Rory pushed her tangled hair out of her face and nodded.
“First, do you know who I am?”
She squinted at him with bloodshot eyes and started to nod, then shook her head and shrugged.
“My name is Antoine Gavin and I’m your prompter. I help you remember things. For example, when is your wedding anniversary?”
Rory didn’t know, and from the expression on her tear-streaked face it was clear she didn’t care.
“June 5, 1982. Do you remember which charity you gave the most to last year?”
She shook her head.
“The American Heart Association.” Antoine steeled himself for this next bit, hoping he could ad lib convincingly. “Now tell me what you’re doing in Jimmy’s room, all upset like this.”
Rory sniffled and her eyes welled up with fresh tears. “He’s dead. They called and told me.”
“Who called and told you?”
“The camp. They said he drowned.”
Antoine suppressed a sigh of frustration. Unlike true amnesia, the plague could be wildly erratic, sometimes recovering memories intact and other times sending long-cherished facts into an irretrievable black hole. It was just his luck that when it came to her son, Rory never forgot anything for very long. “When did you get this phone call?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Well, that’s okay.” He took her hand. “I’m familiar with all your memories because that’s my job, and you don’t have a memory of your son drowning at summer camp.”
Rory gave him a bewildered look. “I don’t?”
He shook his head. “That was just a practical joke by his friends. It was in very bad taste, don’t you think?” Before she could say anything, he hurried on. “Jimmy came home from camp and you and your husband were angry with him for scaring you. He never did anything like that again. He’s a good son. He went to college at the University of Texas and then law school at Columbia. I know you remember this because I’m your prompter.”
“Oh.”
Antoine made a show of checking the date on his phone. “Jimmy usually calls on Sunday nights, but he’s in Costa Rica right now with his wife. They’ll be back in about another week and you can expect to hear from him then. Oh, and he prefers to be called James these days. He’s not a little boy anymore.”
By now Rory was gazing at him intently, still a bit skeptical but not ready to dismiss Antoine’s words out of hand “Of course. James. Will he bring pictures of Costa Rica?”
“You know he will.” Antoine searched his brain for a suitable hook to start leading her away from the topic of her son. “He’s making a special point to photograph birds for you. You knows how much you like toucans.”
Rory smiled. “Yes. And parrots.”
“Parrots, too. Have you been to the new tropical birds exhibit at the zoo yet?” When Rory shook her head no, he began telling her about it, then found a way to turn it into a discussion of the zoo’s suitability as a charity, and soon they were talking about charitable donations in general. At a pause in the conversation he met the eyes of Sylvia, who was still standing in the doorway, and indicated they should move Rory out.
Still keeping her engaged in conversation, now about the art foundations she patronized, he led her from Jimmy’s bedroom and down the hall to her own sunny room where Sylvia helped her into a chair and began brushing out her hair while Antoine found the sound system and turned on some soothing music.
Seeing that she was calm now and Sylvia had things under control, he made his farewells. “I enjoyed talking to you today,” he said. “And you are absolutely right about the American impressionists. I’ll go see the Childe Hassam exhibit this weekend based on your recommendation.”
As he made his way down the hall, Antoine thought about what he had just done. This was his biggest lie to date, but oddly he didn’t feel bad about it. He had given Rory and Jimmy the history they should have had. With no cure on the immediate horizon for such as Rory, it was a privilege to be able to give her some comfort.
When he came to Jimmy’s door, he tested it and found it locked. Good. His new acceptance of the need to sometimes lie didn’t extend to creating the circumstances in which such lies were necessary. Having done as much as he could, he headed down the stairs and out to his car. He glanced at his watch. There was just enough time to get to his next assignment with a few minutes to spare if the traffic was no more insane than usual.
Thirty minutes later, he arrived at the home of his next client. One minute after that, he realized he had left his messenger bag in Jimmy’s room at the Tennenbaum estate.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
That evening as he drove to the Tennenbaums’ after his final appointment of the day, it seemed every amnesiac in the city was conspiring to keep him from retrieving his bag and the important materials inside it before the sun set. It wasn’t just the people turning down one-way streets, or drivers sitting endlessly at stoplights. He was used to those by now. And it wasn’t all the orange cones marking off road work that never seemed to reach completion. By this point many work sites had become landmarks on a par with City Hall, the Williams Tower and the Mecom fountain that marked the roundabout at the juncture of Main and Montrose. There was something else going on this evening, some underlying current of mindlessness that he felt certain had nothing to do with his mood, which was bad enough under the circumstances.
It was a relief to reach River Oaks and pull into the Tennenbaums’ drive, safe for at least a few minutes from the commuter madness. To his surprise, David Tennenbaum himself opened the front door. Antoine had met him only once, at a social function he had attended early in his career at Everett Blair when he was serving as prompter to a former congressman. If David remembered him, he gave no sign and Antoine was forced to introduce himself and explain why he was there. To save face, he didn’t admit he had forgotten his bag. “The room was locked and Sylvia was with your wife. It seemed best to let Sylvia finish calming her and go to my other appointments, but I’ll need the bag in the morning, so…”
“Of course.” David took a step back and motioned him inside. “This is quite a stroke of luck for me. I’ve been wanting to meet you and discuss a few things.”
