“That’s wonderful.”
“Happy, faithful, devoted,” she said wistfully.
Loretta brought the tea and vanished again with the demure exit of a discreet servant.
“So,” he said. “I’m delighted the attractive woman I picked up so suavely actually gave me a call.”
“You Northern boys are pretty straightforward, aren’t you?”
“You betcha,” he said.
“Well, I hope it’s not going to be a blow to your ego when I tell you that I asked you here for a purpose.”
“Depends on what that purpose is.”
“Business,” Sandra May said.
“Business is a good start,” he said. Then he nodded for her to continue.
“I inherited all the stock in the company when Jim died and I became president. I’ve been trying to run the show best I can but the way I see it”—she nodded to where the accountant’s reports sat on the desk—“unless things improve pretty damn fast we’ll be bankrupt within the year. I got a bit of insurance money when Jim died so I’m not going to starve, but I refuse to let something my husband built up from scratch go under.”
“Why do you think I can help you?” The smile was still there but it had less flirt than it had a few minutes ago—and a lot less than last Sunday.
“My mother had this saying. ‘A Southern woman has to be a notch stronger than her man.’ Well, I am that, I promise you.”
“I can see,” Ralston said.
“She also said, ‘She has to be a notch more resourceful too.’ And part of being resourceful is knowing your limitations. Now, before I married Jim I had three and a half years of college. But I’m in over my head here. I need somebody to help me. Somebody who knows about business. After what you were telling me on Sunday, at the club, I think you’d be just the man for that.”
When they’d met—he’d explained that he was a banker and broker. He’d buy small, troubled businesses, turn them around and sell them for a profit. He’d been in Atlanta on business and somebody had recommended he look into real estate in northeast Georgia, here in the mountains, where you could still get good bargains on investment and vacation property.
“Tell me about the company,” he said to her now.
She explained that DuMont Products Inc., with sixteen full-time employees and a gaggle of high school boys in the summer, bought crude turpentine from local foresters who tapped longleaf and slash pine trees for the substance.
“Turpentine . . . That’s what I smelled driving up here.”
After Jim had started the company some years ago Sandra May would lie in bed next to his sleeping form, smelling the oily resin—even if he’d showered. The scent had never seemed to leave him. Finally she’d gotten used to it. She sometimes wondered exactly when she’d stopped noticing the piquant aroma.
She continued, telling Ralston, “Then we distill the raw turpentine into a couple different products. Mostly for the medical market.”
“Medical?” he asked, surprised. He took his jacket off and draped it carefully on the chair next to him. Drank more iced tea. He really seemed to enjoy it. She thought New Yorkers only drank wine and bottled water.
“People think it’s just a paint thinner. But doctors use it a lot. It’s a stimulant and antispasmodic.”
“Didn’t realize that,” he said. She noticed that he’d started to take notes. And that the flirtatious smile was gone completely.
“Jim sells . . .” Her voice faded. “The company sells the refined turpentine to a couple of jobbers. They handle all the distribution. We don’t get into that. Our sales seem to be the same as ever. Our costs haven’t gone up. But we don’t have as much money as we ought to. I don’t know where it’s gone and I have payroll taxes and unemployment insurance due next month.”
She walked to the desk and handed him several accounting statements. Even though they were a mystery to her he pored over them knowingly, nodding. Once or twice he lifted his eyebrow in surprise. She suppressed an urge to ask a troubled What?
Sandra May found herself studying him closely. Without the smile—and with this businesslike concentration on his face—he was much more attractive. Involuntarily she glanced at her wedding picture on the credenza. Then her eyes fled back to the documents in front of them.
Finally he sat back, finished his iced tea. “There’s something funny,” he said. “I don’t understand it. There’ve been some transfers of cash out of the main accounts but there’s no record of where the money went. Did your husband mention anything to you about it?”
“He didn’t tell me very much about the company. Jim didn’t mix business and his home life.”
“How about your accountant?”
“Jim did most of the books himself. . . . This money? Can you track it down? Find out what happened? I’ll pay whatever your standard fee is.”
“I might be able to.”
She heard a hesitancy in his voice. She glanced up.
He said, “Let me ask you a question first.”
“Go ahead.”
“Are you sure you want me to go digging?”
“How do you mean?” she asked.
His sharp eyes scanned the accounting sheets as if they were battlefield maps. “You know you could hire somebody to run the company. A professional businessman or woman. It’d be a hell of a lot less hassle for you. Let him or her turn the company around.”
She kept her eyes on him. “But you’re not asking me about hassles, are you?”
After a moment he said, “No, I’m not. I’m asking if you’re sure you want to know anything more about your husband and his company than you do right now.”
“But it’s my company now,” she said firmly. “And I want to know everything. Now, all the company’s books are over there.” She pointed to a large, walnut credenza. It was the piece of furniture atop which sat their wedding picture.
Do you promise to love, honor, cherish and obey . . .
As he turned to see where she was pointing, Ralston’s knee brushed hers. Sandra May felt a brief electrical jolt. He seemed to freeze for a moment. Then he turned back.
“I’ll start tomorrow,” he said.
