Chapter 1

“ACCIDENTAL INCEST. THAT’S what ruined me.”

“It’s a mistake anyone could have made,” I said.

I was trying to be sympathetic, but Helen Marshall was a hard woman to like. She was well known as a back-stabbing idea-thief. Small (about four inches shorter than my five feet six) with slightly protuberant eyes, she had fingernails like red claws, black hair cut in severe slashes, and made quick, darting movements as she spoke. Altogether, she reminded me of one of the lethal creatures in that old Hitchcock movie, The Birds.

We had met five months before, at the Daytime Emmy Awards.

The meeting had not been pleasant.

Overdressed in a gem-encrusted red Dior ball gown that must have cost as much as a midsize car, she had been seated at the Trauma Center table. I’d been nearby with my Love of My Life contingent. Wrinkling a nose that had undergone plastic surgery one too many times, Helen Marshall had pointed at me—specifically at my beige silk wrap dress—and in a voice loud enough for the three nearest tables of daytime television stars and executives to hear, said, “I saw that dress for sale on QVC. Don’t you think she should wear something more . . . soignée to the Emmys?”

A zinger of a reply had been on the tip of my tongue. But I lost the chance to use it because my left-side dinner partner, Tommy Zenos, executive producer of Love of My Life, squeezed my hand to silence me. “Ignore her,” he had said. “She’s drunk, and I heard she’s about to be fired.” Tommy, at thirty-five, was at least fifty pounds too heavy for good health and much too young to have lost most of his hair.

My dinner partner on the right side was Jeremy Radford, the fifteen-year-old son of Tommy’s and my boss, Damon Radford, the network’s Vice President in Charge of Daytime Programming. In contrast to Tommy’s balding head, Jeremy had enough bright red hair for two people. He was tall for his age, but competitive gymnastics had given him lean muscles and the physical grace to spare him from going through a gawky stage. Jeremy leaned over to me and whispered, “I think you look beautiful.”

“Thank you, Jeremy,” I said.

Then he gallantly buttered a dinner roll for me.

Two hours later, the show had finally progressed to the last four awards. I was dying to go home. My back ached from sitting up straight, and my new three-inch Jimmy Choo heels were so uncomfortable I had slipped them off fourteen “thank you” speeches ago. A new pair of actors—restless young lovers from The Young and the Restless—came to the podium to announce the nominees for “Best Writing.” Finally. This was my signal to get ready to leave; as soon as this award was handed to the winner, there would be a brief commercial break and I would be able to slip away. While Tommy was sweating, clasping and unclasping his hands as they recited the names of the five nominated shows and their head writers, I was squirming around in my seat. Jeremy realized I had a problem. “What’s the matter?”

“I can’t find my shoes,” I whispered.

Jeremy immediately ducked down beneath the table, as though this was the important mission for which he had been waiting. He found my shoes and handed them to me just as I heard words for which I was completely unprepared:

“ . . . and the Emmy for Best Writing of a Daytime Drama goes to Love of My Life head writer Morgan Tyler.”

“Morgan, that’s you!” Tommy jumped up and pulled me with him. He pushed me toward the stage. “Go, go, GO!”

Barefoot, with my shoes in my hand, I ran. A team of associate writers were stampeding behind me toward their few seconds of on-camera glory. As we reached the stage, I let out a whoop of delight, impulsively tossing my three-hundred-dollar toe-squeezers high into the air. The audience laughed at the flying shoes and applauded the crazed writer who had just struck a blow for foot liberation. The presenting actors thrust a gleaming Emmy into my hands, then stepped back so I could face the podium microphone.

“Wow—I didn’t write a speech,” I said. “That’s the truth. I’ve only had this job for two and a half years, so I never expected . . . actually, I voted for the Days of Our Lives writers.”

Audience laughter gave me a moment to take a breath. I decided it was time to act like a grown-up.

