“Defiance is very unbecoming, my dear.”
“I’m rather partial to it myself.”
“You’ll learn.”
“That’s the funny thing about learning. It’s awfully hard to do when you don’t want to be taught.”
Connor Ridley, Shadows Fall
This particular week of December had settled into a pattern of simply beautiful weather. There was just a light dusting of snow glistening over the ground, and the temperature was hovering at a level that she would consider brisk but livable. As a matter of fact, everything was working out perfectly. Meredyth was hardly surprised; she had, after all, been the one orchestrating everything (although she could not, in good conscience, pretend that she had exercised any influence over the weather). It wasn’t as though she would have set out to design all of this without intending for it to go smoothly. There wasn’t much left to be done to prepare. The wedding would be fait accompli in four more days.
She could almost feel herself getting giddy at the thought of the formalization of her and Wyatt’s partnership. Meredyth, naturally, did not do an emotion identified as giddy. Therefore, that particular emotional response remained safely tucked away in the “almost” category. She might be rather caught up in this whole wedding business, but that was no reason for her to turn unfocused. That was, surprisingly (although perhaps it should not have been), rather easier stated than accomplished. She had been learning that there were peculiar temptations toward excess involved in being a bride. It was just as well that it would all soon be over.
The truth be told, being a bride was the single most delightfully unobstructed activity Meredyth had ever participated in during the whole course of her life. It was as if the very word bride carried some sort of charm upon it that made all things give way when it was used. Caterers, florists, and any subclass of service providing personnel that you could think of -- they all gave way without so much as an askance look. Wyatt’s family bowed to her wishes without comment or equivocation. Wyatt, of course, told her to settle things however she liked, but that had been expected. They had always been clear that social affairs were her forte and at her discretion. She had expected compliance from Wyatt. That compliance had come from literally all others involved had been intriguing.
Everyone in her path did nothing but try to prove themselves willing to cater to her every whim. No one questioned her opinions or wishes; no one stood in the way of anything that she wanted. There was only a seamless, flowing path where everything fell into place exactly where she wanted it to be. It was quite a heady experience being a bride. She could see why it seemed to go to some women’s heads. She, of course, had no such difficulties with losing all sense of self-control. She knew what she wanted, and she communicated it effectively the first time around. There was no indecisiveness on her part; there were no last minute changes to create chaos in her carefully planned event. She came, she dictated, and she moved on to the next item on the checklist. She was also competent enough herself to have taken the trouble to be sure that she had parceled out the creation of the details that she had dictated to only those who were competent themselves.
Still, it would become awfully dull awfully quickly if everything in life ran as smoothly as things did for a well prepared bride. A lack of challenges would make one lax, and then who knows how things would end? It was always good to have to put up a bit of a fight in order to get what you wanted. It ensured that you didn’t let things drift off course. Meredyth had always had to work for what she wanted. She wasn’t sure that she could function without a little bit of effort on her part being required to keep everything running smoothly. She wouldn’t know how to begin.
Wyatt would be good for her in that respect (amongst many others that she had, indeed, taken time to make note of and tally). Wyatt would always be the type that mucked something up every once and again. He would, inevitably, turn whatever it was over to her for fixing. He liked having her around for that. She liked being necessary. She would always have to keep an eye out for potential scrapes with Wyatt. They would, however, not be nearly as large of a call on her time as that whole kidnapping fiasco had been. She and Wyatt were clear on that. He knew his boundaries and limitations, and he would stick to them.
She had every intention of enjoying the times that she got to sally forth and rescue Wyatt from his own mistakes, but she would only be doing that when they were honest, miscalculating mistakes. There would be no more of that independent planning nonsense. Wyatt knew he wasn’t much for planning. He needn’t be. She was quite proficient enough at planning for anything they would ever need. Wyatt was deceptively simple like that. Anyone who knew him would automatically know that he was not someone who would come up with elaborate schemes. There would never be any reason to suspect that Wyatt would ever be up to anything not blatantly obvious. It was beautiful cover (should cover ever prove to be necessary). You merely had to hand that man instructions, and he carried them out in the most brilliant way. It was something magnificent to see the way he would rise to the occasion. It was all very deceptively simple. That was Wyatt. That was the quality which she liked to surround herself with -- it was all a matter of taste.
