Spring Fever

by Mary Kay Andrews

  She drew a spare key to her office from her pocket and unlocked the door. She flipped on the light and sighed at what she saw.

  More cardboard boxes were scattered around the office. Stacks of books were piled on top of her desk, and even more stacks—of boxes, files, and miscellaneous papers—stood piled at precarious angles. There was a coatrack in the corner, and from it hung a couple of her old, threadbare sweaters, a Quixie Beverage Company red-and-green-striped driver’s uniform shirt with her name embroidered on the breast pocket, and, yes, shrouded in an age-clouded plastic dry cleaners bag hung the dreaded Dixie the Pixie costume.

  Annajane lifted a corner of the plastic bag and inspected the green felt tunic and red tights. Somebody—her mother, maybe?—had done a neat job of mending the rips from her Fourth of July fall all those years ago. She had a corresponding scar on her knee. You couldn’t even tell—unless you looked really closely.

  She smiled wryly and let the plastic drop. Old wounds. They faded, but they never really went away, did they?

  No good worrying about that now, she decided, clearing a path to her desk. She sat down in front of her computer and plunged herself into her work.

  Two hours later, she sat back in her chair and paused for a moment. The end-of-quarter sales figures she’d been scanning were depressing. Fountain sales, canned sales, liter bottle sales—all were down.

  Her department was gearing up to work with supermarket chains around the region for an important summer promotion. The ad agency’s art department had worked up sketches for the supermarket displays, but to Annajane they were uninspired and, worse, downright ugly.

  She sighed and kneaded her forehead with her fingertips. Davis had already approved the sketches with an enthusiastic “looks great” scrawled in the margins. Annajane was only the second in command in marketing. The final okay was up to Davis—and Mason, to some extent. She had one foot out the door, so why should this matter to her?

  It just did. She hated the idea of stores all over the region flooded with the tacky cardboard displays featuring a likeness of Quixie’s new spokesman—a second-rate Nascar driver—holding the Quixie bottle. The colors were garish, the production quality mediocre, and the driver, Donnell Boggs, whom Annajane had met on his one and only stop in Passcoe for promotional purposes, was a skeezy drunk who’d instantly become Davis’s new best friend.

  She jotted some quick notes on a Post-it and attached it to the sketches before returning her attention to her e-mail.

  A woman’s voice echoed down the hallway, and Annajane looked up, startled.

  Celia Wakefield’s slightly nasal Midwestern accent was impossible to miss.

  “No,” she was saying to somebody. “No, we haven’t discussed a new date yet. It just happened last night, for heaven’s sake!”

  Annajane felt the hair on the back of her neck prickle. Her office door was closed, but she found herself slumping down in her chair, just in case.

  Celia’s heels clicked on the linoleum hallway floor. She was coming closer, and apparently she was having a discussion on her cell phone. “No, Jerry,” she said sharply. “You don’t understand how things are done down here. It’s not just a business to these people. We have to finesse this. It’s a courtship, you know?”

  “These people?” Was she referring to the Baylesses? And was Quixie the business under discussion?

  Celia started to say something, but then she was quiet, probably listening to the unseen Jerry on the other end of the line.

  “Mmm, actually, I think the younger brother is amenable. He’s the middle child, and you know how they are. Starved for approval. I get the feeling he’s interested in exploring his options.”

  Annajane sat up straight now. Davis? Exploring his options? What the hell was going on here?

  Celia had passed Annajane’s door now, and her voice was starting to fade. Annajane got up and pressed her ear to the door, feeling guilty even as she did so.

  “Well, the sister is definitely not president of my fan club,” Celia was saying.

  You got that right, Annajane thought.

  “Mmm-hmm, no, she doesn’t participate directly, kids and all that. But yes, I think it’s likely she does have a stake in the business. No, unfortunately, that’s a bit tricky since she’s best friends with Mason’s ex.”

  Annajane bristled.

  Celia laughed at something her caller said. “You don’t even know the half of it,” she drawled.

  The footsteps receded, as did Celia’s voice.

