“We were just going to have sandwiches and soup,” Brenda replied. She continued hopefully, “Unless you want to invite us over?”
“I was thinking that maybe we could combine suppers. I’ll make a chicken casserole if you’ll bring a salad, or something,” Diana offered.
“Great!” Brenda said enthusiastically. “We’ll bring our deck of cards, too. After supper we can play a few games.”
“All right. How about around six-thirty?” suggested Diana. She was secretly relieved that she didn’t have to spend another night all alone in the house.
“Will do. See you then.”
They had a wonderful time that evening. Terry made an unexpected trip to the store and returned with a bottle of wine to top off the meal. Then they spent a hilarious evening playing all sorts of card games, and making up their own rules as they went along. As Terry put it, they were being innovative and creative. “After all, the rest of the world just plays by somebody else’s rules,” he explained haughtily.
All the same, Diana wondered what it would be like to have a foursome. More specifically, she wondered what it would feel like to have a partner, someone to team up with in games, someone to take your side in trouble, someone to go home with at night. She felt a great affection for Terry and Brenda and wished them all the happiness in the world, but at the same time they made her feel something was missing in her life. They were a team, while she had no one but herself. She didn’t like to spend a great deal of time with them.
All three of them had to get up for work the next morning, so Terry and Brenda left fairly early after helping Diana clear up the supper mess and do the dishes.
After they left, Diana decided to go out biking. As she locked her apartment door, she assured herself that it was merely a physical tension she wanted to dispel. She tried not to think of her cold and empty bedroom. Wheeling down the driveway, she turned for the country roads, pedalling fast.
Terry and Brenda were in their darkened bedroom when they heard the sounds of the garage door being opened. Brenda padded to the window and peeped through. “She’s leaving again,” she said worriedly. “I always feel anxious when she goes out at night like this.”
“She’ll be all right,” Terry said soothingly. “This is a nice neighbourhood, and it’s quiet. She’s always been all right in the past.”
“All the same, I don’t like it,” Brenda replied sharply. “I wish she wouldn’t do it.”
“Can you blame her?” he asked quietly as he went over to the bed and pulled back the covers. “She has nothing in that apartment to make her want to stay. And nobody to make her care to.”
Brenda turned from the window and her eyes rested on him. “I suppose so…”
Diana, unaware of the discussion going on about her, sped on down the streets while visions of Mason Steel, and especially Alex, flashed through her mind. She shook her head angrily. I don’t want to think about him! she told herself. I don’t want to think… She thought of the short blue robe with muscled bare legs underneath, and her mouth went dry. A long steep hill lay before her and her mind accepted the challenge with relief.
By the time she reached home, she was physically and mentally exhausted. In the past she had been attracted to other men, but they had all been a sort of schoolgirl crush. Diana had realised early the nature of these crushes. She had known that they were unrealistic and fleeting. She also had realised that they were for her a form of escape when she was most weary. She had dimly envisaged a knight in shining armour who would come and carry her away from all of the unpleasantness of life and all responsibility.
Now she looked upon her attraction to Alex with dismay. Diana didn’t want all of those old feelings to come back; she regarded them as unhealthy, a threat to her strength of personality. She resolved to do what she had in the past: avoid the situation at all costs.
With that settled in her mind, Diana wearily went to bed.
* * *
The next morning, she got up early. She wanted to be at the office by eight to work a little on a few financial reports before Alex got back from Philadelphia. She remembered something he had said about having those done by the weekend, and today was Friday.
Dressing quickly, she thought again about how strange events had been lately at Mason Steel. Alicia Payne came to mind, and she wondered what kind of motive the other girl would consider strong enough reason for such an act of vengeance. Diana had never experienced any wrong horrible enough to want to revenge it. She couldn’t fathom somebody else imbued with such spite. Therefore such a thing was not possible.
Diana reached Mason Steel with all her doubts diminished.
