worked steadily and well, she had followed instructions scrupulously, and she knew she hadn’t earned half than that. Supposedly the salary was justified by her highfalutin title, Researcher/Word Processor, but the only research she did was with a dictionary, correcting Dolan’s spelling errors.
“Mine not to reason why,” she murmured. But she couldn’t suppress her feeling that something was very wrong about this job. No honest business could afford to pay its employees so well to work in such a costly environment and produce so little.
“Just getting started, Darlink,” Madam had said cheerfully. “Books aren’t made in a day. All of ours will be annuals, and the business firms we serve will be buying replacements every year or two.” Adelle wanted to ask how many firms were likely to buy the books in the first place, but of course that wasn’t her problem. Perhaps it wasn’t Madam’s problem, either.
Paychecks were delivered promptly just before noon on Friday—a truly generous gesture since they weren’t due until the end of the day. “In case you want to shop during lunch hour,” Madam said. The Z-R Publications logo on the checks was both stylish and dignified, the checks were prepared on a check writer and looked thoroughly professional—corporate, in fact—and despite the interminable, scrawling, illegible signature, neither of Adelle’s two previous checks had bounced. The solvency of Z-R Publications could not be challenged by anything she had observed.
Even so, she couldn’t shrug off that feeling of uneasiness.
“If they’re smuggling heroin or running a numbers racket, the police can hardly blame me for something I know nothing about,” she told herself philosophically. The numbers racket seemed the more obvious guess—she certainly had typed enough of them in the past three weeks—and unemployment was the worst thing that could happen to her if Z-R Publications collapsed, whether due to a police raid or bankruptcy. With each passing week, as her nest egg became larger, that possibility seemed less menacing.
She was a recent graduate of Darwood College, a small, non-sectarian school located in Darwood, Illinois, where she was born and grew up. She had lost her parents, one after the other, when she was still in high school, and then, in her third year of college, her guardian died, leaving her entirely alone in the world. In both high school and college she made the mistake of taking courses that interested her rather than those that were practical, but the solid common sense of her guardian kept the error from being a fatal one. He insisted that she attend a business school during her summer vacations. Typing came easy for her—she’d had ten years of piano lessons—and she thought computers were fun.
She finished college on a scholarship and the last of her father’s insurance money, and she chose Ann Arbor, Michigan as a place to look for work because a friend at the University of Michigan sent her an exaggerated description of employment opportunities there. Her first reaction to the city was one of shock. The cost of living there was wildly exorbitant compared with Darwood. After she paid a deposit and a month’s rental on a cramped apartment in a garish tower called Chateau Arb, whose name enabled its promoters to add twenty dollars monthly to its already inflated rates, and bought an overly used, used car from a kindly-looking salesman who reminded her of a favorite college professor, she barely had enough money left to keep going until her first paycheck. Fortunately the car ran and continued to run. She was completely dependent on it—first to find a job, and then to drive to work.
She had been too intelligent to waste time looking for a position that would make use of her small college bachelor’s degree in English Literature. The day after her arrival she answered an ad for a Researcher/Word Processor, and Z-R Publications hired her. She began work the following Monday, and now she was about to cash a third fantastic paycheck.
She gave the check another disbelieving glance, and then she returned to her computer and the columns of figures with the nice wide margins.
When the grandfather clock in the hallway outside her door struck noon, Adelle finished the page she was typing, saved it, and made a backup copy. Then she picked up her purse and coat—although the day was sunny, the weather was unexpectedly cool for mid-summer—and stepped into the hallway.
As she started for the stairs, she glanced back over her shoulder. Goon 1, ever faithful, was watching from the remote end of the hall. She smiled and waved to him; as usual, he made no response. She shrugged and began her descent of a lovely, curved, hanging staircase. She always found it delightful because it gave her a sense of flying. Craig Dolan, with a writer’s gift for polluting the poetic with the mundane, said the sensation was one of sliding down a fire pole in slow motion. At the bottom she turned into the broad main corridor that led to the massive front door.
It was a pleasant day for the half-mile walk to the Arbor Vista Shopping Mall, so she left her car in the mansion’s parking lot and moved briskly along the left edge of the neat, crushed-rock drive that led out to the highway. A thick grove of trees screened the building from passing motorists.
A car approached from the rear, but Adelle didn’t bother to look back. She knew the sound of its motor only too well. As it zoomed past, it swerved close enough to her to whip her coat in the breeze it stirred up. Adelle made no response, but inwardly she was seething.
The driver was Kevin Mondor, and that was his juvenile notion of a joke. His squat little deep blue foreign convertible, which looked much the same coming and going because it was rounded on either end, screeched to a stop at the highway and then made its turn in a swirl of dust and roared out of sight. Fortunately Craig Dolan had already left. Dolan’s maliciousness was more imaginative. If he saw her walking ahead of him, he would slow down until he could catch her at the muddy spot between the end of the crushed rock and the highway and spatter her when he passed.
When she reached the highway, she saw a goon at work beside the road, poking with a shovel at something in a wheelbarrow. She identified him from his pot belly and his hat—it was Goon 4—and he seemed seemed to be mixing cement. Madam had mentioned putting up a sign by the highway, and the pole-like object lying on the ground beside him probably was the support to attach the sign to. Z-R Publications, which thus far had lurked invisibly behind the trees, was about to lose its anonymity.
She continued to walk briskly, and—since there was little traffic to distract her—she thought about her coming weekend. Because she had never been in Michigan before, she planned something touristy each week to familiarize herself with her new home. The previous Saturday, she had visited the Dossin Great Lakes Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Detroit Historical Museum. This Saturday, it would be Henry Ford’s Greenfield Village. On Sunday afternoon, she would attend a concert with a young man who also lived at Chateau Arb—her first date in Ann Arbor. It would be an eventful weekend, and she was looking forward to both days.
In the shopping mall parking lot, Mondor’s convertible stood beside Dolan’s wreck of a car. The latter’s junkyard appearance was as distinctive as that of Mondor’s exotic import. Dolan would be taking his repast at a place called Barney’s Pub, swilling beer with a sandwich. Mondor, a food faddist who believed all meat was poisonous, ate at The Greenry, where the salad bar was reputed to be the most lavish in Washtenaw County. Adelle had never seen the inside of either establishment. She went to her bank’s branch office and split her paycheck into three parts—savings, checking, and a small amount of cash for pocket money. Then she treated herself to a light lunch, without soup, at a tidy little restaurant that called itself The Soup Kettle.
When she finished, Mondor’s silly little foreign car was gone, but not Dolan’s rusted junker—he would stay with the beer until the last minute of his lunch hour if not beyond it. His lateness is returning from lunch was the subject of some of the jokes Mondor told Madam about him. Madam gleefully relayed them to both Dolan and Adelle, but—as far as Adelle knew—her cackle was Dolan’s only reprimand. Dolan’s excuse for every tardiness, which he would
