Текст книги "Spring Fever"
Автор книги: Mary Kay Andrews
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Текущая страница: 26 (всего у книги 29 страниц)
50
Annajane found Voncile in the break room, eating her lunch at a small table in the corner of the room: a tuna-fish sandwich on neatly sliced and trimmed white bread, a huge dill pickle in a plastic baggie, and a small container of baby carrots. Two route drivers sat at a table in the opposite corner of the room, arguing about the merits of Fords versus Chevys.
“Annajane!” Voncile motioned her over. The older woman’s face was wreathed in smiles. Her hair had been freshly permed and colored, and she wore a muted navy print rayon dress.
“Mason tells me you have happy news,” Voncile said, her voice low. “Praise the Lord!”
“Thank you, Voncile,” Annajane said, twisting her engagement ring around to face her palm. “We’re not really making a public announcement yet, but I know Mason couldn’t wait to tell you himself.”
“He was grinning ear to ear when he came in on Monday morning,” Voncile said. “I don’t know when I’ve seen him that happy.”
Annajane laughed. “I’m pretty happy myself, to tell you the truth.”
Voncile sighed and shook her head. “That Celia sure had me fooled. I thought she was just about the nicest, sweetest girl Mason had ever dated—except for you, of course.”
“She fooled a lot of people,” Annajane commented.
“She took a nice check with her when she left, too,” Voncile said indignantly. “Some people have no shame.”
“Maybe so,” Annajane said. She watched as the two route drivers gathered up their fast food bags and tossed them in the trash on the way out of the room.
“Say, Voncile,” Annajane said, trying to sound casual. “Did you know anything about Glenn Bayless having heart problems before he had the heart attack that killed him?”
“Why do you ask?”
“Something came up today,” Annajane said vaguely. “And it started me wondering. So, had he had symptoms in the past?”
“Oh, yes,” Voncile said. “You know he had a spell here in the office, a few months before he passed. It about scared me half to death.”
“Really?” Annajane said, leaning closer. “I didn’t know that. When was this?”
She had to think. “I know it was summertime. One afternoon, he’d had a big steak lunch, probably at his Rotary meeting. He came back here, and his face was so pale; he looked awful. He swore he felt fine, but I knew he didn’t. I got him a glass of water and some antacids, but it didn’t seem to do much good. I’ll tell you, Annajane, I fussed at him so much that day, he threatened to fire me. He finally did call his cardiologist, Dr. McNamara, over in Pinehurst, and of course when the doctor heard his symptoms, he wanted to call an ambulance for Mr. Glenn. Instead, I drove him over to Pinehurst myself.”
“Was it a heart attack?” Annajane asked.
“I don’t think so. But you know how Mr. Glenn was. He was that vain about his age. Never wanted to admit anything was wrong. I’ll bet he never stayed home sick more than once or twice in all the years I worked for him.”
“Mason is the same way,” Annajane said. “Never gives in to a cold, flat denies the possibility he could ever get sick. So, Glenn had been seeing a cardiologist?”
“Sure,” Voncile said. “You know, I made Mr. Glenn’s appointments, business and personal. Even doctors, dentists, barbershop—everything. That way I kept everything on one calendar, so I could remind him. I made his appointments with Dr. Kaufman, and Dr. McNamara. And I got his prescriptions filled. I had to keep after him to take those pills every day.”
“For his heart condition?” Annajane asked.
“And his high blood pressure,” Voncile said. “We had the same prescription.”
Voncile folded and unfolded a paper napkin. “Annajane, why are you asking me all these questions about Mr. Glenn?” she asked. “He’s been gone all these years. Five years now. Are you going to tell me what happened at that meeting with the lawyers today? Mason looked kinda funny when you all got back from lunch.”
“I’d prefer you to hear it from Mason,” Annajane said.
Voncile’s face fell.
“All right,” Annajane said. “I know Mason had to get on a conference call after lunch. And I know he’d probably tell you this himself. So here it is. Glenn’s trust left equal shares of the company to his children, but not to Sallie. His four children: Mason, Davis, Pokey, and Sophie.”
Voncile raised an eyebrow. “You’re saying Sophie is Mr. Glenn’s child? Not Mason’s? My goodness, that must have taken everybody by surprise. But how can a five-year-old own part of the company?”
Annajane sat back in the hard plastic chair and regarded Voncile. She had the best poker face she’d ever seen.