As she entered the office, she was greatly surprised to see Owen Bradshaw in Carrie’s seat with the phone receiver in his hand. He looked at her over his glasses, but said nothing. There was a look of strain about his face that sat oddly on such plumpness. Feeling rather horrible with a sick foreboding of disaster, Diana forgot to take off her coat as she sank on to the couch to wait for him to finish the call. As he finished, he leaned back in his seat with a sigh. “I can’t get hold of Alex,” Owen said flatly.
“He must be at the factory, because he told me he would be either there or at the motel,” she mused out loud. “Of course the phone lines are out at the factory, so you couldn’t reach him there.” She looked at Owen and forbore to ask any questions, although her eyebrows went up a little. He smiled a twisted smile at the expression on her face.
“We have to find him, Diana,” he stated quietly. “It’s going to happen today.”
For some inexplicable reason the words sent a chill down her back. “Why?” she asked. “What’s wrong? What’s going to happen today?”
He stood up and walked heavily around the desk. “I don’t know what,” he spoke reluctantly, acting half ashamed at his admission. “Things have been happening so quickly around here…” He broke off. Then, with a direct look into Diana’s eyes, he asked, “Have you ever been so sure of something that, even though you have no proof, no logical argument, nothing concrete or sane to hold on to, you still believe in it with every conviction you hold solid?”
Only half comprehending what Owen meant, she asked tentatively, “Do you mean something like intuition?” He nodded, looking a bit relieved, and she replied, “Yes, I think I know what you mean. What are you so sure of?”
After a moment he said heavily, “Alicia Payne.”
Diana closed her eyes. Oh no, she thought. “And you think something else is going to happen today,” she stated, rather than asked.
“Yes.” The unemotional reply held a powerful conviction. “The Pittsburgh factory is behind schedule. The Philadelphia one is not producing, even though you and I know that the delay is very temporary. Alex is away, unable to make decisions, with no knowledge of the current events taking place today. We can’t reach him at the motel. The best time for another blow to Mason Steel is today, this morning. If there’s somebody behind this, they’ll know when to strike.”
Diana was thinking rapidly. “Did you try sending someone in Philadelphia to the factory to try and locate Alex?”
“I tried that about twenty minutes ago. We should hear from him soon if they found him.” Owen shook his head. “I’m going back down to my office. Let me know if you hear anything.”
“I will,” she promised as she walked him to the door. “Owen?” He looked at her questioningly. She asked hesitantly, “What do you think they’ll do?”
“I don’t know, my dear. I don’t know.”
* * *
Concentrating was hard after the curiously intense meeting with Owen. His belief that Alicia Payne was capable of such maliciousness had shaken Diana’s little delusion that she had fed last night when she had tried to convince herself that such vengefulness did not exist. She fidgeted around the office, wishing the phone would ring. It was crazy, she thought as she gazed out the window into the bright, sunny morning. I’m really a part of this team, and it all happened so qu
ickly. I care what happens to Mason Steel, to Alex’s company. I’m sweating along with everyone else. As she thought this, she suddenly realised how Mason Steel had occupied her thoughts, to the exclusion of everything else since she had started work. Nothing else in her life seemed quite as important any more to her. All her concentration was centred on something beside herself for the first time in her life.
Carrie arrived, and Diana told her in an outpouring of words of Owen’s conviction and their dread of what the morning would bring. Carrie merely nodded her head with no surprise.
“I don’t find it hard to believe,” she said, when asked by Diana. “I’ve met Alicia, and you haven’t. It makes a difference.”
Diana could only shake her head blankly, at a loss for words.
The shrill sound of the telephone in the other room made both women jump. They looked at each other silently. “I hope it’s Alex,” Diana whispered. “I hope he shouts at us for being fools.” She moved quickly to the desk and picked up the receiver. At first she instinctively held the phone away from her ear, the noise was so loud. Then she was shouting back into the phone, “Calm down, for God’s sake! I can’t understand you!”
