There were still dark moments when he felt shut away from his emotions, but he tried to have the same patience with himself that he allowed the neglected vineyards. He was much slower to flourish than they.
Tonight he felt restless and more than a little worried. He slid work-roughened hands into the pockets of khaki trousers stained with dirt. He’d dug holes for new trellis posts all day, and his body hummed with a comfortable fatigue that he had hoped would quiet his thoughts.
The wall phone in the kitchen rang with echoing urgency. Sebastien bolted indoors. “Yes?”
“Harry Brown, calling from Atlanta.”
“Have you learned anything new?”
“Well, I found her old college roommate. Name’s Liz Vandergard. Hosts a TV show in Atlanta. Sweetest little lady you’d ever want to talk to. We musta talked for thirty minutes. Just as open as you please.”
“What did she tell you?”
“She says that Ms. Miracle moved to Alaska five years ago to do social work with the Eskimos. Hell, I didn’t even know there were any Eskimos left in Alaska. Anyhow, that’s where she is, somewhere north of Nome. Ms. Vandergard says that Ms. Miracle was married twice—once to a rodeo cowboy named Bill Hickok and once to a Greek olive farmer named Hercule Poirot. But as far as Ms. Vandergard knows, Ms. Miracle is single right now. But she’s been dating an oil-rig worker in Nome for the past few months. Some Russian defector named Ivan Jackov.”
Sebastien leaned against the kitchen wall and shut his eyes. Bill Hickok? Hercules Poirot? Ivan Jackov? Harry Brown’s credentials hadn’t mentioned his incredible stupidity. “That is the most preposterous fable I have ever heard.”
“Huh?”
“Give me Liz Vandergard’s phone number.” When Harry complied, he memorized it distractedly, already thinking of new tactics. “Thank you, Mr. Brown. Your services won’t be needed anymore. You may send me your bill.”
“You don’t want me to follow this Nome lead?”
Sebastien looked heavenward. “No.”
As soon as Brown hung up Sebastian placed a call to Liz Vandergard’s office in Atlanta. He glanced at the digital clock atop the refrigerator. Late, but undoubtedly that ambitious woman would be in her office. Biting back his impatience, he worked his way through a receptionist and a secretary at the television station where Liz Vandergard worked.
“You just don’t give up, do you, Harry?” she said, by way of greeting. Her voice was butter-smooth and slightly amused.
“I beg your pardon. This is Dr. de Savin, as I explained to—”
“Right, sugar, right. Good accent. You sound like Charles Boyer with a stick up his ass.”
“I am not Harry Brown—”
“Brown, huh? The last time, you were Harry Garfield. The pect. So now you’re Dr. de Savin, huh? And you want to grill me about Amy Miracle.”
Sebastien gritted his teeth. “Didn’t she ever mention my name?”
“Oh, sure, Doctor, she mentioned it to a lot of people. I’m sure she even discussed it with your boss, the guy who hired you to do this bullshit job. And he’s so paranoid that he’d stoop to any kind of lie to get information on her. What’s the point?”
She sighed coyly. “Oh, wait, I get it. You’ve been told to find out if she ever played around on Mr. Big. So you wanta know everything she’s done over the past few years. Well, let’s just say this. The only thing she ever did wrong was put up with a lot of bullshit from him. And if he thinks he’s going to pester her, or hurt her, because she’s left him, why, you tell him that I’ll come out there and make him sing soprano. How would his fans like that?”
Sebastien gripped the phone. “Is she in danger? This singer, he wants to hurt her? How? You have to tell me. I assure you, I’m Sebastien de Savin—”
“Who dumped Amy ten years ago and never looked back. Yeah, right. You picked the wrong alias, Harry, if you wanted to get on my good side. Tell Mr. Big that he fucked up when he told you to con Liz Vandergard.”
“I’ll come to Atlanta and meet you in person. I’ll prove to you that I’m who I say I am.”
“Don’t bother. I won’t let you through the door. I won’t buy your dog-and-pony show. I’m not meeting with anybody who wants information about Amy.”
