Shameless (The Contemporary Collection) (11 page)

“But I don't have the money!” he protested, throwing his arms wide.

“And I do, is that it?”

“And besides that, you did it, you know you did.”

“For good reason.”

Crafty self-righteousness surfaced in his face. “Hey, I'm the one who should be mad here, the one who got shot at. And all I was doing was riding down the road.”

“You were harassing me. You threatened me.”

“You made me so mad that I may have gone a little overboard. Any man would. You'll have to overlook it.”

She gave him a straight look. “I think, instead, that I'll go out to the pistol range and work on improving my aim.”

“I'd be worried,” he said with a lifted brow, “except I know you wouldn't hurt a flea, much less me.”

Her voice carrying quiet warning, she said, “I wouldn't advise you to bet on it.” And it was at least two seconds before she recognized where she had suddenly acquired that particular tone of voice. Reid. Reid's soft and devastatingly effective warnings.

Keith's eyes widened, then he reared his head back. “You must have had one hell of a weekend to put you in such a foul mood, honey. What happened? Didn't Sayers measure up?”

She had known Keith was a shallow, small-minded, egoistical man; she had just not realized quite how lacking he was until — until she had spent time with Reid Sayers. That bit of knowledge did nothing to soothe her temper.

Her voice soft with menace, she said, “Get out.”

“Don't be that way, honey. I was thinking while I was waiting on you about your little episode with old Reid. I mean, I know you were just curious since you never had another man, nobody except me. I can understand, really I can.”

“Is that the reason you went looking for something different? Curiosity?”

“Well, hell, a man needs variety. So maybe a woman does, too, I don't know.”

“I suppose it makes no difference who gets hurt in the process, either? Such as people like Evie Prentice?”

A grim light came into his face. “We'll leave her out of it, if you don't mind.”

“I don't mind at all. Go on back to her. It's where you belong.”

“You don't mean that; it's just jealousy talking. You want us to get back together, I know you do. If you didn't, you'd have changed your will.”

His-and-her wills, naming each other as beneficiaries, had seemed logical and practical in the early days of their marriage, a matter of estate planning along with the health and life insurance. She hadn't thought of them in ages. With a sardonic look in her eyes, she said, “That's really straining it, Keith. But thanks for the reminder, I'll see about it tomorrow.”

“Come on, Cammie,” he said with a scowl. “What do you want me to do? Get down on my knees and beg?”

“No, thanks, though it might be a nice change.”

“I'm trying to be big enough to overlook your little fling with Sayers. Doesn't that prove how much I want you back?”

The soft laugh that shook her surprised even her with its cynical edge. “Maybe.

But it also shows that you still don't have the faintest idea how I feel. I want you out of this house. Now. Or I call the sheriff.”

“You wouldn't.” As she swung from him and toward the wall phone, he said hastily, “All right, all right. Wait a minute.” He stood chewing his lips while her hand hovered over the receiver. Finally, he shrugged. “All right. Give me the money for the bill and you get the key. We'll call it even.”

It might just possibly be worth it, she thought. But she wasn't a big enough fool to turn the money over to him. He would be back in a week with the money gone and the bill still due.

“Give me the key and the estimate,” she said, “and I'll take care of it.”

“God,” he said, “you used to be such a sweet, trusting little—”

“That was before I married you.”

A sneer twisted his face. “I hear Sayers is a lady killer of a different kind. You had better watch your step around him.”

She looked at him, suddenly reminded. Her movements slow, she took the key he held out and then reached to pick up the estimate. “Tell me, did you know that there was a company wanting to buy out the mill?”

A wary look stiffened his face. “How did you find out?”

“Never mind. You knew, yet you never said a word to anybody — if you had, it would have been all over town. I wonder why you kept so quiet.”

“It was mill business. Besides, nothing was settled; it was just a preliminary offer. I'd have looked a fool if I had talked it up, then it turned out to be nothing.”

That had just enough of a self-serving ring to be true, though she still thought there was something he wasn't telling her. “I suppose,” she said dryly, “that you think it's a good idea.”

