“I’ll be ready,” I said. “Nick didn’t ask you directly about any of this, though.”
“No.”
“What about the manuscript at Merced? Did you mention it to him?”
“I might have. As I said, it was a brief conversation. I’d forgotten about it until you sent me his picture. But — look. He’s far from the first person to overidentify with a writer or character. When it comes to Prado, I’m just as guilty. Any great literature, Mr. Edison, is a mirror.”
Chapter 29
If books were mirrors, Cathedral belonged in a fun house.
One thousand, nine hundred twenty-three mind-numbing, handwritten pages, clogged with strikeouts, erasures, words running left to right but also backward. Or vertically. Or diagonally. Many sheets were blank or featured a single word. Others had been victimized by marker bleed.
Prado catalogued the shelves in an AM/PM mini-mart.
He drew motorcycles. Drew a poor rendition of Keanu Reeves in The Matrix.
A wrinkled blotch marked where he’d spilled some sort of amber liquid.
Occasionally I stumbled across passages that demonstrated his skill and concision: sharp snippets of dialogue, crystalline descriptions of people or places. But these lucid moments were few and far between, and I couldn’t pinpoint any chronology or geography, making it impossible to extract actionable leads.
On page 450 I broke for coffee and ibuprofen.
On page 889 I stopped dead.
A rectangular block of text crowded the screen. At its center was a pencil sketch about the size of a baseball card.
Prado’s drafting skills were rudimentary. But I got the gist.
Saw-toothed water.
Lumpy hills.
Two convergent lines forming a road.
On it, a stick figure.
One arm up.
One giant middle finger extended to the sky.
Sea, mountains, highway; fuck you.
I opened Nicholas Moore’s final TikTok, let it play.
Sea, mountains, highway.
Fuck you.
The drawing was far too crude to call it a match.
Was I committing the same error as Eli Ruíz or Nick Moore or countless others?
Craving meaning, finding it in the mirror?
I combed through the surrounding text, a stew of Spanish and English.
A phrase was tucked into the bottom right corner.
En el nombre del Padre, y del Hijo, y del Espíritu Santo A Men 83261
In the name of the father.
I zoomed in. The writing was faint. But then I saw it. A speck between two digits made it 83.261.
And that reminded me of something.
I replayed Nick’s final TikTok, pausing on the frame where he stooped toward the camera.
As I adjusted the slider, the postmile sign came into focus, one character at a time.
Four days and one bottle of ibuprofen later, I had yet to find another real-world reference.
That didn’t mean there weren’t any. The scan quality worsened steadily; I imagined the unfortunate work-study student assigned the task, drowning in boredom. Prado’s handwriting deteriorated, too. By the end it was a hectic scrawl that tore holes in the paper.
Something might be in there, but I wasn’t going to find it in a PDF.
I booked an appointment at UC Merced for the following afternoon.
In the morning I dropped Myles off at daycare and drove Charlotte to Chabot Park for camp. As I was walking back to my car, a counselor chased after me, calling urgently.
“Excuse me.” She was about fifteen, with box braids. “You’re Charlotte’s dad.”
“Yes?”
“I wanted to talk to you about something that happened yesterday.”
I braced myself. “Okay.”
“The kids were taking turns on the swings, and there was a child who was getting upset because he had to wait so long. Charlotte was next, but she let him go ahead. It was so kind of her.”
“I thought you were going to tell me she did something wrong.”
“Charlotte? Oh no. She’s the sweetest thing ever.”
“You know what? You’re right. She is. Thanks...”
“Nia.” She grinned. “Anyhow. I thought you’d want to know.”
“I do. Thanks for sharing it with me.”
“You’re welcome! Have a great day!” She ran off, braids flying.
I took out my phone to text Amy and tell her. It rang before I could call. Blocked number.
I said, “Hello?”
“This is Maeve Ferris. Octavio’s agent.” A mid-Atlantic accent broadened the a’s in Prado’s name. “I believe you wanted to talk to me.”
“Yes. Hi. Give me one second.”
“Bad time?”
“No, I just need to grab my notebook.”
I got it from the car and jogged along Estudillo Avenue, away from the noisy drop-off area and toward the picnic tables.
“Thanks for getting back to me, Ms. Ferris. I’m not sure what Professor Ruíz told you.”
“You’re searching for a boy who thinks Octavio is his father.”
“Correct.”
“Allow me to assure you: He’s not.”
“And you know that because?”
“Because Octavio was a virgin. And I know that because he told me.”
“Could he have lied?”
“Not a chance,” Ferris said. “He was utterly sincere. Tell me: Have you ever met a man who lied about that? Only the very best ladies do. Plus there are the issues of content and context. Anyone reading that sex scene could tell it wasn’t written from experience.”
“What I read was very short.”
“You should’ve seen the original, before I made him take a machete to it.”
“That bad, huh.”
“The word loins made multiple appearances,” she said. “One of my conditions for representing him was that he walk me through the manuscript, to review it for potential libel. You probably don’t remember, but a number of books around then straddled the line between novel and autobiography, and several of those authors ended up getting sued. Given Octavio’s subject matter, I thought it prudent to have him on record. The sex, the pregnancy — it was all made up.”
“Was Sarah a real person? I ask because the mother of the boy I’m looking for is about the right age, and her name is Tara.”
“Perhaps Octavio knew her or was inspired by her, but he certainly didn’t impregnate her. Short of a Christmas miracle, I don’t see how this boy could be his son. Who is he, anyway?”
“His name’s Nicholas Moore. He was born around when Lake of the Moon came out. Has he ever contacted you?”
“No,” she said. “Born when, exactly?”
“May 3, 2005.”
“Well, that’s another way to know. Octavio and I spent at least a year editing together, and then we had to wait for his place in the publication cycle. The first draft would have been finished no later than about 2003.”
“Ah.”
“Sorry to disappoint, Mr. Edison.”
“That’s all right. I told Professor Ruíz I didn’t think it was plausible. But it is possible Nick convinced himself it was the truth.”
“That wouldn’t surprise me. Fiction can be a springboard for all sorts of fantasies. Now, if there’s nothing else—”
“A couple questions about Prado, if that’s okay.”
A beat. “Be my guest.”
“How’d you come to work with him in the first place?”
“I’d love to claim I divined him with my exquisite literary antennae, but it was pure chance. He sent in the manuscript unsolicited. My assistant pulled it out of the slush pile. Lauren. Smart girl. She went back to law school... Regardless. She liked it, passed it to me. Et voilà. Back then we could afford to take risks. Not anymore. One reason I got out.”