The Company You Keep

by Tracy Kelleher

  “That boy. Snacking all the time. Whatever happened to three square meals a day?” she muttered. Then she raised her voice. “Don’t eat anything until I get there.” She started to cross the neatly clipped grass.

  “Bye, Mom.” Vic headed up his front path. Just another day with the family.

  “Witek, they’re not our kind.” His mother’s voice boomed.

  Vic bent down to pat Roxie, then looked across the lawn. “Don’t tell me you still buy into the class difference thing?” Pretty soon his mother’s thinking would regress to Victorian times.

  She walked back across the lawn to him and pointed an accusing finger. “Pooh, pooh all you want. It still exists. Besides, that girl’s mother? The reporter’s mother?” She lowered her head and looked over her very expensive, ultra-lightweight French glasses. Vic knew because he’d bought them for her.

  “What about Mimi’s mother?” he asked.

  “She’s dead.”

  “That’s too bad. But a lot of people lose family members.”

  His mother emitted a shocked breath. “As I know only too well.” She raised her chin like a warrior ready to do battle. “But her mother?”

  Vic nodded.

  She struck her blow. “They say the father killed her.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CONRAD STOOD ON THE platform at Grantham Junction waiting for the 8:05 Amtrak. Gone were the days of the private bar car attached to the front of the train, and the assurance that you’d be traveling with a certain type of people—fellow investment bankers, partners in major law firms. Even the occasional advertising executive had been allowed into the mix just to keep things lively.

  Of course, all that was history, dating to the time before women had been allowed to join the upper echelons of the workforce—not that Conrad would have ever voiced that sentiment out loud. Noreen would have forcefully taken him to task at even the faintest whiff of misogynist leanings. Still, Conrad was not one to believe in coincidences.

  He flicked his left wrist up, and the sleeve of his Burberry raincoat slipped back. The starched cuffs of his monogrammed dress shirt stuck out the requisite half-inch from the sleeve of his pinstripe suit. He always wore French cuffs, and his gold cufflinks with the crest of Grantham University gleamed. Conrad enjoyed putting them on each morning. He found them reassuring, a symbol that certain traditions would never cease to exist despite the ever-changing world.

  He checked his Rolex. The train was now three minutes late. He had a meeting at ten o’clock, but it wasn’t as if he was worried about being late. After all, given his position in life people waited for him.

  Frankly, if he still had a driver take him into the City as he’d done every morning during the years he was married to Press’s mother, he wouldn’t have been forced to wait around on a concrete platform, buffeted by flying grit every time the Acela train whisked through without stopping on its way to Washington, D.C.

  Alas, the chauffeured car service had come to an end when he married Noreen. She had convinced him that it was every good citizen’s duty to take public transportation whenever possible—good for the environment, she said. He hadn’t needed much convincing. He would have even taken the bus for her. No…maybe not the bus.

  So as he waited on the platform, Conrad eyed the young man standing next to him—tight jeans, black leather jacket, a tattoo crawling up the back of his neck. Conrad looked down. The man’s black boots needed polishing. That may have offended him the most.

  “The 8:05 Amtrak train will be arriving on the northbound track in one minute,” a crackly voice announced over the loud speakers.

  Conrad moved along the platform next to the third billboard down from the stairway. When the train stopped, he would be directly in front of a door.

  The train approached the station from Trenton and ground to a noisy halt. The metal doors slipped open. The leather jacket young man tried to nudge his way in first, but Conrad placed his polished brogue just so, blocking his path. In getting on the train, like all things, he liked to come in first.

  Shifting today’s copy of the Wall Street Journal to the same hand as his briefcase, he stepped inside and opened the inner door to the carriage on the right. Conrad always went to the right.

  Then he found his favorite row—fifth on the left—and took the seat next to the window. Before sitting down, he unbuckled and unbuttoned his tan raincoat and the top button of his suit jacket, then slipped his BlackBerry out of his pocket. He placed his leather briefcase on his lap, the newspaper on top so as not to get ink on his clothes, and settled in for the hour ride.

  He nodded curtly at another similarly dressed middle-aged man who sat next to him. Like Conrad, he immediately pulled out his phone, and the two sat in silence as the train pulled away from the station, speeding along until its next stop in New Brunswick. From there, it would travel express to Newark before terminating at Penn Station in Manhattan. On days when the weather was pleasant—like today—Conrad liked to walk across town to the office. He might be sixty-two, but he was a fit sixty-two, with his twice-weekly squash games at the Grantham Club of New York.

  As the train jostled slightly on the tracks, Conrad scrolled through his messages. He liked to get an early start on things since the Asian markets had already opened, and he frequently had communications from Shanghai and Tokyo.

  Otherwise, it was a good time to delete the flood of unsolicited résumés from job seekers or answer more personal items—updates from fellow members of the Reunions committee or invitations for lunch with friends and colleagues. His assistant Jeremy would follow up on the details of these meetings. Like all good assistants, Jeremy had an unerring ability to fob off people Conrad wasn’t interested in seeing, or pin down those who he did.

  Speaking of Jeremy, Conrad noted there was a message from him marked CONFIDENTIAL AND URGENT.