Her taste ran along definite lines. She knew what she liked. She had heard the comments made here and there since the formal announcement of her and Wyatt’s engagement. Other people didn’t grasp the perfection of it all. They didn’t need to understand. She much preferred it that way. It was always best to have all but a select few in the dark as to your motivations. Anyone who truly knew the two of them (and she readily conceded that that number might not need a whole hand to be tallied off) wouldn’t need to ask questions or wonder out loud as to what the two of them were thinking. The two of them were so perfect that she sometimes found herself rolling her eyes (in private only naturally) at the obtuseness of people in general. (She might find the lack of attention and ability to reason out a convenient quality much of the time, but that didn’t make it any less annoying of a trait to have to deal with on a daily basis.)
Wyatt was biddable and well-connected but so were a multitude of other men in the world. Wyatt recognized her for everything that she truly was, but he wasn’t the first to have seen that. The fact that he embraced and cherished it was a rarer quality. At the end of the day, the most important part was his personality, his fundamental character and how it meshed with hers. Wyatt was deceptively simple, and that was exactly what she wanted.
That was what she always wanted.
Take her wedding dress as an example. It was also a deceptively simple item. It was a lovely concoction of silk that looked (from a distance) as if it was a simple sheath dress. It seemed pretty enough without being spectacular or awe inspiring. It wouldn’t inspire second glances. It wouldn’t cause anyone to gush over it and demand to know where it had been purchased. It was easily shrugged off as well enough but nothing special. You had to be paying attention to notice the less obvious qualities. When you got closer (or caught the light correctly), then you could see that the dress was covered in an intricate pattern of beadwork in the exact shade of the dress itself. It was beautiful, and it was perfect. It represented depth and work and effort all disguised by how perfectly it blended into the finished product. That was her dress, that was her Wyatt, and that was her life.
She was very well pleased. There was something fundamentally comfortable about watching a well laid plan step out of your head or off of paper and come to be in reality. It applied to all things business, all things social, and all things personal. She had planned for Wyatt for a long time, and the final pieces of their wedding falling into place were no exception to the feeling of accomplishment and pleasure that belonged to a completed goal.
She was equally well pleased with the knowledge that no last minute snags were popping up to create tangles in her plans. She had finished things in a timely manner and had no need to try to play catch up with anyt
hing now. The last few days before the wedding would be relatively free from formal effort on her part. There would be final fittings the next morning (or first and last fittings in Lia’s case, but she was confident that there would be little trouble there). That was the final item on her checklist. Everything else in need of her attention had already received it (well, as far as wedding matters went, there were, naturally, plenty of other non-wedding related items in need of her supervision).
The final flower arrangements had received her approval the day before -- again they consisted of a deceptively simple design of white roses and ice blue ribbon that required a second glance before you realized they were held together with jeweled pins that were, in fact, actual jewels. She doubted anyone would notice in much the same way that she doubted anyone else would ever notice all of Wyatt’s potential. She felt a small smile tugging at the corners of her mouth. Most of the details seemed to come back to some sort of an association with Wyatt. It occurred to her then that she had gone positively thematic in all of her wedding choices, but no one else would ever catch on to the theme.
She could live with that. Her mother had always gone out of her way to ensure that everyone in attendance at one of her soirées was nearly bludgeoned over the head with the knowledge of what the theme was. Meredyth preferred her own, more subtle manner of managing things. Thoughts of her mother had been making themselves present more often of late. She supposed it was because this was generally considered some sort of a mother and daughter occasion for collaboration. It hardly mattered, but it was occasionally troublesome to have the unwelcome thoughts insisting on intruding. (They would never actually succeed in intruding. Meredyth simply had better control than that.) She wasn’t sorry not to be sharing it with hers, and she brushed the thoughts away as quickly as she realized that they had come.
What had she been doing? Oh, she was running through her mental checklist. She had been thinking of the flowers. The flowers were finished. The extra staff had been arranged for, screened, and trained in the appropriate ways that Meredyth expected them to complete their assignments for the day in question (and, in some cases, the days preceding). The ballroom had been set up for the reception so that she could see her floor plan layout in reality as opposed to simply in her head or on paper; it had worked out exactly as she had designed. Some items, of course, would wait to be laid out until the night before (dust and all that).
