Janice Wunch left my office, I closed the door behind her and succumbed to a moment of blind panic. What the hell was I going to do now? I was contemplating simply running away and spending the rest of my life as an editorial fugitive when my phone rang. I leapt for it. I didn’t care if it was bad news. At least someone from the outside world was trying to contact me.
It was Fleishman. “How’s the little editor doing?”
“She’s dying.”
He laughed. “You sound stressed.”
I told him about the late list. I told him I didn’t even know what most of this stuff was. I told him to prepare for my impending departure from the ranks of the employed. “I’ll send the clothes back to your mom,” I promised.
“Just go ask that assistant person what to do,” he said.
“Lindsay? But she’ll think I’m an idiot.”
“All the better—that’ll make her day. Assistants love to think people working over them are incompetent morons. It reinforces their own suspicions that they should actually be running things themselves.”
“Yeah, but this girl seems…well, incompetent. I would be happy to give her ego a boost, but I don’t trust her to give me correct information.”
“Hm. Is there anyone else you could ask?”
I thought of Cassie, who looked as if she had never made an incompetent move in her life. “Well, I’ll give it some thought.”
“That’s the spirit!” Fleishman said.
“Anyway, I should be home around six-thirty.” I felt a sudden longing to be there now.
“Good, because I’ve got a huge surprise for you.”
“I hope it involves a large pizza box.” After this afternoon, I had a feeling I was going to need some serious comfort food.
He laughed. “Oh, it’s better than that.”
There was a knock on my door and I hung up the phone to answer it. James, the mailroom guy, was standing there, his stance impatient. He was wearing headphones. “Mail,” he mumbled.
He handed me a plastic tub full of manila envelopes, business letters, and fat padded mailers, all addressed to Julie Spears. I grabbed it automatically and then staggered back under its weight. “Hey, wait a minute!”
He frowned and asked loudly, over whatever was being pumped into his ears, “What’s the matter? You’re her now, right?”
He pointed to Julie’s name.
As much as I would have loved to refuse delivery at that moment, I had to admit that I was indeed Julie now. Damn.
I began to sort through the top of the pile, separating the letters from the packages. I decided that I would come in early tomorrow to open the packages. I needed to think of some kind of logging system, since I didn’t see any evidence of one among Julie’s stuff. Gingerly, I opened a few letters.
Happily, most of them seemed manageable. A woman wanted to know if she could send me her book about a nurse midwife who finds herself pregnant after having a fling at her ten-year high school reunion. Sounded good to me. Another writer was dying to have me read her romantic suspense novel involving a female paratrooper who is taken hostage in a war-torn country and falls in love with a Norwegian Red Cross worker. That sounded good, too. But what did I know? I fired off letters to basically everybody telling them to mail me whatever.
A reader wrote to inform me that she had found several typographical errors, including the misspelling of the word gynecological, in a book called Twins on His Doorstep. She wanted to know if Candlelight books wanted to hire her to proofread their books. I looked up the word gynecological.
Then I looked up misspell.
I put the letter aside with a note to query Kathy Leo.
Several people had written requesting guidelines for writing romances. I searched Julie’s file cabinet, but found nothing under guidelines. When I went over to Lindsay’s cubicle to ask her about guidelines, she wasn’t there.
I was pondering how unethical it would be to rifle through someone else’s filing cabinet when Rita flew out of her door and almost slammed into me. She looked wild-eyed. “Where’s Lindsay?” she asked, practically hyperventilating.
“I don’t know. I came here to ask her about guidelines.”
“She didn’t go to the mailroom, did she?” Her voice cracked on the word mailroom.
“I don’t know,” I said again.
“I hope I didn’t miss her.”
I tilted my head. “Is everything all right?”
Rita sighed. “Probably. But one time she sent a manuscript to the wrong author, and since then I’ve tried to keep my eye on her when she goes to the mailroom so I can follow and double check them.”
“You check every package?”
She frowned. “Is that nuts?”
“Um….” After all, she was my boss. But no wonder she hadn’t taken a vacation in forever.
“You’re right. It is.” She released a long breath and combed her hand through her frazzly hair. “I mean, she’s my assistant, for heaven’s sake. I shouldn’t have to sneak behind her and double check every little parcel.”
“No, you shouldn’t.”
Rita chuckled a little, then stopped just as suddenly. “Maybe this one last time.” Before I could get in a word about guidelines, she darted toward the hallway.
I wandered back to my office, but happened to catch Cassie’s eye as I walked by her open door. I hesitated to ask for her help, but maybe this would be a good icebreaker.
“You wouldn’t happen to have guidelines for the different lines of books, would you?”
She stretched her back as if she had been hunched over a manuscript nonstop since the last time I had seen her. “I think so—let me check.”
She swiveled toward her file cabinet and opened what could have been an advertisement for a perfectly organized file drawer. All the colored tabs were perfectly staggered. No messy stray papers sticking out of file folders.
“When was this picture taken?” I said, pointing to Cassie’s graduation photo.
“High school,” she said as she flicked through her files. “I was salutatorian.”
I made a humming sound of approbation. It seemed expected.
“I should have been valedictorian, but the varsity quarterback had gotten extra credit for doing independent study. All he turned in was a five-page paper on the history of the NFL, but he got as much credit for it as I got for calculus. It was sort of unfair.”
I frowned. It was unfair, and now she
