The writers and producers were doing that, of course, but Warren had his own assistant producer, and Jack had noticed that Warren got the lion's share of the good questions.
Jack picked up a pen and began making a list. His assistant would have to be bright, ambitious, dedicated, intelligent. Someone like . . . Sally.
Why hadn't he thought of it before? She had the experience. They had worked well together in Portland, and she was a tiger behind the scenes. She tracked down every nuance of a story. She'd be a real addition to the show. As it was, all the producers and writers were male. A young woman who loved sports would shake up the perspective a bit. And she'd make sure Jack looked good.
She'd do it, too. He had no doubt about that. Sally was a woman with big dreams and tall ambitions. A chance to be a production assistant for a network show in the Big Apple would really charge her batteries.
This was business, pure and simple. That he'd been attracted to her didn't matter. He'd always be tempted by some young woman; that was hardwired in his DNA, as much a part of him as blue eyes and blond hair. He'd been tempted plenty of times in the past fifteen years--and even more recently--but he hadn't fallen out of the old marriage bed even once. Those days were behind him.
This was strictly business.
Unable to sleep, Elizabeth put on one of the thick terry-cloth robes that Anita had placed in the guest room closet and went quietly downstairs. The old house creaked and moaned at her progress. The wind against the windowpanes sounded like a cat scratching to be let in.
She didn't doubt that the house knew its master had gone on, but this place had weathered the storms of death for a long, long time. The first Rhodes had come to this land long before the Civil War, one of the working-class poor of England who dared to dream of a better life. He'd crossed the sea as an indentured servant and been sold at auction to a farmer in nearby Russellville. He'd worked hard, married well, and planted the seeds of a dynasty.
In the darkened kitchen, she made herself a cup of tea and stood at the sink, staring out at the backyard. Moonlight tipped the dead black branches with pearlescent color. Thin clouds scudded across the breezy sky; they created a shifting pattern of light on the garden.
She tightened the belt on her robe and went outside. The screen door banged shut behind her. The wind suddenly died down. An almost preternatural silence fell.
She shivered, though not only from the cold. It felt as if she'd been summoned out here, perhaps by the memory of their night out here at Christmas.
"Daddy?" she whispered, feeling both silly and hopeful.
There was no answer, no Hollywood moaning or ghostly apparition. No tall man dressed in a flannel shirt and twill pants standing beside her.
She stepped down onto the brick path that bisected and outlined the garden. The thin slippers she wore protected her feet from the cold as she walked past the perfectly shaped boxwood hedges. Here and there, shaped camellia bushes stood above the squared hedge, their glossy green leaves a stark contrast to all the brownness.
This had once been her special place, and now she was a stranger to it. So many times in her youth, especially on long summer nights when the heat made sleep impossible, she'd come out here. Alone and searching. In the winter, she'd scoured the leaf-blackened beds for signs of spring. A patch of lime green moss, a seed pod that had sprouted.
What she'd really been looking for, of course, was her mother, and here, amid the flowers she'd tended so carefully, Elizabeth had thought she felt her mama's spirit.
She'd always tried to picture her mama in the garden, maybe thinning the daffodils or trimming the roses, but all she'd ever seen of her mother were black-and-white photographs, and even those had been scarce. Most of the pictures had been portrait shots--wedding, graduations, that sort of thing. They left Elizabeth with a vague, colorless image of a pretty young woman who always looked perfect but never laughed or spoke.
Elizabeth knelt at the edge of the rose bed. Damp black earth ground itself into the plush fabric beneath her knees.
The bare, grayish brown rosebushes cast shadows on the darkened earth. Moonlight gave them an eerie look, like twisted hands from an ancient reptile, each finger thickened by age and studded with huge thorns.
Behind her, she heard the sound of a door creaking open and clicking closed, then the rhythm of footsteps on the brick path.
"Hey, Anita," she said without turning around.
"It's amazin' to think that those roses'll be bloomin' in just a few months."
"I was just thinking the same thing."
When she was little, Elizabeth had often cried when her mama's favorite flowers wilted and died. Now, though, as a woman full grown, she understood the importance of rest. It was the very bleakness of winter that made spring possible. She wished such a thing could be true for housewives who'd lost their way, that instead of wasting a life, you could be hibernating, gathering strength for the coming spring.
A breeze kicked up, sent a few dry, brittle leaves skittering across the path. "I tended those roses by hand all these years. I never let a gardener near 'em."
Elizabeth sat back on her heels and looked up at Anita. "Why?"
Anita smiled sadly. Her platinum hair was a mass of curlers; thick night moisturizer glistened on her cheeks and forehead. A heavy blue-plaid-flannel nightdress covered her from throat to foot. She looked ten years older than her actual sixty-two. "I smelled her perfume once."
Elizabeth felt a shiver. She remembered the pretty little bottle that had sat on her mama's vanity table. "Mama's?" she whispered.
"It was one of those days--when you were in a mood, as your daddy used to say--you disagreed with everything I said. So I stopped talkin' at all. I came out here, ready to attack your mama's garden. I wanted to fight somethin' I could see. But when I sat out here, all alone, feelin' sorry for myself, I smelled your mama's perfume. Shalimar. It wasn't like she spoke to me or anything weird like that. I just . . . realized I was fightin' with her baby girl, who was broken up inside. After that, whenever you made me crazy, I came out here to the garden."
Elizabeth heard the pain in Anita's voice, and for once, she understood. "No wonder you were out here so often."