  What the hell is she up to? Annajane wondered again.

  She went back to her computer and tried to concentrate on the memo she was writing for Tracey, but her mind kept drifting back to the conversation she’d just overheard.

  * * *

  Ten months. That’s how long it had taken Celia Wakefield to get her claws into first Quixie and then Mason Bayless. Knowing Celia as she did now, Annajane was only surprised that she hadn’t managed it any faster.

  Like everybody else in Passcoe, as well as at the company, Annajane had been thoroughly charmed by her first meeting with Celia.

  Davis had been singing the praises of the hotshot management consultant he’d met on a business trip to Chicago for months.

  “Mama actually met her first, if you can believe it,” he’d told Annajane at a meeting the day after he returned.

  Sallie often tagged along with both her sons on business trips after Glenn’s death. Not that she had much to do with the day-to-day operations of Quixie, but she’d made friends over the years with people in the soft drink business, and Annajane suspected she was eager to go along on the trips because it gave her a chance to get out of Passcoe, stay in the best hotels, catch up with old pals, and shop. Sallie Bayless was a world-class shopper.

  “Mama was sitting in our suite, leafing through the program for the marketing meeting, and she got all excited when she saw that Celia Wakefield was on a panel about brand building,” Davis said. “Turns out, she’d just bought a little dress for Sophie from a company called Gingerpeachy at some ritzy boutique up there and went crazy over them,” Davis said. “Of course, Gingerpeachy is Celia’s company. Or was, until she sold it. Sallie insisted on sitting in on Celia’s panel, and she was so impressed, afterwards she invited Celia to meet us for dinner. I had drinks with her in the bar first, you know, just to see if she checked out.”

  Davis rolled his eyes dramatically. “Of course, I took all of this with a grain of salt. I mean, come on, what does Sallie know about brand building, or marketing? I tried to get out of it gracefully, but you know Sallie. Damned if she didn’t force me to go to dinner, and damned if she wasn’t right. Wait until you meet this gal, Annajane. She’s the real deal!”

  “This is a woman who really understands branding,” he told Annajane. “She built her own company from scratch—kids’ clothing, starting from the time she was twenty-one years old, working as a sales clerk at a little boutique in the middle of nowhere. She was the designer, the manufacturer, the marketer—everything. Last year, she sold the company to a big retailer. Believe that? Ten million dollars! Guess she’s gotten bored with the good life, because she’s doing consulting work these days.”

  A few weeks later, Davis called her into his office and introduced her to Celia.

  Annajane’s first impression had been that this was the most exquisite creature she’d ever met. The chair she was sitting in seemed to swallow her whole. Even with five-inch stiletto heels on her lime-green pumps, she was barely a notch above five feet tall. Her blond hair was silvery against a deep tennis-player’s tan, and her pale lavender suit and low-cut lime-green silk shell should have been too girly for business. But on Celia, it was perfection. She reminded Annajane of a hummingbird. The only thing missing was a tiny pair of wings.

  “Annajane!” Celia had said, leaping up to shake her hand. “Davis has told me so much about you. He says you’re the heart and soul of the company. How can I lure you into going to lunch with me and sha
ring your insights on Quixie?”

  Of course, Annajane had been flattered. Flattery was one of Celia’s many talents. She was warm and bubbly, so easy to talk to. They’d had a hilarious lunch, laughing and talking about the quirks of working for a small-town family-owned company. Celia had seemed surprised to learn that Mason was Annajane’s ex-husband.

  “Really? And you still work for the company after all that? How do you stand it?”

  Annajane winced now at how easily it had been for Celia to draw her into her confidences. For a few weeks, they’d been best buddies, sharing drinks, lunches, even a shopping trip to Charlotte.

  Everybody, it seemed, loved Celia. Everybody except Pokey.

  “She’s a phony,” Pokey said, after the first and only lunch date with Annajane and Celia. “If she’s so rich from selling her own company, why is she piddling around with contract consulting work for Quixie?”

