“And that was it?”
“That was it. He said good-bye and walked away. He didn’t even offer to see me home.” Fritzie sighed. “Peggy’s going to call me back again today and she’s not going to be the only one. And I won’t even be able to say I’m divorced from Jon and it’s none of my business, because with this Thanksgiving dinner party it’s going to look like a very different kind of divorce than the one it is. Or at least, than the one it is when Sheila’s around. Do you think that’s a nice name for a woman? Sheila?”
Cassey Hockner was eating her way through a powdered sugar cookie. Fritzie stared at her and almost leapt. It got that way with food sometimes, she got so hungry she wanted to tear it out of people’s hands. But that was neurosis. Real hunger wasn’t like that at all. Real hunger didn’t hit you when you’d already eaten your 800 calories for the day. Fritzie poured herself another cup of tea.
“Calvin said the oddest thing when I called,” she told Cassey. “Do you know what it was? He said the way Mr. McAdam was behaving, he knew half a dozen people who if they had a chance to kill him, probably would.”
7
Ever since Charlie Shay’s wife had left him and gone to Vermont—to find herself, to find a tree, just to get away from him—he had been feeling rootless and upset, as if he were a helium balloon without a string, attached to nothing, floating. The floating feeling was exacerbated by the subtle change that had come over his status in the office since Jon had gone to jail. It was a change that had as much to do with how he saw himself as with how the others saw him, but it bothered him that he couldn’t pin down when it had started or why. Lately, he had been having a difficult time pinning down much of anything. Charlie Shay had always been one of those people adept at moving on. Leaving high school, he had abandoned his high-school friends for new ones at college. Leaving college, he had abandoned his college friends for new ones in business. Leaving one business, he had abandoned his work friends for new friends at his new place of work. People had always drifted into Charlie’s life and then out again, barely noticed, until he met Jon Baird. Now, after over thirty years, it was Jon who was drifting out.
Except that he wasn’t, not exactly. Jon was still in Danbury, expecting a visit from Charlie Shay once every other week. The office was still where it had always been. Calvin and Julie and Mark and all the other people Charlie had gotten used to during the past few years were still taking up space in the hallways of Baird Financial. Even the holiday schedule was still the same. Charlie’s life had emptied out to the point where he had to spend Christmas at his club and his birthday buying himself a drink, but this year, as for every year but one since he had first met Jon, Thanksgiving was taken care of. The exception had been last year, while Jon was in jail and Sheila was so distraught she’d had to go on a cruise to Bermuda to quiet her nerves. Now Jon was getting out and the Thanksgiving party was on and Charlie was invited. That this invitation seemed to have nothing to do with him—that it had been extended to everyone with a significant emotional investment in fortunes of the business—bothered Charlie Shay not at all.
What did bother Charlie Shay was that it was seven o’clock on a Friday night and he was still in the office. Years ago, that wouldn’t have been very unusual. As a young man he had been very ambitious. What he had been ambitious for was no longer completely clear and he couldn’t have said if he’d achieved it—but that was the way life went, after all, and he didn’t feel entitled to complain. You worked and worked and worked and worked and then one day you looked up and decided you were tired. That was what had happened to him. He was tired. The only time he perked up was when he had an errand to do for Jon, like bringing the McAdam papers and the spare bridge out to the prison so that Jon could review the deal and not have to chew with his gums while he did it.
Charlie Shay was at the office at this late hour because he had gotten lost in a book of crossword puzzles. Crossword puzzles were what he did with himself most of the time these days. Over time, he had developed a mild compulsion—always buy the Times, always do the crossword puzzle, first thing—into an elaborate mania, so that he knew the names and styles of most of the puzzle constructors and the weaknesses of each. He’d even entered the Games magazine national crossword championships this year and come in third. Today, coming back from lunch with a new collection and a determination to have nothing more to do with Donald McAdam or his deal, Charlie had shut himself into his office and let himself go mentally missing. He would have been mentally missing for hours yet, except that Julie Anderwahl was having an argument with Mark in the office next door and she had thrown something. The something had bounced against the wall Charlie shared with Mark, bringing Charlie to. Charlie had wondered for what must have been the millionth time if the two of them behaved the same way in bed, complete with screams and curses and sharp-edged flying objects. Charlie had never had anything but the most conventional forms of sex, and the idea of variations with a little violence (on the part of the woman) intrigued him.