“Why not? Gordon and I wouldn't get as much from it as Sayers, but it would still be a nice piece of change.”

A thought struck her. “But if there's a reconciliation between us, if we're living together at the time of the sale, I would be entitled to half of what you get. I would have thought you would hate that.”

He took a hasty step toward her, stopping only as she retreated. Holding out his hand, he said, “I wouldn't mind, honest to God. It would maybe make things better between us, since you wouldn't be the one with the most money anymore.”

“Yours would be gone in a year,” she said with a shake of her head. “We'd be right back where we started.”

“Oh, Cammie,” he said, his voice low and his eyes wide, “would that be so bad a place to be?”

THE SMELL OF THE PAPER MILL, THAT RAUNCHY
odor like a combination of boiled cabbage and sewage gas, had been an embarrassment to Reid when he was growing up. He had felt personally responsible for it, since his family owned the mill. His dad, a practical man, had always said it smelled like money to him. That had certainly been true; most of the currency circulated in the town carried the stench.

Reid, standing in his father's office, exhaled with a soft snort. Everything in the room was marked by the familiar smell: the leather office chair, the papers in the file cabinets, the pictures on the walls of the mill buildings in their different stages over the years, even the drapes at the window where he stood. He still didn't like it, though he would get used to it again, he supposed, given time. The office also harbored a faint hint of tobacco from the cigarettes his father had smoked until five years ago, and the Cuban cigars that had been his grandfather's indulgence. That scent was a reminder; he could live with it with no problem.

Leaning against the window frame, looking out over the complex of buildings, he felt an undeniable stir in his chest. There were bigger paper mills in the South, but few more efficient. Sayers-Hutton Bag and Paper had its own steam-generated power plant, so it was not dependent on local utilities. The wood yard was a model operation, from the wide, well-guarded gates where the wood trucks lined up to discharge their heavy loads of logs and pulpwood lengths, to the great portable crane that fed the wood into the de-barking and chipping machines. The digesters, where potent chemical mixtures were added to the shredded chips, belched their environmentally regulated but still noisome fumes into the atmosphere to a strict timetable. The great paper machines rumbled and roared at a steady pace, gulping the malleable and purified pulp that came out of the digesters and boilers, drying it and rolling it out in continuous sheets of brown Kraft paper. The bag division took some of the rolls and turned them into bags and sacks, but the vast majority of them were shipped out in the truck-and-trailer rigs that waited in line like disjointed gray freight cars.

There had been a time when most of the paper had gone out on freight trains, when the mill had owned its own railhead and rolling stock. That had been in the early days; the paper mill and the railroad had put in their appearance at the same time, one dependent on the other. The old tracks still snaked through the mill yard as a reminder of another era.

The mill had grown, expanded, changed with the times. It still would, Reid knew, even if nothing came of the Swedish deal. Still, he looked on the possible change of ownership, the huge expansion, as another form of progress. The only difference was that he and the Huttons would no longer be directly concerned with it.

It would be a shame, he supposed, if the family mill tradition ended with him. His dad and his granddad, and old Justin Sayers before them, had been proud of what they had accomplished, and of their contributions to the industrial growth of the South and the increase in the standard of living of the people of Greenley. So was he, in his own way. He just wasn't sure he wanted to live his life for brown paper.

Before the paper mill was put in operation, the area around Greenley, like so much of northern Louisiana, had been farming country. Settled in the late 1840s, there had been a few big places like Evergreen, but most had been subsistence farms. Life on them had been close to the earth, fair during the good years, when the rains fell right and disease and insects were kept at bay, but hard during the bad ones.

Cattle and hogs had ranged free in the woods, people had raised milk cows and chickens, fruits and vegetables; had ground their own cornmeal, boiled their own cane syrup, carded cotton and wool, spun it, wove it, and made their own clothes. Cotton was the cash crop, but the only thing it stretched far enough to buy was flour by the barrel, leather shoes, rifles, knives, patent medicines, and an occasional length of fancy piece goods for a Sunday dress.

