What You Wish For

by Janet Dawson

  At the time, Lindsey told herself she had to do it, to be close to her aging parents in nearby Paso Robles. Her father had begun his slow descent into the tangle of Alzheimer’s disease. Then her mother had a heart attack. She’d always felt as though her two brothers hadn’t contributed as much time and energy as she had to caring for their parents. That task fell to the sacrificial daughter, as Emma put it when Lindsey informed her aunt of her decision to uproot herself and her child from the place she loved, to return to the place where she grew up.

  Lindsey sighed. Road not taken, in life, and in love, wondering what it would have been like if she had followed one path, and not the other. Regrets were pointless, a waste of time. You just have to make the best hand possible out of the cards you’re dealt, she told herself.

  * * *

  At midnight, Clementine and Lola had a growling, hissing altercation at the foot of the bed. Both cats hit the floor and raced out of the bedroom. Lindsey switched on the bedside lamp when she heard something crash to the floor. She threw back the covers, stuck her feet into her slippers, and walked through the kitchen and dining room in the dark, finding her way through habit and the faint illumination from the street lamp outside. An indignant yowl and another crash came from the living room. Lindsey yelped as her shin encountered something. She stumbled, groped her way along the wall, and turned on the overhead light. She’d tripped over the box Tess had left in the hall. It was on its side and the lid was off, spilling the contents onto the floor.

  I said I wouldn’t open that damned box. Now I have. Is it too late to put everything back?

  More hisses from the living room. Lindsey sidestepped the box and switched on another light. Clementine had chased Lola to the top of the shelves that held the TV and stereo equipment, knocking over a lamp and scattering CDs and DVDs to the floor. Lindsey shooed Clementine away, and rescued Lola, who dug her claws into Lindsey’s arm and leapt to the floor. Lindsey examined the red scratches on her arm, then set the lamp back in place. In the hall, she scooped spilled items back into Pandora’s Box. Something glittered. Glass? No, crystal, smooth on one side, jagged on the other.

  Why would Annabel save a piece of broken crystal? And a little silver pineapple, tarnished black?

  Lindsey reached under the hall table and picked up two items that had fallen from the box. The first was a snapshot showing two people—Annabel, about eight years old, and an Asian woman, probably in her thirties, arm wrapped protectively around Annabel’s shoulder. The second was a book, pages open to the flyleaf, with an inscription in a foreign language.

  Deus ex machina. The machine of the gods, in the physical aspect of a couple of quarreling cats and a middle-aged woman stumbling around in the dark.

  14

  The clang of a cable car bell always meant San Francisco to him.

  The cable car rumbled through the intersection of Powell and Post streets. Rod Llewellyn glanced at his reflection in a store window and was startled to see his grandfather’s face looking back at him. The old man was long dead. But Rod was much like him—tall frame, blue eyes, narrow face and sharp nose, hair now more silver than black.

  Why should he be surprised? He was past sixty.

  The light changed and he crossed Powell, walking down Post Street. He’d debated about whether he needed the jacket he wore with his open-necked shirt and crisp khaki slacks. With San Francisco you never knew. When he’d arrived yesterday afternoon it had been raining. Now the Dewey monument in the middle of Union Square pointed up at Monday’s cloudless blue sky.

  He walked past a Dunlin coffee bar and saw people inside. The place wasn’t as busy as the Starbucks across the street. The green-and-white logo of the ubiquitous Seattle-based company sprouted all over the city, like toadstools after rain, far outnumbering the red-and-blue Dunlin signs.

  Post Street ended at Montgomery Street in the heart of the Financial District. Rod crossed Market Street, weaving through crowds of office workers. He passed a ragged homeless man, muttering to himself, stinking of urine, dirt and booze.

  Stevenson Street was more of an alley, sandwiched between Mission and Market streets. Max Brinker waited outside a café called Neetos, his big frame in a gray suit. He was past seventy now. What remained of his hair was white. Max took one final puff on his cigarette, ground it out in a nearby planter, and headed for the café.

  “Bad for you, that.” Rod indicated the discarded cigarette.