Everything for each table was packed away in a table specific container. That way the nonregular staff (whose ability to complete tasks efficiently Meredyth had only the word of their references on) would have no chance of confusion. There would be no mistakes and no silly mishaps on her and Wyatt’s day.
She had reached the end of her mental checklist and was feeling confident that she had, in fact, planned (and contingency planned) for everything. Everything was very nearly finished.
Well, everything wedding related that was. Her little computer project (as Wyatt had begun to refer to it as) was not nearly so close to completion. He thought himself to be cute with his references, and she was amused rather than annoyed at how pleased he seemed to be with his ability to allude to the event in public places while not divulging details. Therefore, she allowed him to continue in his delusion that he was, in fact, being cute and clever. She had decided that it didn’t matter if he never knew that the whole pretense wasn’t very clever (and that anyone other than herself would never have deemed it cute) because he needed to have his moments. It was best to let him have them where they didn’t cause her any bother.
Besides, it made him happy. She did, despite outsiders’ allusions to the contrary, like to keep Wyatt happy -- not that she would ever deign to state such a thing in public. It was no one else’s business on top of sounding weak and sappy. That was the trouble with letting people in -- you got all caught up in what mattered to them, and it had the potential to turn into a colossal disaster. Conveniently, she and Wyatt didn’t have that problem. They existed on the same page (even if they were sometimes reading from different paragraphs).
Take the progress of her current project as another example. Wyatt was chronically disappointed that things weren’t happening in giant leaps and bounds. He expected grandiose findings every time that he turned around (and was always unsettled when they did not appear). She had no such issues, but she had to listen politely and explain to Wyatt that everything was perfectly on track. She hated explaining. Did she do it anyway? Yes. Why did she do it? Wyatt needed the reassurance. She cared enough about his peace of mind to provide it in spite of the feeling of distaste it gave her to have to offer explanations of what she was doing. Although, to Wyatt’s credit, it wasn’t really her that he wanted an explanation from, it was the staff that was engaged in doing the actual work from which he required an accounting. It was just as well -- Wyatt’s implicit trust in her judgment had always been one of her favorite qualities. He’d best not go changing on her at this stage of the game.
She had not expected anything near completion of the reverse engineering of the piece of Glimpse that she had received from Jennifer Ridley to have taken place by now. That would not have been even remotely practical. There were far too many variables to be taken into consideration, and it was imperative that everything be accorded an appropriate amount of time lest something of consequence be overlooked. She understood the complicated nature of the project, and Meredyth had expected the process to proceed at a relatively slow pace. Thus, she had been mentally prepared for periods of seeming stasis. Wyatt lacked her patience (mostly, she was of the opinion, because he also lacked her understanding of what all what they were undertaking entailed). He was forever going on and on (and on) about why it all wasn’t coming together faster than it was.
It was rather soothing really when she considered the implications. That was just another thing about Wyatt that was good for her. He offered her a perspective that didn’t come naturally to the ebb and flow of her thinking. She was all big picture and steady steps in the proper direction. Everything was always about where the pieces would fall in the end game. Wyatt was all about the small picture and being in the moment. Everything was always about where the pieces needed to move next. There were times she thought it was a pity that Wyatt didn’t play chess. It would be interesting to see how their styles would play out against each other on the board. Most of the time, she thought it was just as well that he didn’t. She didn’t need to know what the match up would look like. The two of them were a team; their styles worked with each other -- not against.
Wyatt would help to keep her focused. He brought a bluntness and level of expectation to her life that provided a counter weight to her finesse. His lack of patience would prevent her drifting into complacency. His focus on the now would keep her grounded. His impatience would help push matters along.
There were times when it was far more important to get something right than it was to get it done quickly (obviously, the best of all possible combinations would be to do both, but that was not always an option). This was one of those occasions. It would do them no good (and potentially cause a myriad number of problems) to end up with some facsimile of Glimpse that did not, in fact, accurately recreate its results.
She had explained that to Wyatt, and he had, typically, conceded her point while maintaining that accuracy with speed was to be expected from “experts” in their field. That, he insisted, was what qualified them as “experts.” He had then suggested finding proper motivation to speed up the process. It was such a delightfully Wyatt answer. He really was quite good for her.
