Any Given Moment (The Alexandra Chronicles Book 3)

by Laura Van Wormer

  "Who?" Henry asked, easing back into the pillows, immediately dopey with sleep now that he knew there was no emergency.

  "You, darling," she told him. And then she snuggled in close to her husband and went back to sleep.

  "Oh, God, Monty, I'm exhausted," Elizabeth said, collapsing on the antique oak bench in the Hillings & Hillings reception area. "You're not the only one," he said, letting the broom fall and sitting down heavily beside her.

  They had spent all day Saturday and Sunday supervising the cleaning of the Fifth Avenue offices. When Elizabeth had seen what the gang from ICA had done to them, she knew she had to get the offices in order so that Dorothy and Henry's last memories of them would be as they should be.

  On Friday evening, however, Elizabeth had been so appalled by what they had found in the offices that she and Monty didn't wait for the cleaning people, but spent most of the night throwing out fast-food containers, shredded papers, and unidentifiable trash. They also tried to organize the piles of contracts and correspon­dence that were scattered, willy-nilly, across every inch of the hand­somely appointed floor space.

  Marion Ballicutt and James Stanley Johnson had left few stones unturned in their search.

  And when Monty insisted he would re­place the eight or nine hundred books back on the shelves in the agency's library himself, Elizabeth knew why she had fallen in love with this man—this poor man who had flown in from Chicago, exhausted, to spend a quick, relaxing weekend with her in the Hill­ingses' apartment, and who, instead, within two hours had found himself being put to work in offices that looked like they'd been hit by a bomb.

  But over the weekend the garbage had been taken out, the files were put back together, the furniture was put back where it be­longed, pictures and plaques had been re-hung, and the library looked as though it had never been touched.

  Now she and Monty had finished and were sitting in the front waiting room. It was Sunday evening. He would have to fly back to Chicago in a couple of hours.

  Elizabeth looked at him. Monty's khakis were streaked with ink and dirt and dust, and his blue-and-white striped Oxford shirt was not only filthy, but torn over one bicep. She smiled and reached over to rest her hand on his thigh. "You're wonderful, do you know that?"

  He smiled. "Yes."

  "Oh, you," she said, pushing him away.

  "Me," he said, grabbing her arm and pulling her toward him, "wanttum professor. Or is that a politically incorrect dialect, too?" He stole a kiss, grinning like a delighted kid. "Guess who's coming back to Chicago with you tonight?" she asked.

  "But I thought—"

  "I changed everything around," she said, smiling.

  "You did?" It went straight to her heart, the expression his face took on when he seemed almost scared to believe she cared as much as she did.

  "I can only stay a week, though," she said, smiling.

  "I was kind of hoping you'd stay always," he said.

  They were startled by the sound of a key in the door.

  "Who the heck—?" Monty said.

  The door opened and a figure appeared.

  "Millicent!" Elizabeth said.

  "Elizabeth," she said, smiling. And then to Monty she said, "You," not smiling.

  "What are you doing here?" Elizabeth said, getting up. "I thought you said you'd never leave Bridgehampton again."

  "Shhh," the older woman said, "my visit is not for public con­sumption." She put down the shopping bag she was carrying. "I thought I better see the state of the offices before Dottie came in tomorrow."

  "We straightened out everything, from top to bottom," Monty told her. "The cleaners came and everything."

  She squinted at his appearance. "Evidently they did not get to you." And then she openly frowned. "What are you doing here? You should be in Chicago."

  "Why should I be in Chicago?" he asked her.

  "To do your show," she said. "You were there on Friday."

  "And how would you know that?" Monty asked her, suspicious.

  She did not reply. She merely looked at Elizabeth. "Is it true? What they're saying? That the two of you are..."

  Elizabeth hesitated and then nodded, smiling. "Yes."

  "Ah, I see," Millicent said. And then she moved on to make a tour of the offices, while Elizabeth and Monty stayed there, looking at each other. In a few minutes Millicent was back. She went straight to Monty and took both of his hands in hers. "I forgive you," she said.

  "Well, that's mighty big of you," Monty said.

  "Monty!" Elizabeth said, but Millicent was laughing.

  She clucked her tongue at Monty. "You have no idea how much love will change you, young man." Pause. "So I might as well begin to like you now." She waited a moment. "Now, don't you have something to say to me?"

  "What? That I like you, too?" he asked her.

  "No," Millicent said. "That you'd like very much for me to do your radio show."

  61

  When the merger of Hillings & Hillings with International Communications Artists was completed, the agency moved into the ICA building on West Fifty-Seventh Street and Joshua Lafayette was named division president. A special assistant was also hired to do nothing but focus on the reselling of rights on backlist titles written by Dick Stone, Becky Tomlinson, Alice Mae Hollison, Clarky Birkstein, Warren Krebor, Sidney Meltner, Lucy Boyle, Sissy Connors, Anthony Marcell, Claire Spender Holland, John Gabriel Mendez, and Jorges and Luisa Mantos.

  The old penthouse offices at 101 Fifth Avenue were taken over by two very successful and highly respected literary agencies the Hillingses admired: the Virginia Barber Agency and Loretta Barrett Books.

