An image came to Alice of her face transposed onto a goose’s body, a giant golden egg beneath her. It wasn’t one she enjoyed.
Gabby could sense Alice’s distress. “Okay, let’s step back. You’ve been charging what, a thousand dollars for a story?”
Alice nodded, embarrassed to admit that she had simply been accepting whatever people wanted to give her. Sometimes it was much more than a thousand dollars. More often it was less. From a monetary standpoint, it was never enough. At the rate it took her to write a story, she was making about five dollars an hour. She was going to have to learn to write faster. At least she still had catering, which offered her a steady if paltry income to fall back on.
“Make a list, first come, first served. If you try to determine who’s more deserving or more urgent, you’re going to have a serious headache on your hands. I mean, you should reject anyone who gives you an icky feeling or reeks of difficulty. Otherwise be egalitarian about it. It’s the only way.” Gabby found a legal pad in her bag and started outlining a plan. “I want you to keep a log of everything, the hours you spend with clients—including biking to meet them, gas if you drive—the hours of writing and editing. Any fifteen minutes you devote to a client, write it down. That will give us a sense of how long it takes you to complete a story, and we’ll adjust the waitlist time and price from there.”
“Will people really sign up for a waitlist?”
“If they’ll wait for brunch, they’ll definitely wait for love.”
“I’m not quitting catering,” Alice said.
Gabby mulled this over for a moment. “That’s smart. Until we figure out exactly how to monetize this into a viable and steady income stream, you shouldn’t quit your day job. It would be too stressful.” She knew how Alice responded to stress, the physical shutdown of her body, the hibernation when life overwhelmed her.
“I don’t like this,” Alice said.
“Of course you don’t. That’s why you have me.” Gabby sat up, a smug look on her face. “No more stapled stories though, okay? And I love Agatha, but no one wants to read a story with cat hair on it. You need to put them in a folder or something. On sturdy paper. Make them look professional and expensive.” She sucked in her lips and made a popping sound. “And you need a name.”
“What’s wrong with Alice Meadows? You mean like a nom de plume?” Alice imagined herself in a trench coat and fedora, smoking a pipe that emitted heart-shaped puffs of smoke.
“A business name. Any ideas?”
Alice had one.
And so Oh, Alice Productions was born. Gabby wasn’t sure about the name. It sounded a tad orgasmic, pornographic even, but Alice was insistent. She wouldn’t budge on the comma either. Oh-comma-Alice. That pause was integral. It was deep enough to contain every manifestation, every type of love.
In a small spiral notebook that she now carried with her everywhere, Alice kept meticulous records, noting every fifteen-minute writing interval, every prewriting conversation with clients, in person or on the phone. The list of requests continued to grow. She did her best to be precise about when calls or emails came as well as when she responded. Love was inherently unfair, the way it showered some and starved others. The least she could do was make people’s access to it as equitable as possible.
Still, inspiration was its own life source. It had its own timeframe, its own predilections, its own will, which was more obstinate than Alice’s. The images did not always come to her in the order the requests were received. They simply bulldozed her when they wanted her to listen, abducting her body until she committed them to the page. Any effort to control her calling resulted in its revolt until Alice acquiesced. Despite her best efforts to be fair, she had to follow inspiration where it led, letting the stories unfold in the order they desired. Like love, her gift beckoned her to some over others. It wasn’t rational. It certainly wasn’t fair. Like love, its intoxication was impossible not to pursue.
6
In Which a Mysterious Envelope Arrives
On a crisp night amidst a fog thicker than smoke, an envelope arrived on Alice’s doorstep, the first of its kind. All other requests had arrived via modern technology, emails and voicemails, the occasional text. Alice had not given her address to anyone. She was just returning from work, wanting nothing more than to sleep. Catering was hard on her body. Her lower back ached. Her temples pounded. She fantasized about collapsing onto her bed, but she had several stories that needed endings. Alice produced her best work in these nighttime hours when she was too drained to interfere with the muse as it poured through her. Outside her front door, she took a deep breath to collect herself and went inside to write.
Alice might have missed the envelope entirely if not for her shorthair cat, Agatha, who swatted it free of the doormat. It was thick stock, unblemished, not so much as a smudge of dirt from the mat, perpetually sandy from the wind off the beach no matter how often she swept it clean.
The back was sealed with a wax emblem,MAmonogrammed in scarlet. Alice picked at the wax, careful not to break the seal, and slipped the cream card from the envelope. A five-hundred-dollar bill floated to the ground. Alice snapped it up before Agatha got her claws in it and ravaged it like one of her toys.
She held the card and the bill as she read the note, penned in practiced cursive.
Dear Ms. Meadows,
Word has reached me of your gift. I find myself in dire need of your assistance. It’s best if I explain my circumstances to you in person. Join me tomorrow for high tea. My home is located on Stagecoach Road past the tavern. You can’t miss it.
Please don’t be late. I despise tardiness.
Regards,
Madeline Alger
As a dedicated mystery reader, Alice knew this seemingly simple letter was anything but. She’d practically memorized all of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, devoured every Agatha Christie novel. She loved Daphne du Maurier, Patricia Highsmith, modern-day masters like Tana French and Ruth Ware. She’d read Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series at least four times, never able to guess the ending or the twist, even upon rereading. That was a lie, actually. Alice never tried to guess the twist. Some readers might take satisfaction in uncovering the murderer before Hercule Poirot. Alice preferred to let the mystery unfold as the writer intended.
Right away, this letter intrigued her, the trail of clues it left for Alice to solve: exactly where they should meet and when; the formal high tea; the dire need; William McKinley staring up at her from the face of the five-hundred-dollar bill. Until now, Alice had never seen a bill larger than a hundred, which she was sometimes awarded as a tip at the end of a party. From bar trivia, she knew that this particular currency had been discontinued in 1969, which meant that it was in fact worth a lot more than its value as legal tender. Who was this woman who dealt in rare currency and lived in an isolated part of the Los Padres National Forest where red oaks and sycamores would be her only neighbors?
Stagecoach Road was forty miles of windy two-lane highway carved into the mountains between Santa Barbara and Los Olivos. The road was all edge on one side, all steep bluffs on the other. It had become obsolete more than a century ago when stagecoaches were replaced by the railroad and was now good for a scenic drive, a secluded hike, or access to Cold Spring Tavern. The tavern, once a coach stop, had been operating as restaurant and saloon since the forties and was a popular spot for bikers and tourists alike. Part of what made it so popular was its seclusion, the way it felt detached from the outside world, harbored by forests that stood in contrast to the ocean and beachside city below. There were no houses along the hairpin turns that led up to the tavern, no roads or driveways connecting to houses deeper in the national forest. Yet Madeline insisted both that she resided there and that her house was obvious from the road. Alice was certain if there was a house up there, she would have noticed it before, not that she’d been to the tavern in years. There was one way to know for sure—take her old beast of a car up the steep, looping CA-154 toward Stagecoach Road.
