Deadwood (25 page)

Hannah threw an elbow behind her and got Martin in the ribs, and he realized his mouth was hanging open. He shut it.

“Funny, I forgot she was involved—she was kind of a nerd,” said Jake. “I didn't notice the Spirit Club or business geeks back then. No offense—I was kind of cocky in the old days. Had a run of bad breaks. Never thought at my age I'd still be cutting stinking lawns the way I did when I was twelve years old, but there I was. But since I joined the association, that's all over. Two months ago she approached me to join, and it's like magic. I'm halfway into the Seven Habits of Highly Successful Executives, and all of a sudden I'm the head coach of the football team. I've won my first game, got appointed chair of the stadium fund-raising committee, and have a lock on the contract to clear Jenna's property and landscape the new stadium grounds. All thanks to one person.”

“Michelle Medina,” Martin said, almost whispering.

“You know her?” Jake said, surprised.

“She's my aunt, remember?”

“Oh, yeah, right. You're a lucky boy. You follow Michelle Medina, before long you'll be ruling the world with the rest of us.”

“The rest of you?”

“Brynwood Estates Community Association and Junior Executives of Tomorrow. Your friend Libby will tell you all about it. If you don't get what you want when you ask for it, you demand it. The universe answers.”

This wasn't the answer Martin wanted. But he realized he had known it all along. Aunt Michelle was behind everything.

33

Saligia Rules

H
annah and Martin left so quickly Jake was probably still bragging while they were halfway down the hall. Everyone knew Michelle Medina thought that she was the center of power in Lower Brynwood. It was a joke—she was the Dr. Evil of the Brynwood Estates Community Association. But it turned out she wasn't having delusions of grandeur. Jake looked like a fool, too, with all of that nonsense he'd been spouting to A.J. The joke was the perfect cover, although Hannah doubted he did it on purpose.

Martin looked dazed when they stepped into the sunlight. High-school kids streamed from all exits, hopping into beaters, muscle cars, and late-model SUVs, backing up, peeling away. Hannah said Martin's name. He watched the cars as if seeing a pattern, elaborate choreography amid the near-miss fender-benders.

“Martin,” she said, grabbing his arm, glee rising in her throat. “The bad one is Michelle. We've got her now.”

He shook his head. “We don't. I've been living in her… her lair, and I didn't see a thing. And how are we going to ‘get' her? How do we break a curse? All we know is that she's the one who started the tree carvings.”

“That's not all we know. We know she started the Spirit Tree ceremony, and that's when everything went wrong. We know she's been ruling over this town through the Community Association, and that's how she brought Jake into her plan.”

“And Libby,” Martin said, grudgingly. “The Junior Junior Executives of Tomorrow are all part of it—I would have noticed if I had been paying the least bit of attention.”

“Well, who could? If those meetings were filled with the kind of stuff Jake says, I'd tune them out, too. The Spirit Tree is the key to her power—or at least it was. Something's changing, or Michelle wouldn't be making Jake cut the tree down for her. If we can figure out what's changed, we can stop Michelle, and we can save the tree.”

“And this whole miserable town,” Martin said.

“It's miserable because of her,” Hannah said sharply. “But we have two advantages.”

“Our numbers? Our power?” he said with one eyebrow raised. “Our tremendous pull on the Lower Brynwood City Council, now that Aunt Michelle got your dad fired?”

“Just suspended,” Hannah said, frowning. “Seriously. Advantage one, Michelle doesn't know we're trying to stop her. If what Jake, Waverly, and Libby say is true, she thinks we're on her side, more or less.”

“What else?”

“Two, we have an inside man.” Hannah put her finger in the center of Martin's chest and tapped it. He looked at her finger and she drew it away, pretending to straighten her ponytail. “We have access to her lair, as you called it.”

Hannah had never felt so nervous; standing on the step of Michelle's house gave her the willies. Martin held his breath, too—impressive after the sprint from the high school—as he turned the key.

