LAST FLIGHT OUT OF OZ
By
ADAM SWENSON
&
RICHARD A. SWENSON
KNOLLWOOD INK
For Nico Everett Swenson
7.7.07 – 6.3.08
Abyssus Abyssum Invocat
Copyright
Copyright © 2011 by Adam Swenson and Richard A. Swenson
Cover design and art by Colin Lammie (lammiester@gmail.com)
All rights reserved by Knollwood Ink.
Smashwords edition, January 2012
Smashwords Edition, License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is available in print at most online retailers.
ISBN 978-0-9839066-2-9
Table of Contents
Chapter 1 A Vengeance Begun
Chapter 2 Starry, Starry Night
Chapter 3 Outrun, Outfight, Outsmart
Chapter 4 Tightly Coupled
Chapter 5 Ozymandias
Chapter 6 But Is He Right?
Chapter 7 Taking Flight
Chapter 8 You Can Never Go Home Again
Chapter 9 The Assignment
Chapter 10 Collateral Damage
Chapter 11 This Will End in Tears
Chapter 12 The Relentless Wound
Chapter 13 Deep Greens and Blues
Chapter 14 The Genius off His Meds
Chapter 15 Goodwill to Cats
Chapter 16 Hardball
Chapter 17 The Smell of Death
Chapter 18 Nice Doggie
Chapter 19 A Hole in the Wing
Chapter 20 Want a Pickle?
Chapter 21 The Break In
Chapter 22 May the Mountains Bring Peace
Chapter 23 Follow Your Heart
Chapter 24 Salmon Ella’s
Chapter 25 Must Be Love
Chapter 26 Bomb!
Chapter 27 Terrain Denial
Chapter 28 The Nineteenth Icon
Chapter 29 What She Sees
Chapter 30 Fire on the Mountain
Chapter 31 The FBI
Chapter 32 A Million Little Pieces
Chapter 33 Let the Great Axe Fall
Chapter 34 Unexpected Visitor
Chapter 35 Fuel, Meet Fire
Chapter 36 Home Lies Beyond the Road Ahead
Ozymandias
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1818)
I
met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and
trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the
sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And
wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor
well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these
lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that
fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is
Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and
despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that
colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands
stretch far away.
A Vengeance Begun
Dr. Anthony Weissman had never before stoked the fire wearing his tuxedo. But special occasions warrant special touches.
It grieved him to think that Susan, even on their anniversary, would not approve of tonight. He put the tux on in hopes it might help. She always liked to see me well dressed, he remembered: “Nothing but the best for my beloved Antoni.” Then she’d stand back, look me over, flash a huge smile, pat my chest with both hands, and finish with that big exaggerated kiss. Part of her perpetual affirmation campaign. Not an easy job, this affirming stuff, but she’d known that going in.
He bent over and tossed another log into the fireplace. Then he poked the rising flames with the iron. Almost hot enough.
He began to straighten up, but stopped just in time. His head stayed down. How to do this? I must get to my desk without looking at the mantle. Keep the head down. Avoid those eyes—they’ll be a problem. They’ll try to stop me. Perhaps if I can just keep my gaze on the floor. Then I can slowly rotate away…
No use. He could never keep anything from her, and it was foolish to think he could tonight. Somehow, she always knew. Harsh words with a colleague? She knew before he walked in the door. When the guest conductor disappointed with a Mendelssohn piece (oh my, Antoni was intense about Mendelssohn), she knew to squeeze his hand and lean into his shoulder and whisper, “I’ll make it up to you.” When the nightmares came, the demons barely emerged out of their hole before she chased them back with her devastating love.
Even in death she knows. This part is intellectually awkward, of course, since there’s no God or afterlife. But, however you dissect it, she still knows. She knows about tonight, you old fool.
OK then. Might as well face it. He slowly straightened up, lifted his head, and looked at her. He smiled. He picked up the photo and held it close. Those eyes. They always won. Glistening and blue, like arctic ice, only warm and hopeful and so impossibly generous. The undefeatedness of those eyes. He’d seen her enter a room and subdue it with her eyes alone.
“Good evening, Susan,” he said softly. A gentle name for such a gentle person. She loved all of humanity and all of humanity had loved her back.
“I’m sorry. Please forgive me,” he whispered. “Peace and justice will not embrace tonight. Tonight, only justice.” He kissed her and placed the picture back on the mantle. He started to pivot away from the roaring fire, then stopped. He reached back to the mantle and turned the picture to face the massive stone chimney.
“Justice,” he repeated inaudibly so her eyes would not hear. “Tonight, the great axe will fall.”
He crossed the room to his ornate walnut desk. He sat down and put on a pair of latex surgical gloves. Before him lay a blank, cream-colored invitation made of expensive cotton paper with hand engraving in gold at the corners.
He looked over at the champagne. Not just yet.
Weissman took his calligraphy pen and hunkered over the delicate invitation. What came next had been practiced a thousand times. Flowing from the tip of the pen in his own elegant script appeared six words.
He leaned back and surveyed his work with satisfaction. He blew on the invitation, then blotted it. Next he carefully addressed the envelope, slid the invitation in, sealed it, and placed it on a corner of the desk.
He took off his gloves and threw them into the fire. Then the unused invitations and envelopes. The flames reached for each item, flashing brightly. Finally, the entire calligraphy set with its 24kt gold pen tip. He stirred the embers until nothing remained.
The ink disappeared down the sink, chased by five minutes of water, full-stream. Lastly, he put the ink bottle in a thick cloth sack and hammered it into tiny shards, then threw the sack in the trash.
The deed was finished. Now he could have the champagne. He poured two glasses and took them to the fireplace. Setting both on the mantle, he turned the picture to face him again. “Susan, some anniversary champagne for you. It’s our fourteenth, remember? Of course you do. Hello, Joshua. I miss you son. I’m so glad you have your mother’s eyes.”
They were so innocent. They did not deserve to die. Not like that. He felt the tears coming. He lifted his glass: “I will join you soon.”
Ω Ω Ω
Kevin Morgan occupied the passenger seat of Weissman’s Lexus sedan. Inexplicably, they became friends nearly two years ago just after the brooding genius moved to Colorado.
“How is that even possible,” other students would ask.
Kevin shrugged his shoulders.
“Aren’t you afraid of him?”
“No.”
“A guy at MIT called him smarter than the entire east coast. Doesn’t that scare you?”
“Not really.” Then he looked over and added quizzically, “Why should that scare me?”
