Missing Marlene Read Online Free

large. “Left you? Why?”
    “I don’t know yet. She must not have liked the job. Tonight I’m going to drive up to a place where she hung out, try to find someone who knew her.”
    “What place?”
    “The Roadside Tavern.”
    Ginny grimaced. “Nice crowd she hung out with. Wear your black leather and studs.”
    “Ginny,” Charlie growled. She jumped. Charlie, barely five feet tall, glared at them over the top of the high counter.
    “Back to work,” Ginny whispered, and poured more coffee into Jane’s mug.
    Alone again, Jane returned her attention to the proposal but soon realized she could no longer concentrate and put it back in her briefcase. She dreaded this meeting with Roger. He was so sensitive behind his facade of urbane cynicism. This news would crush him.
    How would Kenneth have handled this? That had always been a little joke between Jane and Kenneth— how would he handle it? But the fact was, Kenneth always did know how to handle a difficult situation, always sailed through with a minimum of ruffled feathers.
    He was her mentor in the truest old-fashioned sense of the word. At twenty-two, fresh from the University of Detroit with a B.A. in English and a head full of romantic notions about book publishing, she landed a job at Silver and Payne, one of New York City’s oldest and most prestigious literary agencies. She would be assistant to Kenneth Stuart, former editor’s editor, now one of the city’s hottest agents. During their five years together, Kenneth taught Jane more than she ever imagined about being a literary agent and about publishing in general.
    It was during their fifth year together that Kenneth (never “Ken,” he’d told her from the start) encouraged Jane to take on clients of her own. It was also at this time that Jane and Kenneth became lovers. He called her his tall auburn-haired beauty. She moved into his apartment.
    For Jane, living with Kenneth was a natural step. She’d been in love with him since the day she started working for him, because he was, quite simply, the most wonderful human being she had ever met: a truly generous man, innocent in his brilliance, totally devoid of pretension.
    Leaving Silver and Payne with Kenneth when he started his own literary agency was an equally natural step for Jane. They set up shop in an office Kenneth rented on West Forty-third Street. Every one of Kenneth’s clients left Silver and Payne to go with Kenneth. Jane’s own client list grew.
    A year later they married. One month before their first anniversary, Jane discovered she was pregnant. They were overjoyed. “Kids need grass and trees,” Kenneth pronounced, and they embarked on a series of weekend explorations of Connecticut, Westchester, and northern New Jersey, searching for The Perfect Town. That was how they found Shady Hills, six square miles of woods and rolling hills in northern New Jersey’s Morris County.
    Hidden among the village’s oaks and maples and pines sat snug Tudor, Colonial, and Victorian homes, many occupied by urban transplants like Kenneth and Jane. In the center of this pastoral haven lay the village green, its centerpiece an ornate white bandstand nestled among lilac bushes. The town still used the bandstand on the Fourth of July. Shading the green were massive oaks, among which ran brick footpaths that connected the bandstand to Center Street, which formed three sides of the green. Along Center Street stood gabled Tudor-style shops—the very picture of an English village.
    One of these shops, a former real-estate office tucked between a gift shop and an old-fashioned druggist, was for rent.
    From that point everything happened quickly. Jane and Kenneth bought the house on Lilac Way, rented the office, and within two months were living and working in Shady Hills.
    Jane worried that the agency’s image would suffer outside New York City, but Kenneth laughed and said a good agent was a good agent in New York City or in Shady Hills or on the moon.