  “That’s what my doctor says,” Max said in his gruff bass. “He feels the same way about red meat. I don’t pay any attention to him. Let’s get some lunch.”

  Neetos was a breakfast-and-lunch place catering to office workers from the Financial District and the neighborhood south of Market. The café had one line for take-out, another for patrons wanting tables. The two men queued up in the second line. Rod scanned the menu offerings on the board above the counter. Max didn’t bother. When he got to the head of the line he ordered a bacon cheeseburger, rare, with grilled onions, fries, and a soda. Rod opted for a bowl of chicken-and-sausage gumbo.

  “Soup. That’s how you stay so damn skinny.” Max led the way to a table at the back.

  Rod smiled. “All in the genes. Tall and thin, that’s my lot.”

  “Crowded in here most of the time,” Max said as they sat down and unloaded their trays. “The food’s good. That’s why it’s busy.”

  “Away from your usual track, isn’t it?” Rod flashed a good-humored grin. “I thought you favored Sam’s.”

  “Thank God it’s still there. Sam’s is old San Francisco. When I got here in nineteen sixty this town was something, but not anymore. It’s sure as hell changed, and not for the better. The whole city’s filthy. It would take a month of Sundays to clean the grime off the pavement. Beggars everywhere, sleeping in doorways, hands out on street corners. The mayor and the Board of Supervisors posture and make speeches. In the meantime, people have to step over crap in the streets. Bon appétit.” Max picked up his cheeseburger. “Now to business. Tell me what you’re going to tell the board next week.”

  Rod spooned up soup. “Hurricanes in Mexico and Central America last year caused a hell of a lot of damage to coffee plantations. The crop loss is significant.”

  “Weather and politics,” Max said. “If it’s not storms or drought, it’s war and some damn politician with his hand out.”

  As they ate their lunch, they talked more about weather, war, and politics, and their volatile effect on tea in Sri Lanka, coffee in Kenya and the cashew crop in Brazil. When Rod finished his soup, he took a sip of his iced tea and set down the glass.

  “Now Max, you didn’t need to hear that report today. Yes, you’re the chief operations officer and I’m the senior vice president who buys product and ships it to the States. But you asked me to come to San Francisco early. Then you called me last night and set up this lunch date in a restaurant south of Market where it’s unlikely we’ll be seen together. Why?”

  Max chuckled and wiped his hands on a napkin. “You were always sharp. That’s why I hired you, way back when.”

  A smile played at the corners of Rod’s mouth. “I thought you hired me because of my youth, strength, and manly good looks.”

  “Well, that, too.” Max laughed, then his face turned serious. “I trust you.”

  “I’m glad you have such faith in me.”

  “I always have.” Max reached for his soda. “You’ve been away from San Francisco a long time. It’s time you came home.”

  “Home?” Rod shrugged. “Like the song says, anywhere I hang my hat is home. I have an apartment in Houston but I might as well move into the warehouse at the port. I spend most of my time there, when I’m in town. The rest of the time I live in hotel rooms all over the world. You want me to come back to work at corporate head­quarters?”

  “I need you,” Max said. “Chuck Caldwell is retiring.”

  “I knew he was thinking about it,” Rod said. Caldwell was executive vice president of operations, Rod
’s immediate superior, and a member of the Dunlin board of directors. “But I didn’t know he’d made up his mind. He’s not that much older than I am.”

  “He says he wants to enjoy his retirement while he’s still young enough,” Max said. “Retirement, hell. If I retired, I’d be bored out of my frigging mind. I’ve been working too long to sit around twiddling my damn thumbs.”

  Rod smiled at the thought of Max ever retiring. Leisure would never suit the old man. “You’ll keep working until they carry you out.”

  “Damn straight,” Max said, a fierce expression on his wrinkled face.

  “When is Chuck retiring?” There’s more to this, Rod thought.

  “It’s official at the end of the month,” Max said. “The board of directors will vote on his replacement at the board meeting on Wednesday of next week. If I have anything to say about it, that will be you. I want you on the board.”

  Rod sat back in his chair. “Me? You say you need me. Why? What’s going on?”

