Terri sighed. “Wait, let me get this right.” She rolled her eyes heavenward. “Women who…recovered from life after divorce.” She paused, looked back at Daci. “Or some shit.”
“You need to tell me for sure before I decide. I can’t be going on some whine-and-weep kinda show, you know. I have a heartless bitch reputation to uphold.”
“Of for the love of fuck! It’s some show about strong women doing stuff most women don’t do—would you just go? I’d go but they don’t want me but I’d love to go. I love Okrah! Just go!”
“Okay, fine! Shit.”
CHAPTER 18
Daci wrestled drowsiness for the remainder of the afternoon. Apparently Kaiserschmarren and beer constituted a nap on glass. She tried amusing herself with emails from the VPs, fallout from the morning meeting.
The VP meeting had gone more smoothly than she’d anticipated. Most of the VPs had long ago been browbeaten into deferring to whoever was in charge and if what she thought they needed was clown suits to raise the profit margins then by golly so be it.
At least that had been the consensus at the meeting. Her email inbox greeted her with a bucketful of kindly worded complaints expressing concerns over the clown suits. These ranged in nature from simple lack of vision regarding the clown suit ratio gain to safety issues regarding the flammability of most clown suit fabrics.
Normally she would have savored these electronic messages like a substitute teacher savors letters of apology from the bad class. But she found the information Terri had shared with her at lunchtime combined with her emerging headache left her simultaneously glum and angsty. She determined this as the perfect time to pick a fight with Geo.
Geo’s office displayed the same worst-of-both-worlds afforded by most bachelor pads; utilitarian but inefficient.
“Is someone trying to kill you?” she asked him by way of a suggestion. “Because this is not very inviting. I’ve got a designer coming.”
He fumbled not-so-surreptitiously for his cell phone, babbling something incongruent about if she wanted to leave flyers. He tilted his head and a lock of his dirty-blond hair fell into his eyes. Daci found him appealing but affected. She watched him look her over without realizing he was, gave him the time to do it, leaned against his desk, crossed her arms and gazed at him evenly.
He fumbled with his cell phone again. Daci, growing bored, sighed evenly and when he looked up this time she glowered just slightly.
“I won’t countenance being tailgated,” she told him.
“Countenance?”
Oh no, a dummy! “Tolerate.”
“Oh.”
Well, at least not proud to be ignorant. Might make him easier to train. “Running your Jeep into my vehicle would be equivalent to driving into a stopped train. If you’re going to continue to drive like that, I’m hoping you’re insured.”
Geo responded, in a low, flat voice Daci knew boys used when they were finished with the conversation. “This is Los Angeles. Everybody tailgates.”
She responded cheerily: “Not me they don’t,” then left, smiling sweetly over her shoulder. But she didn’t feel any better. In fact she felt exhausted. Keeping up any façade for the rest of the day was impossible, with Terri’s strange mystery haunting her. Daci decided to leave until normal business hours were finished.
Geo found her in the parking lot. This pleased her, proved he was just that easy to manipulate. He flirted with her and she stepped just to the left of her business composure, knowing it would keep him electrified. Then just before leaving she sterned up.
“I expect you to change your outgoing phone message. Today. Before you leave.” She had to hide her smile at watching him blush in the heat.
She drove down the 5 to the 405 and then took the Santa Monica Freeway into Los Angeles, caught an early dinner at the Mint, watched the jazz band there for another hour, then headed back up freeway over the hill and to Survivanoia.
Survivanoia’s manufacturing areas ran all three shifts but no other department did. This gave Daci plenty of time to creep around after hours. Tuesday night revealed nothing, so she stayed late on Wednesday, after more board meetings and phone calls and irate emails, spent Wednesday night into Thursday morning checking CAD drawings, sales logs, accounts payable…but just what she expected to find she didn’t know, which may have contributed to her not finding it. Time to try something different.
* * *
“Sure,” her father said. “It seems like one of those things you’ll know when you see. But they say that about embezzlement, too, and plenty of people get away with that every year.” He deftly clipped the empty tangled mass of vines to all but the twin root and the horizontal cordon, leaving a T with five buds for next years growth. “Don’t feel bad,” he said.
“Okay. But that doesn’t solve my problem, Daddy.”
The regal man moved down a few steps and adroitly took on the next tangled mass. Unconsciously, like tying his shoes. Her father was catalogue handsome no matter what he wore, but Dacianna had always liked him best when he worked the vineyard. He wore flannel shirts and boots, and with his wave of hair, neat goatee and sharp, Slovak face he always seemed to her like a person who could protect her from anything. A creature of the land and the forest who could survive in any climate, coax food from any soil, converse with wolves.
She knew differently now, had had these delusions shattered during their trip abroad, but she still loved to see him at work in his rustic clothing. It brought a wave of nostalgia and longing. For the briefest instant she returned to being thirteen and safe and responsibility-free. So unlike today.
“I’m not convinced it is your problem,” he said, retrieving the moment.
