Creature (3 page)

“Go right in, Blake,” Anne Leverette told him from her guard post outside Thornton’s door. “He’s expecting you.” Her smile alone made Blake relax, for it was well known that if Thornton was chopping off someone’s head, Anne never smiled personally at the victim. Her loyalty to Thornton was legendary, and she was known to resent anyone she assumed had caused trouble for her boss.

Blake stepped through the double doors into the immense corner office and found Ted Thornton sitting behind a bare, black marble desk, a telephone cradled against his ear. Thornton signaled him to take a chair, then quickly wrapped up his phone call. As soon as he’d hung up, he stood, offering Blake his hand and asking if he wanted a drink.

Blake relaxed even more—the offer of a drink invariably signaled good news, and was not meant to be turned down.

“Chivas and water,” Blake replied, and Thornton smiled.

“Never settle for less than the best,” he said, pouring each of them a generous shot over a single ice cube. He grinned as he handed Blake one of the glasses. “It’s a cliché, but then, your best moment has become one, too, hasn’t it?” He held his glass up toward a large, framed mosaic on the wall. On a cobalt-blue background, the stylized white letters spelled out the slogan that Blake had dreamed up seven years before.

IF IT’S HI-TECH, IT’S TARRENTECH

“I guess you could say so,” Blake agreed, raising his own glass slightly, then taking a sip of the whiskey. Surely, at this late date, there was a more important reason for this meeting
than for Thornton merely to acknowledge the slogan that had, indeed, become a cliché over the years? He wondered what Thornton was leading up to as he watched the CEO seat himself behind his desk again and regard him appraisingly.

“Ever heard of Silverdale, Colorado?” he asked, and Blake’s heart skipped a beat. This was something neither he nor Rosalie had thought about.

“Is there anyone at TarrenTech who hasn’t?” he countered.

“Oh, I’m sure there are a few.” Thornton chuckled. “I’m not sure most of the people in the Travel Division even know about Research and Development, much less care.”

Blake permitted himself a small smile. “I’m afraid I’d have to disagree with you,” he suggested. “After all, Tom Stevens runs Travel, and his last post was Silverdale.” He didn’t feel it necessary to add that it wasn’t merely the Travel Division’s chief officer who had once been posted in Silverdale, but virtually every senior man in the TarrenTech hierarchy. A posting in Silverdale, as nearly everyone in the company knew, meant that you were in line for the top jobs. As far as Blake knew, however, no one from Marketing had ever been sent there before.

“True enough,” Thornton mused, then fell silent for a few moments as his gray eyes seemed slowly to assess Blake. “Jerry Harris has an opening out there, and he’s asked for you.”

Blake tried not to let his astonishment show. Until two years ago Jerry had run the Digital Division, and though he’d been several rungs above Blake on the corporate ladder, the two men had become good friends, largely due to the influence of their wives, neither of whom seemed to give a rap for Ted Thornton’s general disapproval of his managers becoming too friendly with men they might someday have to fire.

As if reading his thoughts, Thornton spoke again. “If you’d been working for him here, of course, I wouldn’t entertain the idea for a moment—I’ve never believed in letting people build empires within my own company. But you didn’t work for Harris here, at least not directly, and he’s a
good man. If I trust him to run R and D, I have to trust him to choose his staff. Therefore, you’ll be moving.”

It wasn’t a question, it was a command. Blake understood instantly that he wasn’t being offered a new job; he was being informed that he had one. Not that he would have considered turning it down, he reflected, even for a moment. Aside from the fact that to refuse would have meant the end of his career at TarrenTech, he was as aware as anyone that being sent to Silverdale meant that, at the age of thirty-eight, he was already marked for a top position in the company. And top positions didn’t come much larger than they did at TarrenTech.

He instinctively knew it would have been a mistake to ask just what the job in Silverdale would be. There was only one question that was relevant, so he asked it.

“When do I leave?”

Thornton stood up. “You report to Harris two weeks from today, so you’ll want to get there by the end of next week. The arrangements have all been made. A house is waiting for you, and the movers will be at your place in San Marcos next week to do the packing.”

