Act of Darkness(18)

Chronicles of Zed and Zedalia changed all that—and worse, it managed to change it in less than a day. A day was how long it took for the 10,000 copies of the first printing to disappear from library shelves, bookstores, wholesalers, and warehouses and for the reorders to start coming in, thousands of reorders, every one of them delivered (according to Bennis’s editor) in tones of breathless, incredulous panic.

Her publishers managed to get her book back into the stores in six weeks. The stores managed to sell out the second printing of 50,000 copies in three. All of a sudden, she was doing the kind of business most writers only dream of, and she was scared to death.

Maybe she would have been less scared if things at home had been less bad than they were, but the publication of Chronicles coincided with what she ever afterward thought of as the hellfire period of her family’s history. Her father, already crippled by an automobile accident, had nearly been killed by another while on a winter-thaw picnic on the family estate. Her sister Emma had been all but accused of causing that accident deliberately. Her father had responded by setting up a living trust that disinherited all four of his daughters irrevocably. Then he had begun to call them up in the middle of the night, to tell them what he thought of them.

Bennis had never had any question whatsoever about what her father thought of her. She had been hearing it, in words of four to seven letters, all her life. Still, those phone calls were nightmarish, brutal, crazy—coming out of nowhere, cutting into her sleep, leaving her sitting bolt upright in bed with the phone gone to dial tone in her hand and her teeth chattering, night after night after night.

It was nuts, and she knew it. She couldn’t do anything about it. Every day or two, her editor sent her more reviews. Every night, her father rang up and cursed, swore, needled, screamed. It got to the point where she was afraid to answer the phone, even in the daytime, and didn’t collect the mail at all. She would have gone to Tanzania if she could have, but she couldn’t. She was in a very strange situation that began to seem stranger to her every day. She didn’t have any money.

Since Chronicles had never been expected to be a success, she had received a very small advance for it, under $5,000. Because her father was in no mood to support her and her mother in no physical condition to hear about her problems, she couldn’t get money from home. It would be at least a year before she saw royalty money from Chronicles, and in the meantime she had $450 in her checking account, no job, and only one way to get hold of any cash: she could borrow it from the Author’s Guild. Since Bennis had a tutored horror of borrowing money, she didn’t.

She might have been stuck forever in Boston, and driven slowly to suicide, except that a very curious thing began to happen. She began to hear from people who had probably never read a fantasy novel before, but had read this one, because at one time or another they had known her. She got letters from former classmates at Agnes Irwin, former campmates from summers on Lake Winnamachee, former fellow sufferers of the dancing classes that were the terror of every Main Line upper-class childhood life. She got letters from former teachers, former nannies, former riding instructors, former chaperones. Finally, she got a letter from a former somebody she actually remembered, and remembered that she had liked.

This former somebody was named Rosamund Baird, and she had been Bennis’s roommate in Lawrence House their mutual freshman year at Smith College. Freshman year was as long as Rosamund had lasted, and she almost hadn’t gotten to the end of that. The only child of the richest rancher in the state of Texas, Rosamund was very well supplied with money, very wild, and very indiscreet. Smith College was a tolerant place even then, but there were limits. Taking a Jackson Pollock off the walls of the college museum and replacing it with five framed Little Orphan Annie comic strips from the Wetherford, Texas, Gazette was definitely outside those limits.

The return address on Rosamund’s letter was Washington, D.C.—not one of those small towns in Maryland and Virginia that Bennis could never keep straight, but the capital itself. The address was embossed at the top of the first page in curling black script. Under it, in the same purple ink used to draw the bats on the borders, was Rosamund’s private phone number. Bennis looked at it, then looked around her apartment. Small to begin with, it now looked minuscule, diminished by the accumulation of the debris of a life on the point of breaking down beyond repair. Bennis rescued the phone from under the blankets she had dropped on the floor beside her bed that morning and dialed the District of Columbia.

On most days it would have been next to impossible to get hold of Rosamund in the middle of the afternoon, because she would have been out at the hairdresser’s getting ready for a night out. On this day, however, she was just back from her lawyers’. Her third divorce was final, her datebook said she was twenty-five years old, and she was depressed.