“On behalf of our executive producer, Tommy Zenos, and our wonderful cast and team of writers, thank you,” I said. “Miraculously, my name is going to be etched onto this award—if the engraver can pry it out of my hands—but two other names belong there as well. One is Harrison Landers, the brilliant man who preceded me as head writer. Harrison laid the foundation for so much that we’re proud of in our show. The other person who should share this honor is Larry Romano, the actor for whom our ‘Who Killed Jason Archer?’ story was created. Thanks to Larry, ‘Who Killed Jason Archer?’ became a nationwide guessing game and put our show on the cover of Time.”

I was watching the floor manager’s signals and knew I had scant seconds left before I’d get the musical hook and be ushered offstage.

“Love of My Life began on television thirty years ago. It was born the same year I was,” I said. “Larry was part of the original cast. He has been the most enduring—and endearing—villain in daytime drama, the tenderhearted bad guy women loved and men wanted to be. When Larry decided to retire, we wanted to give him a spectacular ‘farewell party’ of a story line. I hope we did.”

The audience applauded warmly for popular Larry Romano. I hoped Harrison, in his seclusion, was watching on television, and knew that the award I was holding was for him, too.

A few minutes later I was standing in the semi-darkness of backstage, clutching my Emmy and waiting for the still photos to be taken. Onstage, another matched pair of gorgeous actors was reading the list of nominees for “Best Actress in a Daytime Drama.” Because no one from our show was nominated in that category, I was silently rooting for the actress who plays “Vickie,” the multiple-personality heroine of One Life to Live. Suddenly, a man grabbed me around the waist from behind. He yanked me tight against him with one arm as his other hand clasped one of my breasts.

“Oh, those luscious breasts,” he whispered.

I couldn’t see his face, but I recognized the voice, and the gall. It was the network’s good-looking, golden-haired golden boy, Damon Radford, Vice President in Charge of Daytime Programming. Sweet young Jeremy’s father.

“Let go of me, Damon.”

“Don’t worry, no one can see us back here.”

There was no liquor on his breath, but I didn’t expect there to be. He seldom drank alcohol because he liked to stay in control of any situation.

“Damon, I swear to God if you don’t take your hands off me, I’ll smash you in the face with this Emmy.”

He believed me. He let go.

Neither of us ever mentioned the incident.

And now here it was, a late afternoon in October and Helen was staring at that same Emmy. The statue was on an eye-level shelf, nestled among my favorite books. “That award should have been mine,” she was saying. “I would have won, but everybody made such a stink about that incest thing . . .” Helen had been the head writer on Trauma Center for nine years, but was fired for “that incest thing” as Tommy had predicted.

We were sitting in my cluttered little office with its bantam windows and peaked attic roof. Experienced at nesting in small spaces, I had managed to cram a desk, two chairs, a library table and three filing cabinets into the room. The obligatory television set was on top of one of the cabinets. Every surface was covered with bound scripts, loose script pages fastened together with color-coded clips, stacks of videocassettes and DVDs, copies of book-length long-term story documents and piles of reference materials. It was—and is—organized chaos; I know where everything is.

In spite of its modest size, my office has a great advantage—it’s located in what was once a servant’s room on the sixth floor of the Dakota, the same colorful old nineteenth-century apartment building at Seventy-Second Street and Central Park West where I live three floors below. I have a very short commute.

Helen turned her attention away from my Emmy and glanced out through one of the small windows overlooking the inner courtyard. The sun was going down and its last rays were casting El Greco–like elongated shadows against the courtyard walls. In an eerie way, the effect was beautiful, I thought.

“This building gives me the creeps,” she said.

“A lot of Rosemary’s Baby was shot at the Dakota,” I replied, “but I don’t believe the rumor it was a documentary.”

Helen wasn’t listening. She was studying the one photograph on my wall. It was a picture of a smiling man with a strong jaw and close-cropped dark hair who was in the driver’s seat of a Land Rover. A young chimp was sitting on his lap, gazing intently out the windshield. Little chimp fingers clasped the steering wheel in a child’s imitation of driving. She tapped one crimson fingernail on the glass that protected the photo and I flinched. “Please don’t smudge the glass, Helen.”