  “Claire’s up to something.”

  “Claire.” Rod sipped his tea. It didn’t alleviate the distaste he always felt when he heard Claire Megarris’s name. “That means trouble.”

  “Right. She doesn’t like me. The feeling’s mutual,” Max said. “She thinks I’m an old fart. You bet I am. I’ve been with the company a long time. I had a great deal of respect and admiration for George Dunlin. He built this company into what it is today, one of the biggest specialty food brokerages in the country. I won’t let her grind his legacy into the ground.”

  “You saved George’s life, or so the story goes.”

  “I was doing a hitch in the Army,” Max said. “George was in Nicaragua buying coffee. Nineteen fifty-nine, when the Somozas were in power. My outfit was on a joint operations exercise teaching the local military how to behave like soldiers instead of thugs—not that it took. We were out at some godforsaken coffee plantation and the shooting started. I knocked George down a second before one of those slugs hit the wall where he’d been standing. He’d have been dead and we wouldn’t be sitting here listening to me tell the tale.”

  “So he hired you.”

  Max nodded. “George was grateful. He never was very demonstrative, but he shook my hand and told me to come see him when my hitch was up, said there’d be a job waiting for me. I’d already decided I didn’t want to make the army a career. When I got out of the service the next year I came to San Francisco and took him up on his offer. He made me his personal assistant. Through the years I had my fingers in lots of pies. Security, then overseeing all the administrative operations at corporate. That’s how I wound up as chief operations officer, even if I don’t know beans about coffee. George trusted me the way I trust you. I consider you my protégé, Rod. And a friend.”

  “Likewise, on the friend part.” Rod was touched by Max’s faith in him. He liked Max, and always had. Once you got used to the old man’s abrasive exterior, he had a good heart. “What’s Claire planning? Or do you know?”

  “Oh, I know.” Anger reddened Max’s face. “Claire is planning an internal takeover of Dunlin Corporation.”

  Rod frowned. “Can she do it?”

  “She can if she packs the board, since Dunlin’s a privately held corporation. George never would go public, never wanted shareholders mucking around in company decisions. No stock, so Claire can’t buy herself a majority share. But she can control the board if she has the votes.”

  “There are seven people on the board,” Rod said. “Four internal, three from outside. So she needs four votes. Lots of companies have bigger boards. More votes needed for a majority.”

  “George believed in keeping the board small, for better control. That worked to his advantage in the past. Unfortunately, now it works to Claire’s advantage. She’s got three votes and she’s working on the fourth.” Max ticked off the numbers on his thick fingers. “The company directors are Hal as chief executive officer, me as chief operations officer, and two executive vice presidents, Caldwell and Claire. The outsiders are the general counsel, who’s a lawyer from that firm where we farm out the legal work, and two family members.”

  “Annabel Norwood and Rebecca Megarris,” Rod said.

  “Right,” Max said. “Rebecca will back her daughter no matter what. Annabel would back Hal, except she’s incapacitated because of that stroke. Hal holds her proxy. Until last year the general counsel was Bert Farnsworth, an old fart like me. He and I agreed on things. I could count on his vote. Then in October he got hit by a car.”

  Rod shook his head. “And died in January. Unfortunate accident.”

  “Unfortunate is right. According to the bylaws, the board can replace a member who’s incapacitated for more than eight weeks. Claire started agitating to replace Farnsworth as soon as we hit that mark. We had to pick a new general counsel. And she had just the candidate, a lawyer in Farnsworth’s firm, her pal from Stanford. Marissa Tybalt.” Max spat the words out as though they tasted bad. “Four women on the board, three of ’em in Claire’s camp. I argue with some half-assed idea Claire proposes, I’m a hidebound old sexist.”

  Rod chuckled. “Max, you are a hidebound old sexist.”

  “Damn right I am. So was George. Claire calls me a dinosaur.”

  “You’ve never liked her,” Rod said. “I remember that tussle over the coffee bars.”

