Truth and Humility (2 page)

Derek laughed and re-sought the moon.  “Must be nice being rich.  You can get away with a lot.”

“Your family’s rich, too.”

“Not the same way.  We still have to" ftill ha work for our living and my dad says that’s how it all started.  The feud, I mean.”

“I heard the stories, too.  Something about the Cahill side inheriting more of the family fortune than the Bennett side about fifty million years ago.”

“I was always told the Cahills stole that inheritance because Niles Bennett died first.  Nellie Cahill, his second wife, changed the will after he died, leaving all the Bennett money to her own family.”

“I was always told it was Cahill money to begin with and the Bennetts tried to use their father’s marriage to Nellie to claim half of the money.”

“And it was
fifty million years ago!
  I just want to tell everyone to get over it already.”

“Me, too.  But I guess so much has happened since then, it’s not about the money anymore.  Fires, sabatoge…”

“Spying, murder…”

“Theft and kidnapping…” Austin sighed at the stars and ran a hand through his thick wet hair.  “Old people sure like to fight.”  He then looked at his friend again.  “We’re gonna be different, aren’t we Derek?”

“Yep.  We aren’t gonna get sucked into this stupid feud like everyone else.  Maybe we should just make a pact never to talk about it.”

“Or our families.  That way we won’t ever fight about rumors and stuff that we hear.”

“Hey… that’s a good idea, Austin.  It ends with us, right?”  Derek held his fist out.

“Right.”  Austin bopped it with his own.  “Besides, if I didn’t have you to talk to, I’d go crazy.  Nobody else understands what I’m going through with this Rena chick.  She just won’t leave me alone.”

“No matter what you do or what you say.  I threw snowballs at Betty Shaw to get her to quit following me and her mother told her it was because I liked her.  Sheesh!”

“I guess it didn’t help that you carved her initials into that tree in the schoolyard.”

“Yeah.  I wasn’t thinking.”  Derek’s look turned whimsical.  “I’d give anything if Brynn were the one chasing me around.  There would be no running involved.”  Brynn Swanson, with her soft blond hair, knockout smile and cute little dimples.  She was already starting to grow boobs.  It was
her
initials he carved into the tree.  DB + BS.  Brynn was always catching him gazing at her with hearts in his eyes.  It was pretty obvious to everyone that he was totally in love with her… everyone except Betty.  His look turned sour as he thought about Betty with her flame red hair, freckled face and buckteeth.  “Now every time I turn around, I see Betty with her puckered lips pointed at me.  Yuck.  Like "48  I’d ever kiss
that!
”

Their laughter carried into the woods.

“Girls are nothing but trouble.”

Fourteen years later:

It had been another busy day for Cahill Demolition.  They were sorely understaffed and Austin had just pulled a double shift with a handful of his crew to make up for the loss.  While he directed many of the demolition jobs himself, there were too many to handle alone.  Austin often called upon hired help to manage the jobs he couldn’t, but the salvage yard was his alone to run.  And it was important that particular crew had a good boss, for reasons no one else understood.

To ease a restless need, he worked hard, as hands-on as any one of his dedicated demolition crew, and triple that of his salvage crew.  His mother’s incessant crowing about hard labor had him chewing holes through the side of his mouth. 
Really, Austin, you have people for that.
  Well, he didn’t want people for that.  If anything good came out of his friendship with Derek Bennett, it was that he learned to appreciate hard work.

And there was just something satisfying about tearing the shit out of stuff.

“Here’s the batch I gathered today, boss.”  Tom Barthaw, with thirty-two years under his belt, was Cahill Corporation’s oldest foreman.   The man made an appearance in Austin’s office just long enough to hand him a small stack of applications.  And since the couch beckoned, he lowered himself to it just for the opportunity to bend joints, work the stiffness from arthritic knees.  They were bothering him more and more lately.  “There’s one or two applicants in there I wouldn’t mind interviewing.  Gonna need someone soon with the Minerva demolition coming up.”

The dog food giant, Minerva Corporation, was suddenly antsy to clear out an old riverside plant that had been abandoned for almost twenty years.

Austin leafed through the documents, loosely scanning each one until his eyes caught sight of something interesting.  “Dan Connor.  Good experience.  Did you meet him?”

“Naw, got that one from Sue.  She said it was waiting on her desk when she got back from lunch.”

There was something about it that bothered him.  Austin narrowed his eyes as he re-read what the applicant listed for experience.  Eighteen years with Wreck-It Salvage, three years supervisory position.  He flipped the paper to re-check the birth date.  “This can’t be right,” he said, sitting back, office chair squeaking under the pressure.  “That would tmean this guy started work when he was three.”

“Must be an error.”

“Never heard of ‘Wreck-It Salvage’, either.  Why don’t you call them and find out what Dan Connor’s story is.”

Tom sniffed and dug a kerchief out of his pocket, ran it under his nose a few times.  For a man in his fifties, he looked and felt timeworn.  Weathered.  His hair had gone gray long ago, the lines of his face deepened from sun exposure and stress, and he spoke with a smoker’s rasp.  “I was going to, but there isn’t a phone number on the app.  Couldn’t find it in the phone book, either.  Must be from out of town.”

