by Nancy Bush
Still, Crenshaw and Crenshaw had found her phone number, so she’d phoned back and the lawyer—Tom Crenshaw—had asked her for her address. She’d been reluctant to give it to him. Not that he couldn’t find it, she supposed; he was just asking to be polite.
He said he wanted to send her something—a package. But he was cagey as hell about what that package contained, and only when they’d gone back and forth and he’d finally convinced himself that yes, she was definitely the Olivia Margaux Dugan whom he was searching for, did he come through and say that his firm had a package for her—from her mother.
Her mother?
After that Liv had simply dropped the phone receiver, stumbled into bed and fallen into a coma-like sleep that she’d just woken up from.
Now she wondered if it was all a mistake. Her mother was dead. Had been since Liv’s sixth birthday. The package could not be from her mother.
She gazed at the phone receiver. It dangled along the side of the cabinet, tethered to the base unit by a long cord, hanging in a way that made her stomach wrench. She could still see her mother’s softly swaying body, the protruding tongue; an image that didn’t fade with time.
Sucking in several deep breaths, she squeezed her eyes closed, then opened them again, picked up the receiver and placed it back in the cradle. More old-school technology. She didn’t have a hand-held receiver. She didn’t even have a satellite phone in the bedroom. Her brother, Hague, had real issues with paranoia—worse than Liv’s by far—and some of his paranoia had definitely penetrated her way of thinking as well. There was a bogeyman out there. Maybe more than one. Better to be safe than sorry.
She did, however, have voice mail and that nagging, blinking red light on the base unit meant she had another call. The lawyer had undoubtedly phoned back. For a moment Liv considered the paradox that was her life. Here she was running away from almost all technological communication and yet she worked for a software company that made simulated war games mainly played by adolescent boys. Okay, she was little more than a low-level bookkeeper for Zuma Software; she’d always been good with numbers. But the irony of her situation did not escape her. She smiled faintly to herself, screwed up her courage, and pushed the answering machine’s button.
The lawyer’s disembodied voice came through the speaker: Ms. Dugan, this is Tom Crenshaw again, of Crenshaw and Crenshaw, Attorneys-at-Law. Please call us back so we can send you the package from Deborah Dugan addressed to her daughter, Olivia Margaux Dugan. Per our earlier conversation, this package was left in our care to be sent to you on your twenty-fifth birthday. As that date has passed, we need to make certain you receive this package soon. A pause. As if he wanted to say a lot more, then simply, Thank you, and a return phone number and the law firm’s hours.
Liv pushed the button a second time and listened to the message again. It was too early to call Tom Crenshaw back. She didn’t even know if she wanted to anyway. She felt hot and headachy and strange just thinking about receiving something from her mother. Her mother. Nearly twenty years after her death.
Putting the number to memory, she got ready for work, then drove her Honda Accord by rote to the business park which housed Zuma Software. The company was situated in a private cul-de-sac, separated from the other buildings by a long drive bordered by arborvitae, isolating it, giving it the illusion of more importance than it truly deserved. Or maybe it was more important. Zuma’s owner, Kurt Upjohn, certainly projected an “I’m better than you” attitude.
Liv skirted the front parking lot and drove to the west side of the building, the unofficial employee parking lot. The building itself was concrete on all four sides, with a glass atrium entryway complete with double doors and a guard of sorts, Paul de Fore, a total tool, in Liv’s biased opinion.
Liv parked nose out, climbed from the driver’s door, remote locked the Honda and started around to the front of the building. She didn’t even think of using the back door as Upjohn wanted all his employees to enter through the front. The back door automatically locked whenever it was used, and could only be accessed from inside. Upjohn was very, very cautious about anyone learning anything about his newest game models created by the nerds/techies who worked in the upstairs office with its glowing screens and simulations and miles of computer code. Liv had only peeked in once when Aaron, Kurt’s son, had practically dragged her up the stairs with him, and she’d been half-awed at the way the room looked like a control room straight out of some high-tech adventure movie.
