The Nomination (20 page)

A minute later she plopped a thick loose-leaf notebook on the counter and pointed to a wooden table where he could spread out and do his research.

The damn thing was arranged alphabetically by street name, so it took him over half an hour to find Simone Bonet's name listed at 1049 Mountainview Road. She owned twenty-two acres. The home and property were assessed at $345,000.

The white-haired woman seemed to be ignoring him, and aside from a couple of younger women he'd noticed sitting at desks in the open area behind the counter, there was nobody else in the Beaverkill town offices on this Friday afternoon in May. Moran figured everybody was probably off trout fishing, which was all right by him. The fewer people who might remember him, the better.

Back in his Explorer, he pulled out his
DeLorme Atlas and Gazetteer
for the state of New York, turned to the quadrant that included the town of Beaverkill, and found Mountainview Road. It went south to north for the entire length of the town, an old state highway, probably, more or less parallel to the interstate. A winding river ran between Mountainview and the interstate.

Fifteen minutes later, Moran was driving slowly along Mountainview Road. Every mile or so there was a little pull off where the road touched the river, and in every pull off two or three cars were parked. Fishermen, he supposed.

The dwellings were widely separated. There were a few farms with picturesque barns and cows or horses in the pastures, and some small ranch-style homes. Mostly, it was fields and trees and brooks and streams. In places a dirt roadway disappeared into the woods. Some of them had mailboxes at the end, some didn't.

There was no mailbox in front of the driveway leading in to number 1049. Moran located it by the process of elimination. There was a mailbox bearing the number 1021, then a driveway with no mailbox. The next mailbox had the name Hewitt, and the one after that had the number 1065 on it.

Half a mile past Simone's driveway, at a dip in the hilly road, was one of those fisherman's pull offs. Two cars were parked there. Moran stopped, got out, and checked the vehicles. They didn't seem to be displaying any special permits. Just some fishing junk in the back and decals with pictures of fish or trout flies pasted on the windows. Moran guessed that you could leave your vehicle in one of these pull-offs for as long as you wanted. Around here, where trout fishing was the main industry, nobody would hassle a fisherman.

The gurgling of water rushing around boulders and over gravel filtered up to him, and through the trees he could see the glint of the afternoon sun on the water.

It was nice. Peaceful. Eddie Moran was thinking he ought to take up trout fishing. He needed a hobby.

Well, maybe some day.

He got back into his car and continued along Mountainview Road. It was nine miles to the first store, one of those mini-marts with gas pumps out front and candy bars and hot coffee and cigarettes inside. He stopped there, filled his tank, and paid the kid at the register with cash.

From there he turned and headed back the way he'd come. He noted the mileage from the end of Li An's driveway, then continued into town. Twelve miles. Nothing between here and there except a few houses and plenty of fields and woods and trout streams. So if she had to go somewhere, it was twelve miles one way and nine the other to get anyplace at all.

Back in town, he parked his truck, put the clunky horn-rims back on, and went into the first fishing shop he came to. It was empty except for one guy, somewhere in his thirties, sitting at a table tying a fly. He glanced up at Moran, said, “How ya doin'?” and returned to his work.

Moran nodded to the guy, then pretended to be interested in the store's wares. In the middle of the room a big wooden display case sat on a table. It had dozens of small compartments, and each compartment held bunches of trout flies. Racks of rods and aluminum tubes hung on one wall. There were chest waders and hip boots and fishing hats. There were freestanding displays of feathers and fur and fishhooks in plastic envelopes that Moran figured were used for making flies. There were shelves stacked with books and videos. There were landing nets and sunglasses and knives. There were racks of shirts and jackets and vests.

Finally on a table piled with calendars and postcards and souvenir ashtrays and mugs Moran found what he was looking for—a stack of oval decals picturing a trout opening its mouth to eat an insect and the words “Catskill Anglers, Beaverkill, New York” printed around the circumference.

He picked up a decal and took it to the guy at the fly-tying table.

The guy looked up at him. “That it?”

Moran nodded.

“Need some tippet material? Got all the flies you need?”

“I'm all set for now, thanks.”

“Buck and a half, then,” said the guy.

Moran paid him and left before they could engage in any memorable conversation.

He got back on the interstate and drove north. He put two towns between himself and Beaverkill, then started looking for a motel with the VACANCY Sign lit.

In the town of Joshua he rented a room for five nights, paid cash, and signed the name Robert Flaherty. He left the section asking for automobile information blank.

He took a booth in the diner down the street from the motel and had the pot roast special, which he ate with a newspaper propped up in front of him, and a slice of apple pie for dessert. It was pretty good. Eddie Moran liked diners.

The last thing he did before he went into in his motel room that night was to stick his new fish decal on the rear window of the Explorer.

DURING JESSIE'S TREK across the continent she learned that the motels and gas stations and restaurants on the interstate highways were more expensive than the ones on the less-traveled state highways or secondary roads near smaller towns. She found the cheaper ones more congenial, too. The people were friendlier. It was a trade-off, though. She felt more anonymous interacting with people along the interstates, where strangers came and went all the time and nobody paid much attention to you.

