“And a new love will bring you forgiveness?” Alice asked.
“Only I can forgive myself. You can help me though. I know you can help me.”
A loud crash sounded beside them as a cat—neither Poirot nor Ripley, but a lithe black Siamese—skittered away from the porcelain plate of cookies that had just shattered on the floor.
“Ellis!” Madeline scolded the cat as she bent down to pick up the plate, split neatly into two pieces. “Look what you’ve done.” She set the broken plate on the coffee table. The cat inched cautiously toward one of the jam cookies on the floor, and Madeline poked at her with a painted red toe. “Off, you. Go find Currer and Acton.”
Ellis slinked toward a windowsill where two lazy tabbies lounged as though warming themselves in the sun that would not rise for another several hours. Alice had lost all track of time. The sky outside was completely dark. It could as easily be nine at night as one in the morning. Alice had not seen a clock since she entered the house, although she could hear a steady metronome ticking somewhere above them.
She smiled at the names of Madeline’s cats, Currer, Ellis, and Acton, references to the Bronte sisters’ pen names. There was no denying she felt connected to this strange woman, a kinship that Madeline must have intuited before they met if she suspected Alice could help her.
Madeline collected the cookies from the floor and returned them to the broken plate.
“Well?” she said as she settled back into the chair. “Don’t leave me in suspense. Will you help me or not?”
When Alice met Madeline’s gaze, she saw something familiar in her expression, something it took her a moment to identify as hope. Madeline, like all of Alice’s clients, believed Alice could assist her. Alice wasn’t clear yet on how to aid Madeline, but she hadn’t encountered a case she couldn’t crack, a client who did not find love.
“I will help you,” Alice said. “I’ll write you a story.”
8
A Love Scribe Is Born
It was strange the way life both changed and remained the same. Each Friday and Saturday, Alice still donned a collared white shirt, black slacks, and Dansko clogs to pass out trays of food. She returned home with achy knees and a sore tailbone, her body too tired for sleep. Only now, rather than scooping Agatha up and settling on the couch for a black-and-white Hitchcock movie or an episode ofThe Twilight Zone, she would plop Agatha on the couch alone and settle into her desk chair to write.
If her gift had its way, once an image seized her mind and the prickling sensation animated her skin, she would stay glued to her computer, not moving until the story was complete. That had worked when she wrote one story at a time, when each was a few pages, a wisp of a tale. Now she had to juggle multiple clients at once, their stories more nuanced and longer than they’d been before. She was finding that the more complicated the case, the more particular the client, the more extended the metaphor and hence the story had to be. Most of her tales now required more than sitting down for four hours and cranking something out. They were written over several sessions, a few pages a day. As a result, that tingling feeling never entirely went away. It energized her like an amphetamine. It also nagged her with guilt, a constant reminder that she needed to get back to the page.
Her vocation also required a wardrobe change. When they met to go over her financial records, Gabby took one look at Alice’s ill-fitting polka-dot button-up blouse and said, “Please tell me you didn’t wear that to meet a client.”
Alice tugged awkwardly at the blouse, which she’d purchased years before at a thrift shop. “I thought it screamed artist.”
“Starving artist maybe.” Gabby stood from the sidewalk table of the coffee shop. “Come on.”
Alice followed her across residential streets, past murals of swans and violet eyes that watched their every step, to a department store on State Street where Gabby made her try on low-cut dresses, stiff pants, and shirts that were sure to stain from deodorant.
“This is so not me,” Alice said, trying to figure out how to tie the belt of a wraparound dress. She emerged from the changing room with the belt lobbed into an awkward bow at her back. Gabby stood behind her, untying the strange origami Alice had assembled the dress into, and rearranged it perfectly. As Alice stood before the mirror, she twirled, marveling at the fact that she had curves where she’d always assumed she was straight, at the way her body looked made for the dress.
“That’s the point,” Gabby said.
They agreed on three dresses, two pairs of tuxedo pants, and blouses that were not entirely unlike her catering uniform, although Gabby made Alice promise never to wear her work clogs with clients or her silk blouses to pass out trays of food. From there, they ventured to Gabby’s salon, where the receptionist air-kissed both her cheeks and fit Alice into the schedule right away. Gabby and her hairdresser, a waifish man with spiky black dyed hair and eyeliner so thick it extended to his eye creases, leaned over Alice, talking about her as though she wasn’t there.
“It’s a little unruly,” the hairdresser said, lifting and dropping a curl of Alice’s hair. “But it has bounce. People would kill for this kind of body. Why doesn’t she take better care of it?”
Gabby shook out Alice’s mane. “Can you give it some shape?”
The hairdresser and Gabby agreed on fringed layers that would keep Alice’s curly hair free-spirited but styled. After it was cut, the hairdresser angled her to face the mirror. Even Alice had to admit it looked perfect.
From there, makeup followed.
“If it’s too high-maintenance,” Gabby told the cosmetician, “she won’t wear it.” Alice wanted to protest, but her best friend was right.
“Fortunately, she has good skin,” the cosmetician said.
They decided on a tinted moisturizer, some mascara, lip gloss, nude nail polish. Alice asked the cosmetician to apply cherry red lipstick, then balked when it came to purchasing the vibrant color. One step at a time, Gabby advised. When Alice returned home from their shopping spree, she discovered that Gabby had slipped a tube of the bright lipstick into her bag with a Post-it that read,For whenever you’re ready.
The transformation did not end with clothes and makeup. It involved exercise, business cards, bindings to replace the report covers Alice was using. “I’m sorry,” Gabby had scoffed when she spotted one of Alice’s stories in her bag, encased in clear plastic. “I didn’t realize you were writing a seventh-grade social studies paper. Presentation is everything. Can’t you find someone to make them look like real books?”
Was this a possibility in the digital age? Were there still craftspeople dedicated to the lost art of binding books? She promised Gabby she would investigate.