Now, as she entered through the mahogany front door—a door surrounded by windows—Paul gave Liv a narrow-eyed once-over, as if he’d never seen her before. Liv clutched her purse harder, an automatic reaction she couldn’t quite repress even though she would never bring her handgun to the office. She wasn’t that crazy.
Jessica Maltona, Zuma’s receptionist, smiled at Liv as she entered, then slid a sideways look toward Paul who was still standing by the front door, arms crossed, watching Liv walk across the polished floor to her cubicle on the far side of the large room. Though the two women weren’t friends exactly—they didn’t know each other that well, Liv’s fault mostly—they shared a silent communication about Paul whom neither could stand.
Liv smiled at Jessica as she passed. He’s a tool, all right. To which Jessica, as if hearing her, nodded emphatically.
Settling herself at her desk, Liv stuffed her purse into a lower cabinet with a lock. She twisted the key and pocketed it, then settled down to the night before’s bookkeeping entries. It wasn’t an exciting job. It was rote, by and large. But rote work was exactly what kept her from thinking and imagining and worrying. No, she wasn’t bipolar. No, she wasn’t schizophrenic. She was just . . . damaged . . . for lack of a better word. From the moment she’d discovered her mother’s body, she hadn’t been the same.
An hour into the job, safely ensconced at her work station, which was about a hundred feet from the front doors and the floor-to-ceiling windows splayed with the Zuma Software red neon logo in script, backward from inside the building but dramatic nonetheless, she picked up the phone and dialed the number before her brain, with its strong governor, could stop her.
“Crenshaw and Crenshaw,” a woman’s voice answered in that slightly bored, slightly snooty tone that seemed to invade the better law firms.
“This is Olivia Margaux Dugan returning Tom Crenshaw’s call.”
“Mr. Crenshaw is not in yet.” There was a small rebuke there, as if she felt Liv should know someone of Mr. Crenshaw’s importance wouldn’t deign to get to work so early. “Would you care to leave a message?”
“Just give him this address.” She told the woman Zuma Software’s street address and finished with, “If he wants me to have the package in his care from Deborah Dugan, he can send it here.”
“May I tell him what this is concerning? Something further?” she asked, sounding a bit miffed by Liv’s high-handedness.
“He’ll know what it’s about.” And she hung up.
Two hours later the package arrived by special messenger. Liv looked up from her computer first with annoyance, then surprise at the speed, then trepidation, as Paul de Fore walked toward her, holding out the 8 ½ x 11 manila envelope. Liv had been inputting figures into a computer program, compiling information to be turned over to Zuma’s accountant, who in turn would pore over the data as if it held the answer to the universe’s deepest questions, who would then pass it along to Kurt Upjohn, the original developer of the war-game-type video games that had put his software company on the map. Her head was full of numbers and seeing Paul coming her way pulled her out of that world and into the present at hyperspeed. She almost felt motion sick.
Paul slapped the envelope on her desk without so much as a word. He was no conversationalist, which suited Liv just fine.
Gingerly picking up the package, she looked it over, her gaze jumping to the return address of Crenshaw and Crenshaw. She’d been alarmed when Tom Crenshaw had asked her birth date, where she grew up, the name
s of her parents, and a myriad of other questions. She in turn had demanded to know to whom she was speaking. How had he found her number? What did he want really? What were his credentials? He explained about Crenshaw and Crenshaw and what a long-established, trusted firm they were. Then he told her about the package and when he invoked the name of Deborah Dugan she dropped the receiver.
But now here it was. The package from her mother, nineteen years after her death. It was a large manila envelope with her name typed on a label affixed to its center. She laid it carefully on the desktop. She almost wanted to poke it with a stick, though it was clearly just some papers. Papers about what, though? She couldn’t think of anything that—
“Hey!” Aaron Dirkus snapped his fingers in front of her face.
Liv sat bolt upright, as if goosed. “Aaron,” she said tightly to Kurt Upjohn’s son, her only “friend” at Zuma.
