Chapter 34
That night I planned to give him the happy news as we ate dinner at the Crazy Greek restaurant, ordering our usual pizza, Greek salads, and pitcher of beer.
I told him about my surprise, and it didn’t have the effect I wanted, to put it mildly.
He was livid that I would interfere with plans that he’d been setting up for months.
He had theater tickets and everything else, he said.
It was last-minute, and he didn’t want me to come.
We had a terrible fight as we left the restaurant.
He refused to get into the car, tossing the key on the pavement, storming off.
Our apartment was almost four miles away, and he was acting irrationally.
As he strode along West Broad Street in the dark, I slowed down the car, calling to him out the window, but he kept going.
I’d never seen him this angry and was unnerved.
I knew better than most the horrible things people do when enraged, desperate, and hurt.
I was frightened, having no idea what might happen next.
And I was angry too. I couldn’t believe he would treat me this way.
It almost seemed that he hated me, and I worried it was about the sexual assault again.
At the time I couldn’t recognize how frustrated and unhappy he was.
Most of what he felt had nothing to do with me.
The person he hated was himself. He’d left a tenured position at Davidson where he’d been beloved, admired, extremely popular.
Now here he was getting close to fifty and disgusted by his life.
After I returned to our apartment, I wrote a note.
“If I’m dead, question Charlie,” it read. “We had a bad fight.”
I tucked it in a back pocket of my jeans.
Marcella would see it if the worst happened.
I knew she’d insist on handling my case, and probably would do my autopsy.
She would make sure the truth came out. As morbid and bizarre as that might sound, it’s no different from being operated on by a gifted surgeon who’s a close friend.
Charlie’s long trek home was his attempt at cooling off. Except he didn’t. Our fighting continued and he yanked open a kitchen drawer, grabbing a knife. He didn’t point it at me but at himself.
“Maybe I should kill myself!” he raged.
I managed to calm him down, but our situation was hopeless.
There was “no room for diplomacy,” as he put it.
After he returned from London, he attended a religious retreat in Virginia, and Bill Carl, the minister of that big church in Dallas, called me.
He wanted to hire Charlie as an associate minister and understood that I didn’t want to move to Texas.
Obviously, Charlie had given him our phone number and relayed my resistance about leaving Richmond.
I felt ambushed and sucker punched, not to mention betrayed.
I explained I had a serious job managing the medical examiner’s statewide computer system.
I couldn’t just walk away from what I’d built, and it was obvious that Bill Carl wasn’t impressed.
I suggested a compromise. I couldn’t move right away but maybe could get there after a while.
“How long is a while?” he wanted to know.
“Maybe six months.”
“That’s way too long,” he said. “The congregation would think, well, that something’s wrong. They’d expect you there in at most a month.”
“With all due respect, Bill,” I replied, “you’re hiring him, not me. I’m not the prize that goes with the Cracker Jack.”
When Charlie got home from his religious retreat, he’d already heard the news, including my Cracker Jack comment.
He said the church elders he’d been with believed it would be best if he and I got a divorce.
Clearly, I wasn’t cut out to be a minister’s wife, and it would be wise to end things before he got his first real job at a church.
We were separating, and I knew it was best. But I was devastated that he seemed to give up so easily.
I resented that our future had been decided by a church committee.
We started meeting with Richmond lawyer Torrence Harmon and agreed that each of us keep what was ours before the marriage.
It was only fair. He’d lived with his furniture and rugs longer than he had with me.
I had no interest in our fancy wedding gifts like Royal Doulton china and Waterford crystal glasses we never used.
I didn’t want his artwork or books. I agreed to his taking our Siamese cat, Billy.
Charlie and I signed a separation agreement, and he changed our billing addresses so that I would take over the apartment rent and other expenses. Once again, I was alone and on my own.
To make matters worse, in November 1988, Michael Congdon started getting the first rejection letters for Postmortem.
By the end of the year, Doubleday, E. P.
