Wickedly Charming

by Kristine Grayson

  “Topical?” Mellie asked.

  “One about fairy tales and how they discriminate against women,” LaTisha said, “and how that has led to the stereotyping of stepmothers as evil.”

  Mellie’s heart leapt. Her dream interview. From the best interviewer in the world. Oprah, with all of her followers, all of the people who loved her, all of the people who thought about the topics Oprah asked them to think about.

  Mellie had always hoped she would get that kind of platform. She just never permitted herself to dream it would be possible—not so soon in this media blitz as Charming had called it.

  Charming. She contacted him as often as possible. She wanted to hear his voice. (Honestly, she needed to hear his voice.) And he seemed interested.

  He listened with enthusiasm to her strange, tired phone calls, and told her he had watched each and every interview (and from some of the details he mentioned, he clearly had). He bucked her up after her first disastrous Minneapolis interview, although LaTisha and the segment producer hadn’t thought it disastrous and neither had Charming after he saw it.

  But he raised her spirits before he saw it by saying, “You’re practicing, Mellie. You’ll get better with each and every interview. You don’t want to start at the top of your game.”

  Of course, she did want to start at the top of her game, but she knew that wasn’t possible. And she had gotten better, with each and every interview. LaTisha told her that she was unlike most writers who got worse as time went on.

  And then Boston happened.

  Chapter 29

  After Ella left, Charming moved like a man possessed. He put one of his employees in charge of the store, called his manager and told her that he needed to her to find a way to cover his shifts this week, since he might be gone, and then he left the store, so fast he wouldn’t have been surprised to see a dust cloud in his wake.

  He had to fight to control his car’s speed as he headed to his daughters’ school. He wouldn’t put anything past Ella, not even kidnapping the girls and taking them to someone who could achieve the destruction of Charming’s family without the paperwork.

  He had called ahead, and the girls were waiting for him in the principal’s office. Imperia had her arms crossed and she was tapping her foot, her blue eyes flashing. Charming had always thought Imperia, in her pissed-off mode, looked like her mother, but actually she looked like a beautiful female version of Charming’s father—strong, demanding, and brooking no disagreement.

  Grace sat on a nearby chair, her feet crossed at the ankles and swinging back and forth as she waited. She was reading a book when he arrived and finished her page before looking up at him.

  “I have a test,” Imperia said. “I can’t go anywhere.”

  “You’ll have to make it up later,” Charming said. Then he thanked the principal’s secretary, put his hands on the back of both girls and propelled them to the parking lot.

  He felt particularly vulnerable. The document, folded and inside his breast pocket, hummed with power. He had nothing, no real magic at all. The power to charm had its uses, but it also had its drawbacks, particularly when faced with magic so real that it could destroy his entire family with the stroke of a pen.

  He put the girls in the car, locked the doors, and drove to the nearest portal. It was in Sherman Oaks, on a road made famous by countless movies and television shows. On one side, a dirt cliff face (with tons of homes built on the rambling roads above). On the other, a hillside with steep drop-offs, so wild you could still hear coyotes at night.

  He parked in a small gravel-covered turnout.

  “Daddy?” Imperia asked, her voice trembling, “What are we doing?”

  She knew where they were because she had gone through this portal countless times. Grace, on the other hand, hadn’t used this portal in nearly five years and, if Charming remembered correctly, she had been asleep the last time they had gone through.

  “We have to go home for a bit, baby,” he said.

  Normally, she would have protested it. This time she just looked scared.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “Nothing, I hope,” he said. “But we’re going back just in case.”

  And he wasn’t going to let the girls out of his sight.

  He unlocked the doors and slid out, then glanced at the dirt wall on the side of the road. The portal still gleamed, as if someone had pasted a thin sheet of water over the sandy dirt.

  His heart was pounding. He figured this portal was far enough away from his store that Ella wouldn’t know about it. He had rejected portals in the Beverly Hilton, another in a major store on Rodeo Drive, and his favorite one, in Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.

  The portals all led into the Kingdoms. In fact, by thinking about where he needed to go, he could pick where he came out in the Kingdoms. He was pretty sure it worked that way for all Kingdom members heading home. But it didn’t happen that way in reverse. He couldn’t enter a portal in the Kingdoms and pick where he was going to come out in the Greater World. He had to find the portal most directly linked to his exit.

  Fortunately, a lot of Greater World portals were linked to Los Angeles, although most of them dumped him in Anaheim, much too close to Disneyland for his own comfort.

  “Take my hands, girls,” he said, extending them. Both girls grabbed on without protest. Grace used her other hand to clutch her book.

  “Something bad happened, didn’t it, Daddy?” Grace asked quietly. She seemed certain, and he hoped it was her natural intuitiveness and not the beginning of some magical ability he couldn’t quite understand.

  “Not yet, hon,” he said. “Maybe not ever.”

  He led the girls to the portal, and as they stepped through, he realized he hadn’t let Mellie know he was leaving the Greater World.

  Well, he thought as he sank into the transition between worlds, he could only hope that she would be too busy to notice that he was gone.