“Didn’t mean to scare you,” he answered affably, though he clearly didn’t care one way or another. Aaron’s last name was different than his father’s, due to some undefined wrangle between Kurt and Aaron’s mother—Kurt had only managed to marry her after Aaron was born and that pissed her off but good, so much so that she’d given her son her maiden name rather than Upjohn. Then later, she and Kurt had divorced anyway. The story went something like that. Liv had never quite got it in full detail, but it didn’t really matter. She’d never wanted to question Aaron further because that would have given him carte blanche to ask her about herself and she didn’t want to go there. Ever.
“You’re kinda in a fog. C’mon, let’s go out back and have a smoke,” Aaron said.
“I’ve got some work to catch up on.” She wasn’t interested in smoking anything, especially Aaron’s type of cigarettes.
“Bullshit. You work too hard as it is. You’re giving the rest of us slackers a bad name.”
“The boss is your father. You can get away with it. I can’t.”
“People are starting to hate you around here, you know that? You gotta come with me.”
He wasn’t going to take no for an answer, and he’d been known to actually pull her out of her chair to get her to comply, so she reluctantly got to her feet. Truthfully, she really didn’t take enough breaks, according to the law, so she followed him to the back door on the first floor and outside to the enclosed patio-type area, with its overhang and its gate that led to the employee parking lot. Her blue Accord was three in, facing out as if ready to take off.
Aaron normally stuffed a brick-sized rock in the door to keep it ajar, but today he actually pulled out a key and unlocked it from the outside, so that the door would stay open until he relocked it.
“Where’d you get that?” Liv asked.
“Kinda lifted it,” he admitted. “Don’t worry. I’ll lock up before we leave tonight. I just can’t stand walking by that asshole de Fore every time I want to breathe some fresh air.” He shot her a quick smile as he pulled a joint and lighter from his pants pocket.
Aaron liked to smoke “maree-wanna,” as he called it. Liv stayed away from all drugs; she’d been encouraged to take enough during her yearlong treatment at Hathaway House to last her a lifetime and then some. She liked a clear head and, apart from a very occasional drink, mostly steered clear of alcohol, too.
“You don’t say much,” Aaron observed with a sideways look as he belched out a lungful of smoke. “I like that about you. Although you’re kind of shut down.”
Remembering her six-year-old self, Liv felt a pang of sorrow for the loss of the independent, headstrong little girl she’d once been. That girl had apparently died along with her mother.
She stood to one side, leaning against the gate to the parking lot, gazing out. Occasionally she’d left the building this way when Aaron had propped open the door. She completely agreed with him that bypassing Paul de Fore was worth breaking some rules. Paul was just one of those guys no one could stand, the type who took his job too seriously and made it hell on everyone else.
Being too serious, though, wasn’t Aaron’s problem.
“Tell me something about yourself,” Aaron said now. He had long hair and wore a plaid shirt over a T-shirt, slacker-style. It hardly mattered since his dad was the boss, but truthfully the programmers and game designers who were on the upstairs floor kind of dressed the same way. Slacker, hacker, computer techie, video game designer . . . there seemed to be an unspoken dress code with them that thumbed its nose at accepted business attire.
Only Liv and Jessica Maltona dressed in legitimate office wear: skirts or slacks, blouses, vests, jackets, sensible shoes, tasteful jewelry and makeup. Paul de Fore wore a navy shirt and pants as if it were a security uniform though there was really no such dictum.
“Well, I’m a Leo,” she said. “I like Italian food and expensive coffee and live in an apartment with a three-hundred-pound cat.”
Aaron coughed out some smoke on a laugh. Liv had never so much as hinted that she might have a personality and she’d taken him by surprise. She wasn’t even sure why she’d said it. She’d just wanted . . . to not be so serious for once.
“Cool. What’s the cat’s name?” he asked.
“Tiny.”
He grinned at her and Liv smiled back at him. It was the most playful conversation they’d had to date and though Liv was simply talking to talk, Aaron peered at her as if she were something he’d just discovered.
“Who are you?” he asked. “You’re too good-looking to be this mousy bookkeeper you want us all to think you are.”