That aside, it would have been far easier to take Glimpse by front door means as it were (via the merger between Walsh Industrial Solutions and Ridley Resources), but contingency plans existed for a reason. (That reason being that there were so often contingencies.) That door had been unceremoniously slammed in her face (point conceded to Connor for all the good that that wo
uld do him in the end). Thus, one proceeded to make one’s way through the contingency plans. The next best option would have been to have Anna McKee herself recreate the program for them, but that had been taken off the table nearly as quickly as it had been considered as a possibility. It simply wasn’t going to happen, and there was no point in wasting valuable time on it.
Meredyth found that she wasn’t as disappointed at the lack of potential viability of that option as she could have been. She had plenty of other options (easier in practical application which made up for what they lacked in speed), so there was no cause to repine over her lack of access to the other woman’s mental capabilities. After all, she had access to the final product created by those mental capabilities and that was far more important.
She found no difficulty in admitting that she was an admirer of McKee’s work. The woman was really quite brilliant and had a knack for finding nonstandard pathways to accomplish tasks that seemed to be unattainable through standard means (or so the lead programmer she had working on the reverse engineering project had led her to believe when he was attempting to explain some of the difficulties that they were having trying to determine what exactly it was that she had created). Meredyth was inclined to value ingenuity. It was one thing to think outside of the box; it was an entirely different thing to create something from scratch outside of the confines of the box because the box didn’t contain anything that suited your purpose. That really took a certain degree of cunning.
Meredyth could respect that (in fact, she did). She could be impressed with the skill displayed (in fact, she was). She had even been rather pleased when she realized that there would be no buying the other woman. It was refreshing (if you were someone who appreciated rejections of cynicism, Meredyth wasn’t, but she could still grasp the concept). She could appreciate the sense of loyalty that made Anna an inappropriate target for bribery attempts. Under different circumstances, she might genuinely like Anna McKee. That change of circumstances including the creation of a world that didn’t involve Anna being a naive little twit who seemingly didn’t care to pursue the full potential of the result of her years of work.
Meredyth shook off that thought. Oh, well. Anna McKee’s loss was her gain. All of her research team had been brought in especially for this particular project. She had no illusions about any of them having Anna McKee’s sense of loyalty. She spent more time than she would have preferred ensuring that nothing ever left the confines of her control. No paperwork, no notes, nothing went anywhere outside of the room the research team had been assigned at WIS. The added security had been a pain to put in place, but it was worth all of the time and trouble. It was valuable, and it was worth protecting. She wasn’t taking any chances with Glimpse. She, after all, wasn’t a Ridley.
She paused a moment to wonder if Jennifer had ever fessed up to the fact that she had let confidential information on one of their projects walk away with a person wholly unconnected to them. She probably hadn’t. It had probably never even occurred to her to do so. If she ever did think of it, then she would probably only do so in terms of how it was Connor’s fault that the merger hadn’t gone through in the first place. She would consider any breeches in security down to him. Besides, she would likely be so busy singing Meredyth’s praises and rubbing her upcoming marriage into her son’s face that it would completely slip her mind. An opportunity to badger Connor like that would never be allowed to pass. It was harsh but true.
Even when she had been rather closely involved with the family, the mystery of why the senior Ridleys always seemed to hold such a grudge against everything Connor did or didn’t do had never become any clearer. It was one of those things that defied all possible applications of logic by simply being no matter how little reason for it to do so there might exist. It was certainly not a mystery that she intended to tackle now that she was well away from their drama. She had her own drama with which she needed to deal.
At the moment, said drama consisted of her research staff’s steadily climbing level of complaint about Wyatt’s demands on their time. She was always very gracious as she listened, but she made it clear that she had no problem with Wyatt exercising his litany of demands. It wasn’t going to hurt any of them to be under a bit of pressure. It would keep them from getting lax. That she, herself, did not share Wyatt’s concern over what he considered a lack of progress was not information to which the research team needed to be privy. That she thought the program was progressing rather nicely was of no relevance to them. They needed to understand that there would be nothing gained by attempts to play her and Wyatt off of each other. There was no good boss/bad boss here. There was only her and Wyatt as a team expecting to see results.
There had been results (even if they were not to Wyatt’s satisfaction). There had already been a few successes in achieving similar outcomes even if they still lacked whatever it was that they lacked that had made Anna’s version of the program so eerily accurate. She was confident that that would come eventually.