  “Goddamn coffee bars are losing money hand over fist,” Max snarled. “I said they would. I argued until I was blue in the face, but Claire ramrodded it through the board. She’s got brass balls, but she’s not as bright as she thinks. We import commodities. We process, package and sell them wholesale to restaurants and grocery stores. Getting into retail was a mistake. Starbucks owns that market. Claire won’t listen to reason. Those coffee bars were her idea, and she doesn’t care how much red ink the company bleeds to keep them going.”

  “Why do you figure she’s planning a board takeover? Something she did?”

  “No single incident,” Max said. “A pattern of behavior, one that smells like empire-building. She moved into a high-level position way too fast, because she’s family. Now she’s invading other people’s turf. The coffee bars should rightly be an operations project, not hers. She convinced the board to move public affairs from admin to marketing, so now she controls that, too. She gets involved in hiring and human resources, which is supposed to be the bailiwick of the VP for admin, who just lets Claire meddle. Then Claire gets Tybalt elected general counsel. She’s got three votes on that board of directors—hers, her mother’s and Tybalt’s. Caldwell’s retirement is her chance to make it four.”

  “She must have her own candidate,” Rod said.

  “Graham from Marketing. One of her bright young protégés. Wouldn’t be surprised if she’s sleeping with him.”

  “That’s the sort of remark that gets you the sexist label.”

  “Except in Claire’s case, I’m probably right,” Max said. “She’s a manipulative, predatory bitch. The only reason she’s in a high-level position is because she’s a relative. She’s after power. It’s all about her.”

  “So you want to throw me into the lion’s den. Thanks a lot, Max.”

  “You’re the logical choice. Someone who goes out in the field and gets his hands dirty. You’re a senior vice president, with the company more than thirty years.”

  “How does Hal feel about all this?” Rod asked.

  “I mentioned your name and he reacted favorably. He likes you.”

  “But he hasn’t given his whole-hearted support.”

  “Claire is lobbying hard for her candidate. Besides, Hal has a lot on his mind.”

  “Annabel’s stroke.”

  “Yeah. Can’t blame him, with her sick like that. He’s distracted. Claire sees an opportunity and she’s moving in. Hal’s an easygoing guy, sometimes too much so. Claire takes advantage of that. So does her mother.” Max narrowed his eyes. “They’re a pair, those two. Cut from the same cloth.”

  “You don�
�t like Rebecca Megarris either. How long has she been a director?”

  “Since ’sixty-one,” Max said. “She’d been lobbying George for a board seat ever since her husband, Lawrence, died. She figured she was entitled to his director slot and a share of the company, too, since her husband started it.”

  “I thought he and George both started it, after World War Two.”

  Max shook his head. “Not exactly. Lawrence started importing coffee after the war. But he was no businessman. That’s why he brought in George, who was an excellent businessman. George built up the company under his own name during the Fifties, expanding the product lines. Lawrence, on the other hand, was fond of booze. He sucked up the sauce, came to work hungover, or drunk. George put up with it for a while, but when Lawrence started drinking at the office, George bought him out. Lawrence drank himself to death. George put most of Lawrence’s payoff money in Rebecca’s hands and a trust for Claire, so they’d be taken care of. But Rebecca figured George owed her a directorship. You need to know this stuff if you’re going to be on the board.”

  “I haven’t agreed to it yet,” Rod said. “Can you get me elected? Claire got Marissa Tybalt elected general counsel over your objections.”

  “Hal will vote with me,” Max said. “With Annabel’s proxy that’s three.”

  “And Claire’s got three. What about the fourth vote?”

  “Caldwell himself. The way the bylaws are set up, he votes on a replacement director before his resignation is effective. He likes you. I’ve already got him convinced you’re the man for the job. And you are. I know that, and so do you. Are you with me?”

  Rod thought about it. Max had always done well by him. “Seeing as it’s you who’s asking, Max, yes. But I won’t be in your pocket. I have an independent streak of my own.”

  “Fair enough.” Max grinned. “I told you when I hired you there would be a future for you with the company. In the meantime, there’s a rumor going around that the Dunlin Building and the south-of-Market warehouse are for sale. They’re not. I want to know where that rumor originated.”