“It’s the town nearest ....”
Gerald, the white-jacketed waiter who usually served them, interrupted to bring oversized Bloody Marys that had seemed perfect for a warm April afternoon. But the drinks looked a bit comical with their too-tall, leafy shafts of celery. The restaurant, Dave’s, was a little more pretentious than the food was good, but Bill and Nancy met there for more or less regular monthly lunches because it was midway between her office near Rockefeller Center and his apartment on East Seventy-Second Street. Nancy liked Dave’s because it wasn’t a regular hangout for authors and agents, many eavesdropping for gossip and information. Nancy said some agents paid waiters in those haunts to keep their eyes and ears open.
“... to where I grew up in Southern Indiana, on the Ohio River. I’ve told you before. It’s where I had my first newspaper job at The Jefferson Courier. You don’t remember because it’s not between the Hudson and East rivers.”
Nancy wrinkled her nose and made a funny face as she reached for a saltshaker. Her geographic shortcomings were a running joke between them, as was his struggle to deal with Google Maps, GPS devices, and technology in general. His work had forced him to master a computer, but that was about it. He was wary of electronic devices that had to be upgraded every six months. His friends sometimes teased him for being a Luddite because he still carried a flip phone. But as a veteran reporter, he knew enough about the dark side of technology to be leery of most current electronic devices that could track an owner’s every move. The Internet was a great tool for gathering information and data, but it worked both ways. Plus, he simply liked words on paper: books, notes, maps.
“And you’re going there to help a childhood friend you haven’t seen in years? You don’t know what his problem is, and you don’t know how long you’ll be gone? When are you’re leaving?”
The waiter returned for their orders. Both had Cobb salad, the Wednesday special. As the waiter took their menus, Bill’s thoughts drifted back to a fishing and camping trip he and Paul had taken when they were juniors at Jefferson High School. They hadn’t caught any fish and lived for three days on baloney and crackers.
“Saturday morning. I’m going to rent a car in New Jersey and drive out.”
“What’s the man’s name again?”
“Paul. Paul Watson. He’s a high school guidance counselor. In Jefferson.”
“And you haven’t seen him since you were in high school? Or was it college?”
“College, almost. Actually, we did meet a couple of times after college. And at the funerals of my mom and dad. And he and his wife, Sharon, once visited me here. We’ve stayed in touch. We talk on the phone three or four times a year. He and Sharon were coming to Jane’s funeral but couldn’t because Paul’s father got really sick. His mother had died a year earlier.”
“Is he in some kind of trouble? Why would he ask you for help after all these years?”
“I’m not sure. He was in a panic when he called and said there was no one else who could help him. He would only tell me it was urgent and begged me to come out as soon as possible. I know him well enough to know that he wouldn’t have pressed me if it weren’t something really serious. He made me promise not to talk to anyone else in Jefferson before I saw him.”
“How long do you expect to be gone?”
“I don’t know. It depends on what I find.”
Nancy had no more questions about Paul, or Bill’s trip, but it was clear she didn’t entirely condone the whole matter. Her unspoken concern was about how this unscheduled sojourn would interfere with his work. He was her top-earning author and she liked keeping him close.
Bill handed her a three-by-five index card on which he had written Paul’s name and home phone number. “In case you need to reach me and my cell’s not working. I also sent it to you in an e-mail.”
Their salads came; during the lull in the conversation Bill studied Nancy, thinking how little he really knew about her. She had a compact little body that looked 20 years younger than her face, which was heavily wrinkled from too much sun. He knew she was forty-six—too old for the little bows she often wore in her frosted hair, he thought. Then he remembered how much he owed her and flushed with guilt.
Later, over coffee, talk turned to the novel he’d recently finished and the publicity tour Nancy and his publisher were putting together for him. But that was months away.
When the waiter brought the check, Nancy studied it like a corporate proxy statement before plunking down her platinum American Express card. Bill was constantly amazed at the habits of the rich.
He shifted on his motel pillow.
Memories of Paul Watson began to surface. Before he left New York, Bill had looked through his high school senior yearbook for the first time in years. There were several pictures of Paul and him together. On the school newspaper. In a drama club production of Hamlet. Clowning around at a pep rally. Paul’s lopsided grin, shaggy blond hair and blue eyes. Bill’s studied seriousness and slicked-back brown hair. It was painful to see himself so young and thin, and innocent. They had graduated from Jefferson High thirty-two years ago next month.
Bill and Paul became friends in the fifth grade, just after Bill’s family moved to a farm they bought near Jefferson. They were Kentucky tenant farmers who had finally saved enough money for a down payment on 40 acres of land across the Ohio River in Southern Indiana. They moved in the spring. Bill’s father built their house with his own hands that summer, working on it mostly at night so he could spend days tending the farm and its corn, soybeans, and valuable tobacco base. Until the house was finished, Bill and his parents lived in a rented trailer they pulled behind their pickup truck from town to the farm. They moved into the house in the fall; in December, Bill’s brother, Ron, was born. By then Bill and Paul had become fast friends—more like brothers, really.
So, he was going to Indiana because Paul Watson was his friend and needed help.
For that alone, Bill would have gone. But there were other reasons that drew him west. Paul’s plea had come in late April, about two months after Bill finished one book and was floundering around, trying to get started on another. He was at loose ends: bored, vaguely dissatisfied, and feeling a bit sorry for himself. A bad combination. He knew he needed a change. A jolt. The Vietnam trip hadn’t done it. He needed to get involved in someone else’s problems. Especially after living alone for more than two years.
A decade earlier Bill had left the newspaper business, after twenty years and some good reporting jobs, to freelance. His last job had been with The New York Times, where he covered national politics from the paper’s Washington bureau on I Street. Most of his friends and colleagues thought he was crazy to leave a dream job. But top editors at the Times assured him he could return if things didn’t work out. There were some false starts, and then he had written two moderately successful true crime books, one about a serial killer and another about a cult of neo-Nazis. Both had resulted in death threats against him that left him so depressed he vowed never to write in that genre again. He decided to write a book that was part politics and part travel; he spent the next two years traveling around Mexico and Central and South America with Jane. Then, after Nancy Luke wrangled a bigger advance than he had dared even hope for, he spent another year writing Points South. The hardback version was on the New York Times best-seller list for almost a year. The advance, the hardback royalties, and the paperback rights brought in more money than he had made in twenty years as a reporter. The next book, the one he had recently finished when Paul called, was a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel called Look Down. It was the only fiction Bill had ever written and was tough going. Since finishing the novel, he had been toying with the idea of another political and travel book, this time about the Middle East, where he had spent two years on assignment for the Houston Chronicle. But he couldn’t get a handle on exactly where he wanted to go with the book. He didn’t have a working title, which was his own personal warning flag that he hadn’t thought it through. He probably would fly to Cairo or Amman and start traveling and talking to people and hope something would come into focus. That was how he’d started Points South, and he guessed it would work again. He was a strong reporter and interviewer partly because of his ability to blend in, to become almost invisible. “Non-threatening, until they read what he writes,” an editor once said of him. Brown hair, brown eyes, medium build, regular features. Everyman with a reporter’s notebook.