"There was a very shrewd writer a long time ago named Saki who said a few very sensible things. For instance, a small inaccuracy can save hours of explanation."
"I like that! What's to get mad about?"
"The small inaccuracy was that the airline didn't cancel. I did."
She looked at him, frowning and puzzled.
"But why?"
"It was an impulse. I didn't want to leave you yet. I can't explain it. I just wasn't ready to leave here yet. Nothing about the place to keep me here, God knows. But it was leaving you."
She looked at him wonderingly.
"That is supposed to make me mad?"
"I lied to you."
"Roy, it was a small inaccuracy that saved hours of explanation. Now I'm ready for those hours of explanation, fella.
Take a couple of them and tell me why you couldn't leave me."
"Well "Or this way," she said, and put her arm around him and pulled him close. They kissed awkwardly, and then stood up and kissed again. It was the first time he had held her close.
There was a feminine softness a yielding, that he had not anticipated. Her mouth was sweet. She was the taller, but they seemed to fit as though designed that way. They were both breathing audibly when they stopped.
He looked at her with delight, seeing for the first time how lovely her eyes were, how crisp and handsome the line of her jaw, saw the delicate miracle of the dark hair springing so alive from the tanned brow.
"Well, I don't want to lie either," she said, 'so I have to tell you I've been wanting that to happen for a very long time, not from the day you registered, but it started to happen pretty soon after that, Roy. It really did. That marriage was so rotten, I didn't think anything like this would ever happen again, that I'd ever feel this way again. For the love of God, make me stop talking. Hold your hand over my mouth or something. I can't stop."
So he kissed her again, and they talked some more, and they walked slowly back the way they had come, holding hands.
At the door to the office he said, "The flight leaves at three thirty-five. I hate to face the whole situation up there. Could you come with me?"
She cocked her head and then shook it slowly and sadly.
"No way, my friend. Your mother-in-law and your kid have got enough trauma going on without your showing up with another lady. It would be vulgar in a way neither of us want or would intend. Okay? You go up and do the memorial service thing and get back on top of your job and spend just as much time as you can with your daughter, and hug her a lot and hold her a lot, and read to her and walk with her and all that. I had that same kind of bad time a thousand years ago and it takes a lot of hugging. Then, dear friend, next spring you bring her down here on a vacation. I'll be here. And I will take her to all the places where I did my growing up around here. And with any luck, she and I will become friends. After we do, then you and I will see how well whatever we found today is lasting. If it is, I'll be open to any suggestion at all, at all."
She went inside and watched him walk back toward sixteen, thinking how much she loved him, and how much temptation it had been to agree to fly North with him.
Brother Fred came in from the living area, eating a jelly sandwich.
"We got us a couple raggedy pilgrims in twenty-one.
Couldn't afford the rates the other side of the Interstate. You nail him?"
"Nail what? Who?"
"You pin the little guy with the mustache to your trophy room wall, Sis?"
"What gives you a dumb idea like that?"
"Look, I have been living here. I have been watching you and the little guy. Don't try to kid me or yourself."
So without warning she was crying and he put his arm around her and gave her a jelly kiss on the forehead and told her that he thought she had roped herself a real nice little guy, all man in spite of the size of him, and apparently doing okay in the world, and if she ever wanted to take off, don't worry about leaving him stuck with the motel. No problem at all. No problem at all, Sis.
29 z Eighteen On Thursday, Jenny MacBeth supervised the mail and money flow under the watchful eye of Finn's replacement. He seemed always to be about three steps behind her, never directly behind, but either off to the left or to the right. She kept darting a glance back to see where he was, and she had the feeling this amused him in an obscure way. He was a stringy, swarthy, hollow-chested man in his fifties. He combed his graying hair straight forward, covering the bald front half of his skull, and it was cropped in a straight line an inch above his heavy black eyebrows. With his posture, glasses with the top halves tinted, and his curiously wide jaw with bulges of muscle at the hinges, he made Jenny MacBeth think of some sort of oversized insect.
All she knew about him was that Finn had told her Harold Sherman had worked for a now defunct airline in accounting and control and had infinite patience and a talent for streamlining detail work, using time and motion study analysis. He had been around for over a year but she'd had very little contact with him.
It bothered her that he was observing her operation when, due to the unexpected quantity of incoming mail, it was not functioning smoothly. Yesterday they'd had to cease operations at quarter to noon and lock all the unprocessed materials in the big vault. Today these had been added to the incoming mail, and her people were flustered not only by the quantity but by the observer. They tried to go too fast and they made more mistakes than usual. Whenever a mistake was made, Harold Sherman was right there, expressionless, a step behind her, watching her correct matters and get the smooth flow started again.
