by Bird, Peggy
“You don’t understand. I can’t do this anymore. All the lies. To Brad. To all these readers who tell me how much they love my work. Everyone trusts me, thinks they know who I am, and what do I do? Lie about it. They don’t have a clue who I am. I’m beginning to think I don’t have a clue who I am. I want to go back to being Claudia Manchester. If I can figure out who the hell she is anymore.”
“Well, not to go all legal on you, but you just signed a contract for four more books as April Mayes. You have to continue to be her for a while. And not everyone is in the dark about who you are. I know. Your publisher knows.”
“Yes, but you two have a vested interest in keeping me going as April.”
“I have an interest in keeping a friendship going that means something to me, Claudia.” She put an extra emphasis on the name. “I’m not using you as an ATM.”
Claudia sank into the upholstered chair. “You’re right. I’m sorry. I guess I’m a little upset.”
“You are a master of understatement.” Mary Lynn sat down next to her. “Look, why don’t we put in an appearance at the reception long enough to keep the organizers happy and then get out of here for dinner someplace quiet so we can figure all this out.”
“I don’t know. I’m beginning to think the only way out of this is to move to another part of the country and start all over.”
Mary Lynn hugged her. “Don’t do that. I’d miss you. None of my other authors are nearly as interesting as you are.”
Claudia sighed. “All right. I’ll stay. For the moment. But if one more thing goes wrong, I’m gone.”
“You’ve panicked about Brad. You’ve panicked about the Seattle romance writers’ conference. What more could happen?” She stood and held out her hand to Claudia. “Come on. Let’s get you dressed in some of your trashiest clothes and go have a glass of wine or two.”
• • •
An hour later, Claudia was back in her room, madly throwing clothes, shoes, and toiletries into her suitcase. Mary Lynn had been wrong. So wrong. On a scale of one to ten wrong, she’d been a twenty. And now Claudia really had to get out of town.
The reception had started out okay. Brad was nowhere in sight and neither were the Emerald City women, which took some of the stress off her. Claudia had a glass of wine and a few hors d’oeuvres, chatted with several of the RWA staffers, and was finally beginning to relax when three women approached her and introduced themselves as members of the Rose City Romance Writers. They’d heard she lived in Portland, and they wanted to extend an invitation to join their chapter. She tried to brush them off by saying she lived in Seattle, but one of the women was most insistent she’d been told April Mayes was a Portlander.
Then, the final blow. The woman from the RWA chapter pointed out the person who was the source of the information about where Claudia lived. It was a faculty member from Portland State who taught women’s studies and was working on a book about the role of romance novels in women’s lives. Claudia didn’t know how the woman recognized her, dressed as April Mayes, but apparently she did.
The jig was now well and truly up.
As soon as she was able to get away from the Portlanders and without saying goodbye to anyone or letting Mary Lynn know she was leaving, Claudia bolted from the reception and went to her room. She called the airline and changed her ticket to a flight leaving for Portland in three hours, then began to pack.
When that chore was finished, she wrote two notes. The first was easy.
Mary Lynn—
Everything is unraveling too fast for me to keep up with. I have to get out of here. Tell the conference organizers I got sick and apologize for my absence. I’ll explain it all to you after you get home. Would you see that Brad gets the note in the envelope addressed to him? Thanks.
Claudia
The second note was more difficult to write. After three tries, what she came up with was:
Brad—
I can’t do this anymore. You deserve better than the person I’ve been pretending to be. I’m going home to try to get my integrity back and my head straight. Please don’t try to contact me. We’ll both be better off if you don’t.
April/Claire
She sealed the envelope, put it and the note to Mary Lynn on her friend’s bed, and left the room. She fought back tears all the way to the airport and on the flight to Portland. It wasn’t until she was safe in her own home that she let go and cried. And cried. And cried. Until she was sick of crying and went to bed.
Tomorrow, as Scarlett famously said, would be another day. And it had to be better than the one she’d just been through. Didn’t it?
Chapter 15
Brad got to the reception late, thanks to a long phone call with his agent discussing the upcoming transition to Mary Lynn’s agency. The event was in full swing when he got there, and the room was packed. He picked up a glass of wine and started looking for Claire. Twenty minutes later, waylaid by a dozen or more people but still Claire-less, he tracked down Mary Lynn. Together, they did what was close to a grid search of the room and, finding no Claire/April, went up to the room the two women shared. The first things he saw were the lone suitcase and the note on one of the beds.
Mary Lynn read it then handed him an envelope. “Cl … April’s left for home. She left this note for you.”
“Left? Why? Did something happen in Seattle? Is she all right? Let me see your note.” He tried to grab it but Mary Lynn tucked it in her jacket pocket.
“Personal. Sorry. Read yours.”
He shook his head as he read it. “I don’t understand. What can’t she do anymore? And what does she mean, the person she’s been pretending to be? I’ve always known about her pen name. I don’t care about that. What the hell is going on? Explain it to me.”
