Читать книгу The Price Of Silence - Kate Wilhelm - Страница 7

On Thursday morning Todd sat cross-legged on the floor, both arms crossed over her breasts, fingers crossed on both hands. When Barney glanced at her as he started to dial, she crossed her eyes.

Sputtering with laughter, he hit the disconnect button. “Stop that!”

“Can’t. This is how I work magic.”

He turned his back and dialed Victor Franz’s number. Victor was his adviser, his mentor, a father substitute who treated Barney like a protégé.

She listened to him explain the situation, and then could make no sense of his monosyllabic end of the conversation. “Yes…. No…. Sounds good…. No problem….”

He hung up and turned around to her, his eyes shining. “You’re a witch,” he said. “Classes on Thursdays and Fridays. He’ll arrange it. And no motel. He said I should plan to use one of his kids’ rooms.”

Victor’s three children were all grown and gone, and he and his wife were keeping a big farmhouse with several acres of apple trees until he retired in two years. They also had two big, shaggy Australian shepherd dogs and numerous cats.

“But there’s a catch,” Barney said, pulling Todd to her feet. “Once a month I have to stay over until Sunday while he and Ginny go to the coast to visit her folks. I have to dog-sit, cat-sit and house-sit.”

“Oh no!” she cried in mock dismay. “And have his library at your disposal! Merciless man!”

Barney laughed and drew her closer, biting her ear not at all gently. “Witch! I think we need to celebrate again.”

They were both subdued when they approached Brindle on Friday. The Great Basin desert stretched out to infinity on one side of the highway, and the Cascades loomed on the other. One looked as dead as a lunar landscape, the other, thinly populated here with ponderosa pines, was as unmoving as a painting. The only signs of life were the cars and trucks on the road.

“You’ll be bored to death out here,” Barney said.

“Won’t. I’ll take up bird-watching. I wonder if there are birds? But you’ll be miserable.”

“Nope. I’ll wander barefoot in the desert, grow a long beard, have visions and become a revered prophet.”

“We are arriving,” she said a moment later. On the left, a mammoth greenhouse seemed ridiculously out of place considering that the temperature was 101. A motel, a gas station with a small convenience store attached, a Safeway…Another store, general merchandise, a tourist-type souvenir store, another motel with a café, a rock shop…It looked like a movie set waiting for the actors. Behind one of the gas stations, a group of manufactured homes stood baking in the sun.

“We turn right on First Street,” she said. It came up fast and Barney made the turn. Now a larger building came into view, a two-story hotel, with a lot of well-maintained greenery visible, and a few more shops. “Right again on Spruce,” she said. Brindle had turned into a real village with houses and yards, green things growing, a restaurant, a few people going on about their business. She spotted the Bolton Building with a neat sign: The Brindle Times, and Barney pulled to the curb and parked.

“Ready or not,” he murmured, and patted her thigh. “Just don’t go into your magic pose. Okay?”

“I’ll try to restrain myself,” she said, uncrossing her fingers.

She had told Ruth Ann Colonna that they would arrive between one and two, and it was ten minutes after one when they entered the building. A pretty, round-faced young woman met them.

“Mrs. Fielding? They’re expecting you. I’ll tell Johnny you’re here. Just a sec.” She was wearing jeans, a T-shirt and sandals. She crossed the outer office, tapped on a door, then entered another room. Two other women looked them over as they waited, an older woman, possibly in her sixties, and a lean young Latina.

The door across the room opened and the one who had met them reappeared, followed closely by a thick-set man with straight black hair. He had a dark tan and big brown eyes.

“Ms. Fielding? Mr. Fielding? Johnny Colonna. Glad to meet you. Come in, come in.” He clasped her hand briefly, nodded to Barney and led the way into his office, where he introduced Ruth Ann.

Todd had assumed that Mrs. Colonna was his wife, and was surprised to meet the old woman. She was taller than Todd and as straight as a stick, without a hint of extra fat; her skin was weathered and wrinkled with a tan as dark as her son’s, and her hair pure white and straight, cut short. Her eyes were startling, green with flecks of amber. She looked sinewy, tough, impervious to the elements. She was wearing faded chinos and a cotton shirt.

Todd was beginning to feel overdressed in her interview clothes—skirt, blouse, panty hose.

Waving Todd and Barney to chairs, Johnny went behind his desk to his own chair, cleared his throat, and then said, “I was impressed by the journal you sent us, but I’m afraid that we’re not doing anything quite like that. We have a weekly newspaper, and a few circulars, nothing like you’re used to working with.”

Without glancing at him, Ruth Ann handed Todd a copy of the latest edition of the newspaper, the one that had infuriated her. “Can you tell by looking it over what went wrong? Theodore, our editor, swears that he edited the copy himself, and he’s been quite good in the past. And I know beyond any doubt that my own editorial was letter perfect.” She sat in a chair close to Todd’s.