“As her legal guardian, Mason will control Sophie’s share of the business until she comes of age when she’s twenty-one,” Annajane said.
Voncile processed that for a moment, then nodded her head slowly in understanding. “So, if Pokey and Mason, and Sophie, don’t want to sell off the company, they outvote Davis, is that right?”
“Essentially,” Annajane said.
“Praise the Lord!” Voncile said, raising her eyes heavenward. “My stomach has just been in knots all this week, thinking about what might happen to all of us if we got sold.”
“Mine, too,” Annajane admitted.
“And Sallie doesn’t have a say in what happens to Quixie?”
“Nope,” Annajane said. “According to Mr. Thomas, Glenn didn’t think Sallie would want to be bothered with running the company at her age. And, after all, he’d already left her pretty well-fixed in his will.”
“My, my,” Voncile said. “I’ll bet there were some fireworks when all of that came out. Especially the part about Sophie.”
“You already knew about Sophie, didn’t you?” Annajane asked.
The older woman allowed herself a small, private smile. “I guessed,” Voncile admitted. “But I never said a word to anybody. And I never will. I’ll take it to my grave.”
“I know Mason will appreciate that. But how did you know?”
Voncile cut her sandwich half into quarters, and then eighths, but she didn’t eat them. “Mr. Glenn had me handle the paperwork to put that girl on the company payroll. We never had anybody working for us in Jacksoville, Florida, before. And then she’d call the office, sometimes, looking for him.” She pursed her lips in disapproval. “Just how old a girl was she?”
“Young. Just twenty-six when she had the baby.”
“Mercy.” She shook her head. “Mr. Glenn knew I didn’t approve of that kind of thing. He was a good man in so many ways, Annajane. He helped people in this town in more ways than you’ll ever know. Paid doctor bills, got folks out of jail. Had to get a few folks put in jail, too. He bought people cars, gave them jobs.”
Annajane smiled. “He gave me my first real job when I was fifteen, remember?”
“I sure do, honey. You were so serious and business-like. Such a good little worker. Mr. Glenn noticed that, too. You were always his favorite.”
“And he was mine, too,” Annajane said, feeling a little weepy. “Even before Mason and I got married, he always treated me like one of the family.”
“Unlike some folks,” Voncile commented. “Miss Sallie just never did take to you, did she?”
“Sallie … had an old, silly grudge against my mother,” Annajane said. “And she always thought Mason could have done better. Maybe she was right.”
“Never,” Voncile said. “I always thought you were Mason’s one true love, even though I did get hoodwinked by that Celia. Mason is a good man, like his daddy. Did you know Mr. Glenn helped us buy our house? My husband, Claude, had been out of work, so the bank wouldn’t give us a mortgage. Mr. Glenn held the paper on the house and let me pay off a little bit every week. Interest-free. He didn’t go to church like Miss Sallie, but he was as fine a Christian man as I ever knew. Not perfect, though. He just had a weakness for the flesh is all. I used to pray about it all the time.”
“Voncile,” Annajane hesitated. “Well, maybe it’s none of my business. Never mind.”
“Go ahead and ask, honey. You’re wanting to know if Sallie knew about the other women, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Annajane said.
Voncile rewrapped the remnants of her sandwich into a neat wax-paper bundle while she thought about her answer.
“If she knew, she never let on to me,” she said finally. “But she wouldn’t have. She is a proud lady, and of course we didn’t really have that kind of relationship. As far as Sallie was concerned, I was just somebody who worked for her husband at the plant.”
“Did Sallie know about Glenn’s heart condition?”
“I don’t see how she couldn’t have known,” Voncile said. “With them living in the same house. I sure knew about my Claude’s cancer. That man didn’t have a hangnail or a hemorrhoid that I didn’t have to take care of.”
That made Annajane laugh. She remembered Voncile’s husband. He was a skinny stick of a man, who always seemed to have an ailment of some kind. He’d taken early retirement from the plant in his late forties.
She decided to confide further in Mason’s administrative assistant. “At the lawyer’s office today, Sallie said she had no idea Glenn ever had any heart problems.”
“That’s not right. It can’t be right,” Voncile said. “Why, Annajane, that Saturday, the day he died, I talked to him on the phone that morning. With him not making it to the Christmas party the night before, I got a little worried that maybe he wasn’t feeling too good. So I called to see if he was all right.”
