Guests and Guilt

by Diana Xarissa

  “Did you talk to our parents about it?”

  “No, not really. I didn’t want to admit that I was struggling. I started drinking to try to stop the voices from bothering me. It seemed to help for a little while, and then it stopped helping and things got worse. I finally dropped out of school and shut myself up in a room with a typewriter and a load of paper and typed out everything that was in my head.”

  “I remember when that happened. You disappeared and no one knew where you’d gone. Mom and Dad were really worried about you.”

  “I didn’t mean to worry anyone. I just needed to be alone to get everything out of my head. It took me about two weeks of almost nonstop typing, but when I was done, the voices stopped. I gave the stack of paper to Mum and then went traveling.”

  “Yeah, I remember that, too. Mom lost a lot of sleep while you were traveling. She used to sit by the phone every Sunday night, waiting for it to ring.”

  “And I usually forgot all about calling her,” James sighed. “I was a terrible son. I was so caught up in my own life, I never even thought about the people I’d left behind.”

  “But the voices had stopped?”

  “Yes, the voices had stopped. I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders. I suppose I was happy for that year when I was traveling. I didn’t have much money, but I had enough to get by and I made a lot of friends on the road.”

  “Like Stephanie, relying on the kindness of friends and strangers.”

  “Yeah, like that, but probably with a lot less sex,” he said wryly. “Anyway, when I got back home, I started working odd jobs. I was starting to think about going back to school when Mum told me that she’d sent my book to an agent who was the friend of a friend of hers.”

  “That sounds like Mom. Always trying to find ways to help us, even if we didn’t want any help,” Fenella laughed.

  James nodded. “Yeah, I was furious with her. I’d never intended for anyone to see what I’d written, but I suppose I’d never really made that clear to her. I told her that I wasn’t interested in publishing anything and that she should tell the agent that if he ever called. Six months later, Mum called me and said that the agent had four different offers from publishers if I wanted to reconsider.”

  “Four? Wow. I’m impressed. I never knew any of this at the time.”

  “You were still a kid. It didn’t concern you.”

  “I wish you would have told me all of this years ago, though. It’s fascinating.”

  James sighed. “That isn’t the word I would use, but it’s my life story, for better or worse.”

  “So what happened when Mom told you about the offers?”

  “Dad and I went to New York and met with the agent. He told me about all of the offers and I picked one. Dad and I didn’t agree, and the agent was on Dad’s side, but I know for sure that I made the right choice.”

  “Why? What did you turn down?”

  “The offer I took was for a good deal of money. I’ve been living off that money, plus what I inherited when Mum and Dad died, for thirty-five years. But there was a better offer. One of the publishers offered me nearly double the advance that I ended up taking.”

  “Double?”

  “Yeah, but it was a two-book deal,” James explained. “They wanted me to produce a second book in twelve months. I would get all of the money up front, but I’d have to pay back half of it if I didn’t write the second book in time.”

  “And you didn’t think you could manage it?”

  “I knew I couldn’t manage it. I told you, the voices had stopped. There was no way I could write a second book in a year. I didn’t have anything else to say. Dad and my agent both thought I should try, that the words would come if I pushed myself, but I knew better. And I stuck to my guns and refused to agree. Eventually I signed the single-book deal.”

  “And got a nice big advance.”

  “Yes, I did. And then Dad and John and Joseph all sat me down and insisted that I invest nearly every penny in complicated funds that I couldn’t touch but that would generate an income for me. They left me just enough money to buy my little house, and then found a way to tie up my royalties as well so that they go straight into my investment portfolio. I was furious at the time, because I wanted to take all of the money and blow it on a fancy car and maybe a cruise around the world or something.”

  “They were right, though,” Fenella suggested.

  James shrugged. “I suppose so. I would have fought them harder, but I really thought that I’d eventually write another book. I knew I couldn’t have another one done in a year, but I assumed it would happen eventually. I mean, the first one had written itself, in my head, without me even wanting it in there. How hard could it be to write another one, if I actually tried?”

  “I assume it was harder than you’d expected.”

  James chuckled. “Harder isn’t the word. Impossible is the word. I used to drink to silence the voices, I now began to drink to try to get them back. Sometimes, when I was almost too drunk to think, I would hear hints of ideas, but they always vanished when I sobered up again.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, me, too. I thought maybe I needed to travel again, but now I wasn’t just some guy who’d dropped out of college and wanted to crash on odd couches. Now I was an author who’d had a big advance. No one wanted to let me sleep on the couch for free anymore. I was supposed to be staying in five-star hotels and dining on caviar and lobster. That I sometimes couldn’t even afford bread and milk didn’t enter into anyone’s mind.”

  Fenella topped up both of their coffee cups and then got up and refilled the coffee maker. It was still only seven o’clock and far too early to be worried about not being to sleep later, even if she’d already drunk more caffeine that she usually did in a day.

  “Anyway, then it was time for the book tour, which was a nightmare in its own special way.”

  “Why?”

