The Girl of the Lake Read online

“Malaysia, so he said.”

  “Malaysia.”

  “Via British Air. I have seen the tickets. Two weeks you and American Express clowns, yes?”

  “Two weeks me and the clowns, Leda, yes.”

  She giggled. But not I: that check I’d written Ducky for eleven mil had joined another eleven mil and headed west.

  ON A MORTGAGE THAT size, they foreclose pretty well immediately. As a fellow chondrichthyan, of course, I understand their thinking: all those rows of teeth have to bite something quick. Broadax, Inc., can absorb eleven million with only some raised eyebrows; Jilly Webster, private citizen, cannot. And the eleven million was just for starters. The Duk had ingeniously hidden three months of nonpayment, all their bills. Phones were dead. Power off. Furniture repossessed. Tow truck, two trips, hoisted the Jags. A stout fellow from the supermarket, even, looming on her doorstep demanding a check. It would be some time before she could harness her company’s funds to rescue her personal self.

  No, we didn’t call the cops; Duk’s desperate moves could await an explanation. And no, we didn’t make prodigious or even simple efforts to find him. Jilly didn’t, for example, call his family. Why worry them? At Broadax, Inc., I simply told Doug Blauveldt to resume the executive search: our man had changed his mind. My personal check to cover the blown advance would follow, ouch.

  Jilly’s theory was that Duk would come back when his crisis resolved, that he was only acting out a lifetime of suppression, the forcible containment of emotion, and she and I told each other this theory repeatedly in different forms, elegant each and every one. Still, she lost her house. Yes, that fast: Duk had apparently come to terms with their lender. So, a matter of expedience, she moved into my guesthouse. And there she bore down, operating her business from the kitchenette, a few phones and computers from my offices, set to work reclaiming all the things she’d lost.

  My guesthouse, just down the hill in that lovely canyon. It had been a neighbor couple’s home till I bought it, an offer sufficient to make them shout like lottery winners, dancing and hugs. Not that I’d foreseen this moment: from my kitchen windows I could see when Jilly was by the pool, watched her pace topless, talking on her phone.

  Sharks do fall in love. It isn’t all just gnashing and splashing and arms coming off clean. Jillian and I shared the loss of Ducky, for one thing, an actual missing person. We also mourned Ducky the nice guy: dead. I brought her a breakfast tray every morning—prepared by my private chef, so not exactly a community-service merit badge, but still—left it on the steps. I brought her a tray when I got home evenings—snacks, a magazine or two, cocktails in a shaker, just left it quietly on a little table down by the guesthouse pool. She’d come out to greet me only in the second week, thereafter daily, often cried on my shoulder. I held her, that’s all I could do. I listened.

  Fifth loss, discovered incrementally: her business had been sabotaged up and down the line, big to small and back again: the Duk, subtly hacking. There wasn’t going to be a recovery. There wasn’t going to be a release of cash. Well, no reason Ducky’s job couldn’t become hers, an adjustment here and there to play to her skill set, which was prodigious. She’d have to wait on her signing bonus, but why couldn’t it be eleven mil? And nice to have the other corner office occupied, extensive remodeling already paid.

  MY INVESTIGATOR, JACK WAX, found that Mr. Nuhkmongamong had indeed embarked on a British Air flight to Taipei. Not another clue further. Jilly figured he was in Bangkok—he’d many a relative still living there. My own vote was London—just a hunch. I knew it to be the city Ducky loved most, a place he could actually speak the language, which he could not in Bangkok, ancestors or no. Weekends, Jilly took to sunbathing naked, let our greeting hugs linger friendly. No further kissing, however. She’d let me know when, or if, and I was content to wait. Plus, we were colleagues now, something further to negotiate. The search for Duk continued.

  Meanwhile, Broadax, Inc., throve. Jillian Webster, no longer Nuhkmongamong, was one tectonic plate and I was the other, she riding high, I sliding under, mountain ranges lifting, unstable structures falling, victims trapped in elevators. She was worth the zeroes of her signing bonus immediately, surpassed all our expectations, these soaring ideas, these practical implementations. Business was rocking, business was rolling. Our stock soared while around us the industry flailed. The world passed our desks, and we ripped off big bloody bites whenever we felt the urge. Four lawsuits settled in our favor, one after the next. A glowing segment on Sixty Minutes, listen to this: “Best Boss on Earth.” Trade barriers dropping in Asia, in Europe, in South America, the right amounts of cash to the right presidential campaigns, all of it paving a golden path, the ongoing uptick.