“Kevin, he hates everybody. He hates everything on campus. He hates teaching.”
“He doesn’t hate Friedman.”
“Yeah, great—he hates the entire world except for two people. That’s OK with you?”
“Listen, guys. I’m sorry, all right. When he arrived on campus, the Institute asked me to help him move in. We hit it off. I have no idea why. I like him, and he likes me.”
They glared at him. Then he added with a twinkle, “If you want to know why he likes me, why don’t you just ask him?”
Meanwhile, Craig Hunter, Kevin’s best friend, knew better than to ask Weissman anything. He slumped in the back seat, carefully hidden from the mirror. His slouching was uncomfortable, but Kevin wasn’t worried about him. Craig had been through worse, like sitting in a tree stand for twelve hours during a blizzard. Keeping silent for three hours wasn’t easy for him either, Kevin knew, but conversation with the explosive professor was a mortal risk best avoided—unless your name was Kevin Morgan.
“Thanks again for driving us,” Kevin said as they neared their destination.
Weissman shrugged. “I was coming to Denver on business anyway. When you mentioned your interview, it just made sense. I’ve seen your truck.”
Kevin smiled. “Yeah, any trip in Dexter is an adventure.” Although his battered four-wheel-drive Toyota was actually quite reliable, it looked perpetually at risk for dropping a vital part.
Conspicuously disguised by the small talk, there was mystery in the air and Kevin reached to understand it. He was, of course, pleased to be chauffeured by a world-renowned scientist. And he loved spending time with his mentor, the man he respected more than any other on earth. But Weissman did not do favors. He did not go out of his way to be polite and helpful. The great Dr. Weissman was many things, but he was not a chauffeur.
Craig seemed to feel it too. Kevin would occasionally shoot a quick look back, their puzzlement communicated with the glance. Weissman was acting quite normally, which in his case was weird. His serenity made them both nervous. His composure and generosity were alarming.
“I hope we didn’t take you too far out of your way,” Kevin said.
“In fact, my business isn’t far from here. Not far at all.” Then he laughed.
Kevin snuck a shocked look at Craig. Dr. Weissman never laughed. Not once. His DNA was devoid of humor.
Weissman slowed as they approached the imposing Peak Engineering International Headquarters. The Lexus turned into an elaborate entrance bracketed with beautiful stone formations. The jagged skyline of the Rockies was perfectly mirrored by the stone creation, an obvious play on the corporate name.
“I wonder if the Almighty got royalties when they copied His mountainscape?” Craig joked, breaking silence for the first time.
Weissman growled and swore something in Polish. Or was it German? Kevin wondered. Craig winced.
As they neared the thirty-story building, it looked carved from a massive block of polished black onyx. It was sleek and ultramodern but also smacked of a dark, menacing juggernaut, completely blotting out the sun. Even the shadow seemed organically sinister.
The parking lot was full, but Weissman managed to find a slot near the front adjacent to executive parking. They got out, and Kevin asked Craig playfully, “My tie straight?” Craig chucked him on the back. Résumés in hand, they set out for the Foster Enterprises building. Weissman trailed behind, looking up at the commanding structure with evident disgust.
A thunderous commotion back at the main entrance made them turn in time to see a red sports car barreling into the lot. The rear of the convertible whipped around the turn, tires smoking. The Corvette shot directly at them in deafening fashion. The driver, a stunning brunette—about their age, Kevin guessed—missed them by a few feet, then screeched to a stop not twenty feet away, seemingly going from 60 to full-park in a second.
“She took the CEO spot,” Kevin said, leaning toward Craig.
“Yeah, right,” Craig said. “More like the mistress.”
Before the engine quieted, the brunette had already exited by leaping over the door. She seemed effortlessly athletic. In no time, she was already halfway to the building.
Her passenger, a similarly fetching blonde, took a deep breath and shook her head. She leaned over and pulled the keys from the ignition, then stepped out of the car. In contrast to the intensity of the driver, blondie looked like a second-generation hippie, sun-kissed and pure. “Maggie, slow down,” she said, jogging to catch up. “You almost killed us back there.”
“I warned you, Summer,” she said. “This always happens. The closer I get to him...”
The young women passed the gawking men without noticing. The doorman opened the plate-glass door for the pair and stepped aside. “Welcome to Foster Enterprises,” he said. Maggie snarled. Summer smiled sweetly, as if to atone. Kevin, Craig, and even Weissman followed quickly behind and stood just inside the lobby to see what might happen next.
The women walked into the marbled lobby where a chunky security guard tried to flag them down. “You need to sign in,” he said.
Maggie ignored him and surged past.
“Ma’am,” he said, jumping up.
Maggie scowled at him and kept going.
The other guard, a thin and balding man, pulled his partner back down and whispered in his ear. The chunky guard’s eyes widened.
“It’s nothing personal,” Summer said as she swept by, all sunshine and rainbows. An elevator appeared and the two vanished.
The doorman drew his eyes away from the scene and turned to Kevin, Craig, and Weissman. “Can I help you gentlemen?”
“Uh…” Kevin said, eyes still on the elevator doors. Craig chucked him again on the shoulder. “We’re here for a job interview,” Craig said with a grin.
“Check in with security,” the doorman said, pointing.
“If you have a scheduled interview,” the chunky guard said, “sign in here.” Despite being newer to the job, he was clearly the alpha. “Then go to the twenty-seventh floor and follow the signs to Personnel.”
“So who was that?” Kevin asked, still staring in the direction of the elevator. The guard glared.
“Right,” Kevin said. “None of my business.” He signed his name.
The thin guard leaned forward with a mischievous smile and whispered, “That, young man, was the boss’s daughter.”
“You mean Foster? Jeff Foster?” Kevin whispered back. “The CEO of Peak Engineering?”
“That’s the one. Do yourself a favor—don’t talk to her.”
Kevin gave a shudder.
“If you ask me,” the guard said, lowering his voice even more, “they deserve each other.”
Weissman chuckled, his eyes glinting. Kevin and Craig looked at each other. It was his second laugh in the past fifteen minutes. Calculated another way, it was his second laugh in the past two years. “I’ll attend to my business,” he said, turning to leave, “and meet you back here around 3:00.”
“Thanks again,” Kevin said, but Weissman was already headed out the doors along with a sudden throng of humanity.
“What’s with Weissman?” Craig asked. “I’ve never seen him like this.”
“The weirdness is piling up,” Kevin said. He tried to look into the parking lot, but the professor had already disappeared in the crowd.
