The Cinderella Pact (11 page)

 
OK, this is one of the more repulsive letters I've had. I'll need to check with my doctor sources—the local clinic around the corner—before answering it. For all I know, snorting every five minutes could be the sign of some serious disease at which point, as Belinda would say, Ready to Blow in Kentucky needs to make sure hubby has left her enough in life insurance.

I should dump the spaghetti in the colander, but I don't. Instead, brimming with curiosity, I go into Belinda's personal messages and click on
Met your editor recently
from [email protected].

 
Oh, brother.

 
What? I was so not coming on to him.

 
Big-boned? So dislikes fat women? Talk about a bloody twit. Livid, I change my computer clock to reflect the London five hour difference and rip off a quick note.

 
Ha! I press Send and shout with glee. The rub is in. Let's see how Princeton's gift to women responds to that one.

Finally, though I don't want to, I click on Lori's e-mail, which is warmly entitled:
Record Keeping

 
Now
that's
interesting. How lucky is that? Or . . . wait. Maybe it's not lucky but devious. Perhaps this is a trap set up by Lori to check whether the résumé Belinda sends her now is the same as the one she sent her a year ago. That would be just like her.

I respond.

 
I sit back and reread the e-mail before sending it, priding myself on the new-girl crack. Lori's new pampered assistant Alicia needs to be sent back to Swarthmore where she came from. It was completely catty the way she stole Dawn's job.

There are all sorts of menacing sounds coming from the stove. Hisses and snaps. But I just have to take a peek first at David Stanton's e-mail—
Inquiry
—and then I swear to myself I will run back to the kitchen.

 
Oh, lighten up.

 
Holy crap!

I stare at the e-mail, unable to breathe. Could it be that this is also a test? That perhaps he is poking me to see if I'm cooked?

In a flash of panic, I calculate the possibility of packing up my computer and my apartment and heading out of town, across the plains of the Far West, never to return to Jersey again. Recover the $150,000! But that's my entire savings. I must fight back.

 
Dang. She's Irish, right? Or was, rather. I type in the first female Irish name that comes to mind.

 
Done. That should buy me some time. Now I can get the spaghetti . . .

Just as soon as I click on Charlotte Dawson's message written in usual literary agent shorthand.

Chapter Eleven

This is what my mother means when she says God always sends an angel to soften the sting of the devil. Here I am, reeling from David Stanton's “gotcha” e-mail and lo and behold, Charlotte drops the bomb that there's a film offer on the table.

Never have Charlotte and I spoken of film. Doing a book, yes, but it would be a book of columns. What is she talking about? I jump out of my chair and begin pacing, thoughts whirring around my head like dried peas in a blender.

It must have something to do with that article the
New York Intelligentsia
wrote about me last month—“Tempting Apple”—about how I grew up poor on the outskirts of London and was beaten by my cruel father until my Irish mother ran away with me and I changed my name to Belinda Apple so my father couldn't find me and how that's why I keep myself hidden to this day.

Damn me and my overactive imagination. I wish sometimes I could put a cork in it to keep the genie in the bottle.

If only it weren't Saturday night, then I could call Charlotte at her office and find out what all this is about. Now I'll be tormented until Monday. I wish there were some way I could . . .

Belinda's cell phone! Of course. Surely Charlotte left a more detailed message on that. I find Belinda's phone buried in the bottom of my purse. Turning it on, I dial my mailbox and enter the password. I'm so impatient, I can't stand still. Forty-two messages. Shoot. Most are hang-ups and then my agent's clipped voice comes on.

“Belinda, Charlotte.” Charlotte talks as if her mouth has been wired shut. “Listen, we've had a very generous offer for the film rights to your life story from a producer with a fairly impressive track record.
Ship of Fools, Death's Door, Finesse
. . . that kind of thing. Anyway, he claims to have an in with Paramount, which has been looking for a
Sex and the City
meets
Bridget Jones
and he's convinced your biography is it.
Loves
the story of you being on the run. So
Silkwood
. Don't want to leave any more info on a message. By the way, you might need to be in California by the end of next week to brainstorm. Call me.”
Click
.

Oh, my word! There really is a film deal!
Eeeeek!

And then it all comes together. The repeat phone calls. The numerous messages from CDA. Here I thought Charlotte was calling because of the trouble Belinda's in at
Sass!
when all along it had to do with the film rights to my life story. Me. On the big screen. Who'd have ever thought that frumpy ol' Nola Devlin, who drives—drove—an Audi Fox and lives with a cat and goes to church with her parents would be the subject of a major Hollywood production?

Hold on. I survey my guest bedroom, the windows fogging from the steam wafting in from the kitchen, and reassess the situation. This biography isn't about me, Nola Devlin of Princeton, New Jersey. It's about Belinda Apple of Chelsea, London. The only problem here is there is no Belinda Apple on the run from her cruel father. How can there be a biographical film about her life when there's been no life?

More importantly, how can I go to California by the end of the week when I don't exist?

OK. I must not panic. Chances are, knowing Hollywood, the film deal will never come through. But what if it does? What if Mr. Bigshot pays for me to fly to L.A. and “brainstorm” and sees that I'm nothing but an overweight, low-level editor at a third-rate women's magazine slash tabloid? Then what?

No choice but to call Charlotte. I retrieve her cell number, press Send, and leave a convoluted message made even more convoluted by the fact that I am slipping in and out of an English accent.

“Hello, Charlotte. Belinda. Well, I don't know what to say, honestly. Talk about fab. Is this really a film offer? What does that mean? Who's the producer?”

I have no idea who's leaning on the horn outside my window, but they really need to cut it out. I focus on my message. “Please call me as soon as you can. I'm sorry I didn't pick up your message until now. You can call me at any hour tonight or tomorrow. Bye!”

“Nola! Nola! Open up!”

Oh, great. It's Bitsy, my landlady, at the door. Shouting, no less. Probably coming up to complain about my pacing the floors. Hey . . . I sniff the air, which smells odd, like . . .

Burning cardboard.

I click off the phone, dash out of the bedroom, and find the hallway filled with smoke and that my kitchen stove is, in fact, about to burst into flames. I must have left the half-empty box of spaghetti by the burner.

Screaming, “Fire! Fire!” like an idiot, I run back into the bedroom to get the patchwork quilt from the guest bed. Never mind that it was the one my grandmother sewed and gave to me on my sixteenth birthday. I can't think about that as I throw it on top of the fire just as Bitsy bursts in with an extinguisher.

Billows and billows of smoke rise up and both of us are bent over coughing. My eyes are burning. I rush to open the windows and, in the process, accidentally push off Otis, who lets out a frightened
“Yeoowww!”
as he falls two stories into the bushes below.

All I can think is: my second fire in the same month. Something is very wrong.

“You nearly burned us all down,” Bitsy barks between gasps and coughs. She is a vision of bright pink and green in the smoke, a fireman in Lily Pulitzer. Bitsy is quintessentially Princetonian, right down to her espadrilles and her “tireless efforts”—the phrase she always uses—for the Princeton Historical Society.

“I was writing,” I say by way of lame explanation. The top of the stove is charred black, as black as the spaghetti pot. My grandmother's quilt is a soggy heap of burned, smoldering memories and my apartment reeks of the acrid smell of fire extinguisher and fire.

We are standing there, the two of us, gaping at the damage, dumbstruck by the mess, when the phone on the wall rings.