Cathy Kelly 3-Book Collection 2: The House on Willow Street, The Honey Queen, Christmas Magic, plus bonus short story: The Perfect Holiday

‘Honey,’ she told Mick now, ‘New York is business. You know the cost of hotels there. I’m going to fly in and out the same day. Let’s have our vacation another time.’

He picked up her cell phone to call the takeaway.

‘OK,’ he said. ‘You want boiled or fried rice?’

Manhattan had once been Suki’s favourite place in the world. The glitter, the hum of excitement, the sense that anything was possible. She’d arrived the summer she was nineteen and she couldn’t wait to get her first waitressing job, didn’t care that she had to share a barely furnished house with eight other Irish college students in the Bronx. She was there – in the city that never slept. And she, Suki Power, was going to conquer it.

She’d been back to Manhattan many times during the years when Women and Their Wars was on the bestseller lists, and while she was with Jethro. Sometimes, they stayed in Jethro’s vast apartment on Park Avenue, but more often they flitted from hotel to hotel. Jethro was addicted to hotel living. He didn’t know how to boil a kettle and, if he thought about it at all, probably assumed the sheets were thrown in the garbage after being taken off his bed every day. He’d lived a normal life once, but that was a long time ago. He’d been a star so many years that he couldn’t or wouldn’t remember it.

Today, as the forever altered skyline came into view from the airplane window, she knew that another love affair was over. New York had moved on without her. Younger people with clear, unbroken hearts now stalked the glittering city. Strangely, this made her feel older than any line on her face did.

Her appointment with the publisher was at two and she was meeting her agent, Melissa, for lunch beforehand.

‘I’ll order something for us in my office, Suki. I’ve got a West Coast conference call at twelve. We won’t have time to go out,’ Melissa informed her when it was all being set up.

Suki knew what that meant: the Suki Richardson account made so little money, taking her out to lunch was no longer financially viable.

The old Suki would have raged about being treated badly.

The new Suki said ‘fine’.

She had a long way to go to become the goliath she’d once been, if she could ever get back there.

When the adrenalin was flowing, Suki felt a match for anybody: when she’d been on television all the time, when boys in Avalon had lusted after her, when she was Kyle Richardson’s wife, when she was with Jethro … But for herself, in herself, she didn’t know the last time she’d felt truly confident. That scared her like nothing else. If she could no longer fight, what would become of her?

The offices of Carr and Lowenstein had once occupied half of a suitably grand brownstone, but when they’d joined forces with a theatrical agency, they’d all moved into a glass tower. Suki spent the time in the elevator on the way to the forty-fifth floor fighting vertigo, a feeling which worsened when she stepped into the sheeny lobby, which was all reflective surfaces, to emphasize how high up they were. The reception had just-big-enough olive trees in planters in every corner and the silvery-green walls were massed with photos of the agency’s most famous and highest-earning clients.

In the Jethro days, he told her the record company people put photos of TradeWind on every wall of their office and played their latest album whenever they visited.

‘Flipped the switch to play another band as soon as we left, man!’ pointed out Stas, the band’s lead guitarist.

‘Sure did,’ agreed Jethro, unconcerned. ‘That’s business, nothing personal.’

Suki saw no photos of herself on the walls of Carr and Lowenstein. Not even an itty, bitty one. And it did feel personal.

The receptionist, a Cosmo-girl vision dressed in nude shades with Lincoln Park After Dark nails, didn’t bother to feign a polite smile as she took Suki’s name and told her to wait. The receptionist knew everything. Who was on the up, who was on the way down.

No picture on the wall and no smiles from Cosmo-girl. It all told a story.

Suki sat on a couch and felt the panic rise. Her career was over. She was broke. There was nowhere left to go and the most dangerous man in the dirty biography business wanted to write about her and the Richardson family. Suki didn’t want all the mistakes she’d made in her life turned into trash-biography horror. It would destroy any credibility she’d got left.

The terror which had been building since Eric Gold first told her that Redmond Suarez wanted to write the book exploded fully into Suki’s body.

‘Which way is the women’s room?’ she asked Cosmo-girl.

‘Straight down the hall and second left,’ said the girl with barely a flicker in Suki’s direction.

Tess would have introduced herself and made the girl smile, Suki thought. Tess was beautiful and yet she’d had that gift of being able to stop other women from hating her. Suki had never mastered it. Men loved her, women were wary of her.

Why was she thinking about Tess so much? It had to be all the worry over the book and how it all linked up. The past, Avalon, all the things she’d tried to forget, all the secrets.