  Life was good.

  Then Ted Brunk called up from Accounting, asked for a face-to-face, unheard of, but the right call: $150 million was missing from the overseas fund. And then Kiki Minimizawa from Customer Relations: in a single month we had lost some eighty percent of our long-term accounts to a young British company that seemed to have copied our business plan exactly and then bid into our base using information you could only call proprietary. I got on the phone for most of a horrendous afternoon. I heard this rumor and that rumor about Broadax, Inc., all lies that had to be quashed. My fellow chairs and CEOs would not speak to me. Except Harvey Barnard back east at humble New England Graphics, that honest gentleman, who explained how he’d been wooed away and told me all he’d heard about our product failures! We had had no product failures of any kind ever!

  “Rumors,” I said.

  Harvey pointed me to articles in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Crain’s Businessweek, and the Financial Times, all forthcoming that day.

  “I’d hardly call them rumors,” Harvey said sympathetically. “We’ve had the information a couple of weeks, just like you. One of your competitors, I’m afraid. And we felt to protect our softer flank, we must go with that competitor. Which is offering quite a value, I might add, straight across the profile. My sympathy, Broadax.” Said as one speaks to a shark from the diving cage—safe enough but still scary. I quizzed him hard and at length he caved: our new competition was Nuhkmongamong Ltd., of London, England.

  THAT EVENING, OF COURSE, I was agitated. I brought the usual tray of drinks down to the guesthouse. Jillian was wearing her laptop and a frown of frustration, staring into its screen, just the leading edge of the news I already knew. I sat at her side, wearing my own frown and a sporty new square-leg Speedo, bright blue.

  Slowly I said what I had planned to not say: “I fear Duk is getting ahead of us.” And went on to outline the subversion of our patents, the seduction of our client base, the careful placement of disinformation in the highest quadrants. All of it quite likely the result of a supremely clever touch with the keypad and spreadsheet.

  Jilly let her eyes roam to my mouth, smoothed all that hair out of her face

  I said, “Let’s speak directly. Did you tell Ducky about our balcony night?”

  She said, “I’m so happy you bring it up.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder, turned her as if for a kiss. “I mean, did you tell him?”

  And she leaned into me closer, like, this close. She said, “I told him because he knew.” And then we kissed, only our second but deeper somehow, the depth of new respect, I suppose, of heightened friendship, attraction untamed, not to mention shared disaster. She said, “Apparently Lorraine Lemoile observed us from an upstairs window—that was some kiss, Broadax.” This one was, too, and we carried on, I lifting her to her feet, backing her to the sun bed, kissing, kissing. “And Lorraine felt embarrassed. That’s what Duk told me—embarrassed for him.” We lay down, quickly tangled, sweetness that would save us. As the thunderheads gathered, as the hot rain began to fall, as the wind picked up around us, as she worked my Speedo down with her toes, she said, “And that’s all I know. I’ve withheld this information too long, Broadax, and I’m sorry.”

  And then what can I say? We were mak
ing love, corner offices no more, just two bodies in collision, positively planetary. I thought of the view from my kitchen, thought of my chef up there, hot show. We’d have to build a bower, provision of privacy, the oddest thoughts in flagrante delicto. “You and I didn’t discuss maternity leave,” Jillian said after, one of those jokes that burrows in and lines a safe chamber with downy pluckings. Giggles subsiding, we stood up, dunked in the pool, climbed out, found our towels, our drinks, the silence of contemplation: the price of this love.

  I really wanted to know: “Duk’s reaction?”

  “Duk wept.”

  Lorraine Lemoile, cat-eyed sharkette, always with eyes for Ducky. Sunset glinted off the pool. Some kiss, Jilly had said. She watched my eyes. I said, “But surely that is not what precipitated this . . . vendetta.”

