Something Rotten, page 6
“I suspect he’s here about the takeover.”
“Good. Let’s get it over with,” Hamilton said. He left for the parlor while I waited for my bagel to get crispy. Candy was hard at work making some kind of cocktail out of gin and Rose’s lime juice. I guess it was happy hour twenty-four/ seven here at the Dew Drop Inn. A servant put a plate in front of me before I could find one for myself, and I ended up walking back down the hall at the same time as Candy. I thought about riding him, but I ate my bagel instead.
I skulked into the smallish sitting room while Candy made a grand entrance, offering Branff a drink from his tray with a flourish. Branff took the one with the lime sticking out of it. Hamilton and Claude had joined Mrs. Prince to welcome their guest, and the two adults took martinis. Hamilton had to settle for a soda. I settled into an out-of-the-way chair in the corner and noshed my bagel while I watched the show.
“Candy makes the best martinis. I see you still drink gimlets, Ford,” Mrs. Prince said with a laugh. “How you can drink those things?”
“Old habits die hard,” Branff said. I guessed there was supposed to be something more to that, something only Mrs. Prince understood.
Claude was unamused. “So you’re here about the hostile takeover, then?”
Branff grimaced. “Oh, I dislike the term ‘hostile takeover.’ It’s so . . . bellicose.”
Claude frowned.
“Belligerent,” Hamilton said. “Aggressive. Warlike. Buy a dictionary.”
Claude scowled at Hamilton, but he had bigger fish to poison.
“Trudy and I have discussed this. We’re not interested in selling.”
“But you haven’t even heard my terms,” Branff said.
“We don’t have to hear them,” Claude said.
“Don’t you? Wouldn’t your board of trustees be interested to learn, for example, that you’re losing market share? You spent a lot of money to court Guerrero Greeting Cards, and they ended up going to Black Forest Paper instead. Not only that, I understand you’re about to lose Doodle Stationery as well.”
Claude turned red. “How can you—That’s confidential! Where are you getting your information?”
Branff settled back into his chair and sipped his gimlet. “There’s also the small matter of Elsinore’s impact on the environment, which, it appears, is not so secret.” Branff withdrew a neatly folded orange flyer from his back pocket and handed it to Claude. “I found this in the window of a business downtown.”
From across the room, the only words I could make out on the paper were: “Brown-Water Rafting Race.”
“Olivia Mendelsohn,” Claude muttered.
“It’s quite clever really,” Branff said. “A play on white-water rafting, I suppose. But since the Copenhagen is brown now—”
Claude wadded the flyer up and threw it into the unlit fireplace. “That girl’s been nagging us for a long time, but she’s the only really vocal one. It’s nothing to worry about.”
“Not yet, maybe,” said Branff. “But I’m in the communications business, Mr. Prince. I know the power of bad publicity. One good stunt, one good human-interest story that gets picked up by a local news crew and then syndicated to the national media, and you’re ruined.”
“Is that some kind of a threat?” Claude asked.
Branff shrugged it off, but it was a threat, pure and simple. And a good one too.
“Think of it as professional advice,” Branff said. “From one businessman to another.”
Claude chewed on this new development. Branff drank his gimlet. Mrs. Prince looked uncomfortable.
“I’m willing to offer you a fair price,” Branff told them. He looked at Mrs. Prince. “More than a fair price, considering the money I’d have to invest to clean up the river and the public relations nightmare you’re cultivating.”
“You mean it can be cleaned up?” I asked.
Suddenly everyone turned and noticed I was in the room with them.
“You can clean up the plant and still afford to run it?”
“My engineers tell me we could do it,” Branff said. He redirected the sales pitch to the people who mattered. “If we use a non-chlorine-based bleaching process instead, the plant can run clean. And cheaper, in the long run, after the initial costs of replacing the equipment, of course.”
I nearly choked on my poppy seed bagel. So Hamilton’s father had been feeding the town a line about having to pollute or shut down. The poisoned look I was giving the collective Prince family went completely unnoticed.
