by Jim Beegle
She told him that she had to leave again on Sunday and could not spare the time to “go play” with him, as she put it.
“Where to this time?” he asked.
“Back to Russia. I’ll have to be there the first part of the week. Then to Berlin on Friday, so I thought I would take the days in between the meetings and go to Paris. It has been ages since I have been.”
“So … you’ll be gone for two weeks?” Mark asked.
“No, just a little more than one week. I’ll be back late Monday. Thanksgiving is that week. Why are you asking?” she inquired of him. “Is something bothering you about my travels?”
He could tell by her tone of voice that she was ready to take offense if it did. “Nope,” he told her. “Just wondering.”
<<<<<<>>>>>>
After the usual rush that marked his arrival in the office had slowed down, Mark took his empty coffee cup down the hall to the kitchen. On his way back into his office, he stopped at Sandy’s desk with a fresh cup of coffee and the morning’s mail. “Here,” he said, dumping a pile of letters on her desk. “Why is it that on any given day you get three times the amount of mail I get?”
“That’s because, Mr. Vogel, everyone knows who really does the work around here,” she said with a smile. She scooped the letters and memos from the middle of her desk and placed them on top of the tray in the corner.
“Well,” Mark told her swirling the coffee around in his cup, “I just may give you a chance to prove that.”
“Oh,” she said, not bothering to look up. “And how is that?”
“I’m going to take a few days off at the beginning of next week. I think I will surprise Amy and catch up with her in France. She’s planning on being there in-between her current run of business trips.”
This caused Sandy’s head to come up with a questioning look on her face. Mark laughed. He knew what was on her mind and answered her before she could speak. “Don’t worry, I’ll call in.”
He left his office early that afternoon and drove home. When he got there, he packed a suitcase with clothes and other things he would need for his trip. He put his suitcase in the trunk of his car and drove off once again on the now familiar route out of the Dallas Metroplex to his place in Runaway Bay. Once he had cleared the majority of Friday afternoon traffic that seemed to knot up around the Texas Motor Speedway on the far northwest side of Ft. Worth, Mark took a card from his pocket and dialed the number printed on it into his phone.
“Mr. Lawton,” he said, when the attorney answered the phone. “Please contact the party in Nassau we spoke about last week. Tell them I would like to visit with them this coming Tuesday morning about eleven o’clock their time, if that would be all right. I will call you Monday before I leave to make sure there won’t be any problems with that schedule.” He paused for a minute and listened to Mr. Lawton’s reply before continuing his end of the conversation. “Thank you for your help. Have a pleasant weekend.”
Mark hung up the phone and let his mind wander to the briefcase on the shelf in his closet at the ranch.
Chapter Three
Driving out of the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex, Mark spent most of his time on the phone making sure that things were taken care of at Micronix so he could travel on Monday without feeling guilty. As soon as he left the city limits of Ft. Worth, the traffic continued to thin out to a point where he could drive long stretches without encountering another vehicle on the road. He found a radio station that played music he did not have to listen to, filled his pipe, and settled in for the drive to the ranch. To Mark, this was one of the best parts of the trip. It wasn’t that he really cared that much for driving long distances, but the open space and the solitude gave him time to think. Sometimes he would have something specific that he wanted to ponder, but most times he would just let his mind wander from thought to thought.
Because he had left earlier in the afternoon than usual, it was still daylight when Mark made his way through Runaway Bay. He stopped at his neighbor’s, the Willies, before going to his own place.
The Willies owned the property next to Mark’s, and they had become good friends the moment Mark moved in. Mr. and Mrs. Willies were trying to keep their ranch and some old farm equipment held together long enough to pass on to a son and daughter who didn’t want them. The time had long since passed since Mr. Willies could support his family solely off the proceeds of his farm and ranch. Years earlier, their farm had been a much larger place. They had enjoyed several hundred acres where cattle ran and crops were raised. They had also once had three children.
Their youngest son, Danny, was diagnosed with leukemia when he was just eight. The Willies were devastated and did all they could for their young son. First, they sold off the stock cattle to pay the hospital bills. Then the equipment they used to work the land and help care for the cattle, then finally the land itself. Now they were left with just two children and a mere twenty acres of land. To make matters worse, their financial problems forced Mr. Willies to take a job in town. On most days, he would get up before dawn and work around his diminished ranch until it was time to go to “work.” Then he would drive his 20-year-old pickup to a farm equipment dealership and spend eight hours, if he were lucky, working on other people’s tractors and combines. After work, he would run the route backwards and work late into the evening on his own tractor. Anyone could look at Mr. Willies and see that his life no longer held challenges to be met and conquered, like Amy seemed to think life did. Life had become a burden that was carried until that final rest, like Cecil’s.