  Secretly, Annajane wondered if Pokey’s dislike of Celia wasn’t just a case of good old-fashioned jealousy. With three small children to ride herd over, Pokey was out of the loop on lots of things. And Annajane and Celia were seeing a lot of each other. But she kept that to herself.

  Instead, she repeated what Celia told her about herself. “She’s only thirty-two. I think the payout is probably over a number of years, and some of it’s actually in stock she can’t touch for a few years. She’s too young to retire, and, anyway, she’s one of these people who always have to be doing something. She loves a challenge. And you’ve got to admit, with the way things are going, we’ve got a big challenge on our hands at Quixie.”

  “She wants more than a job,” Pokey warned. “You wait and see.”

  But before Annajane could come up with a good defense for Celia, the memos started.

  Like Celia herself, they were charming and disarming initially, couched as questions at first, then as suggestions, and then, within a very short period of time, as directives and missives. Celia’s range was broad—she was interested in anything and everything that happened at Quixie, and no detail was too small for her laserlike focus.

  But it wasn’t until she was on the receiving end of one of those memos—this one a coolly worded e-mail she received after filing an expense report following an out-of-town marketing association meeting—that Annajane realized just how lethal Celia’s influence could be.

  AJ: Don’t you think it’s excessive to bill the company for airfare, meals and a night at an expensive New York hotel when we both know these conferences are really more about gossip and personal networking than they are about Quixie business?—CW

  Stunned, Annajane had fired back with a memo of her own, detailing the subject matter of each meeting she’d attended and its value to the company, and adding the fact that she’d spent the other two nights of the conference in an old friend’s apartment, which cost the company nothing. And she’d ended her memo with one last observation.

  CW: Obviously, I disagree with you about the value of these conferences. And by the way, didn’t you meet Davis and Sallie at a conference just like this one?—Annajane.

  After that, there were no more lunches or shopping trips. She had, she admitted to Pokey, finally seen Celia’s true colors. And they weren’t pretty.

  But to everybody else at Quixie, especially Mason, Celia Wakefield was regarded as the second coming. The one time Annajane had dared complain to Mason about one of Celia’s pointed memos to her, Mason worked himself into a righteous indignation.

  She’d entered his office meekly and couched her objection as tactfully as possible, but he’d issued her a stinging and immediate rebuke. “Frankly, criticism of Celia, coming from you, seems kind of petty. She sees the big picture, Annajane, something we desperately need right now. She’s done a great job of analyzing these types of things, and I have no intention of reversing her.”

  Annajane could see the matter was closed. She and Mason had managed to keep their relationship at the office on an even-keeled, professional level after their divorce, but during that brief meeting, she realized things had changed. Celia was making sure of that.

  Not long after that, she noticed that Celia had been given her own parking space, with her name stenciled on the pavement, situated between Mason’s and Davis’s in the company lot. And not long after that, she’d seen Celia and Mason leaving for long lunches together. Soon, they were arriving at the office together on Monday mornings.

  “He brought her to Sunday dinner at Mama’s,” Pokey reported. “You know how many women he’s dated since you two split up—and he’s never brought any of those women around the family. Hell, we never even met Sophie’s mother. I’ve got a bad, bad feeling about this chick.”

  It wasn’t long before Annajane came to realize just how astute Pokey’s assessment of Celia was.

  The day Celia and Davis presented her with plans for the upcoming summer promotion with the Donnell Boggs tie-in, a promotion she’d had no hand in at all, Annajane realized that Celia had quickly and stealthily cut her out of the decision-making loop in the marketing department. Before that day was out, Annajane had begun updating her résumé and quietly putting out feelers to find a new job. Her days at Quixie, she knew then, were numbered.

  Still, the engagement announcement, just six weeks after her own engagement, had taken Annajane totally by surprise. And not, she would admit now, in a good way.

  Celia Wakefield was not a woman to be trusted.

  * * *

  Annajane’s cell phone rang, startling her badly. She groped on her desk to find and answer it.

  “Hello,” she whispered.

  “Hey, Annajane,” it was Mason, sounding … awkward.

  “Hi,” she said, already feeling guilty about eavesdropping on Celia.