“This isn’t about cleaning up the plant, and it isn’t about doing us any favors,” said Claude. “What I can’t figure is why you—”
“How much?” Hamilton asked. It was the first time he’d said anything at all.
“What?” asked Branff.
“How much. Money. How much to buy Elsinore.”
Branff blinked, then recovered nicely.
“Six and a half billion dollars.”
That number danced a little jig before everyone’s eyes, including my own. Claude sat back in his chair, thinking about what he could buy with his share of the cash. Like maybe a Major League Baseball team or three.
“I have seven newspapers,” Branff said, “soon to be nine. They cost me a fortune in paper every day. I acquire Elsinore, we switch over to all newsprint, and Branff Communications cuts out the middle man. It’s called vertical acquisition. And you, Prince family, you get the proverbial ‘golden handshake.’”
“Sell it,” Hamilton said. He stood to leave. “Sell it all.”
“No,” said Claude. “Your father wouldn’t have sold the plant, and neither will I. I’ve done too much, come too far to just hand everything away now—”
“You’ve done too much?” said Hamilton. “You!? What did you ever do but mooch off my dad and wait around for him to die so you could hop into his chair?” He shot a look at his mother. “And his bed.”
Mrs. Prince stood and reached for her son’s arm. “Hamilton, we’re not—”
Hamilton pulled away, knocking over what was undoubtedly a priceless Ming dynasty vase with a lampshade on top. It shattered into a dozen pieces against the hearth, and Hamilton kicked the little end table for good measure.
“Hamilton!” Mrs. Prince cried.
Hamilton turned on his uncle. “My dad didn’t slave his whole life away on this effing place so you could just take right over when he was gone.”
“Elsinore isn’t his. It belongs to this family. Your great-great-great-grandfather built a paper mill here a hundred—”
“My father made Elsinore what it is today. He took a pissant little paper company and made it into a multinational corporation while you did two things: jack and squat.” Hamilton calmed down suddenly. “Unless you did something else to get where you are today.”
Claude stood, dwarfing Hamilton with his bulk. His voice got as icy as Antarctica.
“You know, I used to get the same lecture from your father. ‘I worked hard to get where I am today, Claude. Nobody gets rich overnight, Claude. You’ve got to finish what you start, Claude.’ Well, maybe I finally listened. I put in the time and effort, and now I’m here and your father’s not, and I’m not going to let anybody take away what I’ve earned.”
Claude’s outburst settled on the room like snow, and I shivered. What was Claude saying? Did he envy and resent his brother enough to turn his advice against him and slowly poison him, for once in his life seeing something through to its end?
Hamilton must have had a similar thought, because he stepped backward, clearly frightened by his uncle. He bumped into the lamp and end table that matched the one he’d already destroyed, and his fear quickly turned to anger. He turned and did to the table what he must have wanted to do to Claude right then, reducing it to a pile of splinters.
“Stop!” said Mrs. Prince. “Hamilton!”
“Hamilton, have you been drinking again?” Claude asked.
Hamilton spun on his stepfather. “What if I have?” he demanded. I knew Hamilton had had too much to drink last night, but the only thing he’d had for breakfast was a donut and a hangover. He pretended he was drunk anyway, going Bruce Lee on what was left of the lamp.
Ford N. Branff swirled his gimlet, looking not the least bit surprised at the family meltdown he was witnessing. “Perhaps I’ve come at a bad time,” he said. He was a little too amused for my tastes. Hamilton’s too, apparently.
“Yeah,” he told Branff. “A little sooner and you could have gotten my mom in the bargain.”
Claude told Hamilton to go to his room and Hamilton told Claude to go to hell. Neither of them obliged. Hamilton stalked out to simmer someplace else and Mrs. Prince left in tears. Again. This time Claude followed his wife, his “needy woman” antennae twitching.
That left me and the Banana Republic model.
“Still like to think Hamilton could be your son?” I asked Branff.
