“Oh, this is going to be fun.”
“I’d feel a lot better if I could clear up these discrepancies,” Kelly said, “but I can’t, and I don’t think anybody anywhere could, and you know what that means.”
“Lawsuits,” Bram said solemnly.
“Lawsuits,” Kelly agreed.
“If I were you, I think I’d develop a tendency to migraine headaches, so you can repair to your room with a killing headache whenever the going gets rough.”
“If I did that, I’d probably spend the whole weekend in my room.”
Bram was handing back the paper. Kelly took it and put it on the blotter on his desk. He didn’t have to pack it into his briefcase because he had copies. This was a copy, too. The original was in a bank vault somewhere down on Wall Street, in the safekeeping of the Lilith Brayne Trust.
“What do you think it is about really rich people,” Kelly asked, “that makes them so damn suicidal?”
8
WHEN GERALDINE DART TOOK this job she had with Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh, she thought of it as a definitive break in the history of her life. Up until the moment when Geraldine had first taken the little motorboat from the landing at Hunter’s Pier, across the choppy-glass surface of the Atlantic to the island, she had been just another girl who had graduated from high school but not gone on to college. She could type ninety words a minute and take excellent shorthand, but she didn’t have the money to go to one of the big secretarial schools—and even if she had had it, she didn’t think it would have helped her much. Geraldine Dart had been the object of jokes since she was a tiny child. Tall, thin, awkward, worse than plain, and born to a pair of clam diggers on top of it—everybody had always assumed that she was stupid as well as both ugly and poor, but it wasn’t true. Geraldine actually had a very fine mind, and—what was more important, and more rare—a very clear-sighted, unsentimental way of looking at things. She knew that the women who ended up being private secretaries or personal assistants to the heads of giant corporations, the women who made the truly spectacular salaries in secretarial work, had all at least started out pretty. They were hired for being pretty. Women like Geraldine got jobs in typing pools and word-processing departments and back offices, where they could safely be ignored. Geraldine had decided that it was smarter to save her money and look around for interesting work. Once she had a job she liked, she could settle down a little and decide what she wanted to do next.
Actually, what Geraldine wanted to do next was to buy a house, a three-family place right in the middle of Hunter’s Pier, and rent it out. She had been saving her money for four years now, working on the island and getting to live in, and she almost had enough. She went across to the mainland every Thursday afternoon to deposit her salary check in her savings account. Tasheba Kent and Cavender Marsh made fun of her, she knew that. They thought she was a stuck-up little Baptist prude, because she went to church every Sunday and wore her skirts full and long and her blouses high on the neck. Geraldine didn’t care. She bought the cheapest clothes she could find. They were large and long not because she was afraid of sex, but because she knew how angular and ugly her body was. She went to church on Sunday not because she was pious and committed to God and religion, but because she needed as much legitimate time away from the island as she could get. The island was a suffocating place, and its inhabitants were odder than Geraldine could have been if she’d taken an overdose of strangeness pills for a year.
Today was only Wednesday, but Geraldine was going over to the mainland anyway. The excuse she had given Cavender Marsh was that there were some last-minute things she needed to pick up, what with all the guests coming for the weekend. This was not true. Geraldine never left anything to the last minute. She was the most ferociously organized person on earth. Because Cavender Marsh left everything until it was too late and couldn’t organize his way from the living room to the bathroom, the old man had taken her at her word and told her to have a pleasant day. He hadn’t even protested when she’d said she was going to drive the boat over herself, instead of waiting for Tommy the handyman to do it for her.
Geraldine preferred taking the boat over herself because it gave her a chance to think, and because she didn’t much like Tommy the handyman. Tommy’s people had lived just down the beach from Geraldine’s when Geraldine was growing up. It was Tommy’s opinion that Geraldine had gotten Above Herself. Geraldine liked the ocean even when it was choppy, and the wind even when it was cold. She liked the little boat because she could handle it easily and because it didn’t go too fast. In spite of the fact that Geraldine had lived on the edge of the Atlantic Ocean all her life, she couldn’t swim.