“Of the inside?”
Nobody laughed. She hadn’t intended them to.
“The rest of the materials were supplied by flagship management.” Thomas turned to Peter. “Which brings me to the fact you have your own representative here. Since when has Peter’s word been insufficient for this board?”
Peter had set the cup down. A brown half circle had formed on the tabletop beneath it. “Since about ten this morning, I would think.”
“Tell her,” Thomas said. “Tell her what you told us.”
Peter drew up a chair. For a moment the age in his face seemed so abrupt Miriam wondered if he was unwell. The little room was very warm. He laid the green pen in front of him as if somebody had asked for the surrender of his sword.
“I told them we had not issued a repair ticket on behalf of the workshop since October. That is the statement I made, and it was accurate.”
“And you understood the use to which it would be put?”
“Yes.”
“Who told Claire to keep people with claims out of the book?”
“I approved the compensation plan.”
“Who designed it?”
He looked up from his hands. “You did.”
There was a dreadful little sensation, like the fall of a key from a pocket on a long walk, or the sight of a missed call at an hour in which only one person would have rung. Miriam saw Caroline close her eyes. There had been a proposal for salaries linked to the time taken to settle complaints. It had been her idea, after her mother in her last illness had spent three afternoons on hold over a faulty adjustable bed. Miriam had wanted staff to have power to settle a problem on the spot. If you owned a problem from first contact to final resolution, she had reasoned, you should share in some of the benefit of keeping that customer. It had never occurred to her to ask what happened to somebody’s pay when the problem couldn’t be resolved at all.
“We added the clean-quarter bonus when we needed to keep salaries competitive,” Peter said. “Finance would only pay it if I showed results they could see. We were able to cut the outstanding tickets by nearly three quarters.”
“By having fewer tickets to start with.”
“Yes.”
“And you didn’t go into the shop?”
“I go into that shop every Monday. Ada sets my watch. I can’t manage the winding crown on my own anymore. You know that little tremor I get? It makes me drop it. She puts two minutes on just to keep me honest.”
“Then what were you thinking?”
“After your mother died I promised the staff I would never let the family buy out this business with borrowed money and lay them off to pay the interest. The only terms the bank would give you required that building. I thought if we got the deal done first we could solve the debt after. Put the workshop in the flagship, bring Vernon across, buy Ada a little place of her own if that was what she wanted. Maybe somebody could have a talk with Thomas, see if he would take payments over time. I was going to come to you this afternoon after the signatures.”
“You were going to make me choose between them after I’d given my word to a lender.”
“I thought you were better at choosing than I was.”
Daniel stood at the foot of the table. He had dropped his car keys twice since they sat down. The second time he put them in his pocket, apparently to prevent himself from throwing them at somebody.
“I maintain machines,” he said. “There’s a ventilation plant on top of the hospital that everybody wants inspected on a day there aren’t sick people downstairs. Guess when that day comes. We stop one machine, prove the next one works, put signs up and let the people in the hospital know what we’re doing. You can’t ask a person on a table to hold their breath while you figure out what comes next.”
Thomas examined him with mild curiosity. “Do you have an ownership interest here, Mr. Ruiz?”
“No. I get to leave if you all talk yourselves into bigger trouble. But my mother’s got a chair. The people I left watching my kid have benches. Maybe you should ask them that question before you decide how much money we’re all going to lose you.”
The silver-mustached lawyer drew the papers together. “It’s four fifty-three. The offer to transfer the estate’s shares expires at five unless amended by mutual consent. We can attach a memorandum setting aside the issue of title and detain a portion of the purchase price. Will that suit either side?”
Thomas said yes. Miriam had very nearly said yes too when she saw, in the left margin of the February consent, a little penciled figure. She would have known that sloping eight anywhere. She touched it with her fingernail. It came away gray.
“This is an original sheet of paper from my mother’s desk.”
“It’s a copy of a historic valuation, with a current cover,” Caroline said. “They included comparable sales to justify the new appraisal.”
Miriam turned it over. Under the neatly stapled printout was a column of old addresses. Her mother had used both sides of most pieces of paper. So, evidently, did her estate. Across the back was a list of owners of property in nearby streets, with indications of what each piece of land might be worth should someone wish to buy them together. At the bottom was a notation: Unify at next transfer. No access without Dean frontage.
She placed her hand on the digitized site plan. With the workshop thrown in, the buildings behind the flagship went all the way through to Dean Street. Without it, the only way in for a large vehicle was through the side of the flagship itself.
“Thomas, who approached whom about this sale?”
He looked at his lawyer. The man gave his head the smallest possible shake.
