“Only if you start looking for a job,” he said firmly.
“Believe it or not, I think I’ve already found one,” his daughter said.
Some forty-odd miles away, in Durham, Victor Talbert, VP of Talbert Pharmaceuticals, opened the door of the boardroom not really expecting to see anything except the long polished table and a dozen empty chairs. Instead, he found his father poring over a sheaf of surveyor’s maps spread across the table.
“There you are,” he said. “I’ve been looking all over for you. What’s that? Plans for the new plant in China?”
“Hardly,” his father said.
At fifty-five, Grayson Hooks Talbert wore his years lightly. His dark hair was going classically gray at the temples, his five-eleven frame carried no extra pounds, and his charcoal-gray spring suit fit nicely without calling too much attention to its perfect tailoring.
He started to order his son away from the maps. Victor might be curious, but he would obey. Unlike his older son, who would have looked, sneered, and promptly forgotten, assuming he was sober enough to bring the print into focus in the first place. A grasshopper and an ant. That’s what he had for sons. One clever and inventive, but mercurial and dedicated to hedonistic self-destruction. The other a dutiful plodder who ran the New York office. Reliable and utterly trustworthy and totally incapable of the flights of imagination and ambition that had built this company into one of the state’s major players and its president into a power broker who had the ear of senators and governors.
Victor Talbert looked at the identifying labels and frowned. “Colleton County?”
His father nodded.
“Our subsidiaries are screaming for a decision about our eastern markets and you keep coming back to this? Why, Dad? I thought you were finished out there. You made your point with that bootlegger when you built Grayson Village. You’ve got a good manager in place and it’s peanuts anyhow. Why keep bothering with it? There’s nothing for us out there.”
“You think not?” Talbert said. He rolled up the maps, gave his son explicit instructions about the subsidiaries, and said, “You going back to New York tonight?”
Victor nodded. “We have tickets to a play. Unless there’s something else you want me to stay for?”
“No, I’ll be up next week.”
They walked down to his office together and once Victor was gone, Talbert told his assistant to order him a car and driver. “And tell him we’ll be spending the night at the Grayson Village Inn.”
From the windows of her corner office on the second floor of Adams Advertising, where she was a fully invested partner, Jamie Jacobson could look out across Main Street and see the courthouse square, where pansies blossomed extravagantly in the planters on either side of the wide low steps that led down to the sidewalk.
Another perfect spring day and this was the closest she had come to enjoying it since arriving at the office early that morning. Her own pansies needed attention and she had hoped to take off an hour in midday to enjoy the task. Instead, she had eaten a sandwich at her desk and tried to keep her mind focused on work.
A slender woman with sandy blond hair that had begun to sprout a few gray hairs now that she had passed forty, Jamie glanced at her watch and sighed. Five o’clock already and it would take at least another three hours to finish the presentation needed for a client first thing tomorrow morning.
She would have to skip supper and for a moment she considered skipping tonight’s board meeting as well. As one of only two Democrats on Colleton County’s board of commissioners, she wondered why she kept bothering. Unfortunately, a vote on the planning board’s recommendations for slowing growth was scheduled for tonight and she could not pass up one last attempt to accept it, even though she knew Candace Bradshaw would use every trick in her bottomless bag to vote it down.
Much as Jamie Jacobson hated to admit it, the county’s power brokers had planned well when they picked the newest chair of the board. Candace Bradshaw was as cute as a puppy and just as tail-waggingly eager to please the men who had put her in office and who now profited from the five-to-two decisions the board usually made under her chairmanship. A giggling, cuddly woman, she loved being chair. As long as the men pretended she held real power, she would do everything she could to make them happy, and if they wanted a controversial measure passed, she could be as tenacious as a little pit bull on their behalf.
For over three hundred years, Colleton County farmers had wrested a modest living from its mellow soil. Now economists predicted that in another thirty years, the farms might all be gone, bulldozed under and covered with houses and big-box chain stores as farmers took the quick and easy money. Housing bubbles might be bursting all over the rest of the country, but the red-hot market here showed few signs of cooling.
With its temperate climate, low unemployment rate, and even lower taxes, North Carolina was regularly touted as one of the country’s most liveable places and people were streaming in from the old rust belt states. They moved into the cheaply built houses before the paint was dry and immediately looked around for a nearby strip mall and an all-night pizzeria. Happily for the newcomers, local entrepreneurs were right there to service their needs with almost no interference from the local planning boards. Most of the commissioners believed wholeheartedly in laissez-faire, and why not? Most of them were connected either directly or indirectly to the building trades and much of the new money flowed straight into their pockets.
As a battered old red Chevy pickup parked in front of the courthouse, Jamie sighed again and turned away from the window. Tonight’s meeting would probably be another exercise in futility, a big waste of time; but for the sake of the people who had voted for her, she would be there even if it meant coming back to the office afterward. Maybe after the presentation tomorrow she could take the afternoon off to smell the flowers in her own garden.
Candace Bradshaw’s house was so recently built and furnished that carpets, drapes, and sofas still had that new-car smell. Although it was one of the more modest models in this upscale development—only three bedrooms with two and a half baths—the master bathroom had been designed to her specifications.
To reach it, one walked through a hallway lined on both sides with closets that had sliding mirrored doors. More mirrors paneled all the bathroom walls, including the walls of the walk-in shower. They even fronted the cabinets. The only touches of color were the pink-flowered sink, the dark rose commode, and the matching floor tiles.
And Candace Bradshaw herself, of course, wrapped in a rose bath sheet.
