The Fearsome Particles (29 page)

It caught and grated against the sand inside, but made it all the way in with a shove. So she went back to the edge of the flagstone and brought back a second handful. She blew until she couldn’t any more and then pinched what was left between her thumb and finger and tried to push the last of it in the slot. And this time, when she tried her key, it made it halfway and wouldn’t budge a millimetre more.

Madly, Vicki fell onto her hands and knees and brushed the scattered sand and earth, the visible evidence, off the front steps. Then she ran to the rear entrance and did the same to the lock there, this time making sure to keep the rear door open, so that when the lock had been fully sabotaged, she was able to slip inside the house, and shut the door.

In the basement, she found the circuit box, located the switch that controlled the sliding garage doors, and knuckled it down against its hard spring. Then, just to make sure, she came back upstairs, veered through the kitchen and pantry, entered the garage, and walked across the cool concrete floor to take hold of one of the inside handles. And she wrenched.

The metal door rattled upward.

Pulse racing, she shoved it back down. There was no time left to stop up the lock of the door leading from the garage into the house. Even if she could, it would be one thing to attribute two sand-stuffed exterior door locks to a freak swirling wind, quite another to explain how such a wind made it into the garage. She scanned the doors’ inner workings, and her eyes went to the clean metal runners that the wheels of the doors travelled. It might work, she thought, to jam something in there. In the kitchen, from a box under the sink, she fetched two silver serving forks left over from the dining room setting. She rushed with them and a dining chair to stand on back into the garage, and rammed the forks home between the wheels and the runner of each door. Stepping down off the chair, she nearly tripped in her haste and took a moment, in the cool concrete room, to breathe.

Inside the house, Vicki ran the water in the kitchen sink, took one of the crystal glasses she had set out on a Tunbridge ware tray, and held it under the tap with a trembling hand. She brought the glass with her into the living room and set it inside the brass railing of a rosewood side table she adored, which would have featured the Meissen candlestick figures, had they survived Hella’s misguided packing. Then she sat in the mahogany-framed Edwardian armchair with string inlay, which kept her hidden but provided a view through the front windows to the driveway and Lightenham Avenue beyond. And she waited.

It didn’t take long. Within a few minutes, Avis Nye’s bronze Jaguar emerged from the mottled shade of the street and turned into the sunshine of the drive. Behind her came a black Mercedes sedan bearing Mildred and Alan Webb. When the car first came
to a stop, the two of them seemed frozen in their seats, staring at the house through the windshield of the car, watching it as if they thought it might do something, as Avis, in the middle of a call, hopped from her vehicle and made her little black purse swallow her keys.

Whether by decision or accident of routine, the doors of the Mercedes opened together and the Webbs issued from the car in synchrony, though Vicki’s vantage point gave her a better view of Alan. He was tall and patrician, as she’d expected, and tailored in fine charcoal wools, and the features of his face looked to Vicki to bear the wonderment of a man who’d just been struck, and was confused as to why. He walked tentatively past the Mercedes’ fender, looking up at the house all the while, and converged with his wife at the hood ornament in the middle, as Avis put away her phone.

“The landscaping,” Vicki could hear Avis trill through the window, “was done, from concept to execution, by Tallis and Mauvrey. I mean you can just tell, can’t you? The plateaus are so distinctive. And it should all be grown in by July.”

As they proceeded toward the house, Avis talked about the pale gold bricks, imported from Portugal, about the reputation of the builders, and the desirability of their signature roofing slate. Neither of the Webbs seemed to hear the specifics of what Avis was saying, in that they gave no nods or glances of understanding, as if a pane of glass far thicker than the one through which Vicki peered separated them from the living world. They held on to each other as they walked toward the house, almost as if it terrified them. But Vicki could see that Mildred, in a dark blue sheath dress that exposed her pale arms to the sun, made an
effort to smile as Avis spoke. As a smile, as an expression of pleasure or warmth, it failed. It was no more than a stretching of lips. But Vicki felt a kinship with Mildred Webb in that moment that she hadn’t expected, and couldn’t have explained.