It wasn't until three in the afternoon that she was able to let the last of her people go. She followed Sherman through the Outgoing Mail room, through the continuing roar of the Xerox Diablos to that small office which had been Finn Efflander's.
The room was bare. All personal items, all decorations had been removed. There was a desk, a table, two chairs, two tall file cabinets and a computer terminal.
He asked her to sit across the desk from him. He looked at her with his head lowered, so that she could not read his eyes through the shaded top halves of his lenses. He did not speak.
Though she was becoming increasingly uncomfortable in the silence, she vowed not to speak and then heard herself saying, "When the deposit has gone, that's when I usually have lunch."
"Of course."
"You haven't had any lunch either."
"I am quite aware of that, Miss MacBeth."
"What do you think of the operation?"
"Those shoes you wear are very strange."
These? Yes. The floors are hard. I spend seven or eight hours at a time on my feet. I have foot trouble. Mr. Efflander gave permission."
"Everything Mr. Efflander left behind is subject to review."
"I'm aware of that, Mr. Sherman."
"There are more advanced and faster letter-opening devices than those three you are using."
"I'm aware of that. We've tested some of them. The mail is so varied in size and thickness, they don't work properly for us."
"Maybe with some experimentation they can be made to work. And then you would need only one operator instead of three. Your operation is very labor-intensive."
"That would be a primary consideration if we were... out in the real world where we had to pay going wages, union wages.
But here, it really doesn't ' "Good policy works anywhere. And I was not told that you are in a policy-making position."
"But I set up this whole system when we were handling thirty percent of what we handle now!"
"I'm aware of that. It's all in the records. I will set policy. You will do your job."
She selected her words with care.
"The distinction eludes me."
"It will become clear to you in time, Miss MacBeth. My first policy statement to you is to continually examine the number of people you are using out there, and see where and how the number can be cut."
"It could be cut tomorrow. Fewer work stations. And t
hen we would finish too late for deposit and we would lose a full day of interest on the money we turn in. I have been operating with the minimum number of people to get everything processed on time."
"It was not finished on time today."
"Because we had only a half day to work yesterday."
"I know that. I was merely commenting that you did not finish on time today. What do you think that cost in interest?"
"I have no idea."
"Assuming eight percent, Miss MacBeth, it should be about a hundred and thirty-one dollars and fifty cents."
"That little!"
"That is why I would rather you did not involve yourself in policy. Is the distinction a little clearer?"
"Not very."
"Those women seem very wary of you. You seem to me to be quite harsh with them."
"When they make stupid mistakes, yes."
"You were equally harsh with the operator the time the terminal broke down."
"Was I? I guess it was because I am not used to being followed and watched all day long."
"If I did not follow you and observe you, I would never learn the functions of your department, would I?"
"I could tell you how it works."
"Personal observation is better than something filtered through the mind of an untrained person."
' "Untrained"?"
"In matters of policy. And I might say that you could use some help in actual procedure."
"I beg your pardon?"
"Your work stations are laid out inefficiently, causing wasted time and a certain amount of confusion in distributing and collecting materials."
"I know that! If you will kindly turn off the U.S. mail for a week, I will have that room reorganized. There is a lot of wiring to be rerouted."
"I don't believe impertinence is going to help either of us."
2-95 ' "Impertinence"?"
"Sarcasm is a form of impertinence, Miss MacBeth. We both know I have nothing to do with the mail service. I am delighted that you are aware of the inefficiency of the layout. I want from you a detailed plan showing how the needed changes can be phased in without interrupting your basic service. We need have no further contact until that phased plan is ready for discussion. And at that time I will want to hear your report on the feasibility of a more advanced letter-opening device than those now in use. Thank you for your time."
She stared at him, her mind quite blank, stood up and nodded at him and left the office. She went into her department and looked at the empty tables and desks, the empty computer terminal stations. The pride had been snatched away. A certain tough-minded joy was gone for good. She missed Finn at that moment as desperately as she sometimes missed her dead parents.
Finn had told her to always keep trying to figure out ways to beat the system, and to block them before anyone else moved in. The money of the faithful came through the room like a green river flowing. Joe Deets's microchips provided almost too many checks and balances. Almost. Nibbling here and there was no good. It would be caught. Complaints would come in from donors, about incorrect receipts. The place to intercept would be after the cash was all bound, tagged and bagged for deposit. Two people watched the cash bags at all times. Each day, for a short time, toward the end of the day, she was one of the two.
