“What a coward you are,” I scolded, speaking to James but looking at Mia. “Hiding behind a child?”
He might have said, I told you I was a coward at the start, which would have acknowledged that he knew I knew that he was TrueBlue . So maybe he didn’t know I knew? Well, I wasn’t clueing him in just yet. I wanted to see just how long he would drag out the ruse.
“I had no choice,” he said, hooking the hood of his jacket on the coat tree by the door. “The nanny’s gone, and I needed to see you.”
“Shouldn’t the baby be asleep?”
“Yes, but this is urgent. She’ll probably doze off right here. We need to talk, Annie.”
I sat back down at the desk, swiveled to face him, and folded my arms over my chest. Thunder rolled, though not loudly. When it was gone, I said, “I’m listening.”
Not only hadn’t Mia been alarmed by the thunder, but she didn’t look at all ready to doze off. She was kicking one leg and craning her head back, looking up at James now. He took both of her small hands in his, but his eyes were on me.
“I didn’t expect this,” he began and stopped. Those dark eyes—dark brown eyes, actually, and quite deep—suggested confusion.
“This what?”
“You. This attraction. I’m not supposed to be attracted to Annie Barnes. She’s trouble.”
I grinned.
“See?” he said, pointing at me. The spontaneity of the moment made him look younger. “There. That grin. It does something to me, and I don’t know why. But I keep thinking about things like that and telling myself that there’s no way anything between us could work. For one thing, we live in different places, which I swore I would never do again. And for another, you’d like nothing more than to bring down my family business.”
“That’s not true,” I argued. “If I wanted to bring down the business, I’d have gone to the press long before now. It’s a hot issue, so there’d be no trouble getting coverage. There’d already be producers from 60 Minutes up here and investigative journalists from the big papers. What I want,” I said with emphasis, “is for Northwood to finally take responsibility for two very serious mercury spills, compensate the people who’ve been hurt, and make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
He didn’t deny that there had been two spills. Nor did he ask how I knew. He was distracted, because Mia had started to squirm. Perhaps it was the suddenly heightened slap of rain on the roof, perhaps it was simple restlessness, but she clearly wanted out of the carrier.
Holding the child, he unhooked the straps. “Do you think I haven’t done things? Do you think I haven’t compensated the people I knew who were hurt?” He set the child on the floor and straightened. “Why do you think those people won’t talk with you? They won’t talk because I’ve set up funds to help them with the things they need.”
So here was another thing. TrueBlue knew I was having trouble getting people to talk. James and I hadn’t discussed it.
But suddenly the distinction didn’t matter. “You, personally, set up funds?” I asked. Mia was crawling toward the far end of the room.
“Me, in the name of the mill,” he said, watching the child. “We call it a civic disability package, but I know what it is. So do my father and my brother.”
“Then you know that those spills have caused illness?”
“We’ve known since it happened back at the Clubhouse.”
“And some of that illness has caused death?”
He nodded slowly, grimly.
“Did you set the fire?” I asked.
“No. If I’d had my way, I’d have been blunt and just torn down the building and cleaned up the spill. But it was a fight. My father wasn’t going to do a damn thing at all, until I badgered him enough.”
“He’d have ignored it?” I asked, appalled.
I had barely finished speaking when a loud clap of thunder came. Seeming more puzzled than frightened, Mia looked back at James. Picking up on his lack of concern over the noise, she resumed crawling.
“He’d have prayed it would go away, which, of course, means it would seep deeper into the ground and move toward the river with each rainfall until the river was more polluted than ever.” He sputtered scornfully. “Talk about burying your head in the sand. So I threatened him. I talked about lawsuits and media attention. I told him we had to do something. But I was as surprised by the fire as the rest of the town.” Stretching forward, he scooped Mia up and returned her to his spot. The instant he set her down, she took off again, this time toward the bookshelves beside my desk.
“Why didn’t you speak up then?” I asked, because what James was telling me implicated him in deception, and I didn’t want that. “Couldn’t you have told someone the truth?”
“Oh, I tried,” he said dryly. In a gesture of frustration, he scrubbed the top of his head, ruffling salt-and-pepper hair that was already ruffled—and in this, too, he seemed younger than his usual, composed, authoritative self. His eyes were on the child. “And every time I did, my father would cover my tracks so that it was like I hadn’t said a goddamned word.” His voice rose. “At one point he told his golf buddies that I was full of radical ideas I got at business school. How’s that for a smear? He knew they would spread the word, but in the kind of subtle way that has more weight for its semblance of confidentiality. Sandy is a genius at creating spin and making it stick. It’s a natural marketing skill. And yes, it’s the power thing that you hate.”
I wanted to believe him. He sounded genuinely upset—guilt-ridden, angry, and dismayed. “What about the Children’s Center?” I asked.
