Hunter's Moon (28 page)

“Just out of high school,” she said. If she was surprised by the question, she didn’t show it. “We had a lot going on—thought it might be time to get in good with the big guy. And I guess it stuck.”

That pulled a chuckle from CJ. He shook his head. Here he was, a new Christian with more baggage than he knew what to do with, and he’d tried to kiss an old high school sweetheart who was married to his cousin, and who also happened to be a Christian. It made him want to revisit the grace thing again— pledge his allegiance, such as it was, anew in that camp. Because each and every day proved that he was no match for the pitfalls that awaited him.

“How about you?” she asked, which prompted another laugh from CJ.

“About a month. Can’t you tell I’m sort of new at this?”

Julie nodded, gave him a warm smile.

“I was stupid for leaving,” CJ said.

“Yes, you were.” Then she turned and walked back up the steps.

Chapter 21

Every weekday morning, Maryann went to the Starbucks’ drive-through and ordered a tall chai latte and a scone. It was a routine so ingrained that had she forgotten to turn off of Main Street and into the Starbucks’ parking lot, the car might have guided itself there. Equally routine was that Maryann was not a morning person, which meant there were times when she arrived at work with her recently purchased breakfast and could not remember having stopped to buy it.

A consequence of these two morning constants was that she never remembered the pothole until her right front tire dropped into it. This morning, like every weekday morning for the past six months, Maryann cursed as she finished the roll up to the speaker and jammed her finger on the button to lower her window.

She barked her order and then pulled forward, glaring at the teenager who took her money.

“When are you going to fix that pothole?” she snapped.

The Starbucks employee with the nose ring and hair an unnatural shade of red gave her a sympathetic smile that was long practiced with this particular customer. “I’m sorry, ma’am. I believe they’re sending someone out this week to fix it.”

Maryann glowered as the young lady handed over the tea and pastry. “You said that yesterday,” she said, although the charge was without conviction. Maryann found it difficult to maintain even a well-warranted umbrage before nine in the morning.

The girl behind the window only smiled at her, and Maryann drove off in a tired huff, convinced that the coffee shop employees kept the pothole there just to irritate her.

Maryann drove nine-point-three miles to work every morning, and she resented each tire revolution that ferried her to her job. Wegman’s grocery store where she worked was on Adelia’s south side, the money tenant in a strip mall that had steadily lost most other occupants over the last few years. The only other businesses still operating were a Mexican restaurant that was always advertising free tacos, although Maryann had never seen them make good on that promise, and a fabric store in which she had never observed a single customer.

Adelia’s south side was mostly industrial with a few residential pockets featuring gravel roads, chained dogs, and cars on blocks. Maryann liked to think, as she exited her car every morning, that it was her surroundings that sucked what little energy she had right out of her the moment she felt the parking lot beneath her feet.

The door swished open as she approached and the welcoming smell of freshly baked bread, a signature of the grocery chain, greeted her—even roused her for the few precious seconds that her walk took her through the bakery. The seafood department by which she also passed produced the opposite effect, and by the time she pushed through the employee-only door to get to her office, she’d returned to her morning funk. And today’s funk was supplemented by what CJ had said to her at dinner last night. She’d been livid then; now she was more worried than anything. She’d had a good thing going here for a long while, but maybe she’d become too brazen about it. Maybe it was time to scale back.

“Hey, boss,” the new kid, Mario, said as she passed. He was directing a pallet of cereal boxes toward the front of the store, and he was new enough not to have learned that no one spoke to Maryann before she finished her coffee. He’d learn once she lit into him, which would likely happen soon—either when she was grumpier than was the case today, or when she had more energy with which to focus whatever level of ire she possessed. As it was, Mario’s employment had begun, and had remained, in a no-man’s land where neither her anger nor physical resources presupposed the arrival of her inner enfant terrible.

Maryann knew the rest of her employees had a pool going, and that whoever owned the day during which she finally lost it would stand to win a great deal of money. She also knew that it was this wicked entrepreneurialism that kept any of them from warning poor Mario about the dangerous game he was playing.

This thought cheered her as she approached her office— almost enough that she might have rewarded Mario with a smile had he not already directed his pallet of Captain Crunch through the double doors.

Her office was another contributor to her bad humor—the principal reason being that it was located as near to the loading dock as was possible without her having to sit on a forklift. Her store was one of the oldest in the Wegman family, built long before uniform branch design became the norm. Consequently, hers was one of the only stores in which the general manager’s office was not up front near the customer service center, with its bright lighting, constant temperature, and the hum of shoppers, scanners, and price checks. Instead she was relegated to a small, cold hole in the bowels of the store, where the music of heavy machinery and the random spasms of the climate control system serenaded her.

She’d certainly tried to find accommodation elsewhere in the store, but despite her best efforts her office was in the only workable place, and all of her requests over the last five years for the funds to build out another room had fallen on deaf ears.

It was one of the reasons she harbored little guilt about the backdoor money. If her regional manager could force her to work in these conditions, then he could stand to see some of the store’s profit redirected to what she referred to as her “equity account.”

