And once again Natalie found herself scurrying into the CEO’s office. Only this time probably not for a quick session of hot nookie.
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Tom Mitchell, who sat two desks behind Natalie, watched the secretary’s hurried entry into Madison’s inner realm. Unlike the CEO, he had noticed Natalie’s red eyes and her tears, no matter how hard she tried to hide them under a thick layer of makeup. Clearly the girl was in trouble, and even though the source of her trouble was unknown to Tom, Natalie’s visible distress weighed heavily on him.
For Tom had some trouble of his own to deal with, namely his unrequited affections for the golden-haired secretary, which had been plaguing him from the moment he’d started work at Advantage three years ago. All this time he’d been admiring the lovely young woman from afar, knowing she would never be his.
It had been made clear to him from day one to whom Natalie’s affections in fact belonged: her affair with the big boss wasn’t exactly a big secret. And many was the time he’d seen her sneak into his office, the blinds being pulled, the door being locked, and certain sounds emanating from the office that were more appropriate in a nature documentary than in the offices of a prominent CEO.
Then again, Michael Madison, as far as Tom had been able to ascertain, ticked all the boxes of your classic industry chieftain: he was brash, overconfident, narcissistic, uber-ambitious, and had a wandering eye and ditto hands.
But even though this affair had pretty much sunk Natalie’s stock amongst her fellow staffers, it hadn’t put a dent in Tom’s secret affections. That young man’s heart had belonged to Natalie from the moment he first laid eyes on her, and as far as he was concerned, would always remain that way, now and forever.
But since no one likes to wait for now or even forever, he decided to put pen to paper—or rather fingers to keyboard—and pour his heart out in a message to Hampton Cove’s favorite agony column. And so he began: ‘Dear Gabi…’
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Three rows behind Tom, Doris Booth sat silently fuming as she stared at the gift Michael had left on her desk that morning. It was a copy of Strunk& White’sElements of Style. The perfect gift for anyone struggling with the basic tenets of grammar and spelling.
As the main publicist forGlimmer, language was Doris’s forte. It was her secret weapon and her proudest possession both. And now here this horrible man had basically told her she couldn’t spell?
In the immortal words of Howard White: how dare he! And as her mouth closed with the clicking sound of her perfect white teeth, in one smooth movement she dumped the precious little tome into her wastepaper basket, and picked up her phone to call the HR department.
If Michael Madison wanted a fight, he got one!
CHAPTER 2
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One of the perks of being a cat is that you get to spend so much time with members of the human species. We all know that humans are weird, but they’re also weirdly entertaining. In fact I can spend hours watching humans being, well, human. And it was exactly such an opportunity we were having now, watching Tex Poole, our human’s dad, engaged in an activity he called ‘clearing the attic.’
You have to understand that part of the human experience is to collect junk. Piles and piles of junk. And then at some point, usually in the spring, they suddenly get tired of this pile of junk and start moving it from one place to another. In this case Tex was moving the pile from his attic to the sidewalk, where he hoped other humans would take it away and add it to their own little pile.
It’s one of those human pastimes that’s simply fascinating for a people watcher like myself, and so I was having a great time watching this particular human now.
“Why is Tex putting all this junk on the sidewalk, Max?” asked Dooley, who marveled at the sheer volume of stuff the Pooles had amassed in such a small space.
“He hopes other humans will take it away,” I said.
“But why did he collect it in the first place?”
“Now that,” I said, “is a mystery I still haven’t figured out.”
I may be an amateur detective, but there are mysteries that are simply too deep to fathom.
Tex had donned an old pair of jeans, an old sweater, and had put a baseball cap on top of his head, as he rooted through the stuff collected in his attic, and it really was a sight to behold, as he opened a box, and either uttered cries of ecstasy, or agony. Ecstasy when he found an old train set he’d played with as a boy, agony when he came upon one of Gran’s treasures. Such as there are: ‘priceless’ artifacts she’d picked up at some garage sale in the year of our Lord 1977. Or the oddly shaped—or oddly misshaped, depending on the eye of the beholder—clay pots that were the product of a pottery class she took in the early eighties.
“Will you look at that?” Tex muttered when he opened yet another old box and took out a tattered little booklet. “I used to read these all the time!”
A glance told me it was a booklet in a series featuring the Hardy Boys.
“Who are the Hardy Boys, Max?” asked Dooley, not missing a beat. “Are they boys that are very hardy?”
“I suppose so,” I said. Of course they’d have to be hardy to survive up there in the attic for all these years. At least the attic was dry, but it was also dusty, and not a lot of fun to hang around in for long periods of time.
And so when Tex settled down to read his copy of these hardy Hardy Boys, we decided to take a break from watching him, and go and do the other thing that we enjoy so much: take long naps on any surface we find agreeable. Today I decided to check out the new comforter Chase had brought home with him, and had been extolling the virtues of when he and Odelia put it on the bed that morning.
And as we settled down, I remembered how Chase had said, a catch in his voice, that this would be the first time he and his lady love would get to have first dibs at this nice new thing they got.
How cute humans are. And how naive.
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While Tex was thus engrossed in the adventures of Frank and Joe Hardy, as chronicled by Franklin W. Dixon, keen eyes had spotted the growing pile of attic surplus on the sidewalk. It just so happened that a troop of girl scouts had selected this particular day to traipse up and down the neighborhood to spread some sweetness and light in the form of girl scout cookies, and so when they turned up on the doorstep of 46 Harrington Street, hoping to extract some coin from the Poole family, their attention was momentarily distracted by the remnants of Tex and Marge Poole’s past. So much so that one of their lot, a smallish freckled specimen answering to the name Mabel, felt compelled to pick up a shoebox and take a look inside.
It is, after all, not just cats that marvel at the strange things humans do. Little boys and girls—hardy or not hardy—are just the same. And when Mabel found a stack of letters inside this box, neatly tied together with a red ribbon and a bow, she gibbered excitedly, “You guys, look what I found!”
The other girls of her troop all trooped around, putting their cookie-dispensing mission on hold for the nonce, and gibbered just as excitedly as Mabel extricated the bundle of letters from its receptacle, and gently relieved it from its red ribbon.
“The mailman must have dropped them,” said Mabel, holding the letters reverently. Her daddy was a mailman, and she loved her daddy very much, and had a fervent reverence for the mysterious profession he was engaged in. Handing out presents in the form of letters every day just seemed like such a nice thing to do!
“We have to help the mailman,” said a precocious girl with braces named Jackie.
“Jackie is right,” a third girl named Frida announced earnestly. “If we don’t help the mailman the people these letters are for are going to be very unhappy. My daddy didn’t get a letter once and he was so upset he wrote a letter to the post office.”