Bodice-ripper from the pub biz. It’s no mystery that the business side of this rising industry pair is getting breathless and bare-chested with the bestselling author of another genre. Note to heaving bosoms: Close the office shades. This city has eyes.
Rebecca phoned Jeb that day to see if he had the inside scoop on the offenders’ identities. That was how unprepared she was for her husband’s infidelity. If she had been holding the telephone more closely, she might have heard the office blinds being drawn.
The Other Woman was a celebrity romance writer, a miniseries-spawning, household name, so the imbroglio quickly went national, splashed onto magazine covers and decried in chat rooms and alluded to in the presidential campaign in a stump speech on modern morality. In two weeks Rebecca Loden went from being a mid-list thriller author to the poster wife for spurned spouses everywhere. The just-released Last Words, bursting with pre-pub acclamation and already touted as Rebecca’s breakout book, went back to press eight times, riding the sudden surge of public awareness all the way to number four on the New York Times Bestseller List, her very first charting. The scandal pushed the book into early buyers’ hands; but it was the story itself, that of a rookie female FBI agent tracking a sociopathic militia leader across the American west, that clicked with readers. Now one year later and three weeks into its softcover release, the paperback was number one on the USA Today top fifty, while the romance author, whose affair with Jeb did not outlive the scandal, had failed to chart with her subsequent offering. It seemed that romance readers would tolerate adultery neither from their cherished characters, nor from their favorite authors.
But victories of morality and commerce had meant little to Rebecca. The breakup of her marriage was a car wreck, an absolute broadside, she hadn’t seen it coming. She endured the usual crises of mind, body, and soul. The blame was all Jeb’s, and yet still she searched for reasons. That someone once so compassionate and smart could fail her so badly. He had pledged to change, to restore love, trust, intimacy. In fact he begged her to stay, to go with him to counseling and give him another chance. She agonized and he apologized and she prolonged the suffering by going back and trying to make it work. But Jeb wasn’t interested in repair, he was interested in syndromes, compulsions, addictions, he wanted to convince himself that he was blameless, that having a poor character was not a flaw but a disease. They had been more than a couple, they had been a team, a single ambition, she the author and he her literary agent, but somewhere along the way she had lost him to himself. Somehow he had changed without regard to Rebecca. The sweet, tender, dedicated man she had loved perished in that car wreck — that was how she mourned her marriage. The Jeb she had admired was dead.
And yet the new Jeb was still in her life. He had been profoundly responsible for the business side of her success, argued her lawyers and accountants, giving him a potential legal claim on future earnings. Why forfeit an extra fifteen percent to another literary agent on top of whatever earnings settlement he might attach? The emotional toll of retaining his services — Jeb was a top agent — seemed too great, until anger caught up with her and Rebecca decided that Jeb should have to sing for his supper and not cost her a penny more than he was worth. So the alter-Jeb remained her agent, a doppelganger negotiating the deals for her current work-in-progress, the much-anticipated follow-up to Last Words.
After the divorce was settled and they embarked on separate lives, every block in Manhattan, a city they had discovered together and made their own, became a monument to betrayal and defeat for Rebecca. Central Park was now a wasteland of softball games and summer picnics. The. entire Upper East Side, where they had lived for the last year of their marriage, was off-limits to her now, as though cordoned off by yellow crime-scene tape. The street noise distracted her, and she was unable to write more than a sentence or two without losing her way. The rest of their property had been divided equally, but she found she could not share custody of the city with him. Friends expressed concern about the radical nature of her move, from the Upper West Side to rural Vermont. “Depression” is a word even close friends don’t use lightly. But she wasn’t fleeing New York City so much as she was returning to the only safe place she knew, the only world she could trust now, the world of her writing.
It was writing that had first brought her to Vermont. She had stalled near the end of the first draft of Last Words, whose nemesis she had modeled on Jasper Grue, the leader of the vicious band of backwoods survivalists known as The Truth, who had bankrolled their segregationist militia with a spree of kidnap-murders in the mid-1990s. A scrap of research about his current residence, the Administrative Maximum Unit Prison at Gilchrist, prompted a long drive north into Vermont in an attempt to break the mental logjam. She never got any closer to him than the penitentiary parking lot, but that was all she had needed. She retreated to a nearby country inn and completed the novel that night in a torrent of creative energy.
She now lived a half hour north of St. Johnsbury in a two-story post-and-beam house of exposed wood and high ceilings and magnificent views of the unnamed mountain that was her only neighbor. She wrote at a converted carpenter’s desk in a sunroom off the kitchen, late into each day until the sun cycled behind the cap of the mountain. At night, her world revolved around the broad-mouthed fireplace. This was a period of hibernation, of recovery. Her novel had occupied her full-time, its completion her sole focus.
She felt confident returning north to ADX Gilchrist. Driving her big red Mountaineer, feeling the rhythm of the road under the tires, gave her a sense of independence, something else she had reclaimed from Manhattan. There the city set the pace, traffic lights, train times, escalators. In Vermont, she traveled at her own speed. She slowed now, taking in the regenerative beauty of the Northeast Kingdom. As she crossed the town limits of Gilchrist, the noon sun glinted off crystalline lakes in an ice-laden valley, the snow shining like sugar on the roofs of the cozy lakefront homes. She passed a Christmas tree farm, an acre of neatly spaced rows of blue spruces of graduating heights, and started to feel good again. Nothing very bad could ever happen here.
ADX Gilchrist looked less like the most secure prison in the country than it did a vocational high school fortified against a terrorist attack. The penitentiary was set behind high fences inside a wide clearing of high birch trees cut back from the perimeter in a perfect, sacred square. Rebecca pulled into the main lot and stepped out into a thin, crunchy layer of packed white dust, pulling on her parka and zipping it against the cold. She left her handbag in the car, carrying neither a notebook nor a tape recorder. Both were contraband on the inside.
She stepped past muddy snow plowed into tight piles and across a damp gravel road to the entrance, putting herself in the place of an arriving inmate. She passed under a squat guard tower and there was no one about. The entire prison compound looked like a border checkpoint at the crossroads of nowhere.
The outer fence was twenty feet tall, topped by taut strands of barbed wire angled inward. Inside the fence were bales of gleaming, spiraled concertina wire, stacked three wide and five high. They looked springy if you ignored the two-inch razor blades. Still, the visceral effect of the fence and the wire surprised her. She proceeded to a grille of thicker steel than the fence, with no visible lock or handle, barring her from a steel mesh tunnel inside. There were no buttons to push, no telephone receiver to pick up.