  “People wanted to talk about the themes in my work and the hidden symbolism in what I’d written, stuff like that. I didn’t know there was any hidden symbolism. I’d never been any good in English classes when we’d been asked to identify all of that junk. I either liked a book because it told a good story or I didn’t like a book. Now everyone wanted to know why my main character called his dog “Paw-Feet,” and I had to tell them that it was simply the first name that popped into my head when I was writing. It wasn’t a popular answer.”

  “Paw-Feet?”

  James laughed. “You really have never read my book, have you?”

  “No, I haven’t. You said you didn’t want us to read it.”

  “Yeah, and I meant it. Especially you, with your doctorate and your lifetime spent teaching college kids. You’d easily see that my book is just a bunch of words strung together in a mostly incoherent fashion by someone who had no idea what he was doing.”

  “You’re being too hard on yourself,” Fenella said, surprising herself. She’d never been very complimentary about James’s writing, but he seemed to have forgotten how successful he’d been. “Tens of thousands of college kids read your book every year. It’s one of the most successful books of its type in the past fifty years. Even if you didn’t know what you were doing, you clearly did something right.”

  “Yeah, and after everything I’ve just said, you can imagine how happy I am to have thousands of English majors analyzing my every word,” he laughed.

  Fenella grinned. “The very definition of irony, I believe.”

  “Yeah, but the thing was, I didn’t know how else to make money. I couldn’t go back to doing odd jobs, mostly because I felt as if they were beneath me.” He blushed and shrugged. “Yeah, I was an idiot, but for the first few years, I really did believe everything my agent told me. I was a genius with my finger on the pulse of modern society or something like that. And I was going to make millions, I just needed to write the next book.”

  “And you couldn’t.”

  “It was impossible,�
� James said flatly. “Drinking wasn’t helping, so I tried other things, um, illegal substances. They didn’t help make the voices come back, but they made me forget why I cared about them in the first place. I suppose it was good that I couldn’t afford to fund a serious drug habit. I quit before I let myself get hooked. With drugs and alcohol off the table, I turned to women to help distract me. I felt as if I needed someone new nearly every night, and I’m sure I hurt a lot of very nice women along the way. None of them managed to inspire me, though.”

  Fenella sipped her coffee. She’d never really given much thought to how James lived his life. It all seemed terribly sad, really.

  “Anyway, after a while I gave up on women as well. I mean, I didn’t become a monk or anything, but I stopped hoping they’d be the solution to my problems. Instead, I settled into my little house and began trying to live as frugally as I could. I still wrote, nearly every day, but it was hard work. I couldn’t seem to tell a story. Everything was just words piled on top of one another. I sent a few things to my agent over the years, but after a while he simply stopped returning my calls. Money is always tight, but I don’t have any marketable skills and I haven’t held down a job in over thirty years. You can imagine how many people are beating down my door to hire me.”

  “Maybe you could go back to school?”

  James laughed. “I hated it the first time. I can’t imagine it would be any better now, when I’d be much older than everyone else. I’d probably be the only one who couldn’t even work out how to turn on the computers, too. No, it’s too late for me to go back to school. What I want to do is write another book. That’s where Stephanie comes into the story.”

  “Stephanie is inspiring you?”

  “Not exactly. She’s just full of ideas. She wants to write, but she can’t turn her ideas into stories. I haven’t even had any ideas in too many years. We’re going to work together on a book once we get back home. She’s writing an outline now and I really think it’s going to work for us. I can almost hear her characters talking to me. If it’s any good at all, she has more ideas for more books. We could make a fortune together.”

  “So you’re prepared to let her cheat on you, as long as she keeps working on the book,” Fenella concluded.

  James flushed. “It sounds terrible when you put it that way, but yes, I’m willing to put up with just about anything from her, really, as long as she keeps working on the book. Our relationship is all about the book, at least for me. I don’t even like her all that much, but after thirty-five years of trying, I’m prepared to do just about anything to get another book written.”

  “Does she know how you feel about her?”

  “She’s not really interested in how I feel about her. She enjoys telling people that she’s involved with a famous writer. She’s been with actors and models and millionaires. Now she’s with me. No doubt she’ll soon move on to someone else. As long as she leaves a few story ideas behind, I’ll be happy to see her go.”

  “Will she be credited as an author on the book when it’s done?”

  “We haven’t worked that out yet,” James replied. “We’ll have to see how much of it she actually writes, I suppose. I think it would sell better if it only had my name on the cover, but she doesn’t agree.”

  Fenella had a lot more questions about his collaboration with Stephanie, but she wasn’t sure James had any more answers.

  “Do you really think that she went home with another man last night?” she asked instead.

  “I don’t know. It’s one possibility. Or maybe she went home with one of her friends, or all of them. Maybe they wanted to keep talking after the pub closed so they went back to someone’s house. Knowing Stephanie, she lost the slip of paper with the address on it. She might just be wandering around the streets, looking for the house.”

  “Maybe we should walk over to the pub and back, just in case she is lost somewhere,” Fenella suggested.

  “Yeah, that’s a good idea. Let me find some shoes.”

  Fenella sat in the kitchen sipping more coffee while James made a tremendous racket above her. He’d only been in the house for a day. How could he have possibly lost his shoes already?

