Second act, p.8
Second Act, page 8
“Are you in a job now?” he asked her. “Or are you working part-time somewhere else?” She was well dressed and didn’t look like she needed to work. She was well-spoken, and from what he could tell, sounded like she was from an educated upper-class British background.
“No, I’m not in a job. Actually, I haven’t worked in eleven years. I was a journalist in London for The Sunday Times. I got married and moved here, and I haven’t worked since then. I’ve been doing odd jobs and part-time for the past several months. I need to get back in the work force. I should probably go back to London, but eleven years is a long time to be out of work. I’m not really up-to-date anymore, except for something like this. My computer skills are pretty basic, but I can certainly scan and email.” She smiled at him, and he saw how pretty she was when she did. She was a serious-looking woman, and she hadn’t smiled until then.
He wondered if she was married, but couldn’t ask. He preferred single assistants, like Frances. Their personal lives didn’t interfere, and Violet was a reasonable age. She was not some wild twenty-two-year-old, out dancing every night and hungover the next day.
She volunteered the information on her own. “I’m no longer married and I don’t have children.” He noticed that she looked sad when she said it, but he didn’t comment.
“Well, what do you think, Violet? It’s not an exciting job, but I definitely need help. Would it suit you?” She was obviously intelligent and overqualified for the job, but that was a plus for him, if it didn’t bother her. He guessed at what seemed like a fair rate to him, and her eyes widened in surprise when he said it.
“I hope I’ll be worth that,” she said softly, “and yes, the job would suit me very well. When would you like me to start?”
“Is tomorrow too soon?”
She smiled at his answer. “That’s fine with me. I’ve been filling in at the bookshop, but they can manage very well without me. I told them I was coming for an interview, and I can still help them on weekends.” Andy had a feeling that she needed the money, although she didn’t look it. She looked very well put together, and her clothes looked expensive. She had a well-brought-up look to her.
“You can dress casually for work. We won’t be seeing anyone. It’s just the housekeeper and her helper here, and myself.”
“Are jeans okay sometimes?” she asked cautiously. “Not every day.”
“Fine. Any other questions?” She said she had none, and five minutes later, she left, and he saw that she had come on a bicycle. She seemed like a very nice woman, and none of the work he had for her was complicated. He felt sure she was more than capable of it.
* * *
—
She arrived promptly at nine the next morning, and Andy was waiting for her in the study with a list of the emails he needed to have printed. There were a lot of them.
She had worn a navy blue twin set and jeans, with a string of pearls and running shoes, and got right to work, checking his list. She was working in the library on the main floor. He had offered her tea or coffee, which she declined.
“We need a printer, I’m afraid,” he told her, “and there’s one on the inventory, but I can’t find it, and the housekeeper didn’t know where it is either. There are half a dozen servants’ rooms upstairs jammed full of boxes and the owners’ belongings. I hope it’s not up there. It will take us hours to find it.”
“I doubt it would be, Mr. Westfield,” she said primly. “I think I know where it might be.” She stood up from the desk, walked to the far wall, took out a section of four books, reached in and pressed a button, and a whole section of what looked like bookshelves with leather-bound books on them came forward and revealed a large storage space behind it. The printer and a computer were there. She took both out, and some other supplies and paper she needed to print. Andy stared at her in amazement.
“How did you know that was there?” he asked her.
“A lot of these old houses have secret passages and false walls,” she said quietly, “and even when a new owner remodels, they usually preserve things like that. It was just a guess,” she said modestly. Andy was still stunned.
“That’s incredible. Do you think there’s a secret passage here too?”
“I don’t, but we can always look. They’re hard to find and harder to maintain, and I always think they’re dangerous with children in the house. So if they did have one, they might have sealed it up.” She clearly knew what she was talking about, as Andy realized that there was more to Violet Smith than one guessed initially. She had a Lois Lane quality, the young woman in Superman who had hidden superpowers. She set up the printer without making a fuss, and twenty minutes later she had all his emails printed and ready to sign. And as soon as he did, she scanned and emailed them to the people who had sent them and were waiting for his signature on a variety of documents, most of them financial.
She printed out several more that had come in after that. Andy was in the kitchen getting something cold to drink when Violet came in for a cup of tea and Mrs. MacInnes’s face brightened and she smiled warmly. Andy hadn’t seen the housekeeper smile yet until then. She was pleasant, polite, but a very dour woman. But with Violet she looked genuinely delighted to see her.
“How are you?” she asked her, and Violet responded quietly.
“I’m fine.” She smiled, gently touched the housekeeper’s shoulder, and went back to the study to finish her work. She had been very professional with Andy all morning, but clearly the two women knew each other personally. It was a very small town, so not surprising that they’d met, or were friends.
Everything was finished at one o’clock. Violet’s desk was impeccably neat, and she had done everything Andy needed her to do. He couldn’t resist asking her as she got ready to leave, “Have you worked here before?”