As Todd began to examine the newspaper, Ruth Ann turned to Barney. “Do you have computer expertise also, Mr. Fielding?”

Barney shook his head. “Not a bit. I use a word processor and when I goof, as I do all the time, she fixes it.” He nodded at Todd, who was frowning at the newspaper.

She turned to the last page, then looked at Ruth Ann. “It’s lost the formatting. And the columns aren’t set. Also, someone tried to use text and graphic boxes without setting the parameters.” She would have continued, but Ruth Ann held up her hand.

“If I edited all the paper copy and someone put it in the computer, would it end up garbled like that?”

“Until the program is straightened out, the errors fixed, the formatting reset, things like that, it would probably come out about like this.”

Ruth Ann’s lips tightened. “What are those strings of gibberish?” She leaned over and pointed to a string of codes.

“It looks like different programs were used and codes from one ended up in the text without being translated.”

“Ms. Fielding—may I call you Todd? How long would it take you to straighten out the programs, fix things, print a decent edition if you had the copy?”

Johnny made a throat-clearing sound and Ruth Ann turned to snap at him, “Have you understood a word she’s said?”

“You know I don’t know anything about computers.”

“And neither does anyone else in this office. That’s the problem.” She looked at Todd again.

“I could run off an edition in a day or two if I had all the prepared copy. But it would be makeshift. To fix things the way they should be fixed? I can’t be sure until I know what programs are in use, how many people have access to them, if there are templates, or if they have to be set up. It could be a matter of days, or it could take several weeks. And after all that, your people, anyone who uses the programs, should be trained. I can’t say without more information.”

“When can you start?”

“I thought you said you would want someone by the first of September,” Todd said.

“I want someone now, today, Monday. Todd, if you can start sooner, I would appreciate it. We will cover your relocation expenses, hire movers to come in and pack your things, haul them down here. Meanwhile you could stay in the hotel, Warden House. Would that be acceptable?”

Startled, Todd glanced at Barney. He nodded at her and stood up, then said, “Mrs. Colonna, I think Todd and I should take a few minutes to talk about this.”

“Yes, you should,” she said. “Come along. I’ll take you to my office.” She led the way back through the outer office to the opposite side and opened a door. “My room,” she said. “This is where you’ll be working, Todd, at least until Theodore leaves in September. When you’re ready, just come back to Johnny’s office. Take as long as you like.” She looked around, shrugged, then left, closing the door after her.

It was a bigger office than Johnny’s, and while his had been neat and tidy, this room was cluttered—an old desk, two old chairs, boxes on the floor, papers all over the desktop. A separate desk held only a computer.

“Barney, we can’t just abandon our stuff,” Todd said.

“Honey, that old lady is desperate,” he said softly. He looked at the vintage desk, faded framed photographs on the wall, wooden file cabinets. “This is her baby,” he said. “She has to save it, and she can see a savior in you. We won’t abandon anything. I’ll take care of stuff in Portland and you can go to work. Do you want to start right away? That’s the only question.”

She crossed the office to a tall window with venetian blinds, wooden blinds. She hadn’t seen blinds like that since…Never, she realized. She had never seen blinds like that. Barney had pegged Ruth Ann Colonna exactly right, she thought then. She had been considering the work aspect of the interview, but he had seen through that to the person who had not actually pleaded with her to start, but had come close.

In Johnny’s office again, Ruth Ann sat down and said, “We have to do something now. We can’t afford another issue like that one. How many complaints have you fielded so far?”

He rubbed his eyes. “Plenty. I know we do. It’s just the expense with money so tight.”

“How many times have you brought in a consultant this past year? At fifty dollars an hour. They come in, spend three or four hours fixing things and for a week or two everything seems to work and then it turns into garbage again. We have to have someone in house to keep things working right and to train everyone here.”

“I’m not fighting you,” he said, holding out both hands in a placating gesture. “See. I agree. But, Lord, they look like kids, both of them.”

“They are kids,” she said. “Pretty, precocious children who understand the world they’re inheriting, which is more than I can say for myself. All right. I’ll take them over to the Tilden house and leave the key with them, and afterward I have to go see Louise. And, Johnny, see to it that Shinny behaves himself. She’s to be the editor in charge and he has to accept that.”

Lou Shinizer called himself a reporter; she called him many things but never that. In her opinion he was incapable of writing a yard-sale sign, and in fact he did little more than run around and pick up handouts from various sources, but someone had to do it. He fancied himself a ladies’ man. She was certain Todd would swat him down fast. Shinny did not like to be swatted down.

That evening when Ruth Ann arrived home, she went straight to the kitchen to mix herself a tall glass of bourbon and ice water. Maria Bird was dicing onions, and she looked up as her husband Thomas Bird entered by the back door carrying a Jack Daniels’ carton.

