'There's no need,' Mel said. 'I don't want to interfere with your plans.'
'But we want to hear you,' Shelley said. 'We'll be there.'
'Janey,' Mel said. 'Get on with your preparations for the appointment. I'm going down to the bar and stay out of your way.'
'I'll come with you, if you don't mind,' Shelley said. 'Jane needs to be left alone for a while.'
Jane sat on her bed with the notebook that was one of the freebies included in the conference book bags. She wrote down everything that had been simmering in the back of her mind since the interview with Melody Johnson and the subsequent panels of speakers. It didn't take her long, so she called Mel's cell phone. 'Would you like to come up here?' she asked.
He said, 'Might as well. Shelley's found someone else to talk to.'
She greeted him at the door. He threw his jacket on a chair and followed her to her room. She'd already gathered up her papers and disappeared into the bathroom. When she came out, naked, she said, 'The floor is heating up. I've set all the shower jets at a nice warm level. Let's play in there.'
Shelley came back at eleven, saw Mel's jacket on the chair, and quietly went to her own room without disturbing Jane.
Mel left at one in the morning, in spite of Jane's objections. 'I'm supposed to be in my room. And you need to be up early for your meeting.'
Shelley and Jane were both wide-awake at seven. Melody Johnson called Jane back shortly after eight, saying she hoped she wasn't calling too early and suggesting that they meet in her hotel room, where they could speak privately. Jane agreed and quickly hopped into the shower. When she came back out, room service had brought up the simple breakfast Shelley had ordered for the two of them.
'Are you ready for your interview?' Shelley asked.
'Yes. I've made quite a lot of notes. I won't bother her with all of them unless she asks to hear them. I've put the most important changes up front in my notes.'
'I'm so excited for you,' Shelley said, spreading raspberry jam onto a hot Wolferman's muffin.
'Don't become too excited. It's not a slam dunk,' Jane said.
'I know that. But I have a good feeling about it. Shall we go to the first presentation this morning? It's at eight-thirty'
'I might as well sit in for a few minutes, since we've paid for it,' Jane said.
Thirteen
meeting with the editor. She was well prepared. She knew now that she'd finished the book as a mystery. She hadn't started it, though, with anything mysterious. It was a matter of making clear there was something that was troubling Priscilla from the first chapter, and at intervals along the way. She'd even marked on her outline where these intervals were.
But in the back of her mind, rattling around, was the vague thought that she should have asked Mel something else about Zac. She closed her eyes, remembering what he'd said at dinner, but it was no help. It was a query that had flitted across her mind and vaporized instantly while he was describing the scene of the crime.
From experience she knew, or at least hoped, it would come to her when she least expected it. Halfway through a ham sandwich. Or when she was brushing her teeth or peeling potatoes. She'd
often had lost memories pop up at that kind of boring time.
Once, when someone had asked her who was the artist who did the sculptures and pictures of horses, Jane had had the name on the tip of her tongue for days. When she was loading the dishwasher, thinking about what she'd have for lunch, she had found herself shouting 'Frederic Remington' out of the blue.
That time she'd nearly dropped the glass she was putting on the top shelf. And she'd scared Max and Meow half to death as they were weaving around her feet in hopes of her dropping food.
She wouldn't try to force whatever was puzzling her about Zac right now.
'Are you ready?' Shelley called out from the enormous parlor.
'I am. What are the choices at the eighty-thirty session?'
'I don't remember,' Shelley said as she was making sure the door to the suite had caught and locked. 'Do you have that booklet they gave us with the schedule?'
Jane looked in her book bag. 'Nope. I must have left it on the bedside table.'
'Then we'll do our sit-where-we-can-escape deal.'
The eight-thirty session turned out to be a combination of two things — neither one to their taste.
The first was the speech that the allegedly boring speaker was supposed to give the day before except that Sophie Smith had usurped all his time. The other was another hit at grammar.
Jane and Shelley slipped out.
They went to the restaurant in the hotel and had coffee and luscious croissants with real butter and raspberry jam. 'I'm glad I brought along my water pick,' Jane said. 'I don't want to go to this interview with seeds stuck in my teeth.'
Shelley glanced at her watch. 'Only forty-five minutes from now. You're ready, of course.'
Jane just rolled her eyes and took another croissant and slathered it generously with butter and raspberry jam.
When she went to Melody Johnson's room, she discovered that it was a small suite. Melody had Jane's outline spread out on the dining table. Jane pulled her copy of the outline out of her book bag and they sat down, Melody sitting at the side of the table and Jane at the head. It turned out, fortunately, that much of what they had each marked on the outline tallied almost exactly. They were both pleased.
'Phew,' Melody said. 'I was afraid you were unaware that the mystery didn't really start until three-quarters through the book. We've both moved pretty much the same bits of the plot further forward in the manuscript. I gave you my
card earlier, didn't I? Please send this to me as soon as you finish the revisions.'
'I'm glad you didn't see the whole thing. I forgot bathrooms in the description of the house and then researched it to death and put in far too many details about bathrooms at the time the book is set,' Jane said. 'That's one of the most valuable bits of advice I've learned here. To do a lot of research and then use only the unusual parts that most people wouldn't know about. All I'm keeping is the part about the cisterns on the roofs that were used to collect the water for flushing.'
'Really? That is interesting.'
They both gathered up their papers and shook hands. Melody said, 'You do realize I'm not promising anything. The marketing people sometimes take a great dislike to something an editor likes enormously, and they have more clout than editors do.'
'That's another thing I've learned here,' Jane said. 'I'm so glad I came to this conference and glad, too, to have met you.'
Jane had spent quite a long time with Melody Johnson, and when she went in search of Shelley, Shelley reminded her that Chester Griffith's ten-thirty talk started in only five minutes. This was one seminar Jane had really wanted to hear. He was the bookseller that Felicity had told them about who knew virtually everything about
women mystery writers and liked their work better than hard-boiled men's books.
'You can tell me all about your interview with Ms. Johnson after the talk. I want to hear it, too,' Shelley
