It was hot in here now, hot-cold, hot-cold, hot-cold. Ellen unbuttoned her coat. “I don’t think you should make decisions without talking to me,” she said. “I’m going to be in charge here now. I don’t want you doing things that are going to be blamed on Drew if I don’t know about them first.”
“But that’s ridiculous,” Martha said. “You have no idea what goes on in this office. You have no idea what it is we do. You can’t give orders about something you know nothing about.”
“I can give orders about something I own,” Ellen said. “And I own this. Whatever it is, now that Drew isn’t here.”
“You don’t own this yet,” Martha said. “The will will have to be probated. In the meantime, I’m going to keep this office running the way it ought to be run, the way Drew wanted it run, the way I ran it for him. And if you don’t like it, you can see the lawyers.”
“Martha,” Danielle said.
“Don’t shush me,” Martha said. “This is ridiculous. She doesn’t know the first thing about the work Drew was doing. She doesn’t even know what he did besides be on the radio, and she only knows that because she’s got her radio dial turned to his program. She’s a walking clothes rack, that’s all she is. He married her because she looks good in photographs.”
Ellen smiled slightly. That might very well be true, at least up to a point. She thought Drew might also have married her because she made him feel comfortable. Unlike Martha, or Danielle, or the “right-wing blondes” who had taken over television lately, she didn’t have that Seven Sisters–Ivy League accent, and she hadn’t grown up taking summer vacations on Martha’s Vineyard.
She suppressed a sudden, almost irresistible urge to tell Martha Iles exactly what Drew Harrigan liked to do in bed. She went all the way back to Drew’s office, let herself in, and looked around. It was neat. There were no papers on the desk. There were photographs, mostly of her. She thought they should have had children. Then she changed her mind. To be left with children to bring up after their father had died young was not a good thing. She’d had an aunt that had happened to. Both the children had grown up wild, and one of them had landed in jail for shoplifting when she was only twenty-two.
Martha Iles was hovering at the office door. Danielle Underwood was hovering right behind her. Ellen went over to Drew’s desk, pulled out the swivel chair, and sat down. It was an enormous desk, like the ones executives had in movies from the 1950s. Ellen hated movies from the 1950s. She hated movies from the 1940s, too. She hated all things from back in history. It was all too long ago, and the people never made any sense. She did like this desk, though. This desk made her feel invincible.
Martha Iles came a little farther into the room. “I don’t know what you think you’re doing,” she said. “I don’t know what you think you can accomplish. You can sit behind a desk, anybody can, but that doesn’t mean you can do the work that comes across it.”
“It means I can fire you,” Ellen said.
“Not today, you can’t,” Martha said.
“Then I’ll wait,” Ellen said. “I’ll call the lawyers this afternoon and we’ll see what happens, won’t we? No, I’ll call them now, here, from the desk. I’ve got Neil Savage’s home number. I’ll bet I can get him over here right this minute. Don’t you think so?”
“I think you’ve lost your mind,” Martha said.
Ellen thought that this was something she hadn’t considered. With Drew gone, she was both rich and powerful, if only powerful in this little sphere here, in the office. She could grow to like this, and when she had destroyed it, when she had fired them all and sold whatever needed to be sold and settled whatever needed to be settled, she could go back home and never have to worry about anything again. She knew that people were supposed to have a lot of trouble coming back home when they had been away for a long time, but that was because they became accustomed to the way things were done in the places they’d gone. Ellen had never been accustomed to any of it. She could slip back into life at home as easily as if she’d done nothing more radical than take a day shopping at Wal-Mart. She was even looking forward to shopping at Wal-Mart again.
Drew had wanted to live in this world, but Ellen had never understood why.
2
Sister Maria Beata of the Incarnation was having a bad morning. The only consolation for it was the fact that it wasn’t her usual bad morning. There had been no reading from St. John of the Cross or, even as bad, St. Thérèse of Lisieux at refectory. She thought that if she had to hear all that treacly nonsense about the Bride and the Bridegroom one more time, she’d spit in the soup. The reading this morning had been from St. Teresa of Avila herself, and it had been deliberately bland and unconnected to “the world.” The last thing Reverend Mother wanted was for her nuns to think too long and hard about what had happened to Drew Harrigan, of all people, in their own barn. They’d never been happy about letting people into that barn in the first place. Of course, they had said prayers at Mass this morning and at Office for the repose of Mr. Harrigan’s soul, but they’d said those before, the night he died. They just hadn’t known his name then. It wasn’t the Mass or the Office that was bothering Beata, or the readings at refectory, or how crazy she sometimes got in the long silences that were the background music of all that went on in Carmel. She was not listening for the voice of God this morning, and she wasn’t distressed at the fact that she wasn’t hearing anything. It was still true that she might have made a mistake, coming here, but she didn’t have time to think about it now. She knew in her bones that there were aspects to this situation Reverend Mother hadn’t considered, and she wasn’t looking forward to the fact that she was the only one here who would be able to warn her.