The Perfect Letter (18 page)

“Hello!” she said warmly, holding out her hand for him to shake. “I remember you from yesterday. Jim Stephens, is that right?”

“You have a terrific memory,” said the man, clearly flattered. He took Leigh's hand in his own. Instead of shaking it, though, he pulled her in for a brief but pleasant hug. Normally she would have been irritated, but for some reason she felt a genuine smile spread across her face, and she hugged him back. There was something about him that spoke to her, some quality he possessed that she didn't quite understand, something that made her normal cool reserve with strangers slide into warmth. She didn't quite understand what it was, but she felt immediately comfortable with him, as if she'd known him all her life.

“So lovely to see you this morning,” said Jim. “Looks like you had a good night's sleep. You're glowing.” Leigh blushed—there was no way he could have known about the kind of night she'd had. “There,” he said. “You're doing it again. Putting all the other ladies to shame.”

“Well, thank you,” she said. “Nice to see you, too. I was so happy when I remembered you were coming this morning.”

“Awfully nice of you to say,” he said, setting his manuscript down on the table between them. He had a shock of thick dark hair cut short, graying at the temples, and a very broad, very white smile, putting Leigh in mind of a country Cary Grant. “I've been looking forward to it myself. Not every day I get to talk to a pretty young lady about books.”

Leigh laughed. “You're a bit of a flirt, aren't you? I'll have to keep an eye on you.”

“Promise?”

Leigh laughed again—he was a
huge
flirt. “Are you local? Or just in town for the conference?”

“I'm in Houston these days. I worked for the oil companies after I retired from the Marines, and my kids are there, so . . .”

So she'd been right about his military background. “How many do you have?”

“Two girls. Thirty-two and thirty-five. And three grandkids. They keep me on my toes.”

“And your wife? What does she do?”

“Ex-wife. She divorced me during my second tour.”

“I'm so sorry to hear that,” said Leigh.

“I guess it's a lot to ask, keeping the home fires alive while your spouse does long tours of duty in dangerous parts of the world. I don't really blame her. I'm not interested in holding grudges, I guess.”

“I like that. Maybe we should all be more like you. More forgiving.”

“That's the spirit! Anyway, she lives in Dallas with her new husband.” He laughed. “I say new, but they've been married thirty years now. I still don't quite know how I got to be so old.”

Leigh broke out in a grin. “I'd hardly call you
old,
” she said. “Maybe
well seasoned
.”

“Ah, you're flattering me. You should hear my girls. They talk like I'm at death's door. Like I'm prepared for the old folks' home. They inspect all the women I date, like I'm the kid and they're the father.”

“They're looking out for you.”

“They are. They're good girls.”

Leigh laughed. It was the kind of thing her grandfather might have said, if he were still alive. “So I want to hear about your project,” she said. “It's a novel?”

“It's a memoir about a field officer who gets roped into running illegal missions in Laos during the war.”

“Nonfiction?” Leigh was a little taken aback. “You know you could
get into serious trouble admitting your personal involvement. You sure you want to take that kind of risk?”

“I know. I don't care anymore—I think it's time I told what I saw, what I did. If it means that these kinds of secret wars won't happen again, then I'll consider it time well spent.”

“You're willing to risk a lot to tell the truth.”

“I am. I'm starting to get old, and at a certain point I realized that truth is the only thing that matters.”

Leigh shifted in her seat uncomfortably. “As long as you understand the risks.”

“I do. Took me years to write this book, but I think I've finally got it where I want it. I know you've worked with really top-notch authors, especially Millikin, but I was hoping you might be willing to take a chance on an unknown guy. This book means everything to me. I don't want it to go just anywhere. It really needs an editor who will do right by it, believe in it as much as I do, stand behind it.”

He said this with such sincerity that Leigh was moved.

“I figured if I was going to do it, I wasn't going in halfway,” he said. “Your speech yesterday really spoke to me, about writing from your passion. Made me think I was right to come today.”