They walked toward the elevators. “Did you see those two?” Kevin asked breathlessly.
“Whoa, Kev. Get a grip, man. You’re a rookie—don’t you think you’d better start with some sweet country girl? Those two are walking plutonium.”
Kevin shivered involuntarily as the elevator door closed behind them and they lifted off.
They exited on the twenty-seventh floor and followed the signs for Personnel. After they’d finished filling out a small mountain of forms, they returned the packet to an attractive HR employee. “My name is Jamie,” she said, sensibly dressed with fashionable glasses and shoulder-length blonde hair, “and I’m going to show you around. Please follow me.”
The three left Personnel and Jamie began the tour. “This building is owned by Foster Enterprises. We operate our Denver office out of the top eight floors and lease out the lower twenty-two floors. We also have offices in San Francisco, Chicago, and Minneapolis.”
She led them to the elevators, and they went up to the thirtieth floor. “This floor holds the office of Mr. Jeff Foster, owner and CEO of Foster Enterprises. It also has a series of conference rooms that boast some of the best views in the city.”
They walked into a conference room with windows overlooking downtown Denver and, in the distance, the mountains. The conference table cost twenty thousand dollars, Jamie explained, pointing out the rosewood top, ebony center, holly inlay and mahogany edge. Around the table were sixteen supple black-leather chairs that smelled expensive. The combined effect exuded power, prestige, and intimidation.
“Mr. Foster’s executive suite is in that half of the floor,” Jamie said, gesturing down a long hallway. “But that’s not on the tour. You’ll likely never have occasion to go there. Now we’ll head down to the twenty-third floor, and I’ll show you Research & Development.” They returned to the bank of elevators and waited.
Jamie smiled at them and asked, “Are you from arou—?” Her question was interrupted when the door to Jeff Foster’s suite flew open and Maggie stormed out, Summer in tow.
“What would give him the idea that I might want this position?” she shouted. Summer struggled to find an answer to what, in Kevin’s estimation, was clearly a rhetorical question. Jamie’s countenance took on a pinched, anxious expression.
“He’s got to learn that there are some things money just can’t buy,” Maggie continued. “A clean slate, for example. Absolution. Respect. You can dress a mobster up in a money suit, but it doesn’t take the blood off his hands.” She ranted her way down the hall.
“And for what? An upper management spot, condo, and a company car? What, like I need him to take care of me?”
The elevator arrived and the five of them got on.
Maggie’s tirade continued. “This is the last place I’d ever want to work. Knowing what I know? Forget about it.”
“Hi,” the blonde said to Craig. “I’m Summer.”
Craig smiled and shook her hand. “Craig.”
“What brings you here?” Summer said.
“Job interview.”
“—And to work for him?” Maggie continued, ignoring the social pleasantries going on two feet away. “Employees here aren’t even a number. Numbers he has respect for. Here you’re like a screwdriver or a hammer—use it ‘til it snaps under the pressure, throw it out, and go scour the universities for fresh meat. A person would have to be brain dead to want to work here.”
“Are you in school then?” Summer asked.
“Yeah,” Craig replied. The irony was getting the better of him, and he was smirking. Jamie looked like she’d welcome a swift end to it all. “Colorado Institute of Mining and Technology. What about you?”
“We’re visiting from California. Just here for the day.” She pointed to Maggie with her eyes. “It appears we’re headed back tonight.”
The elevator arrived at the twenty-third floor, and Jamie led them off. Craig and Summer nodded goodbye. Maggie looked at Kevin, “If you’ve got any brains, you’ll run for your life.” Summer tried her best to suppress a snicker and then winked at Craig.
As the elevator descended down the shaft, Maggie’s stream of righteous indignation receded with it.
“Well, she’s got her ... theories,” Jamie said in a futile effort to be diplomatic.
“She spoke to me,” Kevin said in hushed breathless tones.
Craig rolled his eyes.
Ω Ω Ω
The venting had done her good. Maggie felt a vague sense of control return once the elevator doors opened onto the lobby. Summer’s relief was palpable.
“Let’s get outta here,” Maggie said and made a beeline for the exit. Summer smiled and waved at the security guards.
“Thanks again for coming along,” Maggie said to Summer as they stepped out into the unseasonably warm March day. “Just, you know, to make sure I didn’t kill anybody.”
Summer shrugged. “I like Denver.”
Walking to the convertible, Maggie saw an envelope on her seat, cream colored with gold engraving. In an elegant, flowing calligraphy it read:
Requesting the Honor of Your Presence
Jeff Foster
Maggie’s first impulse was to throw it onto the asphalt and see if she could hit it on her way out, but her curiosity was piqued. She opened the envelope, read the invitation inside, then set back toward the building.
“Maggie,” Summer said, “where are you going? What did that say?”
“Give me three minutes.”
Both the doorman and the guards knew better than to make eye contact this time around. Maggie jumped on an elevator and headed up. When the doors opened onto the thirtieth floor, she marched down the hall and burst into Foster’s waiting room. The receptionist tried to slow her, but Maggie was having none of it. Taking hold of the brushed-chrome handle on the thick mahogany door, she ripped it open and stepped inside. Foster looked up from his computer.
“You reconsidered?” he said in a way that wasn’t a question.
“Turning you in? No, still thinking about it.”
A vein stood out in Foster’s forehead. “What then?”
“Somebody put this on the front seat of my rental. Fan mail, I guess. Thought I’d drop it off in person.”
Foster’s brow furrowed, and he snatched the envelope. In a flash, Maggie was already back into the hall, hurrying to the elevator.
Ω Ω Ω
Foster examined the envelope carefully for a clue, turning it side to side and end to end, handling it with the kind of caution one might use for a delivery suspected of a hazardous substance. Finally, he pushed the intercom. “Phyllis, come in here.”
Ten seconds later his secretary was at his side.
“Open this for me.” He handed her the envelope.
She looked suspiciously at him and took the note. “But it’s already been opened,” she said.
“Do I look like an idiot?” he yelled. “Just take the paper out of the envelope and give it to me.” He stepped back a couple feet.
She slowly pulled the invitation out and handed it to him. He refused to touch it.
“Smell it,” he said.
“Pardon?”
“Put your nose down by the paper and smell it.”
She looked at him again, then sniffed the paper. “Seems OK to me.”
“Any powder?”
“How do you mean, sir?”
“Do you see any powder on it?”
She looked at the invitation, then on her hands. “No, not really.”
“Look inside the envelope. Any powder there?”