For now, it wasn’t any sort of percentage for accuracy that would have her depending on it for conducting her long range plans. It was, however, a start. As long as the start was followed at an appropriate interval with an unmitigated success, then all was well. She could afford to wait for a little while. She thought again of Wyatt and his chronic impatience. She could afford to wait a very little while.
Her eyes shifted from the wall at which she had been looking (without actually seeing or registering that it was there) for the past twenty minutes or so down to the red strands of hair that were sliding between her fingers. Pull, slide, pull, slide. Her established rhythm continued despite the potential disturbance of actually paying attention to what she was doing. Meredyth ran the brush through Lia’s hair and for the first time in several minutes, actually bothered to focus on the girl in front of her. It was very easy to allow her mind to wander as her hands continued on their appointed task. It did not take any thought or effort on her part to continue brushing. Her hands were familiar enough from performing the task on her own hair, and they seemed to recognize no difference when transferred to someone else’s. It was a mindless, repetitive task, and it needed little conscious facilitation. It was simply completed movement followed by completed movement cycling on into infinity.
She was finding that brushing someone else’s hair was a very soothing experience. She supposed that was why some people knitted or crocheted or participated in any of those other activities that kept their hands in motion and their mind disengaged with what was going on at present. She didn’t know for sure. She had never participated in any of those handicraft activities, but she thought that she now understood the appeal. It was a sort of occupied stillness that seemed (to her anyway) far easier to adjust and comply with than any sort of stillness that required one to be actually still.
Being still was not something of which she was fond. It always seemed like such a waste. There were always so many things to do that it felt wrong to be still. Still was the enemy. It was the antithesis of progress. There remained, however, the undeniable fact that sometimes deep thought required some sort of bodily stillness. It was a nasty conundrum that she had faced a multitude of times in the course of her life. She might now have an answer to that problem.
Unfortunately, the time it would take to learn any of those hand occupying, thought freeing activities that required one to keep a supply of yarn on hand was something that she was not inclined to invest at the moment. She had managed well enough until now; she would continue to manage (but she would tuck the knowledge of the benefits of activities like hair brushing and crochet to mental reflection for consideration at another time).
Her thoughts had covered quite a bit of ground as she stood behind her sister and let the movement of the brush lull her. She had completed a mental checklist of wedding plans and gone over the status of her recreation of Glimpse for her own use. She had even man
aged to wax poetical about her groom. Of course, not all mental reflections were to the point (or pleasant). Having time for reflection could leave you open to reflection upon things that you would rather leave alone.
She had some recollections of having had her hair brushed by someone else when she was young. If her memory was accurate, then having one’s hair brushed was even more soothing than being the one doing the brushing. She hadn’t thought of that for a long time; she did not choose to dwell on any of those memories. She never did. It was all well and good for others to deliver small dissertations about hanging on to the good while letting go of the bad, but Meredyth knew better. Memories weren’t like that. They were an intricately woven tapestry. One tied into the next, and one memory led into another. The happy, the sad, the pleasant, and the disturbing were all pieces of the same puzzle. If you were going to take a stroll down memory lane, then you were going to subject yourself to reliving all of them. There was no reason to do that to herself. There was nothing about her childhood that was so wonderful that it was worth recollecting the rest to review it.
She ignored the memories of a brush scraping gently over her scalp while her hair ran through her mother’s fingers and a soft voice hummed lullabies close to her ear. They weren’t worth it. They were tied to other times and places. They brought back the acrid taste of smoke to her tongue, and the suffocating sense of drowning slowly in a darkness that coated your lungs with every breath you took. They were tinged with the sounds of a baby wailing in a place where everything (even the small gasps of air that weren’t coated with the moving, following darkness) was too hot. They pulled back in the ache in her throat from yelling (despite the choking and the racking coughing that accompanied it) for someone to come and help, and the sense of loss that settled with the knowledge that there would be no one coming. No, it wasn’t worth it. Memories never were.
The seeming circle of mother related thoughts brought on by this wedding appeared to be cycling back. She was not going to cultivate these intrusions of her mother’s into her present. Her memories of her mother did not belong in her present. They were the past, and they would remain in it. There would be no revisiting them.
