Julia Spencer-Fleming - To Darkness And To Death

So she walked. Put one foot in front of the other. She walked a yard, two yards, three. Made it past another bend in the road. Her head swam, and for a moment everything darkened, but she breathed, and the world came back into view. She was tired. So tired. She had to sit and rest. For just a moment. She sank onto the road, bracing herself with one hand. “Help,” she called tentatively. She took a deeper breath. “Help!” Noticeably louder. “Help!” she screamed, causing a group of crows to burst out of the trees and wheel through the clear sky above the road before disappearing up the mountain. “Help! Help! Help!” she howled, until the woods around her echoed with the sound.

Enough. Get to the road. She rolled to her knees and pushed against the dirt, trying to leverage herself up again. She felt a hot pain, biting and chewing at her guts. Deep inside her, something tore loose- oh, that’s not good, that’s not good, she thought and then everything tilted and a stream of dark bubbles roared up around her head and she was gone.

Shaun Reid stood in his office, considering the rest of his life. He had driven all the way home from his AllBanc meeting only to idle in the driveway, staring at his garage door, wondering what was the matter with him. Why the hell couldn’t he take the money and run? Terry McKellan was right: He’d have enough bucks to retire and live in style with his gorgeous young wife. Hell, he was still young himself, by today’s standards. Fifty was just breaking middle age. He had thirty, thirty-five years ahead of him if he watched his cholesterol and kept active.

That prospect was like looking into a puzzle box picture, where an endless series of boxes opened before him, and each box was a gray and empty room. He reversed out of his driveway and drove to the mill, down streets he had driven for thirty years. More, if you counted the times he had been sitting in the seat next to his dad.

He had loved coming to work with the old man. When he was too small to go onto the floor, his dad had given him the run of the administrative offices. He would ride round and round in the secretary’s chair that spun and rolled, and she would let him crank the mimeograph machine and swipe candy from the bowl on her desk. When he got older, he loved the way his dad would talk to him as if he were another adult, laying out facts and figures, asking for his opinion. At home, he wasn’t supposed to pester his dad, who would stretch out in his chair, tired from a hard day’s work, reading a magazine and drinking the Tom Collins Mom always served him. But at the mill it was a different story. Dad was alert, energetic, attentive. They were a team.

He had never wanted to kick loose, to move away or strike out on his own. In college, when his classmates were studying Marxist literature and marching against the war, he had lied about being a business major, because that was almost as uncool as being in the ROTC. But he never questioned that he was going back to Millers Kill, where an office next to his father’s waited for him.

He stood there now. It was small, tucked between the reception area and what used to be the payroll accountant’s office, until they outsourced payroll to a big firm that cut the checks and handled the taxes and Social Security for them. He had hoped Jeremy would one day work there, within earshot of his father, but-he shook that thought off. Entered the office that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s.

Most of the old pictures, from the first days of the company, were in the reception area now, impressing anyone who got off on the quaint idea that a business might run for over a century without changing hands. The pictures and plaques in his office were personal, and looking at them, he realized how much his life had been shaped by the presence of the mill and his role in its continuity.

There were his mom and dad, and him in bibbed shorts and curly hair, squinting into the sunlight at the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the “new” dam and causeway, now forty-seven years old and aging fast. There were his high school and college graduation pictures. No honors. He had never pushed himself. Never had to. The picture of Jeremy in cap and gown, though, showed loops of gold braid and an Honor Society tassel. Even then, his son had been planning ahead for his getaway.

By his son’s graduation picture was a framed newspaper clipping with a picture of Shaun and Russ Van Alstyne at the 1968 trout tourney, showing off their winning fish, their arms around each other’s shoulders. Russ had left the year after that and not returned for a quarter century. Shaun had seen him a few times since he had become chief of police, at Rotary dinners and town meetings. They had nothing in common anymore. It wasn’t Russ personally. Shaun didn’t have much in common with many of the people he had called friends back in high school. They had aged into grocery clerks and dairy farmers, or they had left town and not come back. There weren’t many success stories in Millers Kill, not for the class of ’69.

He flopped onto the sofa Courtney had picked out for him. Soft leather as comfortable as an old glove. He had kicked and screamed, but once the old couch-picked out by his mother, circa 1964-had been carted away and the new one installed, he wondered why he had put up with the hard seat and scratchy upholstery for so long. Maybe selling the company would be the same. After it was swallowed up by the GWP empire, he’d wonder why he had ever fussed.

Sure. Just like the victims of the Borg never fussed on Star Trek. Prepare to be assimilated.

A knock on the door. He rolled off the couch as the door opened and Jeremy stuck his head in. “Hey. Am I interrupting?”

“What are you doing here?” Shaun’s tone was harsher than he intended.

Jeremy entered the office. “I’m looking for you. You weren’t home, and the Trophy Wife is at church, so where else could you be but at the Holy of Holies, the office.”

Shaun was willing to let the crack about Courtney pass. Once. “If you ever want to rise above the level of gofer, you might try a little work ethic, too. It was putting in lots of hours in this office that paid for your college and B-school.”

“And my year in London and my car. Don’t forget those, Dad.” Jeremy smiled insincerely.

Shaun jammed his hands into his pants pockets to avoid clenching his fists. It was always like this with them. Gretchen, Jeremy’s mother, liked to say they were too much alike. Shaun didn’t see it. At twenty-five, he had been a husband and father, putting in fifty or sixty hours a week at Reid-Gruyn. Jeremy was a glorified concierge who spent every minute out of the office partying. The only thing they had in common was their looks: both tall and rawboned, Shaun’s faded sandy hair the remains of Jeremy’s aggressive auburn.

“I repeat, what are you doing here?”

“I wanted to see if you needed me to smooth your path tonight. I can wrangle you seats at the GWP table, if you want.”

“No, thanks.”

Jeremy rolled his eyes. “Dad, it’s in your best interest to talk with these guys. If they make a bid for the company, your future is going to depend on them. I keep telling you, you can’t make it today just by keeping your nose to the grindstone. You have to be out there, networking. Schmoozing. Personal relationships are important.”

“I know that! Why do you think I’ve been going to those damn Rotary and Chamber of Commerce meetings all these years.”

“Oooo, the Rotary Club.” Jeremy dropped his voice from a falsetto to his normal range. “Dad, if they like your stuff, you have a chance to be a mover and shaker within the GWP structure. You know the Trophy Wife would love that.”