The Fearsome Particles (34 page)

“Look, I’m not some friggin undercover cop here. If he comes in, I’ll call you.”

“Fine. Good. And, one more thing!” He heard Mike sigh through the phone and he cringed. He did not want to make
Mike angry – please don’t be angry, he thought – just conscientious. “Can you leave the number, with a note, some place obvious for the next person who comes on shift? Mike?”

Mike sighed again. “Sure, yeah. Okay?” He hung up.

S
andy sat down in the seat opposite Gerald’s desk and motioned for Trick to drag over one of the chairs by the window. Which he did. Then she turned her attention to Gerald.

“Is there anything that, you know, we can do?” she said, pressing her skirt down across her knees.

Gerald was only half aware of their presence; he was concentrating on the check marks he’d made on the Yellow Pages ads of all the hotels he had called. Those with only three checks, instead of four, he needed to call again. Then back to the hospitals.

He glanced up at her. “What do you mean?”

“Well, you seem to be in the middle of some sort of … problem.” As she said this, she brought her hands up and agitated them in the air, little facsimiles of commotion.

Gerald was thinking about hotels and hospitals. It seemed to him as though he was missing something, as if he had cast out a net that had gaping holes through which entire groups of buildings could swim. “No, it’s under control,” he said. “But here’s the thing.” He dragged his eyes off the Yellow Pages to look at her. “Gwyn Doremond is coming here at three and he wants a rundown on our plan to attack the market share. I need you to give me what you’ve worked up since Friday.”

“Gwyn Doremond?” said Sandy.

“The chairman,” offered Trick, at her elbow.

Sandy turned her head with a frown as if to speak sharply to Trick, but resisted the urge. “Gerald,” she said, “do you want me to give the presentation?”

He stared at her for an extended moment, until she sat back in her chair. “If you wanted to stay somewhere in the city for a few nights,” he said, “where would you stay?”

She blinked. “You mean if I was visiting?”

“Sure. But not a hotel. Somewhere else.”

“Uh.” She glanced over at Trick and then back. “With friends?”

“No,” muttered Gerald. “Tried that.”

“You can rent condos,” offered Trick. “Down by the water. Place is teeming with them.”

Gerald shook his head. “No. That’s not it.” He flipped pages.

“I’m sorry, I don’t know,” said Sandy, and she gave a stoic laugh. “I hardly ever travel anywhere. I’m always
working!
”

He turned the pages of ads and circled the ones with only three checks and nodded at the words coming out of Sandy’s mouth. And the whole time he tried not to think of Kyle’s hand, festering, and the bones setting into contortions, because whenever he did, his head started to spin and he accomplished nothing. When he picked up the phone to make his next call – university housing, that was something he hadn’t tried – he barely noticed that Sandy and Trick had gone.

G
wyn Doremond was a short, brick-shaped man with a head of wavy black hair who would have struck some observers as
handsome in a threatening, bar-thug sort of way were he remotely interested in their opinion of him. But an expression of barely suppressed contempt for anyone he spoke to tended to erase the handsome from his features.

Gerald, on his way to the reception area to meet him, found him in the corridor, staring into the sales area with his legs set wide apart and his dark suit jacket flared back from the hands on his hips.

“Mr. Doremond,” Gerald said, extending his hand.

“You hear that?” Doremond grumbled as a greeting, his Welsh accent knuckling each word as it emerged. He shook Gerald’s hand as an afterthought and folded his arms. “What’s that telling you?”

Gerald looked where Doremond was looking; tried to understand. “I’m not following.”

“This is your sales department, correct?” He leaned forward and cupped a hand to his ear. “Don’t hear a fucking thing, do you?”

“They’re probably all out on sales calls.”

“Stand where I’m standing,” he said. He backed away and pointed to the spot. “Go on. Stand right there.”

Gerald took his position and stared where Doremond had stared. From there he saw two sets of salespeople feet, crossed at the ankles and propped up on salespeople desks, the way Kyle had once studied for his exams, lying with his back on the padded carpet in the living room, a textbook suspended over his head, his feet propped up on the edge of a sofa.

“So,” Doremond said. “What are you gonna do about it?”