“At least send her a message for me.”
“From Doctor de Savin? And upset her with your stupid hoax? Hell, no. Harry, stop taking your cues from those private-eye shows on TV. They suck for authenticity.”
“I will do whatever it takes to win your confidence. You cannot assume I’m lying to you. If Amy needs help, I want to know about it. I have to know about it.”
“Right. Tell Mr. Big that he can help her by leaving her the fuck alone. And you leave me alone.” She hung up.
Sebastien stared at the phone and cursed viciously. Amy was in some kind of trouble, and this maniacal friend of hers was contributing to it with her misguided secrecy. Cold chills crawled down his back. He grabbed a phone directory. This time he would hire a dozen investigators and follow-up their leads in person.
“You stink!” a woman yelled from the back of the club, her voice slicing through the laughter around her. People gasped. Amy felt a momentary clutch of panic as the heat of embarrassment rose to her cheeks. Then she recovered and told the audience, “It’s hell when the folks at the halfway house come here on a field trip.”
The audience laughed with collective relief. Amy forced a nonchalant grin. One of the first rules of stand-up was to stay in control of the situation. You made the audience nervous when you let a heckler best you.
“You stink!” the woman yelled again. There was nothing worse than unimaginative hecklers. They bored the audience quickly, and it was hard to bounce comebacks off their one-note insults.
Amy glanced down to make certain her clench-hold on the mike stand wasn’t obvious. Keep the audience’s respect. Don’t let them feel sorry for you. She sighed and shook her head at the audience, as if weary. “What do you say to somebody who probably got her brains at Toys ‘R’ Us?”
While everyone else hooted and cheered, the heckler, a young, athletic-looking brunette, stood up and fast-balled a beer bottle at Amy. Self-preservation overtook shock, and Amy ducked. Still, the bottle grazed her temple.
In the chaos that followed, with the club’s bouncer wrestling both the brunette and her oversized boyfriend, Amy ignored the throbbing pain beside one brow and began emceeing the fight as if it were a wrestling match.
“I believe she’s got him in a triple bovine lock, folks! Yes, yes, what a technique! She could squeeze a man to death with that attitude! And now the killer boyfriend is doing the famous hold called I-spent-twenty-bucks-on-this-date-and-I’m-not-leaving-without-a-grope-from-someone.”
After the cursing pair was hauled out, the thrilled audience remained in a hyper mood. No way were they ready to sit still and listen right now. Amy waved good night and left the stage to a scattering of distracted applause.
In the wings the club manager slapped a bar cloth wrapped around ice on her temple and asked fearfully, “Are you really hurt? Is this gonna go on my insurance record?”
“I’m fine. No big deal. I’ll write about it in my memoirs. Is aspirin good for brain damage?” She trembled with humiliation and delayed nerves. Holding the ice pack in place with one hand, she made her way through a crowd of comics who commiserated fervently, though she knew that each was secretly thanking God the bimbo had gone crazy during her set, not his.
In the women’s dressing room she slumped on a bench in front of a big makeup mirror and scrutinized the pink knot rising on her right temple. A woman wearing an African-print shirt and jeans breezed in through the rear door, a tote bag slung over one shoulder. “I’m late. What’s going down?” she asked, throwing herself onto the bench.
“My career. Raneeta, there are nights when I think that this is no way for an adult to make a living.”
“Since when are we making a living?”
“Good point.”
Amy’s headache became a stab. “Oh, no.”
“He heard that we worked together at WDIG. He said he’s trying to find you for a client of his. What a load of crap. Elliot’s really devious.”
Amy felt sick. Why was Elliot checking so deeply into her past?
Raneeta chuckled. “The guy said he heard that you were involved with some singer.”
Amy groaned. So that was it. Elliot’s paranoid idea that she’d been seeing other men behind his back for years. “A singer?”