Approaching her office, she ran through her mental delivery ledger to recall who was delivering today—whose overpriced stock she would sign off on so that she could make her mortgage payment. It never occurred to her that just a few steps ago she’d been thinking about slowing down. She thought the money crops today would be ice cream and seafood.

She noticed the light in her office was on, which angered her because it meant someone had been in here. Before she made it three more steps, she had a list of who that might have been and what they would have wanted, as well as what their punishment would be for violating the sanctity of her modest personal space. In fact, she was so well into her plans for retribution that it took a few seconds before she noticed the three people waiting for her in the office.

What unsettled her more than anything weren’t the two men in dark suits who leaned against her desk, but the severe-looking woman in the business suit who sat in her chair, riffling through a stack of papers.

As she stepped through the door, the two men pushed away from her desk—a large, solid one she’d purchased for herself to help give the small room with the visible ceiling pipes a more professional feel—and the woman going through Maryann’s files looked up.

“Maryann Knorrel?” the woman asked.

Maryann nodded, because that was all she found herself able to do as the reason for this unannounced visit became clear.

“Ms. Knorrel,” the woman said, “are you familiar with the term
embezzlement
?”

As the two federal agents closed in on her, Maryann began to cry—a loud bawling that could be heard out on the selling floor had there been any customers out there to hear. As it was, the only ones who heard were her employees, who had witnessed the trio from corporate show up fifteen minutes before Maryann, and who were only now consulting the paper to see who had won the pool.

Daniel had a headache the likes of which he seldom experienced. But an adrenaline rush manufactured by several cups of very strong coffee and the necessity of facing down a challenge made the pain manageable. Even so, he had a hard time remembering when a campaign he’d run had experienced as many bumps—or potential bumps—as this one.

It wasn’t enough that the candidate’s brother had done his best to sink the campaign on national television, for now Graham’s sister had become a liability. Daniel had done his best to keep this latest incident from blowing up, but at the start he knew he was fighting a losing battle. When a senate candidate’s sister was arrested for embezzlement, there was a good chance a hungry reporter would soon be picking up the story, and then running with it.

“Damage control is the key,” Daniel said, but neither Graham nor his father was inclined to listen. They’d been arguing for the better part of an hour and accomplishing nothing. Placing blame wasn’t productive now that the deed was done. All that mattered was to determine if the situation could be leveraged for the good of the campaign, or failing that, how best to deflect the damage the incident stood poised to do.

At this point Daniel had had enough. He slammed his hand down on the desk, which he regretted when stabbing pain shot from his palm to his elbow. Nevertheless, silence settled over the room and he said, “As I was saying, damage control is the key.”

“Damage control,” George snorted. “And how do you propose we do that?”

“The same way I’ve always done it,” Daniel said. “Money.”

George snorted again, and even Graham looked doubtful. “It doesn’t matter how much money we have, Daniel. The story’s out there and it’s not going away.”

“I’m well aware of that,” Daniel said, more archly than he’d intended. Truth be told, the provincial nature of the town was weighing more heavily on him with each passing day, and he found himself becoming short with people at inopportune times. He’d tried to talk Graham into moving the family to Albany for the duration, to distance himself from a town that had become, rather than a boon to his candidacy, a liability, but Graham was reluctant to do that.

“You’re right,” he said. “The story’s out there. And there’s not a thing in the world that we can do to reel it back in. But we
can
make sure the coverage of the story is somewhat balanced, can’t we?”

It took a few ticks for Graham to track with him but he eventually did, as did George, who was shrewder than his son.

“You’re talking about paying off reporters,” George said.

Daniel shook his head. There were some rules even he wouldn’t break. “Only an idiot offers money to a reporter,” he said. “It’s a good way to wind up the topic of an investigative report. I’m talking about displays of appreciation for the fine work of a few select columnists at a few of the larger newspapers.”

“Columnists,” Graham said.

“People whose job it is to write
opinion
pieces. No hard news, no conflict of interest.”

The two Baxter men considered that while Daniel pondered his nails, wondering if he could wait to get a manicure or if he should look for someone local to do it.

“Think about it,” he said when the silence lingered. “It’s not as if you’ve done anything. You can’t be held responsible for all the black sheep who just happen to carry your blood. All you have to be concerned with is your immediate family. You keep them straight, and we can iron out everything else.”

His was the voice of confidence and it had its effect on his audience. When he had their buy-in, he turned his attention to George.

“And unfortunately, Mr. Baxter,” he said, delivering the bad news straight, “if you want to help mitigate what your daughter’s arrest could do to Graham’s campaign, you’ll have to take it on yourself.”

“What do you mean by that?” Graham asked.

“Your father will have to blame himself for the way your sister turned out. ‘I don’t know what happened to my daughter. She was always the black sheep of the family. But at least Graham turned out right.’ That sort of thing.”

He watched George’s eyes narrow, yet he knew the old man would take the bullet. Daniel had started to learn some of the Baxter family history—their fixation on holding political office. The father would do what he could to protect his son’s chances. Of that, Daniel was confident.