Nikki was drawn in. Assuming he wasn’t delusional or grandiose, he seemed credible in his own nutty way. She wanted him to be telling the truth. “Who was she fighting with? Why was it such a big deal?”
“Because,” he said, “she was fighting with Reed Wakefield the same night he died.”
Chapter Seventeen
Jameson Rook glanced up across his office from the screen of his laptop and cast a longing look at the helicopter sitting on the windowsill. His orange Walkera Airwolf had survived the violent room toss by the Texan and now beckoned the writer to take a time-out and come play. He could rationalize a break, too. After drafting for hours, the aluminum body of his MacBook Pro was warm to the touch, bearing witness, he told himself, to his laudible work ethic. It reminded him of the way the helicopter fuselage warmed agreeably after it took flight around his loft.
“And lead me not into temptation,” he said and went back to his keyboard. A journalist who relied heavily on his personal observations, who liked to get his shoes dirty and his shins bruised, whether it was diving for cover in the rubble of a Grozny high-rise during a Russian air attack, tracking Bono to rural Senegalese hospitals with singer Baaba Maal, or getting a polo lesson in Westchester County from one of the visiting young royals, Rook knew the stories were in the experience, not on the Internet. He had a vivid memory and a notes system that delivered him back into the moment every time he pulled the frayed black ribbon of his Moleskine bookmark to part it to a lined page of quotes remembered and details observed.
He worked rapidly from beginning to end of the articles as he wrote, drafting at first-impression speed, leaving gaps and reserving the fine work to be done later when he would move once again from front to back. He made numerous passes like that but always continuously, without any backtracking, for a sense of flow. He wrote as if he were the reader. It was also how he kept his writing from becoming too cute, which is to say, about him not the subject. Rook was a journalist but strove to be a storyteller, one who let his subjects speak for themselves and stayed out of their way as much as possible.
The voice of Cassidy Towne came back to him, and through him she was once again alive in Times New Roman, in all her lively, bitchy, guffawing, honest, vengeful, and righteous self. As Rook chronicled his days and nights with her, what emerged was a woman for whom everything in life, from getting the best cut of Nova to landing an exclusive with an S&M dominatrix who’d brought a congressman to his knees, was a transaction. Her mission in the world was not to be a conduit but a source of power.
A restlessness came over Rook as he neared the end of his rough draft. The discomfort came from knowing how much was not known about the defining event of her life. Sure, he could fill in the gaps in the middle, there was plenty of color for that, but the piece concluded before it reached the real end of the story. His word count swelled; he had enough for a two-parter (note to call the agent), but the bulk of his article, as soundly as it was coming together, felt like a drumroll without the cymbal crash.
Just like Cassidy Towne’s book.
He picked up the helicopter’s radio controller, but guilt pangs made him set it down beside his laptop and reach for her unfinished manuscript. Moving from his desk to the easy chair beside the small fireplace filled with candles, he flipped through her text again, wondering what he had missed. What crescendo had she been building to?
The storyteller in him felt like he would be cheating to submit an exclusive profile that concluded with a glaring loose end. Questions, however intriguing, were not satisfying to him and wouldn’t be to the reader he respected so much, either.