Executive Suite (21 page)

She pressed the opening. “Don, I know you haven't had time to think about it yet—but you will think about it and when you do, please don't be too worried because someone other than Avery Bullard will be president of the Tredway Corporation. The company will go on—and so will you.”

The earnest intensity of her voice made him realize that she was harboring some secret fear. “What are you worrying about?”

“You.”

“Me?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

She hesitated as if she were questioning the propriety of saying more. “Don, I know how much Avery Bullard has meant to you. For you, Avery Bullard has been the company—everything.”

He toyed a morsel of food across his plate. “I'll be all right,” he said, his voice flat and guarded.

Her fingers walked across the table top, gently touching the back of his hand. “I know you will, Don. Forgive me if I said something that shouldn't have been said.”

“Better call Fred now.” He pushed back his chair and rose quickly. She glanced away and he knew that he had hurt her. He stepped behind her chair, letting his hands fall lightly on her shoulders. “Sorry. Didn't mean it that way. Little on edge, that's all.”

He saw her right hand rise quickly to cover his left, and her head tilt back so that he was looking directly down into the jet pools of her eyes. “I love you, Don, and I don't want you to be hurt—that's all.”

His hands gripped her shoulders. “Sure, I know.”

“The Alderson's number is there on the pad,” she said in quick recovery.

He dialed the number. There was a busy signal. “Maybe I'd better run down, see what I can do.”

“Don?”

He turned, silent.

“Will he be the new president?”

“Who?”

“Mr. Alderson.”

“What makes you think that?”

“I didn't think it. I merely asked because you mentioned helping him—as if he were the one who would take charge.”

It was a question that he had been avoiding asking himself but now, openly asked, the question soared in his mind like a sky-reaching rocket and then burst and reburst into a hundred other questions.

“Well, Fred's the oldest,” he said lamely. “Jesse is out of town—Walt, too—no, I haven't any idea who'll be president.”

“If Mr. Fitzgerald had lived, there'd be no question about it, would there?”

“I don't suppose so.”

“Or if someone else had been elected to take his place?”

“But no one has been.”

“I wonder why not,” she said speculatively.

His voice picked up her musing tone. “I had an idea that it would happen at the board meeting next Tuesday—no reason particularly—hunch, that's all. Now—” His voice retreated, avoiding the necessity of saying aloud that next Tuesday the board of directors would elect Avery Bullard's successor.

As happened so often, she seemed to have heard his unsaid words. “I suppose I should know this, but I don't. How is a new president elected—by the stockholders or the board?”

“The board. The stockholders elect the board and then the board elects the officers.”

He sat down again and she poured coffee. “How many are there on the board?”

“The board? Nine. Well, there were nine before Mr. Fitzgerald died. That leaves eight.”

“Seven without Mr. Bullard?” she prompted.

“Oh.” His voice caught. “Yes, seven.”

Her head went back, counting. “You and Mr. Alderson, Jesse Grimm and Walt Dudley, Loren Shaw and that man from New York.”

“George Caswell.”

“Yes, that's six. Who's the other one?”

“Julia Tredway Prince.”

“Oh, I'd forgotten that she was a director.”

“In name, at least. Never comes to a meeting, but she's still a director—officially.”

“You'll elect the president—you seven?”

It was another first question, another soaring rocket. “Yes—yes, I suppose we will.”

Her glance was a forewarning. “Who will it be, Don? Whom will you elect?”

“Good God, Mary, it's too soon to—” He clipped his voice when he heard its edge, choking back his annoyance at the persistence of her cross-examination.

“I'm sorry,” she said quickly. “Forgive me.”

His spoon circled the cup, stirring the coffee, and his eyes focused on the vortex of the slow-spinning whirlpool. “You're right,” he said finally. “There's no use trying to avoid thinking about it. ‘The king is dead, long live the king.'” The spoon stopped moving and the whirlpool spun itself out. “No, I can't see Alderson as president. The job's just too big for him—company's too big. Actually, when you get right down to it, Fred's never been much more than a super-secretary for Avery Bullard. Oh, maybe that isn't quite fair—he is good on financial stuff, damned good—but it will take a lot more than that to fill Avery Bullard's shoes. Fred just doesn't have it.”

