“Scott McNally has his mind on winning this round, so he can play in the big-stakes games,” Cassie went on.
“They teach this after the lotus position or before?”
“Okay, then let me just ask you this. What do you think Scott McNally wants to be when he grows up?”
“What do you mean?”
“Does he want to be selling chairs and filing cabinets, or does he want to be a financial engineer at Fairfield Partners? Which is more his style?”
“Point taken.”
“In which case, it’s fair to ask yourself, who’s he really working for?”
Nick gave a crooked smile.
She stood up. “I’ll be right back.”
Nick watched as she made her way to the ladies’ room, admiring the curve of her butt. She wasn’t there long. On her way back, she walked past Scott’s table, and stopped there briefly. She said something to the lawyer, then sat down next to him for a moment. She was laughing, as if he’d said something witty. A few moments later, he saw the lawyer hand her something. Cassie was laughing again as she stood up and returned to her seat.
“What was that about?” Nick asked.
Cassie handed him the lawyer’s business card. “Just check him out, okay?”
“That was quick work.” Nick glanced at the card and read, “Abbotsford Gruendig.”
“Just being neighborly,” Cassie said.
“By the way, I can see what’s in front of my face,” Nick said. “You’re in front of my face. I see you quite well, and I like what I see.”
“But as I said, we don’t see things as they are. We see things as we are.”
“Does the same go for you?”
“Goes for all of us. We lie to ourselves because it’s the only way we can get through the day. Time comes, though, when the lies get tired and quit.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Cassie looked at him steadily, searchingly. “Tell me the truth, Nick. What’s the real reason the police were at your house?”
76
For a moment, he was at a loss for words.
He hadn’t told her about the police searching the house and yard, which was a pretty damn huge thing not to have told her about. Especially given the connection to her father. Both Lucas and Julia knew the police had been searching for traces of Andrew Stadler. They just didn’t know the real reason.
“Lucas told you,” Nick said neutrally. He tried to keep his pulse steady, his breathing regular. He took a forkful of steak for which he had no appetite.
“It freaked him out.”
“Yeah, well, he seemed to think it was a hoot. Cassie, I should have said something to you about it, but I knew how it would upset you. I didn’t want to bring up your dad—”
“I understand,” she said. “I understand. And I appreciate it.” She was toying with a spoon. “They actually think my father was the stalker?”
“It’s just one possibility,” Nick said. “I think they’re really groping.” He swallowed hard. “Hell, they probably even wonder if I had something to do with it.” The last words came out in a rush, not the way he had heard himself say it in his mind.
“With his death,” Cassie said carefully.
Nick grunted.
“And is it possible that you did?”
Nick couldn’t speak right away. He didn’t look at her, couldn’t. “What do you mean?”
She set down the spoon, placed it carefully alongside the knife. “If you thought he might have been the one doing all that crazy stuff, maybe you could have intervened, somehow. Helped him to get help.” She broke off. “But then, these are the questions I ask myself. Why didn’t I make him get help? Why didn’t I intervene? I keep asking myself whether there was something I could have done that would have changed things. Stratton’s supposed to have all these great mental health programs, but suddenly he wasn’t eligible for them anymore—that’s a real Catch-22, isn’t it? Because of a mental illness, you quit and lose your right to treatment for your mental illness. That isn’t right.”
Warily: “It’s not right.”
“And because of these decisions—decisions you and I and God knows how many other people made—my daddy’s dead.” Cassie was weeping now, tears spilling down both cheeks.
“Cassie,” Nick said. He took her hand in his, and fell silent. Her hand looked pale and small in his. Then a thought came to him, and he felt as if he had swallowed ice. His hand, the hand with which he tried to comfort her, was the hand that had held the gun.
“But you want to know something?” Cassie said haltingly. “When I got the news about—you know—”
“I know.”
“I felt like I’d run into a brick wall. But, Nick, I felt something else too. I felt relieved. Do you understand?”
“Relieved.” He repeated the word numbly.
“All the hospitalizations, all the relapses, all the agony he’d endured. Pain that’s not physical but every bit as real. He didn’t like the place he was in—the world that, more and more, he had to live in. It wasn’t your world or my world, it was his world, Nick, and it was a cold and scary place.”
“It had to have been hell, for both of you.”
“And then one day he disappears. Then he’s dead. Killed—shot dead, God knows why. But it was almost like an act of mercy. Do you ever think that things happen for a reason?”
“I think some things happen for a reason,” Nick said slowly. “But not everything. I don’t think Laura died for any particular reason. It just happened. To her. To us. Like a piano that just falls out of the sky and flattens you.”
“Shit happens, you’re saying.” Cassie palmed away the tears on her face. “But that’s never the whole story. Shit happens, and it changes your life, and then what do you do? Do you just go on as if nothing happened? Or do you face it?”
“I choose option A.”
“Yeah. I see that.” Cassie rumpled her spiky hair with a hand. “There’s a parable of Schopenhauer’s, it’s called ‘Die Stachelschweine’—the porcupines. You’ve got these porcupines, and it’s winter, and so they huddle together for warmth—but when they get too close, of course, they hurt each other.”