“I’m the company president. If something illegal is happening—”
“I don’t think it’s illegal. Research escapes laboratories like lions escape the zoo.”
“Immoral then, okay? Are you convinced that you think it’s immoral?”
Her father looked up from his pruning.
“They should have alerted the public!” Daci took a deep breath, annoyed with her own frustration.
She had flown up to San Jose, then driven a rented car just an hour down the 101 then east to a space between the Diablo Range and the Coyote Rez, to her father’s modest but prized and award winning California vineyard. The better known vineyards—Napa, Sonoma—were farther north. But her father grew grapes thought to no longer exist. He was a legend, an inverted myth. Not a household name—except in households where it truly meant something to be so.
But just now he was the concerned father of a corporate executive. He closed the pruners and latched them. “Tell me again what you suspect is taking place.”
“Someone researched and produced Flower Flu, it didn’t just occur as some abomination in nature. And there is some evidence that Survivanoia did it.”
“So you’re attempting to verify or disprove.”
Daci nodded.
“Any researchers come to mind who might have been involved?”
Daci had already performed this exercise, considered her scientists, arrogant Wolfy and jowly Nikolai and rustic Eagan and ever-amused Akira and Maria who had taken the day off to help with her daughter’s science fair and…“No.”
Her father nodded like she was a schoolchild who’d offered the correct answer. “Likely the research was being done off-site. Survivanoia is contracted with external labs for round-robin requirements.”
“Right. It’d be easy enough to contract experimental work as well.”
“So check those records. It could also be the work of a disgruntled ex-researcher. You did say the notebooks were old, so the timeline would be correct. It serves to explain the whistle-blowing.”
Daci nodded. “I’ll check HR. See who’s been fired or whatever.”
“Also
examine the pollution records.”
“Why’s that?”
“I can’t pour a bad bath of wine down the sewer without advance clearance from the State. I’d imagine there are similar regulations in place for deadly viruses.” He frowned into the distance.
Lost in thought, her father needed to move. He flipped the wire holding the pruners closed and went back to the drastic clipping of his cherished vines. Ahead and behind him, between the rows and rows of trellises, Daci watched his staff, largely Mexican but a few Romanians as well, dressed in jeans, high rubber boots, and big sombreros, quick and precise in the late-morning heat. Usually the air still held a chill through noon, but this morning all the workers had already stripped to shirt sleeves.
“How’s it look this year?” Daci asked.
He shook his head and sighed. “We’re going to have to move it. All of it. Within a couple years. Three at the most. The growing season has gotten too long and the day time temperatures too high. Especially for these little guys. They’re the vines from Romania, everything from the fence over.”
“England?” She knew he’d been looking into land there.
“Looking more like central Canada. Everyone else is flooding into Britain, driving up prices. Canada is also less of a commute. I’ve got a realtor. Should have a firm answer by the end of the month.”
“What about genetically engineering a different rootstock?”
Her father smiled his endearing I’d-like-something-but-am-in-no-position-to-request-it smile. “What about it?”
“I’ll see what I can do, Dad.”
“I assumed you’ve checked your lab records already?”
“Everything that hasn’t been archived.”
“Where are the archives?”
“Underground salt mine.”
“The Hutchinson facility?”
“No, it’d be easy enough to fly to Kansas. Praid.”
“Salina Praid? In Romania?”
Daci nodded, empathizing with her father’s bewilderment since it had been her own reaction upon discovering that any documents older than seven years and considered out of service were shipped to an archive located somewhere in Romania’s famous center for speleotherapy.
“Only Sydney,” her father sighed. A pause. “Don’t you think it’s likely that Sydney is the person behind the design of this disease?”
“I don’t want to believe that.”
“Maybe you should ask him.”
“This is a pretty serious offense, you know? I’d like to have more conclusive proof before I accuse him. And yes I realize the Catch-22 that I’m in.”
“Fair enough. It could also be the old company president. They’re cousins, correct?”
“Yeah.”
“That will make it difficult to get information of any kind about him. Sydney is very protective of his family. As you well know.” He glanced at her, then turned and gazed at her intently, his eyes the same impossible violet as her own. “What about the Flower Flu vaccination?”
“What about it?”
“It seems to have fallen from importance, yes? Taking second place to the origins of the virus?”
“No.”
“Will finding who invented it force the treatment to market any faster?”
She hadn’t actually thought about that but didn’t admit it.
“Daddy, I’ve been there a week!”
He nodded. “Just don’t let the weeds get higher than the garden, as they say.” He turned back to his empty vines. Snip snip snip.” You planning to visit your mother? Since you’re up here?”
Daci crossed her arms. “It’s just as easy for me to drive up to Cacophony from L.A.”
Snip, snip. “So you’ll be doing that, then?” Snip, snip, snip. Rhythmic, like a song.
“Yeah, Daddy.”
Snip, snip. “When?”
“Soon.”
“Promise.”
“I promise.”
Snip snip snip.
