Halt at X: A North of Boston Novel

by Sally Ann Sims

  “That’s fine. If there’s nothing to hide, there’s no problem with this. We’re talking primarily coordination, not vetting,” Honor said, holding the document up. “Since we’re all on the same page.”

  “Look,” said Frank, “the reality of it is that you’ve got to entice these new corporate partners in and fit in with their culture. We shouldn’t be making them pass a litmus test and then give them the privilege of donating to P-H. We’ve got to sell the concept of the school and how it will help their bottom line.”

  This seems more tennis match than chess game, thought Honor. He’s just batting everything back.

  “Ok,” she said. “Try this one. Say Company X wants to help P-H put up a building, a research building, the whole nine yards, with the stipulation that P-H makes their Board chair a professor. Say he has the academic credentials, but he’d be a professor who wants to purport a policy agenda that greatly benefits his business. Just as an example,” she added. “I’m curious about what happens to that gift offer under your lean-and-mean structure?”

  Frank’s face remained impassive. Honor thought if maybe she’d somehow touched on something close to what he was doing there would be some sign, some flicker of something in his facial muscles or eyes, but he was either innocent of that particular dicey situation or else an accomplished actor.

  “And you’re suggesting we have a committee make the acceptance decision based on what?” he asked.

  “How about educational integrity?” Honor said.

  Frank glanced over to Cliff.

  “Well, that leaves it wide open,” Cliff said.

  “Whatever’s best for the school,” Frank said, smiling. It was the obvious answer, yet conveniently committed him to nothing. Just like one of Honor’s nephews learning to say what Honor’s sister wanted to hear. And then doing whatever he was planning to do in the first place.

  “So who decides what’s best?” she pressed.

  Frank checked the monitor again. Five more e-mails arrived, one from Fargill. He looked back at Honor and pointed to the GAP. “I could go for a much pared down version of that.”

  “Great. Show me your markups,” Honor said. “All I ask.” Honor gathered up her briefcase and papers, leaving the GAP on the conference table. “I’m off to see a client,” she said. “Cliff, Frank. Enjoy your day.”

  After Honor closed the door behind her, Cliff said, “Don’t mind her. The momentum you’ve got going is great.”

  Frank watched Cliff’s face for evidence of his continued loyalty. Words, Frank knew, signaled very little in this game. “If you’re with me, we can really take this place beyond what anyone imagined. Way beyond.”

  “I’m behind you one hundred percent,” Cliff said. “Just tell me what you need.”

  Frank did not miss a beat.

  “We need big changes in the Development Department to keep up with my plans. Warren’s the one to lead it.”

  “I wouldn’t dismiss Lucinda so easily,” Cliff said, thoughtfully. “She built that department up from almost zip, and if you hook her into a good plan, she’ll take it way beyond what you’d expect. And she’s as loyal as a service dog. I’ve seen her in action all these years.”

  Cliff watched the effect of his words on Frank’s face. Neither man gave away anything.

  “You two have more in common than you think. Give it time,” Cliff added. “Well, I’m off. See you at the Executive Committee meeting.”

  I haven’t got that kind of time. Or patience, Frank thought, opening Fargill’s latest e-mail.

  * * * * *

  With the sun just piercing through the top half of the floor-to-ceiling windows by the Pecan Room fireplace, Frank watched Warren pull a check out of the inside chest pocket of his suit jacket.

  “He wrote it out while I was there,” Warren said. “Couldn’t believe it.”

  Frank examined the check from Chester Mulholland made out on his corporate account. Seaside Realtors. For half a million.

  And he’s very interested in a naming opportunity for the stadium,” Warren said. “Maybe we can get him and Pat Weld into a bidding war over that. He’s even talking of naming one of the new men’s sports teams.”

  Frank smiled. “Interesting idea, but let’s hook him into something bigger than that.”

  “What’s this?” Warren said, picking up a document from the coffee table.

  “Something we need to hack to pieces and then ignore. Would you like to do the honors?”

  “Ah, the GAP. Lucinda’s baby, huh?”