Avis had made it to the front steps, and Vicki took a calming sip of water from her glass. She heard the muffled jangling of the house keys outside the door. “When you step inside,” Avis was saying, “I want you to notice the breadth and sweep of the staircase; it’s quite unusual.” Vicki could no longer see Avis or her clients from where she sat, but she could hear the scratching of Avis’s key as she attempted to insert it into the lock. “The tiling too,” Avis continued, “in the foyer, is something the builders are particularly …” The scratching in the lock grew more insistent, and then came a sudden silence when Avis wrenched the key out.

“I’m sure this is the right key,” she said, sounding confused. In it went again, and to the grinding and scraping sound was added an intense joggling of the latch. “I don’t understand.” Joggling. Scratching. “It worked just yesterday!”

“Is there another door?” This was Mildred Webb’s voice, sounding flat and lifeless after Avis’s fluty variance.

“Oh yes, oh yes, there’s the rear entrance,” said Avis. But she seemed intent on making the front one work and attempted to wedge the key in again.

“Perhaps we should try the back door,” said Mildred.

Avis, on the steps, sighed. “Yes, of course. That makes much more sense. I’m sorry about this. But luckily there’s a lovely stone path just …” Her voice faded out as she led the Webbs around the side of the house. Vicki, careful to stay hidden, rose
out of her chair and walked through the living room to the hushed foyer, past the sweeping stairs on the left, the hall to the pantry on the right. She walked by the door to Robert’s library, where only one of the Chinese folding chairs could be used (the other having indeed been ruined, as Hella had indicated, by a mysterious split in the seat), and entered the family room. Here she stationed herself in a niche behind a towering dieffenbachia that she’d set next to the window, which allowed a discreet view of the back porch.

“… of this entire area, which is so exciting,” said Avis, as she rounded the corner of the house and passed by a large window that looked out onto the rolling steppe that stretched to the edge of the property. The three figures made their way to the porch, with Alan Webb a doleful presence in the rear, and Vicki watched them, through a smaller window, climb the steps to the rear entrance.

“Isn’t that a delightful ancon above the door,” said Avis, motioning in an abstract way to the carved s-scroll that seemed to spill from the top of the moulded casing like a tiny waterfall. “You don’t often find a detail like that at the rear entrance, but these builders …” Avis was not looking at the ancon as she spoke, her efforts and attention appeared to be entirely focused on the keyhole of the door, the key in her hand and the successful merging of the two, and her patter died away as she tried once and then again to push the key into the lock.

“Damn,” she said. “Damn!” She gave a tiny, furious stomp of her foot, and then turned and looked at the woeful Webbs, helpless. Vicki couldn’t help feeling guilty for the trouble she was causing her.

“I just don’t understand,” said Avis, her face blank with disbelief. “This
is
the key.”

Alan Webb stepped forward with an outstretched hand. “Maybe if I gave it a try.” He accepted the key without enthusiasm and attempted, as Avis backed away, to do what she could not. And then he lowered himself onto one knee and examined the keyhole.

“There appears to be something here.”

“Something …”

“Sand or soil it looks like,” said the grave Mr. Webb. He tried to push the key in again with a barely audible grunt. “It’s no good,” he said finally, and rose from his knee. “I expect these locks will have to be replaced.”

Avis looked from the lock to her clients to the lock again and gave a tiny cough of astonishment. “I don’t know what to say,” she said, sounding fragile and possibly on the verge of tears. “I mean, there must be an easy way to fix this. I’m sure there’s someone I can call –”

“We won’t be able to wait, I’m afraid,” said Mildred, giving Avis another of her pleasureless smiles.

“I understand. But is there …” The agent couldn’t seem to find the spirit to continue and simply watched as the Webbs began to move away from the porch.

“At least look in the windows,” she said suddenly. “I mean, it’s not the same, but you’ll get some sense.”

Mildred Webb hesitated on the steps that were taking her away from the house and then moved toward the nearest window, where Vicki stood only partly obscured by the dieffenbachia’s broad leaves. She leaned tentatively toward the glass and
shielded her eyes with a lined hand, and Vicki, pressed tight against the wall but watching, thought she saw in the woman’s face a flash of something she recognized. Mildred Webb, it was obvious to Vicki, felt forsaken by the world. That portion of contentment that should have been part of her life, that allotment of joy that was rightly hers, was missing. And nothing warming had taken its place. Not even the sense, or the faith, that the emptiness and disillusionment that overpowered her could be accepted or understood. When Mildred looked through the glass into the Lightenham house, it seemed to Vicki that the woman was searching for what she didn’t have, without any hope of finding it.

