WHILE CRADOC BRADSHAW struggled to identify the killer, Nick Pinder basked in the glow of his expanded notoriety. The day after his latest coup, San Diego’s other daily papers published the shocking revelation that the same assassin had dispatched Ingraham and Archer. With no source of their own, they resorted to quoting directly from the Times in some cases almost word for word. Beyond that, the other rags were stymied on how to cover the story other than the same interviews with the victim’s slaughterhouse and hacienda workers that Wendell Smith—yet again relegated to the bridesmaid role—had already penned for the Times.
As Clive Bennett predicted, reporters from the Union and Sun began to pester Nick in a desperate bid for fresh copy. Nick took these interview requests to the boss and asked permission to speak with the other papers. Clive didn’t hesitate to grant his blessing, gloating over the competition groveling at their doorstep, one of the ultimate triumphs of journalism. The local weeklies soon followed. Journalists also arrived by train from Los Angeles to quiz Nick and file their own stories on the heinous events unfolding down the coast. Who was this Nemesis? What were his motives? Would he strike again? Why did the killer communicate only with Nick? Did Nick feel threatened in any way?
Soon it became impossible to open a newspaper anywhere in California without coming across a story about Nemesis and Nick’s extraordinary correspondence with the killer.
This presented Clive with an unforeseen dilemma: the other San Diego papers outsold the Times on days when interviews with Nick appeared. This was not part of his battle plan. They were stealing his glory! Not to mention the additional money in his pocket that came with increased circulation. In response, Clive banned interviews with competing media and instructed Nick to concentrate on producing more copy of his own. In the meantime, Clive instructed Wendell to interview Nick for the Times. He had absolutely nothing new to say about the murders. Nick simply rehashed the same old details. But it was another Clive Bennett masterstroke. Circulation shot up again. Indeed, the public seemed to have an insatiable appetite for both Nick and Nemesis.
Exhausted by all the attention and burning the midnight oil for days on end, Nick decided to do something he had not done in months, perhaps more than a year. He took a day’s leave from work and slept in.
He had discovered a few weeks prior, quite by accident, that one could render a telephone incapable of accepting incoming calls by simply disconnecting the wire that ran into the wooden telephone box from the pole outside. He had done so last night before turning in. Anyone who needed to contact him for work or otherwise would have to ride out from town. Nick knew that if a real emergency arose, Clive would dispatch someone to fetch him. Roz had been both surprised and thoroughly pleased by Nick’s gesture. And she hadn’t seen anything yet.
Nick lounged in bed through much of the morning, sorting through copies of Collier’s Once A Week, Scribner’s monthly, Murray’s Magazine, and other periodicals accumulated on his bedside table. Reading material intended to catch him up on global affairs—which he had sorely neglected in the wake of the Nemesis murders—and stimulate story ideas. Prospectors had found gold amid the jungles of British Guyana. The Brazilians had finally abolished slavery, the last nation in the Americas to officially end the odious institution. Prince Wilhelm, who had a disfigured and largely useless left arm due to childhood palsy, was about to be crowned the new Kaiser of the German Empire. Alexander Graham Bell, inventor of the machine that Nick had cleverly disconnected in the downstairs hallway, had launched a brand-new venture—a learned club called the National Geographic Society dedicated to the “increase and diffusion” of worldly knowledge. This included the creation of an eponymous magazine, and Nick made a mental note to subscribe to the new publication.
Fascinating as all of that might be, none of these stories sparked ideas that Nick might spin into a San Diego angle.
On the other hand, something in a recent edition of Harper’s Weekly proved much more fertile—the photograph of a massive canal under construction across the Isthmus of Panama, along the very route that the conquistador Vasco Núñez de Balboa had followed whilst discovering the Pacific Ocean nearly four hundred years before. A French company was endeavoring to build the canal. Although thousands of workers had succumbed to dreaded tropical disease, they were pushing ahead with the gargantuan project. If ever completed, the engineering marvel would cut the sailing time between San Diego and New York by more than half. Now that he could repackage as a story for the Times.
