CHAPTER 1

By her own inner clock, she was running late.

By everyone else's method of timekeeping, she was ahead of schedule. But Elisha Jane Reed had gotten to her present position of senior editor in the exclusive publishing firm of Randolph & Sons by following, to a good extent, Henry David Thoreau's advice about marching to a different drummer. She marched to that drummer, in double time, so that she could elude his other equally famous phrase, the one about most men leading lives of quiet desperation.

Because the line applied equally, perhaps even more truthfully, to women, as well.

Desperation, as contemplated by the late nonconformist, came to her only in the wee hours of the night, when everything bad was magnified by the shadows in the room and everything good was obscured behind the dust motes. It was then that she took stock of her life, measuring it by the old-fashioned standards that refused to die even in this day and age. The standards that had been laid down for all women since Eve had opted for a more extensive wardrobe than just her long hair and a random fig leaf. Namely, a husband and tiny miniature copies or combinations of herself and the man who had won her hand and her heart.

In that column, as far as her life went, was a very large zero. No children, no husband, not even an ex-husband buried beneath disparaging rhetoric. As far as she was concerned, marriage was the name of a mythical realm into which she had never traveled, never even been invited to tour.

Desperation of the more common garden variety existed for her by the truckload within the halls of Randolph & Sons. This more familiar desperation, coupled with exasperation, involved deadlines, temperamental and at times overpaid authors, not to mention the constant, daunting influx of market statistics, which, even when good, were never as good as Hayden Randolph, the seventy-five-year-old retired, but never-quite-out-of-sight, head of the publishing company, desired them to be.

The old man, as she secretly called the publishing magnate, was going to be there tonight, Elisha thought as she searched in vain for the mate to the diamond stud earring she'd wanted to wear to the party. He made it a point, despite the retirement party he'd authorized to be thrown for him last year, to have his finger in every pie that came out of the Randolph & Sons oven. He didn't seem to trust his own son to preside over the festivities despite his twenty-four years in the business. Tomorrow, Sinclair Jones's latest thriller, Murder By Moonlight, hit the bookstores. Tonight was the book's coming-out party.

"Come out, come out wherever you are," Elisha coaxed in an impatient, singsong voice. No diamond stud appeared in reply.

The diamond studs were her lucky earrings and although she wasn't superstitious by nature, the one time she hadn't worn them to one of these affairs, the author's book had sold abysmally. She would take no chances. Someone had once told her that as an editor, you were only as good as your author's current book.

Carole Chambers would really love for her not to find her earrings, Elisha thought, taking the wide, rectangular jewelry box and dumping the contents out on the top of her bureau. Carole Chambers was the assistant that Hayden's son, Rockefeller, had saddled her with about six months ago. She remembered the day well. She thought of it as Black Monday.

"I want you to train her, Elisha. Make her a junior version of you. Not that I expect anyone to ever be as good as you," he'd said to her in that light tenor voice. "But Dad wants this to happen. So it's either have you train Carole or we kidnap you in the dead of night, whisk you off to some mad scientist's laboratory and have them create several dozen clones in hopes that at least one will be enough like you to satisfy him."

Smiling at the scenario he'd created, Rockefeller Randolph, Rocky to the select few who numbered among his friends, had raised and lowered his eyebrows and rubbed his hands together like the imaginary mad scientist's slightly madder assistant. She'd said yes because what choice did she have?

Elisha sighed in disgust and reached for one of the twelve pairs of reading glasses—all with slightly varying prescriptions—that she kept scattered throughout her penthouse apartment. She hated needing glasses. But where once she could have made out every single detail of every single piece of jewelry spread out on the honey-colored bureau, now entire pieces melded in a semicolorful glob. Colors were no longer as intense as they once were and letters had become black specks on a surface.

Getting older was the pits, she thought, putting the glasses on. She began sorting through the pieces.

Rocky would be at the party tonight, too. Probably sitting off in some corner of the room, communing with glass after glass of whatever wine they were going to be serving. Elisha shook her head. He always seemed to shrink to half his lanky size whenever he was in the same room as his father. Rocky was a very talented, sweet man, but he was considerably short on self-confidence, especially whenever his larger-than-life father was anywhere in the vicinity.

copyright © 2005 Marie Rydzynski-Ferrarella