The Step Between

by Penny Mickelbury

  She quickly completed the letter to the embassy regretting Gibson, Graham’s inability to accept it as a client at the present time, and turned her attention to the electronics warehouse surveillance contract. She intended to make certain that the owner expected to be informed only of that illegal activity relating to the theft of merchandise owned by the electronics company. After struggling with the concepts, both legal and moral, she included language to the effect that GGI would report to the police department any observed evidence of a felony; no other incident or activity would be reported by GGI.

  She wrote swiftly, refining and clarifying the language until she was satisfied that the interests of all parties were both met and protected: the interests of the client, the interests of the client’s employees, and the interests of GGI. Then she turned to the American University law school contract, which essentially was a duplicate of the Howard University contract and which, therefore, required little work.

  For all the complexity of the matter at hand, the Richard Islington contract was fairly straightforward: GGI would employ any means necessary, possible, and viable in the search for Annabelle Islington, and would not be held responsible or liable for any state or condition or situation in which said subject might be found, including deceased, unless a court of law would rule GGI directly responsible for her death. And she and GGI would guarantee the impossibility of that likelihood. For his part, Richard Islington would agree to make available to GGI and its agents all pertinent documents, records, and information in any form, including the names of persons with direct knowledge of Annabelle Islington. “And that includes you, Dicky Rae,” she said to herself.

  Carole Ann pushed the chair back, stretched out her legs, and propped them on the desk. She leaned back and allowed free rein to her thoughts about the Islington case, beginning with the man himself. Her lasting impression of him, based on the one time she’d met him, at a reception she and Al had attended at somebody’s estate somewhere in Potomac for someone of prominence, was that he seemed detached. Uninterested in anything or anyone and disinclined to feign false interest. The crowd ebbed and flowed around him, moths drawn to the heat and light, but it was clear that nobody dared land on Richard Islington. She recalled with clarity that when she and Al had been introduced to him, he’d said, “Good evening to you both.” He had not said, as people are wont to do in such circumstances, that he was pleased to meet them or wasn’t it a nice party or that he’d heard or read about them. Then he’d told Carole Ann that the color of her dress—a red coral—was his “most favorite of all the colors.” And he’d turned away from them to accept another greeting.

  Patty’s two-fisted file, which Carole Ann had all but memorized, supplied dozens of instances that demonstrated the accuracy of the information expert’s elephant analogy. Time and again Islington had either outbid or outbullied competitors to gain control over projects worth many millions of dollars, often against the wishes of the locals. But as there were few rhinos among the locals, Richard Islington almost always got his way, a notable exception being in Florida, where a local developer whose brother was a city councilman benefitted from a hastily enacted legal requirement with which it was impossible for an outsider to comply on short notice. Carole Ann particularly noted a case in New Mexico, where Islington was widely suspected of being the source of erroneous information about a stretch of land in a remote mountainous area that precipitated the withdrawal of a group of local developers from bidding for it. The misinformation—that a bill was pending in the U.S. Congress that would regulate the use of the land, rendering it useless for commercial development—left Islington with uncontested access. He was able to purchase twenty-five thousand acres of pristine forest land for a relative pittance. Six months later, an international developer announced plans to construct a ski resort on the land.

  Carole Ann’s assesment of Richard Islington was that he was a gifted businessman who also was an unapologetic bully; that he often was unscrupulous though there was no proof that he was dishonest; that he had no sense of, or need for, social niceties; that he was oblivious to the effect of his behavior on others because it not only didn’t occur to him that others were affected by his actions, he also didn’t care. Nowhere in the pages and pages of documents in which extraordinary details of Richard Islington’s business and professional lives were revealed was there a single mention of family or friends—unless “former wife” counted—besides that of his “only daughter.”

  None of that helped Carole Ann understand why it was that she believed Annabelle Islington was alive and well and with her mother, but that is what she believed. And so, to a lesser extent, did Paolo Petrocelli, though he knew exactly why he held his belief and he gladly told her: “People either hate or fear this guy, but nobody calls him their best buddy. Why would his wife and daughter be any different? They’re also probably the only people in the world capable of hurting him, and what would hurt him worse than to lose the daughter at the hands of the mother?”

  Pondering the intricacies of the Islington issue, she thought that Paolo could be correct. Since becoming partners with Jake, she had found that she rarely missed the rigors of being a trial lawyer, but she very often yearned for the feeling of satisfaction that accrued when all the pieces of a case came together. She was experiencing that old, familiar sense of satisfaction around the intrafamilial tensions of the Islingtons when OnShore Manufacturing rudely insinuated itself into her consciousness. “Damn,” she muttered to herself, and she lowered her legs, dropped them to the floor, and resumed her upright position at the desk. Back to reality.

