CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Bonnie Jerome checked her watch. She’d skipped lunch to be ready for Frankel’s return call, and now here it was nearly two, and her stomach was ready to consume itself.
To hell with him, she told herself. If Mr. Important didn’t have the common decency to return a simple phone call, then she wasn’t going to wait around all day. What was it about the executive mind-set, she wondered, that made them think people had nothing better to do than wait for them to bestow their precious attention?
The really irritating part was, she didn’t even care about the damn call. It was probably some computer glitch, anyway. With her luck, when Frankel finally rang back, she’d get an earful of just how important he was and how he didn’t have time for petty issues like this. That was certainly the impression she’d gotten from his secretary when Bonnie refused to pass along the substance of the message.
“I’m cleared for everything,” the secretary had pointed out.
“Not according to the message,” Bonnie countered, after which the conversation had ended abruptly.
Maybe she should just call and get it over with; just leave a message with the secretary and get on with her day. Much as she hated to admit it, the prospect of talking to the heir apparent for the directorship had Bonnie a bit frazzled. All things considered, she’d be just as comfortable…
The phone rang, nearly launching her through the ceiling. It had been like this all day. Every time the phone chirped, she’d assumed it was The Man, only to find it was business as usual.
Don’t seem overly anxious, she told herself
The phone rang again. Bonnie hovered her hand over the receiver until it just started into its third ring. “Information Systems,” she said, picking up. “This is Bonnie Jerome.”
“Hold for Deputy Director Frankel, please.” She recognized the secretary’s voice from that morning, and she found herself on hold before she could say a word.
Here we go.
An abrupt click, and he was there. “Hello, Ms. Jerome, this is Deputy Director Frankel. I understand you have a message to relay to me?”
It was him! She recognized his voice from all of the training videos she’d watched and from his appearances on television.
“Um, h-hello, Mr. Frankel,” she stammered. “Th-thanks for getting back to me.”
“What is it you needed?” Suddenly his tone was flat; all business.
“Well, I work down in Information Systems. Actually, I’m a supervisor down here…”
“I know who you are, Ms. Jerome,” Frankel interrupted. “This really is a very busy day. If you could get to the point?”
How does he know who I am? Bonnie’s mind screamed. “Yes, sir. Well, overnight, we got notice that someone over at EPA had accessed a file that was apparently under surveillance at one time…”
“A file?” Where once there had been only annoyance in Frankel’s tone, she heard a trace of interest.
“Yes, sir. A computer file. On a place called Newark, Arkansas?”
“Yes.” The word came fast and hard, as if shot from a nail gun.
“You’ve heard of it, then?” she asked.
“Heard of it! Good God, Jerome, do you live in a cave?”
Whoops! Clearly, she’d revealed her ignorance. At FBI headquarters, everyone assumed that everyone else watched the news and read the newspapers. She struggled on: “In any case, the warning attached to the file said you were to be notified immediately if anyone accessed it. Of course, I nearly didn’t bother you, since the access came from inside EPA…”
“Do you have a name?” Frankel interrupted.
The question caught her off balance. “Well, y-yes, sir. I’m Bonnie Jerome, in Infor-”
“Not you!” Frankel boomed. “The person accessing the file! Do you have a name on who accessed it?”
Bonnie jumped at the sound of his voice and inexplicably felt like crying. Why did he have to yell like that? She fumbled through the printout, looking for the name. It was always in the header, buried among the lines of seemingly meaningless text, yet she always had trouble finding it. “Here it is,” she announced. “Shows up as a Nicholas Thomas.”
She could hear Frankel whisper the name to himself, as if tasting the words. “ Nick Thomas?”
Bonnie shrugged. Like he could see the gesture through the phone. “I suppose so,” she said, but her words were wasted on an empty line.
Melissa Thomas was up to her elbows-literally-in clay when the phone rang. This was the first of her Christmas orders-for a rich museum patron in Los Angeles-and if she didn’t get started on them soon, she’d be giving back a lot of money to a lot of very disappointed people. When she’d first thought of mailing out a catalog of her works, never in a million years did she think she’d get this kind of response.
“Lauren, can you get that, honey?” she called out to her five-year-old. “Tell them Mommy can’t come to the phone.” The thunder of footsteps sufficed as a delighted “yes.”
Now, of course, Nick was off on some dead-end job interview, so not only did she have to fulfill all the orders but she also had to mold, fire, paint, and glaze five pots a day just to make the mailing deadline. It was doable, but a royal pain without a little help.
Melissa heard Lauren pick up the receiver and listened as she ran through the standard street-smart dialogue. “I’m sorry, she can’t come to the phone,” the little voice said, bringing a smile to her mother’s face.
Kneading the clay was therapeutic, created a ruminative state. If Nick could just move away from the past, this marriage could actually survive. But if he thinks, even for one minute, that I’m moving to Arkansas…
“But he’s not home,” Lauren said to the telephone.
Whoa! That was a major break from the script. How many times had they discussed this? Lauren was never to tell anyone that people weren’t home. Melissa stood, and turned the water on full with her elbow. The correct answer was always…
“He went to Noah’s Ark,” Lauren said.
What the… “Lauren! Who is that on the phone?”
“No!” Lauren said emphatically. “That’s where he went! To Noah’s Ark!”
Melissa turned off the water and grabbed a towel. “Lauren, answer me, young lady! Who is on the telephone?”
“Yeah, that’s it!” Lauren announced proudly. “Newah… Whatever you said. That’s it.”
Melissa closed the distance quickly, but not quickly enough.
“Okay, you’re welcome. Bye-bye.” Lauren hung up the receiver.
“Who was that?” Melissa demanded.
Lauren shrugged. “I dunno,” she said uneasily, clearly aware that she’d violated a rule. “Somebody who wanted to know where Daddy went.”
Melissa sighed disapprovingly, then planted her fists on her hips. “Young lady,” she said, “you and I are going to have a long talk about telephone behavior.”
“I love what you’ve done with the place,” Jake said, cringing in the dull light of the hotel room.
Travis was more succinct. “God, it stinks in here!”
“Is this the same room we had last time?” Carolyn asked.
Jake brought his eyebrows together, and he turned to get his bearings out the front window. “Maybe,” he said, pulling on his lip. “Though I’d have guessed a little bit further down the row. It was close to here, though.”
Nick led them to the card table, where he’d already prioritized everything they needed to talk about. As everyone settled into a chair, Nick touched Travis on the shoulder. “Hey, buddy, want to do me a favor?”
Travis looked to his mom and got a nod. “I guess,” he said.
Nick brought a penknife out of his pants pocket. “Great. Take this knife here and open up those boxes, okay? Be careful, though. Use the blade to break the tape only. I don’t want you to tear anything.”
Travis’s eyes grew inadvertently wider, showing a youngster’s instinctive fascination with all things shiny and
