Swan Song (2 page)

May looked thoughtful. “Okay. So precisely what are you going to tell them to do?”

Lizabeth stared out into the otherwise empty stairwell. “This crowd doesn’t want to hear that most of them are dismal hacks who will never make it into the big leagues, which is the reality, of course. So I’m going to tell them the rest of the truth--that publishers have become obsolete for all but the most talented of writers. Instead of wasting months and years of their lives submitting their substandard work to dinosaurs like you and me, who cling misguidedly to anachronistic concepts like grammar, punctuation and fact-checking, they should run, not walk, to the nearest self-publishing site and just get on with it. In fact, we should all stop wasting our time, and I’m talking about you and me.”

Margo was uncharacteristically silent, and I found myself holding my breath. Even May, usually poise personified, looked a bit rattled by Lizabeth’s rant. I could tell she was choosing her words with care. “How do you mean, Lizzie?”

Lizabeth leaned closer to her friend and colleague, her face serious. “Close down, shut up shop, get out of what is laughably called the business. Small publishing isn’t a real business these days. Businesses make money. What we do might more accurately be termed a very expensive hobby, and CreateSpace and all of the other self-publishing options that are now available have sucked the fun, not to mention even minimal profit, right out of it. It just ain’t worth the hassle anymore, girlfriend, so I say, open the floodgates. Let them all slug it out on an even playing field, totally overwhelm an already crowded market with their bad books, and may the best hack win.”

May waded in carefully with a wry chuckle. “I know how you feel, although I’m in a different position. I write mysteries, but I publish romances, and there’s quite a bit more profit in that genre these days. You’re right, though. Publishing is a heck of a lot of work, and the financial rewards are paltry compared to other lines of endeavor.” She punched Lizabeth’s arm playfully. “But you can’t be serious. What would a couple of old wordsmiths like us do with ourselves if we didn’t have our little publishing enterprises to run? Besides, somebody has to serve as gatekeepers besides the Big Five—or is four now?—publishers. We can’t let the riff raff take over without even trying to stem the tide.”

Lizabeth’s frown became even more pronounced. “What makes you think they haven’t taken over already?” She waved a hand vaguely at the closed fire door and the crowd assembled on the other side of it. “Did you get a load of this year’s group? Ten years ago these old gals would have been volunteering at hospitals and blood drives, running food banks, delivering meals to shut-ins … you know, doing some actual good in the world. Now they’re forking out thousands of dollars to attend ridiculous functions like this one, conventions that aren’t going to make money for anyone but their sponsors, and pretending they have a shot at becoming successful authors. It’s worse than misguided. It’s obscene.”

She lurched to her feet, and Margo and I exchanged worried glances as May rose to steady her. “Maybe it’s time to call it a night,” she suggested gently. “Do you have a room here? We could walk down a flight to the lobby and scoot you into an elevator with no one the wiser.”

Lizabeth gave a sharp bark of laughter. “You mean, I should avoid being seen in this condition by my esteemed colleagues,” she corrected May. “Yes, maybe you’re right. If I don’t get some aspirin and a couple of quarts of water into me very soon, my head is going to hurt like hell in the morning. No point in adding physical distress to the intellectual agony of this occasion.” She put her empty cup on the floor with great care and took the arm May proffered. “Lead on, Macduff. Let’s get the tipsy old bat safely to bed.”

“Well, that was interesting.” Margo accepted an unnecessary menu from the waitress at Village Pizza, where we had retreated after seeing May’s inebriated colleague safely to her room at the Hilton. We’d said our goodnights at the door after May had extracted a promise from Lizabeth to swallow her aspirins and water and get herself to bed. As we did at most of the other eating establishments in Wethersfield, Connecticut, we already knew our favorite dishes and ordered them regularly. Other diners might consider us boring. We preferred to think we simply knew what we liked.

“Dispiriting, though,” I added. “Are most of your publisher colleagues so cynical, May?”

“Can I offer you ladies a glass of wine or a cocktail?” asked our little waitress.

We exchanged glances and tacitly decided to pass on any more alcohol. Lizabeth Mulgrew had not been a pretty sight.

