Not sure what else to do, Ashley returned to her room to try to get a bit more work done on her manuscript. Starting tomorrow, she wouldn't have nearly as much time to devote to her own words, and she wanted to crank out a few more pages before hunting down Helene to see what the dinner situation might be.
Chapter Three
THE FLASH DRIVE WAS right where Anthony said it would be when Ashley tiptoed down the stairs early in the morning to retrieve it. The floorboards were creaky and she worried she might wake the whole house, but Helene seemed to be bustling about in the kitchen already, and she had to imagine that her boss would be sleeping soundly after working all night. Ashley herself hadn't slept as well as she would have liked. Her eagerness to start work had caused her to roll over in bed to check the time on her phone several times during the night, and she'd decided to finally get out of bed as the first bit of morning light brightened her room.
Back in her room, Ashley plugged the drive into her laptop and opened the first audio file. Anthony Lang's measured voice began playing back, his words clear and crisp, his tone direct and deliberate. She'd done some transcription work in college, and as simple as some people might assume it to be, it was incredibly difficult to translate speech into typed words. People generally spoke very quickly and used a lot of strange sentence structures and filler words that looked ridiculous when transcribed. She'd had to use a foot pedal to go back and re-listen to almost every sentence in order to be sure she was getting everything down exactly right.
This was a different experience entirely. Her boss spoke with the phrasing and clarity of a writer composing a carefully crafted narrative, and she found his pace just slow enough that she could easily keep up without having to double back. He used a specific set of short codes that he explained before each instance, and she could easily discern paragraph breaks from a pause before the next line. She hadn't intended to do much more than just practice to see how much of her day she'd need to dedicate to work, but the gap of dead silence after the end of the first recording left her shocked that she'd been typing for nearly two hours.
It was a little like listening to a book on tape, she realized. The typing was almost effortless, as it is for those who spend the bulk of their waking hours typing stories or essays for school; and she discovered that she rather enjoyed hearing the development of prose as it spilled from his lips. He rarely stopped to think about what he'd say next, and she was already learning new things about composition from the places where he'd told her to scratch the last sentence and replace it with an impromptu revision. Hearing the story unfold before her from the first chapter was a special gift. She knew this novel would see several rounds of edits that would ultimately change it quite a bit from the first draft she was now transcribing, and this meant she would likely be the only person to ever experience this version of his next book.
Ashley snapped the lid of her computer down and went in search of the kitchen. She desperately needed coffee if she were going to do work this intensely, and she'd already worked well past the time of day she normally had her first cup. Luckily for her, Helene was pouring hot black liquid into a nice large mug as she walked into the kitchen.
"I figured you to be a coffee drinker," said the woman, holding out the mug and nodding toward the sugar bowl on the counter. "Milk and cream are in the fridge, although I should warn you that we don't normally have cream in the house. Mr. Lang likes his coffee strong and black, so you'll be needing to buy your own cream if that's the sort of thing you require."
"Milk is fine," said Ashley, removing a glass bottle from the fridge. Everything about this house seemed from another era, she mused, pouring milk from a bottle that looked like it could have been delivered to the front door by a man in a white outfit with a matching cap.
"How was your meeting with Mr. Lang?" asked the housekeeper.
"Quick," she said. "He didn't say all that much, and then he was off to get started on his work. Something about exercise getting his brain fired up."
"Yep, that'll be Mr. Lang for you. The man's a sweetheart, he really is, but when it comes to his writing work, he's got the social graces of a buffalo."
"Does he always work through dinner like he did last night?" asked Ashley. She'd eaten hers alone in the kitchen while Helene did some late-season work in the garden.
"A lot of the time, yes. It's hard to tell with him. He'll go for months with me having to bring his supper to his office, and then suddenly he's here at the table for breakfast, lunch, and dinner every day for a week. If there's one thing I've learned to expect from our Mr. Lang, it's never to know what to expect."
"That makes absolutely no sense," said Ashley, giggling a little at the idea of working for such a character.
"Mr. Lang makes his own sort of sense, and the way I see it, it's not for me to understand what's going on in his head. I just cook and clean, and I do what I can to try to make him happy."
"Does he go out very often?" asked Ashley, unsure of whether or not she was crossing into overly familiar territory. There was something about the way Helene had said it, but she seemed to be hinting that Anthony Lang wasn't as content as a best-selling author should be.
The old housekeeper's shoulders sagged a little. She frowned and leaned back against the counter, crossing her arms in front of her. "Unfortunately, he rarely goes out anymore. He used to at first, but it's difficult for him out there. You notice how he moves about the place like he can see just fine? It's not like that outside, and I think he sees it as a type of weakness. Damn shame if you ask me."
"What about guests? Surely he must have friends over all the time. Other writers maybe?"
"Nope, hardly ever." Helene straightened up and resumed wiping down the counters. "That's why I'm glad to have you here. Mr. Lang was having all his transcribing done by some company over in who knows where, and it's been just the two of us in the house since I came. Having another person in the place sure will do a lot to brighten things up."
Ashley sipped her coffee and tried to reconcile the energetic and confident man she'd met the previous day with the man his housekeeper was describing. It was beginning to look like there was a lot more to her boss than she could have imagined. His storytelling style was so bold and confident that she'd assumed he'd be a positive and outgoing person, but now it was becoming evident that he was something of a recluse. She was here to do a specific job, and she didn't want to risk it by acting inappropriately, but Anthony Lang deserved better than to be hiding away in this house with nothing but writing to keep him happy. She was going to help him get over whatever had turned him into a man who felt he needed to hide from the world.