For some reason, Mark felt guilty about the relative ease of his own life when he compared his to the Willies’s. It made him feel even worse because Mr. Willies never complained. The family seemed to survive by taking each day as it came and not getting depressed about the things that could not be changed. Through all their troubles, they still held on to a belief that things would always work themselves out in the end. Mark’s appreciation for the kind of people they were drove him to want to help his neighbors. Luckily, he understood that simply making a present of money or unwanted items he no longer needed was not something that Mr. and Mrs. Willies could ever accept. They were good and proud people and so, instead, he used other ways to extend help to them. He overpaid the kids to do odd jobs for him around his place, especially before a new school year started when he knew they would need new clothes. He gave Mrs. Willies things for her kitchen that he would find in Dallas in exchange for picking up mail that never amounted to more than grocery store fliers, and for keeping an eye on his place that no one but Mark ever visited. He would get Mr. Willies to fix things that weren’t broken on the old truck he kept in his barn and rarely drove.
“The thing seems to be running fine Mark.” Mr. Willies told him the last time he knew that needed to take one of the kids to the doctor. “I even put the timin’ light on it.”
“That’s the way it always is. It acts upon me but, never when you have someone else look at it.” Mark replied. “Better go ahead and changes the plugs, point, and rotor. In fact lets not take chances go on and replaces the plug wires and distributor cap too.”
And, when the Willies’ tractor would break down at harvest or planting time, Mark would ask Mr. Willies to take his tractor and run it for a few days—in the hope of finding out what was causing it to seem like it wasn’t running just right. Everyone, except the kids, knew what was going on, but no one spoke directly of it. Mark knew the Willies were grateful for his help.
For a while, Mark had stabled a couple of horses at his ranch. This was early on when Amy would come out to the ranch with him. She thought riding fit the country manor motif she was trying to get Mark to buy into. He had paid the Willies’ daughter, Cindy, to feed, water, and exercise the animals during the week when he was not there. Exercising the horses more times than not meant going riding with a girlfriend or, on rare occasions, a boyfriend. When Amy tired of the ranch, Mark sold the horses because they wer
e too costly to keep for the few times he rode them. Now he employed Cindy to feed and water the turkeys he raised for the sole purpose of giving her some much-needed money to buy some new clothes with. This also ensured that he would have turkeys to give to his neighbors at Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Without really understanding how, these simple acts of kindness to the people who lived around him earned him the status of accepted honorary local with the folks of Runaway Bay.
“How’s the planting going this spring?” The old men he would run into at the hardware store would ask him politely about the crops he never planted.
“I guess OK,” Mark would answer. “Think it will be a wet or dry spring this year?” he asked as a reply. He knew spring rains were the topic that could always be discussed with the sages of the county.
When he bought parts for his old truck at the local auto parts house, or supplies for whatever project was occupying his time at the present, he was afforded the “locals” discount on his purchases. In exchange, he made it a point of keeping his trade in town—sometimes waiting weeks for things that had to be ordered when he could have just as easily picked them up in Dallas during the week. Mark liked the idea that the people of Runaway Bay judged him by the quality of his character instead of the size of his bank account. Just the opposite of how things were in Dallas with Amy and her friends. To Mark, there was no greater honor in life than to go into town on Saturday mornings for breakfast and be invited to sit at the big table in the back of the café with the regulars.
Now, as he stopped by the farmhouse that the Willies had made a home, Mrs. Willies used to ask him about that “pretty wife” of his, but now, by mutual consent, Amy was not mentioned. In the early days, when Mark was still working on the old ranch house, Amy would drive out from the city to see how far along he had come on her country estate. He had made a point of taking Amy and introducing her to Mrs. Willies one evening. To Mark’s dismay, Amy looked around the modest kitchen as if she were a health inspector from the county. While Mrs. Willies had never come out and said anything about it, he could tell that she did not care much for Amy and her “city” ways. Secretly, Mark was sure that the designer jeans Amy insisted on wearing when she used to come out to the ranch had given her away and earned Mrs. Willies’ disapproval.
“There’s coffee,” Mrs. Willies said as she let him into the kitchen. “The mail is on the counter.” Mark got coffee and started sorting through the mail.
“Save the IGA flyer,” she said over her shoulder. “I want the coupons.”
“You didn’t have to wait for me, you could have had them at any time. I never use them,” Mark told her as he laid the flyer aside..
“But it’s your mail. It’s illegal to tamper with other peoples’ mail.” Mark just chuckled and put his empty coffee cup into the sink.
When Mark got to the main house after collecting his mail, the Sun was on the way to the other side of the world, and darkness was quickly enveloping the ranch. He had listened to the weather report during his drive out. Plunging temperatures and the possibility of snow had been sandwiched into the local weather forecast between ads for cattle worm medicine and ground spray good for the prevention of brown bugs and cutter worms.
He went first up to his bedroom and looked to see that the briefcase he had brought with him the week before was still there. He had no reason to suspect that it wouldn’t be, but it made him feel better after he confirmed that it was right where he had left it. He made his way downstairs and into the den that served as his office away from the office. He booted up the laptop computer he had brought from his office and connected wirelessly to the Internet. Once into the system, he navigated to the online reservation area for American Airlines and booked himself on a flight that left Dallas on Monday around 9:00 a.m. It would go to Miami International, where he would have to change to a small commuter plane, operated by American Eagle, that would take him from Miami to Nassau. He would arrive on the island sometime around two in the afternoon local time.