  Chapter 30

  It was Mellie’s first experience with a Gotcha! interview, and it left her speechless. And terrified. But she couldn’t confess terrified to LaTisha. She couldn’t confess anything at all because she was afraid of making things worse.

  Everything started out well. LaTisha had booked them in the nicest hotel yet, with a stunning lobby that paled in comparison to the expansive room. For the first time, Mellie wished she had more time to just luxuriate in the oversized tub or sprawl on the bed covered with linen so soft that it made her want to cry from pleasure.

  But she only had a half an hour to freshen up from the trip, so she took a quick shower (and steamed out her blouse), dressed for television—no stripes, no plaids, no small repeating patterns, and no white—and headed back to the lobby with five minutes to spare.

  The Oprah rumors had started a cascade of media “gets.” The New York Times wanted to interview Mellie when she came to New York. One of Nightline’s producers had called, as had one of the booking agents for the David Letterman Show. Some of the scheduled appearances—like Live with Regis and Kelly—wanted more time, and she was even going to get a better segment on The Today Show (whatever that meant).

  The cab ride was filled with much texting (LaTisha) and Tweeting (LaTisha) and telephone calls (LaTisha) and blogging (LaTisha). Mellie pulled out her phone just so that she could look busy, and because she wanted to let Charming know what was going on.

  Only she didn’t dare talk to him, not with LaTisha there. So she sent him a text message, telling him she’d call later with very good news. Things going well, she wrote.

  She had no idea that “things going well” would only last another thirty minutes or so.

  The segment, for a major Boston public affairs and entertainment program, was a prelude to a WGBH interview that would be compiled into a series on writers and writing later in the year. Mellie had those two interviews, and one major bookstore appearance later in the evening.

  After a quick round make-up session (and arguments about how red her lip
stick should be [“Not red,” Mellie said. “Soft.” Again, a prelude of things to come]), she settled into a round, uncomfortable blue chair in a very blue studio with huge windows behind her. The set-up was supposed to look personal and comfy, but only ended up looking like a cross between an anchor’s chair and a bad 1960s home design.

  The interviewer was not the person that LaTisha had spoken to the day before. That person had been a youngish woman who was trying to make her bones with a “soft” interview about a trendy book on women’s issues.

  This interviewer was not young. She was a hard-edged woman who had clearly graduated from the ingénue’s chair to an anchor position at a C market, and was now trying to make her way into the top tier of television news programming. LaTisha had stopped cold when she saw the woman and had pulled the segment producer aside, quietly begging for someone else.

  That, more than anything, panicked Mellie.

  When the segment producer said the original interviewer was unavailable, LaTisha asked to see a list of interview questions and was denied. She then tried to pull Mellie out of the interview, but Mellie, in her naïveté, refused.

  Later, she would wonder how different her life would be if she had actually listened to the woman whom the publisher had sent along to protect her from herself.

  Instead, Mellie settled into that uncomfortable chair, smiled at the overly made-up woman across from her, a woman whose unnaturally brown hair (with very blond highlights) looked like it had been lacquered into place, much like the skin around her eyes, that had already been tucked one time too often.

  The woman held an iPad with a series of notes on it. She didn’t speak until the red light above the camera came on, then she smiled at Mellie. The smile seemed feral, and for the first time, Mellie had a sense of foreboding.

  The woman didn’t introduce herself, although the voice-over announcer identified her as news anchor Cindy Jordan.

  “Mellie,” Cindy Jordan said warmly and then paused, looking at Mellie theatrically. “May I call you Mellie?”

  What was Mellie going to say? No? Although she was tempted to bolt. However, she’d been in the Greater World long enough to see what happened to television interview subjects who got cold feet while on camera—the footage got replayed and replayed and replayed, making the interviewee look like an idiot.

  “Of course you can,” Mellie said, smiling her warmest smile. It was the last time she’d smile during that interview.

  “I understand that you had help writing your book,” Cindy said.

  Mellie wasn’t sure if she heard the question right. After all, she was tired, and things seemed strange. “Excuse me?”

  She knew that was a lame response, but it was better than trying to answer a question she hadn’t properly heard. LaTisha had told her that as well.

  “I’ve been told you didn’t write a word of Evil,” Cindy said. “Is that true?”

  Mellie didn’t like lying. She never wanted to lie, not about something important. She’d even discussed this line of questioning with Charming, who had said it would never happen (dammit). When she convinced him she needed a way to answer the question, he said to say…

  “Evil is my story,” Mellie said as calmly as she could. “It’s filled with my life and my opinions, my experiences and my thoughts.”

  “But did you write it?” Cindy leaned too close, and Mellie could smell the minted Listerine on her breath.

  Minted Listerine covering just a bit of alcohol. A train wreck, just like this interview was going to be. Now Mellie understood why LaTisha was panicked, why Mellie shouldn’t have sat in this chair.

  But she was here, and either she could stammer her way through the interview or she could take control.

  She opted for control.

  “Did you hear the question?” Cindy asked. “Did you write this novel?”

  “Did you read it?” Mellie asked in the exact same tone.

  Behind the camera, LaTisha covered her mouth with her hand. Apparently Mellie had not given the right answer.

