The Garden of Dead Dreams (22 page)

“We have reason to believe you may be conducting some kind of personal inquiry that is distracting you and others from writing. Is this true, Etta?”

Etta tried to swallow. She couldn’t find words. She couldn’t get past the words “personal inquiry.”

“Writing is the only reason any of us is here.” Opal said. “Is that why you’re here?”

Etta looked from Opal to Hardin, trying to get words to come out of her mouth. Finally she nodded.

Hardin cleared his throat. “Good. We’d like to review your first semester story now. It is due today, as I understand it.”

Etta clutched her bag closer against her chest, trying to imagine what Reed might have meant when he’d mouthed, “I’m sorry.”

“It’s in my cabin. I’ll go get . . .” She scooted to the edge of her seat.

“No,” the director interrupted. Etta winced. “That will not be necessary. May I have your handbag, Ms. Lawrence?”

Etta stood up. “Why?” She stepped backward and glanced at the door behind her, and then spun around, took the four steps to it, and reached for the doorknob. As she twisted it, panic gripped her. The door was locked. She reeled around, her gaze going to the windows.

Opal stepped to Hardin’s side. “Please calm down. The pressure of the creative life can exacerbate personality disorders. Dr. Ryder, the psychiatrist we told you about, is on her way. She has been delayed by the storm, but we expect she will arrive in a matter of hours.”

Etta tried to speak, but couldn’t get any words to come out.

“You will wait for her right here. Now I’ll need your belongings.” Hardin stepped toward Etta.

Etta gripped the strap of her bag. “No,” she snapped, and the director stepped backward. “Why do you want my bag?”

“We need to make sure you’re not a danger to yourself,” Opal said.

“Dr. Ryder believes you are exhibiting signs of Paranoid Personality Disorder. Have you ever been diagnosed with a psychiatric condition?” Hardin asked.

Etta shook her head.

Opal spoke more slowly: “People with PPD believe others are out to get them. They tend to create conspiracies and become fixated on them. They stop leaving their homes; they stop seeing other people; they stop eating and sleeping; they worry incessantly about problems or situations that do not exist. Do these symptoms sound familiar?”

Tears welled near the corners of Etta’s eyes. She felt like she might be shaking.

“Living in a small community like the one we have here can be difficult for some, not to mention the pressures of the writing life.” It was Opal again, but her voice sounded far away, like she was at the end of a long tunnel.

Etta felt faint. She reached for the bookshelf next to her, her other hand clutching her bag so tightly her hand shook. All she could think to say was: “Am I going to disappear?” But the words sounded so paranoid that she couldn’t bring herself to speak them.

* * *

When Opal and Hardin left the room, and the lock clicked behind them, Etta made a beeline to the windows and pushed on both. She’d spent her childhood living in the only old farm house on the outskirts of Temple austere enough to suit her father, so she was all too aware that wood expands in moisture, making windows in old dwellings useless for months of the year. That didn’t stop tears from welling at the corners of her eyes when neither budged. Condensation clung to the inside of the panes. Etta rubbed at the glass with her sleeve. Even if she got one open, what would she do? Jump? Maybe she was a danger to herself.

She moved toward the photograph of Vincent Buchanan hanging between the two windows. It was different than the portraits that hung all over the lodge. It wasn’t posed. Buchanan was standing in front of a lighthouse. He looked to be around Etta’s age. Or a little older?

Etta crouched, pulled the dissertation out of her bag, and flipped it open to the first page.
Vincent Buchanan was born in Buffalo, New York on August 20, 1909.
So the photo might have been taken around 1939? By then Buchanan had already won the Pulitzer Prize for
Rebellious Tides
. Etta flipped to the page of the dissertation where the envelope lay. The rice paper looked wilted, like an autumn leaf clinging to a branch. She tried to still her trembling hands and removed the letter.
July 20, 1940 . . . In a few weeks time, I will be on the other side of this ocean we share.
Could Sakura have taken the photo?

Etta returned the letter to its envelope, tucked it back inside the dissertation, and shoved the dissertation in her bag. She pushed herself up and walked to Hardin’s desk.

The executive chair squeaked under her weight. A cigar rested half-smoked in an oversized ashtray, which looked as though it had been scrubbed clean since the cigar had been smoked.