“What’s that?” Maria asked.

At the same time Thomas Bird asked, “Where do you want me to put this?”

“With the others,” Ruth Ann said, sitting down at the kitchen table. “Papers,” she said to Maria. “And don’t ask what kind because I don’t know. Louise insisted that I stop by her house and pick up that stuff. She’s fading away, Maria.” Thomas Bird walked past them with the box.

“I know,” Maria said. “And she’s ready. But you have no business running around all day in this heat, or you’ll be in the same shape she’s in.”

Maria was five feet two inches tall, stocky, with lustrous black hair done up in intricate braids laced with red ribbons. She had come to help out when Johnny was born, a teenage girl fresh out of high school. Leone had called her “the little Indian girl.” He had left them all when Johnny was two, as if he had fulfilled his duty here and it was time to move on. Maria had stayed. A few years later, Maria had brought Thomas Bird in to introduce him, almost as if asking permission to marry him. He was not much taller than she was, and powerfully built. Ruth Ann had no illusions about who ran her household—they did. She had told them fifteen years earlier that she had named them in her will. They would get the house, Johnny would get the press. She had few if any secrets from Maria, and Maria, no doubt, shared everything she knew with Thomas Bird.

Sipping her drink while Maria prepared dinner, Ruth Ann told her about Todd and Barney. “Shaggy chestnut hair, big eyes like milk chocolate, and a brain. She’ll come back on Sunday and start on Monday and Barney will see to things in Portland and come along in a couple of weeks. He’s like a curly-haired boy, maybe a little younger than she is, or at least he looks younger. She’s twenty-eight. They loved the house, but it needs to be cleaned.”

Maria nodded; she would see to it.

“I reassured them,” Ruth Ann continued, “that the Tildens will likely be away for years.” Their daughter had been widowed by an accident that had left her partially paralyzed, and there were three young children. She knew the Tildens were not going to return to Brindle until the youngsters were grown. Ruth Ann sighed. One after another of her generation, leaving one way or another. Louise, whom she had gone to see in the nursing home, was eighty-eight, on her way out. She took another sip of her drink.

“Anyway, Louise insisted that I go over to the house and pick up that box. Deborah was supposed to bring it around weeks ago, but she’s been too busy and kept forgetting. If I’m going to write the history of Brindle I need that material, Louise said. Strange to be so lucid, and she is, and so weak. She’s entirely bedridden now.”

Maria tightened her lips. It didn’t pay to dwell on the natural order of things, she sometimes said, and didn’t repeat it now, but Ruth Ann got the message and did not continue. She would write Louise’s obit that weekend, have it ready. She would kill Lou Shinizer before she let him touch it.

From the kitchen table she could see that the sun had cleared the mountains, and shadows were forming out on the patio. She picked up her drink and walked to the door. “Can I do anything in here?” she asked. Maria said no, the way she always did. Ruth Ann went out to the patio and sat down again. The air had cooled rapidly as the sun moved on its westward track.

Seeing her old friend that day, knowing her end was so near, had stirred up too many memories, she mused. She had suddenly remembered with startling clarity the last time she had seen her father alive, sixty years ago. Stricken with pneumonia, he had struggled for breath under the oxygen tent they used in those days, only a few years before the penicillin that would have saved him. He had said something about the paper, or papers, save the paper…something. Today Louise had said almost the same thing: she had saved the papers.

After her father’s funeral, Ruth Ann had gone back to Eugene, to the women’s dorm to pack up her belongings and go home again, to take charge of the press, to save the paper. She had worked with her father from the time she was a child and knew exactly what had to be done, while her mother was totally ignorant of every aspect of it.

For years after that, she had lived with her mother in their little house on Spruce Street, two blocks from the Bolton Building that her father had built to house the newspaper. And then Leone had entered her life. She smiled faintly. She had been thirty-eight, in love for the first time, captivated by a pretty face and a charming accent. Leone had done two good things: fathered a child, and built the house Ruth Ann lived in now. A good house, he had said, a Mediterranean house, stucco, with a red tile roof, and wide overhangs to keep out the summer sun, let in the winter light, spacious rooms, this semi-enclosed patio. She took a longer drink. Leone had believed she was wealthy, she had come to realize, and when he learned that she wasn’t, he had pouted like a child. Johnny had his beautiful eyes and some of the same gestures, which she didn’t understand. He had no memory of his father, how could he have learned those gestures? One of those riddles jealously guarded by the genes. She finished her drink.

She brought her thoughts back to the question of papers. After her mother died, Ruth Ann had gone to Spruce Street to pack up the house, and she had found half a dozen boxes of papers that she had never known existed. Now she wondered if her father had told both of them to save the paper, or papers, and if her mother had done so without ever mentioning it. Ruth Ann had moved the boxes to one of the empty rooms and they were still there.