Jan Burke - Eighteen

Instead, I just bought underwear. She didn’t seem to recognize or remember me.

In the car in the shopping mall parking lot, I held on to the steering wheel and screamed behind my teeth. As much as I wanted to, I knew I would never forget Lindy, or fail to recognize her.

To my surprise, Peggy cried when I told her the story of the dead mouse in my pocket. It dawned on me, as I finished telling it, that just about all of us have these memories of some moment of humiliation, have secrets that weigh down our pockets, but are really no larger than a mouse. The things that we think will bring our lives to a halt, don’t. And no one remembers our shame as well as we do.

The next day, Peggy told me that she had gone home and told the story to her mother and to her elementary-school-aged daughters. Her mother cried, too.

Her daughters wanted to know if it was really true that I used to carry dead mice around in my pockets.

“Tell them yes,” I said, “it’s really true.”

Harriet read the letter again. She wasn’t sure why; each rereading upset her as much if not more than the first.

“Once again, I must tell you that the ending of this story positively reeks,” Kitty Craig had written. “I can’t imagine any reader believing Lord Harold Wiggins would choose this method of killing off his enemy, nor would any reader believe he could manage to mask the taste of antimony by mixing it into the braunschweiger. Rewrite.”

Harriet Bently had been writing the popular Lord Harold Wiggins series for ten years now. She knew exactly what dearest Harry (as only Harriet had liberty to call him) would choose to do in any given situation, even if her editor did not. After all, Harry had moved into Harriet’s life-lock, stock and barrel. No, she didn’t invite him to tea like a child’s imaginary friend; but she thought of him constantly, and had grown comfortable with his presence in her life. Like any series character and his author, they had become quite attached to each other.

It was more than Kitty Craig’s rude tone that upset her. Kitty was notorious in the publishing industry for her biting, sarcastic remarks; Harriet told herself (not entirely successfully) that she shouldn’t take Kitty’s insults personally. What upset Harriet was Kitty’s disregard for Lord Harold Wiggins’s intelligence. His trademark was to effect justice without costing the English taxpayers a farthing for an imprisonment or a trial; once Lord Wiggins knew who the guilty party was, he cleverly killed the villain. In this book, Lord Wiggins made sure the poisoner Monroe would never age another day by slipping him a lethal dose of antimony. Monroe was a villain of the first water, and certainly deserved the punishment Lord Wiggins meted out. Harriet couldn’t help but feel proud of her protagonist.

Her previous editor, Linda Lucerne, had loved Lord Harold almost as much as she did. Linda never changed much more than a punctuation mark; Kitty used industrial strength black markers to X through pages of manuscript at a time. Pages that had taken hours of research, planning, writing, and rewriting before they were ever mailed to Shoehorn, Dunstreet and Matthews (known affectionately as SDM), the esteemed publishers of the Lord Harold Wiggins series.

Yes, Linda Lucerne had loved Harriet’s style, and said so from the moment she accepted the first novel, Lord Wiggins Makes Hay While the Sun Shines. And make hay he did. Linda’s faith was proved justified, and the success of Makes Hay was repeated in Lord Wiggins Beards the Lion in His Den and the next seven Lord Harold Wiggins books. Alas, Linda had suffered a heart attack just after the tenth book, Lord Wiggins Throws Pearls Before Swine, had been mailed off to SDM. Upon her recovery, she had opted for retirement from the publishing industry.

Harriet tried hard to remember a sin she might have committed that would have justified so mean a punishment as having Kitty Craig become her new editor.

She had known other writers who had suffered under Kitty’s abuses. Upon learning that Kitty would be her editor, Harriet had complained long and loud to her agent. But Wendall had pointed out that Kitty had been personally chosen for Harriet by Mr. William Shoehorn III. He had also mentioned that unless she was willing to come up with a new main character, they had no hope of moving to another publishing house. SDM owned Lord Harold. Wendall urged her to be open-minded.

Harriet loved Lord Wiggins too much to forsake him, and so she had tried to follow Wendall’s advice. Tried, that is, until she received her first editorial letter from Kitty Craig. A long list of changes were demanded, each demand phrased in abusive language. The one that bothered Harriet the most was the demand to change the ending:

“How absolutely boring! Monroe dies when he swallows lemonade laced with strychnine. Strychnine! That old saw? Is your imagination so limited? Formula writer though you are, I would hope you could come up with something a tad more original.”

Old saw indeed! Strychnine was a classic poison, she lamented, famous throughout detective fiction. But Kitty would hear none of it.

Harriet decided to be big about it; after all, she didn’t want a reputation as the sort of writer who simply couldn’t let go of a word she’d written. She was no rank amateur. She could bear the burden of criticism; being showered with the unwanted opinions of others was inevitable in her profession. And so she set herself to the painful task of revising the ending of Pearls Before Swine. That in turn meant that she had to revise a number of passages in the story, but she did not complain.

In fact, by the time she mailed off her new version, she was quite pleased with it. This time, Lord Wiggins offered Monroe a piece of chocolate cake chock-full of Catapres. It had been a bit tricky for dear Harry to obtain the drug, but she had managed it. Monroe had suffered heart failure thirty minutes after eating his dessert, allowing Lord Harold all the time in the world to leave the scene. It was certainly not as popular in fiction as strychnine, so Harriet thought Kitty might be contented.

Kitty hated it.

“You are going to have to do better than this. Catapres? Could you possibly devise anything more obscure? No reader is going to recognize this as a poison. Crimeny, it sounds like a resort that would appeal to people from the Bronx.”

Not being from New York, Harriet couldn’t guess what Kitty meant by her last remark. She steamed and stewed for a while and then went back to work. Now it was a challenge.

In version three, Lord Harold arranged for Monroe to be bitten repeatedly by a Gila monster.

“What utter nonsense!” Kitty wrote. “How the heck does an English lord happen to have a twenty-inch Arizona desert lizard hanging about?”

Even Harriet had to admit that the Gila monster wasn’t her best effort. She spent a little more time on version four. There might not be many Gila monsters roaming about the English countryside, but she knew that rhododendrons weren’t so rare. And so it was that Lord Harold made tea from the deadly leaves, and served it with scones to the unsuspecting Monroe.

“Harriet, please. You are trying my patience. This is so unimaginative. If you want this to sell anywhere outside of the East Lansing Lawn and Garden Club, rewrite.”

Harriet wasn’t even sure how she found the nerve to try a fifth time. She needed to publish annually to maintain the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed, and Kitty’s demands were delaying the publication date of Pearls Before Swine. She had arranged to attend the annual Mystery World Awards Banquet, the Whodundunits. Her flight from Los Angeles to New York was booked, the hotel arrangements made. But now she wasn’t sure she could face the inquires of her fellow authors; they were bound to notice that the next Lord Harold Wiggins book had not arrived on schedule.