“None that I can see.”
“Then give it to me.” He snatched the invitation from Phyllis’s hand, turned it over, and read it.
“MAGGIE!” he thundered. “Get back here!”
He ran to the door and into the hall, furious to find it already empty. “I could kill that girl!” He stomped back to Phyllis. “Did she say where she got this?”
“No sir.”
Foster went to the window and looked down into the parking lot. Maggie jumped into the Corvette, then looked up. She smiled, waved goodbye, then rocketed out of the parking lot.
His face flushed with anger as he looked again at the flowing script.
I’ll see you in hell, sir.
Starry, Starry Night
Kevin sprinted in a thin line of darkness between streetlights to distance himself from the violated engineering building. The wet grass soaked his shoes and chilled his feet. Craig followed closely.
For three years, Kevin had inflicted himself on Colorado Institute of Mining and Technology. He was occasionally caught and prosecuted but never enough to be suspended. There was a great deal of ambivalence within the administration about young Mr. Morgan. On the one hand, he was the nicest guy you’d ever meet: kind, sincere, helpful to a fault. Smart too, uncommonly so, in an unpretentious manner. Everyone knew he was the brightest person in the room; everyone, that is, except Kevin. On the other hand, he gravitated toward mischief, prompting, to date, at least eight new Student Handbook rulings, such as “Construction or firing of missiles, rockets, or pulse jet engines, propelled by solid fuel or liquid fuel, anywhere on campus (especially the Auto Shop building) requires prior CIMT administrative approval;” or “The no violence toward other students clause extends to possessing, using, or firing potato guns in the dormitories.”
Unfortunately, Kevin’s free-wheeling creativity often exceeded the Institute’s finite range of tolerance for such behavior. They seemed to forget entirely that Kevin was but a few scant years out of his teens, a time of recklessness necessitated, a priori, by the hormonal journey all passengers on the road to manhood go through. A simple problem of biochemistry and genetics, really. Somewhere in the labyrinthine network of mind and glands, a mysterious decision-making mechanism dictated that he be heavy on the gas and light on the brakes. He had not yet been weaned from danger. He was not culpable; he was twenty-two.
And Craig was no help. Tapping into an ability to use juvenile antics for self-entertainment honed to a fine point on the media-barren mission fields of Africa, Craig was a powerful catalyst for Kevin’s brainstorms. Fearless himself, he pushed Kevin ever onward to dizzying heights of well-intentioned creative mischief. Having lived eighteen years “south of the Serengeti” as he said (Botswana or Ouagadougou or Djibouti or someplace like that), out there you either become a survivor or die. You might think that white people would eat off the fat of the land in Africa, due to their cultural status and superior funding. In theory that would be true, if there were any fat in the land. There wasn’t. Not where Craig came from.
Despite the long odds, Craig had packed 220 pounds of rippling muscle onto a six-foot-two frame. For one thing, he ate animals. Not just cafeteria beef but real animals. He’d been known to trap rabbits behind the dorms and roast them over a midnight fire. When the radio played Hank Williams Jr.’s A Country Boy Can Survive, people thought of Craig Hunter. The guy could get it done.
Both now carried backpacks squeezed full with lasers from the lab. The heavy load bristled with sharp angles that dug into Kevin’s ribs, but there was no time to readjust. They were, after all, fleeing the scene of a crime.
Patches of March snow covered the grass underfoot as they closed in on the dorms. Several mature aspens grew in the courtyard and, after reaching even the modicum of cover the trees offered, Kevin and Craig slowed their pace and snaked around back to a fire door labeled “Emergency Exit Only: Alarm Will Sound if Opened.”
Kevin produced a small tool from his pocket and threaded it into the lock. He twisted it with patience and a learned subtlety. The lock clicked, and the door sprung open. No alarm. Craig glanced at his watch. “Gone in sixty seconds,” he said. They ducked inside Fosbert Hall and raced up three flights of stairs. At room 315 Kevin knocked and entered.
His roommate, Wallace, sat with eyes glued to the monitor, interrupting his focus with brief flurries of typing. The glowing screen reflected back into his pasty-white face topped with jet-black bangs. Most Halloweens he was a vampire; it took too much work to be anything else.
As the door opened, Wallace turned, his blue eyes sunken into raven sockets. Kevin warned him that the days-at-a-time stints he spent in front of his laptop were the cardiovascular equivalent of living in a full-body cast, and that his odds of passing on the family name were slim if he didn’t run around in the sunlight from time to time. Wallace didn’t seem to care much about the family name.
“Project Black Hole,” Kevin said. “You in?” Seeing Wallace’s hesitation, he added, “You’ll kick yourself if you miss it.” He nodded almost imperceptibly. Despite his best efforts, Wallace was drawn to all things questionable. Though his mother and grandmother stacked the deck with the most straight-arrow men they could find, even this gentrified gene pool could not bring him to resist. Such a weakness would be his ruination, his mother reminded him every time they spoke.
Kevin smiled at the foregone conclusion, then barked orders and started gathering paraphernalia. Stopping for a second, he reached into a closet for his .243 target rifle. Craig’s eyes widened, but Kevin shushed with a finger to the lips. “Just borrowing the scope.”
He freed the scope and carried it gently in his right hand. With his left he opened the door and peeked in both directions. The trio slipped through the hall to the roof ladder. Above the top rung was a hatch bolted with a lock. Kevin possessed a key for over a year but maintenance had neglected to address the issue, essentially conceding their long-running battle with him.
The lock sprung open, the bolt pulled back, and the roof was their sovereign territory. The 2:00 a.m. sky was cloudless and star-choked as they stepped out. After taking a moment to admire the scene, Kevin and Craig unloaded their packs.
“Where’d you get that junk?” Wallace asked.
“Under the back seat of a ‘62 Chevy down by the river,” Craig said.
“Come on,” Wallace said.
“Found it in a storage closet in one of the engineering labs,” Kevin said. “All boxed up in a dusty corner.”
“What were you doing in a storage closet?” Wallace said.
“Looking for junk,” Kevin said. “Listen Wallace, you gonna help or you gonna annoy?”
“Do you actually expect that stuff to work?” Wallace persisted. “Looks like it belonged to Galileo—right?” He snorted a cackling sound, his trademark self-congratulatory form of laughter.
Kevin picked up a fifty-foot coil of extension cord and threw it square at Wallace’s chest, knocking him backward. He stumbled and bounced down at the edge of the roof.
