Manhunting (24 page)

“She was wearing a cowboy hat.”

“She was?” Jake frowned. “Damn. I didn’t notice.”

“It was bright red.” Will hesitated and then plunged on. “This is about Kate, right?”

Jake glared at him.

“Well, it’s obvious when she drives away, and you start acting like Godzilla immediately afterward.” Will glared back at him. “Call her.”

“It’s not Kate,” Jake said and got up to move to the rail and stare out at the lake.

“Yeah, right,” Will said.

“No,” Jake said. “I miss her like crazy, but it’s not Kate. I mean, she’s part of it, but it’s more.” He shook his head. “Something was wrong before she got here. She just made it worse.”

“So, what is it?” Will sat down to listen.

Jake went over all the possibilities before he forced himself to face the awful truth. “I’m bored,” he admitted.

“Hallelujah,” Will said. “The dead walk.”

Jake turned and sat on the rail to face his brother. “I’m not leaving Toby’s Corners. I like it here. I belong here.”

“So I was wrong,” Will said. “The dead are only staggering, but it’s a start. We’ll take it.”

Jake sipped his coffee and thought for a moment.

“Have we got any money?” he asked, oblivious to Will’s sarcasm.

“Sure. We’re rich.”

“No.” Jake looked at him patiently. “Money. The real stuff. Not the hotel, not the land. Money.”

Will considered. “I’ve got a fund stashed away for emergencies. It’s not much. Maybe fifteen thousand.”

“I want it,” Jake said.

Will started to make a smart comment and stopped. “All right,” he said. “Will I ever see this money again?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Jake said, grinning down at him. “You should have thought of that before you started calling me a potted plant and introducing me to pushy blondes.”

“Speaking of pushy blondes,” Will began, and Jake shook his head.

“I don’t want to talk about her,” he said.

“I’m sure you don’t,” Will said. “Question is, what are you going to do about her?”

“I don’t know,” Jake said, looking back out over the lake. “I’m considering my options.”

“That ought to keep you occupied for the next twenty years,” Will said with disgust. “You’re real good at considering your options.”

Jake scowled down at him. “You’re starting to sound like Kate.”

“Well, she’s an intelligent woman,” Will said. “We’ve got a lot in common.” He cocked a skeptical eye at his brother. “I don’t care about the money or whatever it is you’re going to do with it. But if you think playing around with it is going to make you a happy man, think again. This is about Kate and you know it.”

“I keep thinking,” Jake said, “that if I could just get her back down here, we could work everything out.” He frowned as he thought. “She was happy here, she just didn’t have anything to do. But she was happy here.” He looked back at Will. “Wasn’t she?”

“Yes. She was. Get her back,” Will said.

“How?” Jake asked him.

“Well, you could try calling her and asking her to come back,” Will said.

“No,” Jake said. “There’s nothing down here for her. I can’t ask her to come down here just for me.”

“You’re pathetic,” Will said.

“Not pathetic enough to expect her to give up her life just because I want her back,” Jake said. “There’s got to be another reason for her to come back. There’s got to be another way to get her back.”

Will looked at him with disgust. “Have her kidnapped. Tell her you’re pregnant and she’s the mother. Leave a trail of bread crumbs.”

Jake scowled at him. “I don’t think Kate likes bread crumbs. I need help here. You are not helping.”

“Well, then, leave a trail of something she likes,” Will said, getting up to leave. “Just do something instead of moping around looking like a kicked dog and snarling at everybody.” He left, banging the screen door behind him.

“The only thing she likes is managing other people’s businesses,” Jake said to nobody in particular. And then after a moment, he added, “And me.” It was a new approach, and it brought to mind a new option. He sipped his coffee and stared at the lake while he considered it.

Then he put his mug down on the rail and went to Nancy’s.

Two weeks later, Kate sat in her luxurious office, speaking patiently into her phone with Chester Vandenburg, the vice president of a company that she had been working night and day for the past six weeks to save. Part of her furious concentration was because the company had six hundred employees and four times that many stockholders, and she felt an edge of panic every time she focused on how close the whole thing was to going under. All those people. All those poor people.

The other part of her concentration was an effort to avoid remembering how much she hated the city, how much she despised her job, and above all, how much she missed Jake.

