“The kid’ll have to ask us to rip it out again, here and here, before he can check it. And I don’t think he’ll do that, George. He’d look too damn simple if it turned out he was wrong. He won’t take that chance. What do you think?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hell, the house will be just as good. These kids over-specify everything. They think they’re designing the Taj Mahal or something.”
“Lister, I think we better stick to the prints. All the way.”
Lister stared at him. “Is there something I don’t know, George?”
“Yes, I think I can say there’s something you don’t know.”
“Are you sore about something?”
“No.”
“Oh, I get it. You got another job lined up through the kid. And you don’t want to take the chance. I thought for a minute there you were sore about something.”
“No short cuts, Dug. None.”
“I get it. Sure, boss. Just like the prints from here on in.” He nudged George with his elbow. “But we’ve saved a little, haven’t we?”
“Not enough, Dug. We’ll be over.”
“I’ll keep it down as much as I can.”
“But stay with the specs.”
“I got you.”
They stood up. A small maroon convertible turned into the slanting driveway. Raymond Riker got out. He had a set of the prints with him. He spoke politely enough, but he didn’t smile. “Good morning, Mr. Furmon. Hello, Lister.” He went on into the house.
“You better go on in, Dug.”
George waited in his car. Riker was in the house for a full half hour. When he came out, George strolled over to the convertible. Riker got inside and started the motor. George leaned on the door. “Do you like the way it’s going?”
“It seems all right, Mr. Furmon. I check it frequently.”
“I know.”
Riker gunned the car motor impatiently. George said, “I want to say something to you, Ray. Is that what people call you?”
Riker turned off the motor. “I might as well tell you right now, Mr. Furmon, that I have no intention of making any kind of a deal whatsoever. I know very well you’re going over the bid. I can’t help that. I protect my client.”
“You think I’d try to pay you to goof off?”
Riker shrugged. “I might as well be frank. I don’t like the work you’ve done in the past. When you got the bid, I knew I was going to have to do a lot of checking. I’ve kept the job tight. You won’t make the bid. You’ll lose money on the job. I expected that. So what could you want to talk about?”
“Open up your prints, Ray. I want to show you something.”
Riker shrugged. “Sure.” He unrolled the prints, held them flat against the steering wheel. George had him turn to the third sheet. He explained quickly what Lister had suggested.
“What would you have done, Ray?”
Ray frowned. “Frankly, that hadn’t occurred to me. It would have worked. Why are you showing me?”
“Now back to page two, Ray.” He showed him two short cuts they had gotten away with on page two, and another on page four.
Riker looked at him evenly. “Is that all?”
“That’s all we could manage. You’ve stuck pretty close. What are you going to do about them?”
“You better tell me why you’ve told me this, Mr. Furmon.”
“Just say I’ve gotten religion, Ray. I gave Dug Lister explicit orders today. No more short cuts. We take our loss.”
“I don’t get it. I’d never have found these things. Now you’re going to take more of a loss. I’ll have to have them fixed to conform with the plans, Mr. Furmon.”
“Now we come close to what you said before. A deal.”
“What kind of a deal? What do you mean?”
“You know what we did. Figure what we saved on those three items. I’ll accept your figures. Deduct it from the bid. That’s cheaper for me than what it would cost to rip them out and replace. It’s up to you.”
Riker said slowly, “You didn’t have to tell me. Actually, they aren’t serious.” He looked up from the plans, looked hard at George. “Is there an angle here I don’t understand? What are you after?”
“You design a nice house. Maybe I’d like to build another one someday.”
“This is a damn funny way of going about it.”
“Is it?”
Riker smiled. “You baffle me, George. I was warned that you’re sharp. You’re out of character.”
“One favor. Don’t tell Lister. Don’t let him know you know. And tell Duffy you changed the specs. Then you can do as you damn please about future bids, about your future clients.”
“Anything else?”
“I’ll give you as full access to my office records on any job we do together as though they were cost-plus contracts.”
“Now I’m supposed to be overcome. We turn out to be great pals. Is business slipping, Mr. Furmon?”
George’s smile slipped a little but he readjusted it. “I deserve that, Ray. We’ll talk again, maybe. After this one is done.”
Ray looked at him bleakly for a few moments, then nodded and started the car again and drove off. George wondered if he had been too much of a damn fool. It was a funny feeling to go around feeling as though you had to make gestures of appeasement.
He stopped and looked at the only other job in progress, a house he was building to order, and then drove back to town to his office, in the Palmer Building. He had a staff of two, Emily Garver and Tom Herrick. Emily did the secretarial work, the bookkeeping. Herrick chased materials, made some of the estimates, made himself generally useful. George’s own office was half the room, divided from the other two desks by a temporary partition. He stopped and told Herrick about leaving the saw off to be repaired, and when he could pick it up and take it back out to Herman. He went into his own office and phoned Federal about the lumber they’d delivered, got their promise to replace it and pick it up for credit.
Emily brought him some checks to sign and told him that Mrs. Benjamin Delevan had called and wanted him to call back. Emily was a fat, nervous girl who ended every sentence with a short meaningless laugh, no matter what she was talking about. He signed the checks and called Wilma.
