Compass Rose Part 28

"I'll do it myself." The secretary opened her mouth and blinked. Elsie said, "I'm faculty, I'm administration." She pulled Rose's file. The charge was for incidental room and board. Elsie said out loud, "I thought she slept on the floor. Well, maybe not. But it was all for that d.a.m.n play."

In the file she saw the tax return she'd had to submit for Rose's scholars.h.i.+p. An Aldrich scholars.h.i.+p-that egomaniac put his name on everything. And there was d.i.c.k's tax return. Of course-both parents. She couldn't resist looking. d.i.c.k's gross income was a lot bigger than hers, but his net was much lower. Interest on debts, fuel, maintenance ... Ah. Child support. She'd noted it in her monthly bank statement, but now she saw it as ... what? More than a tenth of his net, closer to an eighth.

It was then that it occurred to her that this was how Jack was so well informed about d.i.c.k's finances. She said to the secretary, "Who goes over these files? The scholars.h.i.+p committee?"

"Yes."

"And who's on that?"

"The headmaster, the dean, three board members-"

"Mr. Aldrich?"

"Yes. He's chairman of the board. They meet in his office over at Sawtooth."

"And they take the scholars.h.i.+p files over there?"

"Yes-I mean, I make copies for them."

"And what happens to the copies? Do you go get them?"

"No. Mr. Aldrich takes care of that. They're confidential. I think he has his secretary shred them."

Elsie jogged back to her house, got in her car, and drove to Sawtooth. Bold. Time for her to be bold. March in and tell him ... what? That he'd abused his position as chairman of the board of the Perryville School, used a confidential file for his private scheme, that unless he gave it up, she'd go to the board and make a big enough stink so he'd lose his chairmans.h.i.+p. He loved his chairmans.h.i.+p, part of being the laird of South County. And there'd be a taint on his good name. They'd have to take his name off the Aldrich scholars.h.i.+p.

Halfway up the stairs to the top floor, she stopped. She was sure he'd cheated, but what proof did she have? All right, all right-go in softly. She was here to ask a favor. What? About the one hundred eighty-five dollars. As head of the scholars.h.i.+p committee, he could clear that up. Penny ante for him, not for her. Hat in hand, poor Elsie. But somewhere in his files ... Get him out of his office. How? Yell fire? All right, all right, something more sensible. She'd think of something.

No secretary in the anteroom. Lunch hour. She knocked on the office door. No answer. Tried the k.n.o.b, not locked. Easier than she thought. And if he came back? She'd be writing him a note. On the memo pad on his desk she wrote, "Dear Jack, A problem I need a little help with." All right, enough there. Files? No steel filing cabinets for Jack, solid oak. Under what? S for Sawtooth? L for land? P for Pierce? No, no, and no. Start from the beginning. And there it was-Adjacent Properties. There was Hazard, and there was Pierce Creek property. Indeed. Erase the people. And there was d.i.c.k's tax return. She pulled it out. There it was in her hand. But now what? If she'd thought to bring a camera ... All right, all right. A witness. Go down to the kitchen and get Mary. Ah. She'd been mean to Mary on the phone-got in an angry jab and hung up on her. But still, Mary wasn't for Jack.

She took a step toward the door. Idiot-there was the phone on Jack's desk. Mary wouldn't have to come up; all she would have to do was listen. And better yet-fortune favors the brave-there was a list of in-house extensions. One for the front desk, two for the kitchen. She imagined Mary under oath-"Yes, Elsie called me from Jack's office. I could tell it was in-house ..."

Mary answered, "Sawtooth kitchen."

"It's Elsie. I'm in Jack's office and I found d.i.c.k's tax return. Jack shouldn't have it; it's part of the scholars.h.i.+p file."

"Elsie, I don't-"

"Just remember. d.i.c.k's tax return. In the Pierce Creek file."

Jack's secretary called through the open door-"Mr. Aldrich? I'm back from lunch."

Elsie hung up.

The secretary said again, "Mr. Aldrich?"

Elsie thought of saying something in a gruff voice, maybe "Close the door, please, Miss Swift." No. Grade B. She called out, "I'm waiting for him. It's me, Elsie."

Miss Swift poked her head in. "Does he know you're here? He didn't say ... I thought he was going to play tennis." She looked out the front window. "Yes. There he is." She looked at the open file drawer. "I'll go get him."

"Thank you."

Miss Swift hesitated. Thought better of whatever she was going to say. Left.