“I like to hear that. It makes me think you'd be just as passionate about getting it out there, selling it.”

“If you ask me to do something, I'll do it.”

“I can't say anything for sure until I've read it, since the success is always in the execution, but I promise I'll do my best to see the potential in it. If it seems like something that will have an audience, then we'll talk some more. Does that sound okay?”

His face broke into a broad smile. “Thank you. That's all I ask.” He paused and said, “If you're not too busy, maybe I could buy you a cup of coffee tomorrow and we could talk some more? If that's not too much.”

She hesitated, thinking about Jake and Chloe. She wanted to find time for them before the conference ended, but she was sure she had time for a cup of coffee, right? Leigh thought through her schedule. She had another day of pitch meetings tomorrow with an hour lunch break . . .

Jim, seeing her face, said, “It's too much, isn't it? It's too much. Sorry, forget I asked. I'm sure you have plans.” He raked his hand through his hair, as if trying to put himself back together.

“No, no,” she said. “I was just trying to remember everything I have to do tomorrow. I think I could manage, if that's still okay?” She felt comfortable with him, as if they were old friends. Comfort and friendship were something she desperately needed just then. “What do you say you meet me in the dining pavilion tomorrow at four?”

“I will. Thank you.”

She took the manuscript from him and shook his hand. He pressed her one hand between his two. What
was
it about him that spoke to her so intimately, that made her let down her guard with him? She couldn't quite wrap her head around it. “Take care,” she said as he went out the door.

The rest of her morning went pretty much as planned—meeting after meeting, some promising, some not—and it was creeping toward noon, when she could go back to her cottage, to Jake, and to the avalanche of texts and phone messages that kept showing up on her cell from Joseph and Chloe. Leigh looked at her schedule—one more appointment this morning. If she hurried she could still make it up the hill to see Jake for lunch.

She was writing a note in her notebook to remind herself about her meeting with Jim the next day when the door opened and her next appointment came inside. “Knock, knock,” said a voice.

“Come in,” she said, still writing, slightly annoyed that she couldn't have two seconds to jot down a note when she looked up to see the man she'd met at the bar two nights before, the one with the long gray ponytail who'd offered to buy her a drink at the last show of the night before Chloe whisked her away. He'd known her name, said he'd known all about her. Her memory was a bit fuzzy, but she seemed to recall that she'd gotten a creepy vibe from him. What had he said to her?
I know all about you, Leigh Merrill.

The man sat down now at the table across from her, leaning forward and knocking his knuckles on the table, twice, as if he were about to make some kind of request or demand. Leigh was immediately on her guard. “It's you,” she said.

“It's me,” he said. “I wasn't sure you'd remember me. You were pretty sloshed the other night.”

“You said you knew who I was . . . now I understand it a little better.”

“You didn't understand it at the time?”

“Not really, no. I try not to engage with people who hit on me in bars.”

“You thought I was hitting on you?” he said. He looked around at the conference room—the windows, the lights, the tables and chairs, the whiteboard, even Leigh's bag on the chair next to her—with a proprietary air. “You must be so used to men hitting on you that you always think that's what they're after. How cute.”

“What can I do for you?” she asked, trying to turn the conversation back to business, trying not to show how annoyed she was.

He produced a thin white envelope from under the table and set it between the two of them, thumping it twice more with his knuckles for good measure. “I have a bit of a thriller on my hands, you might say. A bit of a fast read. A murder mystery, you might call it. I think it will interest you.”

She seriously doubted that—she didn't publish thrillers; didn't
this guy do his homework?—but she put on her most polite expression and asked, “Really? Looks a bit thin for a thriller.”

“More of a book proposal, say.”

Leigh was prepared to say no already—a book proposal? really?—but she humored the creep. “Okay. Why don't you tell me more about it?”

