Out Of Control

The phone rang. She decided to let the machine pick it up.

From where she sat, she could hear the English accent. Nicholas Wynne.

“I hope your stepmother’s on the mend and, of course, I still very much want to talk to you. It’s quite incredible being here in Laguna, actually seeing the places your father painted. Please give me a call at your earliest convenience.”

A fly buzzed annoyingly around her face and she swatted it with her hand, then she got up, took the iced tea pitcher inside and stuck it in the sink. In the fridge, she found a carton of leftover Chinese takeout. She carried it into the living room and flipped on the TV.

Dr. Phil was talking about emotional eating, of all things. Of using food as comfort. Daisy feigned surprise. People do that? She watched as he reduced a fat woman in a red dress to tears, then decided watching other people’s pain when there was nothing you could do to help them was a sick kind of voyeurism. Kind of like being a biographer, when she stopped to think about it. Maybe she’d suggest a quid pro quo. “I’ll tell you about my life, if you tell me about yours.” But then what did she care about Nicholas Wynne or his life?

CHAPTER THREE

“WITH RISING TEMPERATURES and Santa Ana winds stoking fires throughout Southern California, the question on the minds of many in Laguna Beach is, Can it happen again?”

Nick slumped on the sofa, and gazed bleary-eyed at the TV. Late morning sunshine poured in through the French doors, heating the room to tropical temperatures. He sneezed, then sneezed again. He wore the white terry-cloth robe that had been in the bathroom, along with other niceties, such as shoe-cleaning cloths and lavender-scented body wash—compensation, he supposed, for the small fortune he was paying for an oceanfront apartment. A justifiable expense since this would be his definitive work. The work that would earn him a vast quantity of money, enough to take Bella on holidays to exotic destinations, indulge her every whim and, possibly, buy himself the silver Porsche Carrera GT he’d salivated over in the showroom window of Laguna Motors yesterday.

I should get up and open the doors, he thought. I should turn off the TV and start work. I should try to reach Daisy Fowler again. He was starting to feel mildly rejected by Daisy Fowler and just a bit disappointed in her.

He sneezed again. And again.

He’d awakened just before dawn, sneezing his head off. Allergies, apparently from the winds that blew like demons and kept him awake half the night. At one point, he’d been certain someone was breaking into his apartment. Grabbing a shoe, the only thing remotely weaponlike he could find, he’d crept into the living room. The noise, he’d discovered, was a plastic plate, probably blown from somebody’s rubbish bin, hitting the glass of the French windows.

On TV, a reporter was interviewing a fire chief.

The current weather, Nick learned, was eerily similar to conditions fourteen years ago when flames ravaged the local scenic canyons and hills, destroying hundreds of homes in and around Laguna Beach.

“It’s not a question of if fire will revisit Laguna Beach,” the fire chief was saying. “It’s a question of when.”

He would have to remember to tell Bella. “It’s a good thing you didn’t come, darling. No really. Fires burning everywhere. Entire hillsides blazing. No, no, the beaches haven’t burned up, but still…”

He sneezed. He got up from the couch, sat down at the table where he’d put up his computer. He thought about Daisy. Perhaps he’d built up an image of her that no actual woman could live up to. The golden-haired child basking in the sunlight of her father’s love, grown into an ethereal goddess…who had an ex-husband, a fourteen-year-old daughter and goats. And who didn’t return his phone calls. He mulled this for a while, tried to come up with plausible reasons why she might not want to talk to him. He sneezed. Difficult to think while sneezing. He returned to the couch.

He had lined up some other interviews over the next few days. A woman from the Laguna Historical Society who knew Frank from years ago; another breakfast, this one with a gallery owner who had worked with Truman. All peripheral to the biography, though. Truman’s relationship with Daisy as reflected in his art was the central theme of the work. Truman was dead, so no one else really mattered but Daisy. He would give her until this evening and if she hadn’t called, he’d leave another message. Sending more flowers might be overdoing it. He thought about driving past her house. He sneezed.

He was considering spending the entire day on the couch watching the telly when the phone rang.

Valerie, his girlfriend in England. She had also wanted to come with him to Laguna, but things with Valerie were rocky. Actually the entire six-month relationship had never been anything but rocky, rooted mostly in sex and a mutual fondness for tandoori takeout. He listened as she complained at length about the dreary weather in London and her life of late, also dreary.

“It’s horrible, Nick. I’m honestly not sure how much more I can take.”

“Maybe it would help if you got away for a bit,” Nick said. Actually, driving by Daisy Fowler’s house might not be a bad idea. He could be casually passing by just as she happened to walk out. Although her uncle had said something about her living in a compound off a dirt road, which might make casually passing by difficult to explain.

“D’you think so?” Valerie’s voice had brightened. “Maybe you’re right.”

“Absolutely.”

“Brilliant. Well, I’ll get started on it right away. How are things with you?”

Nick sneezed.

“Is that a good thing?”

“Allergies,” Nick said. “Wind’s stirring up dust and pollen and God knows what. It’s having a rather debilitating effect on me.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t read the review of your Bongiovanni book, then,” Valerie said, a note of hesitation in her voice. “It ran in this morning’s Times.”

Nick stared, unseeing now, at the TV. He steeled himself. “Favorable?”

“Shall I read it?”

“Broad strokes will do.”

“You’ll get angry…”

“I won’t get angry, damn it. Do you have the review there?”

“I’m looking at it right now. It’s not bad exactly.”

“For God’s sake—”

“It just says that you…it, the biography, doesn’t add anything to what we already know about Bongiovanni. That was a quote. It also said you held him, Bongiovanni, at arm’s length, that you never really got to the heart of who he was. Inconclusive, that’s another quote and, hold on, here it is. Shallow and superfici—

“Right.”

“More?”

“No.”

He carried the phone into the kitchen, took a carton of orange juice from the fridge and set it on the counter. He’d had his hopes set on definitive. Wynne has written the definitive biography of Bongiovanni. In this uncompromisingly honest work, Wynne has captured the soul of the tenor. He decided he didn’t want orange juice after all. He went back into the living room and collapsed on the couch.

“Nick?”

“What?”

“You’re not sulking, are you?”

“Don’t be so stupid,” he said sulkily. “Sulking about what?”

“The review.”

“Already forgotten about it.” Already mentally composing the vituperative letter he would write to the Times railing about the sheer idiocy of the reviewer who…or maybe biting sarcasm would be more the ticket. He’d think about it later.

“How’s the current project?” she asked.

“The daughter could prove to be something of a roadblock. I sense resistance.”

“The daughter?”

“Daisy. The child in the pictures, except she’s now about forty, has a daughter and runs a restaurant here in Laguna with her ex-husband.”