Retreat (9 page)

    
“What?” Jon asked. He tried thinking back
eight years. There had been so many small deals a year back then before
Freedman started focusing exclusively on the big dogs.
 
“Wait a minute … Carpenter, right?”

    
“Is it coming back to you? I wouldn’t blame
you for trying to block it out. It was particularly ugly.”

    
“You don’t seem to have made out too
badly,” Jon said, waving a hand at the house.

    
“You took everything my father cared about
– his company, his people, his pride,” David said.

    
“And left him with a stink load of cash as
I recall, which you seem to be benefiting from.”

    
“You scammed him. You tricked him into
selling to you. You told him the company would stay intact, that you could save
it.”

    
“I don’t recall the particulars,” Jon said,
leaning against the cold counter.

    
“How convenient. I’d ask my father to
explain them to you but he killed himself six months after you gutted the
place.”

    
Jon grimaced. Sometimes the deals got ugly.
That’s why he needed Clara, to charm the owners. After she started the ugliness
practically stopped. But she hadn’t been there back then. “Look, all I care
about is Clara. Where is she?”

    
“I told you I don’t know and to tell you
the truth I don’t really care. I got what I needed from her,” David said,
smirking.

    
“You son of a …”

    
“Hold on. Hold on,” he said, holding up his
hand and chuckling at Jon’s reaction. “I’m not talking about the satisfaction I
got from that petite body, although I’d do that again in a heartbeat. I’m
talking about you.”

    
Jon’s face prickled with rage and he
clenched his fists. He knew David was baiting him again. “What are you getting
at?”

    
“You loved her, right?” David pushed.

    
“That’s none of your Goddamned business.”

    
“Do you still love her?”

    
Jon looked at him.

    
“That’s what I thought,” David said. “Then
I accomplished what I set out to do.”
 

    
“Which was?”

    
“Do you think it’s a coincidence that she
landed here with me after she fled from you?”

    
“You …”

    
“…planned it. Right down to the cubic
zirconia. It seemed quite authentic, don’t you think? I assume you’re the one
who removed it from her lovely little finger?”

    
“But you have a wife and kids,” Jon said.
He tried to wrap his mind around this new information.

    
“This was more important.
 
Sally understood that and stepped aside. I
think she was relieved to go, to be honest with you, after witnessing my
heritage get shattered.”

    
Jon looked at him with disbelief. He was
playing
 
a game with Clara’s life? A
Goddamned game?

    
“My father watched the company he’d spent
his whole life building be sold off piecemeal, without even so much as a
severance package for his employees. And you didn’t even care enough about it
to make it quick,” David said. Jon could see the cold quest for vengeance
creeping into his eyes. “You dragged the damned liquidation out almost three
years, picking the pieces off the bone until it was nothing more than a
skeleton. It killed him to watch that. You killed him, Griffin, and left my mother a widow, for a
few pennies of profit.”

    
“It was more than a few pennies,” Jon shot
back, not feeling an ounce of pity for Carpenter after what he’d done to Clara.
To him. Rage boiled. “And it took a while because your father had let so much
of the inventory and equipment go to shit. If he cared about that company as
much as you claim then maybe he should have taken better care of it.”

    
“You think you’re so fucking smart,” David
said. “But you know what? You’re an idiot. I took away the only thing you ever
really cared about and made it mine, and you never even knew what hit you. I
knew you’d be too proud to go after her. I’m only sorry she found out about
Sally and the kids before I had a chance to marry her and strategically
dismantle her sanity piece by piece the way you dismantled my father and his
company.”

    
“You are one sick bastard,” Jon said,
backing away.

    
“Ask Clara. She can tell you all about how
sick I am,” David said. “Now get the hell out of my house.”

    
“You stay the hell away from her. You got
your fucking revenge,” Jon seethed as he headed toward the door.

    
“Not even close,” David called after him.
“Watch your back asshole.”

CHAPTER
5

    
It didn’t take Clara long to decide her
best option was to hightail it home.

    
Some might call it running away but she
decided to view it as a strategic relocation. She’d carefully listed her alternatives
on the backside of a table tent at a crowded truck stop off interstate 44 near
Claremore. The adrenaline-rich forty-five miles between the deep-fried chicken
sandwich in front of her and the asshole she’d left behind had helped her put
things in perspective.

    
She could stay, she decided, and start over
in Tulsa.
 
It would require digging deeply into the
reserves she managed to save while she worked down in Fort Worth and kept mostly intact after she
moved into David’s house. It also meant figuring out a creative way to cover
the hole in her resume, which was expanding rapidly now that she wouldn’t be
able to use Aesthetics as a reference.

    
She absently twirled her straw, bobbing the
lemon wedge up and down in her gargantuan iced tea – one size! – as she
considered the other possibilities.

    
There was Fort Worth and Jon’s offer, but she still had
enough pride to keep from sniveling back to him for a mercy job. Latching onto
David had obviously been a colossal mistake and she wasn’t ready to hitch her
fortunes to another man who’d already proved unreliable once.

    
So that left Brighton.

