All I could do was shake my head, I was so heavy with the pain and grief.
What did it matter if Frances tried to hurt me? Did I really care now? Surely she couldn’t do anything worse than this—let Edgar go without so much as a good-bye.
Let her try to destroy me. I’d come back, harder and faster than she ever dreamed.
I was going to write the book. I would bring her down. Frances Ashley, brilliant creator of monsters, was the biggest monster of them all. And I had to be free of her.
KITTEN
—FROM CHAPTER 4
When Kitten had gone in for her bath, Fay opened her nightstand drawer. Inside, she found a jumble, a motley collection of treasures. One pearl-drop clip earring, a stamped leather bracelet, a man’s blue silk pocket square, and a nearly empty bottle of Cacharel perfume. Under these items, she found a book. It was called The Verselet and had a periwinkle cover with a silhouette line drawing of a girl flying a kite.
She sat on the bed and let the pages flutter under her fingers until they fell open to a dog-eared page and a poem, only two short stanzas. She read the first lines—You tell me a story, you weave me a tale—then heard something.
The slap of wet feet on the wood floor.
Ashley, Frances. Kitten. New York: Drake, Richards and Weems, 1976. Print.
Chapter Nine
I stood at the rail of the battered blue-and-white ferry, facing the Atlantic sound. My hair whipped insistently into the corners of my mouth and the creases of my watering eyes. Finally, I scraped my curls back into an elastic and breathed in the salty air, the pungent tang expanding my lungs.
Edgar’s memorial service had only been a couple of days ago, but it already seemed like ages. As did packing my bags while, in my mother’s office, Asa haggled over the phone with the editor at Pelham Sound over the book deal. Strangely, ever since I’d landed in Georgia, a calmness had settled over me. There were no pinpricks. Just humidity permeating my skin and bones and muscles, making me feel like I was thawing.
Part of the reason I was breathing easier was that Asa’s story had checked out.
According to everything I’d found online, what he’d told me was true—Internet start-up prodigy, Iceland guy’s jilted agent, currently employed by Rankin Lewis Literary Agency. Not only that, but we’d also had a conference call with Melissa Greenwald, the editor, where she’d expressed enthusiasm and confidence in me and the project.
Further digging turned up three incidents on Bonny Island, two of them connected—charges filed by guests of Ambletern with the Camden County Sheriff’s Department, claiming that Dorothy Kitchens had harassed them with threats and acts of vandalism. In response, she claimed she was acting in self-defense, that she’d felt threatened by their aggressive and violent actions. Court cases were pending. The whole situation sounded pretty minor to me.
As a bonus, while rooting around the Internet, I was smacked in the face no less than a dozen times with items on Frances’s nuptials to Beno?t Jaffe in Palm Springs. None of them was accompanied by pictures, thank God. Still. Every time I read about my mother and her new husband, I was engulfed in a wave of fresh fury.
But I was in Georgia now—and for the first time, incidentally. Frances had never brought me down because by the time I was born, all her family was gone. And I’d never had any reason to come here myself. It wasn’t exactly Four Seasons territory—at least, not in this corner of the state. I’d been on plenty of yachts and sailboats, never a ferry.
It was actually kind of nice. A different planet altogether from New York. On the drive down from the airport in Brunswick, I think I saw every shade of green, from chartreuse to emerald to forest. There was a smattering of commercial development, but mostly flat fields dotted with cows, stretches of palmetto bushes, scrubby oaks, and towering pine trees that were mostly all trunk. The lack of buildings and people and hot-garbage smell created a pleasant negative space in my head.
Filling the space was a constant buzzing sound—grasshoppers, maybe?—and the sense that my body had almost instantaneously downshifted. I marveled how people managed to work surrounded by all this expansive light and heat and humidity. It felt like I’d stepped into a Southern gothic novel, and all I wanted to do was sit my ass on a rocking chair and drink something cool.
Adding to the relief I was feeling was the knowledge that the final deal memo between Asa, Pelham Sound Books, and me that promised a check for $300,000 was nestled securely in the bottom of my suitcase. Split with Dorothy, that money would come in handy when Frances yanked my trust.
Which she was going to do, when she found out what I was doing.
On second thought, maybe it wasn’t so strange that I was feeling good. Maybe it was the idea that I was about to be free of Frances Ashley—cut off for good—that was responsible for these amazing endorphins.
Or maybe it was the book. The other book, Kitten, that was making me feel so . . . buoyant.
I’d slunk into Frances’s office, grabbed the tattered paperback, Susan Evelyn Doucette Age Twelve’s dog-eared copy, which had still been sitting on the corner of the desk. Finally, I would read the famous book. I had to now. It was research. I tucked it into my bag between the jeans and T-shirts I’d scavenged from Frances’s massive closet.
On the plane, I flipped through a couple of glossy magazines, downed three Bloody Marys and lobster quiche, then halfheartedly Googled Susan Evelyn Doucette. There were next to no results. Just a handful of social-media links, none of them giving any sort of indication who she might’ve been to Frances. And it didn’t matter anyway; I knew I was just delaying the inevitable. Finally, reluctantly, I pulled the dreaded paperback out and was surprised when, an hour later, the pilot announced our initial approach into Brunswick, Georgia. I put the book away in a fog of distraction and something resembling disappointment. I actually liked my mother’s book.
I really liked the fucking thing.
After a slow, mannered opening, the book had gotten going in chapter seven with the discovery of a body—a young Native American girl, Kitten’s playmate on the island. The girl, Cappie Strongbow, had been found—head caved in, drowned and half-eaten by crabs—in the salt marsh. June Strongbow, the mother and an employee of the Murphys who lived back in the shadowy tangle of the island, seemed a likely suspect. Police questioned her and, perhaps biased by the color of her skin, locked her up in the local jail to await charges.
Fay, Kitten’s lovely, red-haired nanny, was obviously Frances.