Mary Lynn wouldn’t meet his gaze. And it seemed to take her a long time to find an answer. Finally she said, “It’s not my place to explain anything about this. It’s April’s. You’re going to have to track her down and ask her yourself.”
He glared at her for a long moment, but she didn’t look like she was about to give in to his fiercest stare. “God damn it, if you won’t tell me what the hell is going on, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.” He grabbed the room phone and, in two calls, sent his regrets to the conference organizers for backing out of his panel the next day and changed his plane ticket.
From Portland to Seattle.
He saw Mary Lynn chewing a fingernail, but she kept quiet.
• • •
No one answered the door when Brad got to Claire’s house in Seattle after flying from Denver. There was a damp package sitting on the porch that looked like it had been sitting in the summer rain for a couple days. No one had been there for a while, it seemed, which would track with her being in Denver. The name on the package wasn’t Claire’s. It was Mary Lynn’s. He wondered why Mary Lynn had packages sent to her rental house when she knew Claire would be out of town, but where she got her online purchases delivered was the least of his concerns at the moment.
He flew home to Portland and began a campaign of e-mails, phone calls, and texts to Claire. There was never any response. He called Mary Lynn almost daily to see if she’d heard from her client and friend. She had not, and because of the worried tone in her voice, which was beginning to show, he believed her.
After a few days of being unable to get through to Claire using her personal contacts, he went for the big gun. He’d hunt her down at work. That’s when the bombshell exploded. Bellevue College informed him there was not now nor had there ever been a Claire Mason employed in any capacity, certainly not as faculty. He checked out three different departments before he believed what they were telling him.
Claire had lied to him about where she worked? Why? Was she not really a teacher? He couldn’t believe she was anything other than an educator. She was too confident in front of a group, imparted information too professionally. And her stories about her students and classes rang too true to have been made up.
Not to mention her books showed extensive knowledge of English literature.
Maybe she was a high school teacher and thought it would sound more impressive if she said she was a college professor. In the hope he’d found the answer, he called every high school, public and private, in the Seattle area. It took him two weeks of free time to work his way through the list only to get nowhere.
Then, for good measure, he called every community college and university in the area. He came up dry there, too.
Once again, he tried to pry information out of Mary Lynn, confronting her with what he’d learned from Bellevue College. While she acknowledged she knew April didn’t work there, she steadfastly refused to tell him anything else about April’s private life. Saying she had been sworn to secrecy, she repeated what she’d said in Denver: He’d have to get the truth from the source. She claimed to have tried to get April to tell him herself while they were at dinner that first evening of the conference, but he wasn’t sure he believed her. She also said she’d not heard from her client since they had returned from Colorado, and she was getting concerned. That he did believe.
He had reached the end of what he thought he could do to locate her. Somehow, this glorious woman had waltzed into and then out of his life, and he had no way of finding her again. The last thread of hope he had was trying to track her down at one of the big romance writers’ conferences. The next one wasn’t until after the first of the year. And since it was early fall, it meant it would be months before he had a chance to run into her again. Assuming she would even show up at the conference.
He tried to lose himself in work, which was more difficult than he expected, even though the start of a new school year was always a busy and exciting time. Every day that passed without coming up with some other way to find her frustrated him. He became withdrawn and moody with his colleagues, even had a difficult time being upbeat for his students. One of his best friends suggested he needed a vacation to clear his head. But winter break was a long way off.
He began to walk every day during his lunch hour, to think. Only a few blocks away from St. Mary’s Academy, paralleling the main buildings of Portland State University, were the South Park Blocks, one of the jewels of downtown Portland. The twelve-block urban green space was full of towering old trees and pieces of public art and was bordered by many of the cultural institutions of the city. It was a pleasant, even restful, place to stroll and think. Or picnic, smoke dope, make out, pass out leaflets about every cause known to the student population. The activities were many and varied.
When he first started his daily walks there, Brad didn’t pay much attention to what other people were doing. He used his walks as a time to be alone, to try to figure out what his next move should be. But as the days went by, and he couldn’t come up with anything to do other than wait, he began to notice the young couples studying together, laughing, holding hands. They made him ache with missing Claire. Almost made him give up his walks, it hurt so much to think about what he didn’t have anymore.
He also ignored, with more success, the hawkers trying to get passersby to take their fliers. Most of the time, Brad walked past them without even acknowledging them. But one afternoon, distracted by a woman with chestnut-colored hair, like Claire’s, he absentmindedly took a flier a student thrust in his hand as he walked past Lincoln Hall. He was about to dump it in a trashcan when what it said registered. There was a one-day seminar on teaching fiction in the twenty-first century going on in Lincoln Hall.
It sounded intriguing. The subject interested him. He had no more classes that day. He didn’t want to go back to his office and face the sympathetic looks on the faces of his colleagues who had taken to dropping by his office, presumably to see if he was still among the living. Listening to some experts on a topic he found interesting, or at least diverting, might cheer him up. And to top it off, it was chillier than he had expected and being inside among strangers who wouldn’t ask him questions wasn’t the worst idea he’d had all day.