“Come on Wallace,” Craig said. “If you fall off it’ll spoil our plan.” He grabbed Wallace under the shoulders and lifted him effortlessly. “Do your job, man,” he said, setting him down and patting him on the rear. “Big surprise coming.”
“I’ll let you push the button,” Kevin said.
“Agreed,” Wallace said with a grin. He picked up the extension cord and plugged it into the roof outlet, then connected it to a power strip. Craig set up a series of seven tripods in their proper locations. Kevin followed, placing the lasers on tripods with careful, steady hands, then using the rifle scope to sight the lasers with exacting precision.
With the lasers aimed, Kevin signaled and Wallace turned on the power strip. They waited for thirty seconds. Nothing. Five seconds later the campus went dark.
“Sweet,” Wallace said. “What’d we do?”
“Last week I noticed sensing devices mounted on outside light poles,” Kevin said. “Electricians installed new sensors to update the automated system that samples the ambient light every sixty seconds. It’s basically a light-dependent resistor that’s equipped with a time delay in the switching circuit. So when natural light reaches a pre-established low, the system flips on the outdoor lights—campus streets, walkways, courtyards. Then in the morning, after the sun comes up, the system shuts the lights off.”
“So we shot lasers at the sensors,” Wallace said, “the sensors read the beam as ambient light, and here we are in the dark.”
“This is not dark!” Kevin said. “Look at that sky. Call that dark? We’re here in God’s nature. We’re simply principled environmentalists. Sabotaging, even if for a few moments, this heinous light pollution.”
“Right.”
The CIMT blackout was broken only by dorm lights of late-night studiers and the occasional headlights piercing the darkness as cars crept around the campus loop, like motorists descending mountain roads watching for deer.
Though full of the satisfaction of a guess vindicated by experiment, there was another, smaller thought niggling at Kevin’s mind. The effects of a dream, such as this majestic vision of darkness laid out before him, were different depending on one’s outlook. He considered the price exacted by this little vagrancy—lights on or lights off?—and decided he’d let it stand. One of Kevin’s driving forces, a conviction that mattered to him, was that people needed more adventure in their lives. Sure, these pranks were inconvenient for some but it’s all a matter of perspective. They could also thank me.
“I think I’m having an Experience,” Wallace said.
CIMT’s indoctrination into the culture of experience came via the teaching of everyone’s favorite English professor, Dr. Fitzsimmons, who often touted the virtues of life’s great moments: receiving a standing ovation, the death of a loved one, a first crush, severe depression. Dr. Fitzsimmons stressed the importance of having capital E experiences in order to relate to the great writers and to generally become a more thoughtful person. To his more literally-minded followers, he explained that when he said great, he did not mean great, so much as he meant epic. Large. These grandiose moments were key to understanding the works of the fiction vanguard: the Tolstoys and Hemingways and Dostoyevskys. (Want to understand Dostoyevsky? Stand blindfolded before a firing squad.) If one lacked firsthand experience in the basic grit of existence, how could one hope to understand the depths of literature?
The vision of that pot-bellied, sixty-year-old chain smoker, rasping his misty-eyed way through the story of his first kiss with Elizabeth Streadley behind the swing set on their sixth-grade playground made the short list of notable experiences for most students. And of course they loved him for it. If the professorial carpe diem shtick brought him near to immortality, his second great tenet, that there was no one “right way” to do things, closed the deal. Of course, engineers knew some ways are righter than others, but they had fun playing his game.
“For me to impose a grid,” he said one day, “a particular overriding and normative ideology on your young lives, would be tantamount to an art teacher telling young Vincent (you remember, young Vincent who cut off his ear?) that true artistic greatness rested in how closely he could emulate the master, Leonardo. Had he done that we would not have Starry Night. Good heavens, the thought of it! Some daring young nonconformists left us such bright and burning works as On the Road, Generation X, and The Violent Bear It Away.
Flannery O’Connor was Dr. Fitzsimmons’s personal hero, if he had such a thing. Kerouac would have held that dubious honor had he not been so drunk and domesticated, so not On the Road, in the last half of his short life.
“Boys,” Kevin said, drawing out a pack of venison jerky from his Army rucksack, “let’s partake.”
“Been into my stash again, huh?” Craig said. “I’ll forgive you.” He grabbed a hefty strip and tore off a chew with his teeth.
“You shot this?” Wallace asked. He wasn’t the hunter type.
“Last year during bow season, over by Gunnison. Nice buck. Took a while to pack him out.”
Kevin fished again in his rucksack for a two-way radio tuned to the shared frequency of maintenance and security. Sitting on the edge of the roof, the trio awaited the disaster relief forces.
Craig chomped off another bite, then turned to Kevin. “What’re you thinking?”
“Guess,” Kevin said.
“Me too,” Craig said.
“I was wondering what she’s doing right now,” Kevin said.
“Well, I doubt she’s sitting on a cold dormitory roof in the middle of the night eatin’ jerky and staring into the blackness.”
“Probably not.” He thought of Maggie in glorious terms—dazzling, high-brow, aristocratic—unaware that, at this very moment, she was cleaning a drunk’s blood off her hiking boots.
“Aw, Kev, forget about her,” Craig said. “She’s Mt. Everest and you’re barefoot.”
“OK Simon Cowell,” Kevin said, elbowing him in the ribs. “Can’t you just let me dream for a couple days?”
“Look,” Craig said, “she’s rich, spoiled, mean, and she’s got Daddy issues. But Summer, on the other hand—”
“You don’t know she’s spoiled,” Kevin interrupted. “She turned Jeff Foster down cold, so she can’t care that much about the money. I mean, yeah, she’s wealthy I guess, but that doesn’t mean…” Kevin tapered off in a pensive fashion. He wasn’t exactly sure where he was taking this.
“The thing I can’t figure out is what was Weissman doing with a box of shells,” Craig said.
“What?” Wallace said. “What are you talking about? What shells?”
Kevin glared at his friend. “Nice, Craig,” he said.
“Wallace, listen up,” Craig said. “I’m talking to you now. You’ve got to promise not to say anything.”
“I promise.”
“I’m serious. If I hear any rumors on campus about Weissman and ammo, I’m coming straight for you. We clear on that?”
Wallace gulped. “Sure, Craig. I won’t say anything.”
“I will bring you up here and throw you off. Understood?”
Wallace looked over the edge. “Understood.”
“Well, I was sitting in the back seat of the Lexus on the return trip from Denver. Actually, trying to stay out of sight of Weissman. I dropped a stick of gum, and when I reached down for it, I noticed a box of shells under his seat.”
