The Accident (27 page)

She glances over and catches Jeffrey eyeing her, and gives him a coy little smile. He looks sheepish and returns his attention to the road, accelerating across the wind-whipped causeway, speeding toward the end of the continent. Isabel tries to lose herself in the scenery, the idea of being here, out of the city, surrounded by blues and greens, water and sand, grass and trees, alongside this man who loves her, this man she might love.

An escape from life, an escape from reality. But not even that: this is just the fantasy of an escape, a fleeting self-delusion. She manages to get a second’s relaxation out of it, maybe two, before the reality of this flight crashes to the forefront of her mind, like a desperate junky bursting into a twenty-four-hour convenience store at two a.m., waving a gun in a shaking hand.

“T
urn left up here.”

Jeffrey leans forward, over the wheel. “Where?”

“There, that little clearing.”

He turns the car onto the gravel, nuzzling the front fender against a weathered chain hanging from chunky wooden posts. Isabel climbs out of the car, unhooks the chain, lets it fall. She waves Jeff through, then replaces the chain and climbs back into the passenger seat. This is their second stop in five minutes; the first was to buy vegetables at a farmstand. Dinner.

Jeffrey drives slowly, bumping over the narrow rutted dirt path through thick vine-choked woods, climbing a slight grade, occasionally
a glimpse of open farmland through the trees. They come to a circular drive surrounding a stand of trees, a shingled house bordered by tall grasses.

They get out of the car, walk to the side of the house, where it becomes clear that they’re atop a towering bluff, a steep drop of fifty feet—more?—down to a rocky beach, slate-blue water, a sliver of land on the horizon.

“Nice place,” Jeffrey says. “What’s that land over there?”

“Connecticut.”

“Aren’t the Hamptons on the Atlantic?”

She can’t tell if he’s being genuine or facetious. “Did you notice us driving through any towns called Hampton? Westhampton, Southampton, Bridgehampton?” This is one of those things assumed by New Yorkers of a certain type: that everyone is familiar with the geography of the South Fork of Long Island.

“What do I know from the Hamptons? I thought we were taking a shortcut. The back roads. Whatever.”

She shakes her head.

“But isn’t Judy’s house in the Hamptons?”

“It is. But we’re not going there: that’s where I want people to
think
we’re going. I want them to follow us to Judy’s house. But we’re nowhere near there.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do you want them—whoever
they
are—to go to Judy’s house?”

“Because her place is next door to a movie star’s house with head-of-state-level security. If anyone unsavory shows up there, taking unsavory action, there’ll be a full-out war.”

Isabel rummages around a large terra-cotta planter filled with lavender, digs out a set of keys on a hardware-store ring. She unlocks the front door, large and heavy and inset with panels of stained glass, a loud creak as it swings open.

She drops her bag in the foyer and walks into the large living room
with the view of the water, shimmering in the late-afternoon light. The beadboard walls offer a very different view, of hundreds of black-and-white photos of every size and shape and type, from tiny Polaroids up through poster-size prints. Each and every one of people.

“So whose house
is
this?”

“Naomi’s.”

“Ah.” Jeffrey nods. “I ran into her just this afternoon.” Everyone in New York book publishing knows—or knows of—the owner of the independent bookstore in Greenwich Village, in whose front room many a first novelist had their first readings.

Jeffrey examines the wall. “What’s with all the photos? This sort of looks like the work of a serial killer. I didn’t realize Naomi was nuts.”

“These are Naomi’s friends. Her life. These are all people who’ve visited this house over the past decade. This had been her parents’ house; the bookstore was theirs too.” Isabel scans the wall. “Naomi loves film, of every sort. She used to be a filmmaker.” She locates the picture she’s looking for, a glossy eight-by-ten at eye height. “Look.” She points. “We spent a long weekend here.”

She watches Jeffrey lean in to get a better look, Isabel with her son and ex-husband. She looked so much younger back then; so much happier. But it wasn’t that long ago.