“Allegory alert,” Nick said.
“You got it. Too far, and they freeze to death. Too near, and they bleed. We’re all like that. Same with you and Lucas.”
“Yeah, well, he’s a porcupine, all right.”
“Got to hand it to you Conover men,” Cassie said. “You’re as well defended as a medieval castle. Got your moat, got your boiling oil over the gate, got your castle keep. ‘Bring it on,’ right? Hope you got plenty of provisions in the larder.”
“All right, babe. Since you see so much more clearly than I do, let me ask you something. How much do you think I have to worry about my son?”
“Well, some. He’s a stoner, as you know. Probably gets high a couple of times a day. Which can do a number on your ability to concentrate.”
“A couple of times a day? You sure?”
“Oh please. He’s got two bottles of Visine on his dresser. He’s got Febreze fabric spray in his closet.”
Nick looked blank.
“Fabric freshener. You spritz it on your clothing to remove the smell of the herb. Then he’s got these Dutch Master leavings in his wastebasket. For making a blunt, okay? This is all Pothead 101 stuff.”
“Christ,” said Nick. “He’s sixteen years old.”
“And he’s going to be seventeen. And then eighteen. And that’s going to be rough too.”
“A year ago you wouldn’t have recognized him. He was this totally straight, popular athlete.”
“Just like his dad.”
“Yeah, well. My mom didn’t die when I was fifteen.”
“What makes it worse is if you can’t talk about it.”
“He’s a kid. It’s hard for him to talk about stuff like that.”
Cassie looked at him.
“What?”
“
I wasn’t just talking about Lucas,” she said quietly. “I was talking about you.”
A deep breath. “You like metaphors? Here’s one. You know the cartoon coyote that’s always racing off the edge of the cliff?”
“Yes, Nick. Wile E. Coyote. An odd role model for the CEO of Acme Industries, I’d have thought.”
“And he’s in midair, but his legs are still pumping and he’s moving along fine. But then—he looks down, and he sinks like a stone. Moral of the story? Never fucking look down.”
“Beautiful,” Cassie said, her voice as astringent as witch hazel. “Just beautiful.” Her eyes flashed. “Have you noticed that Lucas can’t even look at you? And you can barely look at him. Now why is that?”
“If you bring up those Black Forest porcupines again, I’m out of here.”
“He’s lost his mom, and he desperately needs to bond with his father. But you’re not around, and when you are, you’re not there. You’re not exactly verbally expressive, right? He needs you to be the healer, but you can’t do it—you don’t know how. And the more isolated he feels, the more he turns on you, and the angrier you get.”
“The armchair psychologist,” Nick said. “Another one of your imaginative ‘readings.’ Nice guess, though.”
“No,” she said. “Not a guess. He pretty much told me.”
“He told you? I can’t even imagine that.”
“He was stoned, Nick. He was stoned, and he started to cry, and it came out.”
“He was stoned? In your presence?”
“Lit up a nice fat doobie,” Cassie said, with a half-smile. “We shared it. And we had a long talk. I wish you could have heard him. He has a lot on his mind. A lot he hasn’t been able to say to you. A lot you need to hear.”
“You smoked marijuana with my son?”
“Yes.”
“That is incredibly irresponsible. How could you do that?”
“Whoa, Daddy, you’re missing the big picture here.”
“Lucas has a problem with this shit. You were supposed to help him. Not encourage him, goddammit. He looks up to you!”
“I told him to lay off the weed, at least on school nights. I think he’s going to.”
“Goddammit! You haven’t got a clue, have you? I don’t care what kind of a fucked-up childhood you had. This is my son you’re dealing with. A sixteen-year-old boy with a drug problem. What part of this isn’t registering?”
“Nick, be careful,” she said, in a low, husky voice. Her face was turning a deep red, but her expression remained oddly fixed, a stone mask. “We had a very open and honest conversation, Luke and I. He told me all kinds of things.” Now she turned to look at him with hooded eyes.
Nick was torn between fury and fear, wanting to lay into her for what she’d done, getting high with Lucas—and yet frightened of what she might have found out from Lucas.
Lucas, who might—or might not—have heard shots one night.
Who might—or might not—have overheard his father and Eddie discussing what had really happened that night.
“Like what?” he managed to say.
“All kinds of things,” she whispered darkly.
Nick closed his eyes, waited for his heart to stop hammering. When he opened them again, she was gone.
77
Audrey’s e-mail icon was bouncing, and she saw it was Kevin Lenehan, the electronics tech.
She walked right over there, almost ran.
“What’s the best restaurant in town, would you say?” Kevin said.
“I don’t know. Terra, maybe? I’ve never been there.”
“How about Taco Gordito?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Because you owe me dinner. I told you the recording on this baby started at three-eighteen in the morning on Wednesday the sixteenth, right? After the sequence you’re so interested in?”
“What’d you find?”