“What did he say?” Annajane asked, intrigued.
“He sounded funny; his voice was kind of weak,” Voncile said. “He kept insisting he was fine, but he didn’t sound fine. He sounded like he did the last time he was having chest pains. I told him he needed to call Dr. Mac or get over to the hospital.”
“Did he agree to do that?” Annajane asked.
“He kind of laughed at me and said I was overreacting. He said Sallie was right there, and she’d take good care of him.”
“What time was that?” Annajane asked.
“Hmmm.” Voncile folded and refolded her paper lunch sack while she tried to remember. “It must have been around ten o’clock, because I needed to go out and do some last-minute Christmas shopping.”
Annajane felt a chill go up her spine. “Did you check back later in the day to see how he was?”
“I tried,” Voncile said. “I called his cell phone before noon, when I got back from the store, but my call went straight to voice mail, so I called the house. Sallie answered right away, and I asked her how Mr. Glenn was feeling. She told me he was fine, which kind of surprised me. He sure wasn’t fine when I’d talked to him earlier.”
“Did you tell her he’d been having chest pains earlier in the day?”
Voncile’s face crinkled up in concentration. “It’s hard to remember—it was so long ago. I think I asked to speak to him, but she said he was taking a nap or something.”
“So you never did talk to Glenn again?”
“No,” Voncile said, frowning. “I tried later in the day, around three, maybe, but all I got was a busy signal. I tried and tried, for half an hour or so, but then I kind of forgot about it because we were getting my granddaughter’s angel costume ready for her Sunday School pageant. And then we drove over to Garner to spend the night with my daughter.”
Now it was Annajane’s turn to think back on that Saturday, with all its painful memories. She’d run into her mother-in-law at noon, at the country club, and Sallie had been oddly insistent that Annajane join her group for lunch.
She wondered whether Sallie was aware that her husband was having breathing problems and chest pains earlier in the day.
Voncile looked stricken. “Oh heavens. He must have had his heart attack right after I talked to him.”
“I don’t think so,” Annajane said slowly. “Sallie said she found Glenn unconscious at around six that evening. That’s when she called the ambulance. They worked on him at the hospital, but the doctors said it was too late.”
“But that was hours and hours after I talked to him,” Voncile said. “I thought … I mean, I always assumed he’d gone to the hospital earlier in the day, right after we talked. Are you sure that’s right, Annajane?”
“Very sure,” Annajane said soberly.
Voncile crumpled her paper bag into a tight ball. “I just don’t understand. Why didn’t Sallie call the doctor? Or take him to the hospital that morning?”
“That’s what I’d like to know,” Annajane told her.
51
Pokey Bayless Riggs stood on the doorstep of her brother’s bachelor pad, a contemporary two-story wooden structure with soaring beams and weirdly jutting angles located on the grounds of the Cherry Hill estate, just out of Sallie’s line of vision. She’d called in advance and left numerous voice-mail messages, but she had gotten no response. Now she was determined to have it out with him, face-to-face.
She’d been ringing the doorbell and pounding on the door with no luck. Finally, she took a step backward and, cupping her hands into a makeshift megaphone, began hollering, “Davis Bayless! I know you’re in there, you weasel, so you might as well let me in.
“Davis! I’m not going away. I’ll stand here all night if I have to.”
Finally, she walked around to the back of the house, tried the kitchen door, and found it unlocked. She stepped inside and found Davis, seated at the smoked-glass kitchen table, eating a microwaved chicken potpie and washing it down with what looked like a very large tumbler of Dewar’s.
His suit jacket hung from the back of his chair, and he’d loosened his tie and rolled up the sleeves of his dress shirt.
“Go away,” he said sourly.
“Nope,” she said, seating herself at the table, opposite him.
“I got nothin’ to say to you,” he said, fishing a large green garden pea out of the potpie and lining it up on the edge of the plate with a lot of other discarded green peas.
“Then don’t talk,” Pokey said. “Just sit there and listen.”
“This is my damned house. I don’t have to sit here and take any crap off of you,” Davis said. “Why don’t you go on home to your husband and kids?”
But Pokey had had a belly full of her brother. Now she had fire in her eyes and was ready for a showdown.
“Don’t do this, Davis,” she said, crossing her arms across her chest and regarding him with a mixture of regret and disgust.