“I said I hadn’t seen you since college.” Raneeta punched her arm and chuckled again. “Then I got wild and made up this big story about you going to work for a TV station out in Oklahoma. As a weather girl. I said you were probably still there. I said you had changed your name. I gave him the name of this weather chick I know up there. She won’t mind.”
Amy stared at Raneeta in amazement. If all of her friends were making up stories like this one—and she knew that Mary Beth was doing it—then Elliot’s private investigators must be pulling their hair out. Not to mention what Elliot must be pulling out. There was fierce satisfaction in the knowledge. She held her aching head and felt victorious.
It was another dead end. After two months of ceaseless work, of chasing dozens of false stories all over the country, he had come to his last lead. Sebastian fought disappointment as the woman shook her ruffled gray head one more time.
“I don’t know who told you that we had a librarian here by that name and description, but it isn’t true.” She waved a hand at the small, whitewashed room with its modest bookcases. On one wall was a handmade poster promoting the Dothan, Texas, Easter festivities, coming up in a month. “If I had an extra librarian around here, I wouldn’t know what to do with her,” the woman told him. She looked at him with sympathy. “You came a long way to see this gal in person. I could have told you over the phone that there’s nobody named Amy Miracle workin’ here.”
Sebastian sank his fists into the pockets of the windbreaker he wore with brown slacks and the rumpled white shirt he’d had on since leaving San Francisco twelve hours earlier. Fatigue and frustration were gritty companions in his eyes. “I have a number of investigators looking for her, but I had hoped to find her myself, in person.” After ten years, and with so much to be said between them, he wanted their first meeting to be special.
But it was growing less likely that there would be a meeting, special or otherwise. How could a person inspire so many bizarre stories from so many different people? Everyone the investigators had talked to gave wildly dissimilar accounts of her life and whereabouts.
“You look like you need some rest,” the librarian said, and patted his arm. “This woman, you’ll find her. Just don’t give up.”
The irony of those words rang in his head as he thanked her and walked outside to the waiting limousine. Give up? How could one give up an obsession?
“You slayed ’em tonight, lady.”
Amy swiveled toward the nasal male voice. A fortyish man with red spiked hair smiled at her. He was dressed in the kind of unstructured pastel suit that some California men considered de rigueur. He was vice president in charge of comedy programming for a major cable channel, and if he wanted to look like the emcee of a punk Easter bunny show, nobody was going to tell him different. “Hi there, Freddie. I didn’t know you trekked out to clubs in the boonies.”
“I don’t, usually, but I wanted to catch your stand-up again. See how it was working. What kind of commitment have you got here?”
Her throat went dry. She took a large swallow of wine and said in a squeaky tone, “None. I show up at ten every night. I do my set. I get twenty-five bucks. I don’t show up, nobody’d notice.”
“I’m putting together a special. Gonna call it Funny Women. Cute, huh? I’ll probably tape it at the Alexus Theater about six weeks from now. It’ll be a showcase for the hottest new female comics. And you qualify. Interested?”
The crowd of comics at the bar stopped talking to stare. She began to shake even though she was smiling. “You want me, you got me,” she said as calmly as she could.
Freddie beamed. “Great. Have your agent call me.”
“Don’t be surprised if my agent sounds a lot like me.”
“That voice of yours is hard to imitate. Call me.” He hesitated. “Are you sure this won’t be a problem with Elliot?”
“No.” Not a problem. A disaster. Elliot’s erratic and sometimes violent behavior on the set had become common knowledge in the business. “No problem,” she repeated. “I just work for Elliot now. We’re just friends.”
“The show’s been sort of, uh, uh, different in the past few months. It’s not the writing—that’s better than ever—I can’t quite put my finger on it.”
“Don’t be polite, Freddie. Elliot’s losing control, and everybody can see it. The ratings have slipped a lot.”
“Don’t let him hold you back. Right now the last thing you need is a distracting man in your life.”
“Like I said, Elliot and I are just friends.”
“Great. Talk to you later. You’re on your way, lady.”