Few of the area farmers had ever owned slaves. Those who did were seldom able to afford more than a couple of hands to help out in the field, with maybe a female to help the woman of the house with her endless chores of sewing and cooking and preserving food — and to watch after the babies that came every year or two as regular as clockwork.

The War Between the States, as it was known locally well into the 1950s, changed matters very little. Its main result was to take the promise out of the Promised Land for people who had still been first and second-generation immigrants from the slums and rocky farms of England and Ireland, Scotland and Wales. Afterward, farmers and former slaves alike had scrabbled for a living from soil that had never been very rich to begin with, sinking deeper and deeper every year into a spiritual and economic depression that never really lifted. And still hadn't, not entirely.

The paper mill had made things easier. Farmers had quit the land for the steady wages that would buy store-bought clothes, automobiles, washing machines, Christmas toys. People had moved to town, to be closer to the job. And all the acreage that had once been rolling farmland had been taken back by the woods so completely that it was difficult for even the old-timers to point out where the big old places had been.

The land that had always needed special pampering to make a good cotton crop grew trees without effort. The long growing season, with active growth nine months of the year and root growth the other three, produced more board feet of timber per acre in less time than nearly any other place in the world. In the last twenty years, timber had become Louisiana's main natural resource, providing sixty-one percent of its agricultural income. The state actually produced seventeen percent more wood than was harvested every year. It was no wonder the Swedes wanted to locate there.

Behind Reid the office door swung open. Gordon Hutton, a hefty man with heavy jowls and thin, brownish-gray hair in retreat from a narrow forehead, stepped into the room. With the briefcase in his hand, his three-piece suit, and his air of bland pomposity, it appeared he might have been born in a boardroom.

He came forward, hand outstretched, as Reid turned. His voice jocular and a bit bland, he said, “My secretary told me you showed up this morning. I've been expecting you every day for the past month. I'll have them move my things out of here right away.”

Reid's first impulse was to tell the man not to bother. That wouldn't do. He needed to take hold and settle in sometime, and it might as well be now. Besides, it had given him a jolt to see somebody else's belongings on his dad's desk, to realize that somebody else, somebody heavy, had been sitting in his chair. Curious. He had never been the possessive kind, but he was beginning to show the signs. It had been coming on since he got home, he thought. Maybe since he tackled Cammie in the game reserve.

“I'd appreciate that,” he said. He smiled, and kept on smiling as he braced himself against the other man's attempt at a bone-crushing handshake.

“I have a number of problems that need to be cleared up first thing this morning,” Gordon Hutton said. “As soon as I'm free, I'll take you on a tour of the place, show you what we've been doing while you've been gone.”

There was condescension behind the other man's affability. It scraped across Reid's nerves. He said in dry tones, “Don't rush, I expect I can find my own way. I was practically raised here, you know.”

Gordon Hutton's smile faded. “So you were. My old man never let me or Keith near the place until we were in college, didn't want us underfoot while he was working. Shortsighted of him, I always thought.”

“But here you are, enjoying the job, and here I am, dreading it.”

Gordon Hutton pushed out his lips in a judicious pucker. “Since you mention it, I have to say I never thought I'd see you back here. Everybody expected good old Greenley would be too small to hold you after all your globe-trotting.”

Reid looked at the other man, his gaze steady. “Funny how things work out.”

“It is indeed,” Gordon said without expression. “Well. I'll leave you to get on with your homecoming.” He heaved himself around and walked from the room, snapping the door shut behind him.

Cammie had been right, Gordon Hutton did resent his return. Staring after the man, Reid wondered if he would have noticed if she hadn't alerted him. Probably not.

Gordon had never been a particularly likable person. Big even as a boy, he had used his weight to push the smaller kids around, and his position as one of the boss's sons to intimidate most of the rest. It had been his cross to bear that Reid, though younger by several years, could not be daunted by either tactic. That hadn't kept Gordon from trying. It seemed he was still at it.

