The Nomination (14 page)

“I can do that,” said Mac. “It's really up to Simone. We'll see what she's got in mind for her book.”

Austin sat forward and tapped Mac's knee. “It's not
her
book, Mac. It's
our
book. No. Think of it this way. Think of it as Beckman's book.”

“Don't treat me like a novice, Ted,” said Mac quietly.

“I'm sorry. It's just . . . well, you know Beckman. He wants the dirt, the glitz, the gossip, and I'm pretty sure that's not exactly what Simone has in mind. But, hell, she spent twelve years in Hollywood. She's got to have stories. And how'd she get there from Paris, for God's sake? That's a story right there. And why'd she quit? People want to know that stuff.” Austin shook his head. “I'm sorry, Mac. You're a pro. You know what sells books as well as I do.”

“I do,” said Mac. “I'll get it.”

“Not just what she wants to tell you. She's got to give you some juice, too. The mystery of Simone. Where she came from, how she got to where she is, who she fucked along the way. And who fucked her, literally as well as figuratively. Her tragic childhood, her abusive parents, whatever.”

“The juice,” said Mac.

“Yeah. Absolutely. Get the juice.”

Mac smiled. “Trust me.”

“Oh, I trust you,” said Austin. “It's just that . . .”

“I understand,” said Mac. “People are wondering. They wonder if I've lost it. You're probably wondering yourself. Hard to blame you.”

“I wasn't thinking that,” said Austin.

“Well,” said Mac, “don't worry. I haven't lost it. Go get that giant contract done.”

Austin smiled. “Good. I've got faith in you. Give Simone some of that old charm. Get her to tell you stories. That's all we need here. A few good juicy stories.”

Mac nodded. “I'll do my best.”

“Your best,” said Austin, “has always been awfully damned good.”

Mac noticed Austin's choice of verb tense. “Has always been” was not quite the same as “is.” A writer, he knew, was only as good as his next book.

EDDIE MORAN NOTICED a bulge in the pocket of the jacket when he started to put it on. He remembered the last time he'd worn it. It was the night he'd found Bunny in her motel room in Georgia.

He emptied the pocket on his desk. There were balled-up bills, ones and fives. There were a couple of debit cards, an ATM card, and a bunch of ATM receipts. Jake in New York had traced Bunny from Key Largo in the Florida Keys to Davis, Georgia by her ATM visits.

One scrap of paper was a green post-office certified-mail receipt. The name Simone Bonet and the address, a post-office box in Beaverkill, New York, were hand-printed on it in ink. They meant nothing to Eddie Moran.

He smoothed out the bills and tucked them in his wallet. He cut the debit and the ATM cards in half and dropped the pieces into his waste basket. He ripped up the receipts and tossed them, too, and he started to throw away the green post-office receipt when he found himself pronouncing the name written on it. Simone Bonet. Simone.

He remembered Bunny, her eyes wide, her face red, gasping the word, “Seymour.”

Out loud, Eddie Moran said, “Seymour.
Simone
.”

I
t took Mac Cassidy a little over four hours to drive from his house on the north side of Concord, Massachusetts, to Simone Bonet's rambling old farmhouse in the rolling Catskill foothills of Beaverkill, New York. You couldn't see her house from the winding country road, and he drove past the unmarked driveway the first time before he figured he'd gone too far and rechecked the directions she'd given him on the telephone.

She'd had a shy telephone voice, softer than he'd expected, with the hint of an accent he couldn't quite place and the formal diction of someone whose native language wasn't English, and he had to listen hard to hear what she was saying—which, he thought, might have been her intent.

He'd rented the only two of her films he'd been able to find. Her voice had been stronger in the films, but the accent and the diction were the same. Cassidy guessed that her disease had weakened her and affected her voice. Even so, hearing her on the telephone had quickened Cassidy's pulse. It was the sexiest voice he'd heard in a long time.

For the past year—since Jane—he had resisted even thinking about women. The idea of sexual intimacy caused bile to rise in his throat. It literally made him sick. He understood this was some kind of guilt mechanism, but that didn't help him deal with it.

He'd felt it when Simone spoke to him on the telephone, the sudden clenching sensation in his stomach, the need to swallow repeatedly, and he'd felt it all over again watching her on film.

Objectively, Simone had been, well, an adequate actress. In both films she'd played the third corner of love triangles, the mysterious temptress with shady connections. Standard roles without much nuance. The films were trite, and she didn't actually do much or say much in them.