* * *
Zane Frears yawned like a big cat—all bright teeth and pink tongue. He folded down the waistband of his plaid pajama bottoms, stretched his trim, Bing-cherry toned, six-feet-seven-inches first left then right, accompanying this stretching with a series of huffs and satisfied groans, finally scratching a hand through his short, tawny dreads.
The coffee maker hissed and spat, signifying that his coffee was ready. He pulled the carafe from the hotplate, stepped three paces through his kitchen to the marble center island where he folded himself up onto one of the spinning stools and poured a third of the coffee over his big bowl of frosted corn flakes.
Daci admired all of this from the other spinning stool as she sliced cheese and apples and drank her French press coffee.
“Were the funnies ever funny?” She tossed the colored comics from the L.A. Picayune aside.
“Who says ‘funnies’ anymore?”
“Me. And all the cotton tops. Then there’s this article about how there’s too much sex now in the Army.”
“Between soldiers?”
“Right. What did they expect when they upped the enlistment age to forty? The only thing hornier than a nineteen year old boy is a thirty six year old woman.”
Zane grinned over his cornflakes. “You’re living proof of that. I can’t keep up with you.”
“Sure but you’re nearly twenty-nine yourself. That’s old as boy-toys go.”
“Time to retire me, huh?”
“Maybe I’ll join the Army. There’s a movie you could make! Paris Does Parris Isle.”
Zane laughed around a mouthful of cereal. “Parris Isle is the Marines.”
“Don’t spew coffee through your nose. Why are you eating business breakfast on a brunch day, anyway?”
Zane’s velvety grey eyes widened. “I told you?”
“Told me what?”
“Fuck I didn’t did I?”
“I don’t know, you haven’t told me what it is you told me.”
“B.C.’s coming over.”
“Bag of Chips?”
“Yeah.”
“Is that what’s on his birth certificate?”
“I’m thinking no.”
“But you don’t know? He’s your friend for eight years you don’t know his real name?”
Zane shrugged elaborately.
“You’re lying,” she said giggling.
“It’s biblical, his name. I took a sworn oath not to tell anybody, under penalty of death. Then his ex let it out of the bag anyway.”
“I’m going on Okra with her.”
“Okra Winspear?”
“Is there another?”
“When is this?”
“Tuesday.”
“Like in two days Tuesday?”
“That’d be the one.”
“Don’t they film in New York?”
Daci nodded. “The show’s paying the airfare and the Paul Klee exhibition is still up at MoMA. Want to come with?”
“I can’t. I’m interviewing leads for OPV.”
“Really? That’s awesome! Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“I didn’t want to tell anybody until afterwards. It’s cursed or something, I swear. God only wants me to make porn for the rest of my days.”
OPV—Other People’s Violence—was definitely not porn. Zane wanted to be a real filmmaker, and he’d written a script, complete with storyboards, which Daci had read. It told the story of a man whose addiction to hope led him to put himself in the center of other people’s violence in order to stop it, not through force or persuasion, but simple presence, like a port in the storm.
The story and the proposed cinematography had impressed her enough to give him a grant. A month later, the
y had lunch, where they went over details and signed contracts; then they went to the beach and accidentally had sex in the back of Daci’s Hummer.
Zane yawned again and wrinkled his nose. Loose-limbed and grinning, his physical presence mirrored his demeanor. Zane was easy. Easy to smile, easy with his touch. Bright-eyed and hopeful but without expectation or demand. Generous—arguably to a fault. Watching him always gave her a sense of reverse déjà vu; she could see her future self looking back to these moments and knowing memories of this boy would always make her smile.
“What does Snack Foods need from you today?” she asked, smiling at her future memory.
“He wants to get some girls for the new video, plus I told him I’d help him location scout since Stella ditched on him.”
“So it’s a workday is what you’re saying.”
“Right.” Crunch, crunch crunch. “Are you mad? You could go with us if you want.”
“Boy stuff bores me. Besides, Bag of Chips is not one of my favorite people, really. I mean, he’s well-mannered, I’d never bar him from my house, but I don’t want to waste a whole Sunday with him.”
Crunch, crunch. “I’m sorry. I really thought I told you.”
“S’alright, I’m going to see GrandMama anyway. Will you braid my hair, though?”
“Of course.”
It took Zane twenty minutes to put Daci’s claret red hair into a loose two-sided French braid that joined in the back and fishtailed open at the bottom. She could do it herself but it took her twice as long and never held as well. Besides, having someone else do her hair relaxed her. Hypnotic. Like a good massage therapist, Zane didn’t talk.
Once her hair was braided, Zane rolled his hands over her shoulders, bringing heat and loosening the tension there. He wrapped his arms around her and nuzzled her ear. She responded with a deep kiss, running her hand along his jaw and pressing her fingers through the thick, nappy hair under his tawny dreads. He murmured in appreciation, moving a hand underneath her robe but, “We don’t have time for this, Baby,” she reminded him. “You have to meet Slim Jim, remember?”
He laughed and kissed her nose. “When do I get to see you next?”
Baroness Von Smith Page 26
