by Nancy Adams
Two of the secretaries opted to return to the secretarial pool, assuring me that it was just because they'd grown so accustomed to Dad that they didn't feel they could adapt easily to a new boss, but that was hyperbole; in the pool, they'd likely be working for a different department almost every day, or just doing the routine typing and such for the general offices. As long as they did their work in whatever new slot they occupied, I wished them well.
I helped Dad pack up all his personal belongings from the office, and then one of the maintenance guys brought a cart to carry the boxes down to the car for him. We were on the way home before noon, and Dad insisted we stop at an O'Charley's for lunch.
We got our seats, Dad wincing because it still hurt him a bit to sit and slide into a booth, placed our orders (Prime Rib all around, including Emerson—Dad wouldn't ever let him sit in the car while we ate, unless it was an important business lunch or dinner) and then sat and talked while we ate.
“So,” Dad began, “what do you see as your first move, Son?”
I kept my face straight and looked him in the eye. “Well, I've been thinking for a while now that San Francisco isn't really the right place for a corporate headquarters, so I think I'll move us to somewhere more conducive to the kind of atmosphere I want the offices to have, someplace like Pikeville, Kentucky. I thought about going back to Greeneville, but that would be like taking a step backwards, you know? Pikeville is probably better.”
Dad wasn't fooled for a second, he knew I wasn't serious; I'd never been able to bluff him, which is why I stopped playing penny-ante poker with him when I was only ten.
“Pikeville, huh? That's on the Mayo Trail, so I can see where it might give the office a feel of hominess. Of course, you do realize that's also the home of a lot of the Hatfields and McCoys, and some people think the old feud might flare back up again, anytime. I'd hate to see any of our staff getting caught in the crossfire.”
Mom snorted, something she only did when Dad and I were exasperating her. “Are either of you two ever going to grow up and act your ages? Pikeville, indeed! Son, the company has grown by leaps and bounds since we moved to San Fran, and you'd never find anyplace else that would give us the tax breaks we get here. Are you seriously...” She looked at each of us in turn, and it hit me that while I might not have fooled Dad, Mom had almost fallen for it.
I wondered if she played poker?
We all chuckled, even Emerson. Mom glared at us, but I could see the smile she was trying to hide. Emerson tried to keep it going for a minute, claiming that he'd love to be driving for them in the mountains of Kentucky, but Mom shushed him and we all grinned.
After lunch, we went to Dad's lawyers and signed off on the transfer of stock. I wondered how badly this was going to hit me come tax time, but even after that, I'd be richer than almost anyone but Warren Buffet, Bill Gates and a few of the Walton family, so it wouldn't cost me any sleep.
After that, everything was done. I was now officially the top dog in the company that had been named after me, and it wasn't quite as overwhelming as I'd expected it to be. The only left to do was let our PR department put out the press releases, but before I could do that, I had to let one other person in on it.
Katelynn. I had not yet gotten around to telling her everything about the situation. She knew that I was going to take over the whole company, but I wasn't sure how to tell her how rich I now was. I owed it to her, though, to make sure she heard it from me, first, and not on CNN or Bloomberg.
It was almost four in the afternoon by the time we got back to the house, which meant it was just before two back in North Platte. I called her, even though her break wouldn't begin for a few more minutes, and she answered on the first ring.
“Hey, Handsome,” she said, and I felt a rush of happiness at hearing her voice.
“Hey, Beautiful. You busy right now?”
“Just going over the daily reports, getting them ready for tomorrow morning. How's things going?”
“Going good,” I said, and then steeled myself to tell her just how good. “Honey, does it bother you that I'm—well, that I'm worth a lot of money? I know wealth doesn't seem to impress you, but does it worry you any?”
Her voice suddenly became guarded, as if she were afraid of where I was going with this question. “It doesn't bother me, no, but it isn't what I care about, either. If you lost it all tomorrow, I'd still want you, I'd still love you just as much.”
“So, if I were to make a lot more money, then, it wouldn't be a problem for us? I mean, all it would really mean is that we could afford more for our family, someday, right? It wouldn't scare you or anything?”
I could visualize her eyebrows scrunching together as she tried to figure out what I was talking about; it was one of her little traits that I found completely endearing.
“No, it wouldn't bother me. Nate, what is this all about? Are you trying to see if I'm intimidated or overly impressed by your money? Because I'm neither.”
I smiled widely, making sure she could hear it in my voice.”Babe, I'm not a bit worried about it impressing you—but there's something that's come up that I need to tell you, and I want to be sure it won't scare you, either.”
“Well, then,” she said, sounding partially relieved, “just spit it out. Unless you’re about to confess to being a serial killer or something, I'm not going anywhere...”
“Darn, and I was so sure you'd be the girl who'd help me hide the bodies! Nah, it's nothing like that.” I took a deep breath. “Katelynn, I told you that Dad has asked me to take over running the company, and we actually made it official this morning. What I hadn't told you yet was that, in making the decision to put me in charge, he also decided to give me what I would inherit from him when he passes away, and we also made that official today. I now own precisely fifty-one percent of the company's stock—so I'm afraid my net worth has grown a bit.”
