Ghost Writer, page 27
“Sydney! Wait! Wait!”
Sydney was near the elevator, about to turn down a hall, when she turned around, a happy expression filling her blotchy, tear-streaked face. “Yes?” she said with anticipation.
Jonathan caught up with her and caught his breath all at once. “I’m sorry, I just wanted to ask you something.”
“Anything,” she said as she straightened herself up.
“This envelope . . . it was just sitting in the mail room?”
Jonathan tried to ignore the obvious disappointment on Sydney’s face. She looked at her feet, gathered herself, and said, “Yes, it was on top of a pile of mail that hadn’t been sorted yet. Though I did notice it doesn’t have postage on it.”
Jonathan raced past her and took the stairs down four flights to the mail room. He rushed in and tried to find someone who looked friendly. A young man with buzzed hair and a goatee sat at a desk and didn’t seem like he was doing too much.
“Hi,” he said, and the young man looked up at him, yawned, and waited for more. “I received this envelope this morning from someone who picked it up from the mail room. This is very important. I need to know if you saw who brought this in. It doesn’t have postage on it, so it had to be hand delivered.”
“Dunno, dude,” he said, and Jonathan realized he was making paper airplanes.
“Listen to me,” Jonathan said in a stern tone. “You can’t even imagine how important this is. Think. Was anyone here in the mail room this morning that doesn’t work for the company? Someone that delivered a manila envelope?”
The kid looked at the envelope, looked at Jonathan, shrugged, and said, “Dunno, dude.”
Jonathan felt his ears turn hot, which meant his blood pressure was rising. “Who is your supervisor?”
The kid continued to fold his paper. He thought for a moment and then said, “Dunno.”
Jonathan was just about to grab the punk by his silk shirt when a better dressed, mild-mannered, familiar looking man approached him. “Mr. Harper, is it?”
Jonathan’s chest felt so tight it might explode. “Yes,” he managed.
“I’m Roger Tiddle. I’m the mail room supervisor.”
“Yes,” Jonathan started to feel a little better just by this man’s demeanor.
Roger Tiddle looked at the kid and said, “Hank, don’t you have some stamps to lick or something?” The kid rolled his eyes and Roger laughed at himself and then focused on Jonathan. “What can I do for you?”
Jonathan drew in a deep breath and said, “I received this envelope today. It was in the mail room, and it had to have been hand delivered because there is no postage. It’s vital I find out who delivered it.”
Roger smiled a little. “No kidding? A budding author on the horizon, I presume?”
“No, actually, it’s my stalker,” Jonathan admitted with little hesitation.
Roger’s eyebrows raised and he took a small, instinctive step backward. “Goodness. Well, I’m not sure what we can do for you.”
“Has everyone in this office been here all morning?”
“Yes. Except Hank. He’s always thirty minutes late,” he said with a glance over at the kid.
“You have how many people in here?”
“About five right now.”
“Can I speak to them?”
Roger turned and waved his arms, getting the attention of everyone in the room. “Cody, Cindy, Larry, can you come over here?” Three people stopped what they were doing and approached. “Hank, you too. Where’s Lizzy?”
“In the bathroom,” Larry said. “What’s the deal? We’re going to be late for our mid-morning deliveries.”
“This will only take a minute,” Roger said. “This is Mr. Harper. He’s a senior fiction editor for the house. He needs to know if you saw anyone bring this envelope into the mail room this morning.” Jonathan lifted the envelope up for everyone to see.
They all thought for a moment and then Cindy said, “It’s been so busy this morning. I don’t remember.” A young woman, presumably Lizzy, entered the circle.
Larry agreed. “Yeah, I remember seeing that but I don’t know that I saw anyone bring it in.”
“I haven’t talked to anyone other than company people this morning,” Cody said.
Roger’s tone turned very serious. “Think, everyone, please. This is of the utmost importance.”
“What’s going on?” Hank asked.