“It's about a pretty young editor from New York City with a dark and mysterious past, you might say. She's got a dirty little secret she's been hiding from everyone, including the man she loves.”

Leigh swallowed. An uncomfortable coincidence—nothing more.

“It seems this young editor—let's call her Laura—once shot a man in cold blood and let her boyfriend at the time take the fall for it. She does a pretty good job of hiding it, too. For a little while, anyway. She becomes a big shot in the publishing world, meets a rich jerk who wants to marry her, but it all falls apart when her ex-boyfriend gets out of prison and the truth about the murder comes out. She loses everything—the ex-boyfriend, the job, the rich jerk. She loses everything because she isn't smart enough to play the game right.”

The room had gone very small and very dark. The only thing Leigh could see was a dim tunnel connecting her and the man with the gray ponytail. Somehow he knew her secret, the thing that no one, not even Chloe, had ever known. He was threatening to expose her—to Joseph, to the world.

It had to be some kind of mistake. A misunderstanding.
Please, let it be a misunderstanding.
“It sounds pretty awful,” she said.

“It's based on a true story, if that helps at all.”

“It couldn't be.”

“You don't think so? You think I made it up?”

“I don't know what you're talking about.”

His voice dropped an octave, all the false charm flying out of it,
replaced by menace, even hatred. “Oh, I'll bet you do. I'll bet you know
exactly
what I'm talking about.”

Leigh's mouth went completely dry. This wasn't happening. “Who are you?” she whispered.

“We have a mutual acquaintance, you might say.” He grinned at her, showing teeth that seemed very small and sharp, like a rodent's. “A common friend.”

Leigh's terror was replaced by anger. She folded her arms across her chest and leveled her gaze at the man. “Don't be coy. You're dying to tell me, so go ahead.”

“I spent some time up in Huntsville. I saw . . . a lot of mail, you might say. Letters, postcards, catalogs from correspondence schools. You learn the most
interesting
things about people through the mail.”

“You were at my talk yesterday. You must know I don't get much mail.”

“No, but you
wrote
a lot of mail. All those letters in green pen, on the nice stationery. No one got letters like Jake did. They stood out. For example . . .” And here he took a slip of paper out of the envelope and started to read.
“‘I'm serving a sentence, too. Maybe it's the wrong kind of sentence—maybe you don't think it's fair, and it's not—but I can't change that now. I can't change the fact that you weren't the one who really killed Dale Tucker, and I can't change the fact that you decided to tell everyone you were, and that the jury decided to believe you. We both have to live with the decisions we've made.'”

Leigh felt her breath stop in her lungs. Those were her words, all right. How could she forget? She'd been so upset that day. She'd been angry, and she'd let her guard down, admitted the thing she'd been too scared, until then, to admit. And now it seemed she was going to pay for it.

The only person who'd been in the barn besides Dale and Jake was Leigh herself. Everyone knew that. It was still possible for her to go to jail for Dale's murder even though Jake had already served time. A
new prosecutor receiving new evidence, like a letter, might mean a new trial.

“Who are you?” she asked. “Were you a guard? An inmate?”

“I think the less you know about me, the better.”

“What do you want?” she asked, her voice husky with fear.

“What does anyone want, Miss Merrill?” he said. “What makes the world go round?”

She swallowed. “I wish you would stop being so cryptic. Tell me what you're after.”

“Money, and lots of it.”

“I don't have any. I work in publishing, you know. My salary wouldn't make your car payment.”

“Now, you don't think I'm that stupid, do you? I'm talking about your grandfather's money. I know ol' Gene left you a nice chunk. I'm sure you could get your hands on some of it for me, now.”

He was after her trust fund? The money her grandfather had left her? No—absolutely not. The trust was the only thing she had left from her family. Her grandfather had left the horse-breeding business to Leigh's uncle Sonny, which was only fair since Sonny was the horseman in the family and Leigh was hell-bent on moving to Manhattan and working in publishing.