Best Foot Forward (14 page)

I don't think I'm going to wait for that.

Someone in this company had to have this information.

Think,
Boller.

Edna Moran in accounting; she was a good friend of Mrs. Gladstone's. The accounting department in a company keeps all money records. Everything purchased or spent by any department in the company is in their files. Edna Moran knew all.

I dialed her number.

“Hi, it's Jenna from Mrs. Gladstone's office. Mrs. Gladstone was wondering if you could help us contact the outsource people in West Virginia . . .”

“You mean the West Virginia Shoe Manufacturing Company?”

“That's the one.” I wrote
West Va Shoe Mfg Co
on my pad—underlined it twice.

“Can you hold, Jenna?”

Being on hold was part of my job.

She was back. “They're a new outsource company for us. All I've got is their phone number—I don't know why we don't have an address. It's 800-555-0033.”

I wrote that down. “Thank you, Ms. Moran.”

I called the number.

Two rings, then: “Thank you for calling the West Virginia Shoe Manufacturing Company. To send a fax, wait for the tone.” Beep . . .

I dialed it again and got the same message.

I faced my computer and silently thanked Mrs. Kletchner, the school media specialist, who had vowed to teach my class how to conduct a proper search on the computer even if it killed her, which it almost did. I typed in
West Virginia Shoe Manufacturing Company.
Pressed ENTER. In a moment, the words:

 

I typed in
West Virginia Shoe Manufacturing Company, West Virginia.

 

I checked the Yellow Pages on-line; found nothing.

This didn't make sense.

I stood at the business desk of the Chicago Public Library and said to the librarian, “Is there any way that I can check on a company and find out what they do and what their address is?” She smiled. Librarians understand about power—they know how to find anything. I gave her the name of the West Virginia Shoe Manufacturing Company and the 800 number.

She started typing; her eyes watched the computer screen. “How big is the company? Do you know?”

“I don't.”

“If they're doing business, we'll have it here.” She checked, typed. “Nothing there . . . let me see if they have a business license . . . you're sure this is the right company name?”

“Positive.”

She studied her screen. “According to every database that lists companies doing business in America, West Virginia Shoe Manufacturing doesn't exist.”

How could that be?

She checked the reverse phone directory. “Okay, we've got something, but they've got a different name.” The printer whirred out the information.

 

“But this isn't even in West Virginia.”

“No,” she said quietly. “It's not.”

I knew the Cayman Islands were in the West Indies, not West Virginia. She was typing again, clicking her mouse. “They've got a website.”

She wrote down the web address and handed it to me.

When the going gets tough, the tough get a librarian.

 

Palm trees blowing in the breeze against a blue sky. The words
Trade Winds International.
One of those websites that tells you absolutely nothing. What could this place have to do with West Virginia Shoe Company?

A few years ago at my school, some kids in the computer lab broke into the school's database and inserted the name of a fictional student, Milo Bentchik. They gave him an address, a social security number, a phone number, and a straight A average. He was active in clubs and sports. They were hoping to put him up for class president, or at the very least valedictorian, but they were found out and did penance for the rest of the year in detention.

It's amazing how you can make something fake seem real.

I called Edna Moran in accounting, who knew nothing about Trade Winds or Plant 427. She said with the merger this summer, the accounting records were being combined with the Shoe Warehouse and right now it was hard to find anything. But being the most helpful woman in America, she faxed me billing and purchasing records for West Virginia Shoe—two years' worth.

My eyes crossed as I looked at dozens of numbers and categories—leather, glue, rubber, cork, cardboard boxes, tissue paper, thread. West Virginia Shoe had ordered a lot of material over the last two years. The last order they placed was just last week.

That's pretty unusual, I'd say, for a company that doesn't exist.

Saturday. High noon. The closed-circuit TV finally came alive.

Hard-driving music played. Images flashed across the screen of shoes and feet. Elden's face broke out before us, bigger than life.

Murray gasped like people do in horror movies when the serial killer shows up.

“Welcome,” Elden said, “to the new Gladstone's!”

Customers stopped what they were doing to watch.

“Have we got surprises for you!” Elden exclaimed like a game-show host. “Daily specials, hourly sales.” Elden kept talking about the shoes on special and how they were made with quality. He mentioned the Rollings Walkers discounted
everywhere.
“The shoes that built my parents' shoe company,” he said proudly.

I tried to tune it out. Elden insisted the great tradition of Gladstone's hadn't been changed, just updated.

I couldn't listen anymore; I went upstairs.

Mrs. Gladstone had left another sticky note on my chair.

 

There was a list of companies that we did business with. It's amazing all the products you need to make a pair of shoes.

I called AAA Rubber Company, U.S. Thread, Buttons Unlimited, Zack's Zipper Company. Not one of them had heard of West Virginia Shoe or Plant 427. They all shipped their material to our plant in Bangor.

Milo Bentchik rides again.

But why?

 

The end of the day. Murray came upstairs looking happier than I'd seen him in ages.

“In this crazy world, kid, never forget the wisdom of loyal customers.”