She remained riveted in place as he disappeared into the crowd. Finally she realized that people were congratulating her. She mumbled something polite and bolted for the club’s rear exit. Outside, by the dumpsters, under a balmy spring night, she sat down on a trash can and cried. I’m gonna make it big, Doc, I really am. I wish you knew.
“Patience!” Sebastien begged from the night sky over the vineyards, shaking a fist. In this isolated area he could stare as far into the blackness as he wanted without seeing the lights of any other house or farm. The hills seemed endless. The world was empty except for himself and ten years of mistakes that he couldn’t undo.
Rain began to tap gently at the porch roof. You have no patience, it taunted. He pivoted and walked inside, his large shoulders hunched under a mud-stained work shirt, his damp trousers clinging to legs that ached from carrying sacks of fertilizer all day.
Sebastien went through the stone cottage, turning on lights in the still-unfurnished rooms, anxious to push the cool, damp darkness outdoors. He loved the cottage, with its timbered hallway and tall ceilings. It reminded him of the houses in French villages.
He loved the solid feel of the stone floor and the openness of the rooms; the way enormous windows made the outdoors part of the cottage’s soul. He liked listening to his own footsteps echo through the halls and studying the shadows cast by the bare light bulbs in the old iron sconces that dotted every wall. Tonight, however, the sparseness of the cottage mocked him, making him think of his own emptiness.
Angry at his brooding, he went to the kitchen. It was a relic, but large and bright; he had built a wine rack from floor to ceiling on one wall, and the kitchen was crowded with pots, pans, bundles of herbs hanging from the ceiling, magazines stacked on a thick oak table and the heavyset chairs around it, and a portable television at one end of the scarred wooden counter beneath the cabinets.
Someday soon he would begin remodeling and furnishing, but for now he was content to let the cottage live comfortably with its imperfections, as he was trying to live with his own.
He started to make dinner, but decided he had no appetite. He went to the bedroom, where a few sparse pieces of furniture catered to a mattress and box springs set on a plain steel frame. Stretching out on his stomach, he forced himself to concentrate on reading a novel. Sometimes it amazed him to think that he had ever given up reading for pleasure.
Around midnight he put the novel aside and, rubbing his eyes, returned to the kitchen for a glass of water. Sleepless and raw-tempered, he flicked on the small television set and threw himself into a chair by the table. Propping his chin on one hand, he half-watched the program and listened to the murmur of rain on the windowsill above the sink.
American audiences liked the strangest things. He frow
ned at the program’s smirking, hyperactive host, who was interviewing—or was that intimidating?—an elderly man whose hobby was to dip dead insects in polyurethane and stick them by the hundreds to canvases to form the silhouettes of famous people. The entertainer’s questions were more cruel that funny.
The long day of physical labor caught up with him, and before he realized it he was dozing with his chin still braced on one hand. The loud blare of music at the program’s end woke him up. He stood wearily, a little disgruntled at his fatigue. Even though his body had never been more fit, it reminded him some days that he was one year away from forty.
He went to the noisy television, squinting at the program’s credits, which were scrolling down the screen. He was not becoming farsighted, he assured himself, idly testing his vision on the names and production titles. Perhaps a little farsighted, he admitted.
Dismayed at the thought, he reached for the set’s off button. His hand stopped in midair as a list of the show’s writers appeared on the screen. He grabbed the set and held it up, reading and rereading the name he could definitely see—but had trouble believing.
He had found her, right at the end of his fingertips.
Amy didn’t sleep much during the night. Exhilarated by Freddie’s offer and worried about how Elliot would take the news, she left her apartment early and made the long rush-hour drive to Burbank in record time—one hour. Thornton After Hours was based in a five-story stucco building surrounded by palm trees. The writers shared a communal office on the top floor, in a ten-room suite next to the studio where the show was taped when it wasn’t being shot on location.
“Is Elliot in yet?” she asked the show’s receptionist.
She looked startled. “Oh, no. We thought he was with you last night. He disappeared right after we taped. We thought that he’d followed you, uhmmm, uh, that you two had a reconciliation, maybe.”
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