“All right, Mr. Vandenburg,” she said, trying to keep her voice even. “Would you like to explain to me why you just voted the CEO of your failing company a million-dollar raise?”

She tapped her pen hard against the desk as she listened to his dulcet tones explaining the need to cherish good management “Good management is the backbone of industry, Miss Svenson, and surely—”

“That good management is shipping your firm right down the tubes, Mr. Vandenburg,” Kate interrupted, still tapping her pen savagely. “It’s
Titanic
time over at your place, and you just gave the iceberg a nail for ripping a hole in your hull. Have you any idea of the view your stockholders are going to take of this? Roughly the same view that the passengers did on that other disaster, except that this time, Mr. Vandenburg, this time it will not be women and children first. This time everybody’s going down with the ship. Do you feel any guilt about this at all, Mr. Vandenburg? About the employees and stockholders you just screwed? Have you any moral fiber whatsoever?”

She stopped when she heard her voice rising to a shriek.

His voice came over the line, oily and unctuous. “I don’t think you understand big business, Ms. Svenson. Perhaps if—”

“I was raised on big business, Mr. Vandenburg. I cut my teeth on stocks and bonds and wrote my first school paper on leveraged buyouts. My third-grade teacher was quite impressed. I cannot help but feel, however, that she would be even more impressed with the magnitude of your ability to ignore what is happening under your nose at the same time you are facilitating it.”

“Are you accusing me of impropriety?”

“Either impropriety or ineptitude on a truly magnificent scale,” Kate snapped. “With you, possibly both.”

Mr. Vandenburg cleared his throat ominously. “Perhaps it would be better if the firm of Bertram Svenson, Ltd. assigned someone else to our little problem,” he threatened.

“What a good idea,” Kate said. “I suggest the SEC.”

She heard a click on the other end of the phone as Mr. Vandenburg hung up, and then her door opened.

“It’s just me,” Jessie said as she backed in holding two waxy white paper bags. She dropped them on Kate’s desk. “Sugar and caffeine,” she said. “Apple fritters and black coffee. You look like hell.”

“Thank you,” Kate said. “I feel like hell. I always knew I worked with scum, but I never realized it was this bad.” She pulled a foam cup from the bag and pried the lid off. “This smells good. Are the fritters from Debbie’s?”

“Yep. She sends her love and said to tell you that business is great and she’s thankful for your advice every day.”

“I need more Debbies and fewer Vandenburgs,” Kate said. “Unfortunately, it’s a Vandenburg kind of town.” She sipped her coffee and stared wistfully at the fritter Jessie shoved in front of her.

“Who’s Vandenburg?” Jessie asked as she opened her own coffee.

“One of several jerks I am currently trying to keep from financially murdering their own companies.” She sighed and then looked at her best friend, who was blithely chomping away on a fritter. “You know, I used to enjoy this, but now... I’m losing my edge, Jess.”

“You?” Jessie snorted. “Never. How many morons did you slash today?”

“Not enough,” Kate said. “I want to stay and fight the good fight, but this is ridiculous.” She leaned back in her chair. “I’m so tired of this, Jessie.”

Jessie dropped her fritter on the floor in surprise. “You’re kidding. That’s
great.”

She bent to pick up her fritter and Kate said, “No, it isn’t. This is my career.”

“You have a very clean floor,” Jessie said, examining her fritter. “There’s no dirt on here at all.” She bit into the doughnut again, chewed, swallowed, and said, “So have this career somewhere else. Like, say, Kentucky.”

“No,” Kate said.

“You’d go back if Jake wasn’t there,” Jessie said. “You miss it.”

“Maybe,” Kate said. She pulled her fritter toward her and looked at it sadly. “I’m so miserable, I’m not even hungry.”

“You miss Jake, too,” Jessie said. “I can’t believe you’re being such a wimp about this.”

“I am not a wimp,” Kate said. “It’s been six weeks, and he hasn’t called. He probably wouldn’t recognize my name.”

“Oh, please,” Jessie said. “Spare me.”

“He’s probably forgotten I exist. Six weeks.” She looked at Jessie, the hurt plain in her eyes. “Six weeks, and he hasn’t even called once. I’ve given up checking my machine. I buried it under my dry cleaning because every time I go home there’s either no blinking light or, worse, there is one and it’s somebody trying to sell me something.” She shook her head and gestured to her office. “This is all I’ve got, Jess. And I hate it.”