She indicated the man and asked, “Was that your husband?”

“Yes,” I said. I was about to yank her hand away when she removed it.

“He was a hunk,” she said.

Oh yes, he was. That and so much more.

Helen went back to scanning the room, and I took the opportunity to look at that precious photograph. It was one of the hundreds I had taken of him. I wondered what Ian would think if he could see me now . . .

“There’s no place for my desk in here.” Helen’s voice drew me back from Africa, back from the past. “You’ll have to rent another room for me,” she said, frowning as she mentally calculated dimensions.

“No, Helen.”

She ignored me.

I had agreed to “discuss” a possible scriptwriting job on Love of My Life only after enduring her weeks of intense lobbying. I finally gave in when she told me was “fiftyish and desperate.” I’ve been desperate, and in twenty-some years I’ll be fiftyish, too. So here she was, but I was finding it difficult to have a discussion with her because she refused to listen; Helen was behaving as though conversation was a synonym for monologue.

“Trauma Center’s been on the air for forty-two years,” she said, returning to her main theme. “Two hundred and sixty episodes a year times forty-two years adds up to—well, a lot of plots. So I created a romance between two characters who were brother and sister. I didn’t know! It was a secret, revealed twenty years ago, not even the actors remembered.”

“It was bad luck the audience did.”

“Those people need to get a life. I made one little mistake, and the bastard wouldn’t give me another chance.”

The “bastard” was my boss, Damon Radford. He used to be our boss, until he replaced Helen with Serena McCall, an actress who had previously played a beautiful but tormented neurosurgeon on Trauma Center.

“That son-of-a-bitch thinks with his prick,” Helen said. “Serena can’t write. She can’t even spell.”

“Other actors have crossed over to become writers for their shows,” I reminded her. “Some of them came up with interesting stories because they understand the characters. Serena was on Trauma Center for seven years; she might turn out to be a good choi—”

“No, it has to be sex. She’s figured out some disgusting new way to do it. Damon doesn’t care if she ruins the show, not as long as he gets what he wants.”

Helen nodded at the genealogy chart tacked up on the wall behind me. It stretched four feet long and traced the family trees of the two tent-pole families on Love of My Life. It diagramed the relationships among family members and their assorted lovers, friends and enemies in the fictional town of Greendale, USA. “You’re in trouble, too,” she said, stabbing with a long red claw at two of the names on the chart. “Your ‘Nicky’ and ‘Kira’ romance hasn’t caught on with the fans. It’s so disappointing when that happens.”

She turned to face me, smiling like a salesman about to close a deal. “I’ll be a big help to you . . . Actually, we should be co–head writers. I’ll make you look good, and nobody needs to know about it—you keep all the glory. Our little secret.”

With every word out of her mouth, Helen Marshall was illustrating the old saying, “No good deed will go unpunished.”

“No, Helen. We won’t be co–head writers. We can’t work together at all.”

“Why not?”

“We don’t like the same kind of stories.”

That was the truth, but not the whole truth. The larger truth was she was a mean-spirited woman who never had a positive word to say about anyone, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with her. Plus, whenever she came close to me, I smelled liquor on her breath.

“Tell you what—as a favor, just to help you out—I’ll write scripts for the show. I can be your safety net, Morgy.”

Morgy. Yuck. “My name is Morgan. There is no diminutive for it.”

“How odd. What did your husband call you?”

That’s none of your business. “We’re fully staffed at the moment.” I did not add the polite fiction I would call if the situation changed.

She smiled at me then.

It was the smile of a pervert offering candy to a child.

She leaned in close, and reflexively I drew back, repelled by her alcoholic breath. Helen didn’t seem to notice I’d moved away from her. “What if I agree to split the fee with you?” she said.

“Absolutely not.”

Her reaction was utter shock. I realized she’d never considered the possibility that I would turn her down.

“Helen, we don’t have anything more to discuss,” I said. “Now, please excuse me, I have to get back to work.”

She left without saying good-bye. I knew I had made an enemy.