The Nomination (24 page)

He followed the edge of the woods around to the front corner of the house. From there, he could see that Li An was still sleeping on the deck. The way she was sitting, she had her back to the house. It would be best if she stayed asleep, but if she woke up, the way she was facing she wouldn't see him, and in her wheelchair, she couldn't come inside to interrupt him.

So he darted out of the cover of the trees, went to the front door, and turned the knob. It swung open, as he expected.

The door opened into a single big room that encompassed the living room, the dining room, and the kitchen. Eddie Moran didn't know much about art, but he liked the stuff hanging on the walls. And he liked the looks of the furniture, and the colorful rugs on the wood floors, and the feeling of space and light.

He noticed those things, but he wasted no time pondering them. He had work to do.

He went upstairs first. If he should be interrupted, if the blonde should return earlier than he expected, he'd be able to slip away easier if he was downstairs. So he wanted to get the upstairs out of the way first.

There were two small bedrooms and a bathroom up there. It was pretty obvious that they were hardly ever used. A thin layer of dust covered the windowsills and bedside tables. Moran opened the drawers of the tables, careful not to disturb the coating of dust. They were empty. He rifled through the dressers and found only women's clothes and mothballs. The closets held winter-weight jackets and pants. Sweaters were piled on the shelves. He rummaged around and shone his flashlight into the corners. No shoeboxes filled with old photos. No shoeboxes at all, in fact.

He guessed these were guest rooms, and the two women didn't have guests very often. It appeared that they only used the upstairs for storage. Anyway, Li An couldn't go upstairs. If she had the photos, they'd most likely be someplace where she could get at them.

There was nothing in the medicine cabinet or the linen closet in the bathroom except medicine and linens.

Moran crept downstairs. He was wearing sneakers and soft clothing. He could move anywhere in complete silence. He could slither and slink invisibly and noiselessly though buildings as easily as through forests and jungles. He would have been an excellent burglar if he'd chosen that career path.

Well, come to think of it, that's what he was doing. Burglarizing Li An's house. As he had Bunny's.

He went directly to the rear corner of the first floor where, based on his observations, he would find her bedroom.

The first thing he saw was the snapshot propped up against the base of the lamp on the table beside her bed. He picked it up. He had seen it before. This photo had been in the shoebox in Bunny Brubaker's closet in Florida. It was one of the dozen or so photos he had come here to retrieve.

He looked at it. The four of them. Larrigan and Li An, Bunny and Eddie. Plus the baby. Larrigan was holding the baby.

Jesus, they looked young.

It wasn't Eddie Moran's nature to waste a lot of time pondering the past or speculating about the future, and especially not when he was in the process of searching a house and time was of the essence. But still, he couldn't help thinking about how things changed. Now Larrigan was about to become a Supreme Court Justice. Li An was in a wheelchair, and Bunny was dead.

Eddie? Well, Eddie was still doing what he was good at, what he'd been trained for.

He wondered whatever became of the baby. Doubtful a baby would have survived what happened in Saigon.

He stuck the photo in his jacket pocket.

He found a handwritten note and a photocopy of a newspaper clipping—but no more photos—folded up in an envelope in the bedside table drawer. The note was from Bunny. It didn't mention Larrigan directly, but it confirmed that she'd sent Li An the photographs. The clipping had a photo of a woman kneeling beside a man's body. He skimmed the story quickly. Something about an assassination attempt. The woman had a Chinese name. He could read it later.

He folded the note and the clipping, put them back in the envelope, and stuck them in his pocket along with that single photo.

Then he began a methodical search for the other photos that Bunny had mailed to Li An.

It took him thirty-two minutes to cover the two bedrooms, the bathroom, the living room, and the bookshelf-lined den. The other photos were not there. Now forty-one minutes had elapsed since he'd entered. He had just nine more minutes.

He thought it was interesting that there was no TV in the entire house. Lots of books, though.

He found the portable tape recorder on the counter in the kitchen. Moran popped the recorder open. There was a cassette tape in it, and it appeared to be half full.

He put the tape in his pocket.

There was an open twelve-pack of cassette tapes on the shelf. There were three left in the pack. He took one out, slid it into the recorder, and snapped it shut. He hoped they wouldn't notice that now there were only two cassettes left in the pack, and he trusted that when they went to play back the new tape that he'd put in the machine, and found it empty, they'd figure that Li An had just forgotten to turn it on, or had accidentally erased it.

A twelve-pack of tapes. Three left in the pack, one in the recorder. That left eight tapes unaccounted for.

Moran thought of the bag the bearded guy drove away with. Could've been eight tapes in that bag.

He looked for the rest of the photos in all the kitchen drawers and cabinets. No luck.

He eased out onto the glassed-in sunporch. From there he could see Li An in her wheelchair. She was facing the valley and the distant hills. She appeared to be still asleep.