  She was as uneasy about OnShore as she was energized by Islington. For Jake’s sake she would like to be mistaken, but she knew her misgivings were valid. Yet, she also knew and trusted Jake’s instincts. So how could they both be correct? She pulled the OnShore file toward her and extracted Jake’s report. As usual, it was so thorough and detailed that she could visualize the place. He’d spent the better part of a week at the plant and with the CEO, a fifty-seven-year-old native of Maryland’s Eastern Shore named Harry Childress. He was as good an assessor of character as she, and if Jake’s take was that Childress was “a stand-up guy,” then he was. That meant that there was another player . . . someone Jake hadn’t met. But who? She studied the file open on the desk before her. John David MacDonald was the COO counterpart to Harry Childress, and she’d never heard Jake mention him. Was he the rotten apple? And how to find out without risking her partner’s wrath?

  She closed the OnShore file and shoved it away with a gesture of impatience and anger. Anyway, it was too late now to worry about it. It was a done deal: signed, sealed, and delivered even if she had agonized over the contract so long that Jake finally had snatched it away from her and sent it off to OnShore for signature, over her objections. “Dammit, C.A.,” he’d fumed, “we’ve already done half the work and you’re still diddling with the contract. They’ve paid us a retainer—on trust—and you’re still looking for something to be wrong! Stop acting like a lawyer!” And he’d stormed out of her office—contract in hand—really and truly angry with her for the first time in their often stormy but always friendly association. Why couldn’t she let go of whatever was gnawing at her about OnShore and trust Jake? She had enough of her own business to worry about: Suppose Annabelle Islington wasn’t hiding out with her mother?

  She looked up at the square chrome clock that had been a present from her friend Lillian Gailliard in New Orleans: barely eight o’clock, though it felt like hours later. It always did when darkness came at four-thirty or five o’clock in the afternoon. She reopened and reread the work before her, making changes and adjustments, refining and clarifying language, until she was satisfied. Then she turned her thoughts to herself and what was still too long a stretch of night ahead.

  Carole Ann’s husband, Al Crandall, had been murdered two and a half years ago, and while she thought herself well along the road to healing, being home alone for too long a time still
presented emotional traumas that she didn’t manage very well. Usually she ran at night after work, even in the winter. But not in the ice and snow; that was much too treacherous. She was, she realized, hungry, and certainly she could go to dinner. But dining out had been a favorite enjoyment of hers and Al’s, and her favorite restaurants also were his. . . . Then she remembered the new Cajun place in Georgetown. She’d eaten there with Jake and Grace and had enjoyed the food—after she’d admonished herself to stop comparing it with the “real thing,” that being the almost indescribably magnificent food prepared for her by her Cajun and Creole friends in Louisiana.

  She gazed again at the clock. Lillian Gailliard and her brother, Warren Forchette, and their relatives: their great-aunt Sadie Cord and her grandson, Herve; their uncle and his wife, Eldon and Merle Warmsley; Ella Mae Forchette, Warren and Lil’s mother. These people, who now were her family, too, had helped to uncover the horrible truth of her husband’s murder, and then had helped her heal and recover from the trauma of that ordeal. And throughout, they had fed her. The food of the people of the bayous of Louisiana. Nothing in a restaurant ever could approximate the beauty of the real thing. But the food at Bayou North—that was the name of the place in Georgetown—was a noble and worthy effort.

  An hour later, after having talked, via conference call, to all the Louisianans, and after a hiliarious and heartwarming conversation with her mother in Los Angeles, she felt ready to spend an evening amusing herself, wrapped as she was in the good humor and goodwill of the people who loved her. And armed with the good advice from Eldon Warmsley to “drink enough beer that it don’t matter what the food tastes like,” she cleared off her desk, packed her briefcase, and began plotting the fastest way across town.

  3

  RICHARD ISLINGTON WAS STANDING BESIDE his desk waiting for them. He walked forward several paces and met them in the center of the large room in his home that was his office. He shook both their hands, greeting them by name. Then he faced Carole Ann. “That still is one of my most favorite colors,” he said, before he instructed them to have a seat wherever they were most comfortable. They chose a grouping of chairs before the stone fireplace that occupied an entire wall of the room and which was adjacent to a wall of French doors through which the snow-laden woods that comprised Islington’s backyard could be appreciated. It was a majestic sight and feeling, the combination of the huge, crackling fire and the vast iciness.

  These powerful visuals were the only obvious symbols—aside from the man himself—that true wealth was on display. Although Islington did possess and display the aura of one accustomed not only to having his way, but to taking it if it was not freely given—and taking it without fear of consequence or retribution—his home would have been considered modest by those of comparable wealth. It was a stunning, breathtaking house, but it was a house and not a mansion, and so positioned within the forest as to appear to be one with it. The architectural harmony of the place reminded her of the house of a smuggler of illegal Mexicans in the southern California desert, an adobe and tile and log structure that appeared to have risen from the sand and cactus rather than having been constructed upon it.

  Within moments of their seating themselves, there was a quick knock on the door and it opened to admit a tall, thin man in his mid-thirties pushing a serving cart. He was dressed in much the same way as Islington himself—neat wool slacks and a shirt open at the collar, sleeves rolled to midarm. He, too, reflected a higher than average degree of wealth and comfort, and looked nothing like a servant.

  “There’s coffee, tea, soda, beer, wine,” Islington said, waving toward the cart and saying nothing to the man who brought it. No one said anything else until coffee was poured all around—into thick mugs and not puny little teacups—and the man with the cart had left, still without uttering a word.