  Dorothy and Henry Hillings moved out to their farmhouse in Water Mill, Long Island, and Dorothy opened an office in town and hired a secretary. She is still working as a senior consultant to the ICA Entertainment Group. Henry did officially retire and be­gan work on a history of United States Army Intelligence in World War II.

  The Hillingses recently returned from a trip to Hong Kong and California, where they visited their children.

  Mrs. Valerie Collins Kirby—wife, mother of three, part-time schoolteacher of Newcastle, England—received a cash settlement of twelve million dollars from Metropolis Pictures for the right to base the motion picture Race in Space on her cousin's book, Mathew and the Allied Planets. Mrs. Kirby will also receive five percent of the movie's gross receipts, which, with the licensing fees, could add up to as much as another twenty million dollars, a large portion of which has already been earmarked for children's charity organiza­tions around the world.

  Creighton Berns was found guilty on twenty-three counts of domestic copyright-law violation, racketeering, conspiracy to de­fraud, and conspiracy to commit arson. He was fined one million dollars and sentenced to six months in a minimum-security prison and two hundred hours of community work in the Los Angeles Public Library system. One former member of the board of direc­tors of ICA was found guilty on lesser charges, and his sentence was suspended with the payment of fines and the promise of one hun­dred hours of community-service work.

  Two executives of Metropolis Pictures were indicted on con­spiracy charges, as was Marion Ballicutt, who was disbarred follow­ing her conviction. Her sentence was suspended in lieu of fines and one hundred hours of clerical work in the public defender's office.

  James Stanley Johnson also received a suspended sentence, and now works at a Wall Street consulting firm.

  David Aussenhoff finished his movie about a serial killer, which is expected to do well at least in videocassette form. Susie Lanahan made a mouthwash commercial, bought a new car, and still refuses to take David's calls. David is currently dating a masseuse and an airline stewardess.

  Millicent Parks is writing again and is being honored at the next American Booksellers Association convention. It will be the first she has attended in twenty years. The broadcast airwaves are still re­verberating from her recent appearance on "The Montgomery Grant Smith Show."

  Patty
Kleczak's Gone for Love was sold in an auction for $291,000. ICA sold the television miniseries rights the following day. When interviewed by Publishers Weekly, Mrs. Kleczak admitted that the first thing she did after getting the news was go into New York and get her hair dyed blond. The second was book two weeks' vacation for her entire family at Club Med.

  The stories concerning the sexuality of Georgiana Hamilton­-Ayres served only to confirm her enormous appeal—sexual and otherwise—to the movie-going public. Her latest film, people say, could win her an Oscar. When the Hillingses put their Gramercy Park apartment up for sale, Georgiana bought it, explaining to Barbara Walters in an interview that it was the nicest home she had ever lived in as a child, and so why not live it) it as an adult?

  Nobody seems to know exactly where the Honorable Georgiana Hamilton-Ayres disappears to on weekends, but some residents of rural northwestern New Jersey have seen her taking fences on a handsome chestnut mare, alongside an extremely well-liked celeb­rity farm owner who never seems to be identified.

  Speaking of whom, while the ratings of "The DBS Nightly News" have remained steady, the press has noticed a slight decrease in the on-air time of the network's star, Alexandra Waring. When asked about it, the anchorwoman only smiled and said she had reached a place in her life where she realized that her whole life couldn't be work, that she needed a personal life, too.

  Montgomery Grant Smith moved his ever-popular radio show to network headquarters in New York City, a move which provoked many of his listeners to panic that something was happening to Big Mont, that the keen conservative edge of their fearless leader was undergoing some kind of insidious urban corrosion. Insidious cor­rosion or not, Monty's audience is still expanding, and his television show is back in the works. He has lost thirty pounds, simply, he says, by avoiding fatty foods and walking every day.

  Elizabeth Robinson, Ph.D., moved back to New York City to resume teaching history at Columbia University. She currently lives in a lovely apartment on Riverside Drive, which she shares with a two-hundred-year-old countess named Elizabeth Farren, and a two­-hundred-pound radio talk-show host, Montgomery Grant Smith, who is also soon to be her husband.

  The End

  Acknowledgments

  The path to completion and publication of Any Given Moment was perhaps even more complicated than the plot, and there are several people I must thank:

  My parents, Marjorie (Law) and Benjamin Van Wormer, whose values and experiences in the Canadian Red Cross and the United States Army in World War II inspired this book;

  Betty A. Prashker, Shaye Areheart, and F. Amoy Allen of Crown Publishers, for extraordinary editorial care and ingenuity;

  Annabel Davis-Goff, Ann Douglas, and Dani Shapiro, three gifted writers who offered to read quickly and then responded bril­liantly;

  Carolyn Katz, James Spada, and Tom Zito, for their infinite wisdom and regenerative spirit; Dianne Moggy, for coming so deftly out of the blue as the publishing angel she is; Molly Timko, Richard Daugs and, finally, she-who-makes-it-all-work, my agent and friend, Loretta A. Barrett.

  PS: And we all must thank Lona Walburn for the title.

  About the Author

  Laura Van Wormer grew up in Darien, Connecticut, and grad­uated from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University. She is the author of fourteen published books. Prior to becoming a novelist, she was an editor at a major book-publishing house.

  Laura cordially invites you to join her at LauraVanWormer.com where you can catch up on her life and books.