Jennifer Crusie Bundle (35 page)

“So my book is about what happens
after
the happily-ever-after,” Welch said. “Which is why it's called
After the Ever After.
The prologue is a fairy tale about a young woman who comes of age in the sixties. Her name is Cinderellen—” the audience tittered politely “—and she buys into happily-ever-after in a big way. This is the end of the tale.”

Then Welch began to read a scene in which his heroine stood up at the ball and made a speech defending the importance of the environment over big business, a speech that instantly won the heart of the prince, and Tess's heart stopped. It wasn't just the snide tone Welch used—a tone that made people in the audience first smile in sardonic amusement and then laugh in outright derision—it was the words, words that were so familiar to her that she recited them silently in unison with Welch as he read, finishing with: “And from then on Cinderellen and the prince looked for the good in every day and tried to make sure they had a part in creating some of it.”

That got a big laugh, and Tess felt the room swoop around her as her whole body went hot with anger. He was telling the CinderTess story, Lanny's story, and he was making people laugh at it. It was her story, and he was degrading it, degrading her and everything she believed in. She was so rigid with suppressed rage that Nick turned to see what was wrong.

“Tess?” he whispered.

She shook her head, trying to marshal her thoughts.

Welch then segued into Cinderellen's story thirty years later. She was swamped with debts, dragged down by the poor people she was trying to help, unable to keep her small family business going because of environmental restrictions and saddled with a prince who had turned out to be a vapid do-gooding fool. As the audience nodded, enjoying the expected disasters that had befallen the naive heroine, Tess reminded herself to take deep breaths, to concentrate, to do anything to control the rising anger that swamped her because of what Welch was doing to her story.

To Lanny's story.

“I'm going to kill him,” she whispered under her breath, which prompted Nick to shush her.

Welch finished the scene with Cinderellen's emancipation speech: she was mad as hell and not going to take it anymore. Then Welch stopped reading to sketch in Cinderellen's transformation. She streamlined her company by laying off workers and saved a bundle by not helping the poor, but that wasn't enough. She went to the best plastic surgeon in the land and had him transform her back into the beauty she'd been at the ball. Then she set out to tell her story again. Only this time, she was going to do it right, using all her feminine wiles. The last scene he read was a comic seduction scene in which Cinderellen used her newly recovered beauty to seduce the head of the Environmental Protection Agency into exempting her company from environmental controls, manipulating him with a speech on the importance of business over the environment as she slithered first over his desk and then his body. As a piece of satire it was dead-on, a perfect parody of Cinderellen's original speech. People were falling off their chairs laughing.

Tess was catatonic with rage.

“What's wrong?” Nick leaned closer as people applauded at the end of the reading. “Are you all right?”

“No.” Tess turned to him. “We have to stop him. He can't publish this book.”

“Tess,” Nick said warningly. “You are not going to interfere. It's his book.”

“No, it's not. He plagiarized.”

Nick closed his eyes. “No. Don't tell me this.”

Tess shook her head. “He plagiarized. I know that story. It's not his.”

“A
LL RIGHT
.” Nick shut the door to Welch's study behind Tess and Park and Gina. “Explain this to me.”

Tess cast one blindly incurious look around the room, registering expensive paneling, Oriental carpets, a huge leather-and-brass sofa and soulless sets of leather-bound books on walnut bookcases with glass fronts.
Money,
she thought.
It always comes back to money.

“Tess?” Nick prompted.

“He plagiarized,” she replied. “That prologue about Cinderellen? He stole it. Word for word, the whole thing. He stole it.”

“Why would anybody plagiarize that garbage?” Nick asked. “It was god-awful. The good stuff came later. I just hope the critics make it through the early garbage to get to the good stuff.”

“You're not listening to me,” Tess said. “It's never going to get to the critics. He plagiarized, and I'm going to stop him.”

“No!”
Nick and Park said simultaneously, and Gina said softly, “Oh, no.” Then Nick pushed Tess down into the padded leather desk chair and sat down on the desk in front of her.

“That would not be a good idea,” he said.

“Why not?” Tess demanded.

Park snorted. “Because there's a lot of money at stake here, that's why not.”

Nick held up his hand. “Will you let me handle this?” he said to Park. “Please?” He turned back to Tess. “It's like this. We're guests in this man's house, and now you want to accuse him of plagiarism. I know you'll find this hard to understand, but it doesn't seem appropriate under the circumstances.”

“The hell with appropriate,” Tess said. “This is a moral issue. No, it's more than a moral issue. It's my life he's trashing. It's everything Lanny ever gave me, and I'm going to confront him.”

“Confront me with it first,” Nick said.

“Do not let her talk you into this,” Park warned.

Tess appealed to Park. “Doesn't the fact that he stole part of that book make any difference to you? You're a lawyer. You're supposed to uphold the law.”

“That's the police,” Park said. “Don't get us confused. We make a lot more money. And we're going to keep on making a lot more money if you keep your mouth shut about plagiarism.”

“I don't believe this,” Tess said. “You want him to get away with it.”

“Wait a minute,” Nick said. “We don't even know what he's getting away with. Explain.”

“Oh, great,” Park said.

Tess shot him a dirty look, then concentrated on Nick. “When I was about eight, we lived on a commune near Yellow Springs. Here in Ohio.”

“I know where Yellow Springs is,” Nick said. “Go on.”