Three days later, with the evening orchestra of crickets and cicadas around her, Sandra May sat on the porch of their house. . . . No, her house. It was so strange to think of it that way. No longer their cars, their furniture, their china. Hers alone now.
Her desk, her company.
She rocked back and forth in the swing, which she’d installed a year ago, screwing the heavy hooks into the ceiling joists herself. She looked out over the acres of trim grass, boarded by loblolly and hemlock. Pine Creek, population sixteen hundred, had trailers and bungalows, shotgun apartment buildings and a couple of modest subdivisions but only a dozen or so houses like this—modern, glassy, huge. If the Georgia-Pacific had run through town, then the pristine development where Jim and Sandra May DuMont had settled would have defined which was the right side of the tracks.
She sipped her iced tea and smoothed her denim jumper. Watched the yellow flares from a half dozen early fireflies.
I think he’s the one can help us, Mama, she thought.
Appearing from the sky . . .
Bill Ralston had been coming to the company every day since she’d met with him. He’d thrown himself into the job of saving DuMont Products Inc. When she’d left the office tonight at six he was still there, had been working since early morning, reading through the company’s records and Jim’s correspondence and diary. He’d called her at home a half hour ago, telling her he’d found some things she ought to know.
“Come on over,” she’d told him.
“Be right there,” he said. She gave him directions.
Now, as he parked in front of the house, she noticed shadows appear in the bay windows of houses across the street. Her neighbors, Beth and Sally, checking out the activity.
So, the widow’s got a man friend come a-calling . . .
She
heard the crunching on the gravel before she could see Ralston approach through the dusk.
“Hey,” she said.
“You all really do say that down here,” he said. “ ‘Hey.’ ”
“You bet. Only it’s ‘y’all.’ Not ‘you all.’ ”
“Stand corrected, ma’am.”
“You Yankees.”
Ralston sat down on the swing. He’d Southernized himself. Tonight he wore jeans and a work shirt. And, my Lord, boots. He looked like one of the boys at a roadside tap, escaping from the wife for the night to drink beer with his buddies and to flirt with girls pretty and playful as Loretta.
“Brought some wine,” he said.
“Well. How ’bout that.”
“I love your accent,” he said.
“Hold on—you’re the one with an accent.”
In a thick mafioso drawl: “Yo, forgeddaboutit. I don’t got no accent.” They laughed. He pointed to the horizon. “Look at that moon.”
“No cities around here, no lights. You can see the stars clear as your conscience.”
He poured some wine. He’d brought paper cups and a corkscrew.
“Oh, hey, slow up there.” Sandra May held up a hand. “I haven’t had much to drink since . . . Well, after the accident I decided it’d be better if I kept a pretty tight rein on things.”
“Just drink what you want,” he assured her. “We’ll water the geranium with the rest.”
“That’s a bougainvillea.”
“Oh, I’m a city boy, remember.” He tapped her cup with his. Drank some wine. In a soft voice he said, “It must’ve been really rough. About Jim, I mean.”
She nodded, said nothing.
“Here’s to better times.”
“Better times,” she said. They toasted and drank some more.
“Okay, I better tell you what I’ve found.”
Sandra May took a deep breath then another sip of wine. “Go ahead.”
“Your husband . . . well, to be honest with you? He was hiding money.”
“Hiding?”
“Well, maybe that’s too strong a word. Let’s say putting it in places that’d be damn hard to trace. It looks like he was taking some of the profits from the company for the last couple of years and bought shares in some foreign corporations. . . . He never mentioned it to you?”
“No. I wouldn’t have approved. Foreign companies? I don’t even hold much with the U.S. stock market. I think people ought to keep their money in the bank. Or better yet under the bed. That was my mother’s philosophy. She called it the First National Bank of Posturepedic.”
He laughed. Sandra May finished her wine. Ralston poured her some more.
“How much money was there?” she asked him.
“Two hundred thousand and some change.”
She blinked. “Lord, I sure could use it. And soon. Is there any way to get it?”
“I think so. But he was real cagey, your husband.”
“Cagey?” she drew the word out.
“He wanted to hide those assets bad. It’d be a lot easier to find if I knew why he did it.”
“I don’t have a clue.” She lifted her hand and let it fall onto her solid thigh. “Maybe it’s retirement money.”
But Ralston was smiling.
“I say something silly?”
“A four-oh-one K is where you put retirement money. The Cayman Islands isn’t.”
“Is it illegal, what Jim did?”
“Not necessarily. But it might be.” He emptied his cup. “You want me to keep going?”
“Yes,” Sandra May said firmly. “Whatever it takes, whatever you find. I have to get that cash.”
“Then I’ll do it. But it’s going to be complicated, real complicated. We’ll have to file suits in Delaware, New York and the Cayman Islands. Can you be away from here for months at a time?”
A pause. “I could be. But I don’t want to. This’s my home.”
“Well, you could give me power of attorney to handle it. But you don’t know me that well.”
“Let me think on that.” Sandra May took the barrette out of her hair, let the blond strands fall free. She leaned her head back, looking up at the sky, the stars, the captivating moon, which was nearly full. She realized that she wasn’t resting against the back of the porch swing at all but against Ralston’s shoulder. She didn’t move away.