  It wasn’t like Jeremy to use capital letters—his solid education at St. Paul’s and Haverford had instilled in him the gaucheness of overkill.

  Conrad clicked on the email and the text popped open.

  Mr. Lodge:

  As you know, the decision to promote several members of the firm to partner has increased the fully vested members to a record number.

  Which is precisely why Conrad had voiced his objections when the motion had come to a vote several weeks ago. But the resolution had passed anyway, much to Conrad’s chagrin. He anticipated a splintering into factions, a development that he would have to crush sooner rather than later.

  He read on:

  In view of the unwieldy nature of this top-heavy structure, one which will undoubtedly make major decisions more difficult…

  Didn’t I say those exact same words at the meeting? Conrad thought with amusement. So now they were coming around to his way of thinking, after all.

  As your former assistant, I have therefore been directed by the other partners of the firm to inform you that your position at Pilgrim Investors is no longer required.

  Conrad stopped reading. He blinked, then reread what he’d just read.

  This decision is effective immediately. Since you are no longer an employee of PI, you will need to report to Security upon entering the building. From there, you will be escorted directly to Human Resources, where you will find personal items from your former office.

  “Former assistant? Former office?” Conrad said out loud, enraged. The man next to him slanted him a skeptical glance before going back to his own messages. Conrad had personally selected the wood paneling and eighteenth-century French antiques for that office.

  Since you initially instituted the policy, you are no doubt aware that PI’s protocol requires immediate lockdown of a former employee’s computer and business items, thereby ensuring the propriety of the firm’s business. Human Resources will also be happy to discuss with you the terms of your retirement and benefits package.

  In closing, let me say how much I learned under your guidance and that I wish you well in your future endeavors.
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  It was signed by one of the new partners.

  Conrad put his hand to his heart—or what eldest daughter, Mimi, always ready with the snide comment, called his “blood-pumping muscle.” Indeed, he could feel it beating rapidly, painfully. He might not have a heart, but whatever it was, it was breaking.

  He stared blindly out the grimy window at the passing blur of scenery. A coup. An office coup, clearly led by this…this snot-nosed partner who Conrad had personally mentored. A Harvard man. He should have known. Conrad rubbed his forehead. It was clammy.

  Could this really have happened? To him? The founder of the company? Surely he had enough support from the old guard on the board, Conrad reminded himself. Or did he? He was the only founding member still active, the others having retired to charitable work or a life divided between homes in Aspen and St. John. And the number of new partners could have formed a voting block by peeling off a few of the older ones who had been chafing at the bit to change the strategic direction of the company. Yes, he supposed, it was possible.

  Conrad looked up and noticed that the train had stopped. New Brunswick, he realized. He saw the towers of Rutgers over the elevated train platform. People clambered on board. A conductor shouted. Then the train took off with a lurch.

  Conrad lowered the phone to the newspaper on his lap. He looked down at the screen. It had already turned black. The front page of the Journal jiggled up and down with the swaying of the train, the words unreadable. He wondered…

  Wondered how was he going to tell Noreen.

  And then almost immediately, he wondered how he was going to face his fellow classmates at Reunions this coming weekend.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE CHLORINATED WATER sluiced over her body as Mimi performed a perfect flip turn at Delaney Pool on the university campus. It was the homestretch of her 2500-yard workout, a modified version of the program from her water polo days. She wasn’t back to the 5000-yard program, which would have taken roughly two hours, but she still did the mix of sprints, distance swimming and water polo-type strokes. The latter included heads-up freestyle without using the wall to turn around, backstroke with a breaststroke kick, as well as heads-up butterfly with a breaststroke kick. The combination was exhausting. The result was improved stamina, but also an inability to think of anything, which was better than just about any therapy that she’d tried.

  There was something about water, she noted. She remembered the first time she’d jumped into the small, overly chlorinated pool in the sports club on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It dulled the mind to the outside world, but heightened the senses, and not just the pain in her muscles and her lungs, but the sensations of touch and smell. If someone was wearing perfume or a strong deodorant, the odor penetrated. It was as if all her pores were open and inviting to the world around her—that she was one with her surroundings instead of feeling like a skittish outsider. In a word, it made her joyous.

  Which was pretty ironic when you considered how many people, including Mimi in her youth, had found swimming laps tedious beyond despair. But now, with a final sprint to the wall, Mimi felt nothing but exhilaration—and complete exhaustion as she held on to the tiled gunwale and sucked air into her oxygen-deprived lungs.

  She reached up and removed her swimmer’s goggles and her red silicone swim cap, then peered at the large round clock mounted high on the wall. She was checking her time—fastest yet—a good sign, but also registering the time of day.

  She didn’t want to be late in meeting Lilah at Bean World, the local super-cool coffee shop on Whalen Avenue in town. Up until now she’d actually avoided her best friend. She hadn’t seen the point in rehashing the events of the kidnapping, but mostly she didn’t want to see the concerned look in her friend’s eyes. Lilah was this superempathetic person—unlike her, Mimi readily admitted.