“—it doesn’t make any sense!” the voice on the other end was shouting back. There was a slight pause. “Diana?”
“Yes, Neil.” Neil Stratton was the head accountant in their accounting department.
“Have you heard what happened yet? Payne lowered his price of steel this morning—it’s down almost twenty-three per cent of what our prices are! Diana, he’s starting a price war with us!” His voice was rising as he became more agitated. “He’s committing financial suicide! What in Hades’ name are we supposed to do, Diana?”
After the first stunned moment when she heard his words, she began to think furiously, her mind working quickly and clearly. “Neil—listen to me! I’m going to call Alex and ask him what we need to do, and I’ll be right down. In the meantime, you and the others start figuring out how much we can afford to knock off our prices without going under. Figure it down to the bare minimum. If Payne wants a price war, then that’s what he’s got to expect. Be right there.” She hung up without listening for a goodbye.
For a moment she simply sat there, her body motionless as her mind continued to race frantically. She then called for Carrie, telling her to try and reach Alex.
“Don’t stop trying. We’ve got to find out where he is,” Diana told her. “I’ll be leaving to go down to Owen’s floor, and then to the accounting department. Send the call through to me if you reach him.” Carrie hurried back to her office and Diana picked up her own phone. She looked around for the phone booklet; she had a few calls to make too.
Fifteen minutes later, Diana walked into Owen’s office. He looked up from the jumbled pile on his desk. Sitting back, he immediately asked, “Have you got in touch with Alex?”
Sighing, she replied, “No.”
“I suppose you’ve tried to get in touch with the vice-president, Jim Marshall?” Owen looked down at his hands as he spoke. There was little hope in his voice, for the vice-president of the company was a mere figurehead, a title bestowed on an incompetent who earned the seat on the board of directors of Mason Steel by virtue of his large share of stocks in the company. He was invariably absent from the day-to-day working at Mason Steel, a fact that in the past had brought many sighs of relief from Owen and Alex, and showed up rarely at any of the board meetings. He was usually away on some fishing trip, out in the obscure reaches of the wilderness with no modern conveniences and no troublesome phones.
She slumped in her chair. “Yes,” she sighed again. “He’s away. Some new fishing spot, Mrs. Marshall said. He’ll be gone for weeks.” Diana had never met Jim Marshall.
Owen was savage. “We don’t even have a figurehead of authority to work with!”
She was invaded with a sense of panic. Something had to be done right away, or Mason Steel could be ruined beyond repair. Derrick Payne’s move had been a dead giveaway as to who had been the culprit behind the disasters at both of the steel factories. His company was smaller than Mason’s, therefore his output was smaller. There was no chance in the world for Payne to win a price war under normal operating circumstances, for Mason could afford to cut their prices far lower than Payne could. It was, as Neil had exclaimed, financial suicide for Payne. However, one factory was behind schedule at Mason Steel, and the other, as far as Payne knew, was damaged if not destroyed beyond repair. With Mason’s output cut drastically, Payne could deliver the final crippling blow to the company by cutting prices Mason could no longer afford to cut, creating panic selling of the Mason Steel stocks. Diana knew that she was envisaging the ruin of Alex’s company if something wasn’t done soon.
“Owen,” she said urgently, “you’ve got to help me. We’ve got to tell everyone what Alex wants us to do, and it’s got to be done right away, now, this morning, before we lose any more money. There’s only one thing we can do—Payne has left us no choice. We have to cut our prices lower than his, and maintain our present output, God knows how. Get Jack Dobson on the phone and explain to him what’s going on. They’re going to have to work overtime until the Pittsburgh factory is back on its feet. After that, meet me down in the accounting department. I think that I’m going to need you to help me convince them that the price change is exactly what Alex has told us to do. It’s the only thing we can do.”
He nodded. “I know, Diana. I just hope we can convince them of that.” He picked up his receiver as she headed out of the door. “Diana.” His voice stopped her as she put her hand on the doorknob. She turned enquiringly. “I hope you’re a good liar. I hope we’re very good liars.”