    
It wasn’t ideal -- everyone with half a
brain deserted the center of the geriatric state before the ink on their
bachelor’s degrees dried. While most of her friends landed in one of the poles
– Pittsburgh or
Philadelphia –
more than a few left for greener pastures altogether. On the bright side that
meant she didn’t have to worry about her old friends looking down their
predominant noses at her. The only one left was Meg, who worked as her father’s
assistant and would probably be giddy to see someone her own age cruise into
town again.

    
Clara half-turned on her bar stool to
survey the truck stop’s dining room.

    
The majority of tables were occupied by
tired looking men in rumpled clothes, sitting singly like she was. She supposed
she should’ve felt uncomfortable surrounded by all that testosterone as she
perched on the round red stool in her business suit, but instead the transient
anonymity of the truck stop was proving a good place for clear thinking.

    
She smiled as she remembered that Marcy
used to call them fuck stops because of the propensity for low-grade hookers to
wander among the lonely truckers, but she didn’t see anything here that
resembled a sexual free-for-all. On the contrary, she noticed a few booths with
families in them tucked along the rear wall. The men themselves reminded her of
the laborers her father used to hire when she was a kid and he was still trying
to make a go of it with the mine. They’d been mostly harmless, trying to make a
living in a world that never seemed to be on their side.

    
The only thing acutely seedy about her
current setting was the oppressive bouquet of fry oil and diesel fuel, which
she was sure would shadow her in the fibers of her clothing until she found a
decent dry cleaner.

    
She stared back down at her list and tapped
the point of her pen along her three choices, making pin-size blue dots that
she started to connect to form a constellation that slightly resembled Orion.

    
There was a fourth choice, she decided,
which would be to go someplace completely new. She considered adding it to her
list but stopped, crossing out the large number four she’d already doodled. She
didn’t think she was up for that yet. That wasn’t to say that a few months in Brighton might not change her mind.

    
Her agile waitress hurried by, balancing
six plates up one bare arm and throwing a scowl at the inside-out table tent
that was now serving as a wayward roadmap to emotional solvency. Clara twitched
her lips into a toothless smile and picked up her sandwich, which by now had
grown cold. The heavy batter around it was falling limp and soon might slide
off completely. She set it down and took another drink of iced tea.

    
If Brighton
was a so-so move socially, it would certainly be a good one financially, which
was why it was topping the list. She held the deed on a bitsy lake-side
bungalow that was erected shortly after World War II. Her grandmother had
willed it to her on the grounds that she was the only one of the grandchildren
to take an interest in anything that Grammy ever had to say. She’d made that
point clear in her will, much to the chagrin of Clara’s cousins.

    
The truth was she’d enjoyed spending time
with her grandmother, particularly after her mother started taking side trips
into other marriages. They’d play pinochle with a dummy pile on the front
porch, listening to the boats and birds on the lake and drinking hot tea with
milk and sugar. Grammy was her anchor and her sail, grounding her in the things
that were important while insisting she chart her own course. God she missed
her.

    
A few months at the bungalow would be good
therapy, she decided. She had a feeling her father would want her to come to
work for him, particularly since he offered both she and David positions a few
months earlier when they came for the dreaded
hi-mom-and-dad-this-is-my-boyfriend-you-just-found-out-about-and-we’re-getting-married
visit. Clara was nervous about the age difference but her parents hadn’t said a
word about it. They were more concerned about her lack of a paycheck than
anything.

    
Clara frowned. They were right. She hated
when they were right. Life experience and all that. But she was 32 for Christ’s
sake, not some wide-eyed kid fresh out of Penn State.

    
Clara told David they’d stay at the
bungalow, and asked her father to take the winter boards off the windows and
get his cleaning lady to give it a run through. He’d happily obliged, but when
David pulled his rented caddy into the dirt driveway at the bungalow he
insisted that they stay at the hotel in town instead. Clara tried to explain to
him that the bungalow would be more comfortable but he wouldn’t hear of it.

    
She should have taken it as a sign.

    
She picked up her bill – a ticket the
waitress called it – and walked over to the check-out counter, which was
buffeted by a convenience store’s worth of paraphernalia. She pulled a couple
of bottles of water off a refrigerated shelf and an atlas out of the magazine
rack. It was almost a straight shot back to Brighton,
a little bit north and a whole lot east, but she’d never driven the route
before.

    
She paid the bill with her debit card and
got cash back so she wouldn’t feel broke. After she plotted her route in the
crispy new atlas, she settled in, turned up the radio and set out to put as
many miles between her and Tulsa
as she could before nightfall.

    
Clara snapped out of an eerily long road
trance somewhere east of Indianapolis,
so she pulled off the highway at a well-lit interchange and checked into a
medium-sized hotel meant for business travelers. She chose it because of its
proximity to a Wal-Mart, where she could pick up something clean to sleep in
and a change of clothes. By the time she got back to the hotel it was nearly
nine o’clock
and she was exhausted.
She pulled a large sleep shirt out of her Wal-Mart bag and slipped it on.

    
She flopped down on the edge of the bed and
stared at the phone. She owed Jon a call after the scene he overheard back at
the house. He was probably worried and she could at least put his mind at
ease.
 
She owed him that much for
alerting her to her slime-ball fiancé.