Roger glanced at Jonathan, who hesitated but then said, “Can you remember anyone out of the ordinary in here? Someone who maybe just came in and didn’t say anything to anyone?”
Cindy said, “I do remember someone, dressed in a real heavy coat, came in early this morning, around eight.”
“With the dark hat?” Cody asked.
“Yes.”
“That was Wilbur Porter, the maintenance man. The light bulb in our bathroom had burned out.”
“I know Wilbur. That wasn’t Wilbur.”
“It was. He shaved his mustache. Looks like a totally different person.”
“Dude, maybe he should grow a goatee like me,” Hank said with interest.
“Look,” Jonathan said, holding up his hands. “What about anyone else? What about Clyde Baxter?”
“The author?” Larry asked.
“Yes. Did he come in this morning?”
Roger shook his head, glancing at the group with perplexity. “I haven’t seen Mr. Baxter.”
“What about that lady that came in this morning?” Cindy said.
“Yeah, I saw her, too,” Larry said.
“Dude, she was just asking for directions. She needed to be next door. She was at the wrong address.”
“Oh,” several of them said at once.
“Anyone else?” Jonathan asked anxiously. “Anyone dressed conspicuously?”
There was silence, and finally they shook their heads. Cindy added, “Mr. Harper, it’s a nuthouse here in the morning. Someone could’ve come in and no one would notice. We don’t have a receptionist, so people can wander in and out and we don’t even pay attention.”
“I understand,” Jonathan said as pleasantly as possible. “Thank you for your time.”
Everyone dispersed but Roger. “Mr. Harper, what can I do to help? A stalker is pretty serious business. Have you contacted the police?”
“Mr. Tiddle, if you could just please be on the lookout for anyone suspicious. Anyone at all. Carrying a manila envelope.”
Roger laughed a little. “Do you know how many manila envelopes we see here every day?”
Jonathan placed his hand on his shoulder. “Please, just be on the lookout. I’m at extension 1042. Call me for anything. Okay?”
“Of course,” Roger said, and they shook hands.
Jonathan left the mail room with his envelope, and in the terrace overlooking the lobby, he leaned against the rail and decided he had better take a look at what the writer had done now. He was curious that the writer was now down to only one page. He looked around to see if anyone was approaching him, then began to read.
Jonathan had finished the night in the study, reading the new pages left for him by the writer. His wife came downstairs and wondered when he was coming to bed. Jonathan said he would be up soon, but wasn’t. Instead, he made his way outside, into the backyard, and stared up at the stars for awhile.
Jonathan made a mental note that the writer did not know why he had gone outside. In reality, he thought he’d heard something and gone outside to check it out. That was not in the story. Perhaps the writer was losing the power to know everything about him. He continued to read.
The next morning, his wife had woken him up quickly, fearful that he had missed a meeting that was written on his desk calendar downstairs. Unfortunately, Jonathan rushed out the door in such a hurry he forgot to take the pages the writer had left for him the night before. He had left them in an opened drawer in his study.
While he was at work discovering that he indeed did not have a meeting, his wife, while dusting his study, discovered the pages.
Jonathan’s heart stopped beating. Hadn’t he put those in his briefcase? Had he forgotten and left them in an open drawer?
Curiosity got the best of her, and she opened the envelope to read what was inside. Unfortunately, those pages would reveal to her that there was another woman in Jonathan’s life. Sydney. And the conversation she would read between the two of them, where Jonathan expressed feelings for her, and vice versa, would break her heart in two. But there was nothing Jonathan could do, because as he read this passage, she would be reading that one.
“No, no, no, no, no,” Jonathan said in desperation. He raced down six more flights of stairs as fast as he could, knocking people over without even knowing it. “No, no, no . . . please, God,” he said as he ran out of the building and to his car. He fumbled for his keys that he had luckily put in his pocket that morning.