  But now it occurred to her that she really wanted to meet with Lilah. Because she wanted to ask her about Vic. It was only fair. Hadn’t Mimi peppered Lilah with questions two years ago during Reunions about her renewed acquaintance with their classmate Justin Bigelow, the onetime lady-killer and good-time boy? During that weekend, lo and behold, superserious Lilah had been the one to finally tame the wild man. Soon afterward, the two married and their blissful union seemed to defy the gloomy divorce statistics.

  Mimi wanted to ask more questions—but not about Lilah and Justin. Well, she would politely inquire about their work in Congo and how things were going in their new house, not to mention the baby. And then she’d get to what really mattered—what Lilah thought about Vic. There was something about him that appealed to her at this stage in her life. Or maybe it simply was Roxie. Okay, she was a sucker for his dog. And the man went with the dog, surely? But the truth of the matter was, there’d always been something about Vic Golinski.

  God knows, it wasn’t as if she was looking for love. As far as Mimi was concerned, love was a lot of fabricated hooey, with the exception of Lilah and Justin’s relationship. But for her? No way.

  What she wanted to discuss wasn’t burgeoning love, therefore, but unanticipated glimmers of lust. And if she was going to get sage advice from the one person she truly trusted in the world, she would have to get a move on, especially because her mode of transportation was Press’s Trek bike.

  Mimi hoisted herself out of the pool and walked swiftly to the women’s locker room down the hallway. Delaney Pool was a state-of-the-art racing facility—a welcome addition to the old dark and dingy gymnasium pool—and as an alum, she could still use the facilities for free. And, hugging her towel around her, she jogged in her flip-flops through the cavernous structure.

  It took her less than five minutes to shower and slip on her clothes. She didn’t bother with the hair dryer, and instead whipped a wide-toothed comb through her chin-length hair, pulling the dark strands straight back from her forehead.

  She barely glanced at the mirror to check on how she looked. After all, there wasn’t much to fuss about a pair of jeans and an oversize white shirt. Once upon a time the cotton blouse had been formfitting, but Mimi figured with the sleeves rolled up, it fit in with the “boyfriend” style that seemed so popular in New York these days. Actually, the jeans were new—two sizes smaller than what she used to wear. She hated wearing belts, and her old ones simply wouldn’t stay up on their own.

  She bent over to yank out the old canvas knapsack she’d found in her bedroom and stuffed her belongings inside the big compartment. Then she slipped on the old pair of boat shoes she’d found in the mudroom. They looked like they must have belonged to Press at one time. At least they fit her—more or less. Kind of like the black zip jacket she’d “borrowed”, as well.

  On the other hand, there was his bike. When had Press grown so much taller than she? Nothing like not being able to sit in the saddle the whole time. And when she had to stop for a traffic light, she’d had to balance her toes against the curb. There was no waiting flat-footed on the pavement with the crossbar so high.

  After checking to see that she hadn’t left anything, Mimi banged the metal door shut, swung the backpack over one shoulder and headed out of the locker room and up the stairs to the top entrance of the building. The bike racks were tucked to the side of the walkway that ran between a large parking lot and Baldwin Gymnasium, the university’s multi-purpose sports complex. This section of the walkway—with the pool building on one side and the football workout facility on the other—was notorious for producing a wind tunnel effect that could almost blow you off your feet.

  Mimi pushed open the wide glass door and in anticipation of a mighty gust of air, stopped under the concrete canopy to zip up and put up the hood of her jacket. Noreen had been right about the forecast—why wasn’t Mimi surprised? It had started to rain—in this particular location, sideways.

  Mimi hunched over and clutched the neckline of the jacket around her chin. The sides of the hood blocked all peripheral vision. She kept her head pointed to the ground, her focus a few paces in front
of her, and walked briskly toward the bike rack. The wind picked up and belted her chest. “Crap,” she muttered and bent farther forward, blind to anything more than an inch in front of her.

  And smacked straight into a hard surface.

  She yelped. Then looked up. Her hood fell back from her head. Rain pelted her face. It stuck to her eyelashes, and she brushed them off with the back of her hand. She squinted. She hadn’t bumped into a pillar.

  She’d made contact with Vic Golinski’s back.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  VIC BREATHED IN THROUGH his clenched jaw. The rain soaked through the shoulders of his blue blazer and darkened his khaki trousers. A puddle had formed around his dark loafers. He was running late for a meeting with the California plant manager and he could just imagine the snarl of traffic on Route One. On top of which, his dog—his supposedly loyal companion—had decided to take a walkabout on the other side of the Baldwin Gym.

  And somehow, despite the fact that there was practically no one on this part of campus first thing in the morning, and that the walkway was wide enough to fit a battalion of infantrymen walking abreast, some idiot had managed to bump into him—right where his shoulder blades came together and where all the stress of life always seemed to congregate.

  He rolled his shoulders backward—hearing the telltale crackling of incipient arthritis after too many hits on the football field—and slowly turned his neck—yet more crackling—to get a look.

  Why wasn’t he surprised? He hadn’t seen the woman for almost twelve years, and here they’d run into each other—literally this time—twice in two days.