But you couldn't take your eyes off her.

The dirt driveway to Simone's house wound downhill through a mixture of second-growth birches, oaks, and pines. A tumbledown stone wall paralleled one side, and here and there the woods opened into overgrown meadows and rocky old pastures. Cassidy surmised that this had once been farmland.

After nearly a quarter of a mile the terrain opened up and flattened out, and her house appeared, perched on a plateau. Beyond it, the land resumed sloping down to a distant valley, and on the other side of the valley there were more hills, all painted in the pink and yellow and lime-green pastels of spring. It was a gorgeous setting. Except for a white church spire rising above the treetops in the valley, there wasn't another sign of human habitation in sight. It was pretty much what he'd expected. Simone's reclusiveness had become the last element in her legend.

He parked beside a big old Jeep Wagoneer in the gravel turnaround in front, grabbed his briefcase from the backseat, and went to the door.

There was no bell or knocker. He hesitated, then rapped with his knuckles.

A young woman opened it almost immediately. He guessed she had been watching him from the window.

“You must be Mr. Cassidy,” she said. She held out her hand. “I'm Jill Rossiter. Simone's nurse.”

He took her hand. “I'm Mac,” he said. “Please don't call me Mister. It makes me feel old.”

Jill smiled. She was tall and lanky, blonde and quite beautiful. She wore a white T-shirt with a picture of a sunflower on it, snugfitting blue jeans, and sneakers. “Mac it is, then,” she said. “Come on in. Simone's out on the deck enjoying the sunshine. She's been looking forward to meeting you.”

He followed her through an open living area. The inside of the house had the bones of an old New England farmhouse, but it had been completely remodeled. There were big exposed beams and wide-plank floors and lots of glass. The furnishings were leather and stainless steel and maple, with earth-tone area rugs, and the walls were hung with an eclectic collection of primitive oils and pastoral watercolors and black-and-white photographs.

The back of the house was a big sunporch, with slate floors, glass walls, and skylights. Jill led him across the porch, out through double glass doors, down a short ramp, and onto a wooden deck. Simone was sitting in a wheelchair facing the valley and the distant hills. Jill touched her shoulder and said, “Simone, Mr. Cassidy is here.”

Simone twitched, and Mac figured she'd been either day dreaming or sleeping.

He knew she was ill, knew she was wheelchair-bound, but even so, he was shocked at how small and frail and tired she appeared. In her films, Simone had simmered with life and strength and sexual energy.

He moved around so that he was facing her and said, “Hello, Simone.”

She looked up at him. She seemed to study his face for a moment before she smiled and said, “Hello, Mac Cassidy. I am happy to meet you. Ted Austin speaks very highly of you.” She turned her head and looked back over her shoulder. “Jill, dear, please bring Mac some coffee. We are going to get started right now before I become tired again.”

Jill, standing behind Simone, caught Mac's eye and gave him a quick nod.

“Coffee would be great,” he said. “Black, please.”

Jill smiled, turned, and went back into the house.

Mac pulled a wooden Adirondack chair around and sat in front of Simone. “I'm very enthusiastic about this,” he said. “Everybody's thrilled that you've agreed to do it.”

“It is something I feel I need to do,” she said softly. “But I am apprehensive. I have changed my mind a dozen times since I called Ted.”

He nodded. “I understand.”

“Tell me about you, Mac Cassidy.”

“Me?”

“If I am to confide in you,” she said, “if I am to tell you all of my secrets, I need to know some of yours.”

He flapped a hand. “I'm not important.”

“To me you are,” she said.

“Well, okay,” he said. “I've ghostwritten quite a few books. I began as a newspaper reporter many years ago, wrote a couple of long profiles that—”

“Ted vouched for your credentials,” she said. “I want to know what moves you, what frightens you, what you love.”

“I love my daughter,” he said before he could stop himself. “I . . . I love my wife.”

Simone's hand reached toward him and settled lightly on his knee. “There is a sadness in you,” she said. “I sensed it the moment you stepped into the room.”

“My wife—Jane—she died a little more than a year ago. A train hit her. I still don't understand what happened.”

Simone held his eyes with hers, encouraging him, and Cassidy found himself telling her the whole story.

When he was done, Simone said, “You blame yourself, then.”

He nodded. “I suppose I do.”

“You must find the answers to your doubts and questions,” she said.