“Hot tea for me,” May decided, and despite the late hour Margo and I ordered coffee and stirred it thoughtfully as we waited for our dinners.

“Publishing is a tough business, no doubt about it, and it’s getting tougher by the day. Lizzie may have been three sheets to the wind, but she made some good points,” May answered my earlier question. “The easily available computer programs and self-publishing packages offered by Amazon and Google and other big companies have changed the picture dramatically, especially for the little guys in publishing like Lizzie and me. It used to be merely that we couldn’t get the kind of distribution we needed to compete successfully with the major publishers and their imprints, but some pretty good authors who couldn’t get a nibble from them would come to us, and we’d all sell enough copies for everyone to make a little money.”

May sipped her tea and frowned. “Now we can’t compete with the self-publishing companies that make it so easy for anyone with a computer and a checkbook to get into print. The market is totally glutted with mediocre books, and I’m being generous by calling them that, so it’s nearly impossible to get any attention for our titles. It’s a real no-win situation.”

Margo considered her aunt’s comments. “Then how do you do it? Make that,
why
do you do it?”

May thought about that for a few seconds before answering. “You know how we do it, since you’ve watched Isabelle learning about the distribution of our titles over the last year.” Isabelle Marchand had become May’s partner in Romantic Nights Publishing approximately a year earlier and now handled the business end of the operation while May continued to oversee acquisitions and editing. “There are dozens and dozens of on-line outlets and distributors in the business of working with them. Romantic Nights publishes fluffy little bodice rippers and steamy erotica, both sub-genres of romance novels that do very well as e-books. The most unlikely people go in for that sort of thing, and they’re mostly embarrassed to be seen reading the real lightweight stuff. They’re very happy to be able to indulge themselves in reasonably priced titles and hide behind their Kindles and Nooks and phones and tablets and whatever other devices they can get reading apps for. You know our financial situation as well as I do, since Strutter helps out with our books. With Isabelle’s help, Romantic Nights has been able to hold its own so far, but I don’t know how much longer that will be true. My best guess is, not long.”

“So why do you continue the struggle?” I wanted to know. “You’re an accomplished mystery writer, as evidenced by the award you’ll probably be handed tomorrow. Why not just stick with that and leave the publishing headaches to someone else?”

May smiled at our somber expressions. “Why we continue the struggle is a more complicated answer than how we do it. For Isabelle and me and even Lizzie Mulgrew, small publishing is more of a passion than a business, something we do because we love the written word and want to make well-crafted novels available to as many readers as possible. For other small publishers, it’s plain stubbornness, hanging on out of sheer determination not to let the big boys and the self-publishers drive us out of business. As I’ve already said, that’s getting a lot harder to do.”

Her smile faded as she reached for her tea cup once again. “Stubborn as I am, I’m tired. In fact, having the time to write another Ariadne Merriwether novel this year has reminded me how much more I enjoy writing than publishing. Isabelle is way better than I am at running a business anyway. I believe I’m ready to turn Romantic Nights over to her entirely, assuming she even wants it, and go back to writing my little mysteries full time.”

She grinned at us, our shocked expressions saying it all as the waitress delivered our steaming dinners. It wasn’t easy to rattle Margo, I knew, but she was clearly nonplussed. She locked eyes with me for a few seconds, and whatever she saw there seemed to steady her.

“So what do you have to say about that?” May demanded. “Do you think I’m ready to become a woman of relative leisure?”

“I think you’ve earned the right to do whatever you damned well please from here on out,” Margo told her aunt calmly. “Now let’s eat. I’m about to starve to death.”

Shortly after ten o’clock the next morning, I steered my ancient Jetta sedan carefully down the Spring Street fork that lead to the frozen pond on one side of the street and the spring-fed, running brook that ran off into the marsh on the other. About sixty ducks and half a dozen geese floated in the open brook and eyed us warily as we pulled over to their side of the street. The teenage boys who played hockey on the pond had given the waterfowl a healthy motivation to maintain some space between themselves and human beings, even those bearing cracked corn, and I never encouraged them to do otherwise. It was far safer for them that way.

