Pickett The A Novel

A Novel
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-1-5385-1963-9
Verlag: Blackstone Publishing
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 100 Seiten

A November Book Pick from

When archivist Nadia Fontaine is found dead of an apparent drowning, Emily Snow is hired by Regents University to finish the job she started-to organize and process the papers of Raymond West, a famous Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has been short-listed for the Nobel.

Emily's job comes with its inherent pressures. West's wife, Elizabeth, is an heiress who's about to donate $25 million to the Memorial Library-an eight-story architectural marvel that is the crown jewel of the university. The inaugural event in just a few months will be a gala for the who's who of San Diego to celebrate the unveiling of the Raymond West Collection and the financial gift that made it all possible.

As Emily sets to work on the West papers, it begins to dawn on her that several items have gone missing from the collection. To trace their whereabouts, she gains unsupervised access to the highly restricted 'dark archives,' in which she opens a Pandora's box of erotically and intellectually charged correspondence between Raymond West and the late Nadia Fontaine. Through their archived emails, Emily goes back a year in time and relives the tragic trajectory of their passionate love affair. Did Nadia really drown accidentally, as the police report concluded, or could it have been suicide, or, even worse, murder? Compelled to complete the collection and find the truth, Emily unwittingly morphs into an adult Nancy Drew and a one-woman archivist crusader on a mission to right the historical record.

Twistingslowly like a tourniquet, turns into a suspenseful murder mystery with multiple and intersecting layers. Not just a whodunit, it is also a profound meditation on love, privacy, and the ethics of destroying or preserving materials of a highly personal nature.

Rex Pickett is a California-based screenwriter and author who is most well known for writing , the book that became one of the most critically acclaimed and highest-grossing comedy films in Hollywood history. The screenplay for the film was named one of the Top 100 Screenplays of All Time by the Writers Guild of America while the movie itself was nominated for five Oscars (winning Best Adapted Screenplay) and seven Golden Globe Awards (winning Best Screenplay and Best Picture). Pickett also wrote the script for the Oscar-winning Best Live Action Short , and his sequel won the Gold Medal for Popular Fiction from the Independent Publisher Book Awards. The Rex Pickett Papers are in archives at Geisel Library on the campus of his alma mater, UCSD. Pickett resides in Del Mar, California.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Pickett, Rex

Leseproben

Chapter 2

Entropy

8/4/18

Predictably, I dreamed of fires. And moving from one house to another. I had no money. Roommates who were douchebags. The world was falling apart. I felt lost and alone, desperate and savage like an animal, and I remember that I desired a home I could call mine. I awoke to this apartment, a job, the sound of the ocean. Maybe dreams, in their compensatory function, make us appreciate what we have.

Emily awakened bathed in blinding sunlight. The room was white—too white. White walls, white ceiling, beige carpeting. For a moment she panicked, thinking she was in an institution, her thoughts briefly stampeded until the bracing light of consciousness reined them in.

Emily showered and shampooed the grunge out of her hair, threw on a pair of burgundy corduroys and a faded black long-sleeve T-shirt, and slipped into the kitchen. The refrigerator was as cavernously barren as when she had opened it before going to bed.

Dying of thirst, Emily powered up her laptop. The internet connection worked—thank God!—and she went online, typed in her address, and asked Google for nearby stores. The postapocalyptic dream still lingered in the penumbra of her befogged brain, and she tried to shake free of its ragged remnants. She needed coffee; she needed food; she needed not to feel anxious.

Emily climbed sleepily into her car, found the freeway a mile away, rode one exit north, and pulled into the Flower Hill shopping mall. She intuited her way to Swell Coffee, a local third-wave coffee house, and ordered an Ethiopian pour-over and a croissant. While she waited for her order, she surveyed the large, airy room with narrowed eyes. The customers constituted a cross section of youth she associated with Southern California. They were casually dressed, some in sandals, all of them either staring at cells or bent over laptops, even those who were seated across from each other.

“I guess the fires are still burning,” Emily remarked, if only to hear her voice, as the young male barista slid her cup of coffee on a saucer toward her. A second dish rattled next to it with her heated croissant.

“Yeah, it’s terrible for the horses,” he lamented.

“What horses?” Emily asked.

No one was waiting behind her, so the barista produced his tablet and played Emily a news clip that showed startled Arabians bolting from their stables as smoke billowed in the skies behind them. In panicked herds, some of the horses galloped off in zigzagging patterns, while others tragically returned to their stables, where, the barista informed her, they burned to death in a kind of frenzied, unconscious self-immolation, their home their chamber of death.

“That’s terrible,” Emily remarked, prying her eyes away. The alarming video reminded her of her dream, that entropy seemed disconcertingly ubiquitous now. Who would bring order to the chaos? And those horses, rearing and bucking beneath a canopy of flames—she realized she had inadvertently brought a hand to her mouth to stifle her dismay.

