“Honey, there’s no time. After the NIH mess blows over, we’ll fly back and take care of that maniac. Don’t worry.”
Bonnie Lamb said, “If they let him go now …” She finished the sentence in her head.
If they let him go now, they’ll never find him again. He’ll vanish like a ghost in the swamp. And wouldn’t that be a darn shame.
Bonnie bewildered herself with such sentiment. What’s wrong with me? The man abducted and abused my husband. Why don’t I want to see him punished?
“You’re’ right,”, she-said to Maxr “You should ‘go back to New York as soon as you can.”
With a frown, he reached over and lightly smacked a mosquito on her arm. “What does that mean-you’re not coming?”
“Max, I’m not up for a plane trip this morning. My stomach’s in knots.”
“Take some Mylanta.”
“I did,” Bonnie lied. “Maybe it was the boat ride.”
“You’ll feel better later.”
“I’m sure I will.”
He said he’d get her a room near the airport. “Take a long nap,” he suggested, “and catch an evening flight.”
“Sounds good.”
Poor Max, she thought. He hasn’t got a clue.
FIFTEEN
Bonnie Brooks’s father worked in the circulation department of the Chicago Tribune, and her mother was a buyer for Sears. They had an apartment in the city and a summer cabin on the boundary waters in Minnesota. Bonnie, an only child, had mixed memories of family vacations. Her father was an unadventurous fellow for whom the northern wilderness held no allure. Because he couldn’t swim and was allergic to deerflies, he avoided the lakes. Instead he stayed in the cabin and assembled model airplanes; classic German Fokkers were his passion. The tedious hobby was made more so by her father’s chronic ham-fistedness, which turned the simplest glue job into high drama. Bonnie and her mother stayed out of the way, to avoid being blamed for disturbing his concentration.
While her father toiled over the model planes, Bonnie’s mother paddled her across the wooded lakes in an old birch canoe. Bonnie remembered those happy mornings-trailing her fingertips in the chilly water, feeling the sunlight warm the back of her neck. Her mother was not the stealthiest of paddlers, but they saw their share of wildlife-deer, squirrels, beavers, the occasional moose. Bonnie recalled asking, more than once, why her folks had bought the cabin if her father was so averse to the outdoors. Her mother always explained: “It was either here or Wisconsin.”
Bonnie Brooks attended Northwestern University and, to her father’s puzzlement, majored in journalism. Soon she embarked on her first serious romance, with a divorced adjunct professor who claimed to have won prizes for his reportage of the Vietnam War. The absence of plaques in the professor’s office Bonnie naively attributed to modesty. For Christmas she decided to surprise him with a framed, laminated copy of his front-page scoop about the mining of Haiphong harbor. Yet when Bonnie searched the college’s microfilm of the San Francisco Chronicle, for whom her lover had supposedly worked, she found not a single bylined story bearing his name. Demonstrating the blood instincts of a seasoned reporter, she contacted the newspaper’s personnel department and (using harmless subterfuge) was able to determine that the closest her heroic seducer had ever come to Southeast Asia was the copy desk of the Chronicle’s Seattle bureau.
Bonnie Brooks acted decisively. First she dumped the jerk, then she got him fired from the university. Subsequent boyfriends were more loyal and forthcoming, but what they lacked in dishonesty they made up for with indolence. Bonnie’s mother grew tired of cooking them meals and deflecting their halfhearted offers to help dry the dishes. She couldn’t wait for her daughter to graduate from school and find herself a grown-up man.
Good or bad, jobs in journalism were hard to come by. Like many of her classmates, Bonnie Brooks wound up writing publicity blurbs and press releases. She went to work first for the City of Chicago Parks Department and then for a baby-food company that was eventually purchased by Crespo Mills Internationale. There Bonnie was promoted to the job of assistant corporate publicist. The title was attached to a salary that ten tough years in most city newsrooms wouldn’t have earned. As for the writing, it was as elementary as it was unsatisfying. In addition to pabulums and breakfast cereals, Crespo Mills manufactured whipped condiment spreads, peanut butter, granola bars, cookies, crackers, trail mix, flavored popcorn, bread sticks and three styles of croutons. In no time, Bonnie Brooks ran out of appetizing adjectives. Attempts at lyrical originality were discouraged by her Crespo supervisors; during one especially dreary streak, she was required to use the word “tasty” in fourteen consecutive press releases. When Max Lamb asked her to marry him and move to New York, Bonnie didn’t hesitate to quit her job.