Antoine didn’t need this. He was already running late if he wanted to avoid waiting for the equipment he wanted at the gym. He also hoped to catch Rafa before dinner, since it had been days since they caught up on how they were each doing on finding places to hide Dymphna’s archives. But of course Antoine couldn’t reveal anything like that to the spouse of his star client, so he smiled and said that he’d love to hear what David had to say.
Pleased, David led him through a long corridor that led to a large pleasant room of armchairs and sofas, with two 80-inch television screens and a bar in one corner. The TVs were showing a zombie flick, and David turned them off, then went to the bar. “What can I get you, Mr. Gavin? I have a nice collection of single malts.”
The offer was tempting, but Antoine asked for mineral water instead. “Company rules,” he explained. “Prompters aren’t allowed to have alcohol.”
David nodded in sympathy. “Not so good for the brain cells, I guess. One Pellegrino, then.”
Once they each had their drinks, they found seats on the sofa and after a bit of small talk, David got to the point. “You’ve done good work with my wife,” he said. “Sylvia thinks very highly of you and she’s the most sensible housekeeper I’ve ever had. I trust her word when I’ll trust no one else’s, and she says it’s thanks to you that Rory has become…easier to live with.”
“I’m happy for the opportunity to work with her,” Antoine said. “She’s a lovely woman and you’re a very lucky man.”
David sighed and gazed at nothing in particular. “I was once, before our son died. Before other personal troubles. Before the plague.”
Antoine sipped his mineral water and waited.
“You see,” David set his scotch aside. “Rory was once a very active, vibrant
go-getter type. Not in a business sense, of course, but in a complimentary way. You know, serving on charity boards, running the house, planning our vacations and things like that.”
Of course. Antoine was well aware that men of David Tennenbaum’s stature wanted the sort of wife whose accomplishments wouldn’t compete with their own.
“She used to host a party like you wouldn’t believe, but the amnesia changed her. She’s become…smaller, more nervous.”
“It’s not an unusual outcome in severe cases,” Antoine told him. “The patient usually knows something’s not right and they become afraid of making mistakes and embarrassing themselves or their families.”
By now David was staring at the plush carpet, nodding. “I thought you might say that. The change in her has been upsetting, not just because I love who she used to be but because…” he sighed.
Antoine held his breath and waited.
David forced a grim little smile. “I have a Whoami app like everyone else. Set it up myself. And lately it’s been…wrong. Or rather, I suppose I’m the one that’s wrong.”
Antoine chose his next words carefully. “There are ways we can test for early amnesia. When it’s caught quickly, there’s a lot we can do to slow it down.”
“I don’t want it slowed down. I want it stopped altogether.”
“We all do,” Antoine assured him. “Scientists around the globe are working on it.”
“Not fast enough.” David turned fearful eyes on him. “I have businesses to run. I have plans. I can’t become something like…” he waved a hand in the general direction of the upstairs rooms, “that.”
“I understand. If you choose to contract with Everett Blair for memory services, you’ll get the results of all the most cutting-edge research into memory preservation and retrieval, so you’ll be able to take full advantage of the cure when it becomes available.”
“I don’t want a contract with Everett Blair,” he said. “Not because I don’t value what your company offers. When Rory became ill, I refused to give her anything less than the best. But for myself, I can’t take a chance that my condition will become known.”
“We specialize in confidentiality, sir.”
David gave him a look. “Only up to a point. Eventually it always becomes obvious who needs a prompter.”
“In that case, I’m not sure how I can help you.”
“Don’t pretend to be stupid, Antoine.” David sat back down. “I want you to be my prompter. Off the books. I’ll pay you directly, in cash. It’s already known in my social circles that you’re helping Rory, so your presence here won’t attract any more attention than it does now. So how about it? Name your price.”
Antoine hesitated. It was a tempting offer, but part of his contract with Everett Blair stipulated that he was to do no external counseling. He belonged to Everett Blair exclusively. David made a good point, though. He was coming here on a regular basis already, so who was to know if he was prompting David as well? “I’ll consider it.”
“Don’t consider. Do it. I can tell you want to. How does five thousand a month sound?”
Since David would probably not need more than semi-weekly memory sessions and some nutritional counseling at the start, it sounded fantastic, but still he wasn’t sure.
Luckily at that moment Sylvia came into the room to tell David he had a business call.
“Maybe I can get my bag while you take that call,” Antoine offered. While David went to argue business with his associate, Antoine followed Sylvia up the stairs and waited for her to unlock the door to Jimmy’s room.
“I need to go check on Ms. Tennenbaum,” she said after she had turned on a light in the boy’s well-preserved bedroom. “Just turn off the light and lock the door when you leave. You know the way back to Mr. Tennenbaum’s lounge?”