Emily took her coffee and pastry and sat down at an unoccupied table. Like everyone else, she stared into her phone. There were the usual email advertisements and announcements from her past places of employment. Fastidious like so many archivists, she preferred to keep her inbox clear because she hated it when emails stared back at her like the black cat who had stolen into her apartment, seeking attention. The one from Louis she filed in a folder without reading. Seeing his email caused his profile photo to pop up and haunt her too-vivid imagination, degrading it with anger. She promised herself to delete it when she had time.

When she glanced up, a man a few years older than her was staring at her furrowed brow. She instinctively glanced away. A female colleague at Harry Ransom had warned her that Southern California men were strange. Because the city, with its vast network of cobwebbed freeways, was structured around the automobile, it fostered a personality of alienation that made men more socially awkward. Smart women like Emily tended to generalize that asocial men were tougher to understand, that their desires were often singularly focused, their libidos refracted through a distorted lens from too many miles spent alone on the road. It was a city of loners, and Emily was determined to be the most alone of all in the three months she was going to spend here.

Using her cell to locate nearby stores, Emily spent the afternoon on the crisscrossing freeways, stocking up on food and supplies. She wandered around in a high-ceilinged Bed Bath & Beyond, bought blackout curtains and some culinary improvements like a decent tea kettle and the best chef’s knife she could afford. At Jimbo’s, a natural foods grocery chain, she filled two bags with staples. She drove freeways under fitful skies that bled blue through the orange from the fires that were ravaging the inland mountains and canyons.

Back in her apartment, she distributed her purchases among the cabinets and refrigerator. She popped open the cage-and-cork-secured half liter of ale from Societe, a local craft brewery that had been recommended online, poured a glass, and went to work on the blackout curtains with a tool kit the apartment owner had thoughtfully supplied. She unpacked and stocked the bathroom shelves with shampoo, conditioner, lavender-scented soap, some makeup, Q-tips, a toothbrush, and the remainder of her essentials. One suitcase of clothes was stacked onto open shelving, dresses hung on plastic hangers. She traveled light. As in her dream, she was always on the verge of departure. Maybe she didn’t want a home. Maybe she wanted to be a roustabout, a project archivist the rest of her life, moving itinerantly from job to job and never settling down. Yes, that’s who she would be.

Before dark, she changed into a pair of sweatpants and a black T-shirt with white lettering that read “I Love Baudelaire” and walked down the steps of the apartment complex to a short alley that led through a quiet neighborhood of seaside homes. Within blocks she came to the bluff that fronted the Pacific. Santa Ana winds gusted from her back and groomed the incoming waves, blowing spray back off their feathering lips. Emily took up surfing the few months she spent in the Bay Area and found that she liked it. She enjoyed the solitariness of it, the fact that you didn’t—unlike tennis—need a partner. She loved being with nature, even if the invisible creatures that teemed beneath conjured the mythic ogres of Jung’s collective unconscious. The adrenaline rush of her first wave was addictive, and she was hooked. She would have to buy a new board and a wet suit, she decided, as she drank in the view. La Jolla Cove hooked out into the sea’s heart from the south. To the north, the coastline gently curved westward and the hills were painted like a watercolor.

Emily leaped down to where the train tracks were laid along the cliff’s edge and headed south. She couldn’t believe how close the tracks ran along the vertical face of the friable bluff. Two or three more storm-lashed winters and these tracks would have to be put out of commission, she thought to herself.

Two teenage surfers outfitted in black wet suits and cradling small tri-fins under their arms approached her along the tracks. They both nodded at her, and she nodded back as they trod wordlessly past. Emily pulled a pair of wireless earbuds out of her sweatpants pocket and plugged her ears with them. Enlivened by the scenic view, her legs leaped in front of her, and she took off running, a mixtape filling her ears.

As she jogged along the bluff, she could feel a smile draw a line in her face. The way those surfers, a decade younger, had ogled her made her realize she was still a woman to be reckoned with. With her shock of spiky hair, luminous sky-blue eyes, slender but feminine figure that showed muscle where it was meant to, she knew she was beautiful, but she made a deliberate effort to conceal it. Louis had complimented her many times on her looks, usually—she winced in remembering—when they were naked and entangled in twisted, sodden sheets, his desire for her inflamed.

Fuck you, Louis. I really believed you showed promise. That’s why I gave my heart to you. And then you trampled on it, extinguished it like the butt of a cigarette you had finished smoking halfway down. I had to live with that other woman’s face in your text messages, her words in your emails, your words to her, the same words you said to me. I’ve never been so betrayed in all my life. I could have had almost anyone, but I fell for you because I believed in you. I will always love someone who can conjure magic through a talent for an art. But your words were sacred and inviolable to me. To read them written to someone else—what a fucking betrayal!

Emily halted her racing thoughts when she noticed a woman approaching, jerking a panting cocker spaniel on a leash. She didn’t want the woman to think she was mad. Hurt had brought tears to her eyes, and she wiped them with a swipe of her hand. It occurred to her that with the earbuds visible in her ears the woman might assume she was talking on the phone. The woman smiled as she passed and said hi. Emily smiled a reply as she slowed to a walk, her heart beating, still, after these weeks since her breakup, trying to expunge the image and voice of Louis from her imagination.

She...