  “Yes. And Singh. That new Indian guy on Exec Committee put it together with Honor, but it’s Lucinda’s doing. She’s trying to throw up roadblocks for me, like she’s been doing from day one.”

  “So what are you thinking?”

  “I think we make her job even more unpleasant,” Frank said. “Unsettle her. Do you know what I mean?” Frank put a hand on Warren’s shoulder briefly. “Like, didn’t you say she and Aden are getting a little too close?”

  “Yes,” Warren said. “I’ve got people watching. Digging.”

  “Good.”

  Frank moved toward the tall window, then stopped suddenly and turned to Warren.

  “Call some of her favorite donors, explain that she’s unavailable. Personal problems. Be sympathetic and vague. Tell them you’d like to catch up with them. And — ”

  “I know. Ease them over. To us.” Warren sat back on the couch, listening, smiling.

  “Right. And then there’s her husband. He’s turning out to be… quite the embarrassment, I hear?”

  “We gotta be careful there, Frank. We don’t want to piss Weld off. He’s got Bart on a PR job.”

  “Good point. Perhaps we could… .” Frank turned back toward the window just in time to see Margo scurrying up the walk to the back of the mansion.

  “I’ve got a visitor. Take a hatchet to that GAP while I’m gone,” Frank said.

  Frank straightened his tie and exited the room just as the bell gonged at the back of the mansion. He waved off John, who’d been passing through the hall carrying next week’s menu and a vase of tiger lilies. Frank peered through the narrow vertical row of windows by the side of the door. Margo, in a white blouse and high-waisted black pants, was stabbing at her cell phone with her right hand and fluffing out curls with her left. He opened the door.

  “This is a nice surprise,” he said.

  “We have to talk,” Margo said.

  As he steeped toward her, reaching out a hand to her arm, she meet his gaze without returning his smile, holding her arms up and away from him. Then she stepped brusquely around him and headed toward the Pecan Room. Stopping abruptly at the entranceway, she turned, almost colliding with Frank. “In private,” she said.

  Frank followed her to the library. Margo stood next to the Japanese screen, scanning the hallway through the door. “Shut the door.”

  Frank obeyed, his curiosity piqued.

  “I was just at The Puffy Muffin for a quick salad. The place is absolutely abuzz.” She hissed the last word.

  “With what? You’ve got my undivided attention now, Margo,” he joked. He braced his arm over her head on the stone chimney. She slipped out from under him and sat in a wing chair.

  There was a sharp knock on the library door. Frank went to open it.

  “Look,” Warren whispered. “I need to do a few things at my office. Let’s check in later.”

  Frank nodded and shut the door.

  “Sorry about that. What things?” Frank said, returning to a spot between the wing chair and the fireplace.

  “Two things. One. That I’m getting my way with you ’cause you’re getting your way with me, if you catch my drift. You know that’s been over for weeks. And that wasn’t what it was about anyway. At least I didn’t think that.” Her right hand started on her curls, but she stopped suddenly and picked up a palm-size white jade figurine of a sleeping deer from the end table, cradling its cool curves.

  “Margo. I didn’t think
that at all. I always — ”

  “I don’t know how any of that leaked,” she said, looking into his eyes. “And as for who got their way, I think we’ve both been dissatisfied.” She returned the jade deer to its spot under the stained-glass shaded lamp that was switched off.

  Frank stiffened and jerked back, like he’d been slapped, and half sat, half fell onto a hard-cushioned love seat. “Who is — ”

  “And two,” she continued. “Vanessa Weld told one of the reporters for The P-H Sentinel that Warren was the one who raped Thea Gimball. Of course, she leaped at the scoop and promised a full story ASAP.”

  * * * * *

  Margo left immediately after imparting the news, claiming a freshman orientation planning meeting, and Frank jumped on his cell phone to Natalie Biddle at The Sentinel’s office. He moved over to the Pecan Room.

  “Hold the Gimball story,” he said. “At least until next week.”

  “You can’t interfere with the freedom of the press,” she said. A little too smugly, he thought. The eldest daughter of Honor Emerson’s law partner is not a shy person.