He held out sheets of paper; on them were scribbled names, phone numbers, and pointed comments:

“We should have a decent collection by the end of the week,” Murray said. “Madeline wants to get customer comment cards printed up pronto.”

“Put some red sneakers on them.” I told him Yaley's story about the little boy.

“You know, kid, that gets me right here.” He pointed to his heart, not his stomach.

 

Sunday finally came.

I met Charlie at the doughnut shop. I got the tour, too.

“What I love about it here is these doughnuts make people happy,” Charlie told me. “People think every doughnut is alike.” He broke a doughnut in half, showed me the inside. “But to be a Duran's, it's got to have substance and texture. And it's got to be big!” He opened his hands. “How can that be junk food?”

He showed me how to roll out the dough. He had strong arms. “Timing's everything with doughnuts—you let them cook a few minutes too long, they get too heavy.”

“Have you always worked here?”

“I rebelled against the family business for a while.”

“You don't look like a rebel.”

He smiled. “I wasn't a real good one. When my great-grandpa died, I got serious about the place. We called him The Doughmeister. I've got a picture of him up here for inspiration.” I peered at the black-and-white shot of a tall, skinny old guy who looked a little like Charlie.

There was a sign on the wall:

 

Charlie put two raspberry creams into a bag and we walked to the theater on Dearborn Street that showed old movies.

The craggy old detective was examining a footprint the murderer left in the garden. “They always leave something,” he said to the younger one.

Charlie opened the bag in the darkened theater and handed me half a doughnut.

“You see that insole step?” The old detective pointed to an indention in the footprint.

“Yeah.”

“Well, that's made by a right foot slightly turned in at the ankle, which is exactly what Rodney Querlon has when he walks.”

Insightful music played.

“So what do we do?” asked the young detective. “Rodney Querlon has disappeared.”

The old craggy detective stood up slowly and called in the boys from forensics to sweep the place for clues. “Our man Rodney thinks he got away with murder, and when a man thinks that, you can bet he's going to make another mistake.”

We settled in as the mystery unfolded. Gradually the old detective solved the crime and dealt with the mystery of his own life.

“Here we are,” he said to his girlfriend at the end, “alone in a city teeming with lonely people. I open my doors to the rich and the poor, the lost and the unlucky. It's not the kind of work I expected to do, Myrna. But this is the work I've chosen.”

Myrna took a long drag on her cigarette without coughing. “Or maybe it chose you, Johnny.” She looked meaningfully out the window. “Maybe it chose you.”

We walked out of the theater, holding hands.

With the exception of dancing once with a guy in Texas and a few unmemorable blind dates, I haven't held many guys' hands.

I've held a lot of male feet, though.

Not every teenager can say that.

 

“Well . . . ?”
Opal asked when I called her.

“He understands retail,” I said dreamily.

By the middle of the week, the customer comment cards came from the printer, complete with a little pair of high-top red sneakers in the corner.

Did they ever!

Yaley was beaming about the cards. Mrs. Gladstone had asked her to design them.

“I've never been paid as an artist before.” Yaley held the check Mrs. Gladstone gave her like she couldn't believe it.

By the end of the week we had forty-four customer comment cards on Gladstone's new look. Comments ranged from “chaotic” to “moronic” with warnings about slipping quality on several brands.

I made copies of them and Mrs. Gladstone mailed them off to Ken Woldman and Elden. She was whistling when she did it. She was getting requests for those cards from other stores who'd had enough.

Her hip was getting worse. Her doctor was getting impatient. “She needs surgery,” he told me when I canceled appointment after appointment.

Schoolwork was mounting. I had too much to do.

I was trying to find time to see Charlie.

“You know the problem with human beings?” my grandma used to say to me. “We think we can wear too many hats at once. It's not possible.” She'd pile on two or three to make the point. “It's an outright fashion disaster.”

We'd laugh and I'd try my best to remember there's just so much a person can do at one time without going crazy.

But I was skating close to crazy.

Even journalism seemed like too much to handle. Mr. Haloran was treating us like real reporters.

Check your sources, he kept saying.

Check your facts.

Assume nothing.

My desk at work was piled high with to-do projects. Merger woes mounted. A sole-less person would have walked away, but I couldn't.

The shoe world was the world I'd chosen, or maybe it had chosen me.

I looked at the June report from our Bangor plant. Looked at the list of suppliers I'd called. There was one I'd missed—Transcon Shipping. I dialed, got Lou at the shipping desk.

“Someone else was just asking about this order,” he said. “Right now we're picking up three ocean export containers for West Virginia Shoe through to Long Beach twice a month.”

Finally—a connection! I was about to ask him what address he had for West Virginia Shoe, but then . . .

“Lou, did you say
ocean
?”

“Our ships,” Lou assured me, “are the best in the business.”

“Did you say
ships
?”

He chuckled. “That's what we use to cross the ocean.”

What's he talking about? We're an American shoe company that makes shoes in this country.

I sat up straight. “Which ocean might that be, Lou?”

“Well, we take the Pacific and then turn left into the China Sea to Thailand.”

“Thailand?”
I almost dropped the phone. “You mean the
country
?”

“That's the one.”