The bishop’s visit. Maybe he should go. The last time he had been to church was their wedding, seven years ago. But what the hell. He needed divine intervention at this point.
An acid twinge scorched his stomach. He heaved himself out of bed and headed for the bathroom. He had a few antacids left in the giant economy-sized bottle he had bought. Last week. He needed to see his doctor, get a prescription, but he had been too pressed for time. Pressed for time. And now he was almost out.
He shook four tablets into his palm and knocked them back, crunching them into powder before swallowing. He winced at the chalky-sweet taste. He examined himself in the mirror. Christ, he looked terrible. Like he hadn’t slept in a week. Maybe a month. He bent over the sink and splashed cold water in his face. He couldn’t meet Terry McKellan looking like he was on the edge of a breakdown. Confidence. That’s what he had to project. Energy. Resoluteness.
He checked himself out again. Tried a smile. Maybe caffeine would help.
In the kitchen, he plugged in the machine and shook a mound of ground coffee into the filter. He thought about cereal or toast, but his stomach roiled in protest. When the coffee was done, he took a cup into his office. His desk, his papers, his open laptop drew him unwillingly, in the way that a gruesome accident demands you slow down and stare. He set his mug beside the computer and turned the machine on. A spreadsheet sprang to life. He went over the numbers again, as if the cobbler’s elves might have come in and done some creative accounting for him while he slept, but no such luck. They were exactly as they had been last night, as they had been at yesterday’s board of directors’ meeting, as they had been since GWP, Inc., had pinned Reid-Gruyn in its massive sights and indicated it might be interested in acquiring the operation.
Shaun had thought he was safe. He had thought they were too small to draw any of the big boys’ attention. Too specialized. With too slim a margin of profit. That was what was going to sink them, now.
“We’re not saying that we like the idea of selling up to GWP,” Clyde McAllister had said at the directors’ meeting. “But let’s face it.” He pointed to the spreadsheets in front of him. “If we have to start importing pulp from Canada, the additional costs are going to cut our after-tax profits to the bone. The next slack time or economic downturn, we’ll have to start eating our own belly to survive. We have to recommend the takeover be placed before the shareholders.”
Where were all the directors that jumped through hoops at their CEO’s command? Why didn’t he have any? Just a group of stone-faced men and women, people who had known him since childhood, for chrissakes, telling him it was their responsibility to the shareholders. Tolling a death knell for the business he had inherited from his father, and his father’s father, and his father before him.
His hand closed over a short stack of correspondence. Replies from merchant banks in New York, declining to invest in upgrading the depreciable assets, declining to lend the business capital, declining his corporate applications for loans that would let them buy back stock. Terry McKellan was his last hope. If Shaun could get a personal loan, enough to increase the family shareholdings from 49 percent to 51 percent, he could stop the buyout dead in its tracks.
“If it weren’t for the sale of the Haudenosaunee woods, Shaun.” That had been Elaine Parkinson. “If we weren’t losing that source of pulpwood, we wouldn’t be entertaining this motion. But the new numbers don’t add up.”
He had read a science fiction story once about a girl who stowed away on a spaceship that was bringing medicine to some far-off planet. The ship had just enough fuel to make it-without the added weight of the girl. So the pilot had shoved her out the airlock. He had been regretful and all, but hey, it was the good of the many against the good of the one. It had been titled “The Cold Equations.” That was what he was in the grip of: cold numbers. Estimates of the cost of pulp imported from Maine, from Canada, from the northernmost reaches of New York. Cold places, where the forests grew unbroken for a million acres and lumbermen drove in in the dead of winter so their ten-ton machines wouldn’t mire on dirt trails. Places he could fly to in an hour, or two, or three. But you can’t fly lumber out. You haul it, board inch by board inch, and every foot of the way costs: the taxes, the insurance, the man-hours, the fuel.
His board of directors had read all the cold numbers. And they were willing to throw Reid-Gruyn out the airlock.
He opened a drawer and swept the politely worded turn-downs into it. He turned off his laptop. Time to hit the shower. Put on his most expensive casual clothes-no suit; he wanted to look affluent, not desperate-and go see the corporate loan officer of AllBanc. His last chance. He paused in the doorway.
She counted off the exits as she drove past them. Tuxedo. Half Moon. Clifton Park. Saratoga Springs. Every mile Becky Castle put between herself and Albany felt like another stone rolling off her shoulders. She was headed home for the weekend. Home to the mountains. She triggered the cruise control and jammed her finger on the radio scan button until she found a bouncy country song she loved.
Before ski season and after leaf peeping, the Saturday morning traffic was light on the Northway. She had missed the turning leaves, missed them entirely this year, cooped up in the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation’s office in Albany writing grants and copyediting the
Becky was the one who had put it together. She was the one with the personal contacts with the Haudenosaunee heirs. She was the one who had sold the idea to her higher-ups at the Adirondack Conservancy Corporation. She was the one who came up with a list of prospective buyers, researched the tax advantages, met with the executives of GWP. She was the one who had wrangled, cajoled, kissed up to, persuaded. And tonight, she was going to be at the head table with the conservancy’s president and lawyer, at a ceremony that would take a quarter of a million acres out of private hands, restoring it to the “forever wild” state called for in the New York constitution.
She grinned as the Glens Falls-Queensbury sign disappeared behind her. She was, no lie, officially Hot Stuff. Suddenly she couldn’t wait to talk with Millie. She fished her phone out of her bag and speed-dialed her friend’s number. The phone rang once, twice, three times, then Millie’s voicemail clicked on, asking her to leave a message.
“Hey, girlfriend. What are you, sleeping late? I’m in my car, headed for Millers Kill, so give me a call when you get this. Love ya!”
As her thumb hit the end-call button, she realized she should have told Millie she was coming to Haudenosaunee this morning. Maybe she could reach her using the camp’s phone? Becky scrabbled through her bag, hauling out a bottle of water, her camera, a Baggie of yogurt-covered raisins. She finally found her address book, flipped it open, and laid it on her knee. She entered the number and pressed the send button.
The phone barely had time to ring. “Hello?”
Becky blinked at the unfamiliar female voice. “Hi. I’m trying to reach Millie van der Hoeven?”
“I’m afraid she’s not here.” The voice on the other end seemed to deflate.
“Have I reached Haudenosaunee?”
“Sorry. I mean, yes, you have. I’m sorry, I should have said. I’m Lisa. I’m Mr. van der Hoeven’s… I clean house for him.”
“Okay. Can I leave a message for Millie?”
There was a long pause. Becky wondered if Millie’s brother, Eugene, had hired some sort of mentally disabled woman to work for him.
“Look, when I said she wasn’t here, I didn’t mean she’s gone out shopping or anything,” Lisa said. “I mean she’s missing. Supposedly she went out for a walk last night and never came back. There’s a search and rescue team out looking for her right now.”
The Northway stretched out ahead of her, long and gray and undulating over rise and hollow. “Missing?”
“Are you a friend of hers?”