“This may be one of the worst ideas I ever had. No good deed goes unpunished and all that,” Duane Starling grumbled from the back seat where he and Becky Lynn Carmichael, our part-time employees and best of pals, were unbuckling their seatbelts. Duane’s best friend was Charlie Putnam, our third partner Strutter’s son, who was attending UConn in Storrs. Duane had extended a summer job with us by making himself an invaluable employee of Mack Realty and Romantic Nights, May’s publishing company, which shared his time.

Becky slapped his arm lightly. “Stop groaning. We offered to help Kate feed the hurt and stranded birds while Emma’s visiting her boyfriend, so get on with it. How does this work, Kate?”

I was glad I’d invited the two young people to help feed the feathered ones this morning. It had been a tough winter so far, and my daughter Emma deserved the break she was taking in Oregon. Every morning from November through mid-April, she and I made the trek to the Spring Street Pond to feed the halt and the lame. Then I circled back to where Old Main Street crossed over the marsh to do the same for the little birds that wintered there, and she went over the Putnam Bridge to her job in Glastonbury as a real estate paralegal.

Summoning up an enthusiasm I didn’t really feel, I unsnapped my own seatbelt and popped open the car trunk as I climbed out. “Just follow me,” I instructed.

An icy wind made the 20-degree temperature feel more like 20 below as we huddled in the shelter of the trunk. I handed each of the young people a large plastic pitcher and pulled the tab from a 40-pound sack of cracked corn, which rested beside a bin of birdseed. That was for our next stop.

I used my teeth to pull off a glove, opened the sack and dipped my plastic pitcher deeply into the cracked corn, then gestured for Duane and Becky to follow suit. Carrying the pitchers close to our bodies, we made our way gingerly through the piled-up snow and icy patches along the narrow street as we looked for an appropriate flat spot in which to spread out the corn.

“This looks okay,” Duane said. “It just needs the snow packed down so the kernels don’t sink in.” He handed Becky his pitcher and proceeded to jump up and down on a shallow drift, causing the ducks and geese to rise, squawking in protest, and flap or swim deeper into the marsh. Duane promptly lost his footing and fell on his backside in the snow. Becky hooted.

“That’s what you get for showing off. You’re lucky you didn’t break a leg, fool,” she chided him, but she set the pitchers down to offer him a hand.

Duane didn’t seem to take offense and accepted her helping hand without blustering, as so many other young men might have done in his place, I thought. Perhaps it had to do with his being gay—nothing testosterone-related to prove. I removed the cover from my own pitcher as Becky dusted the snow from Duane’s jeans and collected theirs.

“The important thing is to spread the corn out in several long rows so the birds don’t have to fight each other to get at it. They’re only going to get a few mouthfuls each, so we don’t want to make it any more difficult for them.” I emptied my pitcher carefully in a long row, and the two young people did the same, leaving several inches of space between the rows. We retreated to the relative comfort of the car, glad to get out of the wind even after our brief exposure. Within seconds, the onslaught began in a whirlwind of flapping wings as the hungry birds fell upon our offering. Duane and Becky gaped as a dozen ducks became fifty, jostling for position along the rows of corn as they attempted to snatch what few kernels they could.

Bringing up the rear and off to the side a bit came the ones who could not fly for one reason or another. Not wanting to make pets out of these wild creatures, more for my sake than theirs, I’d avoided naming most of them, but three of the geese had been regulars for several years, and I hadn’t been able to help myself. Droopy’s right wing sagged against his body, obviously badly broken at some point years ago. Gimpy limped heavily on a twisted foot, still bearing a metal band around one leg. My heart went out to both injured males, even as I searched for my favorite, a female I’d dubbed Fray. Instead of being covered with feathers, her right wing stuck out from her body like the slats of a denuded umbrella, rendering her totally unable to fly. I searched the bank and was rewarded by the sight of her clambering awkwardly up the slippery snow bank to where I’d put a small stash of cracked corn off to the side. Despite her clumsy gait coming out of the water, Fray easily inserted herself into the throng and hissed her way to an advantageous position. She may have been injured, but she was feisty. I’d known her for years.