Maybe the writer was wrong. Maybe. How could he predict his future? How? Impossible. This was just to scare him. Kathy probably didn’t find the pages at all. His entire body was numb as he drove the fifteen long miles toward home.
Kathy’s body hunched over their small, white kitchen table, her hair hanging over her face like a waterfall. He knew she’d heard him come in. Their front door always squeaked. Even through his tears, he could see the white pages on top of the table, spread out as if they had been studied with diligence.
Jonathan had no words and hoped that Kathy might say something first. After a moment of standing there, she finally looked up. There were no tears. Surprisingly, no anger either. Just a face full of sadness. A face that looked older and wiser. A face that reflected an unspeakable humiliation.
“You’re home.”
Jonathan nodded, his eyes darting back and forth from Kathy to the pages. She watched him carefully and he decided it was safe to sit down at the table with her. He tried to wipe his tears away, but they just never stopped flowing. He had hit his breaking point, and he knew it.
He disregarded his runny nose and fought the urge to hide his face in his hands. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Kathy’s voice was eerily soft. She avoided his eyes and looked down at the pages when she said, “Do you love her?”
“No! No, honey. No! These pages . . . they . . . they don’t really reflect what happened. Whoever wrote this didn’t know . . . didn’t know what was in my heart. They just wrote down this conversation.”
“But you couldn’t answer ‘why,’ Jonathan.” Kathy’s voice trembled. “When she asked you why . . .” Her voice trailed off.
Jonathan wanted to grab her hand, but his fear was that she would pull it away. He couldn’t take that right now. So he folded his hands together and said, “Kathy, what the writer couldn’t possibly know is that I couldn’t answer that question not because I couldn’t make up my mind. It was because . . . because . . .” Jonathan, who had made a career from the English language, could not explain what was inside him—now or then.
“What?” Kathy asked, her eyes beginning to glisten with her own tears.
Jonathan stood and paced, shaking his head and running his hands through his hair. “I can’t explain it. It’s weird. I mean, I was presented with this . . .” He glanced over at her. “. . . this temptation, I guess you could call it. And something inside held me back. I mean, men have affairs all the time. Bad and good men. And somehow they justify it. And I couldn’t. I don’t love her, Kathy. I don’t. But at the time, when we were having so many problems, I thought she was the answer.” Jonathan stopped and turned to her. “Do you understand?”
Kathy nodded a little, pushing her hair away from her face and tracing the arch of her eyebrows with a finger. “What does she look like?”
Jonathan slid into the chair next to her and this time did grab her hands. She didn’t pull away, which gave him confidence to look her deeply in the eyes. “It doesn’t matter what she looks like. Kathy, when I met you for coffee and you came in wearing that skirt and that yellow top, I don’t think I’d ever seen anything so beautiful in my life. You glowed. I forgot all about the problems we were having. And that’s when I knew I had to be straight with Sydney. Nothing had happened, but if we had continued down the path we were going, something might have. I didn’t know what was going to happen to us, but I knew I didn’t want to stop trying.”
Kathy didn’t resist his thumb moving up and down the back side of her hand, though she couldn’t look at him. Jonathan waited as patiently as he could for her to say something, realizing that he could be a divorced man very soon. He had never imagined himself divorced before. Ever. But he had messed up. He had betrayed his wife, and that was enough to end a marriage that was already shaky. His mind wandered to an image of him alone in a small apartment with rented furniture, watching TV and holding a picture of his children.
Kathy pulled one hand away from his and touched her face lightly, her fingertips brushing the tops of her cheekbones as if she were concentrating on the texture of her skin.
For a moment their eyes met, and Jonathan said, “I love you. I do. I know I don’t show it. And sometimes, Kathy, I don’t feel it. But I know it’s there. Buried sometimes. But it’s there.”
Kathy nodded and glanced away. “Don’t you know I feel the same way about you? That’s why I’ve been so upset that you’ve been working so much. You’ve been so distant. I thought it was me.”
Jonathan hung his head. “I’ve felt empty inside. I don’t know why.”