Blake swallowed, his head suddenly spinning. What would Sharon think? Shouldn’t he at least discuss it with her? But of course she knew how TarrenTech worked as well as he did, and he wouldn’t be the first executive to be transferred on short notice. He stood up.

“Thank you, Mr. Thornton,” he said. “I appreciate your confidence in me, and I won’t disappoint you.”

Thornton’s brows arched slightly, and when he spoke, his voice held an acerbic note. “It’s Jerry Harris I have confidence in,” he said. “And it is Jerry you won’t disappoint.” Then he flashed a smile and extended his hand. “And call me Ted,” he added.

The interview was over. Everything in Blake Tanner’s life, and the lives of his family, had just changed.

2

It wasn’t until they’d started south on Highway 50 out of Grand Junction that Sharon Tanner began to feel better. For two days, as they’d driven from San Jose to Reno, then across the seemingly endless wastelands of Nevada and Utah to Salt Lake City, she’d sat numbly next to Blake in the front seat of the station wagon, the desolation of the landscape perfectly reflecting the bleakness of her spirit.

Less than two weeks, and everything had turned upside down. Of course, there had not been any question of their going. After all, hadn’t they talked about the possibility for years? But neither of them had ever seriously thought there was any chance of Blake being transferred to Silverdale—it was a research facility, and Blake’s expertise in marketing had always seemed to both of them to preclude making the quantum leap within the company that an assignment at Silverdale represented.

And yet it had happened, and for the next ten days, until the movers arrived, Sharon had been far too busy dealing with the myriad details of winding up their affairs in San Marcos to deal with her emotions.

Only now, as they began making their way through the
foothills of the Rockies, did the reality of it all truly begin to set in. And as the scenery began to take on a majestic beauty, Sharon felt her spirits begin to rise.

Of the four of them, only Blake had seemed unaffected by the prospect of the sudden move.

Mark had immediately been excited about the change. For him the advantages had instantly overbalanced the disadvantages, since the prospect of living in the Rockies, with the mountains’ towering peaks, broad valleys, and abundance of wildlife, had been irresistible.

For Kelly it had been something else entirely. The prospect of leaving her friends had at first infuriated her. Then, when she found that her anger wasn’t going to change anything, she had sunk into a darkly sullen silence which was, Sharon reflected, at least better than the screaming tantrums of the first few days after Blake had come home with news of the transfer.

Her own reaction, she realized now, had been mixed. The advantages of the move had been obvious—the salary was a third more than Blake had been earning, and his future prospects were suddenly unlimited. Nor did the prospect of living in Silverdale upset her; indeed, she’d always been curious about the little town nestled in the mountains, which was so important to her husband’s employer, and she would be reunited with her friend Elaine Harris. Nor was Sharon sorry to be leaving San Marcos, which long ago had been swallowed up in the urban sprawl around San Jose, losing whatever character it may once have had, disappearing into the faceless morass of subdivisions and shopping malls.

But simply to pack up and be gone in little more than the space of a week seemed somehow unnatural to her. Almost, in an odd way, like dying. She’d barely had time to let all her friends know she was leaving, much less see them all to say good-bye. There had, of course, been a farewell party, but by then the house was in too advanced a state of chaos for her to host it herself. In the end the Tanners’ farewell had been thrown by John Ripley, Blake’s boss, and most of the guests
had been TarrenTech people, not the wide range of friends from the academic and arts community whom Sharon had always felt most comfortable with.

Still, the decision had been made, the movers had come, and now all their worldly possessions were in the van that had left San Marcos a few hours before they themselves had piled into the station wagon.

The car was crowded with the four of them, plus Chivas and the cage full of rabbits, which the movers had refused to be responsible for and which Mark, with her support, had refused to give up, despite his father’s loudly voiced disgust. The rabbits proved to be a distraction for Chivas, who had spent most of the trip lying placidly in the back of the car, staring at the small animals as they huddled together in their cage, their eyes wide with fear, their noses twitching uncomprehendingly. Kelly’s sullen silence had finally begun to evaporate—the energy of maintaining anger over a two-week period finally having proved too much for her—and Mark had spent his time with a collection of field guides that had appeared from God-knew-where, identifying every bush, tree, flower, and geological feature they passed. Now, thirty miles ahead, lay Silverdale.