In the women’s room, she locked herself in a stall, put down the toilet seat lid and sat. A Xanax for nerves, some Tylenol for the headache that was rumbling at the base of her skull and one of her prescription antacids to quell the bile that seemed to rise so easily these days. She washed it all down with her bottle of water. That all these ailments were stress-related didn’t pass her by, but Suki knew there was no easy fix when it came to stress. She was broke, so that stress wasn’t going away anytime soon. And the book …

The women’s room door slammed and Suki got up, flushed the loo loudly to imply she wasn’t in there taking cocaine – which she would have been, back in the day – and came out.

She slicked on some lip gloss and walked back up the hall as if she hadn’t a care in the world. Act as if, she thought.

Melissa Lowenstein was a tall, striking woman who favoured tailored pantsuits worn with a single large piece of costume jewellery. Today’s was a striking orange Perspex brooch on one lapel.

‘Suki, great to see you,’ she said, shaking hands.

Melissa didn’t go in for continental air kissing. ‘Gives some men the wrong idea,’ she’d told Suki once. ‘Kissing can make them think it’s fine to put a hand on your butt. Kissing blurs all the rules. So I keep it simple. No kissing anyone, no touching – and no messing if they overstep that line.’

Suki found this approach strange. She liked seeing the flicker of admiration in men’s eyes, liked using her sexuality as part of her personal arsenal of weapons. But it was different for Melissa, she realized: Suki was the talent, the performer, whereas Melissa had to do deals with men. Totally different.

At Melissa’s small boardroom-style table, lunch was set up for two: some deli cold cuts, bagels, salad and diet sodas.

They sat and helped themselves, even though Suki wasn’t in the slightest bit hungry. The Xanax was kicking in and now she wanted a strong coffee, preferably a macchiato with foam, and a cigarette, then she’d relax totally. But instead she made up a plate of salad and poured herself a diet drink.

‘How’s the book going?’ Melissa asked.

Suki had already worked out how she was going to answer this.

‘Slowly,’ she said. There was no point in lying to Melissa. She was about to explain all the issues which were clouding her head: money worries, the damn Suarez book, and point out that if she was earning more money, then she could concentrate …

‘What’s wrong?’ rasped Melissa, bonhomie gone, suddenly looking panicked. ‘You’ve given the publishers the outline, Suki. That’s what they’ve paid for. Reuben is a big fan of yours, he turned down Women and Their Wars all those years ago and he still regrets it. That’s money in the bank for you, but the publishers won’t keep waiting for ever. Past glories have got you this far, now you have to deliver – on schedule. My ass is on the line with this. Your due date is in three months and they’ve had nothing so far. What’s going on?’

Suki could feel the hand holding the glass of soda shake at Melissa’s lengthy outburst. The fear rose in her again.

‘It’s Redmond Suarez,’ she said. ‘He’s writing a book about the Richardsons. He’s interested in me. I’m so stressed about all of this, I just can’t write.’

The words, once blurted out, had the effect of making Melissa sit back and smile with relief.

‘Suki, relax, honey. This is good, better than good. This is a publicist’s dream. I get that you’re worried. Nobody wants a guy like that writing about them. Suarez is a sewer rat – but people are interested in sewer rats. No matter what he says, it will be good for your profile. A little of that high-class Wasp stuff can only do you good. Plus, Reuben is going to flip with joy. He’s always had a thing for the old Republican Mayflower types like the Richardsons and he’d like nothing better than to see them red-faced with embarrassment – if WASPS can go red, that is. Money can’t buy it!’ She beamed. ‘This is all good. Why didn’t you tell me before?’

Melissa began eating her bagel again and Suki somehow found the strength to put her glass down. ‘I need a coffee,’ she said. ‘I can’t eat.’

Melissa flipped a switch on the desk phone and asked for coffee. ‘Hurry, Jennie, we’ve got to be out of here at forty after one to get to Box House by two.’ Then she turned back to Suki. ‘So,’ she continued, ‘what have you heard about the Suarez book? Have you talked to the Richardson family about it yet? I presume they know? Bet they do.’

‘I haven’t talked to them,’ Suki said, ‘but they’ll know. They always know everything.’

That she knew for a fact.

By the time they got to Box House Publishing – another monolith of sheeny glass – Suki had drunk two coffees, plastered a nicotine patch on her arm in lieu of cigarettes, and taken another half Zanax. She was feeling no pain and the face she examined in her compact mirror was looking good. Tranquillizer-induced good, she knew, but that was fine. Who cared where the relief came from, right? She raked her blonde hair back from the widow’s peak in place of combing it, and applied more eyeliner and fire-truck red gloss.

‘Is Suarez interested in the Jethro years?’ Melissa asked as they went up in the elevator.

‘Not sure,’ said Suki, unconcerned in her happy bubble. ‘Not yet, anyhow. Jethro’s people would have the lawyers on to him like a shot. It’s always hard to nail down facts with bands like TradeWind. The tabloid rumours are so wild, nobody cares what another biography would say. Jethro never speaks, never denies, never apologizes.’