She didn't know how she was going to do it, but she couldn't sit idly by while he lived out his days in relative isolation, not after everything he'd done for his country and definitely not after everything his books and stories had done to influence her own decision to become a writer.
Chapter Four
SEVERAL DAYS PASSED, AND Ashley fell into a simple rhythm of transcribing the audio recordings before taking a break and working on her own project. Lang composed and dictated into his recorder for a fair number of hours each day, but his total output was typically reduced to a morning's careful transcription. Much of writing involved knowing where a story was going, and she was beginning to recognize just how much Anthony Lang made things up as he went along. She herself was more of an outliner. She wanted to know the full arc of her story before starting the writing, but each day she could tell that his recordings contained the words of a man discovering the story as he told it. It was amazing how clean the work was in these first drafts; it was almost as though he thought each sentence over in his head several times before speaking it out loud.
Some days Ashley ate dinner alone in her room; other times she shared a meal with Helene in the kitchen. After nearly a week of slipping comfortably into a working routine, she was confused when she came down one day to see if she could help the housekeeper with dinner and saw that two places had been set in the dining room.
"Mr. Lang asked that you dine with him tonight," said Helene, entering with a bottle of wine and two glasses. "Didn't I tell you this at lunch?"
"No, you didn't tell me," said Ashley. She could have easily been irritated by Helene's forgetfulness, but the woman was so kind and likable that it was difficult for her to hold this sort of thing against her.
"Must have slipped my mind," said the woman on her way back to the kitchen.
"Is that a bourguignon I smell, my dear Helene?" asked Anthony as he entered the dining room.
"You know it," came the reply from the other room. "Sit yourselves down and pour some wine already."
"I'll get it," said Ashley, reaching for the bottle.
"So how have you been finding the work?" asked Anthony.
"Quite enjoyable, actually," she replied. "You speak so clearly and it's very easy to transcribe. I have to admit to feeling I'm being let in on a secret as the first person to hear your new story as you write it."
"We're only at the beginning now," he said. "Just wait until we get past the halfway point. I always struggle with my characters around this time, and it's nearly impossible for me to not want to go back to the beginning and tear everything apart."
His hand slid along the table, his fingertips skimming the surface delicately until they found the base of the wine glass. Ashley was impressed with how agile he was around something like a delicate wine glass. What little she knew about people who weren't born blind led her to believe that it took years of dedicated practice to adjust to a life without sight.
"I've never been one to shy away from a challenge," she said. She sipped her own wine and watched him. He was smiling and seemed perfectly amiable, not at all like the dour hermit Helene had made him out to be.
"No, I don't doubt that for a second. My years of service have taught me how to take the measure of a person, and I knew you'd be the right one for the job. I've written my last five books by recording the narratives and having them sent off to be turned into text, but I've never been fully happy with how they turned out. There's just something missing in the process, and after reviewing the work you've done so far, I was thinking it might be more efficient to meet each day and discuss the previous night's work. Would you be amenable to such an arrangement?"
Was he really asking her to provide editorial feedback on the story in progress? This was huge, and it showed her that he had a tremendous amount of faith in her abilities as a writer. "Of course, that would be great," was all she managed to say.
"Excellent." He closed his eyes, seemingly out of habit, and sniffed the air. "Mmm, it seems as though dinner is about to be served."
As if on cue, Helene appeared with a bright orange, enameled cast iron pan held between two oven mitt clad hands. She placed it on the table and served each a generous portion of the rich beef stew. She disappeared, only to reappear seconds later with a basket of fresh baked bread and a dish of rich creamery butter.
"It's an old family recipe," said Anthony. "I've been trying to get her to hand it over since the first time she made it for me, but she refuses to give it up. All I know is that it takes her most of the day to prepare."
"Oh, it's not like you'd cook it anyway," said the housekeeper, wiping her hands on her apron.
"Don't think dear Helene is being insensitive to my lack of sight," said Anthony. "I was never one for cooking before the accident, so it stands to reason I'd be a lot less inclined now that I can't see whether I am picking up an onion or the wrong end of a chef's knife."
"It is quite delicious," said Ashley. She hadn't anticipated having his lack of sight come up in conversation, and she didn't entirely know how to react.
"I'll leave you two to talk," said Helene.
"How is your new project coming?" asked Anthony.
"Oh, it's going well enough, I suppose. How did you know I was working on a new story?" she asked.
"Lucky guess," he replied. "Like I said, I learned a few things about judging people and situations during my years with the CIA. I obviously knew you were an aspiring author when I hired you; and since moving down here and into my home is a major transition for you, it seems only fitting that you use this opportunity to start a new project."
"That's remarkable," she said. "I hope you won't think me too forward, but how much of what you write in your books is from your time working in the field?"
He turned to face her with a deadly serious expression. "That's classified information, I'm afraid. I could tell you, but then Helene would have to kill you."
Ashley laughed before she could stop herself, nearly spitting red wine all over the table. "Well, I won't pry any further then."
Anthony smiled and chuckled along with her. "Hold on to that sense of humor. You're going to need it if you spend much time around me."
They ate in silence for a few moments before he spoke again. "Nothing in my books is an exact depiction of any specific operation or event, but I'd be lying if I said everything in my books comes from my imagination. Any more than this and you'll need to get a few more drinks in me first. And none of this wine business. You'll need to ply me with whiskey to get at my inner secrets. Top shelf only, I'm afraid."
"That can be arranged," she said. "It would be a shame to spend all this time working with you without getting to know the man behind the legend."
"You're welcome to try, but I have to warn you, I've been trained to resist several different methods of interrogation."