Antoine nodded and waited until he heard her footsteps die away down the hall. Then he went into the room and found his bag exactly where he had left it at the foot of the bed. After a cursory check of the contents, he was satisfied that everything was still inside. And why wouldn’t it be? It wasn’t as if anyone would go snooping around a dead child’s bedroom.
And now he had an idea, an idea so obvious he was embarrassed to have not thought of it before. Who, indeed, would look for anything important in the room of a dead boy? He took the packet of historical accuracies from his messenger bag, and after checking over his shoulder that Sylvia hadn’t returned to watch him from the doorway, he slipped the envelope between the mattresses, then shook the bedspread back out so the disturbance would not be obvious.
Dymphna had said that most history was saved by accident. Someone hid something and forgot about it, or they left it in a place that for whatever reason went undisturbed. This room had remained the same for the last twenty years and would likely continue to be like this for at least a few more decades. Perhaps by then, whoever was trying to alter Houston’s history would have died or found a more interesting project. In the meantime, Jimmy’s room was an excellent repository for these precious documents, and if he accepted David’s offer, he would be spending even more time than before at the Tennenbaum household. A lot of history could be saved here.
Antoine slung his satchel over his shoulder, turned off the light and pulled the locked door closed behind him. He had an offer to accept.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
By evening, the problem of how Antoine was going to get into Jimmy’s room on a regular basis without a key or a darn good excuse had become obvious, and lacking any better ideas he turned to Rafa to brainstorm solutions.
“Did you see what kind of lock it was?” Rafa asked as they discussed the matter over dinner at a midtown pizzeria. “With some kinds, all you need is a credit card, but for others you have to have special tools and training to get in.”
Antoine admitted that no, he hadn’t been paying attention, other than that there was a lock on the inside of the doorknob.
Rafa considered. “That kind doesn’t usually need a key, and if you think about it, you don’t really want too good a lock on a kid’s bedroom door. What if the little brat tries to lock you out, just to be a jerk? It’s probably the easy kind you can open with an allen wrench. That’s probably how the maid does it, too. They don’t need any kind of fancy lock to keep an amnesiac society lady out.”
“I’ll take a closer look next time I’m there.”
“Have you thought about how you’re going to ditch the maid long enough to do this? You say she watches you all the time.”
“That’s only when I’m with Rory,” Antoine pointed out. “I doubt David will let her hang around during our sessions. And even when I’m with Rory, I can always make an excuse and go to the bathroom or something.”
“Well, if you can get around those little problems, we’ll be in business.” He grimaced and took a bite of salad. As far as Rafa was concerned, eating vegetables was a hardship almost on a par with the restrictions on sugar and alcohol in his Everett Blair-approved diet. Having swallowed the offending roughage, he took another slice of pizza. “It’s a brilliant idea and good timing, too. I’m running out of ideas for places to stash this stuff.”
Antoine nodded agreement. Against their misgivings they had tried using a small antique chest in Rafa’s apartment as a temporary holding area until the afternoon he had a last-minute client cancellation and came home to find a suspicious person lurking in the hall outside his door. The man had left quickly at Rafa’s approach, but he and Antoine had begun stashing documents in more creative places after that, seeking nooks and crawl spaces in common use areas around their apartment building and hoping for the best. Utilizing the Tennenbaum estate was a solution that solved all their problems, as long as Antoine could consistently gain access to Jimmy’s room.
“I might be able to use other locations in the house, too, once I get to know the layout better. That place is big enough to keep Dymphna printing and copying things 24/7.”
“She’d like that.”
<
br /> For a moment both men looked glum. The pace of the historical errors was increasing and Dymphna was anxious that they find a way to do more. She had reached out to a few colleagues she thought she could trust, but judging by the vague and sometimes evasive answers she received, she wasn’t sure if her concerns had been taken seriously.
Adding to the sense that she was running out of time to save her archives, she had been approached twice in the past month by strangers asking odd questions about the historical collection and how she knew which facts were true. On another occasion she felt certain a man in a blue sedan was following her with malicious intent until she turned into a fire station for help and he sped away. All of this led her to believe that she needed to get as much good material to safety as she could, but Antoine and Rafa’s circumscribed abilities to carry and hide the documents was a limiter. “Don’t you have any other friends?” she asked in frustration, but although both men had colleagues at Everett Blair with whom they were on good terms, they hesitated to trust any of them with something of this magnitude. They might be thought crazy or amnesiac, putting their jobs in jeopardy. And even if they could convince someone of the true nature of their project, they might be bringing an unsuspecting person into danger, to be followed and scrutinized for what purpose they still didn’t know.
“I’ll keep an eye out for hiding places I can use at the homes of some of my other clients,” Antoine said. “But the Tennenbaums are the only ones I know to have a room they don’t allow to be disturbed other than for weekly dusting. Otherwise, we’d have more space than we’d know what to do with.”
Rafa agreed. “There may be something I can do too, but yours is the best idea so far.”
They finished their dinner and went to a nearby pub to shoot some pool with some friends from Everett Blair, but Antoine begged off early, saying he was tired.