What the hell. The seminar was almost over, but he could still catch the last speaker. What did he have to lose? He went into the auditorium to listen.
The lights over the audience had been shut off and the lights on the stage were dim as the speaker behind the podium went through a PowerPoint presentation. The subject appeared to be a comparison of literary and commercial fiction. He couldn’t see who was speaking, although he could tell from the voice it was a woman. A woman who sounded like someone he knew, although the mic was lousy and she kept getting feedback, which distorted her voice.
And what she was saying—he’d heard it before, hadn’t he? It puzzled him. He couldn’t put his finger on why it all seemed so familiar. He regretted not picking up the program with the list of presenters from the stack outside the auditorium. Maybe if he listened long enough, he’d figure out who it was and why she sounded familiar. Someone was bound to say her name during the question and answer session.
Then a slide flashed on the screen with a series of bullet points. As the woman began to expand on the first one, Brad scanned the list.
-Writers of genre fiction are assumed to be hacks or writers who can’t make it in the world of literary fiction.
-Good writing is good writing. Don’t dismiss a book because it’s shelved as “romance,” “mystery,” or “science fiction” or embrace bad writing because it’s labeled “literary fiction.”
-Authors of commercial fiction want to give readers an escape, a heroine to admire, a hero to sigh over, a story that makes them think.
-Romance writers want to give readers a happily-ever-after; mystery writers want to reassure their readers good wins out over evil; sci-fi authors want their readers to know the aliens can’t defeat the earthlings.
-If it’s well written, it deserves the same respect the author of a mid-list literary fiction book gets.
It didn’t take reading more than two of the bullet points before the light bulb in his brain went on. Of course he recognized the information. And, therefore, the speaker. But how …?
He ducked back into the hall and grabbed a program. The speaker was Claudia Manchester, PhD, Portland State University professor of English literature.
A.k.a. April Mayes. A.k.a. Claire Mason.
Jesus, if he was correct, he’d been searching all over Seattle for her and she’d been in his backyard the whole time. What the hell was this all about?
When the lights came back up, he confirmed what he already knew—the woman speaking was Claire. Claudia. Whoever. She was in a tailored suit, unlike anything he’d ever seen her wear, seemed to be wearing little or no makeup, and had her hair piled up on her head in a stylishly messy bun. She wasn’t the hot April Mayes from San Francisco and Denver, and she wasn’t the casual jeans-and-sweater Claire Mason from all those weekends they’d spent together.
His first thought was she must have one hell of a wardrobe to outfit all of her personas.
His irrelevant thought was rapidly followed by a mix of emotions he wasn’t sure how to handle. As he watched her field questions from the audience, he was relieved his search was over. But not too far under the relief was anger at how she’d lied to him, as was a deeply embarrassed sense of having been had. Lastly, he was intellectually curious in an oddly detached sort of way about what the hell she thought she was up to and why she’d acted as she had.
The anger propelled him down the steps from the balcony and out into the Park Blocks to where the air was cool and he could breathe better, the auditorium having become unbearably stuffy. The head of steam he was building up almost exploded as he stood, shaking with anger, in the middle of the block, trying to decide what to do.
Should he go back to St. Mary’s until he could come up with a plan? Hell, no. If his colleagues felt sorry for the sad and mopey Brad Davis, the played-for-a-fool Brad Davis would get even more pity and he was not in the mood for it. Neither was he confident he could hide how angry he was about what he had discovered.
M
aybe he’d call Mary Lynn. Obviously she had known this little fact of Claire … uh … Claudia’s life all along. They were friends, not merely agent and author. She had admitted as much when she said she had tried to convince Claire …damn it … Claudia to tell him the truth. They must have had a good laugh at his expense when the two of them gossiped about him. No, wait, they wouldn’t have done that. If he knew anything, he knew they weren’t cruel. Even so, why had Mary Lynn kept the information from him?
Ranting to Mary Lynn wouldn’t get him what he really wanted, of course, which was an explanation and an apology from the source of his pain: Claire/Claudia/April. Maybe he should go to her office and wait for her, to see what her reaction would be. Maybe the element of surprise would get him what he deserved.
He knew the English Department offices were located in Neuberger Hall, and he wasn’t very far away from the building. Why not? There was no sense wasting all this righteous indignation. He’d hunt her down, like he had in San Francisco. Only this time, he wasn’t amused by Bambi’s wily ways. He was mad. If she was lucky, his intellectual curiosity would kick in and he’d be able to control his temper long enough to demand what he wanted from her without yelling.
But intellectual curiosity never got a chance. Before he could take more than a few steps toward Neuberger Hall, Claire … Claudia … Bambi … and a gaggle of other people, colleagues from the way they seemed to be talking to each other, crossed in front of him. They’d apparently gone out the side door of Lincoln Hall and come back to the Park Blocks to do the same thing he was doing—head for the English Department’s offices. He stopped before his quarry could see him, then, after the group had gotten twenty yards ahead of him, followed, trying to decide exactly how to handle the situation.