And when Vicki saw the loss and despair in Mildred Webb’s face, and recognized the look from, of all things, the face of her own son … she felt a pain under her ribs that made her gasp and bend into the leaves of the dieffenbachia. She was still there, struggling to breathe, when the Webbs drove away, and Avis marched back to the door to give it a kick.

A
uthority, Gerald had once been informed, went to those with a knack for dispassion. The authoritative, he was told, conveyed indifference. Did they do so because of talent? Money? Title? Was disinterest a rare and innate gift? And how was it distinct from apathy? He didn’t know, and he suspected there were nuances to not caring that would always be beyond him, that would keep him, as a leader, from ever being great. But if there was even a chance that he was going to be a
CEO
, Gerald thought, it was time he started acting like one. And so, though it took an extraordinary act of will, he managed to hold on as the meeting time approached, not arriving five minutes early as he typically did but waiting until an almost blasé five minutes past, before he rose out of his chair and headed down the hall to the boardroom.

He took the long way past the photocopy station, where Monik was wrestling with a toner cartridge, and beat back the
impulse to stop and help her, because he was already engaged in an important activity and Monik was perfectly capable.

He passed the small lunch room where someone had left the coffee maker unattended and found the strength to do nothing about the scorched arabica stink.

He continued through the sales area where three of the five salespeople were sitting at their desks not taking calls and not drumming up business. And instead of expressing his irritation by blurting out something pointedly ironic (“Everyone on target for this month? Terrific!”), he made a mental note to have a sit-down with Leslie Morton, the chief sales rep, in the very near future.

But his stamina for high-level disinterest was nowhere near
CEO
grade, and before he made it out of the sales area he found himself turning and asking, in a voice more plaintive than he would have wished, “Did anyone here leave the coffee on?” And so, after a general mute shaking of heads, Gerald was able to savour the sour taste of his inability to maintain even a pretence of chief executive nonchalance all the way to the boardroom entrance.

He entered the room angry. He tossed the leather portfolio he was carrying on the end of the table and when it landed with a slap loud enough to make everyone in the room jump, he liked it. A quick scan around the table told him everyone he expected to be there was, and they all looked anxious, and that suited him. He sat with a whump.

“All right, everybody, let’s get started.” He glanced at Sandy on his left. “Sandy, why don’t you go first.”

“Um …” Sandy leaned forward, over the table, and appeared to be trying for more intense eye contact. “Do you think I could go last? What I’m doing needs a bit of set-up and I don’t want to delay things too –”

“Fine. I don’t care. Trick, you go first.”

Trick, who was sitting across from Sandy and maintaining extraordinary focus on the pad in front of him, looked up, wide-eyed. “I was thinking I’d go last.” He glanced at the others, and back at Gerald. “You know, as sales and marketing director.”

“Well, as sales and marketing director,” said Gerald, “why don’t you go first and set the standard.”

“Sure, but –”

“That’s what I’d like,” said Gerald. “We’ll go around the table, starting with you. Then Phil –” He noticed Phil, who was abnormally still, had a tensor bandage around his left wrist. “What happened to you?”

Phil raised his wrist. “Squash with my kid. Hit it with a forehand.”

“Ouch,” said Doug, wincing. “Hurt?”

“Like a mother.”

“Ouch,” Doug said again.

“Okay,” said Gerald. “So the order’s Trick, Phil with the sore wrist, then Doug, then we’ll break so Sandy can set up, and then she’ll go. Sound good?” He leaned back, set his eyes on Trick, and waited.

Trick had a pen in his hand and he began to wobble it between his thumb and his index finger. He looked at Gerald and wobbled his pen and swallowed. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s
good.” He firmed up the grip on his pen and rapped the pad in front of him. “I didn’t make up any slides, you know, because I couldn’t be sure of getting the outlet, so” – he rapped the pad again – “I just jotted down some thoughts here.” He cleared his throat and edged his chair away from the table.