A team of servants—including Candy the Cowboy—appeared out of nowhere and immediately began cleaning up the debris from Hamilton’s rampage. I crossed to the fireplace to retrieve the crumpled brown-water rafting flyer before they could whisk it away. In fifteen minutes the room would be wiped clean, and this little episode would only be a legend, whispered about quietly over bowls of gruel in the staff dungeon.
Ford Branff stood and handed his empty glass to Candy.
“Please let Mrs. Prince know that I’m staying at the motel by the interstate,” Branff said. “You know the one?”
“Sí,” said Candy. I noticed he didn’t waste one of his plastic smiles on Branff.
“Room 112,” Branff added.
“Sí, señor. Muchas gracias.”
Branff frowned at Candy and walked out of the room without telling me good-bye. And here I thought we were bonding.
“You want me to take that back to the kitchen?” a young female servant asked. She nodded at my empty breakfast plate.
“No thanks. I got it.”
She smiled and I smiled and left her to her dirty work, wondering again about what it took to keep picking up after children and not be their mother.
I also wondered how Candy knew Branff drank gimlets without ever asking.
CHAPTER NINE
Hamilton disappeared after playing Godzilla in the parlor, and I didn’t want to spend all day searching the house for him. I was more interested in Olivia’s brown-water rafting race. I knew now, from what Branff had said, that she was right about the Princes jerking Denmark around on the pollution thing. I had no intention of riding a raft down that skanky river, but I figured I’d put in an appearance for moral support. I also knew it would get me points with Olivia. I hated myself for being so sycophantic, but she was the kind of girl you liked to have points with on account, just in case.
I didn’t know what to make of Claude’s revelation. I could see now that Hamilton was right; Claude resented his brother and coveted his success. But that resentment didn’t mean he had murdered him—it just meant he wasn’t sad his brother was dead.
I smoothed Olivia’s crinkled flyer again on the car seat beside me and took a left, heading down to the river. It was already eighty-five degrees outside by eleven thirty that morning, and the air was so heavy with humidity I debated turning on my windshield wipers. I threw the air conditioner on full-blast and felt my 1986 Volvo 240 gasp under the strain. My car was big and boxy and white. It was older than I was, and had been handed down to me through no less than three sisters. I loved it like it was one.
I thought I’d followed the directions wrong when I got to the raft race site. There were only a couple of cars parked along the road above the river, but I saw Olivia’s Jeep hiding among the underbrush and found a safe place to tether the Volvo. I started to sweat the minute I stepped out of the car, and the steep descent to the riverbank was work and made it worse. The smell from the pollution was overpowering too, and the air was so thick it felt like I was drinking the river. The only place I had been with humidity this bad was St. Louis last summer, visiting my dad. At least there the air soup only tasted like asphalt and motor oil.
Olivia stood talking with a man and a woman on a small, flat bank beside the Willy Wonka-like river. A couple of big yellow inflatable rafts, the kind tourists go flopping down rivers in, sat in the grass beneath a string of little colored pennants and a sign that said: “First Annual Brown-Water Rafting Race.” Olivia caught sight of me coming and wrapped up her conversation with the other two. They shook hands with her and nodded hello to me as they left.
“Brown-water racers?” I asked Olivia.
“Friends from town. The few who actually support cleaning up the river.”
From her clinging shirt and the way her hair was plastered to the back of her neck, it looked like Olivia had already been out there awhile. At least my Cardinals hat was helping keep things under control.
I nodded at her brown-water rafting sign. “You know, you’re really not supposed to say ‘first annual.’ Nothing’s annual until you’ve done it a couple of years in a row.”
“Thanks,” said Olivia. She put a hand in her back pocket like she was going for a wallet. “Do you charge for editorial services, or is this one gratis?”
I smiled. “Call it a donation. So, am I early or late?”
“You’re right on time. Start letting the air out of that raft over there.”
“No takers, then?”
