Wounded Earth (12 page)

“But could he order somebody else to kill defenseless creatures?”

“No.”

“Not even for the mother of all photo opportunities?”

“No,” Larabeth said. Flatly.

Cynthia was silent for a moment, seeking a new angle to impress the boss.

Well, this is going swimmingly, Larabeth thought. Exactly the way you pictured meeting your daughter for the first time.

Larabeth wanted to drop her briefcase and fold the girl—woman—into her arms. (
Wouldn't that be professional?
said the hateful voice in her head.) She wanted to scream. She wanted to run out the door, chase J.D. down, and try to explain herself to him.

She cringed to think of the moment when Cynthia rushed up to the car with her enthusiastic greeting. J.D. had allowed her a single withering look, said he'd pick her up at five, and put the car in gear. The car was rolling before she had the door shut.

Did he hate her because she had hired Cynthia—well, caused Cynthia to be hired—to work for BioHeal? Did he hate her because she hadn't had the strength to meet her daughter, but she hadn't had the strength to let her daughter go, either? Or maybe he understood those things. Maybe he was just disgusted that she didn't even have the guts to tell him what she had done.

She disgusted herself. It hadn't seemed so bad at the time when she offered Cynthia a job fresh out of graduate school. Good geologists were hard to find, and geologists with undergraduate training in safety engineering were damn near nonexistent. It didn't hurt her conscience (much) to offer a job to a qualified scientist.

And she didn't invade Cynthia's privacy. At least not much or not often.

She sighed. The situation seemed so sordid from J.D.'s point of view.

“Dr. McLeod.” Cynthia's voice penetrated her thoughts, repeating her name for the third time. Her face (so like Larabeth's own—surely someone had noticed!) looked worried.

You're scaring her to death.
The pesky voice in her head was apparently never going to give up.
She thinks she's bombing out with the boss. Some mother you are. Do something.

Larabeth, who had no experience at being a mother but who had many years of experience at being the boss, finally got herself under control.

“I think you have some great ideas and I'd like to hear more of them. I think BioHeal is going to benefit a great deal from your enthusiasm.”

The younger woman relaxed visibly. This mother stuff apparently required tact, quick wits, and nerves of steel. Larabeth wasn't sure she was up to the challenge.

* * *

Larabeth watched Cynthia drive out of the N-Deck parking lot. She had disappointed her daughter by not inviting her to join her for dinner. Instead, she'd assigned Cynthia a pointless report to write and sent her back to her hotel alone.

Under any other circumstance, she would have taken an up-and-coming employee someplace impressive and let them talk. Anyone who still made sensible conversation when confronted with Larabeth's most imposing CEO aura had promise. She didn't give demerits if they used the dessert fork on their salad, but she noticed if they were intimidated by all the redundant flatware. Table manners can be taught; presence of mind cannot.

She would have enjoyed having dinner with Cynthia, even if she weren't her mother. They had spent the afternoon on research in the N-Deck file room and, within an hour, they'd functioned as a team. Her daughter was a born scientist—smart, intuitive, and disciplined. Larabeth was so proud.

Pride wouldn't be enough to get her through dinner.

J.D. drove into the parking lot a little fast, then stopped abruptly at the curb where Larabeth was waiting. He busied himself with adjusting the steering wheel while she got in, and she had a fleeting thought that he was giving her the silent treatment.

“So you found a new way to do surveillance on Cynthia?” he finally said. “What do you pay her? It would have been cheaper to put me on the payroll and let me snoop into her private life to my heart's content. Make that your heart's content.” He jerked the car into gear and peeled out without checking for traffic.

Larabeth pushed an imaginary brake into the floor of the passenger side. “Being mad at me isn't good enough reason to get us both killed,” she said.

“We can't have that,” J.D. said, achieving an approximation of the speed limit. “Who would be left to look after Cynthia? She's only a twenty-something-year-old adult with two college degrees. She might need her mother. Only her mother doesn't have the guts to be a part of her life and she doesn't have the guts to stay out of her life, either.”

Larabeth took a peek at J.D. His face was as foreboding as the Louisiana sky before a tropical storm ripped in from the ocean. Why did she feel like a kid answering to her father for some serious misbehavior? J.D. was an employee. She was (at least) five years older than he was. Why did he have her completely cowed?

She knew the answer. It was because J.D. was right.

“I thought you had changed,” he said, “but this is worse than anything you ever had me do to the poor girl. You hired her, right out of college. You probably pay her an obscene salary—”

“It might seem obscene to you, but it is right in line with the market value of a well-qualified geologist. She's done a good job for BioHeal. I've shown her no favoritism.”

“No favoritism. Would she have gotten a job with BioHeal in the first place if her boss—her mother—hadn't wanted to spy on her?”

Larabeth dropped the contents of her briefcase onto the floorboard of the car. She awkwardly gathered the papers together, grateful for the chance to hide her face.

“Our recruiters said there were five or six people who were equally qualified for the job. Cynthia was one of them. Maybe I suggested that she be the one hired. Okay. Maybe I don't usually participate at all in hiring entry-level employees. But she was qualified for the job and she wasn't chosen over a candidate with better qualifications.”

“So your professional ethics are intact. What about your personal ethics? How do you live with yourself when you pass her in the halls without speaking? Do you go to the corporate softball games to cheer her on, check up on her boyfriends, spy on her friends?”

“Of course not. She's assigned to the South Carolina office. She has a demanding job overseeing our cleanup operation at the Savannah River nuclear site, and I have no contact with her.”

“Well, that arrangement is certainly risk-free for you. And it gives you plenty of time to snoop through her personnel file for scraps of information.”