Miriam took her notebook and wrote one line on a fresh page. At five to five, while she wrote, a picture of her son came up on the phone. He was standing in a cardboard forest holding a painted apple, looking extraordinarily pleased by the prospect of letting somebody have it. She took the old green pen, signed what she had written and pushed her notebook across the table.
I decline the offer presented today.
Outside the room, somebody started a vacuum cleaner.
“I’ll ask you again,” she said. “When you put that building in my agreement, who were you actually selling it to?”
Chapter 9 — The Things That Came Back
The person Thomas had been selling to, it turned out, was already in the room. It was the man with the silver mustache, although the precise capacity in which he sat there was more interesting than his remarkably placid expression had so far suggested. He was counsel to the estate, yes, but he was also a director of a company that had taken an option on the debt the bank intended to issue to Miriam. He had declared both interests to Thomas in writing. Miriam had been listed as a party to be notified on completion.
“You expected me to default?” she said.
“I don’t think everybody who borrows money is going to default,” he said. “I do expect to be able to sell something valuable if they do. That is not unusual.”
The hope, apparently, was to buy the debt at a modest discount and wait for the first autumn interest payment, which Miriam would almost certainly be unable to meet if she kept the workshop open. At that point he could either take possession or consent to a sale of a strip wide enough to service the buildings at the back. A landowner had proposed a hotel there with an entrance on Dean Street, the site of the bakery and the shop. The hotel would have been of no particular interest to anyone on the street. What made the whole thing work financially was the prospect of selling to a chain that liked a loading bay big enough to turn a truck.
“A truck,” said Peter.
“A great many people enjoy regular employment because a person with a truck can reach their places of work.”
Miriam had never met a person who quite so thoroughly failed to hear the words coming out of his own mouth. She had been that person before lunch, she supposed, which rather spoiled the pleasure of judging him.
“Who owns the option under the old Pike loan?” she asked.
Thomas apparently did not know. His lawyer claimed that under the terms of the estate settlement it belonged to him in his official capacity until all other claims could be proved. That at least was an answer that could be tested. She asked Caroline to get the name on the original loan rather than the name on the typed summary. Caroline spoke quietly into her phone and sent an assistant to the county records office before they shut the door.
Peter picked up his jacket and made a halfhearted attempt to put his cup in the bin. The bottom fell out of it. For a moment everybody who had come to talk about four million dollars got up to find something to mop up forty cents’ worth of cold coffee. The spell of the afternoon broke. The silver-mustached man left with Thomas. They took their unsigned offer and left the appraisal, which belonged to the bank anyway.
It was a little past five. Outside, on the sidewalk, a crowd had gathered around a young woman in a wheelchair who was demonstrating, with the help of roughly forty dancers in ordinary street clothes, how to perform a very energetic piece of choreography without knocking down the man who sold orange juice. The man in the paper crown seemed to be enjoying his role. As Miriam stepped out, a brown hand reached for hers and whirled her through a turn. Someone on a speaker sang something about the glory of being foolish on a Friday and nobody bothered to tell them they were early by a day.
In the confusion it took Miriam a moment to see Claire beside her. The younger woman had brought a small black box.
“I know what you want to ask me,” Claire said. “I don’t know why I never told people we still had the ring. I didn’t know who it belonged to until today.”
“What changed?”
“My father made me sit down and go through my mother’s things. Her letters and her canceled checks and the stuff you say you’ll sort one day when there’s nothing on TV. I’ve been paying a sitter to help him go through it and he waits until I’m home. It’s me he wants to look at it with. Today he had the nerve to tell me why.”
“Why?”
“He can’t always remember, and it scares him there’ll be stuff in there about me that he’s forgotten. It won’t do him any good to remember that by himself.”
Inside the box was a gold ring with a small diamond set sideways. On the inside, in a place where nobody had been likely to look while the ring contained a finger, was the little half moon that had been Vernon Price’s mark since he was seventeen years old. It made sense that Josephine would have asked him to check the join when she put the setting on. On the underside of the diamond, where the light hit the prongs, was another mark Miriam had seen in old family pieces. A tiny star with one point missing. This was what her mother could do with a graver and two or three unhurried strokes.
Claire had brought something else. It was a letter to her from her mother with the date left blank. Hugh and Margaret Mercer had had a child late, after each of them had already seen quite a bit of the world that they liked and a little more of it than they could stand. The letter described May’s brief engagement to Samuel Pike and the moment in a hospital room when she had understood she loved the man who brought her an orange and went away again so she wouldn’t feel obliged to thank him. There had been no great quarrel. Samuel had let her go, against his private wishes and with good grace. They remained friends for many years. When he died she had intended the stone from his grandmother’s brooch to go back to his family. She hoped her daughter would take that as a request and not a demand.