What could he do? Could he restore those days? Could he
take back every moment of thoughtless neglect, rescind every overbearing command to shape up or buckle down? He remembered seeing Kyle study that way, and because it made him seem careless, he’d once actually told him to stop:

Could he take that back? Could he find some way to patch all the rents that were showing now in the fabric of his son? Before he could do that, he had to find him, and more than anything he wanted to get back to the phone. But Doremond was talking about something else, he knew. Gerald turned to him. “I’ve been meaning to have a talk with Leslie Morton.”

“You’ve been
meaning
to,” repeated Doremond. He chuckled with apparent disgust. “Man of action, eh?” He glanced up and down at the figure in front of him, taking in the vision through narrowed eyes. Then he turned his square shoulders and signalled for Gerald to follow him. “We can use Bishop’s office.”

Gerald walked with Doremond partway down the hall and stopped outside the sales and marketing department. “Be right there, sir,” he said and for a moment watched Doremond carry on as if he hadn’t heard. Then he looked in as Sandy met him at the door with a file folder thick with papers.

“I think everything’s here,” she said in a half whisper. “You’ve got the market share figures for the last three years,
and then I’ve sketched out the marketing plan, including the trade shows and the direct mail and the distribution, and I have cost projections from Doug and–”

Gerald took it from her. “Thanks, Sandy.” The folder felt heavy, but no more than he’d expected; it had the heft of hard work. “Could you let the woman at reception – what’s her name?”

Sandy stared at him. “You mean Mary?”

“Mary, right.” He tapped his forehead with a knuckle. “Could you ask Mary to monitor my line, and let her know where I am, and ask her to” – he tried to breathe deep, but his lungs seemed to resist the air – “to let me know if any calls come in about my son.”

For a second, Sandy’s eyes searched his. “Yes. Of course.”

She said it so firmly, so precisely, his knees almost buckled with relief. He set a hand against the doorframe and managed a better breath. Then he thanked her and pushed off down the hall.

“I’ll be close by,” she whispered after him, “if you need me.”

F
or the first few minutes Doremond didn’t bother with a chair in Bishop’s office of walnut and dark leather. He stood at the window looking down on the movements of men and trucks at the loading dock.

“How many shipments out today?” he said as Gerald stepped into the room.

Gerald had to think for a minute. “Six,” he finally said. “Four to western Canada and two to the States.”

“And tomorrow?”

“Let me – uh, four, I think.”

“You never think of piggybacking your shipments to regions?”

“Yes, all the time.”

“What I’m looking at here,” said Doremond, jabbing a hand toward the scene below, “is two teams of men filling two mid-sized trucks going to the same goddamn place.” He glanced scornfully at Gerald. “Am I right?”

“Actually no,” said Gerald. “One of those is going to Edmonton, the other’s going to New York State.”

“Did you have two trucks going west this morning?”

“Yes. To Winnipeg and…” –he had to think– “Saskatoon.”

“So. Same fucking difference. You could’ve combined those two into one, saved yourself a truck and a driver, half the men, and cut your fuel costs thirty per cent.”

None of that was true, because the trucks in the morning had been full-sized rigs, completely filled. But Gerald didn’t have the heart to argue. He wanted this to be over, and he watched Doremond finger the change in his pocket until he turned his attention back into the room.

“Bishop thinks highly of you,” Doremond said, not looking at him.

“And I think the same of Bishop.”

That seemed to pique the chairman’s interest. He glared at him, jangling his change. “Some friend you turned out to be then, letting him step knee deep into the muck.”

Gerald hesitated. “You’re talking about the market share?”

Doremond played his tongue along his lower lip. “If you can call it that. ‘Market sliver,’ I’d say. Bloody shame the way the
people in this company, yourself included, let it wither up till there’s almost nothing left.” He brushed his hand through the air, as if to show the weightlessness of the company, or the effort made. Abruptly he turned and strode to the corner of the office, where he claimed a stuffed armchair, leaving the low leather sofa for Gerald. “All right then,” he said. “Sit down and let’s hear what you have to say about it.”

If a man could become attached to an open, empty space, Gerald felt nailed to the doorway. The doorway opened onto the hall, which led to his office and his phone, and his only chance of finding Kyle.

