Chapter 1 #2
Her agent, Robert Farr, shielded her from all direct contact.
Several times over the years, he had tried to encourage Felicia to step into the limelight, but she saw no reason to.
She was comfortable as she was. When the children grew up and moved out after college, she took a smaller apartment in a slightly better neighborhood in the East Eighties, looking out at the East River, and said she was happy there.
Robert also knew that she had bought a large property in Connecticut in the name of a corporation her attorney set up for her, and she spent time there anonymously.
As Morgan Reed’s “editor,” she was frequently asked to give interviews about her, which she always turned down.
Morgan Reed’s name was prominent on Robert Farr’s client roster.
Felicia’s appeared nowhere except on private documents that only Robert handled himself, and kept locked in his safe.
At the time of Felicia’s death, her secret had never been revealed.
It had been her intention to continue working into her old age, and to divide her very considerable fortune and all of her possessions between her children.
The house in Connecticut was a beautiful two-hundred-year-old farmhouse, which she maintained impeccably.
It had forest land around it, rolling hills, and a small lake.
It was a peaceful place, and eventually she wrote her books there and rarely came into the city.
When she did, she saw her children at the modest apartment, where they believed she lived, and she kept it for that reason, and eventually only went there when she saw them or spent the night in town to go to the theater, and didn’t want to drive back to Connecticut.
The rest of the time she was writing and lived in seclusion in Connecticut.
She led a very quiet, solitary life, and worked all the time.
Her attorney, Scott Freeman, tried to get her to at least tell her children about her remarkable career and share it with them, but she didn’t want the money to corrupt them, or to diminish their motivation to make something of themselves.
When she came up with money to help them, if they were in distress, as she had to for her middle daughter, Olivia, she assured them that Morgan Reed paid her handsomely for her editing, and she had enough put aside to be able to help them.
None of them even remotely suspected the fortune she had amassed in twenty-seven years, with careful investments to enhance the proceeds from her advances and royalties.
And she didn’t want her attorney to tell them until a month after she died, whenever that happened, so the initial dust would have settled by then, and they would have recovered somewhat from her passing, at whatever age it happened.
Bill’s untimely death had taught Felicia that it could happen unexpectedly at any time, and her own parents had died young, her father of a stroke and her mother of pancreatic cancer, which had been shocking and fast. Felicia kept her affairs in order, and was wise and responsible with her money for her entire life.
Felicia had been a modest woman, who had no desire for fame or public attention.
The success of the books spoke for itself, and was enough satisfaction for her.
More than anything, she didn’t want her daughters drastically changing their lives because she had made money, or living on borrowed grandeur, based on someone else’s accomplishments.
She wanted them to achieve their own success, whatever they considered that to be.
She didn’t want to rob them of the satisfaction of their own victories.
But they were going to have to face their lives now without her, and both Robert and Scott knew that the whole story of the second half of her life was going to shock them profoundly, and that her daughters might even resent her for her silence and the secrets she kept.
But they had lacked for nothing and she had been an attentive mother, without the frills of luxury.
They had comfort and stability and love.
She respected hard work more than anything.
Felicia was an only child, and had always been shy.
She’d been busy with her family and writing while her children were growing up, with full responsibility for them, and she had become truly reclusive once they left home and she moved into the smaller apartment.
As far as her agent and attorney knew, she occupied her enormous Connecticut estate alone, without a partner, but when the two men had lunch together one day to go over her investments and contracts, they both realized that they knew nothing about her personal life.
She could have had a man in her life, but she never said so, and there was no sign of it when they visited her.
They were the only guests in Connecticut.
She employed only live-out day help there, and spent her nights alone, and they both knew that she worked primarily at night.
She had successfully hidden both her private and her professional life from all who knew her, even her children.
She had no desire for fame in any form, and didn’t want people chasing or befriending her because she was famous.
Scott often realized how lonely she must be, but she seemed like a lively engaged person, wasn’t maudlin or strange, was still close to her children, and had written well over a hundred books in her lifetime.
It was a remarkable achievement, which she had shared with no one except her agent and attorney, as far as they knew.
And certainly not with her children, with intentional determination. She guarded all her secrets closely.
“It’s going to be a hell of a shock to them,” Robert Farr commented to Scott Freeman, when Scott called him before he sent the letter to her children about coming into his office, just to confirm the timing.
“I know.” Scott was serious. “I’ll do whatever I can to help them.”
“If they let you,” Robert added, knowing her children, which Scott didn’t.
He had never met them. Robert had been a slightly remote, serious grandfather figure to them for their entire lives, and occasionally offered them advice, as he did to Felicia, when asked.
After estate taxes, her daughters were going to inherit eighteen million dollars each and the property in Connecticut jointly, which was valued at about fifty million.
Both men wondered how it would change all of their lives.
They were sensible, intelligent, discreet young women, and they were about to inherit a great deal of money.
Robert knew them and had known Bill when he worked for him.
And he had been Felicia’s agent for all twenty-seven years of her literary career.
Robert was eighty-two, but still active and in good health.
Scott had only represented Felicia for ten years, and was forty-eight.
He didn’t know her as well but admired her immensely.
She was honorable, intelligent, direct, and kind.
She had been an unusual woman, and they both liked her, and were going to miss her as a client and a friend.
She said she had had a lonely childhood with cold, critical parents, which had made her drive herself harder to win their approval.
She had grown up in New York, had a relatively normal childhood as an only child of dull, socially responsible, stern, intellectual parents with high standards for academics.
And she had been happily married to Bill.
She was close to her daughters, but she admitted that she saw little of them now, since they were busy and had their own lives, and she was determined not to be a burden on them, or interfere in their lives.
Robert could see in her writing that she had been a lonely woman, and had filled the void in her life with her work.
He marveled at how she came up with one fascinating plot after another, which were never repetitive.
She had honed her skills sharply over the years, edited her books herself, and held herself to a high standard of excellence.
She wrote constantly. Robert had moved her to another publisher eight years earlier, who paid her higher advances.
It had been a good career move for her. The new publisher gave her books more publicity, were masters of social media, and played up the mystery of her identity, which only made her an object of greater fascination to her readers.
She always spoke respectfully of the fictional Morgan Reed she worked for, and made her seem real when she spoke of her as her “boss” to her children.
It seemed tragic to both Scott and Robert that a woman who was creative, vital, and talented, and still so productive, should be killed by a random sniper.
The man who had killed her was twenty-two years old, had grown up in foster homes, had managed to escape psychiatric treatment, and had a long history of mental problems that had gone untreated.
He had no motive for his rampage. Her name was mentioned in the news stories about the shooting only as Felicia Weston, an unknown book editor, and her story faded quickly from the news.
Robert had enough of her recent unpublished books for another contract when her current one ended, but after that Morgan Reed would fade away onto the shelves of publishing history as a phenomenon and only he as her agent, her lawyer, Scott Freeman, and her children would ever know the truth of who Felicia Weston had been and what she had done.