She was quiet for a long moment, and then I heard her sigh. “Nate, I don't care how much money you have. I know that you're rich enough we'd never want for anything, but what the actual total amount you’re worth is just isn't important. The only thing that worries me is if you start to think that it has anything to with how I feel about you, because it absolutely does not.”
“Babe, I know your father provided very well for you, and while it might not be in the amounts my own Dad was making, I wouldn't call your family poor, either, not by a long shot. That alone tells me that you're not a gold digger, so let's get past that, okay? What I need you to know is this: as of today, I'm no longer a millionaire, I'm a billionaire. Is that going to cause you any problems about us?”
She laughed. “Nate, I can't even get my mind wrapped around any figure bigger than my own paycheck! My Dad always told me that life is just a game, and money is only the way you keep score. If you look at it that way, then I guess you’re one of the winners, and that just means I'm a lucky girl, because I was picked by a winner!”
I closed my eyes for a moment and counted my blessings, starting with this girl who'd come into my life. With her by my side, I felt pretty much like a winner, all right, but it had nothing to do with money.
“Katelynn, have I mentioned that I love you?”
“Once or twice, I think; but you can say it again, if you want, I won't get tired of hearing it.”
“That's good, because I'm never going to grow tired of saying it! And you can expect to hear it again pretty soon, because I'm going to get a few things set up out here tomorrow and Friday, and I'll be flying out again this Saturday morning. I'm bringing the Lear, so you can pick me up at the airport there, and if you take the day off, we can spend it together.”
“Now that, my dear Mr. Simmons, is the best offer I've had all week! I can't wait to see you, and get my arms around your neck.”
“That goes double for me, Babe.” We chatted a bit more, mostly just the inane little things that boyfriends and girlfriends say to one another when they're apart, and then we each had to get back to doing our
jobs. For her, that meant going back to managing a store; for me, it was time to start planning the future of the company, and that meant meeting with our department heads.
If only I'd known how drastically that meeting was going to change my life for the worse.
Chapter Four
Entering The Labyrinth
* * * * *
I scheduled the meetings for the following morning, beginning with personnel, then marketing and security and purchasing and others. Each department head would come to my office to give me a general report on what they were doing, any issues that needed to be addressed and such, and I'd be making a lot of notes. The idea was to identify areas that I would want to make changes in.
It was a nice morning when I'd finished breakfast, so I decided to drive myself in to the office. That meant I had to decide which car I wanted to take; one of the perks of being wealthy and single was that I could afford to indulge my passion for cars, and I had a fair collection. As I walked out to my garage—it held about forty of my personal cars—I decided to drive one of my earliest acquisitions, the 1971 Hemi 'Cuda I'd bought and restored when I'd first gotten home from the Marines.
This was a fantastic machine, and I'd gotten it at a steal for only seventy thousand dollars; the seller was in need of money fast, or he would have been able to get closer to a hundred thousand out of it, easily. I snapped it up as soon as I saw it advertised on Craigslist, and then stripped it down until no two parts were still bolted together and started the restoration process. Dad actually climbed into his old work clothes and spent a lot of days in the garage helping me, and I remember that it was a great time for both of us.
I fired it up, then rolled out of the garage and down the long driveway to the road before giving the powerful girl her head. The big Hemi engine screamed as I gave it the gas, and I was doing eighty only a few seconds later. The road we lived on was almost a private one, since there were only two other homes out our way, and no one would be calling the cops to report me, so I really enjoyed the ride all the way out to the highway. From there on, I drove the speed limit, though; I had learned the hard way that the local CHP didn't care how much money you had, they'd still write you a ticket!
I got to the office a bit before eight, when I would be meeting with Barbara Newsome, who ran our personnel department. If things had not changed so suddenly in the past week, I would soon have been working under her, learning the ropes of her department; now she was working for me.
She arrived right on time, and we began discussing the issues in her department. She told me about a trend she'd seen lately, involving what seemed to be a higher success rate among older new employees. In the past, we'd found that younger people seemed to adapt more easily to our ways of doing things, but over the past couple of years, it appeared that things were reversing. New hires over forty were showing themselves willing to unlearn what they'd always been taught and devote themselves to doing things our way, and this meant we were seeing a higher retention rate among them than ever before.
Barb attributed it to our company's reputation for taking care of its employees; our benefits were among the best to be found anywhere, and we worked hard to make sure we met any needs that an employee might have. We would hire whoever was best qualified for a job, regardless of age, race, gender, disability or any other factor, and we'd actually won several notable humanitarianism awards for sticking to such policies. We had a couple of stores with managers who were quadriplegic; all we did was add a Voice Operations System to the computers there, so that they could do their computer work, and assign them a helper for things their arms or legs just could not do. Since both of those stores regularly outperformed others in their districts, we felt the investment was well justified.