“Could you tell what kind?” Kevin asked.
“9 mm.”
“You sure.”
“I’m sure.”
“And they weren’t there on the trip up?”
“Correct.”
Their attention was drawn back to the mini-drama before them when the CIMT campus security roared up with the zeal of a rent-a-cop who suddenly finds something to do. He parked two wheels on the curb, two off, then stepped out of the SUV with an air of self-importance.
“Security calling maintenance,” he shouted through the radio, “we’ve got a situation, over.”
“What?” maintenance answered.
“All the campus lights are out. This is a dangerous situation that needs to be rectified. Situations are more likely to occur when darkness is upon us, and they are harder to control.”
“We’re on our break now, be out in fifteen minutes, over.”
“But darkness—”
“Over.”
“Isn’t that Doyle?” Craig said with a laugh. “Got to be. Sounds just like him.”
Kevin suspected he was right. Evidently Doyle, a high-strung sophomore, was security’s newest recruit, looking to earn easy money during the quiet night watch.
“I guess we’re about to find out if Doyle can take a joke,” Kevin said as he pulled a small transmitter with an ominous-looking red button out of his backpack and handed it to Wallace.
“Push it,” Kevin said.
Wallace coughed and gave him a look.
“Do it,” Craig said.
Wallace’s existential struggle lasted all of a millisecond. When he pushed the button, a squadron of fireworks exploded from the roof of Women’s Residence Hall (WRH), the sole women’s dorm on campus. Arcing high, they detonated with a thunderclap over the administration building. A few seconds later, a second volley roared heavenward, bursting into brilliant white streamers. Next came a sequence of blues and reds and greens, reminiscent of Iraqi anti-aircraft fire, flying off the roof in all directions.
“Maintenance!” screamed Doyle into the radio, “this is campus security. Code red! Code red!” No response.
“Guess maintenance turned off their radio,” Craig said. “Sucks to be Doyle.”
The security SUV tore off in the direction of WRH. Dorm lights clicked on across campus, windows flew open, and cheers rose from the approving student body.
“Who’s on WRH?” Wallace asked.
“Better not ask,” Kevin said. “Plausible deniability.”
“Impeccable answer,” Craig said.
With lights flashing, Doyle pulled the security SUV onto the WRH sidewalk and ran, in uniform, in the wee hours of the morning, into the only substantial concentration of eligible women for miles around.
“Wish I were Doyle right now,” Wallace said.
“Maybe you should work security,” Craig said.
“Not with you two miscreants out of your cages.”
Their break over, a sluggish Ford maintenance van with roof racks and dangling extension cords rolled onto the scene. Two maintenance men in institutional jumpsuits piled out of the van, turned on flashlights, and began inspecting the zone of commotion.
“Maintenance calling security. We’re on site. Can’t find much. It’s dark out here. Just a lot of ash. What’s up?”
“Thanks for the help,” Doyle snapped. “I’m working on catching the perpetrator now. Maintain radio silence.” Searching throughout the women’s dorm would delay him a bit, a serendipitous perk in the midst of an otherwise stressful night.
The maintenance men chattered as they checked this box, that breaker, this stretch of wiring. Occasional dumb luck would position one in the path of a laser and, if he lingered long enough to cut off the beam, the campus lights in that section would come back on.
“This section’s back up,” one called.
“What did you do?” the other would yell.
“Nothing,” the first said. As he moved away, lights would darken again.
“What did you do now?”
“Still nothing. Must be a short.”
Blazing flashlights came together to conference, then moved away, like stars playing hokey pokey. It reminded Kevin of minimalist theater.
“Hey Doyle,” maintenance radioed, “we think it’s an electrical short. Any luck tracking down the pyro?”
“When I got to the roof he was gone.”
“Obviously the lighting problem and fireworks are related,” maintenance said. “And we can guess who’s behind it. If so, he’s listening to us right now.”
Kevin’s cell phone vibrated in his pocket. He let it go to voice mail. Next, they heard a ring in Room 342, and Kevin knew his pursuers were waking the RA. Bert was pretty old for a young man and didn’t relish getting out of bed—meaning they had about five minutes. Kevin and Craig realized they shouldn’t risk going down the ladder into the hallway. Their propensity toward mischief was not accompanied by a commensurate facility in the matter of perjury. Authorities were thus best avoided immediately post-infraction.
“Time to go,” Kevin said.
He removed the last item from his bag, a fifty-foot section of climbing rope. A locking carabiner secured the rope to the steel hatch, and the rappelling setup was ready.
Forgoing a climbing harness, Kevin descended old school, weaving the rope around his body like a snake and using his hands for the brake. This method involved pain but such is the price you pay—pain suffered for the sake of adventure had redeeming value in Kevin’s code.
He slung his weight over the side, swinging away from the wall then back again as he dropped.
“That’s got to hurt,” Craig said peering over the edge. Kevin disappeared into the blackness below.
Wallace flipped off the power strip, shutting down the lasers and reigniting the campus. Next he scrambled to disassemble the lasers and tripods, placing everything under a tarp—to be returned the next evening, of course. Silently Craig followed Kevin over the wall. Once down, Wallace unlocked the carabiner and dropped the rope after them. He turned away from the edge just as Bert poked his head out onto the roof.
“Wallace, what are you doing up here?” Bert demanded. “It’s 2:00 in the morning.”
“Leonid shower. Meteors. It was supposed to be huge tonight, but it’s been a bust.” Wallace didn’t share Kevin and Craig’s inability to misrepresent facts. “Except for those fireworks. Did you get a load of that action? Awesome!”
“Get down off of here before I write you up. I want to get back to bed. Where’s Morgan? Maintenance is after him. I couldn’t find him in your room.”
“No idea,” Wallace said, following Bert down the ladder.
Outrun, Outfight, Outsmart
Although Maggie and Summer rolled into their Palo Alto apartment at midnight, Maggie was up at 5:15 a.m., per usual, and dressed quickly. She savored her morning run and fell asleep each night anxious to wake and be off. No alarm needed. Ever.
She disdained alarms, as she disdained tiredness, fear, whining, and mediocrity. Maggie was a doer, not a sleeper. She never yawned, not once in a year. Never felt tired. When others remarked on her steel, she changed the subject—it came, unfortunately, from her father.
With no fuss, she brushed her teeth, pulled her shoulder-length brunette hair out of the way in a binder, and put on a sleek $200 pair of running shoes. Her 5’9” body was lean and tan, blessed with almost maintenance-free skin and hair. Hers was a family of lookers, smart and each successful—for one reason or another. Not respectable though. Not really.