  “No, but I can interfere with the funding of the press,” he said.

  He could hear her quick intake of breath.

  “Just kidding,” he soothed. “Please just give me a couple of days, Natalie, the weekend?” Frank softened his voice to a just above a conspiratorial whisper. “I need to sort through some things, and we don’t need Thea traumatized more than I imagine she is already. And I’m sure, given your journalistic integrity, that you’ve no interest in spreading ill-founded rumors.” Make her feel like the ball’s in her court.

  “Ok, we’ll break it Tuesday,” she said and ended the call before he could get “goodbye” out of his mouth.

  He quickly punched in Warren’s number. “Vanessa Weld is accusing you of raping the Gimball kid. Come back over ASAP.”

  As he slipped the phone into his suit jacket, Frank noticed, through the crack between the wall and the left side of the open double doors, John’s head in the foyer. Ear to crack. When Frank walked toward the door, he heard a knock and then a muffled swear. When Frank emerged from the Pecan Room, John was arranging tiger lilies on the narrow marble-topped table where there was now a puddle spreading out from the vase. John did not look up as Frank passed through the foyer to the front door. Once out the door, Frank continued around the mansion on the south side, away from the parking lot, to the backyard.

  Frank soon heard a car door slam and rapid footfalls on the clamshell driveway. Warren appeared around the high boxwood hedge in the small expanse of what passed for lawn, half dead grass, half moss, shrouded in the deep shade at the rear of the mansion. His face held none of its cocksure buoyancy of a half hour ago, with his clenched jaw and an odd puffiness about his narrowed eyes. A major portion of the right half of his usually slicked hair was flat and unreflective. It was the first time Frank ever saw Warren with asymmetrically coiffed hair.

  Frank led Warren toward the edge of the lawn to an access point for the cliff trail overlooking the narrow beach. He unlocked the gate that guarded the perimeter rim of the mansion property, let them both through, relocked it, and then led off down the trail. A few hundred feet to the north, Frank sat down on a wrought iron bench, motioning for Warren to join him. A brisk onshore breeze buffeted their faces, and the harbor to the south was choked with triangles of sails.

  “Why are we meeting out here? I’m not in the mood for a garden party.” Warren looked with disgust at the uncomfortable iron bench. Then he took a short step to the low cliff railing and glanced three hundred feet down to the beach where two gulls were arguing over something in freshly deposited seaweed.

  “The house has ears,” Frank said, indicating with a jerk of his head over his shoulders when Warren spun around.

  “Huh?”

  “Pringle. He’s amassing a dossier. On both of us, I suspect. Damn near broke that hideous vase trying not the get caught.” Frank’s smile held no warmth as he squinted grimly at the sea, glittering like a field of cut crystals in the full sun. He pulled sunglasses out of his breast pocket.

  “What about the Gimball kid?” he said.

  “That Weld bitch!” said Warren. “I can’t believe she’d say that I did it. I don’t even know the Gimball girl.”

  “What’s Vanessa got against you?” Frank stood up. “Damn uncomfortable bench.” He joined Warren leaning against the rail at the outer edge of the cliff face.

  “Hell if I know. I wasn’t the one that called off the marriage to Rachael, who she’s so cozy with. That’s the only connection I can think of, but I can’t imagine Rachael would ask her to smear me. She’s just not like that.”

  Warren absently tossed a large pebble off the cliff. It landed near the gull on the right. Both gulls pushed off into flight, cussing louder than they had been over the seaweed.

  “I also thought our love was just a bit thicker than a business deal gone wrong, but I guess I was wrong on that one too,” Warren added, his anger simmering into self-pity.

  Frank scanned Warren’s profile. “You didn’t do anything she could possibly misconstrue as rape? These college girls usually exaggerate, you — ”

  “Frank, I don’t even know Thea Gimball. I’m not even sure if I’ve even seen her on campus since I couldn’t tell you what she looks like.” He picked up a larger rock, the size of a small fist, and threw it as far as he could. It landed about twenty feet from a wave that had just reached its final height up the beach.