  Her eyes again found my mouth. “No. It was something worse. Something else I’ve withheld. I don’t know why. Let me show you.” She rose like a vision, slid into the guesthouse naked, reappeared shortly, clad in one of my old House of Kwo robes, a thick letter in her tomboy’s hands. “That’s my handwriting,” she said. “And this is a draft of an emotional letter to my sister, Kate, one of those letters you do not send. And if you do not send it, Broadax, it might very well be in your sock drawer a month or two, or even nine weeks, and your husband might then find it and read it.”

  First line: Dear Kate: I am in love with Ted Broadax.

  I DON’T HAVE TO say much about the Broadax collapse. It’s been the subject these last three weeks of every op-ed column and all the TV pundit palaver a man can stomach and even The View. Competition from Europe is the official line—the president of the United States said it herself, part of her brilliant address to Congress. Competition from Ducky, she should have mentioned. First our products and services, then our client base, then large numbers of our best people defecting, even Brunk, then Blauveldt, moving to London. Last our patents—all quite legally if unwisely sold to him, all traceable deals (these hard drives hold everything—every email, every transaction—whether you’ve really written the emails or made the transactions or no). It’s a brilliant, malevolent, fully electronic fiction. A fiction I can’t counter, because every traceable link, every clue, every witness, says it is fact. Even my secretary, devoted Marie, seems to remember certain phone calls I never made. Marie is moving to London, by the way. She always wanted to head up a subcorporation, apparently, and she loves Carnaby Street.

  My personal financial collapse is another story.

  The first sign was the Mayflower moving van at my guesthouse—all my belongings there removed under the eyes of the biggest sheriff I’ve ever seen. And then the lovely young couple I’d apparently sold the place to, moving in.

  Jack Wax? Moved to London.

  Next, Duk got my house. My legal team? Suddenly a conflict of interest. “A new client” was all Buzz Dorfmann would say.

  My retort: “London?”

  “I’m not the least bit sorry, Broadax.”

  My personal checking account: frozen. My credit cards: maxed then canceled. My cars, all four: leases terminated. My life insurance: never existed. Every last little souvenir I owned: sold, checks from eBay users around the world all countersigned by me, all deposited by me, all spent, apparently, all gone, all the objects dutifully mailed by my houseman just before his own Heathrow flight. Seventy-three bucks in quarters, dimes, and nickels from the jar in my empty garage got Jilly and me a night at the Hi-Ho Motor Lodge under the freeway. This gave us an address to receive a wire of five thousand dollars from Jilly’s sister, the loyal and lovable Kate, all done old school via pay phones, Pony Express.

  Kate’s gift of cash, unintercepted, brought us to our final frontier. Ducky had won. I put in a call to Leda Loa. Coming as planned. I owned my Maui condo, our last bastion, free and clear. But Leda Loa didn’t answer. A call to her home, and her sweet old mother just barked at me: Leda Loa had moved to London.

  The hell with her. We’d cook for ourselves. But in Maui my condo was occupied. A gentlemanly fellow who worked in advertising. All the transfer papers were in perfect order, title and deed, my signature unassailable. I’d sold the place. Made a good profit, too.

  “Do you want this?” the ad exec said, opening his big closed hand. “They said it was yours.”

  A heavy grizzly bear key chain, true ruby eyes, key ring through the nose.

  “No,” I said. “Keep it. It goes with the house.”

  SO JILLY AND I camp on a hidden beach on the vast family land of a loyal old Polynesian pal, island to remain unnamed, man who’s never once used a computer, let’s put it that way. Shelter of driftwood and castoff plastic sheeting, my darling and I just two more of the familiar homeless beachies hereabouts: sunsets, starlight, long walks daily, long nights, storm and calm, peace and quiet. We’ve got nothing but our talk, but our talk ranges widely. My beloved reads to me, sweet bedtime tones, some really excellent books from the lost-and-found at the public beach not a morning’s walk away. That’s where I got my flip-flops, too, and where we’ve found all manner of useful things, from snorkels to hair ties to shampoo. We bob in the surf, we live in the moment, we run in grass skirts, homemade hats big as umbrellas. We couldn’t avoid a little industry, help the local kids tie-dye T-shirts to sell to tourists, cash only, enough for sundries and the occasional bottle of good gin. The picking crew over at Dole donates surreptitious pineapples, coconuts fall on the roads, the spear guy on the rocks by the jetty offers fish we don’t even recognize, practically free. The old lady on the hill has her garden and if we help, we eat greens and beans and tomatoes and poi. Fire on the beach with our kind, everyone adding a little something to the kettle: stone soup. We’re breezy in love, famous for it here, a bun in the oven, whole lives ahead, permanent family leave. No more Broadax. No more Webster. New names secret, location untraceable, not a kilobyte in sight, sharks unto minnows, part of the scenery.