“Aunt Michelle?” he called. No answer. “Excellent. Into the lair.” He held the door for Hannah and she ducked in, brushing his arm.

“Where do we start?” Hannah asked.

“I'm not digging in her underwear drawer,” said Martin, shuddering.

“How about the office? We're allowed to use the computer, so if she catches us, we have an excuse for being there.” Hannah thought about her words—
if she catches us
. What would Michelle do? How much power did she have? She was evil enough to curse a whole town. To drain it, even kill. What would she do to two kids who stood in her way?

Martin booted up the computer as cover, and Hannah noticed a set of Lower Brynwood yearbooks, 1987 through 1990. How had they missed them? She browsed the Lucite awards lining the shelves, looking for any other clues they hadn't noticed. Employee of the Year from Horizon Network Communications, Businesswoman of the Year from the Lower Brynwood Chamber of Commerce, random tokens of appreciation from the Kiwanis, the Lions, the Garden Club, the Lower Brynwood Athletic Boosters. Michelle must have spent half her life at awards banquets in her own honor. Like a deity collecting offerings.

Right in the middle was a small brass plaque. Hannah picked it up to take a closer look.

“Hey!” said Martin. “We got an email from Jenna. It's marked urgent.”

“No way! Maybe she's gotten the Spirit Tree declared a national Champion Tree. Jake won't be able to cut it down.”

‘“Good news, bad news,'”
Martin read aloud.

“Let me read, too,” Hannah said, leaning in behind him, the award gripped in her hands. “The good news had better outweigh the bad.”

First the bad news. While the dimensions of the Spirit Tree are impressive, the Arbor Society reports that another American beech near Pittsburgh, while narrower in trunk girth, is nearly ten feet taller and thus retains status as Champion Tree
.

But the good news is very good. Hannah, I sent the photo of the arborglyph to a colleague in the anthropology department, and he wants to study it further. He believes that this may be a genuine carving in the hand of Thomas Brynwood dating back to 1797. If so, the Spirit Tree can be protected as a Witness Tree and a historical landmark. Whether or not the arborglyph is genuine, he has filed a temporary restraining order against the tree's removal until the historical investigation can be completed
.

Hannah whooped. “We won, Martin! They won't be able to cut the tree down now.”

“That's only part of what we need to do,” Martin said. “That gives us time to lift the curse, but we still don't know how.”

Hannah felt the weight of the brass award in her hands and studied it. Engraved on the center:

7∑

Hannah peered at the smaller letters written beneath it: THE SALIGIA RULES.

“Saligia rules!”
she said. “That was carved on the tree.”

“What?” Martin said. “Who's Saligia?”

“I don't know.” Hannah grabbed her bag, spilling papers as she pulled the notebook out. She found the photo of the seven sigmas—she'd stared at those letters so often that she barely thought about the carving beneath it. “There was nobody named Saligia in any of the yearbooks that I remember. I don't think it's a person at all.”

She pulled up a search window and typed in the word. She clicked on the first result.

SALIGIA
IS
AN
ACRONYM
BASED
ON
THE
L
ATIN
WORDS
FOR
THE SEVEN DEADLY SINS
. S
UPERBIA
,
AVARITIA
,
LUXURIA
,
INVIDIA
,
GULA
,
IRA
,
ACEDIA
.

“The Seven Habits of Highly Successful Executives,” said Martin. “Pride, avarice, extravagance, envy, gluttony, anger, uneasiness.”

“Where does it say that?” Hannah asked, skimming the page but not finding the words.

“It doesn't. But those are the Seven Habits of Highly Successful Executives that Junior Junior Executives of Tomorrow was trying to teach us. That's what Jake was talking about when he told us how he'd gained sudden power.”

“Seven Sigma is the Seven Deadly Sins?” Hannah's head spun. “What kind of cult is this?”