“Do what?” he asked, innocence itself. “Eat a potpie for dinner? You should try one.” He pushed his plate in her direction. “They’re really good. Jax Snax just bought this company. Maydene’s Home-Style Frozen Diner Dinners. Jerry sent me a big ole carton full of ’em. They got frozen pot roast, frozen chicken and dumplings, frozen mac n’ cheese. I may never have to go out to dinner again.”
“Stop trying to change the subject,” Pokey ordered. “Everybody in town knows what you’ve been up to. You’ve hired a lawyer to contest Daddy’s trust arrangement, and you’re already starting to drag our family’s name through the mud. And for what? More money?”
Davis placed his fork on the side of his plate with elaborate precision. He wiped his mouth with a paper napkin. “Look here, Pokey. I don’t see why you’re so hot and bothered about selling Quixie. I mean, let’s face it. You ain’t never really had to work a day in your life. Sure, you played at working for Daddy summers in college, and a little bit after you married Pete, but you’re just a stay-at-home mama. And that’s fine. You’ve got three swell little boys and another on the way. Pete makes a good living. Why do you wanna go messin’ around with stuff that doesn’t even really concern you?”
“Don’t you dare patronize me, Davis Bayless,” Pokey snapped. “I am not one of your stupid bimbos. I may not have worked in the day-to-day end of Quixie, but you better believe I know what goes on with our business, and I do care. I care deeply. Daddy knew that, even if you don’t, which is why he left me an equal share of the business.”
“Yeah, well, I wouldn’t count on that trust agreement standing, if I were you,” Davis said lazily. “My lawyer says there’s loopholes in that thing big enough to drive a Quixie truck through.”
Pokey clenched and unclenched her fists and finally clasped them tightly together in an effort to keep herself from slapping the smile right off her big brother’s jowls.
“Your lawyer is a jackleg Yankee just dying to take you for every dime you’ve got,” Pokey said. “And in the meantime, you need to know that I will fight you every step of the way if I have to. Because I will be damned if I will allow you to sell off my heritage. And my sons’. I’ve taken a look at that Jax Snax offer, and it’s a load of garbage. You know what happened to that family-owned pretzel business they bought? They shut it down. Yeah. Spun off the one product they really wanted, shifted production of it to one of their own plants, laid off two hundred and fifty workers, then sold the equipment for scrap metal. That town was already hurting, but losing the plant was like putting a stake through its heart. Half the houses in town are in foreclosure, and I read on the Internet that they’ve closed the town’s only high school. They have to bus the kids forty-five minutes away to the next town over. I am not gonna sit still and let that happen here.”
Davis shook his head. “You and Mason just don’t get it. Frankly, Daddy didn’t get it either. Even six, seven years ago, the handwriting was on the wall. But he refused to believe it. Twenty years ago, there were nearly a dozen other family-owned soda companies operating in the Southeast. Now? You’ve got what? Three or four? If that many? You know why? Because it’s a lost cause. Quixie is a dinosaur. We can’t compete with the big boys. Not unless we become one of ’em.”
“See!” Pokey said. “When you think like that, it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. We’re still operating in the black, still have a good product, but I believe you actually want the company to fail. That’s why you resist any kind of change in the product line or spending any money to update the plant or the distribution network. You’re deliberately sabotaging Quixie.”
“Me?” Davis laughed. “I don’t have to do a goddamn thing to make that happen. All I have to do is sit back and let Mason keep on the way he’s keeping on. Which I don’t intend to do.”
Pokey took a deep breath. “What’s the matter with you, Davis?”
“Me? Nothin’. I am fine as frog hair.”
“No, seriously,” Pokey said. “You’re my brother, and I love you, but I don’t understand one thing about you. We were raised in the same house, by the same parents, but sometimes I wonder how you got to be the way you are. Don’t you have an ounce of loyalty towards our family?”
“I’m a businessman,” Davis said, shrugging. “Family loyalty’s got nothing to do with it. I love my big brother, but I have serious doubts about his abilities to run Quixie the way it needs to be run in this economy. I’ve tried to talk sense to him about that for the past five years, but to Mason I’ll always be the dumb baby brother. The wannabe.”
“You say you love your brother?” Pokey asked. “Is that why you slept with his fiancée?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Davis said. He took a long drink of the scotch, and she noted that his hand shook. Just a little. “And this conversation is beginning to bore me, little sister. What say you get the hell out of my house?”