“The hard drive’s partitioned into two sections, right? One for the digital images, the other for the software that drives the thing.” He turned to his computer monitor, moved the mouse around and clicked on something. “Very cool system, by the way. Internet-based.”
“Meaning?”
“Your guy had the ability to monitor his cameras from his office.”
“What does that tell you?”
“Nothing. I’m just saying. Anyway, look at this.”
“That doesn’t mean anything to me. It’s a long list of numbers.”
“Not a techie, huh? Your husband has to program the VCR for you?”
“He can’t either.”
“Same with me. No one can. So, look. This is the log of all recorded content.”
“Is that the fifteenth?”
“You got it. This log says that the recording actually started on Tuesday the fifteenth at four minutes after noon, right? Not like fifteen hours later.”
“So you found more video?”
“I wish. No, you’re not following me. Someone must have gone in and reformatted the section of the hard drive where the recordings are made, then started the whole machine over, recycled it, so it just looked like it started from scratch at three-whatever in the morning on Wednesday. But the log here tells us that the system was initiated fifteen hours earlier. I mean, it’s saying there’s recorded content going back to like noon that day. Only, when you click on the files, it says ‘File not found.’”
“Deleted?”
“You got it.”
Audrey stared at the screen. “You’re sure of this.”
“Am I sure the box started recording at noon the day before? Yeah, sure as shit.”
“No. Sure you can’t retrieve the recording.”
“It’s, like, so gone.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Hey, you look, like, disappointed. I thought you’d be thrilled. You want proof part of the video was erased, you got it right here.”
“You ever read the book Fortunately when you were a kid?”
“My mom plopped me down in front of One Life to Live and General Hospital. Everything I learned about life I learned from soap operas. That’s why I’m single.”
“I must have read it a thousand times. There’s a boy named Ned, and he’s invited to a surprise party, but unfortunately the party’s a thousand miles away. Fortunately a friend lends him an airplane, but unfortunately the motor explodes.”
“Ouch. I hate when that happens.”
“Fortunately there’s a parachute in the airplane.”
“But unfortunately he’s horribly burned over ninety percent of his body and he’s unable to open the chute? See how my mind works.”
“This case is like that. Fortunately, unfortunately.”
“That pretty much describes my sex life,” Kevin said. “Fortunately the girl goes home with Kevin. Unfortunately she turns out to be a radical feminist lesbian who only wants him to teach her how to use Photoshop.”
“Thanks, Kevin,” Audrey got up from the stool. “Lunch at Taco Gordito’s on me.”
“Dinner,” Kevin said firmly. “That’s the deal.”
78
Nick’s cell phone rang just as he was pulling into the parking lot, almost half an hour later than usual this morning.
It was Victoria Zander, the Senior Vice President for Workplace Research, calling from Milan. “Nick,” she said, “I’m at the Salone Internazionale del Mobile in Milan, and I’m so upset I can barely speak.”
“Okay, Victoria, take a deep breath and tell me what’s up.”
“Will you please explain to me what’s going on with Dashboard?”
Dashboard was one of the big new projects Victoria was developing, a portfolio of flexible, modular glass walls and partitions—very cool, beautifully designed, and something Victoria was really high on. Nick was high on it for business reasons: there was nothing else like it out there, and it was sure to hit a sweet spot.
“What do you mean, ‘What’s going on’?”
“After all the time a
nd money we’ve put in on this, and—it just makes no sense! ‘All major capital expenditures on hold’—what do you mean by that? And not even giving me the courtesy of advance notice?”
“Victoria—”
“I don’t see how I can continue working for Stratton. I really don’t. You know, Herman Miller has been after me for two years, and frankly I think that’s a far better home for—”
“Victoria, hold on. Cool your jets, will you? Now, who told you we’re shelving Dashboard?”
“You guys did! I just got the e-mail from Scott.”
What e-mail? Nick almost asked, but instead he said, “Victoria, there’s some kind of glitch. I’ll call you right back.”
He clicked off, slammed the car door, and went to look for Scott.
“He’s not here, Nick,” Gloria said. “He had an appointment.”
“An appointment where?” Nick demanded.
She hesitated. “He didn’t say.”
“Get him on his cell, please. Right now.”
Gloria hesitated again. “I’m sorry, Nick, but his cell phone doesn’t work inside the plant. That’s where he is.”
“The plant? Which one?”
“The chair factory. He’s—well, he’s giving someone a tour.”
As far as Nick knew, Scott had been inside the factories maybe twice before. “Who?”
“Nick, I—please.”
“He asked you not to say anything.”
Gloria closed her eyes, nodded. “I’m really sorry. It’s a difficult position.”
Difficult position? I’m the goddamned CEO, he thought.
“Don’t worry about it,” he said kindly.
Nick hadn’t visited the chair plant in almost three months. There was a time when he’d visit monthly, sometimes more, just to check out how things were running, ask questions, listen to complaints, see how much inventory backlog was on hand. He’d check the quality boards at each station too, mostly to set an example, figuring that if he paid attention to the quality charts, the plant manager would too, and so would everyone below him.
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