Half an hour later Blake turned left off the highway and they started up the road toward the hidden valley in whose heart Silverdale lay. It had been a mining town once, but the ore had long since given out, and the town—like so many others in the area—had begun to die. Ted Thornton had discovered it a decade earlier, and then, after having lost three major projects to the sort of industrial espionage endemic to Silicon Valley, had decided to move his Research and Development arm out of the San Jose area.

He’d quietly bought up large tracts of land around Silverdale, and before the town knew quite what was happening, a strange sort of light-industrial complex had appeared on the west side of the crumbling village. The buildings, long and low, had been perfectly landscaped, but not so perfectly that the few remaining residents had been unaware of the
cameras that photographed everything in the area. But along with the buildings had come jobs, and then people.

And suddenly Silverdale, after fifty years of slow and steady decline, had come to life again.

As they came over the pass that seemed to separate Silverdale from the rest of the world, Sharon got her first view of the town. She gasped, for it was not at all what she’d been expecting. It appeared before her like something out of a picture book: neatly laid out, its streets narrow and shaded by a profusion of aspens and pines. The houses, all of them centered on large lots, were of various forms of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century architecture, each of them different, but with enough similarity to give the town a feeling of unity. All of them had large porches in front, and each yard was surrounded by a neat white picket fence. Before they dropped into the valley itself, Sharon could see that each of the main roads through the town seemed to lead somewhere—to the north was the high school and what looked like an old-fashioned Carnegie library; to the south a shopping area; everything within easy walking distance for everyone in town.

“It’s incredible,” she breathed as Blake brought their speed down to the posted limit of twenty miles an hour. “It looks like something out of the past.”

Blake grinned across at her. “That, as I understand it, is the whole idea. Ted found a group of architects who seem to think we’re lousing things up with shopping malls and subdivisions, and he turned them loose here. Told them he wanted a company town that wouldn’t look like one or feel like one, and since he’d bought up nearly every parcel of land here, he was able to do it. Something, isn’t it?”

Sharon gazed sharply at her husband. There was a look about him that told her all this wasn’t a surprise to him. “You knew what it was like?” she asked.

“I saw a movie of it last week.” He chuckled softly. “I think John Ripley was afraid I was going to change my mind, so he showed me some tapes. But I have to say, the place is even prettier than I thought it would be.”

“It looks like pictures of where everyone’s grandma is supposed to live,” Kelly piped from the backseat. “Except no one’s does. Anyway, no one I know. Everyone’s grandparents live in condos.”

“Where’s our house?” Mark asked. He’d finally put his books aside and was gazing out the window with the same wonder as the rest of the family.

“Telluride Drive,” Blake replied. “Two forty South.” The road had narrowed sharply, and two blocks farther along he turned left, drove two more blocks, then made a right. The moving van was pulled up in front of a medium-sized Victorian house halfway along the block. Already, some of the Tanners’ furniture was spread along the sidewalk. Blake pulled the station wagon into the driveway and the family, followed by Chivas, climbed out of the car to stare at their new house.

It was painted a pale green, with its trim done in a tone several shades darker, set off here and there by touches of an orange-rust color. A wide porch spread across the front of the house, curving gracefully around the turret that rose up from the southeast corner. There were small bay windows jutting out from the sides of the house, and on the second floor all the windows were framed by shutters. The roof rose in a steep pitch, the angles of which were softened with delicate latticework, and the roof itself appeared to be made of slate. The house was surrounded by tall aspens, whose narrow height complemented its design, and though the style of architecture had seen its most glorious days at least a hundred years before, Sharon could tell at a glance that the house itself was no more than five years old. She gazed at it in silence for several long minutes, taking in every detail. When at last she turned to Blake, a smile was playing around her lips.