She said soberly, “I just hope that Alex agrees with what we’re about to do. If he’s angry, then I take full responsibility.”
She was out of the door and gone.
The accounting people were a little skeptical at first, but the habit of taking orders from someone in authority dies hard in some, and Diana and Owen represented the authority. Besides which, they both lied with an excellent show of credibility. Diana insisted on doing most of the talking with Owen only backing her from time to time, adding his own considerable influence only when the most reluctant balked. She was determined that nobody but her was going to get the blame for what she had decided. Owen, at first trying to reassure her that what they did was the only thing that they could do, later became nervous himself when Alex’s plane arrived in New York that afternoon. Diana was unable to come to the phone when Alex called and when she learned that he had arrived at the airport, was quite alarmed at the thought of picking him up. In the end, Owen offered to go for her and pick Alex up himself, taking pity on her agitated state. She gratefully accepted.
“However,” she told a sympathetic Carrie, “this only postpones the inevitable meeting. Oh, Carrie, I hope what we did was right!”
Chapter Four
Diana sat back in her chair and rested her head tiredly. After staring at the ceiling for a few moments, she closed her eyes. Alex is going to be here any minute, she thought to herself. He’s going to roar at me, tell me what a stupid fool I am, tear my ego to little tiny bits and then fire me. She got a morbid sense of satisfaction out of thinking about it. It’s either that, or promote me, she told herself, and smiled at the thought.
She had been so engrossed with herself, she didn’t hear the door open to admit a very quiet Alex. His footsteps were nearly noiseless on the carpet, but some sixth sense made her look up calmly. Alex walked over to his own chair behind his desk and sank into it, one hand going up to rub his eyes which, even to Diana across the room, looked red-rimmed and tired.
“Hi,” she said softly. He turned his head and glanced at her. “Are you going to fire me?” It was asked in a matter-of-fact way, almost cheerfully, as if it didn’t matter at all.
One side of Alex’s mouth curved upwards. “No, I’m not going to fire you, you little idiot.” Diana’s back relaxed and she sagged in
her chair, relieved. His gaze sharpened at the movement and he asked incredulously, “Did you really think I would?”
She shrugged, a small movement of the shoulders, trying to seem unconcerned. Alex was watching her face. “I didn’t know what to expect, I guess,” she watched the ceiling as she spoke. “To me, I couldn’t see any other action to take; it was the only thing we could have done. But I didn’t know if it was what you wanted to do.” She rolled her head a little on the chair. “I didn’t know if you wanted to resolve it another way.” I didn’t know if you wanted to talk to Alicia instead, she thought, but didn’t have the courage to say.
His face hardened. “What else could I have done?” he asked sharply. “Go to them and ask them if they might change their minds, maybe reconsider?” Diana winced at his tone. “No, there was nothing else to do but that. Now we can only wait and see who cracks under the strain first, Payne or us. I only hope that the Pittsburgh plant can handle the extra work load until the Philadelphia plant is repaired. Otherwise Payne just might win.”
She moaned, “I can just see it now. Late hours, hard work, no lunch breaks, no weekends relaxing at home…”
He continued the line of thought, “…no dinner dates, no days off, no theatre, no picnics until this is all resolved! Lord, it makes me tired just to think about it!”
* * *
Mason Steel had a hard time in the next few weeks. The Pittsburgh plant was worked to the limit, filling in for the Philadelphia plant, and also taking new orders for steel due to the price war that waged between Mason and Payne. Alex transported workers from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh so that the plant could be manned in three shifts until the other plant was operable. He was often gone from the New York offices to manage working conditions in Pittsburgh, and from time to time to check up on repairs in Philadelphia. Diana was indeed promoted to the proud office of Operating Manager, a title which gave her authority to make decisions in case she was unable to get in contact with Alex in case of emergency.
A Deeper Dimension: A Vintage Contemporary Romance Page 6