“This is George, Wilma.”
“George, are you going to hire that Schermer boy?”
“He starts July first. Why?”
“Well, George, I want to tell you what happened last night. It was really terrible. We were almost frantic with worry. It’s about Ellen and that Schermer boy. It seems that …”
George put his feet on his desk. He closed his eyes. My God, how the woman could talk. On and on and on. Takes her forever to get to the point. She finished the whole story. “What do you think of that, George?”
“Quite a hassle. Good thing Ellen got out of there.”
“That Schermer boy ought to be in jail. Attacking a young girl.”
“The point is, I guess, you don’t want me to hire him.”
“Well, you won’t, will you?”
“Now, Wilma, you think this over. Do you want the boy hanging around, or do you want me to give him a summer like he’s never had before. He’ll be so pooped by quitting time every day, he won’t think of anything but going to bed.”
“Well …” she said hesitantly.
“His old man asked me to give him the job. And I said okay.”
“Will it be … hard work?”
“As hard as I can make it.”
“Maybe you’re right, George.”
“Don’t worry about it, Wilma. Seen Alice today?”
“Why no. Why do you ask, George? Do you want me to give her a message or something?”
“No. No thanks.”
He sat with his hand on the phone for a time, then lifted it and dialed his home. “Hello, punkin. Go get your mother. Run. Tell her it’s an emergency, punkin.”
He heard Sandy yelling in the house. Alice came on the line. “George?
George, what’s the matter?” She sounded breathless.
“I thought you ought to know it’s a lovely day, baby.”
“What? George, you fool!”
“Don’t you agree?”
There was a silence. She laughed softly. “A fine day, George. Yes.”
It reminded him of those telephone conversations in the teen age of long ago. The silences, the meaningless, meaningful things.
“I thought you ought to know.”
“M-m-m.”
“Be good, girl.”
“Good-bye, George.”
He hung up, grinning at nothing. Then he sobered, pulled paper toward him, began to list his assets. Home, cash, investments, equipment. It made a comforting total, but not comforting enough. There would be losses. This whole change of pace might sink him without a trace. Then everything would have to be thrown into the pot. There was a way it could be done more safely, he decided. He could change from a single proprietorship to a corporation. That would mean in effect a double tax on income, but it would safeguard the home, the investments. They wouldn’t go into the pot then if he went broke.
It would be a nice safety play, but he had the peculiar feeling it would take some of the joy out of it. If you believed in something, then you wanted the risk. You wanted a battle, with something at stake. He felt as if he had suddenly climbed onto a horse, with milady’s colors tied to the lance. Then he was forced to grin at that image of himself. Hell, a man had to scare himself every once in a while. This was the time. Forget why he was doing it. For the love of it, Herman had said. Right now that would do as good as any other reason. After dinner tonight he would fool around with some sketches, based on Herman’s idea. Alice might have some ideas too. No more than two drinks before dinner then, or he’d be designing houses for Martians. Rough sketches, then go over them with Herman, and then take them to an architect. Use honest short cuts in construction to save money, and then pass that saving along. Maybe Riker could help. The kid has good ideas.
Chapter Eleven
After two sets of tennis Brock’s blister began to bother him so he told Betty and they agreed to delay the play-off set until the next time. They swam and got some sun. She was like she had been the day before. He had brought clothes this time, rented a locker for the summer. She went back to the cottage to change and then met him down in front of the club and they walked down the highway to the bean wagon for lunch. They sat at the counter and had two hamburgers and a milkshake apiece, and he told her about Ellen.
Betty nodded. “I like her. And the Rawls boy is sort of sweet and nice. But I don’t go that Franchard item. Not one bit. Catty little beast. And the Schermer boy is just a nothing. A storm-trooper type.”
“Get definite ideas, don’t you?”
“I’m a definite-type person. Or hadn’t you noticed?”
“Just that you’re a definite type.”
“Lines I get yet. Now what do we do?”
He looked at his watch. “One o’clock. How about a walk? Back of the course. Pine woods. Nature-study deal.”
“Good.”
“I’m going to find out if you’re as tireless as you act, Miss Yost.”
“Or as tiresome?”
“That too. Let’s go.”
He cut across the course, setting a long-legged pace. And she kept up easily. Beyond the twelfth fairway he located the path that led up into the hills. It was quite steep. They went down into the valley between the hills, crossed the creek on the steppingstones, and went up the far bank and up the second hill.
“Does this superhighway go anyplace in particular?” Betty asked.
“Ready to give up?”
“Not until I drop, and may I add that it won’t be long now before I do.”
“Just a little bit further, Miss Yost, please.”
There was a level spot on the crest of the second hill. Somebody with hatchets, rope and energy, possibly a scout troop, had made a rustic picnic table with benches and some rustic armchairs, badly weathered. At the edge of the level spot there was a steep drop. Betty crossed her eyes and pretended to snap sweat off her forehead, and then she saw the view. She walked over to the edge and put her fists on her hips and looked out across the wide valley, seeing the distant highway, tiny cars glinting in the sun, patchwork farms on the gentler slopes beyond the highway.