There were some bookshelves and a big oak desk on the sunporch. Moran went to the desk. In the top drawer were files holding bills and tax returns and some legal documents. He rifled through them quickly, aware of the time. The photos were not there. Maybe some of that other stuff was relevant, but he didn't have time to read everything, and he didn't dare steal them. What he wanted was those other photographs that linked Larrigan with Li An, that connected him to that time and place and those secrets.

It was troublesome that she didn't have them. It meant that somebody else did.

In the bottom drawer he found a gun. It was wrapped in an oily rag. Without moving the gun, he pulled away the corner of the rag. It was a square, short-barreled little silver automatic, looked like a .32 caliber. As Bond would say, a lady's gun. Moran smiled. Why not? A couple of women living way the hell out in the sticks ought to have a gun in the house. You never knew when some burglar was going to open the front door and walk in.

He closed the drawer. He was done. The rest of those photographs were not in the house. Eddie Moran would stake his reputation on it.

Aside from taking that single photo, Bunny's note, the newspaper clipping, and the half-filled cassette, he left everything exactly as he'd found it.

Li An would miss the photo as soon as she went into her bedroom. She obviously kept it propped up beside her bed because it was important to her. She'd figure it must have fallen under the bed or something. The next morning she'd probably ask the blonde to help her look for it, and the fact that they couldn't find it would be puzzling. But these things happened to everybody, and judging from the way Li An slept all the time, he guessed she was taking medication that would confuse and disorient her and make her doubt her memory.

She'd notice the missing envelope, too. Maybe not right away, though. She might not even connect it to the missing photo. Either way, she and the blonde would be baffled. They'd look everywhere. They'd blame the cleaning lady or poltergeists. Each would suspect the other of misplacing it.

It would end up being a mystery.

The last thing that would occur to them would be that they'd been burglarized. Especially when the burglar was as neat and efficient as Eddie Moran. And nothing of any value was missing.

He looked at his watch. His time was up. He moved quickly into the living room and peeked out the window. The Wagoneer was nowhere in sight.

He slipped out the front door and was back under his hemlocks in two minutes.

Twelve minutes later he heard the now familiar rumble of the old Wagoneer coming down the driveway in low gear. He didn't bother watching through the binoculars or recording the time in his notebook this time.

Eddie Moran was done here.

And so, waiting for night to fall, he settled back against the trunk of the hemlock and allowed himself to think about how good the blonde looked in her cropped T-shirt and snug, low-slung jeans. Maybe some day . . .

AFTER DINNER, SIMONE Sat out on the sunporch to watch the darkness arrive. Almost immediately her eyelids grew heavy. She fought against sleep. She feared sleep—or, more accurately, she feared waking up. She was sleeping more and more. Her daytime naps came more frequently, and they lasted longer, sometimes two or three hours. She was going to bed barely after sundown now that the longest days of the year had arrived. She tended to awaken early, and in those vulnerable early moments of consciousness, in the gray half-light of the day's first hour, she invariably felt in her heart an overpowering weight of dread and despair, and behind her eyes lingered the images and emotions of awful dreams.

Some days, the bleakness never went away. It was not fear of death. Simone had reconciled herself to death. It was . . . emptiness. Her life, she believed, had no meaning. She had contributed nothing. She would be remembered, if at all, for being one of the first actresses to reveal a glimpse of her pubic hair in a movie.

What a legacy.

But now there was Mac's book. Her book. And now there was Jessie Church. Her own daughter. Simone had much to live for, she told herself. She had goals and purposes. She had things to do and events to anticipate.

So why did that overpowering weight of dread and doom continue to press on her heart?

Well, the irony was not lost on her. Now, after an aimless, useless life, she'd finally found hope and purpose, a reason to want to live. And now she was dying.

“You better take me to my room,” she said to Jill. “I can't seem to keep my eyes open.”

Jill wheeled Simone into her bedroom and, with an arm around her shoulders, helped her move from the wheelchair into her bed. She fussed with the blankets and Simone's pillow, then bent and kissed her forehead.

Simone lifted her hand and touched Jill's face. “I love you,” she said.

Jill nodded. “I love you, too.” She kissed Simone softly on the lips, smiled, then turned and left the room.

Simone lay there staring up at the ceiling, trying not to cry. After a few minutes, she rolled onto her side to turn off the lamp on the table beside her bed.

It took her a moment to realize that something was missing. The photo, the one she'd taken from the batch that Bunny sent her, that she'd been keeping propped up against the base of the lamp—it was gone.

Probably fell off the table, she thought. The movement of air from pushing back the blankets and fluffing the pillows and getting into bed would do it. It got blown onto the floor, maybe under the bed. She'd have to remember to ask Jill to look for it in the morning.

Simone lay awake longer than usual, worrying about her photo, knowing it was irrational but feeling in her stomach that awful dread, the feeling that something terrible had happened. Or maybe it was a premonition that something terrible was going to happen.