Free Holmes & Moriarty 02 - All She Wrote (MM) by Josh Lanyon

other plans.

Chapter Seven
    The Tudor Teashop was a largish building with black-and-white decorative timbering, fake chimneys complete with fake chimney pots, and long, narrow windows with flower boxes containing perky plastic blooms.

    Inside, it was quaintly decorated in ye olde pseudo-English style complete with Staffordshire pottery and pictures of the queen. It was packed on this Friday afternoon, but we found a table near the fake fireplace and sat down to order our lunch.

    The ladies went for various cakes and dainties. I opted for the most substantial selection on the menu which turned out to be three different kinds of finger sandwiches: smoked salmon, watercress and walnut. I don’t think any of it was true British fare, but by then I was starving and I’d have been willing to eat soggy cucumbers or anything else my system could digest.

    “Can I ask you a question?” Victoria asked diffidently once we’d given our orders to the tiny brisk Englishwoman who owned the Tudor Teashop. “How did you get an agent?”

    I opened my mouth. Closed it.

    “Remember,” Nella told her. “He wrote letters to everyone in Writer’s Market .”

    I said, “Huh?”

    “Oh, I must have missed that,” Victoria said.

    “Me too,” I said.

    Nella turned those wide blue eyes my way. “Isn’t that right?”

    “Well, I mean it’s sort of right. I didn’t write everybody . I tried to target agents who handled my kind of thing. Agents I had a chance of scoring with.”

    “How many rejections did you get?”

    “It’s a long time ago.”

    She said with disarming honesty, “I always remember the rejections better than the good news.”

    I thought of the recent rejections in my life. Maybe my perception was wrong, but I felt like even though I received fewer rejections these days, my bounce back had been better when I was younger. Part of that was probably spending nearly twenty years at the same publishing house with the same editor. Not to mention the thirteen years I’d spent with David. Although
    “spent with” was maybe looking at it through rose-colored reading glasses.

    I said, “I was lucky. My agent was starting up and she was what’s known in the industry as hungry . She signed me before the others had a chance to reject me.”

    “Is she looking for clients?” Nella asked.

    “You know, I’m not sure.” It was the truth.

    Her gaze fell, her cheeks turned pink, and I knew she felt she’d been brushed off, which was kind of true, but not entirely.

    To my astonishment, I heard myself saying, “If you want to mail me a copy of your manuscript, I could send it on to Rachel with a note of recommendation.”

    She lit up happily.

    Yeah. No good deed goes unpublished.

    “What’s to stop you from stealing Nella’s story?” Poppy broke in.

    “I’m sorry?”

    “You could steal Nella’s story and submit it as your own, right?”

    “ Wrong .” One cold, compact ice cube of a word cracked out of the frozen tray I wanted to dump over her head. I was too offended to let it rest there. “First of all, ideas aren’t the hard part.
    Secondly, there are no new ideas, only the author’s unique execution.” I think I spoke the word execution with more fervor than strictly necessary. “Thirdly, why the hell would I want to submit Nella’s book as my own when I—like every author in the world—like my own work better?”

    “I guess I hit a nerve,” Poppy said, amused.

    “Nerve is the right word. I’m offering to do Nella a favor and you’re basically—” I stopped there. He who argues with a fool is a bigger fool. Or drunk. And I was neither. I wasn’t drunk, anyway. Worse luck.

    I said to Nella, who was staring wide-eyed from me to Poppy, “Do what you want. If you feel safer sending the book on your own, you can let Rachel know I recommended you.”

    Our food came at that point, which was probably as well. I occupied myself with the triangles of sandwiches and did my best not