She slipped from the kitchen and made a dash for the bathroom, where she locked the door and indulged in the first honest laughter she could remember in weeks.
Meanwhile, in Angela Gamble's kitchen, Joseph "Yank" Yankowski remained just as Susannah had left him. The refrigerator door was still open and he hadn't moved from his position. Only his eyes were different. Beneath the lenses of his glasses, the lids were squeezed tight while inside his skull billions of interconnected nerve cells churned with activity. Thalamus, hypothalamus, the fissured moonscape of cerebrum and cerebellum-all the parts of Yank Yankowski's genius brain were at work, accurately reconstructing from memory each separate micron of Susannah Faulconer's pale naked flesh.
Even though she hadn't slept well, Susannah awakened early the next morning refreshed and full of energy. The encounter with Yank had amused her, and the confrontation with Sam had given her courage. She decided that a woman who could stand her ground in an argument with Sam Gamble was capable of anything. Even while she slept, her mind had been working, and as she stepped into the shower, she once again heard the voice that had whispered to her in her dreams. Appearances. Appearances are everything.
Sam came into the kitchen a little after eight o'clock. She had already dressed and she was standing at the sink drying the dishes from the night before. Normally, he teased her about her tidiness, but this morning he didn't seem to have the heart for it. She didn't need to ask why he was so quiet. They were due to pick up the printed circuit boards in an hour. But what good were circuit boards when they didn't have the money to buy the components that went on them?
He walked over to the refrigerator and pulled out a carton of orange juice. Without bothering to fetch a glass, he tilted the container to his lips. She wiped off the counter with the dish towel and then hung it away neatly. Appearances, she told herself. Appearances were everything.
He turned, really seeing her for the first time. "What are you all dressed up for?"
She wore square-heeled leather pumps and a black and white checked suit that was several years old and had never been one of her favorites. Still, it was good quality, and it was the only professional-looking outfit Paige had included. Her hair was neatly coiled at her neck with the pins she had borrowed from the Pretty Please Salon. She stepped forward. Sam had said that Yank's machine could give her courage. It was time to find out if that was true. "We've tried it your way," she said. "Now I want to try it mine."
Spectra Electronics Warehouse was exactly the sort of place most women hated. It was a vast electronics junkyard of a building with concrete floors and towering shelves filled with cardboard cartons reinforced by wire strapping. An open ceiling supported a network of pipes and jaundiced neon lights. Thick parts catalogues with dog-eared pages were mounted next to a long wooden counter plastered with Fly Navy bumper stickers. The place felt cold and smelled like metal, plastics, and old cigarettes. It was so different from the sorts of places Susannah normally patronized that she might actually have liked it if she hadn't been paralyzed with fright.
"Hey, Sam. Howzitgoin'?" The man behind the counter looked up from a pile of invoices.
Sam swaggered forward. "Not too bad, Carl. How about you?"
"All right. No complaints." Carl pulled a pen from an ink-stained plastic pocket protector and returned his attention to the invoices. Sam was obviously not regarded as a customer important enough to warrant any more of his time.
Sam looked at her and shrugged, telling her without words that this had been her idea and she was the one who could see it through. The piece of toast she had eaten for breakfast clumped in her stomach.
When Sam saw that she wasn't moving forward, he came to the proper conclusion that she had lost her nerve and gave her a look of disgust. She wanted to show him that he was wrong-that a socialite could teach a silver-tongued hustler a few things, that she was good for something more than planning cocktail parties. But her feet felt as if they were glued to the floor and she couldn't seem to unstick them. He wandered over to thumb through a parts catalogue, separating himself from her.
Without quite knowing how it had happened, she found herself moving forward. Carl looked up. He seemed vaguely perplexed. Women in Chanel suits-even suits that were five years old-weren't frequent patrons of Spectra Electronics.
She extended her arm for a handshake, then tightened her grip when she realized it wasn't firm enough. "Faulconer," she said, introducing herself with her last name for the first time in her life. "I'm Susannah Faulconer. Sam's business partner."
Her hand was clammy. She withdrew it before he noticed and gave him a bright red business card with SysVal boldly printed in black. As she passed it over, she prayed that the ink was dry.
SysVal stood for "Sam Yank and Susannah in the Valley," the name she and Sam had been arguing over all morning, right up to the time they stood at the counter of a print shop that guaranteed business cards in an hour. Sam had wanted to give the company an antiestablishment name like General Egocentric or Hewlett-Hacker, but she had stubbornly resisted. He had yelled at her right in front of the clerk at the print shop, but their confrontation the night before had stiffened her resolve not to let him have his way when she knew he was wrong. She still could barely believe that the name on the card was the one she had chosen.
"Faulconer?" Carl said as he eyed the card, which had her name written in the bottom corner incongruously placed in front of Sam's and Yank's and-even more incongruously-with the bold title "President" printed after it. "You have anything to do with FBT?"
"Joel Faulconer is my father," she said, "but I'm currently on sabbatical from FBT." That was vaguely true.
She turned her head as if she were knowledgeably surveying her surroundings, when actually she was just trying to slow down her heartbeat. From Sam's briefing, she knew Carl was the person they had to deal with, but what did she know about someone who owned an electronics warehouse? The building was cool but she was perspiring. She would never be able to carry this off. She was a socialite, not a businesswoman.
And then she saw the respect in his eyes generated by hearing her last name, and she found the courage to plunge ahead. "Sam tells me that you're the best dealer in the area. He's a severe judge, and I'm impressed."
Carl was pleased by her praise. "We try," he said. "We've been here for ten years. In the Valley that's a long time." He began telling her in some detail about his business.
"Interesting," she said as he wound to a close.
He gestured toward a cloudy Pyrex pot sitting on a hot plate. "Can I get you a cup of coffee, Miss Faulconer?"
He seemed to have forgotten Sam's existence, and for the moment that was fine. Off to the side, she could see Sam thumbing through the catalogues, but she knew that he was taking in every word of this exchange.
"Thanks, but I'm afraid I don't have time. I have another appointment." She gave her wrist a brisk glance only to remember, too late, that she wasn't wearing a watch. All of her watches were in her dresser drawer at Falcon Hill-or on her sister's wrist. She surreptitiously tugged down the sleeve of her jacket before Carl could notice.
"You're obviously competent at what you do. Reliability is important to me." Her knees were starting to feel weak, but she plunged on before she lost her nerve. "For some time I've been interested in helping develop small companies outside the FBT umbrella. I've been looking for ventures that excite me-new products, new concepts, fresh people. When Sam showed me the computer that he and his associate had designed, I knew I'd found exactly what I'd been looking for."
"Sam's a good guy," Carl said, belatedly remembering who had brought her here. "He's got good instincts."