  “You think you can find my daughter,” Islington said into a silence that they knew he reserved the right to break.

  “We think it’s reasonable to look for her,” Carole Ann replied.

  “Means the same thing to me,” Islington shot back. “Y’all ain’t the kind of people who’d take a man’s money just for the pleasure of taking it. I know who you are, Miz Gibson, and I know about Graham. Know about you, too, Petrocelli. And I know you know all about me.”

  Carole Ann didn’t really believe that Islington was the kind of man who would feel the need to rely on his poor-country-boy, idiosyncratic dialect to put them off balance; she believed that his idiomatic manner of speaking was genuine. But she was not willing to give him the benefit of the doubt, so she put him on the defensive.

  “Not enough, Mr. Islington. We’d like to know why you think your daughter left, and whether that had anything to do with your wife’s disappearance.”

  Aside from first sipping at his coffee, then slowly and deliberately placing his coffee cup on the table next to him, Islington exhibited no sign that he’d been affected by the intended sting of her words. Petrocelli, making no effort to subvert his reaction, shifted in his seat and angled his body just slightly so that he could see her as well as Islington. Then he took a noisy sip of his coffee and swallowed audibly. Carole Ann understood his warning: don’t turn off Islington! But she ignored him and calmly watched and waited.

  He appeared so ordinary: average height and build with the average amount of thinning, graying hair for a man in his middle fifties, with the ruddy complexion of someone who spends significant time out of doors. His clothes—herringbone tweed slacks, pale yellow silk shirt, loafers—were expensive and of good quality though not in the least ostentatious. But he was uncannily, eerily still. He sat without moving or speaking, barely blinking and breathing, and it was, ultimately, unnerving.

  Carole Ann, too, sat silently with her legs crossed, right knee over left, between the two men, but angled toward her host. She, too, wore expensive and well-tailored wool slacks and a silk blouse and slip-on loafers. She cradled her coffee cup in her palms, a caress, almost, in appearance, but in reality an occupation for her hands.

  “My wife left because she didn’t like it here. She missed her home. She didn’t share my need to be wealthy. She felt uncomfortable in the presence of educated people, especially other women, who made a game of looking down on her—she wasn’t very . . .smart. And I claimed Annabelle as mine. I took her with me everywhere I went, kept her close to me. I had my money and I had my daughter and I didn’t need more.”

  “That explains why your wife left, but presumably your daughter didn’t feel unwanted?” Carole Ann deliberately made it a question. She wanted to elicit some degree of emotion from the man, and almost succeeded.

  “I don’t know what Annabelle felt,” he replied in a tight voice. “She didn’t talk to people, she read books.”

  “What’s her name, Mr. Islington? What’s your wife’s name?” she asked quickly, deliberately too close on the words out of his mouth.

  He didn’t answer for a moment, in which he appeared to be trying to remember. “Eve,” he replied finally, in a flat tone.

  She shifted gears. “Why do people dislike you so, Mr. Islington? I’m certain that you don’t care why; I just wonder if you know why.”

  For the first time he smiled. It was small, and brief, but it was there, and it was real. “Because I don’t respond or react to things or events or people or circumstances. Not the way they want me to or think I should. And you know very well, Miz Gibson, that folks don’t like what they don’t understand.”

  She met and held his gaze, wondering what, exactly, he meant. She did, indeed, know very well the extent to which people distrusted and disliked that which they didn’t understand, that which was different. She’d been different from the majority of the people in her surroundings for the majority of her life. But then, she was Black and female. Surely Richard Islington wasn’t equating his preference for rudeness and people’s reaction to his behavior with . . .but of course he was. The cocky set of his head and his steady, level meeting of her gaze
indicated that.

  “Anybody mind if I jump in here?” Petrocelli looked from one to the other of them, aware that he was interrupting something intense, something potentially explosive. “Did your daughter ever tell you that she wanted to leave or that she planned to leave or did she ever threaten to leave?”

  “No,” Islington replied dryly and then stood abruptly.

  Petrocelli followed suit, getting to his feet as abruptly, and clearly creating a brief moment of unbalance for Islington. “I know your daughter has her own place, Mr. Islington, but does she still have a room here?”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’d like to see it,” Petrocelli responded in a calm tone.

  “Why?” Islington asked again, the challenge undisguised.

  “We need your complete cooperation, Mr. Islington, if we’re to have a successful working relationship.” Carole Ann rose to her feet as she was speaking, placing her cup on the table and turning to face the two men in a single, fluid movement. “It should be obvious to you why we need to learn as much as possible about Annabelle. But even if it isn’t, please accept that it is.”

  Islington opened, then closed his mouth, and turned away from his guests and strode over to his desk. He touched a button on the telephone and then crossed to the door and opened it. “My associate, Jack, will show you Annabelle’s rooms. He will also have for you the signed contracts and a retainer. I know you’ll contact me when you have something to say.” And he turned away from them and returned to his desk, leaving them alone in the hallway just as the tall man who’d wheeled in the drinks cart appeared.