Then the stars and the moon were gone, replaced by the darkness of his silhouette, and he was kissing her, his hand cradling the back of her head, then her neck, then sliding around to the front of her jumper and undoing the buttons that held the shoulder straps. She kissed him back, hard. His hand moved up to her throat and undid the top button of her blouse, which she wore fastened—the way, her mother told her, proper ladies should always do.
She lay in bed that night alone—Bill Ralston had left some hours before—and stared up at the ceiling.
The anxiety was back. The fear of losing everything.
Oh, Jim, what’s going to happen? she thought to her husband, lying deep in the red clay of Pine Creek Memorial Gardens.
She thought back on her life—how it just hadn’t turned out the way she’d planned. How she’d dropped out of Georgia State six months before she graduated to be with him. Thinking about how she gave up her own hopes of working in sales. About how they fell into a routine: Jim running the company while she entertained clients and volunteered at the hospital and the Women’s Club and ran the household. Which was supposed to be a household full of children—that was what she’d hoped for anyway. But it never happened.
And now Sandra May DuMont was just a childless widow . . . .
That was how the people in Pine Creek looked at her. The town widow. They knew that the company would fail, that she’d move into one of those dreadful apartments on Sullivan Street and would just melt away, become part of the wallpaper of small-town Southern life. They thought no better of her than that.
But that wasn’t going to happen to her.
No, ma’am . . . She could still meet someone and have a family. She was young. She could go to a different place, a big city, maybe—Atlanta, Charleston . . . hell, why not New York itself?
A Southern woman’s got to be a notch stronger than her man. And a notch more resourceful too. . . .
She would get out of this mess.
Ralston could help her get out of it. She knew she’d done the right thing, picking him.
When she woke up the next morning Sandra May found her wrists were cramping; she’d fallen asleep with her hands clenched into fists.
It was two hours later, when she arrived in the office, that Loretta pulled her aside, gazed at her boss with frantic, black-mascaraed eyes and whispered, “I don’t know how to tell you this, Mrs. DuMont, but I think he’s going to rob you. Mr. Ralston, I mean.”
“Tell me.”
Frowning, Sandra May sat slowly in the high-backed leather chair. Looked again out the window.
“All right, see, what happened . . . what happened . . .”
“Calm down, Loretta. Tell me.”
“See, after you left last night I started to bring some papers into your office and I heard him on the phone.”
“Who was he talking to?”
“I don’t know. But I looked inside and saw that he was using his cell phone, not the office phone, like he usually does. I figured he used that phone so we wouldn’t have a record of who he called.”
“Let’s not jump to conclusions. What did he say?” Sandra May asked.
“He said he was pretty close to finding everything. But it was going to be a problem to get away with it.”
“ ‘Get away with it.’ He said that?”
“Yes, ma’am. Right, right, right. Then he said some stock or something was all held by the company, not by ‘her personally.’ And that could be a problem. Those were his words.”
“Then what?”
“Oh, then I kind of bumped into the door and he heard and hung up real quick. Seemed to
me, at any rate.”
“That doesn’t mean he’s going to rob us,” Sandra May said. “ ‘Get away with it.’ Maybe that just means get the money out of the foreign companies. Or maybe he’s talking about something else altogether.”
“Sure, maybe it does, Mrs. DuMont. But he was acting like a spooked squirrel when I came into the room.” Then Loretta brushed one of her long, purple nails across her chin. “How well do you know him?”
“Not well. . . . Are you thinking that he somehow arranged this whole thing?” Sandra May shook her head. “Couldn’t be. I called him to help us out.”
“But how did you find him?”
Sandra May grew quiet. Then she said, “He met me . . . Well, he picked me up. Sort of. At the Pine Creek Club.”
“And he told you he was in business.”
She nodded.
“So,” Loretta pointed out, “he might’ve heard that you’d inherited the company and went there on purpose to meet you. Or maybe he was one of the people Mr. DuMont was in business with—doing something that wasn’t quite right. What you were telling me?—about those foreign companies.”
“I don’t believe it,” Sandra May protested. “No, I can’t believe it.”
She looked into her assistant’s face, which was pretty and demure, yes, but also savvy. Loretta said, “Maybe he looks for people who’re having trouble running businesses and moves in and, bang, cleans ’em out.”
Sandra May shook her head.
“I’m not saying for sure, Mrs. DuMont. I just worry about you. I don’t want anybody to take advantage of you. And we all here . . . well, we can’t hardly afford to lose our jobs.”
“I’m not going to be some timid widow who’s afraid of the dark.”
“This might not be just a shadow,” Loretta said.
“I’ve talked to the man, I’ve looked into his eyes, honey,” Sandra May said. “I reckon I’m as good a judge of character as my mama was.”
“I hope you are, ma’am. For all our sakes. I hope you are.”
Sandra May’s eyes scanned the office again, the pictures of her husband with the fish and game he’d bagged, the pictures of the company in the early days, the groundbreaking for the new factory, Jim at the Rotary Club, Jim and Sandra May on the company float at the county fair.
Twisted: The Collected Stories Page 32