Ghost writer, p.15
Ghost Writer, page 15
Jonathan about dropped the china he was holding. “Naomi, what are you—”
“Talking about?” Naomi smiled, stood with much effort, and walked to the window. “She is quite pretty. What is she, about thirty?”
“T-t-twenty something . . .” Jonathan felt his head spinning a little. “Seven. Or eight.”
Naomi turned. “My Jonathan, I have known and loved you for so long. You are like a son to me.” She joined him at the kitchen counter. “You are walking down a destructive path.”
Jonathan gripped the edge of the counter. “Look, Naomi, I don’t know what you think is going on here, but—”
“Oh, please do not try to convince me you are not, in the very least, flirting with this young woman. I see it in your eyes. In her eyes. The way you two stand close together when you’re looking at something. The way you look at her when I’m the one speaking.” Naomi patted him on the cheek. “I’m not blind yet.”
Jonathan stepped away from her. “Naomi, please, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said hastily and with too much anxiety in his voice.
Naomi laughed and moved herself along the counter with her hands, arriving at the sink to finish the dishes. She washed them, and Jonathan felt an urgency to try to convince her there was nothing going on.
“You must believe me. I mean, I like Sydney. She’s bright and nice and fun, but we’re not having an affair.”
“I didn’t say you were having an affair.”
“But you said—”
“You were walking down a road that leads to destruction.”
Jonathan couldn’t think of anything to say, but Naomi wasn’t finished anyway.
“You know, I have walked that same path.” She turned to him. “Yes. It was 1940, and I had been married for one year. I met a young man, a delivery boy who worked in our neighborhood. My husband was away a lot, and I grew lonely. This boy started coming around more and more, and before I knew it I was in love with him.”
“You had an affair, Naomi?”
“Yes, I did,” she said sadly. “It was devastating. I couldn’t believe I had actually kissed him. Twice.”
“All you did was kiss him?”
Naomi shook her head. “Things were so different long ago. A kiss was everything. It meant intimacy. A kiss betrayed everything sacred in my marriage.”
Jonathan listened and watched Sydney smell the roses outside. “But Ira forgave you.” A deep, solemn silence hovered in the room. “Right?”
Naomi shook her head and continued to wash dishes. “Jonathan, Ira was my second husband.”
Jonathan frowned. “What? I didn’t know you had been married twice.”
“Well, dear, it isn’t something we older people are proud of. These days marriages and divorces come a dime a dozen.” She sighed. “My first husband left me. His name was Wilton.”
Jonathan crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, look, Naomi, I appreciate the advice. I really do. But nothing is going on. We’re not having an affair. I haven’t kissed her,” he said with emphasis. “She’s just in some trouble. I’m trying to help her.”
Naomi dried the counter. “What kind of trouble?”
“Did you see the bruises on her face?” Naomi nodded. “She’s in a relationship with a very violent man. His name is Jeremy. And she just can’t seem to realize the danger she’s in.”
“Poor girl,” Naomi said as she folded her towel.
“I’m simply trying to help her get out of that. That’s all.”
Naomi looked at him questioningly.
“That’s all.”
Naomi put everything in order on her counter, closed all the doors on her cupboard, sat down at the table, and said, “My Jonathan, if you’re going to be her savior, who’s going to be yours?”
chapter 13
Naomi Yates had let the conversation drop and joined Sydney out in the gardens. On the way back to the office, three hours later, Sydney was rambling on about how wonderful Naomi was, but Jonathan remained unusually quiet, listening, nodding . . . but far, far away.
Back at the office, Jonathan stopped by Edie’s desk to get any messages.
“Long lunch,” she commented, handing him a neat stack of handwritten messages.
Jonathan looked up at her, then quickly passed through each message to see which ones needed his immediate attention. The last one grabbed his attention. He looked up at Edie.
“Kathy . . . Kathy stopped by?”
Edie seemed to sneer and smile all at once. “Why, yes.”
Jonathan casually leaned against her desk, trying to hide the fact that his pulse had just shot up to a level that caused his ears to turn red and burn. “No kidding? What, uh, what time?”
Edie was filing her nails. “Oh, a while after you left.”
“What for?”
“What for?” Edie’s face swirled with questions.
“I mean, why did she come by? Did she say?”
“She was hoping to take you to lunch.” Edie took her concentration off the long pinky nail she was shaping. “Are you okay? You look a little—”
“I’m fine.” Jonathan pretended to look at his other messages. “You told her I was . . . ?”
“Gone.”
“So she left?”
“No, she waited for a while.”
Jonathan was about to bite through his own tongue. Of course, nothing happened between him and Sydney, but knowing Edie, she wasn’t about to shed a positive light on the situation.
“Why didn’t you tell her I was at lunch? How long did she wait?”
“I did tell her you were at lunch. She decided to wait anyhow. She left about an hour ago.”
Jonathan stuck his hands deep down into his pockets, trying to hide the fact that his hands, among other limbs, were shaking. “I see. Well, she’ll be happy to know that I went to see Naomi Yates. She’s a big fan.”
“I bet,” Edie said, flipping her file and starting on her left hand.
“I’ll have to call her.”