In the still of the night, when she couldn’t sleep, she often thought about them: the Fosters. She wondered if there were some sort of deep telos pulling them all to seemingly enviable positions in society. Jealous hangers-on stared at her dad’s 38-foot Scarab at the house in Key West, a house that was, not coincidentally, only a couple of blocks away from Hemingway’s old haunt. This had been a big selling point to Jeff who really bought into that Hemingway strong-man act.
Most people only knew of the house and trappings and didn’t think any further than to be jealous. They missed the evils behind the curtain. When the spotlights flare, the Fosters are ready in all their splendor: gregarious, powerful, and charming when called for. But the Fosters are actors. Strange that none of us went into it.
The more fanatical onlookers see that Cindy, her mom, visits the home in the Keys more than Jeff. They see and they talk. Why does Cindy go there for months on end? Survival. Jeff’s presence is like an inferno, consuming all the oxygen in a room, sending the occupants kicking down doors to get air. The word selfish comes to mind. Aggressive maybe—no, not enough. Lethal. Yes, of course, that’s the word.
Maggie’s thoughts occupied her down the stairs, out the door, and through the pre-running rituals. She started jogging slowly, savoring the morning and letting her body warm. The Bay Area morning was like most in early March: bracing, with an ethereal quality if you arose early enough. Fog clung low to the ground as her lithe body sliced through. Street signs and trees and buildings materialized out of the haze, then disappeared as she passed. Running in a dreamscape.
Some warned that jogging this early before sunrise might be dangerous, with muggers and rapists lurking in deep shadows. Maggie smiled at the threat. She could outrun, outfight, or outsmart any of them. Some days, she almost wished a molester would give it a try.
Within twenty minutes she had reached the Stanford campus and cruised down the Row, past the frat houses littered with the detritus of last night’s debaucheries. She sped up. These were not part of Maggie’s world. She raced past the Compound, her nickname for the Stanford engineering buildings and the venue of her daily conquests, climbing another rung in the slow, broken ladder women-in-a-male-world climb.
Maggie paired with Summer, her roommate and best friend, for lab assignments. Like Maggie, Summer had her reasons for avoiding men, chief among them the name she’d been given by her fertile-loined hippie parents. Still shot through with psychedelic idealism, enchanted with the myth of the beauty and goodness of peoplekind, they picked a name—Summer Skye Schaeffer—that jumps to rhyme (bummer, dumber, hummer, plumber). In the process, they tragically underestimated the cruelty of thirteen-year-old boys. Summer, selectively, had a lingering resentment. Since she was beautiful, her self-imposed chastity belt was lamented and generally regarded as quite a loss to the community, the eligible bachelors’ sadness in proportion to the temptation, which was considerable.
“Listen Maggie,” Summer would say, “the odds are in my favor. I can afford to be picky.”
Yet, as Maggie pointed out, Summer was not looking for an actual man but for the Platonic form of a man. Cinematically brainwashed into thinking one man can be strong, good-looking, sensitive and intelligent, Summer forgot to factor in the artificial perfection the filming process bestows on a star, coating his flaws the same way a coat of paint glosses over the knots in a board. If an actor flubs a line he can do it over. If a voice spikes where it shouldn’t, it can be edited for continuity. Witty repartee for the actor is generated by repartee specialists.
“You can’t expect any one man to be that good,” Maggie said, “least of all engineers. You might look for a silver-tongued devil in the English department, but then you’ll have to support him. It’s a tradeoff.”
“Better that than these geeks who think the ability to solve quadratic equations in their heads has sex appeal,” Summer said. “I almost want to tell them to save their breath, but then I wouldn’t get to watch them flop around so much. It’s comical.”
That’s about where things stood between Summer and the endless series of men coming up to her table, hunting for a smile: comical.
Despite the gender wars, or perhaps because of them, the Compound was their bright spot on campus, as day-by-day they logged small victories that added up over time in people’s minds. They were bona fide engineering prodigies, the unapproachable twin goddesses of Stanford science.
The pressure to excel was on them both anyway, so they decided to make a game of it. Summer had her own reasons; Maggie’s kick in the pants came from her father. Their method messed with masculine psyches. Always, always achieve the top scores. Finish labs first. Challenge wrong answers contentiously. Then leave the room discussing trivialities straight out of National Enquirer or Star. These banal discussions were a product of Maggie’s reasoning that no spectacle could be more ruining to the insecure men left working, who appraised themselves so often and harshly. Yet these two women, the best and the brightest among them, wiled away extra brain cells on the kitsch of American pop culture.
Maggie finished her run with a smile and went back to shower before class.
Ω Ω Ω
By late afternoon in the apartment, Maggie was deep into her studies when Summer’s cell rang. Maggie followed the noise to the kitchen and looked at the screen: Corey Evans.
Well, Sunshine, this might teach you to remember your phone.
“Hello,” Maggie said in her best Summer impersonation.
“Hey. This is Corey Evans.” He hesitated. “Is this Summer?”
“Yes, Corey. How are you?” Maggie said sweetly.
“Uh, I’m fine. Thank you. Summer, I was wondering if you’d like to stop by O’Leary’s Pub tonight. My friend’s band is playing there, Blips and Bleeps.”
“Who’s the band again?” Maggie fired short sentences, thinking the more she kept Corey off balance and the quicker she brought this conversation to an end, the greater the odds he wouldn’t grow wise.
“Blips and Bleeps.”
She tried desperately to stifle her laughter—it’d be a dead giveaway. Summer’s laugh was distinctive, infectious; everyone loved it. Maggie’s laugh, on the other hand, often came out a sneer. She suspected that growing up in her house addled the portion of her brain responsible for genuine, cathartic, from-the-bottom-of-the-soul laughter.
Her house was like a coffeemaker: Maggie the pot, always being poured out, never replenished, the surface under her always hot, until whatever little she had left inside was charred and sticky, of no value to anyone. This emotional climate had left her snappy and reflexive, and, until a couple of years ago, unspiritual. What little acceptance she felt had been due to her brain. Success was the language spoken in the Foster house.
“Summer?”
“Oh, sorry. I’m a little tired, that’s all. Sounds fun. OK, it’s 5:30 now. I can finish my work and pick you up at 8:00.”
“But they start at 8:00. And why are you picking me up all of a sudden?”
