Rook went over to the counter to pour some hot water through two Melitta filters of French roast, leaving her to spread that last stack out across the table. She found herself drawn to these more by feeling than reason. What were these pictures telling her? She tried rearranging them by date stamp on the backs. The sequence didn’t teach her anything. She made another order by geography. She stared at that grouping for a while and felt nothing coming back. Then Heat tried something uncomfortable for her: She let go of Cop-Think and went back to something more primal.
She let Nikki, the seasoned investigator, think like Nikki, the little girl. And when she did, she thought of how her mom used to love to make her laugh by striking those very same Price Is Right model poses at home. Or to Nikki’s greater mortification, in the aisle of a supermarket or at Macy’s. She called it “styling,” and little Nikki would giggle or groan with embarrassment depending on where her mom styled. The funniest places were at home, safely away from the eyes of schoolmates—or anyone, for that matter. Cynthia would sweep her graceful arms and delicate wrists in front of the oven. Then she’d open the door to style the interior. And then do the same for the fridge, opening the crisper and styling a head of lettuce. “Styling,” her mom had said, “is what you do when it’s not polite to point.”
A new idea triggered by that old memory dawned on Heat. She looked at one photo, then another. Sure, this could have been some running gag or inside joke within the network; the early version of how people nowadays text cell shots of food in the shape of presidents, or forced perspectives of themselves pretending to hold up the Gateway Arch or cradling the Hollywood sign in the palm of a hand.
But what if it wasn’t a joke?
What if her mother and Nicole Bernardin and Eugene Summers and her other friends weren’t just goofing but were doing something else? What if they were using what appeared to be a sophomoric joke as cover for something more serious?
If styling was what one did when it was impolite to point, what if they were pointing at something?
She called Rook over to the array on the table and shared her idea. “Go with me on this,” she said then tapped the first shot. “Check it out. Here’s our butler, Eugene, in front of the Riesenrad Ferris wheel in Vienna back in 1977. He’s holding the camera in one hand to take his own picture, and with the other, he’s styling toward that booth of tourist brochures.” She went to the next. “Here’s young Nicole in 1980 in Nice. She’s at the outdoor flower market, but look, she’s gesturing to a service locker near the entrance. And even in this one …” She picked up the picture of Cynthia in Paris—the same one Nikki had used for her reenactment to stand in her mother’s footsteps. “In this one, Mom’s styling toward that wooden book vendor’s stall. See it, the one that’s over on the side of the square near the Seine?” She set the photo down with care. “I think these are signals.”
“Hey,” said Rook, “I definitely think you’re on to something, but I’m the foil hat guy, remember? How do we find out for sure?”
“I know how.” Heat opened her notebook and flipped pages until she found the cell number she wanted.
Eugene Summers gave her a chilly reception, obviously still harboring bruised feelings following the slight he’d felt from Rook at lunch. But the butler was, in the end, a man of manners. He took a break from shooting Gentlemen Prefer Bongs out in Bel Air to find a private place to answer her question. He didn’t even play the what-if game. “You cracked the code, so I might as well tell you. Especially since it’s a dead protocol anyway. You’re absolutely correct. We’d adopted those modeling poses as our own little Nanny Network secret language. In fact, it was your mother who came up with the idea of styling. She’d say, ‘Styling is what you do—’”
”’—when it’s not polite to point,’” said Nikki, doubling him. And then she asked, “Tell me one more thing. What were you pointing to?” Heat believed she had cracked that one, too, but needed to hear it from him, and without prompting.