“Hey, now,” she said softly. “Almost worth the trip.”
“Not many people know about this place.”
“Not many people would want to know about it, after the first trip up here. But I like it, Delevan. I like it much.” She came to where he sat on the rustic table, swinging his legs, and took a cigarette and went over to the nearest chair and sat down, long legs crossed at the ankles, sitting on the end of her spine.
“On that tree there, Betty, just below that sort of scar, you will see a deathless inscription. See?”
“Where … Oh, I see it. A sort of bulgy-looking heart with a crooked arrow through it. And initials. BD. That would be you. Who was MB?”
“A deathless love named Marian Brastlehauer.”
“Nobody has a name like that. You made it up.”
“No, really. I used to think it was the prettiest name in the world. Brastlehauer. Brastlehauer. Her father was a freight agent for the railroad. She had one crooked front tooth. That intrigued me. A flaw in my beloved. A lovely flaw.”
“Did she ever see that touching inscription?”
“See it! I got arm-weary when I was half through and she finished it for me. We used to come up here and kiss breathlessly. She never had much to say. I guess I did all the talking. We came up here in winter once. The trail was icy. She slipped and bumped her mouth on her own knee and that crooked tooth cut the inside of her lip. Such red red blood.”
“Tell me more.”
“We used to bring salami sandwiches. And bottles of chocolate milk. We were both fourteen. My first love.”
She looked at him soberly. “That’s always a good love. That first love. And you know, you’re kind of grown up to be able to talk about it in just that way, Brock. I mean you’re not building it up or tearing it down. You just tell it, and it’s kind of sweet that way. What happened?”
“I do not cut a handsome figure in the end of this tale, Betty. She came to school with tears in her eyes and told me the railroad was moving her father down to Buffalo. And that, of course, was equivalent to Southern Rhodesia when you are fourteen. We kept saying our final good-byes for a full month. We made the mistake of saying the final good-bye in her front hallway. I guess it was pretty emotional at the point her father walked in. He chased me all the way down to the corner, with Marian screaming like somebody was tearing her wings off. That was the last time I saw her. We wrote every day for about ten days. Then not so often. Then not at all. You know, funny thing. I don’t think I’d know her if I met her on the street.”
She ground her cigarette out against the ground, leaning over to do it. And straightened up, looking too sober.
“Brock, I didn’t think you’d come back after last night.”
“Why not?”
“I felt all night as though I was behind glass.”
“That’s a good description. That’s what it was like. But I didn’t mind, really. I mean I knew it wouldn’t always be that way. It was just last night. But, well, I want to say something if you won’t misunderstand. I sort of want just … a date. Somebody to go around with, without it getting all complicated or anything.”
“There’s somebody else?”
“No. Nobody else. Just that I … I’ve just gotten over enough complications to last me for a long time, that’s all.”
And she gave a surprisingly sharp flat mirthless bark of laughter.
“I thought you’d misunderstand. I didn’t say it right.”
“You said it right. I just happen to be in a position to understand perfectly exactly what you mean, that’s all. And it’s funny. It’s ridiculously funny, Brock. That’s all.”
“But—–”
“And that’s what I want, too. So let’s make it a deal. We’ll be each other’s … companion. Dreadful word, that.”
“A deal.” By leaning far over, and with her stretching, they were able to shake hands.
She smiled into his eyes. “I like you, Brock. You’re a nice guy. I’ll be better fun next time we go out. But it will be Dutch, like last night.”
“I ought to object, but it means we’ll be able to go out oftener if I don’t. Practical. A Delevan trait.”
She gave him an odd, questioning look. “You told me about your first love. Would you like me to tell you about my last love?”
“If you want to.”
“I think I better tell somebody. Maybe it is the story of my life. That sounds impressive, doesn’t it? The story of Elizabeth Fletcher Yost. Third person? Easier, maybe. Betty was the only child of Mr. and Mrs. Fletcher Herron Yost of San Francisco, Paris, and Bermuda. As Mr. and Mrs. Yost were pleasure-loving people and enjoyed the delights of travel and had friends all over the world, and had mucho dinero, young Betty was frequently left at their main base of operations in San Francisco. At first with nurse, maid, and handyman. Later, of course, with governess, maid, and handyman. At the age of nine she was sent off to a very highly rated school in Switzerland and later she went to a convent in Paris. Four years ago her father died rather suddenly. While attempting to water-ski behind a float plane. All his friends said he was very young for his age. I remember him as a large tan grin full of white teeth, and too much money in the mail. Her mother described the estate taxes as being vulgar. It is one of her mother’s favorite words. Since then …”
She looked at him then, a clear, bright, almost startled expression, and got up quickly and went to the edge of the drop and stood with her back to him. He did not know how to react, what to say.
“Betty?” His voice was uncertain, tentative.
“It’s all right,” she said, her tone flat. “That was a mistake. I thought I could be bright and sassy. But it’s too close. And it isn’t something I can just sit and smile and talk about. Even though I feel as if I ought to.”
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