He showed no surprise that I knew about that, either. Mia had begun taking books from the shelves, a soft thu-thunk of each, audible only because the rain had eased again. He went after her and began putting back the books. “Yeah, well, that’s an ongoing argument,” he said. “Sandy claims that the other leaks were a fluke, and that since there hasn’t been a problem under the Children’s Center so far, the drums there are solid and that to do something will only draw attention to the presence of those drums, which are illegal, by the way.” He sat back on his heels, looking up at me from there, “And before you lambaste me for that, please remember that those drums were buried before I became part of the company. I was away in college at the time. Sandy had no reason to ask my opinion. I sure as hell wouldn’t have built civic buildings over a toxic waste dump. Is that idiocy?” he cried.
“The Children’s Center is a tragedy waiting to happen.”
“Yes,” he shot back, “and I have nightmares about that. But you have to understand, my relationship with my father is tenuous. That’s why I keep to myself and run my own part of the business. He and I don’t see eye to eye on things, and the more I push, the more he marginalizes me. So I have a choice. I can let myself be marginalized so much that I’m no good to the company. Or I can pick and choose my fights—which is what I do. The mill is the lifeblood of Middle River. If it folds, the town is in dire straits.”
Hadn’t TrueBlue said something similar?
Thunder struck. Mia shot a frightened look at James. His hand on her head soothed her.
“But what about the Children’s Center?” I pushed. “Would you want Mia there?”
“Why do you think she isn’t?” he asked with a tortured look. I had touched a raw nerve. His voice was impassioned as the thunder rolled off. “Do you think I don’t want her with other children? She needs to learn how to play. She needs to learn how to share. She needs to have friends, and playdates with children with mothers, because, Lord knows, I’m no mother, but I’m doing the best I can, damn it. Okay, she’s only ten months old now, so keeping her home with the nanny is okay, but in another few months I’ll have to do something. My father would be perfectly happy to keep her hidden away. I refuse to do that.”
“Hidden away because she’s adopted?”
“Hidden away because she’s not adopted!” he said so sharply that Mia began to cry. Quieting instantly, he drew her up into a hu
g. “Shhh, I’m sorry, baby,” he murmured against that short, shiny black hair. “I’m not angry at you, never at you.”
Mia cried for another few seconds before responding to his calm.
“There,” he said by her ear. “Want to take the books out again?” With an economy of movement, he put every last book back on the shelf and sat her down. She went right to it with a resumption of the same soft thu-thunk, thu-thunk as each book hit the floor first with the bottom of its spine, then with its side.
Me, I was stunned. Arms no longer crossed, I had my hands on the edge of my seat. “She isn’t adopted? Does that mean what I think?”
There was no thunder to punctuate his revelation. It was striking enough on its own.
James bowed his head toward Mia, then raised it and faced me. “Up until last year, I was on the road often. When you develop new products for a company like ours, there’s a lot to consider, from the machines that produce it, to the raw materials those machines need, to the markets that will purchase the product when it’s complete. I’ve been doing this kind of thing for ten years. For six of those years, I had a relationship with an advertising executive in New Jersey. It started off as professional—she created an ad campaign for us—but then it became personal. She wasn’t supposed to get pregnant, but it happened. She wanted to abort; I wanted the baby. I finally made her an offer she couldn’t refuse.”
“You bought her off?”
“Don’t judge me,” he warned.
“I’m not,” I said quickly. “I’m just amazed. Was she after money all along?” It was a definite possibility. Anyone dating a Meade of Northwood Mill knew she was dating money.
His eyes held mine. “No. She wasn’t after anything. When push came to shove, she didn’t want anything—not me, not my baby. She had a town house she liked, and a job she liked, and there was no way in hell she was giving up either, much less moving to a small town where she would stick out like a sore thumb because she was Asian American. Well, she was right about that part. I argued that it wasn’t so, because she was such a dynamo of a woman that she would have made friends here, and the color of her skin wouldn’t matter. But Middle River isn’t ready for someone like her, not so long as Sandy Meade is at the helm, because he sets the tone for the town. He’s not exactly a bigot; it’s just that he’s threatened by anything different. He went berserk when I told him about April—that’s Mia’s mom—so I knew how he would react to the baby. I picked her up at the hospital when she was two days old, and my father dictated the spin.”
“That she was adopted? How could he do that? And how could you let him? You’re her biological father.”
The thu-thunk of Mia’s mischief had kept up, but I’m not sure James even heard. He looked disgusted. “Well, I can be bought, too. He told Middle River the story he could swallow, and told me that if the truth came out, he would disown me.”
“Why?”
“Because Mia’s different, and Middle River doesn’t do different. Adopting her is acceptable because it makes me a remarkable person who is giving a poor orphan a good home. Siring her myself is something else.”
“I think you’re wrong,” I said. “I think Middle River would love that you insisted Mia be born. Doesn’t Sandy see that?”
“No. And if you’re going to accuse me of going for the money like April did, all I can say is that Mia is my flesh and blood, and I want her to have every advantage money can buy. It’s bad enough that her mother wants no part of her. Amazing how history repeats itself, isn’t it?”
“Your mother died.”
