Body Copy (28 page)

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Authors: Michael Craven

Tags: #Mystery

Tremaine gave Nina a look.

“I’m only laughing because I’m sitting next to living proof that you survived,” she said.

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Michael Craven

“Fair enough,” he said.

“You were in pretty good shape back then,” she said.

“How about now?”

“Room for improvement, but not bad.”

Then, Nina Aldeen looked right at Donald Tremaine and said, “Thanks for taking the case, thanks for figur-ing it out. I’m glad I know the truth. I feel like I helped do something good.”

“You did.”

He looked at her, saw in her face that, yes, she had done something good. She helped to find that lost piece of the puzzle—the killer, the truth—that had created a deeper rip in her family than just the fact that there had been a murder. And, in that same discovery, she’d gotten out of her head a little bit, and one step closer to recovering from her divorce.

But
, Tremaine thought,
what other good things had she
done?

When was the last time he’d told anyone about Mandy Rice getting shot and killed? And when was the last time he’d put the details of his own divorce through a different filter, looked at them with a different perspective?

Tremaine said, “You know, Nina, you did something good for me, too.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“And what was that?”

“Well . . .” he said. And there was the pressure in his chest, the heat on his face. The guilt he felt about Mandy and his failed marriage to Susan somehow still ramming 284

B O D Y C O P Y

around inside him. “It felt good for me to talk about some of the things we talked about during this. Why I quit the tour. Your divorce, divorce in general. It was good for me to talk about those things. To think about them. You know?”

“Yeah, I know.”

Tremaine wanted to talk more, he felt comfortable enough with Nina to let just a little more out. “Some of that confusion will always be with me, but I’m a little closer to being okay with it.”

Nina said, “Sometimes a missing puzzle piece isn’t really missing, it’s just being ignored. And the way you find it, and deal with it, is to look at it, and think about it, and talk about it.”

Tremaine nodded. He continued to look at her. But not just at her appearance—no, at her everything. And in that moment, he got a quick, incandescent feeling of hope. He knew, in that tiny section of time, that he could, that he would, someday get back in the relationship game.

Someday. Yeah, someday.

It made him uncomfortable, uneasy. But somehow it was good. He knew for sure that it was good. Yes, in that moment, he was on a wave, but it wasn’t a wave he could control. It wasn’t a wave that he could slice and carve and shape. It wasn’t a wave that he could maneuver on and manipulate. It was a wave that took him wherever it wanted to go.

He remembered now Nina first arriving at his house, looking up at him standing on the roof of his trailer, hand shielding her eyes. He remembered her walking on the 285

Michael Craven

beach at night, sitting across from him at the Lobster, waving to him from the steps of Gale/Parker. And as he examined those memories, he was glad, he was grateful, that he’d been able to help her.

Or was it the other way around?

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C H A P T E R 4 1

A week later, Tremaine was up on the roof of his trailer reading a draft of Nina Aldeen’s book,
Split Up
. Re-markable. Sad, angry, strong, inspiring, just like a book like this should be.

He had planned to start the book on his flight to Australia the next day, but he couldn’t wait, the big manuscript sitting on a table in the trailer was just too tempting. He knocked out about a hundred pages, then stood up and looked at the surf. Looked to be about three to four, really good shape. Tremaine knew he was definitely going to get his fill of surfing Down Under, but, man, it was a nice Malibu afternoon. Warm, still, just right. And the waves looked good. It’d feel nice, it’d
be
nice, to be out there.

Tremaine went inside the trailer, gave Lyle a pat on the Michael Craven

head, put Nina’s manuscript in his carry-on bag for tomorrow. He’d pull it out later that night and read more, he knew that, but he wanted to at least pretend he was going to save the lion’s share of the book for the plane.

Tremaine looked out his window and saw Marvin Kearns walk by, dressed as a cowboy. He shook his head and laughed.

Then Tremaine looked at his surfboard bag, all packed and ready to go. He thought, do I really want to go through the trouble of unpacking just to grab a few waves, even though I’m headed to Australia tomorrow to surf for two months?

And then, in an instant, the board was on top of the Cutlass, and the Cutlass was parked at the break, and Donald Tremaine, backlit and silhouetted by the sun, was gliding across a perfect Malibu wave.

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A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S

I would like to thank my mom, my sister, Priscilla, Sarah Durand, Daniel Greenberg, Emily Krump, Michael Signorelli, and last but certainly not least James Frey. In many different ways, you have all been great.

About the Author

Michael Craven is an award-winning advertising writer who has worked for some of the most creative agencies in the country. His career has taken him from New York City to Los Angeles, to Boulder, Colorado, where he lives and works. Michael grew up in Jackson-ville, Florida.
Body Copy
is his first novel.

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Credits

Cover design by Milan Bozic

Cover photograph by Lesley Robson-Foster/Getty Images
Copyright

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

BODY COPY. Copyright © 2009 by Michael Craven. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

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ISBN 978-0-06-175978-9

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