  Good-bye to you Duk, good-bye.

  The Tragedie of King Lear

  DURING THE INTERMISSION OF The Music Man at the Rocky Pond Summer Theatre, Miller Malloy stayed in his seat. He’d never been to the place without his late, beloved wife Lou, who was the theater buff he’d never been, an actor, in fact—at least she’d been one in her college years. He’d never been to any show alone before, but there it was, loneliness in a beautiful old theater built in a venerable New Hampshire dairy barn back in the 1920s, a very familiar musical, a surprisingly robust and talented cast, many reasons to smile, many to weep. He examined all the biographies in the playbill. Some of these folks had been around the block more than once. The female star, playing Marian the Librarian, had played the title character in the TV series Supergirl, it said, but Miller had never seen the show, no idea how impressed to be. At the back of the little booklet was a notice in jovial font, no doubt an advertising slot that hadn’t been filled:

  ATTEND! FUND-RAISE! DONATE!

  VOLUNTEER! ROCKY POND!

  During the second act he couldn’t concentrate for the possibility of volunteering. He saw himself staffing phone banks, cleaning the toilets backstage, taking tickets at the door, attending cast parties. Then he saw all that again and added a position on the theater’s board of directors, eventually gave himself the chairmanship, bringing his extensive corporate experience to bear, making the company hum, the retired savior. By the time the last stirring note of “Till There Was You” was sung (that Supergirl was dynamite!), he practically owned the place. And that was before the smashing finale and reprise of “Seventy-Six Trombones,” which made his heart pound luxuriantly.

  Next morning, the last Saturday of his solo vacation, late August, he found his excitement hadn’t abated. And so he went to the Rocky Pond Summer Theater box office when it opened and bought another ticket. Then he asked after the company manager. Who, it turned out, was the one selling the tickets—a chubby, cheerful young woman in overalls and kerchief, indefinite tattoo on her hand. Or not that young, fifties—Miller couldn�
��t tell anymore.

  “Oh, we’d love it if you’d volunteer!” she said. And pulled him by his own, inkless hand. “I am Marcia.” Backstage, nothing whatsoever was going on, yet even abandoned it was a lively place: dressing rooms, props he recognized from the night before, costumes on racks, graffiti more and less amusing, a large blackboard filled out in a grid, neat lines of permanent paint—the title of every Rocky Pond production from 1923 forward, room for only nine more.

  Marcia said, “I need someone to get ice for the cast party tomorrow. And, really, if I gave you money, someone to do all the shopping? We need cold cuts kind of thing, cheese, crackers, soft drinks, not too much wine, if you please, even less beer, maybe a big bag or two of chips. Napkins, all that stuff. Paper plates, what have you. Your first job, should you decide to take it on!”

  “Happy to take it on. And I’ll donate everything besides. No need to give me any cash.”

  She brightened, softened, already seemed to love him: “Now we’re talking. It’s the end of the season, not just the end of the run, so it’s a big bash. About forty actors and musicians and crew and their friends and donors and family, including kids? No idea how to add that up. A hundred? In the back of the theater here. Everything to be set up by one o’clock. Matinee starts at two, ends at four thirty, five. The big rehearsal room in the back? It’s where they used to milk the cows? Do I seem pushy?”

  “Push away! I’ll help serve, too, if you like.”

  “Oh, I’d like. Oh, my dear man! I’d like it divinely. You’ll be alone, in fact. Though I’ll try to lend a hand. Our indentured servants, I mean interns, have had to go back to college. You’re a godsend! Literally! And proof of Her existence!” She gave him a grin and a hug and a pat, and bustled back to the front of the house.

  Miller wandered out onto the stage, looked up at the spotlights, all the colored filters, the expanse of empty seats, felt a surge of new life in his breast, just as his therapist had warned he’d feel, wonderful.