Elsie took a breath. Leave the file drawer open? Yes. And she had the tax return in her hand. Let him come in and figure it out. Better yet, lay the tax return on his desk. She'd stand up and stab it with her finger.

Jack came in wearing his tennis whites, his face and knees pink.

"I've just got a minute. Or I might say that you've just got a minute. Miss Swift tells me ... Never mind. What are you here for?"

She braced herself to feel as if she was in uniform again. "That paper on your desk." She took a step toward it to stab it with her accusatory finger, but he beat her to it. He picked it up. "Is this from in there?" He pointed his own accusatory finger at the file drawer.

"Yes. And it shouldn't be. The scholars.h.i.+p files ... That's supposed to be for the scholars.h.i.+p, the confidential scholars.h.i.+p meeting. You're using it illegally."

Jack sat down. He said, " 'Illegally.' " He wasn't indignant, just musing. He said, "Miss Swift, could you come in here for a second?"

Miss Swift practically stood at attention.

"Could you find the Sawtooth S and L file? And then go down and tell them I'll be along in just another minute."

He riffled through the file and pulled out a copy of d.i.c.k's tax return. He held it out to her. "As the mortgage holder in due course, we acquire all the information d.i.c.k submitted to the bank: the appraisal, outstanding debts, and, of course, tax returns. So it's in the S and L file and cross-filed under Pierce Creek. And there we are. Anything else? Well, yes. We should remember nursery rules. I won't go into your room and play with the toys in your toybox if you won't play with mine." He got up. "I'll see you out."

chapter eighty-one.

I should have said, I should have said, I should have said ... Nothing. Just as well she'd said nothing.

By the time she drove out the Sawtooth gate the heat in her face was gone. Cold. Cold to her core.

She got home. Too incompetent to do anything but slump onto the sofa and curl up. Everything that came into her head was in miniature. Tiny scenes on a one-inch screen. Jack laughing, saying to someone outside the frame, "I caught Elsie snooping through my files." He laughed, and everyone joined in. He said, "No, no. Just sent her home."

In all the years she'd known him she hadn't ever lost an argument to Jack. Oh, he'd got his way, there was Sawtooth Point turned into his gated domain. But she'd been right, and now she was wrong-wrong and nakedly foolish.

It wasn't fair that this one time, this one technicality, should undo her.

It wasn't fair that men got the verbs and she ended up with adjectives. Jack plotted and squeezed and bulldozed. She was caught snooping-pathetic participle, half verb, half adjective.

It wasn't fair that she knew South County, had hiked and waded and paddled all through it, knew the animals, the insects, the trees, the rocks, and the ponds, and Jack shuffled papers and owned it. He put on his wizard lawyer's hat, pulled out his magic papers and wrote his magic words, and-presto change-o-they cast a spell. Okay, Jack was bad, but maybe she wasn't good enough. She'd served her time in the woods and marshes, and used up that goodness in taking d.i.c.k to bed. No sudden accident-she'd wanted him, wanted to have their child. And then? She'd been good again, good with Miss Perry, as good as a dutiful daughter-Captain Teixeira said so. And she'd absorbed the stinging side of Rose and let May and Mary have their share of Rose's affection. Of course, there was another way of weighing that-what single mother wouldn't be grateful for help? All right, all right-but here she was now, fighting to save May's house ... so May would say to d.i.c.k, "Go do your laundry in Elsie's was.h.i.+ng machine"? She knew what that meant-she was sure she knew what that meant. But twenty minutes ago, she'd been just as sure she had Jack dead to rights. Could it be that May only meant for d.i.c.k to visit her the way Tom visited Rose? Elsie had sifted d.i.c.k's report of that do-your-laundry remark and his dumb male puzzlement, stuck in the literal. She herself had sifted it into finer and finer grains. She'd imagined May's coming to a grim indifference-he could go do his laundry the same way he went to sea. Over the horizon. She'd imagined May settling on the phrase "Do your laundry" as willed blindness. Elsie had also imagined a barb of disdain-"Go do your dirty laundry." Take it up there-all that smell of rotten bait, of diesel fuel, of overspiced food your Vietnamese and Portuguese crew cook up for you, and your captain's swagger. Then go get cleaned up and come back home and make yourself useful.

This wasn't some silky French arrangement, two sets of books for the business, two sets of books for la vie conjugale. This was Yankee stoicism. Less said the better.

