Roll with the Punches (42 page)

"I want to see Dad," I told Frank when he opened the door a crack.

Bang!
"God damn it! Let me go home!" Dad yelled.

"He needs a few more days to settle in. We told your mother. He might hurt someone if he sees you now." Frank started to close the door.

"I have a right to see my father. Where's Nadja?" I said, puffing up to my full height and shoving a knee in the door jamb.

A baked Alaska of a woman with thick glasses waddled up beside Frank. "Oh, it's Miss Reynard Jackson," her voice rasped with sarcasm. "Nadja's out of town. I'm Melody. Now you go cool off and let us experts do our work.”

I didn't move.

Her grin was oily. "We don't want to have to call the police, Miss Book Thief. Or the tabloids.”

"Ethel! Let me call Ethel!" Dad yelled.

"Dad!" I yelled, nearing tears. "Mom said I could take you home. It was a big mistake putting you in here. She was just overwhelmed earlier. You can come home now."

Frank stepped outside and shut the door behind him. "Don’t tell him that! He's still too dangerous to let go now, especially to a criminal like you. We have our standards. Now go on home. Scat."

I jumped up and down. "Let me see my dad! I have a right to take him home!"

"Only when you get power of attorney." A rough shove at me, and he ducked back inside the door and shut it in my face.

Back in the car, I beat on the wheel until my hands hurt. Then I saw my laptop, my little pet, my second home. I opened the case and pulled it out. Then I powered it up and clicked on Microsoft Word. But something was wrong in IBM-ville. No word files. None. I punched every button ten times, then shook the thing and beat on it. Still nothing. Shit. I closed it. No decal. This laptop wasn't mine! It was a new one, just like mine. But not mine.

"ARRRRGGGGGHHHHH!"

No laptop
, no Dad, no Dal
,
no Harley,
no James,
no job,
no
book
, no
future, no reputation
.
My life was crashing into oblivion. I hauled off and screamed, long and loud and jagged and splintered, pummeling the steering wheel until I could no longer see the residents looking out their windows through my corrugated red haze.

That was Black Sunday.

*
      
*
      
*

That afternoon, between abusive calls to James and pouring thunderstorms, I visited Helena Street and hammered on Nadja's door twice more, but they kept it locked. On one visit, I saw a U-Haul full of Japanese furniture leaving the driveway. That evening, I parked outside the care home, glaring through the drizzle at the damned second-grade-style "Nadja Kay's Corner" sign with the jauntily-dancing letters over the door, wishing I could take Dad home for a game of hearts. Between several efforts to break down the facility's door, I furiously skated around the block or drove the streets of Orange County. I kept well away from Mom's house and tried to hope she was doing well. All the while, I missed Dal like a trash can bereft of its banana peels. And every time a car passed, I just wished it was the police, delivering Dad and a stern warning to me like before.

The one time I drove by my condo, there were paparazzi camped out on my lawn. So in the wee hours, I had to park far away and creep over my back fence like a common thief in the dark. Then I ransacked my own place for signs of my backup flash drive, only coming up with two old James Taylor tapes and a missing earring.

Late Monday morning, I awoke to more gray skies and an army of ants trailing across my kitchen countertop to the garbage. They always came in for refuge from hot or wet weather and stayed for tea and cookie crumbs. As I wiped up the last thousand little crawlers, Monica called. I let the machine get it.

It blared out: "Rhonda. You haven't called me about Dad, and Mom won't answer either. Is something up? You're awfully quiet. If you don't return this call by tomorrow, I'm coming home.”

I picked up the phone and put it right back down. It was no good. She'd wheedle the whole story out of me in minutes and come anyway.

Then Marian called. The machine recorded her saying, "Tomorrow's group meeting's canceled because of Jackie. I left you a message on your cell phone.”

I picked up the phone and dialed. "Marian, hi. It's my sister's cell phone. I don't know the message password."

"How's James?" she asked. "After that closet fun at Jackie's, you'll forgive him the green card wedding to Yvette, right?"

"We’ll ... see." I was wary of group members right now, as everyone had so many secrets. I asked again, "Marian, you didn't maybe misplace my
Memory Serves
CD somewhere?"
Like at Pala?
"Where someone might have picked it up and decided to take a
gamble
on publishing it?"
Hint, hint.