He was looking at me, slowly shaking his head. It was as though Pandora’s box had been opened, and he just couldn’t close it back up. “That’s what Sandy would have Middle River believe. Aidan even believes it, but the truth is that my mother is alive and well and living in Michigan with her second husband and the three daughters she had with him.”
My jaw dropped. The dead mother had been part of Middle River lore. With a concerted effort, I closed my mouth. Another round of thunder grumbled past. “Do you ever see her?”
“I go there once in a while.”
“And you never told Aidan?”
“Oh, I told him, but he chose to carry on the myth. That means he doesn’t have to think of visiting or sending a note. It means less responsibility for him. And hey, I hear what he says. He doesn’t owe her anything. She wasn’t here when he was little, and he was younger than I when she left. It was lousy growing up without a mom. But Sandy’s even more at fault. He was miserable to her while she was here. I want him to pay for that. One way is through my daughter. I want Mia to have a piece of his estate. There’d be poetic justice in that on several scores. So I’ll keep my mouth shut until the inheritance is safe.” Seeming purged, he turned his attention to the child. She had crawled farther along the floor to the next bookshelf and, with more rhythmic thu-thunks, was pulling those books off, too. “Oh, little girl,” he said, making a face, “look at this mess.” He began to pick up the books.
Beak of a nose? Had I really thought that once? Yes, his nose was straight and more pointed than some, but when he made a face for his daughter, there was nothing beaky about it.
“Leave them,” I said. “She can play. There’s no harm.” I was trying to ingest what he had said. “Who else knows she’s biologically yours?”
He kept his eyes on the child. “No one.”
“And you told me? Annie Barnes? The town loudmouth?”
His eyes met mine. “I trust you.”
The simplicity of it—the honesty I heard and its implication—made me cry out, “Then why TrueBlue?”
He didn’t blink. “When I talked with you that first day at the diner, I thought maybe you could help. But it was awkward, given who I was. You didn’t trust me. And I didn’t know if I could trust you. I sensed that TrueBlue’s being anonymous would appeal to your novelist’s imagination.” He gave a crooked grin. “Besides, you’re from Washington, aren’t you? That’s Deep Throat country.”
“Uh-huh, and Woodward and Bernstein got a book out of it, but I’m not writing a book. I’ve said that from the start, and still you hid behind TrueBlue.”
“Hid?” He considered that, then lightened up. “I actually thought it was kind of fun. And it was a relief. I said that—or TrueBlue did. Because I wasn’t me, I could ask you questions without your asking me questions that I wasn’t comfortable answering.”
I was feeling vaguely used. “So I’m asking them now. Why do you need me to find people who were exposed at the time of those two spills? You know who they are. Isn’t that what your ‘civic disability package’ is about?”
“There are people we don’t know about. I want an inclusive list.”
“Ask the guard at the gate.”
“I would if I could, but sixteen years ago, he was a token presence. He wasn’t there all the time, and when he was, he didn’t keep a paper trail of who went where. He does now, because security is an issue everywhere, but he didn’t do it then. So we don’t know for sure who was at those sites at the time of each spill. I can’t exactly put an ad in the paper. And I can’t go around town asking people, because that would create a rumor that could grow out of control. Beside, we’ve never had proof. We never wanted it—and I’m using the royal we, meaning the voice of the company. When we created those disability packages, we suspected illnesses related to mercury poisoning, but we give generous disability packages to our own employees anyway, so this was simply perceived to be an extension of that. We never made connections to mercury, certainly not publicly. So we never got that proof. Did Tom find it in Phoebe?”
I was saved from answering by Mia, who chose that moment to make a pitiful sound. It wasn’t from the storm, because the thunder was more distant now and the rain a bearably light patter on the roof. She was sitting in a sea of books, rubbing one tiny fist back and forth over her nose. Her other hand was pulling her hair. She was tired.
James caught her up and cradl
ed her on his shoulder.
Me, I wasn’t quite there yet. I was still looking at that sea of books. Well, yes, they were books, but not like novels or reference books or even sample books. For the first time, I realized that they were my mother’s notebooks, apparently displaced during Phoebe’s recent reorganization frenzy. Hidden down by the floor, they hadn’t made it either to my radar screen or to Sabina’s. Now it struck me that they might tell us whether Phoebe had been with the WIBs that fateful day.
I didn’t say anything to James.
And don’t ask me why, because I don’t know. Yes, he had said he trusted me, and given what he had confided in me earlier, I believed him.
The problem was me. Maybe I didn’t know what to do with that trust?
Mia was quiet, her eyes closed, cheek on James’s shoulder. Putting my elbows on my knees, I leaned forward and whispered, “She’s very sweet.”
James stroked the child’s head with a large, strong, masculine hand that reminded me of things we had done in the dark. Not knowing what to do with that thought, either, I simply met his eyes and said in a voice soft enough not to wake the baby, “Why do you need proof now?”
“Proof is the only surefire lever I have.”
“For what?”
“A bloodless coup. There’s a board meeting Monday at four. Can you come?”
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