“No,” she said quietly. “I know Mrs. MacInnes from town. We shop at the same market, and she comes into the bookshop quite a lot. We have a lending library there too.” The explanation sounded reasonable to him. After Violet left, he made himself a sandwich in the kitchen and chatted with Mrs. MacInnes when she walked in.
“I noticed that you and Violet know each other,” he said, fishing a little. He was still curious about Violet, and what she was doing in Winchelsea Beach. It seemed like a dead end for her. “She said you met at the bookshop. She’s a lovely woman and very efficient.”
“She’s a wonderful person. It’s a shame she has to work,” Mrs. MacInnes said with feeling, obviously sympathetic. “At least she’ll be treated well here.” She had already decided that Andy seemed like a kind man. “She’s fallen on hard times,” she volunteered, which made sense to him, given the way Violet spoke and the clothes she wore.
“I’m surprised she’s not working in London,” Andy said.
“She probably can’t afford to move. London’s expensive. She can live more cheaply here, and the realtor hadn’t told them and maybe didn’t know.”
“She’d make more money there,” Andy said. It was a catch-22, and it sounded as though Violet was trapped where she was, which was good luck for him. He still couldn’t get over her guesswork with the bookcase. That was quite a trick. He would never have known the false wall was there, and the realtor hadn’t told them and maybe didn’t know.
As promised, Violet came to do his office work for him, five half days a week, and everything he needed got done. She kept to herself and spoke very little and was willing to do whatever project he asked of her. She was resourceful when she needed to be, creative, intelligent, and vastly overqualified as he had guessed, but she didn’t feel demeaned by the job. She thanked him regularly for the opportunity. She was respectful, pleasant, and discreet, and never spoke of herself. In some ways she reminded him of Frances in the beginning, when she was still young and very shy. He had come to realize that Violet wasn’t so much shy as reserved. She had strong boundaries that she enforced, and although Andy was aware that she knew Mrs. MacInnes, she didn’t visit in the kitchen and try to hang out with her. She stayed in the library, which she used as an office. Maybe because she was British, she was even more formal and old-school than Andy. He had encouraged her after the first day to call him by his first name, which she did, but she was always respectful.
He had so much financial work the second week that she worked all day Friday, until after six o’clock, and she didn’t complain about having to stay late when they finished at almost seven o’clock. She was in a hurry when she left. She was having dinner with a friend, and pedaled off on her bicycle with a wave at Andy, and wished him a good weekend. He couldn’t help wondering if she had a boyfriend, she was such a good-looking woman. He hated to think of women like Violet and Frances being alone, and there were so many of them. They didn’t get out in the world to meet someone, were either justifiably afraid of the internet or had had bad experiences with it, and many had few opportunities in their jobs to meet men. In Violet’s case, none at all. Andy had no visitors to his office in Winchelsea Beach, and he had had very few suitable single male visitors, other than major movie stars, for Frances in LA. He hoped that Frances would meet a good guy in her new job.
After Violet left his house on Friday night, Andy poured himself a scotch from the bar in the library. He hadn’t had a drink since the previous weekend, but he was feeling relaxed and had nothing to do. He still hadn’t tried eating at the local pubs. He didn’t like dining out alone and was living mostly on takeaway food. He noticed a folder on Violet’s desk that didn’t look familiar, and wondered if she had started a new filing system of her own. He opened the file and was surprised to see what looked like a manuscript for a book. He flipped through the pages and saw that there were three chapters, and he saw Violet’s name carefully written on the inside cover. Feeling like a thief, he sat down on the couch with it, and read it straight through with a second scotch. It was beautifully written, a gripping story of a woman held in the thrall of a dangerous narcissist with criminal intentions who was blackmailing her, holds her hostage, and plans to kill her. Andy was frustrated when the last chapter ended, and he wanted to read more. There were no further chapters in the folder. It was a fantastic story, and would make an excellent book, and even better movie. He put it back on the desk, thinking of Violet, a woman of carefully hidden talents. She had mentioned nothing about her writing skills in the interview. He couldn’t wait to ask her about it on Monday, although he would have to admit that he had read it without her permission. She was a very talented writer, and he couldn’t wait to see her and ask her about it, and if she had written more yet.
She was an intriguing woman, and something about her quiet demeanor suggested to him that she had secrets. And the sadness he had glimpsed on the beach haunted him.
His own life was an open book to her now, or very nearly. The correspondence she had read and scanned from his lawyer talked about his severance agreement from Global Studios, as did the emails from his investment advisor. If she read between the lines, she would know that he had been fired from somewhere. It didn’t take much to piece the story together, and she was a bright woman. She had signed a standard confidentiality form when she came to work for him, and he wondered how much she had figured out. She hadn’t said anything to him, or asked. She was very discreet and polite.
* * *
—
As Andy had guessed, Violet was intrigued by his emails. She hadn’t figured out all of it, but it was clear that he had been fired, and the name Global Studios was in some of the correspondence. The payments had come from two different corporations, both AMCO, which she was familiar with, and FAQTS, which she had never heard of. The payments were for an astronomical amount of money, although she had seen amounts like it before, and bigger. She was more worldly than she appeared. She had seen things that Andy could never have dreamed of. But she was sure that Andy was an honest man. In the two weeks she’d been there, he never talked about his job, and she wasn’t sure if he was retired or still working, and if he might be working remotely from England. He seemed to be taking time off from his job, whatever it was, and even in the informal setting of the house he had rented, she could sense how important he was in the world from the way people addressed him in their emails.