“It was our last vacation.”

CHAPTER 34

N
aomi needs to use both hands to carry the giant bottle of donated Italian white, pouring sloppy splashes into flimsy cups. The bookstore plays host to some glass-stemware parties, and some plastic-cup parties; this is one of the latter.

The author finished his reading and Q&A a half-hour earlier, but he’s still seated at the small table in the back room, inscribing books and chatting with his friends, who like him are in their late twenties, nearly all the men wearing plaid or porkpies with tight blue jeans rolled at the cuff. The women all seem to have glittering little studs in their nostrils, and ironic eyeglasses or haircuts, or both.

Naomi squeezes the author’s shoulder as she walks by, a more intimate gesture than their relationship warrants. But her business is cultivating intimacy with authors, as well as with editors and publishers, publicists and sponsors—the jug wine has been donated, as has the cheap cheese—and bloggers and newspapers, and the community board and the principals of the local elementary schools, and anyone else who can help a bookshop maintain its presence as a neighborhood institution, a cultural center, a community resource.

She walks out the French doors and down the few steps into the backyard, which had always been a neglected overgrown haven for rats
and pigeons during the decades that her parents owned the shop. They’d started the radical left-wing bookstore back in the early seventies, when such an enterprise constituted a viable retail segment, bizarrely. Over the years Berger’s Books transformed into a general bookstore, reflecting the evolution of the Village itself, from a low-rent haven for artists and writers and musicians and intellectuals, then to the epicenter of East Coast gay life, then to an enclave for yuppies who preferred their gentrification with a whiff of bohemian, and most recently the realignment that accompanied an influx of the downright rich and famous, refugees from Beverly Hills and the Upper East Side who pay five million for one-bedroom penthouses. Bleecker Street was once littered with cluttered little shops selling beat-up antiques and used vinyl and secondhand books and novelty condoms. Now it is almost exclusively high-end fashion.

Naomi grew up in this shop, doing her homework sitting on the floor in the history section, stocking shelves as a teenager, starting the newsletter and building the website. But she always had other full-time-ish jobs in the film industry, while at the same time constantly trying to raise the money to produce her own highly experimental—and admittedly not widely understood—short films. Perhaps this didn’t look like a satisfying life for a fully grown adult woman. But as she kept telling her parents, it was.

Then they died; a drunk driver during broad daylight on the Long Island Expressway. Suddenly Naomi was the sole proprietor of the shop. She couldn’t bear to simply shutter the joint, nor to look for buyers. So she took the helm, temporarily, during one of those occasional windows when the finances of the book business appear to be in relatively good shape. People in Greenwich Village bought a lot of books, and didn’t welcome chain stores; Berger’s was doing all right. And Naomi quickly grew fond of the whole thing, the employees and the customers and the authors, the kids and their moms who came to the Saturday-morning readings.

It took her a few years to admit that her temporary stewardship had
turned permanent. Then she hired a guy to build a simple counter in the rear, and bought a handful of beat-up café tables, and an espresso machine, and a few baskets for baked goods. A place to hang out on a rainy day. And for when it wasn’t raining, she reconfigured the backyard, put some secondhand teak furniture out there, plus a few bins of plastic toys, and all-weather outlets for the computer users—the writers and programmers and start-up dreamers—who swarm into every café every midmorning, living their office-less lives in public, absorbing free wi-fi. Not too many of these café people buy books, at least not regularly; but they do pay for coffee and scones. Some days she sells more scones than books.

But now these backyard tables are occupied by the party’s smokers, dropping their butts into nearly empty plastic glasses, getting jovially drunk on a Tuesday night.

Her phone rings. She glances at the screen, and sees something odd: it seems to be herself who’s calling. “Hello?”