It sounded right. The problem was that she couldn't be certain. She couldn't march up to May and say, "I've been meaning to ask you-do you not want to know?" She vaguely remembered from college physics something about uncertainty, about indeterminacy. The very observation is an intrusion by the observer that ruins the experiment ... Was that Heisenberg, or was it Schrodinger and his cat?

Since when did she worry about certainty? She used to thrive on taking chances. She used to be good at keeping her balance. Now she was sprawling again. She'd been wrong about d.i.c.k's files, fallen out of a tree, got poked in the face with a stick. Fainted dead away in Captain Teixeira's radio room. Losing her footing right and left. And no skipping over that she'd opened the window to Walt, lost her grip. Falling was when she stood still as he unpeeled her bicycle suit; falling was when she was nothing but breath, so weightless that he hoisted her up and swung her onto the bed, nothing to it.

A trickle of heat in her. Immediately chilled. If anyone found out. Him and his "This is like a dream come true." Ripe for telling. A Deirdre O'Malley story.

She shook it away, back into the pile of her other mistakes-all in a clump all since ... when? Since Rose's play. Her headlong charge at Rose. Her tin ear. No, worse than a tin ear. Something was wrong with her inner sense, whatever part of the brain it was that gave her a moment of insulation between her first impulse and rus.h.i.+ng ahead. But how could she have known about the Sawtooth S&L's holding d.i.c.k's mortgage? Stupid girl! Mr. Salviatti told her.

Never mind if she wasn't good enough-what if she didn't know what was really going on? She used to be pleased by how alert she was. But now, if she was sleepwalking, how would she find her way?

chapter eighty-two.

Jack sent Elsie a copy of the plans for his new property. The attached handwritten note read: "To save you another trip to my office." The first page showed a bridge across Pierce Creek and a raised boardwalk leading to a gazebo in the nature sanctuary. The architect's drawing included a woman in a wheelchair on the boardwalk. Jack included a copy of a letter from Elsie's old boss at Natural Resources, approving the plan and praising Jack for "encouraging public access in a way that minimizes impact on the environment."

Elsie leafed through the plans in a rush of anger. The second time through she made a more careful and bitter a.s.sessment. The wheelchair was a shrewd touch. Natural Resources was always on the defensive about access to nature for the disabled.

Page two was a map that showed a small parking lot in place of d.i.c.k's front yard, another smaller footbridge across the creek, and a path and a ramp to the boardwalk. All in all, Jack would lose only a narrow strip of the three acres to the general public. The royal road was from Sawtooth, across the downstream edge of d.i.c.k's three acres. There was plenty of room for the three new cottages, daintily sketched in. The contractor for the boardwalk, bridges, gazebo, and cottages was to be Wormsley and Fitzgerald. So Eddie and Phoebe had rolled over. And, Elsie noticed, the company was no longer Wormsley and Son. Had Phoebe finally edged Walt out? Or did Walt just get an urge to ride off on his motorcycle into the north woods? A small bubble of relief there.

Page three was another map. Everett Hazard's old barn was to be the Hazard Memorial Library. The house was still there, labeled "private dwelling," and in the field two more cottages. So-six house sales and six new Sawtooth members.h.i.+ps-Jack would rake in almost two million dollars. Of course, he'd have to pay Eddie's company to build the five cottages. Those would cost Jack-what?-a half million. And Jack would have to pay something to Mary and JB, but just the difference between the Hazard property and Mary's old restaurant. For d.i.c.k and May, Jack was throwing in a small rickety house in Snug Harbor and an unplowed field that didn't even border a paved road-getting those items off his books. She was pretty sure he had a tax dodge in there somehow. By her rough calculation Jack would come out with a net profit of a million and change. Jack's making money wasn't painful in itself; he'd always been annoyingly rich. It was his triumph that was hateful. Half by bullying, half by finagling, he'd rearranged people's lives and won. What's more, she counted it as his fault that she was angry with most of the people she cared about.

She was about to shriek when Rose emerged from her bedroom. Half asleep, she shuffled to the bathroom. Midday. Rose's diva schedule.

Elsie had given in to the show at Sawtooth. Rose had sat across from Elsie at the dining table and listed the arguments for her singing and not singing, laying out the fingers of her right hand and her left hand.

"I owe it to the rest of the cast." (Elsie recognized a Mary Scanlon note). "Of course, Uncle Jack deserves to be hurt. But May told me that she can't bear it if I don't sing. She says she'd feel worse about that than having to move. And she says they're going to have to move anyway. But you think ... you think I'd be a selfish little s.h.i.+t."