With this trend, we would begin looking at hiring more older workers, especially those who had been displaced from their original careers. A former computer operator could stock a shelf as well as any high school dropout, and would be more likely to advance in the coming years, if we could get one who wasn't desperate to go back to the field that had failed him or her already. I signed off on Barb's ideas and she left to begin developing a new hiring campaign designed to attract displaced workers.
Next up was marketing, and Lee Martin came into my office. He brought along a helper, a young man who set up a projector that was connected to a laptop computer, and they gave me a short presentation on some new ads Lee and his team had developed. Some of them used new technology that let us film a stock commercial, then insert different products into them with a computer program, including the voice over that described the product. The software could take a shot of an actress holding a can of tuna, and change it so that she was holding a box of cereal, instead, while fitting new, computer generated words to her lip movements so well that only a skilled lip reader would be able to spot the switch. It could also change the color of the actress' clothing, her hair style and eye color, to the point that we would appear to have several entirely different commercials with only one filming.
I was impressed, to say the least. This new technology would save us several million dollars a year, since we could switch the modified commercials around through every product line we wanted to feature. Lee was beaming as he and his assistant left my office.
My next meeting was with Mike Davenport, our head of security. Mike's job was to hire or contract for any security staff we needed for our stores, distribution centers or offices, as well as overseeing the people who did our background checks and drug screens. Having something on your record didn't mean you wouldn't be hired, necessarily, but lying to us about it would, so we were thorough about the background checks. The drug screens were simply an unfortunate necessity in our modern world; people with drug problems simply never had enough money, which meant that they were more likely to steal from us. We had to protect our company, even if it meant requiring our employees to submit to a few indignities from time to time.
Mike came in right on schedule, and began going over the things he felt I needed to know. He told me about some of our stores that had begun having frequent break-ins, and we discussed options like whether to move the store, hire full time security personnel or contract with a local firm for irregular patrols. In some cases, it just would be cheaper to move the store to a different area of town, but others would need actual night time security guards.
The next item we discussed was a report on which items were most likely to be taken by shoplifters. These included certain over-the-counter medications, tools, canned goods and mouthwash, the latter being popular with teenagers because of its high alcohol content. You could get fairly drunk on a couple bottles of a generic brand.
Then we turned to store personnel reports, the items that turned up on some of our more advanced background checks. We performed the advanced checks when someone was being considered for promotion, or when we'd received a tip about something we felt should be investigated, and they didn’t always make us happy.
The list he brought in held thirty two names, all of people we were looking at for advancement within the company. I scanned down it and spotted a name I recognized instantly: Donna Bennet.
“This one,” I said, pointing to her name. Donna was the likely new assistant manager at Katelynn's store. “What's the story on her?”
Mike shuffled through some files and passed one of them over to me. “We did an advanced check on her when you recommended her as AM for the North Platte store, and didn't find anything to worry about. She had a DUI about eight years ago, which she had revealed in her initial hire, and there are some reports that she was accused of violence against her ex-husband, but no actual charges were ever filed against her. We passed her for the AM position, but then, last week,” he paused, and a grin appeared on his face, “we started getting some employee reports from her about your MT there. Ms. Bennet seems to think the MT is attempting to seduce you, and is using her feminine wiles to cover up the fact that she isn't really up to doing her job. I dismissed i
t as jealousy.”
I chuckled. “Good idea. Miss Burke isn't trying to seduce me at all, and in fact, it was I who began the relationship between us, the one I'm certain you already know about. We're discussing making it a permanent one, but I'd bet you knew that, as well.”
Mike grinned wider. “Would I be worth my pay if I didn't? Anyway, like I said, I blew it off, but then on Monday, we got another report from her. The Sunday totals sheet came in, and this gal says it's been altered, that Ms. Burke skimmed a couple of hundred dollars from it into her own pocket. I called down to bookkeeping, and they didn't see any discrepancy at first, but when they compared it to the computer logs, there really is a difference of about two hundred dollars and change.”
I looked up at him. “Seriously? I know Katelynn wouldn't do anything like that; any ideas?”
He nodded. “Turns out, Ms. Bennet was the acting manager on Sunday. If she played with her tally sheets before turning them in, and Ms. Burke didn't catch it, then we could have a discrepancy like this that would look like it was the manager's fault. I asked bookkeeping to look it over, and they said there isn't any direct evidence to support my theory, but it made sense to them. I think this gal is out to get her boss's job, and may be jealous of your own relationship with the manager. I've got her flagged to make sure anything she does comes across my desk immediately.”
“Good. Keep me posted on it. I'm going back out this weekend, and I'll try to figure it out there, too. Don't say anything to the manager, yet.”
We went through a few other incidents that had caught his attention, and discussed some new security devices that he was looking at. I vetoed one suggestion, involving adding RFID chips to everything we sold; it wasn't really cost effective, and so many people in a lot of our markets were bothered by them that I didn't want to rile up the conspiracy theorists against us.