Edie didn’t respond, and Jonathan figured she wasn’t about to volunteer any information. He walked briskly to his office, shut the door, and dialed home. As the phone rang, he reminded himself, between deep breaths, that nothing had happened or was going to happen between him and Sydney. He’d act like everything was fine . . . which it was . . . and tell Kathy he was sorry he’d missed her.
He thought it was a little strange, as the phone continued to ring, that Kathy had come to his office for lunch. She used to do that all the time, but in the last year, she hadn’t even been by once.
The answering machine picked up, which he thought strange, since the girls should have been home from school by now, so he left a message he hoped sounded sincere.
“Kathy, hi, it’s me . . . of course you know it’s me . . . um, sorry I missed you. Maybe we can go to lunch later in the week. Okay, I’ll see you at home tonight . . . bye . . . I’ll be home early . . . bye.” As he hung up the phone, he replayed everything in his head, wondering if he sounded too worried, too shocked, too . . . guilty.
His time for pondering was cut short, however, by the stack of unread manuscripts that seemed to sort of lean to the right, as if threatening to tumble if some weight wasn’t taken off soon.
He definitely had to tackle Zippy’s proposal sooner than later, but he decided to go ahead and continue to read Clyde’s story. Though it contained the errors typical of Clyde’s first rough drafts, he saw amazing potential.
Pierce Jenkins threw his fishing line out as far as he could into the pond in front of us. His waist-high rubber suit was covered in dried mud, and my being one who never quite “got” the whole fishing thing, I couldn’t quite feel comfortable next to the large box of night crawlers.
“You’re not here to hear my fishing stories, are you, Keaton?” he said, watching his line bob up and down in the water. “You went and talked to Esther Caladaras?”
“Yes. This morning.” I paused. “I also talked to Jerome Mitchner. I—”
Pierce held up his free hand, took a drag from his cigarette, then took the cigarette out, exhaling slowly. “Keaton, I know why you’re here.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. I do.” Pierce looked at me again. “You need me to go talk to Esther.”
I nodded, a little thankful I didn’t actually have to come out and say it. But I felt the urge to explain. “Yes. I think she’s interested. You were right when you said she hates the FBI. The whole idea that the FBI would move a body to save their reputation really ruffled her feathers.”
Pierce plucked at his beard. “Funny. I always saw Caladaras as more of a bulldog myself.”
I laughed. “She’s a little hardcore. But her hate for the FBI may help me get Mitchner off. I mean, Pierce, I’m haunted by the fact that an innocent man could die for something Dietrich Donomar did. He’s already had enough victims.”
“You don’t have to convince me,” Pierce said, though in a rather shallow tone.
“So you will talk to Esther? Tell her what you know?” I asked. Pierce was silent. “Look, I know she can protect your identity. That’s not going to be a problem. She’ll guarantee that. And besides, when this story breaks, it will expose a really ugly side of the FBI, a side I suspected always existed but never really knew for sure.”
Pierce drew in his line. “You’re willing to stake your whole career on this, Keaton? The FBI won’t just lie down and take this, you know.”
He was right. I didn’t know what would happen to me, but I did know that I couldn’t let Donomar have one more victim. “I know.”
Pierce hooked another worm on top of the one already on the hook. “These fish are pigs. Sometimes it takes three or four of these night crawlers to get them to bite.”
I couldn’t even pretend to sound interested.
He threw his line back out. “So, Esther never asked about your source, how I knew the information?”
I shrugged. “She said she wanted to talk to you, of course. But that’s it.”
“She never asked why your source saw the file?”
I paused. “Well, no.”
Pierce looked at me with hard eyes. “Didn’t you ever wonder, Keaton?”
I shook my head, not really following. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, did you ever wonder how I know this?”
“You said it was top secret, that no one knew, but that you had some inside info on it.”
Pierce laughed suddenly, very hard. I smiled a little myself, wondering what the big joke was. “Boy, did I get you,” he said, using his index finger to pull on the inside of his cheek like a fish caught on a hook.
“I’m sorry, I’m not—”
“I found the body.”
I stopped everything . . . breathing, thinking, talking. I then processed those four words slowly. I guess Pierce read my puzzled expression, because he then said, “I was fishing on my day off. The body had floated onto land not more than twenty feet away from me.”
I could hardly speak. “You were the agent who found the body?”
“Yep,” he said, not looking at me. “I called my supervisor from my truck. I told them who I suspected it was. They asked if I was in an isolated location. I said I was. They told me to stay put. And then four men arrived, three of whom I didn’t know. The fourth was my supervisor.”
I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Pierce, you were involved in this?”
Pierce laughed a little. “Well, actually, they paid me not to be involved.”
I couldn’t keep my mouth from hanging open. “You were paid off?”
Pierce puffed on his cigarette, keeping his eyes forward. “Yeah. It was a nice down payment on this house behind us.”
I stood up. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “Pierce!”
“What?” he said calmly. “Like you wouldn’t have done the same thing?”
“No, I wouldn’t have!”
Pierce shrugged, and his line went straight. “Got one!” he yelled and reeled in a small fish that did acrobatics in the air as it came onto shore. “Tiny thing.”
