“I, uh.”
“Breathe, honey,” Nina said again.
We all waited politely. “You, uh, that is, the customers were wondering…” She didn’t seem to know how to proceed.
“Were we too loud, honey?”
“Yes. Loud. You were loud.”
“They heard you upstairs,” I told everyone. “Through the concrete and the floors and over the sound system.”
“Excellent!” Christie said.
SIX
I CALLED DORNAN BEFORE BREAKFAST. HE WOULDN’T PICK UP. I LEFT A LONG message. When I called again, half an hour later, he answered.
“It didn’t look like work,” he said.
“No.”
“In fact, it looked to me as though I showed up just in time.”
An image popped into my head of Dornan in baggy blue shorts and sagging tights, cape askew, kicking down the door to my suite to the accompaniment of melodramatic music.
“I did, didn’t I? Show up in time?”
Depends how you look at it. “Yes.” Though I hadn’t got the information I’d wanted.
“Aud, don’t take this the wrong way, but are you sure you’re all right?”
“How do you mean, exactly?”
“Last night just… well, it’s not like you. The whole idea strikes me as baroque and too complicated, all that potential for things to go wrong. And the timing. It’s almost as though you set yourself up for it. At best, it seems uncharacteristically silly.”
Irresponsible. Then a victim. Now silly. “Every week a new high.”
“Yes, well, that’s probably some sort of joke, but those drugs were truly wicked. Most of those other people are still in hospital. One of the carpenters just had to go back on a ventilator, for God’s sake.”
He was very well informed.
“Look, why don’t we just go back to Atlanta? You don’t really care about your warehouse anyway, and you’ve seen your mum. I’ve seen enough of the Seattle chains. I have some ideas to be working on, and, besides, the business is probably dissolving with no one looking after it. Let’s just leave. Don’t get distracted. What happened with the drugs is irrelevant, like, like an earthquake. It affected you, yes, but it wasn’t aimed at you. It wasn’t personal.”
“Oh, but it was.”
“More than a dozen people—”
“Dornan, think about it. This whole thing has been aimed at getting me to sell the warehouse cheaply. Who I was didn’t matter, it was the fact that I owned the warehouse. They began by reducing my cash flow sharply, by calling OSHA and EPA to harass my leaseholder, which they hoped would make whoever owned the warehouse view it as a liability. It was a liability. But then Rusen came along. He started trying to deal with the problem, he tried to talk to EPA and OSHA, so then whoever was engineering all this had to start messing with the production itself.” The day-as-night exposures, the lighting setup, the props. “And when Rusen, with his unexpected corporate efficiencies, starts trying to find ways to finesse that, and keeps making his payments to me, they start to scramble and dump drugs in the coffee. Which I drink. Ironic if you stop to think about it. Two months ago all they would have to have done is make me an offer. As you’ve said, I didn’t really care. The only reason I came out here in the first place was to be distracted.”
“And because of your mum.”
“Yes. But mainly to get away from Atlanta. Only now I find I’m being manipulated again.”
“This is different.”
“Is it? They drugged that coffee, and I drank it. They slid their nasty little hands inside my head and paddled about. I can’t rely on myself anymore. Is what I see real? Can I walk up a hill without my heart faltering and the oxygen not getting to my lungs because some compound that I can’t even name has altered my metabolic cycle? If I have to run I don’t know if I can. If something, someone comes for me, I don’t know if it’s really happening. Do you know what that’s like?”
“No.”
“So, yes, now I care. I’m going to get these people. And you know what?” And it slowly dawned on me that this was true. “I’m going to enjoy it. Because, as you say—and you’re obviously more well informed than I am—someone is still on a ventilator, and the people who did this to her—”
“Him.”
“—him deserve whatever I can mete out. This is something I can do something about. It won’t be easy, because Seattle isn’t my town, and I’ll have to do things differently, but I’ll find them.”
“I’m getting that.”
“I’m going to get information from Corning’s office and follow it. And if, in order to get to these people, I have to deal drugs or talk to kiddie-porn merchants or get naked with gorgeous women I’ve given a lot of money to in the privacy of my own suite, I will.”
“Though you didn’t. Get naked.”
“No.”
“Though she was very decorative.”
“She was, wasn’t she?”
“But not really your type, in the end.”
“No.”
“Maybe if she’d pissed you off,” he said. “That seems to work for you.”
I said nothing.
“Well, I don’t imagine there’s any way I can help, but if there is, let me know.”
“There is something,” I said, and imagined him flinging himself skyward and hurtling around the earth faster and faster until it slowed, and reversed, and the film of my life ran backwards through the last year to the afternoon when Julia sat on my lap by the fjord and said she was going to Oslo and there was no reason for me to go with her, she would only be gone twenty-four hours, and I said all right. “Have dinner with me tonight. ”
“You’re eating again?”
“Not by choice. Come be my moral support. With my mother and Eric.”
Silence. Then he sighed. “What time?”
“Seven. I’ll pick you up.”
THE SUN was bright and the air soft. It was going to be a hot day, for Seattle. The sunshine seemed to puzzle and provoke the normally placid local drivers. Crossing Fifth Avenue, I heard the tire squeal and horn honk of two separate near misses.
I got to Corning’s office at two minutes to nine. Gary was hovering by the door, already agitated.
“Miz Corning’s been… there’s… I’m afraid your appointment is postponed.”
I moved him aside gently. The reception area was brightly lit, and the adrenaline coursing through my system made it seem brighter still. Corning’s door was ajar, and her lights off. “Don’t move,” I said. I listened.
“She’s…”
I walked in, turned on the lights. Perfectly tidy and normal, apart from a lone piece of paper facedown on the floor. I picked it up. Page two of a standard commercial lease, blank. “Gary?” He ventured in behind me. “Where is she?”
“That’s just it. I don’t know. She hasn’t been in, and she hasn’t called. It’s not usual.” Emphasis on the last word.
I turned and waited.
“She’s very particular about clients. Always here half an hour before an appointment, always wanting the file so she can appear to have remembered everything about the client. The personal touch, she called it.”
Past tense. “When did you get here?”
“Usual time. Eight o’clock. Well, five minutes late, so I was worried she’d… I’ve been working on a presentation on the new… on the presentation she was going to give later this week.”
Was going to give. He was young, but not stupid. Perhaps he knew something he didn’t know he knew. “Why are you so worried?”
“I just am. It’s not usual. When she still wasn’t here after I’d finished my coffee, I waited another minute or so, then called her cell, in case she was stuck in traffic, so I could ask her if there was anything I could do to prepare for her meeting, you know, so she wasn’t cutting it too fine, but there was no answer. She always answers her cell. So I thought maybe she was sick, so I called her home. Nothing. So I checked her appointment calendar, and she hasn’t canceled anything, so I was thinking maybe she’d had an accident.”