Her secretary buzzed her again. “Tim Davis of Davis Enterprises on two.”

“Yet another jerk,” Kate said and picked up the phone. “Hello, Tim.”

“What the hell is this about not laying off the Princeton plant?”

“It’s not cost-effective,” Kate said. “The money you save in the layoffs will be counteracted by your retraining fees and start-up costs when the plant kicks into gear again. Also, it’s very bad PR, laying off people who have worked for you for twenty years.” Kate clenched her jaw to keep from screaming. “That kind of thing is right up there with ripping off the pension fund. And speaking of the pension fund, I was just going over some interesting figures.”

“Who the hell are you working for?”

“My daddy,” Kate said. “He’s a son of a bitch, but he never stole from widows and orphans. Clean this up, Tim.”

He hung up on her, and she dropped the phone back in its cradle. She looked over at Jessie and said, “I hate this. I hate this, I hate this,
I hate this.”

“What you need here,” Jessie said, “is a plan.” She reached across Kate’s desk and pulled a memo pad toward her.

“Oh, no, I don’t,” Kate said.

“Why not?” Jessie said. “It worked before. Give me a pen.”

“Yes,” Kate said. “It worked beautifully. That’s why I’m back here, lonely and miserable....”

“Now as I recall,” Jessie said, ignoring her, “first we set goals. In this case, I think the goal should be to get you married to Jake.” She stretched her arm across the desk and took Kate’s pen.

“Jessie,” Kate began, and Jessie overrode her again.

“Now, what’s keeping you from marrying Jake?”

“Well, he’s not speaking to me, and that’s a real drawback,” Kate said, sarcastically.

“We don’t know that he’s not
speaking
to you,” Jessie said. “We just know that he’s not
calling
you. There’s a difference.”

“At the moment, it escapes me,” Kate said, but Jessie wrote down,
“1. He won’t call,”
and then looked at Kate again. “What else?”

“Jessie,” Kate said, but Jessie said, “Look, the man loves you. You love him. And I’m going to get you back together. What else?”

“He
thinks
he might love me,” Kate corrected. “He was still pondering the question when I left.”

“Okay,” Jessie said and wrote,
“2. He thinks he might love her.”
She looked down at the list and said, “This is coming along nicely. What else?”

“Well,” Kate said, seething as she thought about it, “he hates confrontation. But he also hates women who manipulate him, which pretty much cuts off all form of human contact except sex.”

“How does he feel about sex?”

“He’s heavily in favor of it,” Kate said, wondering gloomily if he still was, and if so, with whom.

“Okay,” Jessie said, and wrote down,
“3. He hates confrontation and manipulation.”

“Plus,” Kate said, “he’s not working. He’s just wasting himself, and that drives me crazy.”

“Well, it is his life,” Jessie began, and Kate overrode her.

“It’s a terrible waste and he knows it. He’s just running away from commitment of any kind. And what really makes me crazy is that he uses the opposite argument for keeping me away. He says there’d be no career for me there, so I have to go. But there’s no career for him there and he gets to stay.”

“Well, you would go nuts not working,” Jessie pointed out fairly, but she wrote down,
“4. He’s not working. 5. He runs away from commitment. 6. He thinks there’s no career for her there.”

“Okay, read me the list,” Kate said gloomily, and Jessie did.

“Is that it?” Jessie said. “We can fix this stuff.”

“No, there’s another one,” Kate said. “He doesn’t want to get married. And I do. I want it all. Commitment, rings, the church, the whole thing.”

“Okay,” Jessie said and wrote down,
“7. He doesn’t want to get married.”
She shoved the list across to Kate. “Piece of cake.”

Kate looked at her in disbelief. “Jessie, this is awful. What do you mean, piece of cake?”

“Well, you’re going to have to do some compromising,” Jessie said. “If the man doesn’t want a career, he doesn’t want a career.”

Kate frowned and said, “Maybe. What about the rest?”

Jessie pulled the list back and studied it. “Well, number one really is easy. He won’t call? You call him.”

“And sit and listen to his embarrassed silence on the other end? No.”

“Then go down and see him. It’s only a four-hour drive. You miss Nancy. Penny’s down there. It’s been a month. Go visit.”

“I don’t know...” Kate said.

“Do you want him or not?” Jessie snapped.