Dutton, and William Morrow had passed with criticisms about the author and Scarpetta.
“I felt the writing was too monochromatic,” an editor commented.
Obviously, I wasn’t a fiction writer, and it was time to face it and move on.
I’d written four novels over the past four years, all of them failures.
I was working in a morgue and getting divorced.
Maybe I should return to journalism. What choice did I have?
I set up a job interview at the Miami Herald while spending the Christmas holiday with my father, Rita, and Jim and Mary.
I met with the newspaper’s editors, and it was awful taking tests to check my writing ability.
It felt insulting after all I’d been through.
While I was in Miami, Charlie moved everything out of our apartment.
He’d decided it would be easier for both of us if I weren’t around to see that happen, and he was right.
By now, his anger had burned off. The two of us were sad and felt like failures.
When I returned to Richmond after the New Year, the only remaining furniture was my word processor, the desk, office chair, and a lamp.
Charlie also left me the TV and our blue Honda sedan.
Neither of us had any money, and he moved into a parishioner’s guesthouse.
I slept on the floor, and Marcella let me borrow lawn furniture for the living room.
At least I had something to sit on while watching TV.
Living alone, I was unnerved and haunted by what I dealt with at work every day and while out with detectives.
I bought my first handgun, a Ruger .38 revolver, and took shooting lessons from a Henrico County police officer.
I installed a deadbolt lock on my bedroom door and made sure never to leave my windows unsecured.
Sometimes I carried my Ruger, depending on where I was going.
On January 19, Michael Congdon heard from the Mysterious Press.
I was stunned that editor Sara Ann Freed had turned down Postmortem.
It was obvious from her comments that she hadn’t read the new manuscript, probably assuming it was another version of The Queen’s Pawn.
This time I didn’t bother calling her to ask for advice.
The writing was on the wall, as my mother used to say.
Not three strikes, but four. And that wasn’t counting my impending divorce.
I blamed myself for not being a better wife.
I was a bad version of Kay Scarpetta and a worse Ruth Graham.
I blamed Charlie for listening to his clergy friends instead of me.
I had a nightmare that I was escorted past all of them in candlelight, headed to my execution.
Enraged and heartbroken, I vented on the tennis court, serving so hard I tore my rotator cuff, eventually requiring surgery.
I gathered up my wedding dress and the boxes of old tennis trophies stored in a closet of the apartment.
I tossed all of it into the parking lot dumpster, getting rid of a past that seemed disastrous.
Maybe for the first time I could empathize with Mom burning her children’s clothing and wanting to sail away.
The third week of January 1989, I took Amtrak to Washington, D.C., interviewing at USA Today, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal. None of them were interested in hiring me. I’d been working at the OCME longer than I’d been a journalist in Charlotte.
“We don’t have a morgue beat,” an editor at the Post told me.
I rode Amtrak back to Richmond on January 24, discouraged to the point of despair. I supposed all I could count on was my job at the OCME for the rest of my years. I drove back to my apartment, and could hear the answering machine beeping as I walked in. There was a message from Michael Congdon.
“Scribner might take your book,” he said in the recording.
I called and he explained that one more person needed to read the manuscript, “to make sure” the publisher wanted it.
Hopefully we’d know tomorrow. By now I was numb and didn’t believe my luck would change.
But tomorrow would come and I’d get the confirmation.
Scribner editor Susanne Kirk thought the book had special qualities, and that Kay Scarpetta was dynamic.
Four days later I was headed to Manhattan, taking the train to meet Michael Congdon and Susanne Kirk. Scribner bought the U.S. rights to Postmortem for $6,000. The first $1,200 of my advance went to posters I had made at a local print shop. That winter I recruited help from my buddy Betsy Mikell.
We’d known each other since shortly after I’d moved to Richmond.
My age and a former tennis pro, she played doubles with me at the Westwood Club and hung out regularly.
Our friends Sue and Steve Lewis drove us around Richmond taping the posters inside stores and restaurants.
That was the extent of Postmortem’s advertising.