“Mr. Grimm?” she prompted.

“Jesse? Well, Jesse is a wonderful man—great in a factory, best there is—but—”

A thousand memories floated together in his mind, overlapping, forming one composite image of Jesse Grimm's impassive face … the slow puffing of his pipe … the taciturnity that made him go for hours without saying a word. No, Jesse would never do what Avery Bullard had done … light the flame in a man's heart … fire him to do the impossible. “No, I hate to say it because I like Jesse so much, but he couldn't do it—he just couldn't.”

“What about Walt Dudley?”

He started to shake his head before he spoke and then caught himself. Yes, Walt Dudley did have something … the words that Jesse didn't have. Men listened when Walt talked. He could sell … and he could teach other men to sell. People liked him. Yes, that was Walt's strength, making people like him … but it was his weakness, too. Everyone hadn't liked Avery Bullard. There were times when a president had to be hard … crack the whip … scorch a man's soul. The man might hate you but you didn't dare think about that … it was the way you made men … it was the way you built a company … made it run. Walt Dudley didn't have that inner strength, that hard core, that courage to fight the world without caring what the world thought. His voice dipped into his stream of thought and he said aloud, “No, not Walt Dudley.”

“That leaves Loren Shaw.”

His rejection was instantaneous. “God no, not Shaw!”

“I hadn't realized that you felt that strongly. I knew that you didn't like him too well personally, but I thought you—”

“Or any other way,” he cut in. “The one thing I've never been able to understand about Avery Bullard is why he brought Shaw into the company in the first place.”

An almost invisible smile played behind her black eyes, “Perhaps because he's so different from all the rest of you—the leaven for the loaf.”

“He'll never be president, I can tell you that!” he said grimly.

“Since you've rejected all the others, apparently you've decided to vote for yourself.”

He grimaced at her attempted humor.

There was a quick change in the tone of her voice. “Don, whoever the new president is, he won't be another Avery Bullard. If you're weighing everyone against Avery Bullard, no one else can possibly seem adequate.”

He flinched inwardly, freezing the mask of his face to avoid a visible reaction, not because she had probed the secret truth but because she had insisted again on exposing it. It was the one characteristic of Mary's that he disliked, the way that she sometimes made him feel as if he were a case study in abnormal behavior and she were a teacher announcing her findings to a class.

Yet Mary was right. There couldn't be another Avery Bullard. All that could be done now was to come as close as they could. There were only four choices … no, only three … Shaw was out. Alderson … Grimm … Dudley? Alderson … Grimm? Alderson. Yes, Fred might carry on. He had been the closest to Avery Bullard … knew the most about what was going on in the whole company … the things that no one else knew. But Fred was weak. No, maybe it wasn't weakness … maybe it was agreement. Yes, that could be true. Maybe that was the reason that Fred never spoke out against Avery Bullard in executive committee meetings … because he thought as Mr. Bullard thought … as people who are close to one another come to think alike, almost as if they were sharing a common brain … as Mary so often knew what he was going to say before he said it.

Mary's voice broke into his consciousness. “Are you sure that Mr. Alderson would want it?”

He blinked, wondering for an instant whether she had actually said it or whether it was only an imagined confirmation of the question that had just come to the edge of his own mind.

“He hasn't been too well lately,” Mary went on. “I know that from talking to his wife—and he's not a young man, Don. He must be sixty-one or sixty-two.”

He moved abruptly, twisting himself up out of his chair, feeling the urgency of movement, the need for escape from the logic of too simple reason. That's what Mary never realized … that everything couldn't be worked out like a little problem in mathematics.

“I'll run down and find out how to get word to Jesse,” he said evasively, starting for the door.

