosalind, can really keep his books from being read."

"I was afraid she was going to do something worse, something violent," he says.

"Do you think he ever will write books of his own?" Maya asks.

"I doubt it," he says. 

"What next?" Maya asks.

He takes the next book off the pile. "Megan O'Keefe, a new short story called Burn Long Into the Night," he says.

She takes the book, and they read.