  “If we don’t find her, when we get back, I’ll ring Shelly and see if she can find any of Stephanie’s friends in the phone book,” Fenella said when James finally rejoined her.

  “Yeah, that would be good. I have my phone with me, in case Stephanie tries calling. I’m pretty sure her battery is dead, though.”

  They walked directly to the pub, which was locked up tightly. The parking lot in front of it was completely empty. A single car was parked in the back, but it looked as if it had been there for more than a few days.

  “Let’s walk around a little bit, just in case she is lost,” Fenella suggested as they turned toward home.

  “I don’t think this is helping,” James said a few minutes later, as they found themselves unexpectedly at a dead end. “We should just go home and wait for her there.”

  They retraced their steps back to the pub and walked back to the house. James picked up the key from under the mat and unlocked the door.

  “I never lock my door at home,” he told Fenella.

  “I did, in Buffalo, and I would never have left the key under the mat, either, but the island is pretty safe.”

  “And it isn’t our house to worry about,” James laughed.

  Fenella bit her tongue. While the furniture in the house wasn’t exactly to her taste, she didn’t want to have to pay to replace it, either. Perhaps leaving the key under the mat wasn’t the best idea. They went back into the kitchen, and Fenella picked up the phone on the wall and called her own apartment.

  “Shelly? It’s Fenella. I wasn’t sure if you’d be there or at home. I need a favor, please.”

  “No problem. I thought I’d wait here until you got home so that I could find out what’s going on. Is everything okay?”

  “Yes, at least, I hope so. Stephanie didn’t come back to the house last night. We assume she stayed with one of her friends, but we don’t have any phone numbers for them. Can you check the phone book and see if any of them are listed? It’s in the top desk drawer in my bedroom.”

  “Hold on a minute and I’ll get it.”

  “She’s going to get the book,” Fenella told James. He nodded and then slumped back into his chair, a coffee mug tightly in his grip.

  “Who am I looking for, then?” Shelly asked.

  “Annie Lawrence,” Fenella replied. “I think she lives in Douglas, but I’m not sure.”

  “I’m pretty sure that’s what Stephanie said,” James told her.

  “Lawrence? There are two, a Matthew and an R.T. Lawrence. Is that any good?” Shelly asked.

  “R.T? I can’t imagine any name starting with R that would have the nickname Annie, can you?” Fenella replied.

  “Not really, but I can give you the number if you want it,” Shelly said.

  “I’ll take it. Whoever it is might know Annie, I suppose.” Fenella wrote down the number that Shelly read out. “What about Maureen Rhodes?” she asked.

  “Give me a second,” Shelly said.

  Fenella could hear the pages turning as she waited.

  “There are a few more of them than there were Lawrences, but no Maureen or even any with initials. You can have Mark, Donald, Peter, or Susan, if you’d like.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she uses Mark in the phone book to hide the fact that she’s a single woman? Or maybe her real name is Susan. I’m not ready to start ringing all over the island just yet. Let’s leave Maureen. Maybe you’ll have better luck with Courtney Bridges.”

  “Bridges? Let me see. There’s one listing for Bridges, and it’s Mr. and Mrs. Charles and Elizabeth,” Shelly told her.

  “That might be Courtney’s parents. I don’t want to call them, not unless we get desperate. Stephanie did say that Courtney was married now, but I don’t think she mentioned her married name.”

  “I wish
I could help more,” Shelly said. “Is James very worried?”

  Fenella glanced over at her brother, who was sitting back with his eyes shut. “Yes and no,” she said. “There are a dozen possible explanations. It will be interesting to see which one is the right one when she turns up.”

  “If I can do anything else to help, just ask.”

  “I can’t imagine what else you could do, but I appreciate the offer.”

  “Ring me back when she turns up. I’m curious now as to what’s happened to her.”

  Fenella promised to do just that and then put the phone down. “We don’t have any definite results, but I have a number that could be Annie. Should I try or should we wait a while longer?”

  A knock on the door interrupted them.

  “That’s will be Stephanie,” James said happily. He started to his feet, but Fenella was already on her way to the door. She waved James back into his chair.

  She wanted to have a word with Stephanie, and there was no time like the present. Whatever the nature of her relationship with James, simply not coming home at night and worrying both James and Fenella was unacceptable. Fenella opened the door and then gasped.

  The man on the doorstep frowned. “I don’t know why I’m even the slightest bit surprised to see you here,” Mark Hammersmith said, shaking his head.

  6

  Fenella glanced back into the house. James had stayed in the kitchen. She stepped out the front door and pulled it shut behind her.

  “I’m going to guess that you’re here because something has happened to Stephanie,” she told the police inspector. “I know you’ll want to talk to my brother about her, but maybe I could break the news to him?”

  The handsome man, who was in his mid-thirties, shrugged. His brown hair flopped over one of his green eyes and Fenella felt an irrational urge to tell him to get a haircut. Maybe she was getting old, or maybe she was just worried because whatever had brought Mark to her door wasn’t going to be good news.