Roz came into the bedroom around ten and announced that breakfast was being served. By the time Nick shaved and dressed, Roz and Lupe had pulled the kitchen table and two chairs out back, placing them on a patch of grass that caught the morning sun. And there they ate together, husband and wife, for what seemed like the first time in ages. Eggs fried over easy, strips of bacon, fresh tortillas, and coffee. A feast prepared by the ever-remarkable Lupe, who had transformed into not just a good cook in the short time she had been in service to the Pinders, but also a demonstrative addition to the household, warm and loving like the daughter that Nick and Roz could never have.
From their perch on the lawn, they could look across to the other homes on Golden Hill, including the blood-red monstrosity recently erected by the writer, artist and actor Jesse Shepard, a house he dubbed “Villa Montezuma” in his typical over-the-top fashion. Beyond lay the bay, stretching off to the south towards the dark mesas of Mexico and the Coronado Islands. It was a marvelous summer day, the fog already well out to sea, the bay sparkling, and just enough of a breeze to take the edge off the heat. A picture of how things might have been between Nick and Roz if their time together had taken a different tack, if Nick hadn’t let work and writing consume his life. In his mind, it wasn’t too late. For Nick, this glorious June day marked the start of a campaign to win back his wife’s heart and mind.
At about half past one, a goods wagon pulled by two mules came trundling up the path from town. Onboard sat a burly gringo in a beaver hat and a Mexican sidekick hunched beneath a sombrero and serape. They removed a wooden crate from the flatbed and hefted it into the living room. Wielding a crowbar, the big gringo ruptured the crate. Inside, protected by straw stuffing, was a brand-new Model VS 2 sewing machine. Known for its wondrous vibrating shuttle, the Singer rested in its own rosewood case on a five-drawer sewing table with treadle base and foot pedal, the very machine that Roz had ogled in the window of Marston’s Emporium months earlier. She was shocked that Nick had taken notice, and even more surprised that he had remembered so long after.
Nick had purchased the contraption with money earned from selling the Nemesis story to out-of-town papers. His way of apologizing for letting his writing overshadow his wife. And a not-so-subtle insinuation that perhaps she should take up sewing again, if not for profit, certainly for recreation and her own sartorial satisfaction.
As Roz cleared the protective straw away from the machine, Nick slipped into the kitchen and returned with two glasses and a bottle of champagne. Not the cheap stuff, but a bottle of demi-sec from Reims. Making sure not to douse the sewing machine, he popped the cork, and they toasted twice. Once to Singer and once to their marriage. Roz couldn’t recall the last time she had seen her husband so cheerful, far removed from the remoteness in which he had languished for months.
Before Roz knew it, they had polished off the bottle, and Nick began to undress her, right in the parlor. And when she protested—they could hear Lupe rummaging around in the kitchen—he took Roz by the hand and pulled her upstairs. Stripping her naked, he swung her around into a sitting position on the bed and stepped back to consider the artistry. “You truly are divine,” he crooned.
Roz replied with a blush, crossing her arms in an involuntary reflex. They made love just once. But it was long and good and slow, more finesse than fervor. Afterward, they lay sprawled on the bed, drenched in sweat, at peace with the world and themselves. Nick nodded off—she could feel the change in the velocity of his breathing—and Roz clutched him tightly in her arms, wanting to believe their union had finally turned a corner and would always be such. Like back in the days when she had truly been the most important thing in Nick’s life. Yet Roz knew in her heart of hearts that it most likely wouldn’t last. In another day or a week or a couple of months, Nick would fade away again. That other side of his life would reclaim him, as it had a dozen times before.
How do you keep someone’s undivided attention? Could passion last for more than a fleeting moment? Roz couldn’t answer either question. As she lay there, she found herself thinking that perhaps that was the nature of things—relationships that ran in seasons, at times fresh and crisp like the first days of summer, at other times dark and cold like winter.
Curling up against her sleeping husband, she would relish the warmth while it lasted.