“Bunch of hippies,” Park put in.

“It was a nice commune,” Tess flared. “Anyway, one day not too long after we got there, this guy showed up.” She bit her lip, the hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach growing as she remembered how special Lanny had been and how Welch had just raped his story. “He was really wonderful,” she said. “He was probably in his early twenties. A big husky guy.” She smiled. “I thought he was a mountain. Big and broad with long brown hair and a big brown beard. Big ears. Everything about him was bigger than life.”

“Great,” Nick said. “Get to the point.”

“His name was Lanny.”

“Is this important?” Park asked. “Because Gina and I are missing cocktails.”

“Shut up, Park,” Nick said.

“He told me that same story,” she said. “The prologue story. Word for word, it's Lanny's story.”

“And you remember it thirty years later?” Nick asked. “Come on.”

“He told it to me over and over again the whole summer,” Tess said. “Every time he told it, he added something, another task the heroine had to do, another problem she had to solve, and it got to be really long. When he left at the end of the summer, he wrote it all down for me, and Elise used to read parts of it to me every night for the two years we lived there. I know big chunks of it by heart.” She glared up at Nick. “And your great American author was reading that same story. I could recite parts of it with him. He stole that story.”

“Who's Elise?” Nick asked, confused.

“My mother.”

“And she read you a story about this Ellen?” Park said. “I don't believe it.”

“No. My story was about CinderTess.”

Park rolled his eyes.

“Lanny wrote that story for me,” Tess said to Nick, ignoring Park. “And Welch stole it, and I'm going to—”

“Are you sure, Tess?” Nick said. “This is serious.”

“I
told
you,” Tess said. “He wrote it for
me.
It was my story. And at the end Lanny always said, ‘And CinderTess and the prince always looked for the best in every day and made sure they had a part in creating some of it.”' She stared up at Nick defiantly. “And that's exactly how Welch ended that part he read to us.”

“Could be the same,” Nick said reluctantly. “So you're saying that Welch is using parts of the same story.”

“No,” Tess said. “He's using
all
of the same story. Word for word. And even worse, he's making fun of it. He's making
my
story sound stupid and…” She caught her breath and tried to slow herself down. “Look, the CinderTess story was important to me. In fact, sometimes I think it had more impact on me than my parents did. I know Lanny did.” She stopped and looked at Nick, her jaw tight with determination. “I know it sounds childish to you, but basically Lanny taught me how to live my life with that story, and I'm not going to let some aging neoconservative with writer's block turn it into an antifeminist tirade. I'm going to talk to Welch.”

“Wait a minute.” Nick folded his arms and stared down at her with disgust. “Let me get this straight. The reason you're always rushing in to save the world is that this guy told you a fairy tale?”

“Didn't you have any book when you were a kid that affected you like that?” Tess asked. “You know, like
The Velveteen Rabbit?
Love is what makes you real?”

“People should be more careful about what they read to their kids,” Park said. “Some of this stuff sounds dangerous.”

“Well, kids just don't get caught up in the
Wall Street Journal,
Park,” Tess snapped. “They tend to be deeper than adults.” She turned back to Nick. “But the important thing is that he's taken the story and turned it inside out. It's as if he'd rewritten
The Little Engine That Could
so that it
couldn't.
”

“I had that book,” Park said.

“I did, too,” Gina said.

Park smiled down at Gina. “That was a good one, wasn't it?”

“Exactly!” Tess said before Gina could mention any other childhood favorites. She glared at Park. “Wouldn't you be angry if somebody stole that book and made the train fail?”

Park looked startled. “Well, yes. But that's not—”

“Well, that's why I'm angry,” Tess said. “He didn't just steal Lanny's story, he made it sound…stupid. Foolish.”

“It was stupid,” Nick said.

“No, it wasn't. Not if you were a little kid. It still isn't if you have any values at all.”

“Oh, hell, don't start,” Nick said. “Let me think about this.”

Park sat down beside him on the edge of the desk. “Don't bother.” He turned to Tess. “This was a handwritten manuscript, right? Not published in any way?”

“Right. But that doesn't—”

“And this was in the sixties?” Park said.

Tess counted back. “About sixty-five or sixty-six. I can find out for sure.”

“Then legally it doesn't matter,” Park said. “According to the copyright law of 1976, any work automatically comes under copyright as soon as it's written. But before that, which means the sixties, we're dealing with the 1947 law that says works not produced for sale must be registered with the copyright office, and I don't imagine your hippie buddy did that. Of course, since he wrote it down and gave a copy to your mother, that could be construed as publication, but not enough to remove it from fair assumption that it was public domain. I think Welch is covered.”

Tess listened to him openmouthed and then turned to Nick. “This is Park? This walking textbook of loopholes is Park?”

Nick shrugged. “I told you—nobody knows contract law like Park.”

Park went on as if he hadn't heard them. “Plus, part of the 1976 law says that plagiarism is only an issue when the new work affects the potential market of the work in question. Frankly, from what I heard, there is no potential market for that drivel. In fact, if Welch's book makes it big, your hippie buddy could actually profit because then there might be a market for his stuff. Besides, Welch can't copyright something that belongs to someone else even if he uses it in a copyrighted book. So your buddy could still claim copyright to his old story and publish it.” Park stopped, struck by a thought. “I wonder if he's represented by anybody. What did you say his name was?”