“You ask me out, I pick you up, that’s the way it works. So, is this band headlining? We’ll just miss the opener.”
Corey took an uncharacteristic pause to absorb this information. “Good idea,” he said, “but it won’t work because there’s no opener.”
“All right, 7:45. I’ll drive fast.”
“Great. Pick me up at Campus Drive and Mayfield.” The enthusiasm in Corey’s voice was unmistakable, like a kid who thinks his parents don’t have any Christmas money but is happily surprised when, on a long shot, he gets his new Radio Flyer anyway.
“See you soon,” Maggie said. “Oh,” she added. “Corey? Thanks for calling.”
Ω Ω Ω
“You what!” Summer gave the only sort of reaction she was capable of: visceral and unvarnished, a 50/50 mixture of anxiety and anticipation. “How did this happen?”
“Well, your phone rang, and I answered,” Maggie said with a broad smile. “It’s not my fault you left your cell laying around. Again.”
“Maggie…” Summer said sternly.
“I picked up and apparently he thought it was you.”
“What! You impersonated me? Maggie, I’m trying to give you the benefit of the doubt here, but, on the other hand, I just might kill you.”
“Come on. It’s not like I started World War III. All I did was agree to a simple date on a Friday night with a great guy who’s infatuated with you. And to an Irish pub of all places.”
Though Summer was her best friend, Maggie liked seeing her out on a limb. She enjoyed the genuine humanity, the drama. In Maggie’s family, when people lashed out, it left a mark. Summer’s tradition of hippie anger was basically toothless, a benign indignant noise rooted in the family belief in nonviolence.
“To you it’s a simple date,” Summer said. “You’re not the one who has to go out with him.”
“Summer, he’s nice, he’s cute, and he’s the only guy within a thousand miles you kind of like. If you don’t single-handedly stop the good times from rolling, you two could have a lot of fun. Tonight might be the beginning of something beautiful.”
“I don’t want to be part of something beautiful.” At this point Summer was trying to scream at Maggie, realizing how funny it sounded, and laughing at herself. Maggie knew she’d won.
“Perfect. So you’ll pick him up at 7:45?”
“Fine, I’ll pick him up at 7:45.” Summer was still trying hard to sound mad in a precedent-setting sort of way but was too overcome to pull it off. “Wait—what time is it now?” She looked at her watch. “Six thirty! Maggie, you’re killing me here!”
“Relax, Sunshine. You’ll be fine.”
Summer headed for the shower while Maggie put away her books. She opened the refrigerator and reached for a Gatorade, then changed her mind and took the pineapple juice—an act, in itself, that reminded her just how much Summer had influenced her habits over the past three years.
In truth, Summer was the source of many changes in Maggie’s life: spontaneity, sunsets, laughter, even giddiness. In contrast, the pre-Summer era of Maggie’s existence had been ruled by Jeff Foster, and if the spontaneity-sunsets-laughter-giddiness quad had a sworn enemy on the planet, it would be her father.
On cue, Maggie’s cell played Taps. She was tempted to let it ring, but after yesterday, this might be interesting.
“What?”
“Margaret, this is Jeff.” He paused for a moment as if trying to remember what’s supposed to come next. No one else called her Margaret, and she hated it. But it was useless to try to change his mind. Jeff’s mind was prudentially immobile. Nobody changed Jeff Foster’s mind but Jeff Foster. He was his own solar system.
“What do you know about the note?” he finally asked. “Where did you get it?”
“I told you—the front seat of my convertible.”
“That’s crazy. Who could possibly know what kind of car you were renting?”
“Apparently somebody who’s done their homework.” Then she added with a laugh, “Wow, that makes it sound kind of scary, huh?”
“I’m glad you find this amusing, Margaret. Well, I get death threats all the time and I sleep like a baby.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen your liquor cabinet,” she countered. “What did the cops say?”
“Who said anything about the police?” he said heatedly. “We handle these matters internally.”
“Oh, I get it. Not good PR to reveal the names of ten thousand suspects who might wish you harm? That would make an interesting front page article in the Wall Street Journal.”
“Anyone who’s successful in business makes enemies, Margaret. It’s a fact of life.”
“Congratulations. By that measure, you’ve been very successful.”
“It’s just a juvenile prank.”
“Calligraphy on an engraved invitation? I thought juveniles used spray paint and rotten eggs. And they say this generation is going down the tubes.”
Jeff was twisting in the wind and he knew it. He’ll change the subject, Maggie thought.
“How’s school?” he said, a clunky segue. School, Maggie, you know—the bottom line, the family reputation, the GPA.
“The usual.”
“All As? Excellent. What’s your financial situation?”
“At my current rate of spending, I should have enough to last me until I’m married with eight kids.”
“Has Cindy been giving you money?”
“No Jeff, you just give me lots of money and I don’t spend much. It was a joke.”
Pause.
“Well you’re certainly not your sister. Every time I talk to her, she needs more.”
“If Ana-Lese has a talent, squandering is it.” Though on the surface this was a jab at her sister, Maggie was in fact directing it at Jeff. Some time back she had developed the knack of slandering a third party in a way that implied culpability on Jeff’s part. He never acknowledged these circuitous allegations since she always left the shadow of a doubt as to whether or not she was directing criticism at him. He didn’t want to call attention to it, just in case.
“She has taken after her mother for now, but maybe someday she’ll seek the satisfaction of a real career.”
Maggie said nothing, waiting to see if Jeff would keep the conversation going himself. Ana-Lese was an uncomfortable subject for him, so probably not. Understanding Jeff’s mental processes as she did, she knew that the superficially caring and level-headed way he talked about Ana-Lese’s train-wreck of a life was nothing more than a business habit—put a good spin on things; say nothing incriminating; protect your interests. While this held true for Ana-Lese, the same rule did not apply to Cindy. When it came to Cindy, there was no holding back.
But it was obscene, the way he talked with such detached and lifeless diction about Ana-Lese, about his own daughter, probably bombed out of her mind right now. The man was an oxymoron, a walking hedge-fund algorithm with sex organs.
Whatever. Conversations with Jeff were to be tolerated and dealt with expediently so she could get on with what comes next. Not unlike a transaction at an ATM.
“All right, Margaret. Study hard. Hold the line.”
“Ah yes, the Foster way. Are we done?” Maggie asked.
“Not quite. I called one of my former classmates at MIT who runs their Advanced Degrees program. He says you could get a Ph.D. in interdepartmental studies in one year. I’d advise it Margaret. It would pad your résumé nicely—”