Feeling guilty for doing so, she looked him up on the internet that weekend, and saw all the recent articles about his being fired in the sale of Global Studios. She was shocked to read that he had been head of the studio for nineteen years and had been fired summarily. And then she realized what he was doing in England. He was licking his wounds, and probably figuring out what to do next. She felt sorry for him when she had read it all. What they had done to him sounded cruel and unfair to her. Violet knew about cruel and had been there herself. But she hated to see it happen to someone else, and he seemed like a kind, honorable man. She could only imagine how much he must be hurting now, particularly to have come so far from his home, to live in a strange house, in a country not his own.
She thought about him all weekend, and had new compassion for him. She didn’t want to let him know that she knew now, but she liked him even better, knowing what he’d been through only a month before. She knew he must still be reverberating from the shock of being fired. She wanted to console him, but dignity and discretion demanded that she not even let on that she knew. They were strangers to each other and she was only his employee. She couldn’t say anything, all she could do was live up to his faith in her. She was grateful that he had asked her nothing personal about herself since the interview. She had wounds of her own that she had no desire to share, with him or anyone else.
Chapter 7
Andy was eager for Violet to arrive while he finished his breakfast and coffee on Monday morning. He had read Violet’s chapters again the night before, and they read even better the second time than the first. Her story was fantastic, and so was the pace. Her writing was smooth and beautiful, the story was gripping, the characters strong. He wanted to know about the story and how much of it she had written, if there was more, or was she just starting? She was a talented writer.
Violet came to say hello to him in the kitchen when she got to work. He thought she looked relaxed and in good spirits, and she and Mrs. MacInnes smiled at each other. Andy got up as soon as he saw her, walked to the study with her, and asked her to sit down. She looked suddenly frightened. He was so serious that she was afraid he was going to fire her.
“Did I do something wrong?” she asked, and looked on the verge of tears.
“No, far from it. I want to ask you about this.” He turned and took the folder off the table and held it so she could see it, and she went pale.
“I’m sorry, Andy. I shouldn’t have. It’s some papers of mine. I brought it to work to use your copy machine. The one in town is always broken. I should have asked you before copying my own papers without your permission.”
“You can make a hundred copies of what’s in this folder, as long as you give me one of them,” he said. “Violet, these are among the best opening chapters I’ve ever read, and the others were by famous professionals. This is brilliant. I apologize to you for reading it. You left the file on the desk. I opened it on Friday night, and I saw what was in it. I was curious and read it. So, I apologize to you. What are you doing with it? Are you writing a book? I read it again last night and I couldn’t put it down. I liked it even better the second time.” Her dark violet eyes looked huge in her face.
“I’m trying to write a book. I’ve always wanted to, but I didn’t have time, or the courage. I’ve only been working on this for a few months. And yes, there’s more. I’ve almost finished it. I’m working on the last chapter now. But the rest is all handwritten. I haven’t typed it up yet. I’ve only typed the first three chapters, which is why I brought them in to copy on Friday.”
“Then I have a proposition to make you. I will pay you for full days, till five every day, and when you finish my work at one every day, you can spend the rest of the day typing your manuscript. I want you to finish this soon. You are sitting on an absolutely spectacular piece of work. And I have a question to ask you. Do you want to try to have this published as a book, or would you like to turn it into a screenplay? You could publish the book afterward, if you wanted to, or the reverse, and have a movie follow the book. It’s incredibly cinematic, and I think you should do it first as a screenplay. I can find someone to work with you if you want, or even help you do it.” Andy paused then, and continued to look at her. “You’ve been scanning my legal and financial correspondence for two weeks. I’m sure you’ve figured out that I was the head of Global Studios for nineteen years. I got fired a month ago when the studio was sold. They said I was protected in the deal, but I wasn’t. They signed the deal on Friday night and fired me at nine o’clock on Monday morning. So, to put it bluntly, I’m out of a job and unemployed. I may even stay that way. Studio head positions don’t come along very often.
“I was a screenwriter for sixteen years before I got hired to run the studio. I know screenwriting in my sleep, and I’ve never written anything as strong as you just did. But I can show you how to do it as a screenplay, if you want to do it yourself, and use my connections to set you up with a producer who would help put a deal together for you. You can still publish it as a book, before or after. My son-in-law is a book publisher and I’d be happy to introduce you to him too. Violet, this is big league stuff, and I may have been fired a month ago, but I have all the connections you need to get this project going. I’d like you to use them, if you’re willing.” Suddenly he laughed as he looked as her. “Hell, maybe I’ll be an agent in my next life. And if so, I want to be yours. But seriously, I’d like to help you with this. You have an award-winning piece of work here.”