Mark had never been to the Bahamas before. So when he brought up hotels in the reservation system, he picked the Atlantis Resort, mainly because it was reasonably priced, close to the airport, and accepted US dollars for payment. While money wasn’t a real problem, wasting it on a hotel he was not likely to see much of didn’t make much sense either. He decided against renting a car since he would have to rely on maps and the mercy of the other local drivers. Instead, he would take cabs when he needed to travel on the ground.
Mark was not concerned about Amy finding out about his trip because, for the sake of convenience, he and Amy kept several bank accounts. They maintained joint checking and savings account for household expenses, and they both also had personal accounts, which were used for their business needs. Early in the marriage, they had tried to keep just one joint account, but right away the problems of trying to pay company credit cards from expense money deposited into one account had become a nightmare to keep straight. To solve the problem, they each opened checking accounts that they would keep reimbursed expense money in and away from the family accounts. At Amy’s insistence, they had opened them in different banks as well—just to keep the bank from crossing the accounts and undoing what they were trying to do. Mark had his bank statements sent to his office along with his company credit card bills. He wasn’t sure where Amy’s went.
It was into this separate and personal account and not the joint one, that Mark had deposited the money he had received from Cecil’s estate. It was this money that he planned on using to travel with now. He would use the debit card connected to this account to travel. He considered what he was doing and how he would need to do it as he logged out and shut down his computer.
He really wasn’t sure of his motives for being so secretive other than the fact that Cecil had gone to such extremes to tell him to be this way. Until he knew exactly what awaited him in Nassau, he decided it was a good idea to continue following Cecil’s strong advice and not tell anyone what he was up to.
The weekend was filled with the usual chores and repairs that Mark enjoyed. Several times over the last few years he had seriously toyed with the idea of moving out here and telecommuting to his office in Dallas, but he knew that Amy would never agree to move from Highland Park. As long as she was still his wife, he felt it important that they should try to live together. It wasn’t that he disliked Amy. He was sure that he had loved her once, and he was sure that he was still in love with the woman he had married several years ago. But he did not care much for the woman she had become. Not that he begrudged her the success that she was enjoying. Mark knew, however, that in order to get to where she was in her career, she had to become ruthless in how she conducted her business. Unfortunately, this carried over to her home life.
Like most people, Amy had been unable to turn off the person she was at work when she came home, and she had become just as ruthless with Mark. That was one of the major reasons why he had turned DECCO down when they had offered him the vice president’s job with Micronix. He had seen too many aggressive managers get used to treating people as if they were assets that could be counted on a balance sheet—disposing of them when the stock price needed a boost. He had also seen most of them unable to leave that attitude at the office. Instead, they began treating their families with that same ruthlessness—giving them notice of unsatisfactory performance and then terminating them. Mark did not want to become that kind of man.
After a full weekend, Mark rose at five o’clock Monday morning to prepare for his trip. He showered and shaved, dressing in dark blue cotton Dockers, brown deck shoes that looked good but also lent themselves well to the long walks that always accompanied traveling, and a starched white shirt with a button-down collar. The last thing he did before leaving the house was transferred his laptop computer from the soft-sided black case that had come with the machine into the case he had taken to the law offices of Winston Lawton. He did not put on a tie, but carried a coat
with him.
He drove east, through Runaway Bay, waving in the casual way that people who made their homes there wave. Some of the folks he recognized and some he didn’t. He drove at the posted speed limit for much of the trip until he hit the Ft. Worth city limits. There, the throngs of people heading for their jobs in and around the area caused traffic on Interstate 35W to move at a pace that could best be described as stop-and-go, with the majority of the time spent stopping.
While Dallas is the focus of most of the attention by the majority of people outside of Texas, and quite a few inside the state as well, Ft. Worth, with a population of almost half a million, has its own rich and colorful history that parallels that of Dallas. It is every bit unique unto itself, even though the two cities are only thirty-five miles apart. Now some of the surrounding cities were growing up as well into large sprawling areas. Ft. Worth even had its share of the major north/south freeway—Interstate 35. Just outside of Waco, 60 miles to the south of the Metroplex, the locals referred to as the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, Interstate 35 split into two different freeways. One of them traveled with no fewer than four, and in places as many as ten, lanes, through Ft. Worth, while the other spur of the same interstate made a similar kind of journey thirty-five miles to the east through the heart of Dallas. The Ft. Worth version of Interstate 35 was named I35 West, while its Dallas twin was called I35 East. The roads stayed this way for another fifty miles north of both towns, until they were rejoined to continue the trip to Oklahoma City.
Mark stayed on Interstate 35W until he came to one of the east/west running freeways, Highway 121, which would take him to DFW International Airport. He joined the cue of cars as they slowed to collect tickets from the parking attendant before entering the airport complex. He parked his car in the short-term lot in front of the vast American Airlines terminal, collected his luggage, and joined yet another line at the ticket counter. He gave the ticket agent his confirmation number and driver’s license, exchanging a charge on his debit card for a ticket and a boarding pass for the flight to Miami and then on to Nassau.
