Lead-Pipe Cinch (8 page)

“I wasn’t lying, exactly. I will call her. Eventually.”

I bit into my sandwich. The toast crunched and I tasted salty bacon. It tasted exactly the way it had when I was a teenager. The ripe tomato dripped juice and seeds onto the plate. I wondered where Dee got tomatoes this good.

Sue dunked the corner of her patty melt in the pool of ketchup on her plate, and took a bite. I could smell the grilled onions that oozed out the sides of her sandwich.

“I know that. No, I meant the other lie,” she said around a mouthful of beef and rye toast. “The one about being fine.”

Once again, Sue’s conversation had swooped around and landed exactly where I didn’t want it to go.

No, that wasn’t true. I was here because I did want to go there. I wanted to tell someone about Blake. I wanted to let Sue in to a little corner of my old life.

Maybe.

“Okay, I’m not fine. Not entirely.”

Sue stopped, a French fry halfway to her mouth.

“Did I hear that right? The original tough girl admitting she isn’t okay?”

I nodded. “This situation actually has me kind of spooked.”

Sue washed the fry down with a gulp of tea. Her voice turned serious. “Georgie, nothing spooks you. Ever. You nearly got caught breaking into Martha Tepper’s house, you got shot at and ended up in the hospital and you just shrugged it off. Now some stranger gets hurt on a construction site, and you’re spooked?”

I picked up an onion ring and broke it into little pieces, building a mound of golden breading in the middle of my plate, hemmed in by the remaining pieces of sandwich. It was pretty much how I felt.

“He’s dead, Sue.” I looked up at her shocked face, and hurried on. “Looks like he drowned in the moat—is that a stupid way to go, or what?—and Sean found him there when he got to the site this morning.”

“Okay,” she said slowly. “That’s creepy. Is that what’s bothering you, that he died in the place you were working?”

“Yeah.” I pushed the food around on my plate. My appetite had disappeared. Sue reached over and snagged a ring without asking—another thing that hadn’t changed since high school.

“Thanks,” she said, waving the ring. “But it sounds like there’s more. Is there?”

Dee hobbled over and refilled our tea. She dropped the separate checks—like always—on the table. She walked to the front and turned the “Open” sign over, then went back behind the counter and turned off the grill.

I glanced at my wrist. I was still wearing the battered plastic watch I wore for work, and it said two o’clock, straight up. I looked at Sue.

“Gotta go.”

We each grabbed a check and dug in our pockets for cash. Dee didn’t like to mess with plastic, a fact the occasional tourist had to learn the hard way. Locals knew to carry cash if they wanted lunch at Dee’s.

We carried our plates to the counter, as though we were back in the high school cafeteria. Somehow, it had always seemed like the right thing to do.

I started to cross to Katie’s when we walked out, but Sue grabbed my arm and pulled me toward her shop.

“You were telling me about the accident,” she said, “and there was something more you were going to say. You can get your bread fix later.”

Daisy and Buddha greeted us with happy barks when we unlocked the shop. They knew Sue was a soft touch and she didn’t disappoint them, slipping them each a green treat.

She didn’t get them ready for a bath, though. Instead, she sat down on her stool behind the counter and motioned me to the other stool.

“Now, make like Paul Harvey,” she said. “I want the rest of the story.”

“I knew the guy.”

“But you said it wasn’t anyone on the crew, Georgie. And if it wasn’t anyone from Pine Ridge, who was it?”

“Someone I used to work with.”

“The guy from Tiny’s?” she exclaimed. “The hunk with the designer wardrobe and the four-hundred-dollar haircut?”

My brain, the part that didn’t want to deal with Blake’s death, wondered how Sue knew about four-hundred-dollar haircuts, much less had the ability to spot one.

“That’s the guy that fell in the moat?”

“His name is—was—Blake Weston.” I crossed my arms over my stomach, as if I could hold myself together that way. “We were friends, then more than friends. It ended badly, and I hadn’t seen him in several years.”

“Until he walked into Tiny’s.” Sue finished my thought. “No wonder you looked like you’d seen a ghost. He didn’t seem much like your type, though. Way too slick.”

I chuckled. “And what is my type?”

Sue reddened. “You know what I mean, Georgie. You’re a plumber now, and you hang around with people like me and Paula and Wade—and none of us exactly have a designer wardrobe, unless you include Wrangler and Fruit of the Loom on the list.”

“I’m still an apprentice,” I reminded her. “And I hang out with people like you because you and Paula and Wade are my friends. But that doesn’t mean I didn’t have other kinds of friends before I came back to Pine Ridge.”

“Did you?” Sue said. “Have other kinds of friends?”

Unfolding my arms, I stood up and walked across the shop. My back was to Sue. “I don’t know.”

I fiddled with a display of cat toys, lining them up carefully on their metal peg. “I knew a lot of people in San Francisco, and I worked and socialized with them. But I don’t know if they were friends.”

The gloom was getting to me. I squared my shoulders and turned to face Sue. I steadied my voice and forced a matter-of-fact tone as I summarized my years at Samurai.

“After I got my master’s degree, I started a computer security company. When I started expanding, Blake was my first partner, and we did well. The computer industry was exploding, and we were the hot new thing.

“Guys with money came looking for us, offering to help us grow. They didn’t want to interfere in how we ran the company, or so they said. But when the industry started cooling off, they changed their minds.

“I knew a lot of things about hardware and software”—I walked back to counter, and picked up the thumb drive we’d left sitting there before lunch—“but not a lot about office politics. Blake did.

“When the money guys decided to ‘go in a different direction’ ”—I made air quotes with my fingers—“I was the one who left.” I forced a smile I didn’t feel, and hoped it wasn’t too obvious. “And now you know, the rest of the story.” I mimicked the popular radio host’s signature line.