“I don't know,” he said. “I just—I'm not sure I could live with what I might learn.”

“You are an expert in unlocking other people's secrets,” she said. “Making sense of their lives. You must do that for yourself. Only then will you be able to move on.”

At that point Jill came into the room and put a tray on the coffee table. It held a mug and a carafe and a glass of orange juice and a plate of cookies. She handed the juice to Simone and poured coffee from the carafe into the mug. “Can I get you anything else?” she said to Simone. “I thought I'd run out for the mail and pick up some groceries while you had company.” Simone turned to Mac. “Is there anything you need before Jill leaves?”

“I'm wondering if you have any scrapbooks or photo albums or old letters or documents or—”

“I didn't keep scrapbooks,” she said. “I was never very interested in preserving the past. You can't preserve it. Even if you wanted to. You can only remember it.”

Mac shrugged. “If you have anything at all, it would help.”

“What about those photos?” said Jill.

“Of course,” said Simone. “Bring that envelope from my desk, will you?”

Jill went into the sunporch, and a minute later she came back out holding a manila envelope. She handed it to Simone.

Simone held it in her lap. “There are some photos in here from a time in my life that I will tell you about. Also a couple of documents from that same time.” She handed the envelope to Mac.

Inside the envelope were eight or ten black-and-white snapshots of a very young Asian girl in various poses with a couple of somewhat older people, obviously Americans. The photos were curled and faded and poorly exposed, probably taken with a point-and-shoot camera. There were also a couple of official-looking documents printed in an alphabet Cassidy didn't recognize, with signatures in ink that was so faded he'd need a magnifying glass to read them. He held them up to Simone. “What are these?”

“I will tell you about them,” she said. “They are part of my story.”

He nodded. He didn't want to push her. He sensed her skittishness about the whole thing. “May I take them?” he said. “I'd like to photocopy them. I'll return them to you.”

“You can have everything,” she said. “I have taken one photograph for myself. I keep it on the table beside my bed.”

Cassidy slid the envelope containing the photographs and documents into his briefcase and took out the new battery-powered tape recorder he'd bought for her and a twelve-pack of tapes.

“I want to show you how this thing works,” he said.

TWO HOURS LATER Mac was back on the road. He wanted to get home in time to have supper with Katie, even though he'd told her he might be late. Talking with Simone had made him feel anxious, as if some new disaster was lurking just beyond his peripheral vision.

When your wife gets killed by a commuter train, you understand that anything can happen to anyone, any time. You can't count on anything. Nobody is ever safe. The knot of anxiety he felt whenever he couldn't actually see Katie and know that she was all right was a constant reminder of that.

It had gone well with Simone, though. They'd decided that the best way to get started would be for her to tell as much of her story as she could remember into the tape recorder he'd brought for her. She tired easily and napped frequently, and this way she could speak to the tape for short periods of time whenever she felt up to it. No purpose would be served for Mac to be present whenever she was able to talk. She didn't need him to prompt her. Anyway, at least now, at the beginning, he didn't want to start asking hard questions. Simone thought she'd feel less inhibited if she were alone, and besides, he could do better things with his time than wait around for her to feel well enough to talk for a while.

He'd visit periodically to give her suggestions and pick up the tapes. On his end, he'd begin to line up interviews he'd need to conduct. He'd try to get copies of her other films. He'd touch base with his contacts in Hollywood, track down the actors and directors and others who'd worked with Simone, who might have stories to tell him. He'd look at the photos, try to determine if they could be enhanced enough so they could be reproduced for the book. He'd get somebody to translate the documents she'd given to him. Then he could ask Simone about them.

There were some medical people he needed to talk to about multiple sclerosis. At this early point in the project, he believed that Simone's disease might turn out to be a central theme in her story.

He planned to drive out to her house every week or so to spend an afternoon with her, perhaps ask her to elaborate on something he'd learned through his research, but mostly to get a sense of her.

Already he was convinced that she was a complicated and secretive person with important stories that she might be unable to remember or, if she did recall them, unwilling to tell. Mac Cassidy's job was to help Simone unlock her subconscious mind where painful memories tried to hide and convince her that she needed to release them.

He glanced at his watch, then fumbled his cell phone from his jacket pocket and speed-dialed his home number. It rang five times before his own voice answered. “You've reached the Cassidys',” he heard himself say. “It looks like nobody's home. Please leave a message and we'll get back to you.”