"I'm so sorry, hon. I've looked and looked for that thing."

I picked an ant off my arm. "Marian. Do you think James could have done it?"

She paused. "You mean steal your work? I thought you two were thick as thieves until Yvette showed up. And as we said, he's a beginner. On the other hand, those love scenes he wrote …"

"What about them?" Somebody knocked at my back door. I got up to get it, phone in hand, but spied a camera lens at my kitchen window. I locked the door and went to hide in the bathroom as the knocking got louder.

Marian was saying, "Male writers usually just go right for the action in love scenes. In and out. Slam, bam, thank you, Ma'am. And their female characters have to do all the seduction work. Have you noticed? But James is different. He writes all that luscious detail, like he could get inside a woman's head. Whew! In his latest draft, that Fabiolino's hot, like a woman would see him. And
he
seduces
her
, initiates the—er—um." Her voice lowered. "Some of his scenes just jumped off the page and sent me for the ice box faster than any love scene I've ever read before. I saved them for future reference.”

With her boy toy?

"And just the name Fabiolino," she went on. "So perfect. What man would choose that? Especially after calling the guy Charlie for so long, it took real insight to change his name to Fabiolino.”

"Too bad his plot had holes big enough for the Space Shuttle," I said.

"The point is, Rhonda, Yvette married him for a green card. He'll be free again soon, and you should consider—I mean, how many men look like that and write like that?"

I could feel her
wink, wink, nudge, nudge
over the phone lines.

*
      
*
      
*

Fabiolino. Fabiolino.

As I hung up, a light went on in my emotion-saturated brain and the connection popped out like a huge pan of brownies fresh from the oven. Duh! The girl at the conference had read a scene straight out of James's book, including Fabiolino and Ariel. I'd been too brain-dead about Dal to connect the two until now. But how had she gotten hold of it? Did she know James? Was she one of his computer geek friends? Had she somehow gotten hold of James's book? Was
she
Reynard Jackson? If so, she had also stolen my book, but how? I didn't know her. Had James maybe uploaded my book off my CD to his laptop or flash drive and had she then raided his laptop or stolen his flash drive? Or was there someone else involved? I ran to the kitchen, found my purse, and dug out that conference reader's outline. Her name was Sylvia Bliss. I dialed her.

"Team Time Real Estate. Sylvia Bliss," she answered.

I peeked out the bathroom door. Two camera lenses were at the window. There was loud pounding on the door. I went back to the bathroom.

"Hi, Sylvia. I met you at the writer's conference last weekend. I don't know how to ask you this, but that scene you read at the conference, the one with Fabiolino and Ariel. Um … Did someone happen to give it to you or sell it to you?" Oh, that sounded awful.

"What? Sell it to me? Hey, who the heck are you? I wrote that scene myself. My hairdresser's name is Fabio Leno, he's very depressed, very hunky, and he smells just like my character!"

"But I've seen that scene before. I actually worked on it all summer with another writer, and—"

"Oh, you're Rhonda Hamilton! Miss Plagiarist 2006! Of all the nerve! You took my book? How did you get hold of my stuff? I saw you in the tabloids. I'm calling the Times right now to confirm their story." She hung up.

Oh, crud. I sat on the avocado tile floor with the stupid faucet dripping, dripping, dripping. Why
had
James's love scenes been so well written from a woman's perspective? It made much more sense for a woman author to write wonderful love scenes like that and name a character Fabiolino. James and I had worked more on his terrible action scenes and transitions between scenes. But all of us in the group had just drooled when he'd read the sex scenes. Had those scenes been a tiny part of my falling so completely in love with him? Or a big part? A guy who wrote such masterful heroes and such great sex must be the man of my dreams. Unless he hadn't written them.

So, if the work
was
Sylvia's, it would explain everything: why the love scenes gleamed, why the action scenes stank, and why James's real-life closet seduction scene reeked as well.

I dialed Sylvia again.

She was cranky. "I called the Times! Go away!"

