Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Forty-Two

Melanie Joan and I went for a good long walk along the Charles the next morning, past the Longfellow Bridge and then toward the Harvard Bridge at Mass Ave, having decided that if we didn’t make it all the way to the bridge, we’d stop when one of us finally got tired.

“I don’t get tired,” she said.

“I do,” I said.

I was tired, period. Tired from my trip to upstate New York, exhausted from trying to figure out who Dr. Charles Hall thought I might be, from over there on his side of the rainbow.

I was tired of worrying about my father, and Melanie Joan. Somebody was coming for her, clearly, the way somebody had come for Joe Doyle, after he had come for my father.

I had now spent quality time, if you could call it that, with both of Melanie Joan Hall’s husbands. Such a joy. Somehow her second husband, Dr. John Melvin, was still connected to me, and to her, and to Joe Doyle.

Which connected Melvin to my father.

I felt as spun around as I did when I tried to figure out the financials in Billions.

I looked across the river to Memorial Drive, where MIT was. The view from this side of the river, as always, was pretty sweet. Just not as sweet as it was from over there. Surely somebody at MIT could figure out what the hell was going on over here, at least with me.

The reason I had waited to have the conversation that Melanie Joan and I needed to have about Charles Hall was because I was too tired to have it last night after Richie drove my pistol-packing father home.

I had my snub-nosed .38 in the side pocket of the Boston Strong hoodie I was wearing this morning. I didn’t really need any kind of sweatshirt, with the temperature in the low seventies. But I felt as if I did need my gun.

“Why the nondisclosure?” I said.

“Won’t I be violating it by disclosing that?” she said.

I swallowed a sigh.

“Melanie Joan,” I said. “I like you. I do. You’ve been more than generous to Rosie and me with the house, even though you could ask us to leave at any time. But having said that? I am not in the mood to fuck around today.”

“Can’t a girl make a joke?” she said.

“What joke?” I said.

“Well,” she said, “someone’s in a pissy mood.”

“ ‘Pissy,’ ” I said, “doesn’t even begin to describe my mood, frankly.”

She was wearing high-rise Lululemon tights that were extremely tight. But she could carry it off at her age. She kept herself up. And her figure. She didn’t just try to power-walk every day. I could hear her most mornings doing a Bar Method class on her laptop. She could have afforded having a trainer come to her. But she said she liked being able to simply close her screen instead of having a trainer hurt her feelings. She had pointed out one morning that all of life should be like that.

Just close the screen.

Make the bad man — or woman — go away.

“The nondisclosure,” I nudged.

“You know Charles helped me with my first book,” she said. “To me the money was just a gesture of gratitude. Somewhat like alimony.”

“Even if he remarried?”

“Even if.”

“Why couldn’t you just send him a monthly or yearly or whatever stipend without an NDA?”

“It was just like my own personal insurance policy against him wanting more someday,” she said, “or trying to tell people that he had done more with my book than simply help edit it before it was in the hands of a real editor.”

“Did he do more than edit it?” I said.

“No,” she said, perhaps too quickly. “The person who ultimately did the most to shape that book was the real editor. Chaz.”

Chaz Blackburn. Her editor at McCardle & Lowell then, and now. The publishing house was still located in Boston, in the same building where it had been for the past one hundred years, at Washington and School.

Because he had been credited with discovering Melanie Joan, and because of all the success they’d had together, he was not only the chairman of the company now, he owned a very nice chunk of it.

I had met him a couple times in the past when Melanie Joan had come to town for book launches. Blackburn was in his early eighties now, I was pretty certain. But he still edited her books and, she said, gave no indication that he was considering retirement. The company had no policy about that and it wouldn’t have mattered if it did, because for all intents and purposes, Melanie Joan and Chaz Blackburn were the company by now.

I hadn’t told Melanie Joan, but I planned on calling him later today or tomorrow, just to learn more about the circumstances of her manuscript coming to him over the transom, as publishing people liked to say back in the day. And for him to compare it to my rogue manuscript.

For now I just said, “What does Chaz think about this ghost manuscript?”

“Chaz says that the only person who can write like me is me,” she said.

Of course he does, I thought.

“And no one has ever come to him, or anybody else at McArdle and Lowell, with the suggestion that you’re a plagiarist?” I said.

I was starting to flag a little. Melanie Joan seemed capable of walking all the way to one of my old classroom buildings at Boston University.

“Stop using that word!”

“How about theft of artistic content?”

“No,” she said. “No, no, no. Because there never was any.”

“The current Mrs. Hall says that the romantic involvement that you shared, and she shared, with Dr. Charles was hardly unique.”

She smiled. “The man did have his charms.”

“Did he ever mention other students whom he thought showed real writing promise?”

“The youthful me actually asked him that question once,” she said. “And he said that no one he’d ever had in class approached my ability as a storyteller. He said that every writing teacher hopes that someone with a talent like mine walks into the room someday.”

“Before he collapsed he clearly thought I was someone else,” I said. “Any idea who that might have been?”

There was a four-person shell to our right now, gliding through the water. It looked easy. I had tried it one time. It wasn’t.

“I’m sure I don’t know,” Melanie Joan said. “And now, according to you, he is permanently cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs.”

“Beautifully put,” I said.

“Oh, God, Sunny, will you lighten up?” she said. “I’m sorry he’s in the shape he’s in. I am. But he will be taken care of for the rest of his life.”

“For that one moment with me,” I said, “he was intensely present.”

“What exactly are you asking me?” Melanie Joan said.

She sounded petulant again. Another of her default positions.

“I guess I am asking you,” I said, “if there’s something you didn’t want him to disclose about you that you haven’t shared with me.”

She stopped. I stopped. She turned so that the Charles River was behind her.

“You make it sound as if I have some deep, dark secret,” she said.

“Where would I ever get an idea like that?”

She crossed her arms.

“Maybe I need to rethink this relationship,” she said.

“Is that a threat?”

“An observation.”

“Maybe we both need to rethink this relationship,” I said.

I thought of how cruel sunlight had been to Holly Hall. But not Melanie Joan. Even just going out for a morning walk, she had done some banging makeup job on herself.

“I hired you this time for the same reason I did the last time,” she said. “To look out for me.”

“You may not believe it,” I said, “but that is precisely what I’m trying to do.”

“Well,” she said, “it certainly doesn’t sound that way to me this morning. Sometimes I get the feeling that the one really stalking me is you.”

With that, she turned and started walking back up the Esplanade toward River Street Place. I had no choice but to follow her, even though she was walking at an even more brisk pace than before.

But I had to admit that the walking was working for her, and the Bar Method, and the Peloton she had back in Los Angeles. I hoped my ass looked as good as hers did when I was her age.

If I wasn’t in such a pissy mood, I might even have mentioned that to her.