Reid waited a few minutes to see if anyone was going to appear to clear the office. When no one did, he raked the papers on the desk together, bundled them up with everything else he didn't need, and dropped the lot on the floor. Digging a pen and a legal pad out of a drawer, he laid those ready, then walked to the corner, where a huge, black steel safe, a relic from the twenties, sat. He knelt on the floor in front of it, putting out his hand to touch the ornate red and gold lettering around the door.

The safe had been the most fascinating thing about the mill to him when he was a kid. He had been no more than four when his grandfather had let him open it for the first time. There had been a box of caramel all-day suckers inside. Big surprise, or so his grandfather pretended. They had smelled like cigar smoke and the mill, but tasted fine. After that, it had been Reid's special privilege when he was around to take the business records from the safe in the morning, then put them back in the afternoon.

A smile curved Reid's mouth as the combination sprang into his mind the minute he touched the dial. Feeling the same heavy spin, hearing the tumblers kicking over, it seemed for the first time that he just might belong after all.

The financial and operating statements were there, just where he expected them to be, where the Sayers men had always kept their accounts. The only difference was that they were now computer printout sheets in plastic binders instead of leather account books. Removing the statements with dates going back six months, Reid closed the safe, then sat down and spread the printouts across the desk.

Two hours later he was still leafing back and forth, frowning, taking notes, and running his fingers through his hair. He had known the operation had grown in the last decade and a half, but had not known the extent of it. He was amazed.

The only way to make sense of the figures was by comparing percentages and ratios. Still, he was a little puzzled by some of what he found.

He dug deeper, checking back and forth. He was beginning to think he might one day get a handle on the operation when he heard the quick tread of footsteps coming toward the office. The door swung open with such force it banged against the wall.

Reid was on his feet in less than half a second. Ready. Poised with his back to the nearest wall and the closest weapon to hand, a letter opener, in his clenched fist.

Keith Hutton strode into the room. He grabbed the door panel and slammed it shut again. His voice rough, edged with a sneer, he said, “I've been wanting to talk to you for three days, Sayers! It's about time you showed up.”

Reid eased his stance, rolling his shoulders to remove some of the tension. Tossing the letter opener on the desk top, he moved around the desk to rest one hip on a corner. Bracing his hand on his thigh, he said, “If you'd really wanted to see me, I think you could have found me.”

“You'd have liked that, wouldn't you,” Keith scoffed. “Well, I'm not fool enough to run you down at the Fort. Too many men have accidents out in the game reserve to suit me.”

He was talking about fall hunting accidents and other assorted homicides that showed up in the vast stretch of deserted woods from time to time. The idea didn't warrant comment. Reid said evenly, “I have nothing against you.”

“Well, I've got plenty against you. I know you've been sleeping with my old lady. Hell, everybody in town knows it. But I want it stopped, here and now. You got that?”

For a brief instant Reid wanted nothing so much as to push the other man's teeth down his throat for the tone of voice he used toward Cammie. It would not be hard. Keith Hutton's once handsome face and athletic body were both going soft. His eyes were bloodshot, and his hand, propped on his hip, waggled back and forth as if he couldn't hold it steady. The smell of liquor was strong around him.

He wasn't worth the effort it would take to flatten him, Reid thought. In contempt laced with pity, he said, “I think Cammie is capable of making her own arrangements. And choosing her own friends.”

“Some friend. You got no business being anywhere around her,” Keith stabbed a finger at Reid. “She's still my wife until the divorce is final.”

“The way I heard it, you left her.”

“Anybody can make a mistake.” Keith's eyes shifted.

“With a woman like Cammie, you don't always get a second chance.” Reid's tone was bleak. He had his own regrets where she was concerned, some of them going back years, some as new as this past weekend. He should never have allowed her to make him lose his temper. He wouldn't have, of course, except that he was afraid she might be right about his motives and the mill. None of which mattered now.

Keith narrowed his eyes. “You telling me you're taking over?”