So she'd mostly stuck close to the interstates. This trip was not about economizing.

Now that she was in the middle of Illinois with a new identity and a new car, though, Jessie felt that she could stay anywhere, mingle with people, let her guard down, just be herself—whoever that was. For the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt safe.

She knew it was a dangerous feeling. She'd have to resist it.

After she'd swapped cars with Jimmy Nunziato, she continued along Interstate 74 to Bloomington and then, without thinking much about it, hooked onto 55 North. Interstate 55 led to Chicago, thence to Evanston.

Jessie felt her hometown tugging her.

She'd grown up in Evanston, the daughter, the only child, of Michael and Ellen Church. Kindergarten, elementary school, middle school, high school. She'd played softball and field hockey, gone to proms, made the honor roll, worked at the ice-cream stand in the summers, dated nice boys, kept her virginity.

It was a good childhood.

From the beginning, Michael and Ellen had talked to Jessie about the fact that she was adopted. They didn't know anything about her biological parents, but that was irrelevant anyway. The point, they kept emphasizing, was that she was the one they'd picked to be their daughter. That made her special.

Jessie had always accepted that. She felt loved and safe with Michael and Ellen Church. She did feel special. As far as she was concerned, they were her parents and she was their daughter. Being adopted didn't mean anything to her one way or the other.

Her mother died of ovarian cancer when Jessie was a freshman at Northwestern. It happened fast. Her father called her at her dorm in October and told her Mom was in the hospital for tests. He called her again in March when Jessie was studying for midterms to tell her that she better come home right away.

Just like that.

Two years later, on a snowy night in February, Michael Church was murdered in the parking garage at O'Hare airport. Three nine-millimeter bullets in the chest from short range. They found his Nissan Pathfinder parked in a lot near Wrigley Field five days later.

The police figured it was a simple, random robbery. Whoever shot Jessie's father took his wallet and his watch and his vehicle. People got mugged in Chicago every day.

But there were undercurrents of suspicion that didn't escape Jessie. Michael Church was an executive with a computer company that had contracts with several Asian and Middle Eastern governments. He did a lot of traveling. He might have been a government spy. Or a drug importer. There were whispered stories to explain his murder. More interesting stories than just getting mugged in a parking garage for his car and the contents of his wallet. Stories that somehow made Michael Church the villain.

Nothing was ever proven, and the stories died fast. But Jessie never forgot them.

Many people who thought they knew Jessie assumed that she went into law enforcement because of her father's murder. It was one of those simplistic, easily understood, pop-psych explanations, and Jessie never bothered to correct it.

But the fact was, she'd wanted to be a cop ever since she could remember, and she was already working toward her degree in Criminal Justice when Michael Church was gunned down.

It took Jessie nearly four years of part-time detecting to figure out who'd killed her father. His name was Artie Toomer. Toomer was a small-time crack addict who mistook Michael Church for somebody else. By the time Jessie tracked him down, Artie Toomer was already dead, shot twice in the face by his girlfriend while he was passed out on her couch. She explained that she was sick of being slapped around.

So Jessie had been cheated out of her revenge. Hardly a day went by when she didn't think about it, and every time she did, it pissed her off all over again.

On this Friday night in May, Jessie Church found herself in a motel off one of the Interstate 55 exits north of Bloomington, Illinois, near the town of Cooksville, just a morning's drive to Evanston. She wasn't certain why she'd come this way, except that she'd been thinking about her childhood and her parents and, for the first time in a long time, she was wondering where she'd really come from.

She'd left San Francisco because she had to. She headed east because that's where there was space to lose herself, and because she needed to hook up with Jimmy Nunziato along the way. She'd made Beaverkill, New York, her destination because it seemed to be the kind of place where no one would ever think to look. It was a tentative destination. The note from S. Bonet, who claimed to be her biological mother, had given her the idea, that's all.

This was not a quest for her identity. Jessie had not set off on this cross-country journey to find herself or to discover her past or to seek her roots.

She was just trying to shake Howie Cohen.

Now, though, in Cooksville, Illinois, on this Friday evening in May, with a new name and the documents to back it up, she figured she was just two or three days of easy driving from Beaverkill, New York, and she found herself trying to imagine actually knocking on S. Bonet's front door, having this woman open it, seeing her face, and realizing in some flash of recognition that Jessie couldn't begin to imagine, maybe some deep-buried memory suddenly bulling its way to the front of her consciousness, that, yes, this woman had given birth to her.

Jessie found the note that she'd stuck in the pages of the Joyce Carol Oates novel she'd been reading. “I have reason to believe that you are my daughter by birth,” S. Bonet had written in green ink. “I would like to verify this. I can only assume that you would like to know, too. I beseech you to respond.”

Jessie lay back on her motel bed and closed her eyes. “Beseech” was a strong word.

She wished S. Bonet had not written this note. It was like getting a phone call that your father was murdered. You couldn't ignore it. It changed everything.

Jessie picked up her cell phone and dialed the number on the note.

It rang four or five times. Then a young-sounding woman's voice said, “Hello?”

“Is this Ms. Bonet?” said Jessie.

“This is Jill. I'm sorry. Simone's sleeping. Who's calling please?”