She slowly traced the route of the deposit bags, out to where they were guarded while awaiting pickup, in an anteroom behind a waist-high counter near the door to the vault. She lifted the gate and went behind the counter and walked over to one of the storage cabinets and opened the door. There were three spare money sacks, folded, placed neatly on a shelf. She closed the door and went to the counter and leaned upon it, arms folded, head bowed, devising and discarding scenarios, measuring risks.
Late on Thursday afternoon Sheriff Dockerty phoned Rick Liddy at the Center.
"Got a little bit of news on the Owen thing," he said.
"Sheriff, okay if I put you on the office speaker here? On account of I happen to have Elly Erskine here with me."
"Doesn't matter to me. Both you boys have taken a pretty keen interest in this, and there's nothing to keep me from telling you what is going on. I mean, it isn't going to screw up any trial testimony because we haven't got any suspect yet.
You know my people have been helping the state people looking for the purse.
"Anyway, they found it about noon today down at the bottom of a place where there's a deep cut where the Interstate crosses about fifteen miles south of here. You know the place?
It's where the median is more like a ravine, and they put in the concrete culverts under the two sides of the Interstate."
"I know where you mean."
"To reconstruct it, what the driver of her car would have done was go over into the left lane and fling it out the driver's side window down into that artificial ravine, all brushy at the bottom. It was a good shot and he hit it in the middle, but the bag had a big shoulder strap and what that did was loop right over the top of the stump of a dead tree. That way, in the rains, when the water came up so high there, the shoulder bag didn't get washed away. But you can understand it was a real mess.
The shoe was in there and the torn pants, and her personal stuff. Any papers or paper money got turned to mush and washed out of there, but the credit cards were pretty much undamaged. Coombs's people took it to their lab to see if they can learn anything from it. If it hadn't hooked on to the tree, it would have been washed down to God only knows where.
Good aim, good idea and bad luck."
"It happens that way."
"But I saved the most interesting part till last, boys."
' "Interesting"?"
"I've gotten the idea, I don't know where or how, that you two might know a little bit more about the Owen thing than you've told me. Maybe it is just a hunch or a suspicion on your part, and you don't think it's enough. But here's what happened. This morning Moses went back to where he'd been working when he got the notion to go to the Mall and preach.
Mrs. Bennett's little place. He finished the work and gathered up his tools and got paid and drove on back to Mrs. Holroyd's place and parked out back behind the barn where she likes for him to park that old wreck. When he was walking from his truck to the school bus, shots were fired. She called me, all shook up, and I went out there. All three missed him, and it isn't hard to see why. I was able to get a good line on the direction because one of them came through the windshield of the bus and went all the way through and out the screening at the back, about two feet lower than where it came in. One smashed the handle of his hoe and stuck some slivers from the handle into his thigh. No telling about where the third went, but he says he heard it make a kind of thup noise as it went by, so it was pretty good velocity, and close.
"I paced it back and got myself pretty winded before I found where it had to come from. The ridge back of her place is a good seven hundred yards, and when I moved to the right spot and looked around I found where the grass was flattened down and somebody had mashed four cigarette butts into the dirt while they waited. Now what I want to tell you boys is that here we've got somebody as unglued as Moses himself, and he thinks that we're a bunch of Supreme Court liberals here who had to let Moses, the killer, go free on account of the rules of evidence or some damn thing. So this tower of moral judgment is going to blow Moses away mostly because he's different, not that he's done anything.
"But he tried from too far off, and I guess he'll think it over and try from closer. You boys got anything to say to me?"
Liddy knew the silence was lasting too long, but he couldn't find the right words.
"I guess I just don't know what you mean."
"I think you boys know what I mean all right. You are, or were, good cops, both of you. That outfit you're with seems to want to go down its own road, wash its own underwear, sing its own songs. But there has to be a structure, a network of law and law enforcement. I'm not telling you anything you don't know. Taking in two or three hundred million a year doesn't
make you people immune any more than it makes the telephone company immune. I'm not going to push on you, hear?
But I kind of like that Moses. I wouldn't want anything to happen to him that could have been prevented by you boys.
Okay?"
"Okay, Sheriff. Thanks for calling."
Liddy hung up, leaned back, knuckled his eyes, faked a
Z98
yawn and ended it with an expiring sigh.
"How do you want to do it?"
"How do we want to do it?"
"You see him come out of the chapel yesterday? No, you weren't there. You heard about death warmed over. There it was with that little old wife of his sort of holding him up, and snarling at him every two steps."
John D MacDonald - One More Sunday Page 36