Kathy squeezed his hand a little. “Don’t you?”
Jonathan frowned with confusion. “Don’t I what?”
“Know why?” Kathy stood, looking down at him. “Don’t you know why you feel empty and why you couldn’t have an affair? Don’t you?”
Jonathan was perplexed by the question and wanted to answer, but he truthfully didn’t know how. He just stared wide-eyed at her and wondered what would happen next. To his astonishment, a small smile crept onto her sad lips, and a single tear rolled down her face, around her lip, and dripped off her chin.
“I’m sorry, I—”
She cut him off with a wave of her hand. “It’s okay. God’s timing is perfect.”
“What?” Jonathan couldn’t begin to follow.
She sat back down in her chair. “I’m just . . . just so happy nothing really happened between you and this woman. I’m so glad.”
“Me too,” Jonathan said, touching her face. “I couldn’t bear to lose you and this family.” He cupped the side of her face. “We’re going to get through this. We’re going to make it.”
Kathy laughed and cried all at once. “I know.”
They sat together for a long moment, laughing and crying and holding each other, and then Jonathan said, “Don’t you want to know why I’m home so early?”
Kathy wiped the tears off her face. Jonathan stood to get a glass of water. He opened the freezer to put ice in his glass. “Kathy, this whole manuscript about my life is getting spooky. Real spooky.” He turned the faucet on. “I don’t want to scare you, but . . .” He noticed his hands were shaking as he was trying to drink his water. He immediately set his glass on the counter. “But the reason I’m here early is because I received another page from the manuscript. And it said that . . . that you would be here, reading this, when I came home.”
Kathy rose from the table, pages in hand. “Jonathan, I—”
Jonathan cut her off by grabbing her shoulders as gently as he knew how with the emotions that flooded his body. “I don’t know how this is happening. I don’t know. I’ve never been so scared in my life.” Jonathan’s eyes were wide and fearful. “How can someone know all of this about me? Is it a ghost? Is it God?”
Kathy shook her head, touched his face, and then laid her head on his shoulder. Jonathan held her tightly and before long they found themselves weeping. After a moment, Jonathan moved her a bit back so he could see her face. “It can’t be a ghost. And it can’t be God. God wouldn’t come down here and open a life up like a book, would He?”
Kathy smiled a little. “Well, He did once. A couple of thousand years ago.”
Jonathan moved away from her so he could think. He shook his head. “I’ve never heard of anything like this. Ever. It’s not God. It can’t be. So the next logical person is Clyde. He’s got to be the writer. I’m going to go find him right now.”
As Jonathan turned, Kathy grabbed his shoulder. “Wait.”
“What is it?”
“Do you have to go now?”
“Now is as good a time as any. I’ve got to stop this madness. I feel like I’m going insane. Kathy, someone is predicting every move I make, and they’re right on. Right on! How is that possible?”
“Well, how could it be Clyde? He doesn’t have any supernatural powers. He’s just an old guy . . . and a good friend, I might add. Why are you so certain it’s him?”
“Because he’s the best shot I have.” Jonathan threw up his hands and headed for the door.
Kathy stood a few feet away, her arms wrapped around herself to protect her from the blast of cold that would enter their house when he opened the front door.
“Kathy, I’m going to stop this once and for all.”
Kathy touched him lightly before he opened the door, causing him to turn around. “Honey, don’t be too hard on him.”
Jonathan’s head tilted to the side. “Why not? He’s made my life miserable. He’s acting like a psychopath. Why shouldn’t I be hard on him?”
Kathy cleared her throat. “I’m just saying . . . I mean, it has helped us, hasn’t it?” Jonathan’s eyebrows raised in question. “Well, hasn’t it? I mean, who knows what would’ve happened if you hadn’t gotten those pages. Maybe you would’ve had an affair.”
Jonathan opened the front door. “I don’t know. But this is flat-out crazy. He’s crazy for doing it.”