She crossed with him. “Don, is there anyone in Mr. Bullard's family who should be notified?”

“There isn't any family,” he said, and the words brought a recognition of the barrenness of Avery Bullard's life and a resurgence of his own grief.

“There's his wife.”

“Wife? They were divorced years ago.”

“She might still like to know. I think Edith Alderson has her address.”

“All right,” he said noncommittally, shielding the memory of the bitterness he had felt many years ago when Jesse had told him how Avery Bullard's wife had deserted him when he needed her most. It had been a long time since the thought had entered his mind and, walking toward the car, he wondered at the strangeness of Mary's having remembered that Avery Bullard had once had a wife.

7.38 P.M. EDT

The telephone receiver hung over the edge of the dresser, swinging like a slow pendulum beating against the mechanical drone of the buzzing dial tone.

Erica Martin, prostrate on the bed, heard nothing but the endless repetition of Mr. Shaw's voice saying, “Oh, hadn't you heard, Miss Martin? Mr. Bullard's dead.”

It had come, not as a blow but as a cold steel blade, cutting deeper and deeper, severing nerve center after nerve center, spreading a slow paralysis that ended in oblivion.

There had been a time that was lost, and then she had felt the slow return of consciousness creeping back through her body, but not through her brain, distant and remote, as if her body were something detached with its own ability to generate sensation, and the sensation it generated was of the crushing weight of emptiness. It was a dead weight and now that was all there would ever be, never the life weight of a man, never the filling of that never-filled need, never the yielding for which her dreams had so long prepared her. It was not her mind that cried out against her body, but her body that cried out against her mind. It had been her mind that had made her run away when there had been nothing to escape, made her afraid when there had been nothing to fear, robbed her of what might have been but now could never be.

Slowly, like the drifting of a cloud, the ebbing paralysis released her brain. She opened her eyes and saw the telephone receiver hanging where she must have dropped it. She willed her body to move and was strangely surprised when it did move. Standing, she replaced the telephone receiver on its cradle. Then she reheard Mr. Shaw's voice, vaguely distant as if it were a memory of something heard under anesthesia, and he was asking her to come to the office. “I'm afraid I'll need your help tonight, Miss Martin.”

The hall door stood open, as it had been open when the telephone had rung, and she walked out through the door, still too numbed to accept the conscious relief of tears.

7.41 P.M. EDT

Edith Alderson stood stiffly erect, staring at the almost closed door. The whiteness of her face was the only whiteness in the murky gloom of the dark hall. Her hands cupped her elbows, making a rectangle of lean arms and thin shoulders that emphasized the sparse angularity of her figure. She was not a happy woman and her body seemed a physical manifestation of her unhappiness.

A few minutes before, driving home from the Willoughbys', she had confirmed what she had fearfully sensed in that moment after the announcement of Mr. Bullard's death—that Fred would be the next president of Tredway. Her own first reaction had been one of enormous relief that she had at last escaped the overpowering domination of Avery Bullard, but that had been before she had seen Fred's face, before he had talked to her on the way home.

She could hear his voice now, talking to that Mr. Oldham in New York about the arrangements for bringing the body to Millburgh, and with every word she could hear Fred's voice becoming stronger and stronger, more and more commanding. In a minute or two the call would be over. Then he would walk out through that door and she would face him. Her whole body tightened in preparation, her muscles taut, her thin lips drawn hard, the cords lining her neck.

These next few minutes would be her last chance to fight back … her last chance to save what little there was left of their lives. She wasn't ready … it had happened too fast … there had been no warning. Even worse, fighting back was a lost habit. There had been too many intervening years since she had given up in her battle against Avery Bullard.

Desperate for time … every step would give her another precious second … she walked from the dark hall into the almost matching darkness of the living room. The sun outside was still bright but the faint light that filtered in through the dense mask of overgrown shrubbery outside the windows was too weak to dispel the room's eternal gloom.