“Well?”

He thought of Bishop in Phoenix, leaving him with this opportunity. Counting on him. And it was true what Doremond had said; he had already let the man down. He forced himself to the sofa and sunk to its edge, telling himself there was nothing he could do for Kyle just now, and not believing it for a second. He opened the folder, set it onto the glass-topped coffee table in front of him, and tried to make sense of what it contained.

“There’s been a trend …” he began. But the knowledge of what sort of trend it had been seemed to slip away from him. He picked up the first set of laser-printed pages to get a better look, saw the names of companies, the numbers in rows, nothing like phone numbers. The image came to him, without warning, of five-year-old Kyle wanting to be picked up. He had gone running through the grass in his bare feet, and he’d stepped on a sharp pebble. It obviously hurt, but there was no cut. Why all the fuss? Gerald had given him a pat on the bottom, no comfort, and told him to go on and play. But he was here to talk about his
plan. He tried to set himself to the task. “The market share has been, um …” He had to keep going, had to throw some words out there, keep talking. “Not what, really … it hasn’t been.” He cleared his throat, tried to focus. But he was shivering from memories … Kyle pleading to be taken into his arms … places he hadn’t thought to call.

“Mr. Doremond,” said a strong voice. “I’m Sandy Beale, from the sales and marketing department.”

He looked up from the confusion of pages in his lap and saw his rescuer taking Doremond’s thick hand into her firm, cool grip.

“Mr. Woodlore asked me to present you with our strategy to turn the market share of this company around.”

“Saw you outside there,” said Doremond, watching his hand being shaken. “Wondered what was going on.”

Sandy nodded and winked at Gerald. “Just waiting for Mr. Woodlore’s cue.”

H
e threw water on his face in the staff washroom and came back damp to his desk, breathing again, everything clear in front of him – his telephone, his phone book, his plan. The numbers were screaming at him from the page. He’d begun dialling hospitals again when Mary the receptionist peeked into the room.

“Oh, Mr. Woodlore, I didn’t realize you were here.” She showed a pink slip of paper in her hand. “I was just going to leave this on your desk.”

He watched her come forward. “What is it?” he said, his finger and his faint hopes frozen above a nine.

“I don’t think it’s important,” said Mary. “Sandy told me you were expecting a call about your son. I would have put that through. This was just some woman from a bed and breakfast in Oakville.” She held the pink slip out to him, across his desk. “She didn’t say what it was about.”

He took it from her as he hung up the phone and stared at the name written in Mary’s crisp hand:
Meda Ghaemi, Gooseberry B&B
.

Bed and breakfasts, Gerald thought. People stay in them.

“Okay?” chirped Mary, on her way out. “Do you want me to keep watching your line?”

He pressed his thumbnail under each written number as he dialled it, for fear he would mix up the order because of the swirling in his head. “Thank you,” he mumbled over the kettledrums in his chest. He sealed the phone to his ear through two rings … three.

“Hello?” said a woman.

“Is this Gooseberry Bed and Breakfast? Are you Meda Ghaemi?”

“Yes, hello?”

“This is Gerald Woodlore. You called me just now.”

“Oh, yes,” she whispered. “Thank you. I am sorry to call you.”

“That’s fine. Just–”

“I want to ask, are you in the family of Kyle? He is a young man, a boy–”

“What is it!” barked Gerald. “Is Kyle there?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “At the computer of my son. His hand is not good. I think maybe he was in an accident? And
more now – he is sick, I think. He shakes from cold. I gave him a coat. I said to him go to a doctor but he said no. So I went to his room to look inside his wallet, I am so sorry, forgive me, but it was good because I found the card for you.”

“Where are you?”

He wrote down the address and the directions she gave him.

“Don’t let him leave.”

“Yes, thank you,” said the woman. “Are you coming?”

“I’m coming now. It will take me twenty minutes.”

“Thank you,” said the woman.

The hall he raced down took him by Bishop’s office. No light showed from under the closed door and as he ran past he heard Sandy’s voice, shouting, “They’ve got your wife, Mr. Doremond! Will you give up your wine cellar to save her?”