"Sylvia, wait! Don't hang up! Please! Please! The press has it all wrong. My work was stolen, too, and I
believe
you. I'm not a plagiarist. But I may know who is. Did you possibly work on that manuscript with a critique group?"

"If you're implying that I copied from somebody—"

"No, no, no. Not at all. I think someone lifted your work. Like they lifted mine."

She snorted, but didn't hang up.

"Sylvia. Please. In your group, is there a James Connors or an Yvette Winkler?"

She sounded disgusted. "My group's in Brea on Monday nights. All older women. Look, however you got published, it doesn't give you the right to—"

"Fine. Sorry to bother you. It's just such a coincidence. My own book got published by someone else, and now I'm getting blamed for trying to steal it from him.”

"How?" Guarded interest.

I gave her the short version. "I know this sounds fantastic. But I just wondered how your work showed up in James's laptop. Maybe both our problems have the same source. You never worked with an irritating little redhead or a tall, hunk—blue eyes, dark curly hair?"

"Oh. You mean Jim O'Riley.”

Sylvia's dam broke. "That was
my work
! How dare he read it to a bunch of strangers and pretend it was
his
? That evil little … blot on mankind. See, I'm a positive thinker. But last fall, in my other writers' group, my critique partner, Jim O'Riley, said he was an agent's assistant and the women all swooned over him. We worked together for weeks until I finished my first draft and then he just turned on me. Overnight, he got all picky and convinced the whole group that my book would never sell. He said I needed to drop it and start over with a different premise. Everybody figured that as an agent, he must be right. So I started a new book. Then the weasel just disappeared after shipwrecking months of my work. Can you believe that?"

"Oh, yeah. I can. Real jellyfish." My stomach was livid.

"Well, except for the tattoos." Her voice warmed.

Oh, no.

She giggled. "We went to Santa Monica Pier once for a kite show, and I said how colorful it was. He said, 'You ain't seen nothin', babe,' and raised his shirt. Oh, my God! Every San Francisco landmark you can imagine. He made them dance for me.”

How come he never took me to a kite show?
"So you really ditched your draft and started over from scratch?"

"Well, would you continue working on a book once your whole group hated it? And I didn't dare show it to the new group for fear of a repeat problem. So I scrapped it."

"So why did you bring it to a
Read and Critique
session at the conference?" I asked, wetting a wad of toilet paper to wipe a bloom of ants off the bathroom countertop.

"A freelance editor told me it might have potential. Boy would I like to strangle Jim."

*
      
*
      
*

I didn't go to the rink for Monday night practice, deciding to give myself some needed rest and the Amazons some extra time to cool off. They might still be a smidge mad at me. But the constant paparazzi pounding on the door got to me, and sleep was elusive, giving me all kinds of time to worry about Music Man and Dal. And get hungry. Really hungry. There was almost no food in the condo, and I needed food to think constructively. So around ten the next morning, I rocketed out of the condo on skates with a bag of clothes and three umbrellas blazing.

The paparazzi took this as a sign of guilt and snapped photo after photo, yelling, "Are you really Reynard Jackson?" and "Did you plagiarize twelve manuscripts?" and, "Are you hiding out from the law?" and, "Are you really pregnant with Jackson's baby?"

I got through the crowd and to my car without really hurting anyone. Much. Of course, I had to drive like Harley to lose them. Then I put on a wig and glasses and settled down at a Burger King to eat fries. And brood.

Was James really Jackson? If so, he'd need to be a great writer or a great actor. With a ghost writer. George? Marian? Jackie? Yvette? Stephen King?

I bit savagely into my fish sandwich. Yvette could easily ghostwrite, but she'd just moved here. Or was that a lie? Maybe she and James had been working together for a long time, he procuring manuscripts and she rewriting them. Together, they could equal Jackson. But lately, she seemed so afraid of James and so weird. Had their writing conspiracy gone bad? Had she been about to sell James out to me at the bout before he showed up and whisked her away so painfully?

I picked up the phone and dialed James, but his phone numbers were disconnected and Yvette's answering machine was full. I called everybody who knew either of them, with no luck. Now I wished I'd taken that wonderful weeping-tattoo opportunity to see James's apartment. Almost.