Ouch
, said the voice in her head.
How did he guess that?
She kept Cynthia's personnel file in her fire-safe file drawer. Nobody else had a key. She knew each page by heart. There were the annual performance reviews, each of them documenting excellent work. There were two letters of commendation, one from her supervisor praising her coolness under pressure and one from a client praising her willingness to try new approaches to old problems. “She doesn't seem to know the phrase ‘But this is how we've always done it,’” the letter said.

In the back of the file was the employment application, filled out painstakingly by hand, with a set of college transcripts and a young person's sparse resumé attached. A blurry Polaroid was stapled to the upper right-hand corner. Cynthia—her daughter—peered out of the old photograph. And, today, she had seen her with her own eyes.

The thrill of it was coming home to her now. She had seen her daughter. That overrode the embarrassment J.D. was dealing out. She remembered the pale, heart-shaped face and the cloud of dark hair. Cynthia had her own face, her own fragile build, but she was her mother's daughter.

Larabeth's father had acted on the best of motives, but he had been wrong. When he found out about her pregnancy, all those years ago, he blamed himself. He had brought the rapist into her life, all because he felt sorry for his little girl who was too shy and bookish to get a date to the tenth-grade Christmas formal.

A simple phone call to a college buddy living in the next town brought the buddy's son to Larabeth's doorstep. The boy was seventeen years old, six feet tall, powerfully built and, best of all, carried the mysterious cachet of being from out-of-town. How she had preened in the other girls' envy as she spent the evening at his side. How she still retched at the thought of spending the rest of the night at his mercy.

Her father had chosen not to prosecute her rapist. Better to have him out of their lives, to forget him, to make things like they had always been.

Larabeth's father had spoken to her gently, as he always did, and explained his reasoning. She had not wanted to go away, had not wanted to give up her baby, but she wasn't strong enough to hurt her father. He said that she would never truly care for the child if she kept it. He said that every time she looked at the baby, she would see the brute who betrayed her innocence.

It was a rational assumption. At the time, Larabeth wasn't sure herself how she would feel if the baby looked like its father. But today, looking at Cynthia, she knew that her own father had been wrong. She didn't remember what Cynthia's father had looked like any more. She had almost succeeded in forgetting his name. When she looked at Cynthia, she didn't see anyone but the daughter she gave away.

J.D.'s voice brought her abruptly back to the present and to their argument. “Am I getting the silent treatment?”

“What?”

“You had just finished claiming that you have no contact with Cynthia.” He pulled into a parking slot outside Larabeth's motel room.

“I wasn't just claiming it. It's true. I have no contact with her. I have never laid eyes on her before today.”

J.D.'s mouth gaped. “You've never—” He tried again. “Then why did you bother to hire—” Finally, he said. “I don't understand you.”

Larabeth gathered her things and got out of the car. She leaned in the passenger door and said, “Of course you don't understand me. There's only one explanation, one justification for my behavior.” She closed her eyes. “I am her mother.”

“You've said that before. And I'm going to say again what I said five years ago. If you are her mother, then act like her mother. Meet her, talk to her. You might like each other. You might not. But how will you know unless you try?” He opened his mouth to say more, closed it again, and let Larabeth shut the door and walk away.

Larabeth slung her purse strap over her shoulder and wondered how she was going to manage this Babykiller thing without J.D. to help her. She hardly thought it likely that he would continue to work for a woman who disgusted him.

She had an urge to jump across the sidewalk into her motel room so she wouldn't have to walk over the place where the dead sea turtle had lain. There was only a faint bloodstain remaining. She supposed the motel staff had spent some time with a pressure washer. It had only been that morning, eleven hours tops, since she found the turtle on her doorstep, yet now she was more preoccupied with Cynthia than with Babykiller or dead animals or Agent Blue spills.

Fate was strange. It chose today to bring her together with her daughter right in front of J.D., the only person who knew or cared whether she ever spoke with Cynthia at all. When Cynthia was hired, Larabeth had arranged Cynthia's job assignment so that it would be unlikely, but not impossible, for them to ever cross paths. Life was more interesting when she knew that her daughter could be waiting at every curve in the road. And now they'd passed that curve together.

* * *

Cynthia laid her head against the airplane window and tried to sleep. She hated these late-night flights and she hadn't planned to take one but, thanks to outstanding planning by the bigwigs in the New Orleans office, she was winging her way eastward in the middle of the night. And she had to be at work early in the morning.

It was weird the way the corporate honchos had her jetting across America without ever once speaking to her. First, there was the message on her phone telling her to report to Nebraska. Well, she'd done that. And did a royal job of not impressing the CEO, too.

Then, she'd tried to check into the hotel (the one they had picked for her—a ritzy one) only to have the hotel clerk hand her an envelope holding a plane ticket.
Change of plans
, the note said.
Your South Carolina project is now top priority
. And what did that mean, she wondered? What about the report Dr. McLeod had assigned her? Should she drop it or should she just throw the CEO an e-mail when she finished?

She guessed she'd figure out what to do later, when she didn't have a plane to catch, so she'd driven to the airport and checked in her rental car. At about bedtime by Eastern Time, she settled herself on a 737 bound for Atlanta.
Either I work for a bunch of idiots
, she thought,
or I offended the boss so bad that she had them send me home.

With those two comforting thoughts, a skimpy blanket, and a small pillow, Cynthia did her best to get some sleep.

* * *

Babykiller settled himself in his bed. He elected not to ring the housekeeper for a massage. There was such a thing as too much enjoyment for one day, and he'd had an entirely pleasant day and a lovely flight. After all these years, he was still moved by the colors of the stars and the utter darkness between them. He would miss the stars when he was in hell.