  “I’m over at the hospital, and Sophie’s awake, and asking for you,” Mason said. “I told her you’re pretty busy what with the move and all, but…”

  “I was just wrapping up some work, and then I’ll be over,” Annajane said hurriedly. “How’s she feeling?”

  “She’s kinda pitiful,” Mason admitted. “She’s trying to be brave, poor kid, but she can’t understand why it still hurts. I thought maybe you could take her mind off it.”

  “I’ll stop on the way over and pick up a video we can watch together,” Annajane said. “I’ve got her copy of Milo and Otis at my place. She never gets tired of seeing that.”

  “Great idea,” Mason said, sounding relieved. “Should have thought of that myself.”

  Yes, Annajane thought to herself. You should have. Or your fiancée should have—if she weren’t so busy plotting something nefarious.

  Annajane got up from her desk and looked around the room with a sigh. She really should make a start on clearing out some of this old junk before leaving for the hospital. That wooden bookshelf nearest the door, for example. The bottom shelf held a row of dusty cardboard filing boxes that had been sitting there since she’d moved into the office eight years ago. As far as she knew, the boxes hadn’t been touched for decades before that.

  She grabbed the hand truck she’d borrowed from the plant and stacked three of the boxes on it. The cartons were unexpectedly heavy. A plume of dust arose as she lifted the lid of the carton on top, and she sneezed repeatedly. Inside the carton were stacks of age-browned file folders with fading but neatly typed labels. The top file was labeled CORRESPONDENCE, 1972. Clearly, the boxes contained nothing anybody had needed or wanted in the past forty or so years.

  Annajane maneuvered the unwieldy load of file cartons through the plant and out to the loading dock, where a large Dumpster was located. She grunted as she hefted the first box into the empty Dumpster. But when she bent to unload the second box, which had been somewhat crushed from the weight of the top box, its sides collapsed, spilling the contents onto the concrete surface of the loading dock.

  “Dammit,” she muttered, scooping up a load of papers.

  Her mood changed when she saw the contents of the box. They were slick, full-color me
chanicals of vintage Quixie advertisements.

  The top ad had a vividly rendered illustration of Dixie, the Quixie Pixie, perched on the top of a Christmas tree, winking impishly and offering a bottle of Quixie to two pajama-clad children peeking around the corner of a living room that could have come straight out of a 1950s movie.

  GO AHEAD, the ad’s headline urged. SANTA WON’T MIND.

  CELEBRATE CHRISTMAS WITH QUIXIE CHERRY COLA!

  “Oh, wow,” she breathed, looking closer. A notation on the bottom of the mechanical indicated that the ad had run in the December 1957 issue of Look magazine. The illustration was signed, in the corner, with familiar block lettering. She blinked and looked again, but the signature was still there. Norman Rockwell.

  She had no idea the company had once hired the country’s most famous illustrator for its ad campaigns.

  Annajane looked at another mechanical. This one was for the June 1961 issue of Saturday Evening Post and showed Dixie again. The illustration had the mascot water-skiing behind a sleek speedboat driven by a pair of windswept but gorgeous bathing-suit-clad teenage girls. Both the girls held bottles of Quixie in their raised hands.

  THE WATER’S FINE, the ad’s headline said. BUT QUIXIE IS EVEN BETTER.

  She fanned through the rest of the files. There were more mechanicals for Quixie ads over the ages, artists’ sketches, and even memos about upcoming promotions.

  One of the promotional pieces was a recipe booklet titled Entertaining Ideas with Delicious and Nutritious Quixie.

  Delicious, yes, Annajane thought, but what demented marketer had dared to suggest that Quixie was actually healthy?

  And yet, the booklet, which Annajane surmised was ’60s-era, offered more than a dozen recipes with accompanying color photographs for Quixie-inspired dishes, ranging from a Quixie-glazed Easter ham to an elaborate three-layer molded Quixie JELL-O “salad” to a Quixie-based fruit punch featuring a festive cherry and lime sherbet-accented frozen ice ring.