Rose let her head fall on her hands and began to cry.

"No," Elsie said. "I never said that." She saw Rose as a child again. She saw Rose being pulled back and forth across the splinters of the grown-up fight with Jack. She said, "It's okay, it's okay. We did what we could. You did as much as anybody."

Rose had kept on crying. "It's okay," Elsie said. "Mary wants you to sing. May wants you to sing."

Rose lifted her head. Elsie waited for Rose to look at her, to look to her for the final word.

Rose sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She went to the kitchen sink and splashed her face. "I guess," Rose said. She patted herself dry with a dish towel. "I guess they know I'm only really happy when I'm-"

"Onstage." Elsie didn't mean it to sound as sharp as it came out.

"No," Rose said. She turned around. She wasn't angry. She sighed and said, "It's not like that. It's more like when I'm singing, I'm more music than I'm me." She shrugged. "It's hard to explain."

Elsie was irritated by Rose's "I'm more music than I'm me," dismissed by Rose's "It's hard to explain." She'd been trying to comfort Rose, she'd invoked Mary and May. She'd hoped, of course, that Rose would come back to her. All right, then. It wasn't enough to be moved by Rose's tears and to coo a few soothing words. And she hadn't even done that all that well. "Only really happy ... onstage." That toad of a remark had hopped out of her mouth before she could stop it-a reflex of all her old quarrels with a difficult child.

Lucky for Rose, then, that she had Mary and May to swaddle her. Elsie didn't let that thought hop out of her mouth. With some effort, she said, "Rose. Rose, I know that sometimes I'm a difficult mother."

"It could be worse."

Elsie had laughed.

And now here was Rose at midday in her nightgown and bathrobe. Elsie erased the word diva from her thoughts. She said, "How'd it go?"

"Fine."

"You want some breakfast?"

"Maybe later."

"You know, if you don't eat at least a little breakfast the first hour you're up, your body thinks that-"

"I know, I know. I know what my body thinks, thank you."

Rose stopped her slow shuffle and shook her head. She turned toward Elsie. "Mom, I almost forgot. Tomorrow's the day everyone's going to help May with her new field. Well, not everyone. Mary's got to work at Sawtooth, but JB's going, and Deirdre and-"

"I know. Deidre's picking me up in her jeep."

"I'm going but not till later. May said I should sleep in. So I hope you can get there early."

"I'll be early."

"This means a lot to May after everything that's happened."

"I know."

"You were late when we all went to May's house."

Elsie waited until Rose was brus.h.i.+ng her teeth, her knuckles stopping her mouth while she worked on her back molars. Elsie said, "Let's try to change the rhythm. I may have a tin ear, but I've got a sense of rhythm. So I won't nag you, you won't nag me. I've been angry at Jack and in a bad mood because I screwed up. You're working hard, you're doing a grown-up job, and you should get to be a little temperamental." Rose pulled the toothbrush out and leaned over to rinse her mouth from the spigot. Elsie said, "But I think we could both-"

"Mom, I get it."

chapter eighty-three.

When Elsie got to the field she recognized the place. At first she just took in Eddie on his tractor and the little crowd of volunteers, but then she saw the row of black locusts. Her sticks were still there, the two top ones dangling askew.

It took them a while to get organized, since Eddie kept deferring to May and May kept deferring to Eddie. Phoebe said, "You've got a plan, Eddie. Don't keep it a secret. I've got to get back to Sawtooth."

Everyone got a crowbar or a spade and lined up. Eddie said, "Okay-put the rocks here in my front scoop. When I've got a load, I'll dump them over there. If you've got a crowbar, stick it in a ways. If you hit a rock, find an end and pry her up. Get someone with a spade to dig around and loosen her up."

The gra.s.s was still wet with dew, but the sun was high enough to make it hot. Before long their boots and pant cuffs were soaked and their s.h.i.+rts were getting wet with sweat. Eddie's tractor engine chugging along behind them was noisy enough, but it was the rocks clattering into the front scoop that made conversation impossible.

Eddie yelled, "Whoa!" and drove off to dump a load. Deirdre said to JB, "You'll ruin your back if you don't bend your knees. Watch how Tran does it."

JB said, "Don't teach your grandmother to suck eggs," and May laughed. JB, encouraged by this, said, "This kind of work is in my blood. Listen, O'Malley, I'll bet you don't know who's the second-most-important man in Irish history."