How long would Hardin be gone? It was lunchtime. An hour? Maybe a little more. Etta tried to push through the tightness pulsing at the back of her throat.

She opened Hardin’s lower left drawer. A bottle of Macallan rolled toward Etta. She thought about taking a drink. She could almost feel the burn at the back of her throat, the calmness sinking into her stomach. But she slammed the drawer shut. She needed to stay sharp.

Etta found little of interest in Hardin’s desk, except for a handful of letters from authors requesting permission to visit the academy. Marilyn Bernard, one of Etta’s favorite authors, was among the applicants. Etta had pre-ordered her most recent book,
Water on the Moon
, months in advance. What would the author’s workshops be like? Then a chill washed through Etta. She would not be meeting Marilyn Bernard. She was locked in an office awaiting a psychiatrist’s pronouncement that she was insane.

Etta moved to the wooden filing cabinet across the room. The top drawer contained information related to donors and bequests: legal forms for archival and monetary donations, a donor’s bill of rights, a transfer of stock form. There were annual reports to donors for the previous five years and individual files for past donors. Another file was labeled “prospective donors” and stuffed with a thick fading list of names, which had been printed on a dot matrix paper. The second drawer consisted only of budget spreadsheets, as well as contracts for repairs to the lodge, work on the grounds.

Etta wondered if directing a writer’s academy was the most boring job on the planet, worse than temping at Morgan, Kane, and Associates, until she pulled open the third drawer. It was slightly more interesting. It contained files for authors, and Etta recognized many of the names instantly. Had they all visited the academy at some point? Was Robert North in there? Isabella Peña? Etta tried to push some files back to see the names in the middle, but they wouldn’t budge. Something must have fallen and jammed everything. Etta opened the drawer all the way and reached for the back, her fingers wrapping around a thick file lodged there. She pulled it out, and her eyes registered the name on the typewritten label at the same instant that she heard Opal’s voice in the reception area.

Etta snapped her gaze to the door then slammed the drawer shut and stepped away from the door. She expected to hear the click of the lock, to see the doorknob twist. But several minutes passed. She couldn’t make out words, but she could hear the cadence. They were arguing. Etta clutched the file folder and padded closer to the door until her ear was pushed up against it.

“Does anyone with a Y chromosome turn your mind to putty? We should have reunited that last one with her fucking father like she wanted.”

Silence. Etta forced air into her lungs and pressed her ear closer to the door.

Opal spoke again, but Etta couldn’t make out her words.

More silence.

Opal again: “Consider what’s at stake here. The major needs to be involved in this one.”

Hardin now: “We already decided. Nothing is at stake. We’ll expel her for misconduct. We’ll have Evelyn sign the report. We’ll release that to every news station in the country if we ever hear from her again.”

“That was before we talked to her. She’s . . . Maybe you were right about the last one. All the Waterhouse boy had to do was say hello to her. But this one, watch her eyes. She knows more than you think.”

“She doesn’t know anything.”

Opal’s voice faded. Did she step further away? Etta slid her ear down. “I’m going to get Mills.”

“Opal . . .”

A door slammed shut. Then it creaked open and slammed shut again.

Etta gazed at the folder in her hand, at the way the typewritten name had yellowed and faded over the years.
Lowther, Matthew Kenneth
.

* * *

It’s amazing what a woman will do when she’s desperate.

Those were the words on the cover of
Dissatisfaction
, Etta’s first Courtesan romance, just under the title. They coursed through her mind now as she strode to Hardin’s desk and picked up the ashtray. The half-smoked cigar rolled to the floor. Etta weighed the glass in her hand. Ten pounds maybe.

In Loretta Ann Fox’s first Courtesan romance, the heroine, Miss Kristine Richards, found herself trapped in a house fire. Kristine, a woman who could never decide what to order for dinner in a restaurant let alone how to handle an emergency, locked herself in her second floor bedroom and waited for her beau Morgan Kane to arrive. As the flames ate their way through her house, Kristine was convinced fate was on her side. Her fiancé was Morgan Kane, a strong, handsome fire fighter, who she’d chosen over Henry Ross, a nice, but too-talkative reference librarian at the Detroit Public Library. Morgan was late, as usual, for their date, but he would arrive soon to save her. Except as the black smoke slid under Kristine’s bedroom door, and she breathed in the acrid air, Kristine began to wonder if Morgan wasn’t on his way after all. That’s when she got desperate.