Sue glanced at the thumb drive I held loosely in my hand. “That’s how you know all that stuff about cookies and worms and spyware and all that stuff you told me about? That was the kind of stuff you were doing?”

“Among other things.” I shrugged. “But I left all that down there, and I don’t want to do it anymore.” I grinned again, and this time I did feel it. “You and Barry are the only ones I make an exception for.”

“So this Blake guy was, what? More than somebody you worked with, that’s for sure. Are we talking close business partner, or maybe ex-boyfriend?”

“We dated,” I hedged. That wasn’t a lie, exactly. It had been a little more serious than that, at least on my part, but a girl has to have some pride. I wasn’t ready to admit he’d been willing to dump me the instant the investors offered him the corner office.

“And Sandra doesn’t know any of this, does she?”

I shook my head. “Would you tell her?”

Sue burst into giggles. “No way!”

I tossed the thumb drive up and caught it. “Now, let me see if I can figure out what’s wrong with this thing.”

I walked back into the office, feeling better than I had since the day I spotted Blake at the McComb job site. I was sad he was dead—we had been close once—but I could stop thinking about him for a little while.

A very little while.

I arrived home with a better attitude, freshly groomed dogs, and a feeling of accomplishment. The thumb drive problem had turned out to be a simple conflict caused by connecting two drives at the same time. All I had to do was disconnect the other drive, and everything was fine.

I thought about what might have caused the problem as I fed the dogs and checked the refrigerator for dinner.

Same stuff that was there at lunchtime, plus a fresh loaf of whole wheat from Katie’s sitting on the counter. I’d stopped in after I’d solved Sue’s computer issue.

The stale bread gave me an idea. A quick check of the cupboard turned up cinnamon and vanilla. With eggs and stale bread I had French toast, and the dregs of the marmalade would substitute for syrup.

My mother would be proud.

The pan was hot, and I had just put the first bread slices in when my cell phone rang. I didn’t recognize the number, but the area code was familiar.

San Francisco.

Another ghost.

I let the phone play its cheery ringtone. I knew the call would ruin my mood, and my evening. I could just let it go to voice mail, and worry about it later. Or tomorrow. Or next week.

But if I did that there was a good chance that the ghost, whoever he was, would show up in Pine Ridge. Ignoring the call wouldn’t make a difference. Besides, I’d obsess about it the rest of the evening if I didn’t pick up.

“Hello.”

“Is this Georgiana Neverall?” The voice was vaguely familiar. I had heard it before, but it was older and deeper than I remembered.

“Speaking.”

“Georgie! It’s so good to hear your voice. How are you?” This time, the voice squeaked a little at the end, and a face attached itself to the memory.

Richard Parks. He was an intern at Samurai, a student from the local community college with too little money and a terrifying talent. I swore the boy dreamed in machine code, the way fluent foreign language students dreamed in French or German. Within his first week I had realized he could have my job if he wanted it.

I wondered if he did.

“Richard?” I asked.

“Yeah, Georgie, it’s me! It’s really good to talk to you again. I mean, the circumstances and all, that’s not so cool, in fact it’s really terrible. But I just never thought we’d hear from you, after you took that buyout and moved away. And then Blake called and said he’d run into you in some tiny town up in Oregon, but he hadn’t got a chance to talk to you.”

Richard’s words rushed out, piling on top of one another, and threatened to overwhelm me. It took a few seconds for the meaning to sink in.

“Buyout?”

“Oh! I’m not supposed to know about that, am I? Forget I said it, okay? It was just that everybody knew, and it’s been a long time, and . . .” His voice trailed off.

“What are you talking about, Richard? And how did you get my cell number anyway?”

“From the sheriff. He called here about Blake, and I might have mentioned that I knew you and did he know how I could get in touch with you, since I knew you were up there.” I could picture Richard’s baby face—heck, he
was
a baby—with a blush creeping up his neck. Richard may have been a computer genius, but he was still just an awkward kid.

“Blake told you he ran into me?” I was still trying to process the torrent of words.

“He said he bumped into you in a local restaurant. Told Stan Fischer he didn’t get much chance to talk, but he figured he’d see you later and catch up. That’s all I heard, but I know Stan talked to him a couple times.”

I remembered Stan Fischer all too well—the eight-hundred-pound gorilla of the investors, and one of the architects of my ouster. The legend was he’d made his money working the Alaska pipeline in the seventies, and come back to California to invest it. He’d done well, but money and age hadn’t smoothed out any of the rough edges. He’d gone through several wives, a couple girlfriends, and there was office gossip about Stan and an intern. He still looked and acted like a roughneck.

“So Stan’s running things now?”

“Well, Blake’s in charge, but Stan’s pretty involved. That is,” he amended hastily, “Blake
was
in charge. I guess Stan’s taking care of things for now. You know, until we can figure things out.”

“So, Richard, about that buyout? What was it you heard?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all, Georgie. I didn’t say a thing, okay?” He sounded more than embarrassed. He sounded scared.

“It’s not a big deal, Richard. I just wondered what people had heard.”

“What I heard was that there was a confidentiality agreement, and if anyone talked about it they’d be fired. You know this industry, Georgie. If somebody got canned here, they’d have a tough time finding another good job.”

I nodded, without realizing Richard couldn’t see me. Of course. He was afraid of losing his job if he talked about my nonexistent buyout.

I caught a whiff of something burning.

My dinner!

“Frack!”
I dropped the phone on the table, and grabbed the frying pan. The toast in the pan was turning black around the edges. I dumped the whole mess into the sink, and turned off the stove.