The Bone Parade (45 page)

The note proved blessedly brief: “Good luck, sweetheart. I’m with you.”

But not brief enough to keep her from seeing that he could have chosen his words more carefully, too, made them less susceptible to sarcasm.
I’m with you.
Where were you a few months ago? And where are you now?

A quick, furtive look around the lobby assured her that he wasn’t haunting its remote corners. Thank God for small favors.

She took the key card from the receptionist and handed it to the bellman.

They stepped off the elevator on the sixteenth floor, and she trailed him to a plummy suite with a large bedroom. Nice. The Congress was treating her well.

She heard the bellman opening the drapes and turned to take in a view of Lake Michigan as wide as the horizon itself.

Two weeks ago clocks were set back an hour, and though it was still early evening, the blackening sky, with its gray filaments of cloud, looked like an eerie reflection of the dark, windswept water.

A chill prickled her arms, and as she rubbed them, the bellman, more alert than most, pointed out the thermostat. He turned it up, and as he left she handed him a five.

She unzipped her laptop case and reviewed her speech, double-checking the most painfully revealing lines.

The words she’d written over the past few weeks left her stomach feeling as if she’d never left the elevator, and more glad than ever that she’d declined the invitation to dinner. Hardly tempted in any case by the morel-stuffed mahi-mahi that was, at this very moment, taking its final bow on terra firma.

The bellman had hung her garment bag in a closet with a full-length mirror on the door. After slipping on a cerulean blue dress that highlighted her eyes, she gave herself a once-over, fluffed her honey-colored hair, which promptly deflated in palpable protest, and called it good.

Not quite. In deference to the harsh lights that seemed to bear down on every podium she’d ever commanded, she reluctantly applied mascara, lip gloss, and enough blush to enliven her pallid Portland complexion. About as much as she’d concede to the dogs of demeanor. But she’d learned the hard way that when you went before your public, you really did ignore your appearance at your own peril. That hideous photograph of her in
People
? Taken at a speech she’d given in Orlando two months ago. All the proof—and impetus—she’d ever need to primp.

She returned to her laptop, checking the time on the screen. Fifteen minutes and counting. One more look at the speech, even though she’d committed every last pause to memory.

Second thoughts? “Try third and fourth ones, too,” she murmured.
But you’re not turning back now.

The title sounded simple enough, “Opening Records in the Era of Open Adoption,” but simplicity in all guises is pure deception—ask any magician worth his wand—and this surely proved true in the scroll of words her eyes now scanned.

Minutes later she made the trip back down the elevator and glanced in the ballroom as she headed to the backstage entrance. Packed! Camera crews choked the aisles, including one from
60 Minutes
and another from
Dateline NBC.
Both shows had been hounding her for interviews. Ed Bradley himself had called, not some assistant to the assistant producer. She’d liked his manner on the phone, very smooth, yet chummy, but supposed that every reporter had learned to give good phone, a skill as necessary to their success as it was to the practitioners of another, more bluntly seductive art. He was so good she’d almost asked him what he was wearing.

All the attention was a sign, she supposed, that she was truly emerging into national prominence and mainstream interest, coming as it did only three weeks after that cover story in
People
. The headline? “The Orphans’ Private Eye,” a gussied-up way of overstating the humdrum nature of her work, which typically entailed hours of web searches and visits to the dustiest removes of distant libraries. She had allowed to the reporter that occasionally she did the work of an actual gumshoe—surveillance, interviews, impersonation—and evidently that had been enough to earn her the colorful sobriquet. But danger, the kind often associated with PIs? Not a bit. Her world was no more noirish than a cheese blintz.

The initial blip of publicity had occurred two years ago right here in Chicago when she’d appeared on
Oprah
; but she’d shared that hour with birth mothers and their children and had been featured only briefly, which had been fine with her. But
60 Minutes, People, Dateline NBC
? This was a whole new level of fame, and she wasn’t sure it was good for the open adoption movement to be wedded so closely to one person, even if that person happened to be her.

Hush

Mark Nykanen
won four Emmys and an Edgar Allan Poe Award as a correspondent for NBC News. This is his third novel, following on the heels of his previous highly acclaimed thriller, The Bone Parade. He lives in Nelson, British Columbia.

For more information, please visit http://www.marknykanen.com

Copyright © 2004 Mark Nykanen

Norwegian Wood
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EPub Edition © AUGUST 2010 ISBN: 978-1-401-39932-0

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