Cat In An Alphabet Soup (Catnap)

When Temple stared at her incredulously, she added, “accidentally, of course,” and went on. “I’d never been married before, but I was no kid. I might have resisted Chester, but he was so fascinated, so enthralled by my work. At the time it seemed to mean that he took me seriously. What he took seriously was my work; he took my work.”

“Took your... work? How?”

“He absorbed it. He became what I was.”

Temple, still confused, searched for the right next question.

“Have you ever been betrayed in love, Miss Barr?”

It was a no more personal question than Temple had been asking. “Yes,” she answered with fierce honesty. “I think.”

Rowena laughed, a pleasant sound and an expression that did pleasant things to her plain face. “I can’t say I was disappointed in love, but I was betrayed in my judgment. I failed to see that it wasn’t I to whom Chester was so earnestly attracted, it was something I had.”

“What?”

“Power.”

Temple didn’t know what to say. Claudia’s press release had described Rowena Novak as a senior editor at Trine Books, not a bad position, but certainly not one that would put her into a corner office in Manhattan.

Rowena’s fingers, sallow and ringless, moved up and down the sides of the oversize Styrofoam cup as if they were caressing Baccarat crystal. Her face softened with rueful recollection, reflected a sadness at the ways of the world, at what she had been and Chester had done.

“He saw me edit, that’s all. He saw how careful I was in phrasing revision letters to my authors; he saw me worry when I couldn’t offer them the money, and support I thought their work deserved; he saw them trust me and depend on me. He saw how a good editor—and I was, am, a good editor—nourishes the literary ego, encourages it to stretch to produce the book it hopes to. He was fascinated by how my authors confessed their troubles—money, marriage. Writing books is a long, lonely business. Authors hope to find an editor who will listen through it all, though they seldom do today. Editors are itinerant midwives now, sometimes leaving a house in mid-contraction, unable to invest their own ego in an author or a work they may never see through to the end.”

“And Chester took what he saw you doing, twisted it, and became a bad editor.”

“A destructive one, rather. He didn’t do it consciously. You must remember he had started as a doctor, in the days when physicians were demigods. Patients came to him with their ills and insecurities extended, like an aspiring writer presenting a sickly manuscript. Through all the years, he had missed that position of power, of judgment.”

“Then why did he quit practicing medicine?”

“He had to. Can’t you guess?”

“No,” Temple admitted.

“Malpractice. He lost the suit, lost his license. Lost his power. He never really found himself again, until he met me and saw that there was another way to wield power over people’s lives and make money at it. Best of all, he discovered the medical thriller, so he could have it all back in a sense.”

“You give me the shivers. He sounds like a villain in one of his own books.”

“Oh, no.” Rowena smiled. “No. You will find few villainous doctors in Pennyroyal Press books. Only Owen Tharp could get away with doing that occasionally, for some reason. What you will find in a Pee-R Press book are whining, incompetent, crazy, homicidal nurses. You will find demanding patients and pompous, worthless hospital administrators, especially if they’re women. But you will rarely find ignoble doctors.”

“Remind me to skip reading a few. Claudia said Chester called Lorna Fennick a ‘press-release-pushing ball-busting broad.’ He hated women?”

Rowena nodded. “So deeply that he didn’t consciously admit it.”

“Why?”

“Only Chester really knew. He seldom spoke about his family, but I gather that he felt humiliated in grade school by the women teachers.”

“That warped him on women for life?”

“Maybe.” Rowena smiled. “I remember him grumbling more than once that a man used to be able to get away from women in medical school....” She sighed. “He never had been a prepossessing man; dates couldn’t have come easily when he was young. Maybe that’s why he went through five wives later: to prove he could do it. After our marriage, I realized that he feared losing part of himself in the face of women’s competence. That’s why Lorna couldn’t work for him for long.”

“Lorna Fennick worked for Chester Royal?”

“She was his editorial assistant when he first began packaging for Reynolds-Chapter-Deuce. She never married him, but she’s another victim of the Chester Royal School for Women, as is Mavis Davis.”

“What about his male authors—did he abuse them, too?”

“A raging thirst for power will consume any kind of fuel, but, no, it never bothered him to see another man get ahead as much as it did a woman.”

“Not much question why he was murdered.”

“No. Somebody’d had enough.”

“Not you.”