“It’s amazing what a woman will do when she’s desperate,” Etta said out loud.

In Kristine’s case, it was a library book—an oversized coffee table tome about sea turtles that Henry Ross had recommended when Kristine had stopped into the downtown branch of the Detroit Public Library a week before. Henry had remembered from their coffee date several weeks before that Kristine liked sea turtles.

In Etta’s case it was Director Hardin’s ashtray. Etta hurled it toward the window, aiming for the spot toward the lower left corner that she’d researched was the best spot for Kristine to hurl her book—the spot near the sill where a window was most likely to shatter if struck. Sure enough, the glass burst. Etta gasped at the sound of the glass shards tumbling over each other on their way to the floor. Then the roar of the rain thundered into the room.

Etta had done more research for
Dissatisfaction
than she did for all of her other romances combined. She’d volunteered at the Ann Arbor Library a few evenings a week so she could understand the day-to-day minutia of her hero, Henry Ross’ career. And she’d learned how to do taekwondo and make a martini, two of Henry Ross’ other specialties.

She also interviewed Bart Townsend, her friend’s brother, a fire fighter-in-training at the Ann Arbor Fire Department to better understand the handsome, but two-timing Morgan Kane, whom Etta named after the law firm where she temped during the day while she worked through the nights writing her first romance novel. Bart had explained what a woman stuck in a raging house fire should do, and Bart’s words came to mind as Etta stood at the sill of the director’s shattered window, glass crunching beneath her feet, and blinked to try to make out the ground one story below. “Your lady’d be crazy to jump straight out of a high-up window,” Bart had said in the macho way Bart said everything.

Etta hadn’t entirely believed Bart since he seemed to exaggerate the dangers of everything a woman might want to do, but now the ground did look far away. She squeezed her eyes shut, trying to remember Bart’s words. “She should cover any sharp edges sticking out of the sill by draping a towel or blanket across it then throw as much clothing or bedding out the window as she can to soften her landing. Then she’s gonna want to lower herself down as far as possible, even just arms length, before letting herself fall to the ground. Then that lady needs to get her ass up off the ground pronto and run away from the building.

Etta set her bag on the floor, unzipped her coat and draped it across the windowsill, folding it over itself until she couldn’t feel anything sharp as she padded her hands along it. Then she pulled her wool sweater off, shivering against the icy rain that pelted her arms. She balled it up, leaned over the sill, and dropped it straight down. Etta searched the room for anything else that looked soft. A jacket? A sweater? She tried to pull the cushions from the chairs. They wouldn’t budge.

Etta walked back to the window, flung her bag across her shoulder, and stepped onto the window sill. She crouched, squinting against the rain, searching for a ledge or a tree branch to help her to the ground. There was nothing.

Then Etta did exactly what Kristine Richards had done. She inched herself around, clutched onto the window sill, and lowered herself to arms’ length. She hung there until her arms ached, praying that a wool sweater would somehow miraculously break a one-hundred-and-ten-pound woman’s fall. Then she let go.

* * *

Unlike her heroine Kristine Richards, Etta didn’t believe in fate. She’d only put it in the plot of
Dissatisfaction
, because she liked the idea that checking out a library book could be the piece of fate that saved a woman from a house fire instead of getting engaged to a handsome fire fighter. While Kristine Richards was saving herself from the fire, fate had it that Morgan Kane was spending his dinner break in bed with Kristine’s best friend Melinda, climaxing at the moment that Kristine let go of the window sill. Fate was a romance writer’s best friend.

Etta picked up her head and blinked. She tried not to breathe through her nose. She pushed herself up and flinched as an earthworm crawled out of the decomposing kitchen waste next to her foot. The compost pile stank, but she couldn’t have asked for a softer place to land. Fate? Carl had started the compost bin during the summer, collecting the kitchen scraps and garden debris daily and piling them in this bin. Had he done it for her, to give her a safe place to fall? Or to make her realize what it was that she had to do next?