First, Mom’s wisdom teeth went to hell and got infected. She had to have them all pulled. That was bad. Then Uncle Harry, troublesome Uncle Harry, still not fifty years old, tripped in the Bayonne care facility and fractured his skull. That was a lot worse.
Mom talked to the lawyer who helped her with book contracts (and took a healthy bite of our agency fee for his trouble). He recommended another lawyer who specialized in liability and negligence suits. That lawyer said we had a good case, and maybe we did, but before the case got anywhere near a courtroom, the Bayonne facility declared bankruptcy. The only one who made money out of that was the fancy slip-and-fall lawyer, who banked just shy of forty thousand dollars.
“Those billable hours are a bitch,” Mom said one night when she and Liz Dutton were well into their second bottle of wine. Liz laughed because it wasn’t her forty thousand. Mom laughed because she was squiffed. I was the only one who didn’t see the humor in it, because it wasn’t just the lawyer’s bills. We were on the hook for Uncle Harry’s medical bills as well.
Worst of all, the IRS came after Mom for back taxes Uncle Harry owed. He had been putting off that other uncle—Sam—so he could dump more money into the Mackenzie Fund. Which left Regis Thomas.
The jewel in our crown.
7
Now check this out.
It’s the fall of 2009. Obama is president, and the economy is slowly getting better. For us, not so much. I’m in the third grade, and Ms. Pierce has me doing a fractions problem on the board because I’m good at shit like that. I mean I was doing percentages when I was seven—literary agent’s kid, remember. The kids behind me are restless because it’s that funny little stretch of school between Thanksgiving and Christmas. The problem is as easy as soft butter on toast, and I’m just finishing when Mr. Hernandez, the assistant principal, sticks his head in. He and Ms. Pierce have a brief murmured conversation, and then Ms. Pierce asks me to step out into the hall.
My mother is waiting out there, and she’s as pale as a glass of milk. Skim milk. My first thought is that Uncle Harry, who now has a steel plate in his skull to protect his useless brain, has died. Which in a gruesome way would actually be good, because it would cut down on expenses. But when I ask, she says Uncle Harry—by then living in a third-rate care home in Piscataway (he kept moving further west, like some fucked-up brain-dead pioneer)—is fine.
Mom hustles me down the hall and out the door before I can ask any more questions. Parked at the yellow curb where parents drop off their kids and pick them up in the afternoon is a Ford sedan with a bubble light on the dash. Standing beside it in a blue parka with NYPD on the breast is Liz Dutton.
Mom is rushing me toward the car, but I dig in my heels and make her stop. “What is it?” I ask. “Tell me!” I’m not crying, but the tears are close. There’s been a lot of bad news since we found out about the Mackenzie Fund, and I don’t think I can stand any more, but I get some. Regis Thomas is dead.
The jewel just fell out of our crown.
8
I have to stop here and tell you about Regis Thomas. My mother used to say that most writers are as weird as turds that glow in the dark, and Mr. Thomas was a case in point.
The Roanoke Saga—that’s what he called it—consisted of nine books when he died, each one as thick as a brick. “Old Regis always serves up a heaping helping,” Mom said once. When I was eight, I snitched a copy of the first one, Death Swamp of Roanoke, off one of the office shelves and read it. No problem there. I was as good at reading as I was at math and seeing dead folks (it’s not bragging if it’s true). Plus Death Swamp wasn’t exactly Finnegans Wake.
I’m not saying it was badly written, don’t get that idea; the man could tell a tale. There was plenty of adventure, lots of scary scenes (especially in the Death Swamp), a search for buried treasure, and a big hot helping of good old S-E-X. I learned more about the true meaning of sixty-nine in that book than a kid of eight should probably know. I learned something else as well, although I only made a conscious connection later. It was about all those nights Mom’s friend Liz stayed over.
I’d say there was a sex scene every fifty pages or so in Death Swamp, including one in a tree while hungry alligators crawled around beneath. We’re talking Fifty Shades of Roanoke. In my early teens Regis Thomas taught me to jack off, and if that’s too much information, deal with it.
The books really were a saga, in that they told one continuing story with a cast of continuing characters. They were strong men with fair hair and laughing eyes, untrustworthy men with shifty eyes, noble Indians (who in later books became noble Native Americans), and gorgeous women with firm, high breasts. Everyone—the good, the bad, the firm-breasted—was randy all the time.
The heart of the series, what kept the readers coming back (other than the duels, murders, and sex, that is) was the titanic secret that had caused all the Roanoke settlers to disappear. Had it been the fault of George Threadgill, the chief villain? Were the settlers dead? Was there really an ancient city beneath Roanoke full of ancient wisdom? What did Martin Betancourt mean when he said “Time is the key” before expiring? What did that cryptic word croatoan, found carved on a palisade of the abandoned community, really mean? Millions of readers slavered to know the answers to those questions. To anyone far in the future finding that hard to believe, I’d simply tell you to hunt up something by Judith Krantz or Harold Robbins. Millions of people read their stuff, too.
Regis Thomas’s characters were classic projection. Or maybe I mean wish fulfillment. He was a little wizened dude whose author photo was routinely altered to make his face look a little less like a lady’s leather purse. He didn’t come to New York City because he couldn’t. The guy who wrote about fearless men hacking their way through pestilent swamps, fighting duels, and having athletic sex under the stars was an agoraphobe bachelor who lived alone. He was also incredibly paranoid (so said my mother) about his work. No one saw it until it was done, and after the first two volumes were such rip-roaring successes, staying at the top of the bestseller lists for months, that included a copyeditor. He insisted that they be published as he wrote them, word for golden word.
He wasn’t a book-a-year author (that literary agent’s El Dorado), but he was dependable; a book with of Roanoke in the title would appear every two or three years. The first four came during Uncle Harry’s tenure, the next five in Mom’s. That included Ghost Maiden of Roanoke, which Thomas announced was the penultimate volume. The last book in the series, he promised, would answer all the questions his loyal readers had been asking ever since those first expeditions into the Death Swamp. It would also be the longest book in the series, maybe seven hundred pages. (Which would allow the publisher to tack an extra buck or two onto the purchase price.) And once Roanoke and all its mysteries were put to rest, he had confided to my mother on one of her visits to his upstate New York compound, he intended to begin a multi-volume series focused on the Mary Celeste.
It all sounded good until he dropped dead at his desk with only thirty or so pages of his magnum opus completed. He had been paid a cool three million in advance, but with no book, the advance would have to be paid back, including our share. Only our share was either gone or spoken for. This, as you may have guessed, was where I came in.