Aunt Michelle's voice rang out from the doorway. “Not a cult,” she said, her voice lilting cheerfully. “A philosophy. Once upon a time certain leaders tried to convince common people that ambition was a bad thing. But those leaders themselves always knew the Answer.” She smiled at Martin and Hannah, but the expression didn't reach her eyes.

Hannah put her hand on Martin's arm, cautioning him to stay silent. Maybe Michelle didn't know what they were trying to do. Maybe she hadn't heard much. She might still think they were on the same side. Hannah smiled back. If she had ever been persuasive in her life, now was the time.

“You mean, Seven Sigma is like the secrets of success?” Hannah leaned in toward Michelle, trying to look interested and relaxed when all she wanted to do was make a break for the door.

The corners of Michelle's eyes crinkled, and Hannah thought she believed her. “Exactly. It's the Answer. Throughout the ages, only a few have known it, but those people have ruled—Machiavelli, Borgia, Raleigh, Sun, Morgan, Oppenheimer, Rand, Milken, Madoff. And now little me in Lower Brynwood.” She batted her eyes.

Hannah nudged Martin again, trying to get him to loosen his fists. She stood calmly and asked, “So, what's the Answer? How did you find it?”

“I'd like to say I owe it to Junior Executives of Tomorrow, but they owe it to me,” she said, dusting an invisible speck of dust off a gaudy award. Probably to draw attention to it. Michelle turned toward them and continued, “Back in high school, they had a consultant from the Happy Elf Bakery come talk to us to tell us about how Six Sigma processes would make American manufacturing competitive. But I knew it would never go far enough to make a difference. The summer between my junior and senior year, I saw a flyer about an all-day seminar that promised to teach the Seven Habits of Highly Successful Executives. I took the train to a hotel ballroom downtown and paid my entrance fee—half the college money I had saved. Best money I ever spent. I was the only high-school kid in a room full of business suits, but I had found my calling. That's where I found it—the Seventh Sigma that failing businesses had forgotten. I learned the secret the ancient ones called the Answer.”

“Like the answer to a prayer?” Hannah asked, tilting her head.

“No.” Michelle shook her head and wagged her polished finger. Her voice rose. “You don't get what you want by begging for it from some daddy god. You get it by demanding it of the universe.”

She's like a bully robbing the universe of its lunch money
, Hannah thought. But she could tell Michelle wanted to talk. What was the good of ruling the town if you couldn't boast about it? What was it called—
Superbia?
Pride?

Hannah said evenly, “If it works so well, why doesn't everyone do it?”

“Easy. At least it's easy for me.” Michelle's eyes gleamed. “Throughout history, there were always some who were afraid of power, and others who tried to keep it for themselves. The early Christian church renamed the Seven Sigma the Seven Deadly Sins and tried to eliminate them. But it turned out that when do-gooders like Thomas Aquinas defined the Seven Deadly Sins—SALIGIA—they unknowingly preserved the ancient philosophy for a select few—like me—to decode.”

“I don't get it,” Hannah said, shaking her head and taking a side step toward the door, as if she were just shifting her weight. She tried to catch Martin's eye, but he was glaring at Michelle. She had to keep him quiet—he looked as if he were about to explode. “If they're sins, how can Seven Sigma make you successful?”

“They're not sins—they're virtues,” said Michelle, spreading her palms and fluttering her eyelashes innocently. “You've heard of the virtue of selfishness? That's just the beginning. Anger is wrath against your enemies. Envy drives you to vanquish your foes. Avarice drives you to amass more wealth. Gluttony—such an unattractive word—means that you take the resources that are yours and anything else you can get your hands on.”

Martin nearly choked. “You're inhuman.”

The smiling mask dropped from Michelle's face. “Wrong again, Martin,” she said, a furrow appearing between her eyes like it had been cut with a knife. “Being human means gaining dominance over the natural world. And these are the principles of running a successful business.”