His mobile rings. An actual call, not a text.
As if he’s telepathically summoned the man, it’s Andrew.
“Nick. Where the devil are you?”
“I’m at Lear’s. Si told you that.”
“Yes, right. But I’ve got a situation here. Sandy just called. About Toby Feld’s mother. She’s prone to tantrums, apparently, but Sandy thinks this one’s serious. What the fuck did you say to that woman?”
“All I did was ask her to silence her mobile. We were in rehearsal!” Sandy is the casting director.
Nick listens to silence for a moment. Andrew finally says, “I almost wish I’d gone with the other kid, the one whose mother stays home, where mothers belong.”
Nick says nothing.
“You know what I mean,” Andrew adds. “In any case, we’ve decided you shouldn’t call her. But can you and I get square on a few things? It’s like you’ve gone rogue on me out there.”
“I found them.”
“Found what?”
“Lear’s e-mails to me. About what went on in that shed.”
Andrew sighs loudly. “Nick, you are a dog with a bone.”
“I am.” Nick’s heart is pounding.
Andrew’s laugh is all-suffering. “All right then. Send them. Let me have a look.”
I can’t, Nick thinks. “All right,” he says.
“You’re out of there when?”
“Monday. I’ll be back in the city, then I’m yours.”
“Good. If I lose Toby, there’ll be hell to pay, but we’ll pay it.”
“I’m sorry if I—”
“It’s not about you, forget it. Gotta run. Hey. We’ll houdini our way around it.”
That’s Andrew, sure of a way out before a crisis has even taken hold. And that is so not Nick.
“I am a fucking blighter, a scoundrel,” he says to the blank face of the telly.
The bedeviling phone tells him it’s barely nine o’clock. He could take a shower, try to calm down, but he’s already dressed and experiencing the surge of panicky adrenaline that strikes whenever he feels guilty of even a microscopic misdemeanor. This time it’s a capital crime. Or is it?
He has an idea.
He rings Serge, then rummages in his suitcase for one of the half dozen baseball caps Si gave him after the Oscars—gift-wrapped, with a card that read, For the new, conspicuous you. This one tells the world he’s a fan of the San Francisco Giants. He snatches his shades off the dressing table and goes out to wait in the driveway.
Tommy looks up from her sorting and stacking at the sound of tires on gravel (a surface Morty chose over asphalt for its telltale nature). From a corner window of the studio, she can just see the turnaround by the kitchen door, where Nick Greene is climbing into the Town Car, Serge closing the door behind him.
Is he leaving already? She sees no baggage, but she feels remorseful; has she done something to drive him away? She will not go back to the house just to check if the actor’s things are still in the den.
She cannot believe how many, many papers Morty kept: everything from expense receipts gathered on tour (all tallied and packaged by Tommy) to correspondence with his mother’s physicians, from bookmarks advertising every bookstore he’d ever set foot in to faded scribbles he made on memo pads in hotel rooms around the world. Some of it is well organized, but much of it isn’t. In a single folder she found an orphaned brokerage statement, an illustrated thank-you letter written by a first-grade class in Hartford, a shopping list (in Tommy’s handwriting) on which he’d sketched a parade of insects, and the receipt for a Navajo weaving he bought in Santa Fe. Only the dates, all in the spring of 2007, unify these items.
The studio was, of course, Morty’s personal kingdom. Tommy expressed no opinions on its tendency toward bedlam and spent very little time here. But the file cabinets devoted to Morty’s personal and professional correspondence with editors, agents, educators, academics, and fellow authors—including significant e-mails printed out on paper—were the domain where he wanted Tommy’s hand, her imposition of order. They were both well aware that one day these papers would be valuable to archivists and scholars of children’s literature, and until recently, Tommy envisioned turning it all over to Meredith Galarza. Now it is Tommy’s to do with as she deems fit, so long as she keeps in mind the goal of financing Ivo’s House. Franklin has already found a candidate for the directorship. Tommy will have to fly out and meet with the woman.
She stops for a moment just to look at Morty’s drafting table, so far untouched. What will become of this space? Did Morty expect her to stay on here, alone, indefinitely? It occurs to her that the Tommy he envisioned as his executor and heir would have been at least ten years older. And she would have been prepared for all this. Or she would have talked him out of it.
—
“The place we’re headed,” Nick says, leaning over the front seat, “should be up there, on the left…yes! There’s a space just…Exactly. Brilliant.”
As the laconically obedient Serge backs into the parking space, Nick pulls the key from his pocket and reads the name on the manila tag again, as if he might have imagined it: Pequot Trust & Savings. The same words chiseled in granite beneath the pediment of the faux Greek temple across the street.
Oh God, that word: trust! A virtue spiraling swiftly down the drain.
Serge kills the motor and gets out.
“I’ll be in there a bit, I think,” says Nick as Serge opens his door (a gesture Nick has given up on trying to deter). “You have coins for the meter?”
Serge nods.
Nick sprints across the street and up the steps of the bank. Yes, it’s open on Saturday. Till noon. Plenty of time. Before opening the door, he fills his lungs and hums slightly, to steady his voice.
Once inside, he feels a good deal less sure of his mission. He stands in the center of the reassuringly old-fashioned space—marble floor, fluted columns, walls muralized with primitive scenes of bucolic goings-on—until a young woman in a camel-colored suit approaches him and asks if she can be of service.
“Why, yes, thanks so much,” he says, instantly removing his hat and shades, as Grandfather taught him, before remembering—as the young woman’s recognition lights up her face—that this courtesy is one he’s lately been advised to ignore.
But she’s a game professional and says calmly, “How may I help you, sir?”
“I have a key to a lockbox I’d like to visit.” He hands her the key.
“Come this way,” she instructs.
She leads him into a blessedly secluded cubicle, where she takes a ledger from a shelf and opens it on her desk. Once she arrives at the desired page, she looks back and forth, three times, between the key and the tiny number on the page at the tip of her frosted-lavender fingernail.