Too good-looking? She had straight brown hair, hazel eyes and a mouth and jaw that were set too tightly, or so she’d been told. “I’m kind of average-looking.”
“Look in the mirror, sometime.”
She shook her head. Whenever she looked in the mirror she saw a woman with anxious eyes whose personal life was nonexistent and whose professional one was practically invisible, too.
He flapped a hand at her and sucked in his last toke. “You’re good-looking and you’re too serious. You should have some of this.” He held out the teensy little end of the joint.
“Nah.”
“Or a glass or two of wine, or a few mojitos, or some Xanax. You just need to let go.” He pushed on the gate and let himself into the back parking lot.
“You’re going to piss off your father by ignoring security,” she warned him.
“A guy’s gotta do what a guy’s gotta do. You go out this way sometimes, too.”
It was true. Though Liv generally played by the rules, there was this inner part of her that occasionally liked to flout authority. Most of the time she pretended it wasn’t there. But sometimes it stretched and peered around like a waking beast, looking to prowl. Was it because she’d spent time constrained by others? Or, the fact that the police had left an indelible impression on her since her mother’s death, and not a good one. Or, maybe it was just a side of her personality that she mostly ignored and that surprised her and others now and again when it suddenly popped up. She wasn’t the meek worker bee everyone thought she was, though she took pains to make others see her that way. A kind of camouflage, like an animal’s coat or a bird’s feathers.
By the time she left work she still hadn’t opened the package and when she got back to the apartment she dropped it on the kitchen counter while she threw together a quick meal—a microwavable TV dinner with limited calories and limited taste; her eating habits hadn’t evolved over the years, either.
She went to bed at ten-thirty and stared up at the ceiling through the dark. She could hear the comfortable sounds of the refrigerator humming and the tinny voices from her neighbor’s television, which seemed to be right behind her head, set against the paper-thin wall that separated their units, her bedroom butting up against theirs.
She fell asleep, then came to abruptly at midnight, wondering what had woken her. There was moaning from behind the wall. It had been her neighbor Jo’s last climactic shriek during lovemaking—something that happened regularly enough—t
hat had penetrated her sleep.
Sleep . . . That’s what some people called it, though Liv was pretty sure her sleep was different than others’; she’d learned that over the years. Hers was disturbed by images that kept coming back, creeping into a dream that had nothing to do with whatever the dream was about, images burrowing inside, memories from her childhood that simply wouldn’t go away. Gruesome visions. The kind that had sent her to Hathaway House, a place for troubled teens who were recovering from serious issues: drug addiction, suicide attempts, self-mutilation . . . whatever. She’d been sent there because she was “disturbed,” or so said her evil stepmother—yes, she really did have one—who had convinced her father to seek help for his nutso daughter. Only it hadn’t helped, apart from making Liv realize that her problems were small compared to some of the other kids’ at Hathaway House.
But because she was underage and had no choice, Liv put in her time there and finally, much to the evil stepmother Lorinda’s dismay, had been pronounced “in recovery” sometime in what would have been her senior year of high school. She was released into her family’s care and she went on to earn her GED. She’d learned by then that the best thing to do was just not to tell anybody about the powerful images she had of her mother’s body hanging limply from a noose that had been attached to the rustic kitchen rafters of their old home. Images that stole her sleep. Images of a suicide that had left Deborah Dugan’s two children, Liv and her brother, Hague, in the hands of a stunned father who quickly took a new bride.
Liv blinked in the darkness. The television next door was now tuned to an old sitcom that ran in the off hours and every so often the canned laughter would burst out in little fireworks of har, har, har. Liv listened to it and thought of the couple who lived adjacent to her in Apartment 21B. Young and in love, around her own age, they seemed to live on pizza and Diet Coke. At least the girl did. The guy had a penchant for beer. “Whatever’s on special,” he told Liv one day when she met them on the outdoor balcony and he was lugging a six-pack of Budweiser. They were trying to hug, kiss and giggle with each other while he also was threading the key into the lock and then they sort of fell inside and slammed the door shut behind them.
