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I sank to the couch onto a pile of cut-up magazines, my eyes riveted to the page. “Um, yes…it appears to be…” I read the entire article and looked up. Two wide, bloodshot eyes stared out at me from a rat’s nest of tangled hair. “It says that you didn’t grow up in a dysfunctional family in Alabama. And that your mother didn’t abandon you with strangers in a trailer park when you were thirteen…and you didn’t spend two years at a state mental hospital. It says that your real name isBetsy Ross Middlefield and that you grew up in Darien, Connecticut, with your father, who is an insurance executive and your mother, Mary Ellen, who belongs to the DAR and runs an interior decorating company.”
Phoenix shook her head, dislodging a feather that had leaked out of the comforter. “Mother’s name is Mary Alice,” she said, “not Mary Ellen. She’s going to be really pissed when she sees this.” She burrowed down under the blankets and covered her head.
I took the tray and the paper back into the kitchen, then sat at the table and reread the article twice. Then I sat staring out the back door at the frozen terrain. I’d had a lot of shocks since I’d come to Fairwick. I’d discovered that the man in my erotic dreams was a real incubus, that my boss was a witch and my next door neighbor an ancient deer fairy. My colleagues were demons, witches, and fairies. My favorite student was under a curse that was going to ruin her life. I lived in a town that straddled two worlds and apparently I had a hidden talent for opening the door between those worlds. I shouldn’t have been thrown by one mendacious memoirist—Phoenix certainly wasn’t the first—but I was. Badly thrown. Phoenix had been my roommate for three months. Although she was a little wacky, I’d come to like her. She was funny and generous and cared about her students…or at leastoneof them. I’d known her to be careless, silly, and vain, but never mean. I’d enjoyed listening to her crazy stories, but now I knew that they’d all been lies. And it wasn’t as if she’d been lying to cover up some secret supernatural identity. She’d been lying because…Well, I didn’t know why she’d been lying. If she ever got off the couch perhaps I’d ask her.
But right now I had to go or I’d be late for class. I went back into the library and sat down on the couch by Phoenix’s feet, moving aside a stack of newspapers and the purple folder that contained Mara Marinca’s work.
“Look,” I said to the frizz of hair peeking up over the quilt.“I’ve been meaning to tell you that I’ve been reading your mem—book, and I think it’s really good. Maybe you were meant to be a novelist and not a memoirist. This story will blow over sooner or later. Look at James Frey! He’s still publishing.”
“I’ll have to give back my advance,” a small voice moaned from beneath the blankets. “And I’ll be fired.”
“I don’t know about the advance, but if you like I’ll talk to Dean Book.”
“Would you?” Phoenix’s sharp nose and big eyes appeared over the edge of the quilt. She looked like the wolf hiding in the grandmother’s bed in Little Red Riding Hood.
“Sure. I’ll call her on my way to class. Why don’t you get up, take a shower, have breakfast…” Sober up, I wanted to add, but didn’t. “And whatever you do, don’t answer your phone or any emails from reporters.”
I was going to tell her to stay in, but then I realized that wouldn’t be necessary. She hadn’t left the house in days. Honeysuckle House had its second writer recluse.
I called Dean Book on my cell as soon as I was out of earshot of the house. She answered on the first ring.
“I just read the story,” she said without preamble. “How’s Phoenix?”
“Stricken. She must have realized that minx Jen Davies was on to her because she’s been sulking all weekend.”
Dean Book called the Australian reporter something rather stronger thanminx.
“Are you going to fire Phoenix?” I asked.
“I have to talk to the board, but I’d like to hear Phoenix’s story first. Is she at your house?”
I’d reached the entrance to campus. I turned around before entering the gates and looked back at Honeysuckle House, visible now since Ike had trimmed the hedges back. I thought Isaw a shadow move near the back of the house, but it was only a shrub swaying in the wind. “Yes, she’s there. I don’t think she’s going anywhere.”
“Good. I’ll come by in half an hour to see her. May I use the key under the gnome if she doesn’t let me in?”
I told Dean Book she could without bothering to ask how she knew about the hidden key and was about to hang up when she asked me one more question. “There hasn’t been any further sign of…him, has there?”
“No,” I answered, making my voice upbeat. “Not a trace. Nada. Zip. Elvis has left the building.”
Dean Book took so long to reply I thought AT&T had dropped another call. I half hoped it had and she’d missed my lame attempt at levity. But after a beat she replied. “Good. One less thing to worry about. Have a good class, Callie.”
I did have a good class. I’d asked them to read a Victoria Holt novel over the break, suspecting that a pocket-sized romance novel might be a better travel companion than one of the heavy eighteenth-century novels we’d been reading.
“It was great,” Jeanine Marfalla, a pretty sophomore from the suburbs of Boston, enthused. “I read the whole thing on the train ride home and bought two more of her books at a used bookstore.”
Nicky said that her favorite part was when the heroine hears the hero murmuring German endearments at her locked door.
“It gave me chills,” she said. Nicky looked better for the break, rested and well fed. Mara, however, wasn’t in the class at all. When I asked Nicky after class where Mara was, she blushed and told me that she wasn’t sure because she hadn’t been back to her dorm room yet. She’d spent the break in town with Ben. I suppressed a jealous pang that she had gotten to spend time with her boyfriend and I hadn’t.
I checked my phone and found a text message from LizBook asking me if I wouldn’t mind taking Phoenix’s workshop for her. I texted back that I’d be happy to and asked how Phoenix was doing.
Not great, the dean texted back.Come back right after you’re done with her class.
When I walked into the writing workshop the first person I noticed was Mara. She looked embarrassed to see me. “I am so sorry to miss your class, Professor McFay. I got used to sleeping late on the vacation and overslept this morning.” She looked awful—exhausted and bone thin—and yet I’d recalled her eating quite heartily at Thanksgiving. I wondered if she was bulimic.
“That’s okay, Mara. You can make it up to me by telling me what Phoenix assigned over the break.”
“Oh, she never assigns anything,” Mara answered. “She just tells us to keep going with our memoirs. To dig down to the bitter roots, as she always says.”