“I’ll go when I’ve had my say,” Pokey retorted. “And I believe you do know what I’m talking about. You and Celia have been in cahoots over this Jax Snax deal for a long time now. I just wonder how long you’ve been in bed together, literally.”
“You’re crazy,” Davis said.
“Not as crazy as you,” she said calmly. “Let’s talk about Friday night, shall we? The night before Celia was supposed to marry Mason. Remember him? Your beloved big brother, the one you’re so loyal to? How crazy could you be, Davis, taking Celia to the same motel you always take your sluts to? How stupid could you be, paying cash but making sure to ask about the Quixie employee discount? And what kind of lowlife, slimy horndog struts around calling himself Harry Dix?”
Davis looked away and closed his eyes slowly.
“You don’t know anything,” he said. “You’re bluffing.”
“Really?” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a photocopy of the registration book from the Pinecone and waved it under his nose. “That’s my proof. Your handwriting, and the place where you wrote down the license number of the Boxster. Dumb shit. And you should know, Celia was seen coming out of that room with you the next morning by more than one person. You are so busted.”
He opened his eyes. “Does Mason know?”
“No,” Pokey said. She put the photocopy back in her pocket. “He already knows she’s a lying, cheating piece of crap. I really don’t have the heart to let him know his own brother is just as bad. Or worse.”
“So, what? You’re gonna blackmail me now?”
“No. I’m going to appeal to your long-dormant sense of decency. And your greed. Pete and I have had a long talk. We want you to sell us your share of Quixie.”
“As if.” Davis drained the scotch in his glass and poured himself another tumbler full. He took a long drink, smacked his lips, and drank again.
Pokey reached over and took the glass out of his hand. “Listen to me, Davis. We’re serious. Jax was prepared to pay the family thirty million for Quixie. You own a quarter interest. Pete and I want to buy you out. We’ll pay you seven and a half million cash. You take the money, go do whatever you want to do. Buy that house on Figure Eight Island, take a job with Jax Snax, or whatever. Or just sit back and count your money. But you walk away from the company. And you drop your challenge to Dad’s trust agreement.”
Davis got up and walked over to one of the gleaming ebonized kitchen cupboards. He got himself another tumbler, grabbed the Dewar’s bottle, and poured himself another dose. He leaned up against the black granite countertop. “What if I don’t take your offer? What if I decide to stay around and fight?”
“You’ll lose,” Pokey said, her chin jutting out. “And in the process, you will have antagonized everybody in this town. You will have trashed Daddy’s good name, and you will have estranged yourself from your entire family. Including Mama.”
“Mama…” he started to say.
“Mama is feeling hurt and betrayed right now, finding out about Sophie the way she did. Although I’m not really certain she didn’t suspect all along that she wasn’t Mason’s child. She’ll get over it, eventually. And when she does, she will not want that piece of news broadcast all over some lawsuit and the Bayless family name dragged through the mud. And you had better believe she would never, ever, forgive you for the way you betrayed Mason by sleeping by Celia.”
Davis jiggled the ice in his glass and smirked. “All of y’all are gonna have to get over this thing you have against Celia.”
“And why is that?” Pokey asked.
He chewed on the ice for a moment before answering. “What would you say if I told you we’re together now?”
“You and Celia? Is this a rhetorical question, or is this your ass-backward way of telling me the two of you are an item?”
He shrugged. “It was probably inevitable. We both tried to pretend we weren’t attracted to each other, but hell, it is what it is.”
Pokey shuddered. “What it is is grotesque, Davis. The two of you together? It’s a bad reality show on a third-rate cable channel. But the sad thing is, the two of you deserve each other. I just hope Mason doesn’t find out when the two of you hooked up.”
“You just said you’d never tell Mason,” Davis pointed out.
“I wouldn’t. But if Mama were to find out…” Pokey shrugged. “You know what Passcoe’s like. It’s a small town.”
“It’s a shithole,” Davis muttered into his scotch. “A two-horse, two-traffic-light shithole.”
“All the more reason you should take the money and run,” Pokey suggested. “Delta’s ready when you are.”
“Maybe I will,” Davis said. “Tell Pete to give me a call in the morning, if he’s serious.”
“No need to talk to Pete,” Pokey said. “I handle all our family finances. I’ll have our lawyer draw up an agreement, and I’ll send it over to you in the morning.”