  Frank watched Warren as if measuring or calculating something. Warren caught him.

  “Honest, Frank. I don’t know her.”

  They watched the sea shimmer with blinding indifference to the predicaments of the men on the cliff above.

  “I bet Lucinda’s behind it,” Warren said suddenly, his fists against the railing. “Like, Vanessa just moved her horses to that stable she’s at. And — ”

  “So what’s the connection? What about the guy who they first said did it? That Irish guy?” Frank said.

  “Well, I donno. Let me think.”

  Frank leaned his forearms against the rail, stretching his back, and then stood up straight. He put his right hand on Warren’s back for a few seconds, palm open, just below the base of this neck.

  “Hey, I believe you,” Frank said. “Let’s just move into damage control. I bought us till Tuesday before the story hits.”

  “Hits where?” Warren said, his voice rising in exasperation.

  “The Sentinel. Margo said it’s all over campus.”

  “Geeez! I’ve been away on donor calls the last couple of days.”

  Frank thought for half a minute and then asked, “Can you prove where you were when it happened? And offer a witness who’ll speak up?”

  “I was meeting with a guy I work with. I’d prefer not to ask him to speak up,” Warren said softly.

  “I think you’re going to have to. To save your skin,” Frank said. “Not to mention, your job.”

  Warren slunk back to the iron bench and sat down.

  “And your future as Vice President.”

  Warren looked grimly out at the sea. The wind had stopped, and the laboring chug of a lobster boat’s motor reached them on the cliff.

  “I’m working with someone to… help us speed up getting Lucinda to move on. Like we’ve talked about? To make things a little less friendly for her at P-H. I was meeting with him that night, the night that Thea was supposedly raped.”

  “Who is this guy?”

  “He’s from New Hampshire. Used to be a bouncer in Newcester. Lost his job. He’s… .” Warren looked briefly at Frank and then back out over the ocean. “He’s freelancing, you might say. In security.”

  Frank looked south along the trail then north. They were quite alone.

  “Can this guy keep his mouth shut?”

  “Yes. For a price,” Warren said. He frowned at the trail in front of his feet.

  “Fine. Then you were with me that night. Dr
iving to a donor visit. Out of town. And then — ”

  Warren looked up and watched Frank pace the railing. The top of the cliff face was splintering into jagged rock tiles. Frank kicked pieces of flinty rock ahead of him. He picked up a palm-sized piece and hurled it like a Frisbee. It caught a wave.

  “Then we went back to Margo’s place! If you two are vouching, we’re cool.” Warren sounded relieved, grabbing onto this new scenario as a way out of this pit he had fallen into.

  “Forget Margo,” Frank said. He wished it were that easy for him to forget about her. “She won’t join us in this.”

  Warren watched Frank’s face with intense interest.

  “I’m going to have to be enough in the witness department,” Frank said. The opening notes of Beacons of Knowledge rang out from Frank’s jacket pocket. He checked caller ID. Cliff Plunkett. He slipped the phone back into his pocket.

  “What has this guy done, anyway? I better know,” said Frank.

  “Who?” said Warren. His mind seemed to have slipped off somewhere.

  “Your security man.”

  Warren opened his mouth.

  “No,” Frank said. “It’s better that you don’t tell me.”

  Warren looked at Frank askance.

  “Let’s head back,” Frank said, starting south down the trail, Warren following close behind. “I’ll take care of Natalie at The Sentinel. Don’t talk to them until you hear from me.”

  They were crossing the front lawn when Frank noticed a car he didn’t recognize. Warren got into his BMW and pulled out. Frank walked back through the front door of the mansion.

  John seemed to have quickly recovered his dignity from being discovered, Frank thought. His face was reanimated when he drew Frank’s attention to the Pecan Room with a sweep of his arm.

  “One more guest before the weekend starts,” John said. “I’ve just brought refreshments.”

  Frank nodded and headed for the door.

  Art d’Argenta

  “Ah, Dr. Wickes. Frank,” Bomi said, standing up. “I seem to have come across an accounting problem I need your expertise on. You’ll probably be able to clear this up in no time.”