Her life was far too orderly and far too focused on the future to allow for getting tangled up in the chaos of the past. She had now, and she had the future. That was where her focus would remain. She had her plans, she had Wyatt, and she had Lia. Her plans were taking shape as solid realities. Wyatt (steady, reliable Wyatt) would follow through with them with her. Lia, on the other hand, was going to require a little more work than had been expected. She could handle that. It was, after all, Lia. Lia was important because Lia was hers. She was her first project -- her first foray into making the world into what she knew it should be. Lia had nearly always been hers. Their father had never had any interest, and Lia’s life had always been hers for the directing. If she had to jump through a few extra hoops to keep it that way, then what was that to her? It was the end game that mattered. It was always the end game that mattered. The end game in this particular place was Lia’s loyalty landing squarely in her camp.
It was important, vastly so, that Lia would be on her side in the end. Meredyth would not have been able to tell you why it was so important. It was something that she had never troubled herself to examine. It was simply fact that Lia’s acceptance was considered necessary. It had been part of her grand plan since before there had been an actual grand plan. There had been a time when she had considered it equally inevitable. She had not, as a matter of fact, changed her opinion on the inevitability of the outcome. What she had done was reconcile herself to the fact that Lia (like all other facets of her life) was something which required effort on her part. It had been easy to let Lia get lost in the shuffle of her other plans and projects (she took full responsibility for the laxness on her part that had left an opening where others could take advantage).
Lia had always been so low maintenance that it was easy to forget that the very things that made her low maintenance in the first place (her stark averageness, her biddableness, her inattention to detail) were also traits that made her an opportune target. She had dropped the ball when it came to protecting Lia from Connor (the fact that the consideration that Lia would need protecting from Connor had never occurred to her notwithstanding). She had been boxed into a corner by an unexpected move, and the responsibility for fixing the resultant damage fell onto her shoulders. She had left Lia vulnerable; she would make sure that such an occasion never reoccurred.
It had taken a lot of concentration and legwork to put Lia’s new situation together while, somehow, requiring less effort than one might expect to make the necessary medical protocols happen. It was disconcerting how credulous people were. Did they honestly expect to go through life without anyone ever taking advantage of their willingness to take things at face value?
That school hadn’t so much as blinked an eye at the arrangements she had insisted on for dosing Lia with her medications for her “conditions.” One would think that if nothing else, then the suddenness of Lia’s transfer would have raised some eyebrows somewhere, but it would appear that it did not. They hadn’t so much as uttered a question over the fact that they were not to give her the medication directly. It was enough to make you wonder what all went on at that place. She understood (and actually appreciated) discretion, but she felt there should have been a little more convincing involved. Their standards, however, were not her problem. As a matter of fact, they helped to solve a problem for her.
There hadn’t been any difficulties on the part of Lia’s previous educational establishment either. The Lawson girls (the both of them) were loners at heart, and it was more evident than ever in the complete and utter lack of interest that followed in the wake of her moving Lia out of the city. The school merely handed over records and boxed up the contents of her sister’s locker. There were no curious schoolmates calling to ask for an address or to say goodbye. There were no concerned teachers inquiring if there had been a problem. Lia had always been a background fixture. She was invisible and unnoticed. No one cared that she was gone.
It would be good for Lia to know that. It would be a nice reminder for her that Meredyth was the only one she should be trusting; she was the only one who really cared. Who knew what Connor might have been filling her head with, but she should have had plenty of time away from whatever it was for its effects to be minimal by now. It was high time to start bringing Lia back in line. There was no time like the present; she might as well get started tonight.
“I understand your allergies have been giving you a lot of trouble at school lately,” she opened. It wasn’t the most convincing method, perhaps, but it was only Lia. Since when had she ever bothered to question anything? It would do. This occasion hardly called for strategic brilliance. “It’s a pity allergy medicine has so many side effects. It must be difficult to get through all your work with that hanging over your head.” She paused and met Lia’s gaze in the vanity mirror. There was no flicker of anything to be seen in her sister’s eyes. Sometimes, it was rather trying that Lia was so simple, but the fact that it made everything else so much easier more than made up for it.
“They don’t seem to be bothering you here,” she tried again. “That’s to be expected though, isn’t it, Lia? I always make everything better for you, don’t I? That’s what sisters are for.” She would let that thought settle for a while. It would accomplish what it was supposed to do. Lia would come around. She wouldn’t give her any other options.
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Glimpse: The Complete Trilogy Page 29