  “That’s not relevant,” Cindy said, as if brushing off a comment about the weather. “What’s relevant are all the rumors flying around that you have not written a word of this novel, that you’re passing yourself off as the author when in fact a bookstore owner in Southern California wrote this book. A male bookstore owner.”

  Mellie’s mouth had gone dry. She understood all the implications. She even understood how it sounded. Hell, she and Charming had even discussed it—the political correctness of a man writing a woman’s novel. Of Prince Charming writing an understanding book about an evil stepmother.

  “Is that true?” Cindy asked.

  Mellie had no answer. She didn’t even open her mouth.

  And Cindy Jordan, consummate professional that she was, knew that silence on television was called “dead air” for a reason, and that reason meant the end to an interesting segment, so the woman became judge, jury, and prosecutor all on her own.

  “Because,” she said, “in this era of James Frey and all those lying memoirs, all the misinformation and unsubstantiated facts, all the people who plagiarized other people’s works and passed them off as their own—”

  “I didn’t plagiarize anything,” Mellie said, and winced, knowing how awful she sounded.

  “Well, yes, how could you when you haven’t written a word?” Cindy said, looking at the camera. She wasn’t talking to Mellie. She was playing to her audience.

  But in doing so, she had given Mellie an out.

  “I’ve written a word,” Mellie said. “I wrote and wrote and wrote on this novel. It seemed like I wrote the book forever. It takes a lot to learn how to write, you know, especially when you’re a woman like me who has had no formal education. I spent more time on this book than you can imagine.”

  “Are you saying you had no help writing it?” Cindy asked.

  “All writers have help,” Mellie said. “My editor, my friends—”

  “But you wrote every word?” Cindy leaned even closer, as if she could intimidate Mellie into an answer.

  She certainly was making Mellie uncomfortable.

  “What exactly are you accusing me of?” Mellie asked.

  LaTisha’s hand moved from her mouth to her eyes. She peaked through her fingers as if she were afraid to watch. Maybe she was.

  “I’m accusing you of perpetrating a fraud on your readers.” Cindy had a triumphant tone, as if she were the defender of innocent readers everywhere.

  Even though she had probably never voluntarily opened a book in her entire life.

  Mellie squared her shoulders. “I’m no fraud,” she said softly. “I’m the prototypical evil stepmother. I haven’t lied.”

  The segment producer made a motion with his hand.

  “We’ll get to the bottom of that after this,” Cindy said, and the red light on top of the camera went off.

  “What the hell was that?” LaTisha stayed behind the camera. Obviously she didn’t want this part filmed. But she was glaring at Cindy Jordan.

  Cindy smiled. She had clearly been waiting for this moment. She waved her iPad at LaTisha, pointing to something on the shiny smooth screen, something Mellie couldn’t see.

  “I have documentation showing that your client didn’t write a single word of her novel,” Cindy said. “Someone named Dave Encanto who has a bookstore in Los Angeles, wrote every word. I have a letter here from a screenwriter named David Bourke, who says that he knows for a fact that your so-called writer here can’t write. And I’m scheduled to interview a woman named Essy White-Levanger, who claims that Mellie is her stepmother and can’t even read—”

  “I can too,” Mellie said.

  “—and certainly wouldn’t be able to write anything.”

  “What is all of this?” LaTisha asked Mellie.

  “I don’t know about these charges,” Mellie said as she took the microphone off her lapel. “I don’t know where they came from or why they’re happening now. But I do know
that I’m done here.”

  She stood up and set the mike on the chair. Then she glanced at the camera. The red light was still off.

  Thankfully.

  “I’m sorry,” she said as she took LaTisha’s arm. “I should have listened to you.”

  “Yeah,” LaTisha said dryly. “You’re going to have to listen a moment longer because I need to talk to these kind folks. And you’re not going to say another word.”

  Mellie nodded. She wasn’t about to say another word.

  “I need your so-called evidence,” LaTisha said. She hadn’t moved, even though someone turned a camera toward her. She glared at the operator. “And if you film this, I’ll sue your ass every which way from Sunday.”

  The camera operator turned the lens away from her.

  Mellie stood behind her, heart pounding.

  Cindy still sat in her interview chair, as if expecting both LaTisha and Mellie to join her at any moment.

  “You have no right to our information,” Cindy said.

  “I have every right,” LaTisha said. “You either deal with me or our lawyers.”

  “Lawyers don’t scare me,” Cindy said. “Why don’t you both stick around? Then you’ll see my evidence. Otherwise, wait until the six o’clock news.”

  LaTisha made a face, then grabbed Mellie’s arm and propelled her forward. They headed down the hallway.

  “Why didn’t you stay?” Mellie asked, tripping on her heels as she tried to keep up.

  “Because we are on the cusp of a PR disaster,” LaTisha said, “and I could spend my time fruitlessly arguing with a woman whose career was going nowhere until this afternoon or I could find a way to protect us. I opt for protection.”

  “Thanks,” Mellie said.

  LaTisha frowned at her, and then pushed open the double doors leading outside. “I’m not going to ask you about this Encanto or this Bourke guy until we get somewhere private, but really, is your stepdaughter named White-Levanger?”