“Tell him what I told you to tell him!”
What Mom wanted me to tell him was that he had to help us or the thin financial ice we’d been walking on for a year or more was going to break and we’d drown in a sea of debt. Also that the agency had begun to bleed clients because some of her writers knew we were in trouble and might be forced to close. Rats deserting a sinking ship was what she called them one night when Liz wasn’t there and Mom was into her fourth glass of wine.
I didn’t bother with all that blah-de-blah, though. Dead people have to answer your questions—at least until they disappear—and they have to tell the truth. So I just cut to the chase.
“Mom wants to know what The Secret of Roanoke is about. She wants to know the whole story. Do you know the whole story, Mr. Thomas?”
“Of course.” He shoved his hands deeper into his pockets, and now I could see a little line of hair running down the middle of his stomach from below his navel. I didn’t want to see that, but I did. “I always have everything before I write anything.”
“And keep it all in your head?”
“I have to. Otherwise someone might steal it. Put it on the Internet. Spoil the surprises.”
If he’d been alive, that might have come out sounding paranoid. Dead, he was just stating a fact, or what he believed was a fact. And hey, I thought he had a point. Computer trolls were always spilling stuff on the Net, everything from boring shit like political secrets to the really important things, like what was going to happen in the season finale of Fringe.
Liz walked away from me and Mom, sat on one of the benches beside the pool, crossed her legs, and lit a cigarette. She had apparently decided to let the lunatics run the asylum. That was okay with me. Liz had her good points, but that morning she was basically in the way.
“Mom wants you to tell me everything,” I said to Mr. Thomas. “I’ll tell her, and she’ll write the last Roanoke book. She’ll say you sent her almost all of it before you died, along with notes about how to finish the last couple of chapters.”
Alive, he would have howled at the idea of someone else finishing his book; his work was the most important thing in his life and he was very possessive of it. But now the rest of him was lying on a mortician’s table somewhere, dressed in the khaki shorts and the yellow sash he’d been wearing as he wrote his last few sentences. The version of him talking to me was no longer jealous or possessive of his secrets.
“Can she do that?” was all he asked.
Mom had assured me (and Liz) on the way out to Cobblestone Cottage that she really could do that. Regis Thomas insisted that no copyeditor should sully a single one of his precious words, but in fact Mom had been copyediting his books for years without telling him—even back when Uncle Harry was still in his right mind and running the business. Some of the changes were pretty big, but he never knew… or at least never said anything. If anyone in the world could copy Mr. Thomas’s style, it was my mother. But style wasn’t the problem. The problem was story.
“She can,” I said, because it was simpler than telling him all of that.
“Who is that other woman?” Mr. Thomas asked, pointing at Liz.
“That’s my mother’s friend. Her name is Liz Dutton.” Liz looked up briefly, then lit another cigarette.
“Are she and your mother fucking?” Mr. Thomas asked.
s“Pretty sure, yeah.”
“I thought so. It’s how they look at each other.”
“What did he say?” Mom asked anxiously.
“He asked if you and Liz were close friends,” I said. Kind of lame, but all I could think of on the spur of the moment. “So will you tell us The Secret of Roanoke?” I asked Mr. Thomas. “I mean the whole book, not just the secret part.”
“Yes.”
“He says yes,” I told Mom, and she took both her phone and a little tape recorder out of her bag. She didn’t want to miss a single word.
“Tell him to be as detailed as he can.”
“Mom says to be—”
“I heard her,” Mr. Thomas said. “I’m dead, not deaf.” His shorts were lower than ever.
“Cool,” I said. “Listen, maybe you better pull up your shorts, Mr. Thomas, or your willy’s gonna get chilly.”
He pulled up his shorts so they hung off his bony hips. “Is it chilly? It doesn’t feel that way to me.” Then, with no change in tone: “Tia is starting to look old, Jimmy.”
I didn’t bother to tell him again that my name was Jamie. Instead I looked at my mother and holy God, she did look old. Was starting to, anyway. When had that happened?
“Tell us the story,” I said. “Begin at the beginning.”
“Where else?” Mr. Thomas said.
13
It took an hour and a half, and by the time we were done, I was exhausted and I think Mom was, too. Mr. Thomas looked just the same at the end as when we started, standing there with that somehow sorry yellow sash falling down over his poochy belly and low-slung shorts. Liz parked her car between the gateposts with the dashboard light blipping, which was probably a good idea, because the news of Mr. Thomas’s death had begun to spread, and people were showing up out front to snap pictures of Cobblestone Cottage. Once she came back to ask how much longer we’d be and Mom just waved her off, told her to inspect the grounds or something, but mostly Liz hung in.
It was stressful as well as exhausting, because our future depended on Mr. Thomas’s book. It wasn’t fair for me to have to bear the weight of that responsibility, not at nine, but there was no choice. I had to repeat everything Mr. Thomas said to Mom—or rather to Mom’s recording devices—and Mr. Thomas had plenty to say. When he told me he was able to keep everything in his head, he wasn’t just blowing smoke. And Mom kept asking questions, mostly for clarification. Mr. Thomas didn’t seem to mind (didn’t seem to care one way or the other, actually), but the way Mom was dragging things out started bugging the shit out of me. Also, my mouth got wickedly dry. When Liz brought me her leftover Coke from Burger King, I gulped down the few swallows that were left and gave her a hug.
“Thank you,” I said, handing back the paper cup. “I needed that.”
“Very welcome.” Liz had stopped looking bored. Now she looked thoughtful. She couldn’t see Mr. Thomas, and I don’t think she still totally believed he was there, but she knew something was going on, because she’d heard a nine-year-old boy spieling out a complicated plot featuring half a dozen major characters and at least two dozen minor ones. Oh, and a threesome (under the influence of bulbous canary grass supplied by a helpful Native American of the Nottoway People) consisting of George Threadgill, Purity Betancourt, and Laura Goodhugh. Who ended up getting pregnant. Poor Laura always got the shitty end of the stick.
At the end of Mr. Thomas’s summary, the big secret came out, and it was a dilly. I’m not going to tell you what it was. Read the book and find out for yourself. If you haven’t read it already, that is.
“Now I’ll tell you the last sentence,” Mr. Thomas said. He seemed as fresh as ever…although “fresh” is probably the wrong word to use with a dead person. His voice had started to fade, though. Just a little. “Because I always write that first. It’s the beacon I row to.”