“Hi Naomi, it’s Isabel.” Her old friend, calling from the landline in Naomi’s weekend house. Another of her parents’ follies from the seventies—a ramshackle shingled house atop a tall bluff near the end of Long Island. It was the middle of nowhere, back then; bought for a song, and slowly renovated on the cheap. Her parents were pretty astute investors, for a couple of Communists.

“Are you in my house, Isabel?”

“Is that okay?”

“Of
course
. I have only one best friend who’s also my literary agent.” When Naomi was halfway through writing her memoir, she’d sent it to a very encouraging, extremely astute Isabel, who helped her re-imagine the whole structure, turning it into a much better book than Naomi would’ve—could’ve—written on her own. And then Isabel had represented the project, submitted it to a dozen editors, and within a few weeks had collected a half-dozen offers, reaching all the way up to $110,000. Six figures!

But of course the agent’s commission was 15 percent off the top. And who knew that the advance was payable in four separate disbursements? And because it wasn’t Naomi’s sole revenue in any of the four years of payouts, she had to lump the money into her overall income, taxed at her general rate for city, state, federal. So in the end that six-figure payday translated into four deposits of roughly $15,000 apiece, spread over four years.

One of the partygoers is telling a very loud story, and Naomi looks around for an unoccupied spot, a quiet zone. She starts to walk inside. “You know you’re always—
always
—welcome.”

“Thanks,” Isabel says. “Sorry I didn’t call to ask, or anything. It’s been … This has been a very strange day.”

Naomi unlocks the door to the windowless office, dim and quiet and tiny. “Everything okay?”

“Oh … God, it’s hard to explain. But listen, Naomi, the cameras in the house: they still work, right?”

For her most recent film project, Naomi had secretly wired the entire ground floor of the country house with small hidden cameras, and microphones. “Yeah.”

“Good. Would you mind telling me how you turn them on?”

This was unexpected. “Sure.”

“Good, thanks. And Naomi?”

“Yeah?”

“That gun? Is it still here?”

“So we’re in agreement?” Charlie asked.

Dave nodded.

“This is exciting,” Charlie said, smiling broadly. “Are you excited?”

“I am.”

Everything was going better than expected. So they had started talking about what was next, with that optimistic arrogance particular to young men like them. And next was the American cable news network, whose investors were already lining up. Charlie was going to have his own show, the main draw, weeknights prime-time.

“We’re going to do great things,” Charlie said, gazing out the window of Wolfe Worldwide Media’s main conference room, perched atop an old building in Silicon Alley, with open views of the Empire State Building, just a half-mile away. “Great things.”

“We are.”

“You don’t sound too convinced.”

Dave tapped his pen on the pad for a few beats. “We still haven’t discussed it, Charlie.”

Charlie shifted in his seat. He took a sip of coffee, replaced his cup to the table.

“I’m talking about the other girl. The one in the dance club.”

“I know what you’re talking about.”

“She may have seen us. She may be able to identify you, or me for that matter. When you’re on television all the time …” Dave held out his hands, explaining the rest of that unappealing narrative.

“Then she might recognize me.” Charlie provided it, confirmation that he understood. “She might come forward, point a finger:
That’s him! The last person with my friend before she disappeared! J’accuse!!
Is that what you’re afraid of?”

“Yes, that’s right. Aren’t you?”

Charlie blinked his assent. “So are you merely pointing out an obvious problem? Or do you have a solution?”

“Do you?”

Charlie picked up his coffee again, but didn’t raise it to his mouth. “We have to determine whether that’s likely to happen, don’t we?”

“Duh. How?”

“First we find her. That shouldn’t be so hard. Her name was in the newspapers, we know where she went to college, and when. We should be able–”

“Yeah,” Dave cut him off, “I got it: we can find her. Then?”

“We figure out if she recognizes me. Which I’m sure she won’t. So we’ll be in the clear.”

Dave smiled, condescendingly. “Yes Charlie,” he said, leaning forward, forearms on thighs, hands clasped in front of him, prayer-like, “but what if she does?”