“Pierce, what—”
“Look, Keaton, you may have looked that temptation right in the eye and walked away. I couldn’t. Not on the salary they were paying me. Lucy had just had our son. Bills were piling up.”
I took a deep breath and grabbed him on the shoulder. “Fine. What’s done is done. I still need you.”
Pierce flicked his cigarette into the water. “Funny how things come back to haunt you.” He took the fish off the hook. “I thought that was history. I thought it was buried.”
“But now it’s what I need to help an innocent man. Will you help me?”
Pierce’s bottom lip trembled a bit. He watched the fish he had just caught flop around helplessly on the wet grass next to him. He stared at it a long time. When it was just about dead, he gently picked it up, unhooked it, and threw it back in the water. “You would think fifteen years would sort of squelch some of the guilt. But it hasn’t.” His hands trembled as he rolled a new, unlit cigarette back and forth between his lips. “I thought it was harmless. I mean, I knew it wasn’t exactly ethical, but I couldn’t really see the harm in it. We all were sure Mitchner did it.”
I didn’t know what to say. Pierce was my only chance, but I couldn’t ask again. He knew what I needed. I just hoped he would make the right choice.
Pierce closed his tackle box and lifted the collar of his jacket up around his neck. “I wonder what the FBI does to men who are paid for their silence and then 15 years later come forward with the truth?” He stood and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I know what the Mafia would do.”
I quickly stood, too. “Pierce, this isn’t the Mafia. And besides, Esther promises full protection of your identity.”
Pierce turned to me. “Come on, Keaton. We both know what a joke that is.”
I nodded reluctantly.
He sighed and looked toward his house. “My son’s fifteen now. Charlie’s a good boy, you know? I mean, he drinks occasionally and hangs out with the wrong crowd sometimes, but I think he’s going to turn out okay.” His eyes lingered there. “I want him to be proud of his old man. That’s what I want most. I want him to make the right choices because I did.” He then looked at me. “Let me know when and where.”
I wanted to let all the air I was holding inside out in one long sigh, but instead I just grabbed his shoulder and squeezed tightly. He nodded, shuffled his feet in the dirt, and then said, “Well, I’d better get inside. I’ve got a lot of explaining to do to the wife and kid.”
I watched as Pierce slowly made his way up toward his house. He was just a silhouette against it as the lights from the windows created a bright glow in the inky night. I felt good inside. I was on the path to saving a man’s life. I just hoped everything else would fall into place like I expected.
Jonathan finished the chapter just as Carl Osburg rapped lightly on his door.
“Come in,” Jonathan said as he tapped the edges of the manuscript, trying to line up each page to form a neat stack. He wrapped a large rubber band around it and placed it on the edge of his desk.
Carl sauntered in, his tie loosened and the top button of his dress shirt undone, a sure sign the end of the day was near.
“Hey, Carl,” Jonathan said. “If you’re wondering about Zippy’s manuscript, I haven’t read it.”
Carl ran his finger along the side of Jonathan’s large bookcase, shook his head, and then pulled out a book, flipping through it nonchalantly. Jonathan tidied up his desk and asked, “Carl, is there a reason you’re just hanging out in my office?” Jonathan looked at his watch. “It’s five o’clock. Shouldn’t you be going home?”
Carl smiled but avoided eye contact. “Been a long time since I left at five.”
“Staying late to see how you can terrorize your fellow editors with a certain dysfunctional nonfiction ghostwriter?”
Carl smiled again, this time closing the book he had in his hand and returning it to the shelf. He walked to the door and shut it, causing Jonathan to sit up a little taller in his chair. “What is it, Carl?”
Carl sat down in the chair across from him. “I consider you a friend, Jonathan. And I hope you consider me one, too.”
Jonathan loosened his tie as well. “Sure.”
“I don’t want you to take this the wrong way. I mean, I’m here because I care.”
Jonathan swallowed hard and decided to remove his tie altogether. “Okay . . .”
Carl leaned forward. “There’s been talk, Jonathan.”
“Talk?” Jonathan repeated slowly. His mind reeled faster than he could control. A thousand scenarios passed through his brain in a few short seconds. “Look, it’s just gossip.” Jonathan’s shirt stuck to his back as he suddenly began to perspire profusely. He wondered how much Carl knew about him and Sydney. And who else knew? Obviously enough people that Carl felt he had to come and confront him.
Carl bit his lip and said, “It’s more than just gossip. The evidence is pretty clear.”
Jonathan stood and popped the two top buttons of his shirt open. He turned his back to Carl and leaned on the windowsill. How could he save face now? People were talking. He reminded himself that nothing had happened. People could talk all they wanted and it was just gossip. But he also reminded himself that gossip had a way of making itself very real.
“Carl, just tell me what you know. I can assure you nothing is happening.”
Although Jonathan couldn’t see Carl’s expression, the silence coming from him was enough to make him turn around. Carl was frowning, rubbing his forehead, and clearing his throat all at once. Jonathan moved around his desk, grabbing a paper clip so he would have something to do with his hands. “Seriously, Carl. I appreciate the concern, but nothing is happening.”