Olivia released the stopper from one of the rafts and started to roll the air out. “Nobody was going to come down here and raft on the Copenhagen,” she told me. “They’d be crazy to. Hell, the water would probably eat the bottom of these rafts up like acid anyway. I just did it for the publicity.”
I looked around for the publicity, but I didn’t see any.
“All right, all right,” she said. “I was hoping someone from the Daily Dane would come out and cover it, but they ignored me like always. It got mentioned in the calendar, though, and I had flyers up around town. I figure it’s something if I can just keep reminding them the river’s here.”
“The Daily Dane?” I asked.
“Denmark’s little newspaper.”
I had my raft half-empty now, and I hefted the rolled-up part up under my arms and squeezed. Sweat poured down to the small of my back.
“You’d think the smell would be enough to remind them.”
Olivia sat on what was left of her inflated raft. “It’s not. But it looks like I got through to at least one person.”
At first I thought she meant me, but then I saw where she was looking. On the road above us, Hamilton was watching from behind the window of his SUV. When he saw we’d spotted him he punched it, screeching away in a cloud of rock and dust.
“You seem to be doing an awful lot of work just to reach one person over and over again,” I told her.
She picked up an armload of paddles. “Come on. Help me take this stuff to my Jeep.”
We stowed everything in the back of Olivia’s Jeep and she nodded for me to join her. I didn’t much care where we were headed, but Olivia had someplace in mind. We climbed up and up, into the hills and mountains above Denmark, without either of us saying a word. The asphalt led to a gravel road that eventually became two dirt tracks, and then no kind of road at all. The Jeep bumped and bounced and came to a stop. Olivia hopped out and I followed. I hadn’t noticed it when the Jeep was moving, but the air was cooler here and not as muggy. There was actually a breeze, and as I smelled the scents of pine and hydrangea I realized we had risen above something else up here: the stink from the Elsinore Paper Plant.
Olivia pushed through some brush and we emerged onto a rock bluff about the size of one of those big yellow rafts. It was mostly flat, with a bit of a slope out toward the edge where it plunged into an amazing view of Denmark, the mountains, and, in the distance, the belching smokestacks of Elsinore. Olivia sat on the rock, and I found a place next to her. She took in a deep breath, and I let her have her moment of Zen.
“You were right, you know,” I said finally. “About the paper plant being able to clean up their act. The bastards just don’t want to spend the money.”
Olivia nodded like she’d always known. She hugged her knees to her chest and kept looking at that view.
“Nice spot,” I said. “I think I can see my house from here.”
“Hamilton brought me up here. On our first date.” She laid her head on her knees, facing me but not looking at me. “And lots of times after that,” she said.
I tossed a decaying pine cone over the edge.
“You know how you saw him write a poem to me once?” Olivia asked. “It wasn’t the only one. After he went away to school, he wrote me a new poem every day. In actual letters, not in e-mails or anything. That’s not the kind of thing you do for a summer fling, is it?”
“Doesn’t seem like it, no.”
“He could be really sweet like that, you know? I’d go to the mailbox and there’d be one almost every day. On really beautiful paper.”
“Probably Elsinore paper,” I told her.
She laughed, but I could hear tears in it. “Yeah. It probably was,” she said. “The bastard.”
It was her time, her place, and I let her go where she wanted.
“I really thought he loved me. And I loved him too.”
I didn’t question her use of past tense. I’d already edited her once today. Olivia sniffed and tried to dry an eye on her shoulder so I couldn’t tell she was crying, and I pretended not to see her.
“So I don’t know if you know this,” I told her, “but Hamilton’s a good pitcher. Really good. He could probably get a scholarship somewhere, even though he doesn’t need it.”
Olivia didn’t say she was interested, but she didn’t say she wasn’t, so I kept talking.
“So one time our sophomore year, Hamilton’s pitching this amazing game—a perfect game through seven innings. You know what a perfect game is? No batter from the other team ever gets to first base. No walks, no hits, no errors. It’s practically impossible. There have only been like seventeen perfect games in the history of Major League Baseball.”