But that’s not what the application said. Whoever Dan Connor was, Austin deduced with a mental shrug, he wasn’t very good at lying.

Something niggled at the back of his mind.  There could be one explanation…but it was a stretch.  Still, as he kept reading, there was a voice inside his head that said this applicant very well could have started working at the age of three.  As he thought back, a particular memory came to mind.

Danny?  Is that you?

There
was
a Bennett named Dan.  But what would a Bennett be doing filling out an application for Cahill Demolition?  It would spell near suicide for a member of that family to dare step foot on Austin’s work site, under false pretenses or no.

He dismissed the possibility entirely.  Nobody was that stupid.  But then something else caught his eye that made him sit up and reconsider.

“You’ve gotta be kidding me,” Austin barked dangerously, a sound that made most men step back.

“Boss?”  Tom noticed the younger man’s nostrils flare, heat rise to his face and he wondered at the cause.  “Something wrong?”

A small fire ignited in the pit of Austin’s stomach as he read the line again. 
Strengths are leadership skills, knowledge of structural integrity, AWS & ASME certified welder, attention to safety standards, climbing and scaling tall structures…
and the rest just blurred as he focused on that last line.

Derek Bennett was a known climber, his ability to scale structures without taking safety precautions unmatched by most.  Austin remembered watching in awe as his teenaged friend took on an old five-story office building that was scheduled for demolition a week later.  He’d back up and approach it at a dead run, then climb while using momentum to launch from window sill to window sill until he disappeared over the parapet on top.  It was like watching an expert mountain climber scale the kiddie wall at Outdoor World.  That kid had the lithe physique, long fingers and steel guts that were made for climbing.  Not an ounce of body fat on him, just lean muscle and an uncanny resistance to gravity.

Coup> w Romanld be Derek’s little brother had the same skills.

With a near snarl, Austin picked up the phone and dialed a number listed as a reference on the application.  His mind was made up by the time the tri-tone bleeped in his ear. 
We’re sorry.  The number you have dialed has been disconnected or is no longer in service. 
All of the numbers were wrong on this application, except for Dan
Connor’s
cell phone number, he was certain of it.  And Austin, without a doubt, knew why.

“Hire him,” he said, his voice deceptively calm.

Tom wasn’t fooled.  He’d been working for the Cahills way too long not to know the look on Austin’s brooding face.  The dark eyebrows were dangerously lowered over those piercing eyes as they nearly burned a hole through the paper in his hands and there was a particular vein that popped in the side of his neck when he was angry.

Which was way too often since Rena’s death.

Something about her loss changed the carefree young man he’d known since a child to the dark, unforgiving grown man he was today.  And sporting a tall muscular frame and menacing presence, grown he was.  But at the youthful age of twenty-six, Austin shouldn’t be as brooding and cynical as he was.  And Tom had the feud to thank for that.

It showed in everything Austin had his hands in.  His large office was impeccably tidy, military style if a short description were to come to mind.  Light green walls, white trim, not a hint of clutter, scant inbox, and he expected the same from his assistant, Sue.  She complied of course, going to great lengths in order to please her boss.

For Tom, however, one of the perks of working for the Cahills so long was the fact that Austin respected his opinion.  It made questioning the younger man’s irrational decisions second nature.  “Aren’t you being a bit hasty?  I haven’t conducted interviews, yet.”

Without pause, Austin slapped the paper down on his desk and rose to his feet.  “Now, you don’t have to.”

End of subject.

____________

What the holy hell am I doing?
Danny asked herself as she stood rooted to the pavement in front of the big gate.  Fifty yards to her left was the white two-story Colonial-style house that was, as history states, her great-great-great grandfather’s home.  The old salvage yard was somewhere behind it, she knew.

Chimneys on each side, wood lap siding, columns and shutters, pristine landscaping...the place was beautiful.  Much more grand than her family’s large-but-modest two-story Cape.  While this place had abundant space for a large family, theirhavamily, s had been cramped with three kids to a room at one point.

But the Cahill home, as well as the twenty wooded acres it rested on, had been off-limits to the Bennett clan for over a century since they’d been kicked out and pushed way south of Springfield.  Now, on the north side of Missouri’s third-largest city, completely out of her element, Danny raised a finger and pushed the intercom button.  She noticed the security camera above it.

Well...no turning back now.

As she contemplated the level of her sanity, she reminded herself why she was there.  College.

In short, she was a Bennett boldly entering Cahill territory in a desperate attempt to pay for a higher education.  But, as was her motto, what they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.  Cahills didn’t work.  They paid people to do it for them and the odds were in her favor that if she kept her cap low, she’d hide in plain sight with all the other workers.  Never lay eyes on a Cahill.

Besides, she wasn’t here to cause trouble.  Far from it.  In fact, she despised everything about the feud.  She’d lost some good friends because of it and Derek... well, he’d fallen victim to it years ago despite his secret childhood friendship with Austin Cahill.

Of course, the feud wasn’t the only problem she was facing.  There was that little matter of gender.  Orientation was bound to be eventful when they found out Dan Connor was a woman.  But she didn’t lie on her application, just left a few things out of it; like a handful of letters in her first name, her
entire
last name and gender.  She figured that would come out in the interview, of course.  The first step is getting one at all, and she knew it would never happen if the applicant were a woman.