Smart House

ISBN-13: 978-1-62205-001-7

SMART HOUSE

Copyright ©2012 InfinityBox Press

All rights reserved. Except for the use of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews, no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means in any manner without the written permission of the publisher.

All characters, groups, places, and events portrayed in this novel are fictitious.

Cover: Richard Wilhelm

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SMART HOUSE

Kate Wilhelm

Chapter 1

Three things happened that
week in April to make Beth Elringer decide to attend her husband Gary’s birthday party. The first was losing her job, which came about because of a broken press at the company where she worked as editor. Beth and Margaret Long, her employer, sat opposite each other in a booth at Taco Time. Beth pushed a tamale around on her plate while Margaret talked.

“I just can’t take it any longer,” Margaret said. She looked exhausted. “We were up all night, and then the damn press went blooey and we have as much chance of meeting our deadline as we have of finding pearls in oysters.”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“You know how to fix the damn press? A pulley broke. Three weeks, Mike said, to get a new one installed, if we had the money to do it in the first place.”

“What will you do?”

“I wish to God I knew. But, honey, you’d better be thinking of another job. I just don’t know if this is the last straw. I have a feeling it could be.”

Beth liked her job as editor; she had a book of poetry in the works that she especially liked, by an author who might never get it published if the Long Press went out of business.

The second event came two days later when her brother Larry asked for a loan. She gasped when he told her how much he needed. He had been out on strike; he and his wife had gone into debt and they would lose the house and everything else if he couldn’t pay off some bills.

The third thing was finding her cat dead a few nights later. She wept over that. She knew she could get another job, and she had taken out a bank loan to help her brother, but there wasn’t a damn thing she could do for the cat. If she had not been so preoccupied with jobs and loans, she would have noticed that it was sick, poisoned maybe; she would have taken it to a vet instead of finding it stiff and cold on her kitchen floor.

That night she examined the agreement she had signed with the Bellringer Company when Gary had given her a share of stock. There were only nine shareholders, and the company was said to be worth millions of dollars. Even one share was worth a fortune, she knew. And she owned one share. The agreement stated that if ever she wanted to dispose of her single share, she must first offer it to Gary without telling anyone else it was for sale. She read the paper twice, then nodded. Gary’s party, she decided. That was the time to tell him. He would be in a good mood, happy with a weekend party going on around him, pleased that she was attending. He had predicted that she would be back, had infuriated her with his self-assurance about her penitent return. She read through the agreement one more time. If she and Gary could not agree on a price for her share, she could then present it at the next shareholders’ meeting and accept the highest offer that met or exceeded Gary’s offer. That would be the day after his weekend party. If still no satisfactory price could be agreed to, an independent accountant would assess the market value of the share, and she would be paid that amount by the company, the payment to be assessed among the shareholders according to percentages of ownership; they would then divide the share. But she knew it would never come to that. Gary would snatch it up. And if he didn’t, then his brother Bruce would.

Two weeks later she boarded the small commuter plane in San Francisco on her way to Smart House. The invitation had said simply somewhere on the Oregon coast, and the airplane ticket had been for the town of North Bend. “Don’t worry about it,” Gary had said on the phone, “we’ll meet you.” Now Beth stared bitterly out her window at the great expanse of ocean, all gray and frothy near the shore, with deep shadows and gleaming highlights beyond that, and then flat gray to the horizon. She could make out fishing boats, small boats closer in, a large oceangoing cargo ship, all dipping and swaying and passing from sight above and below her tiny window on the world. She could feel her stomach rise and fall in time with them. She clutched the arm of her seat and closed her eyes, but that was even worse. When the plane went down, she wanted to know it. She could not understand why it mattered, but she did not want to plummet into the sea with her eyes closed. The plane was buffeted from side to side, and it rose and fell with an unpredictable motion that did not allow for compensation. Just when she braced for a downward plunge, the plane rose alarmingly, then dropped again.

Damn Gary, she thought over and over. Damn him. Gary had scrawled on the invitation, “You’ll love the plane ride. I can’t wait to show you Smart House!”

Thirty, she thought morosely. Who would have gambled on Gary’s surviving this long? The plane lurched and dropped at the same time. She hung onto the seat and muttered, “Damn him! Goddamn him!” Staying married to Gary Elringer for ten years, she thought, gave her privileges; who had a better right to damn him to hell?

On the ground, waiting for the plane from San Francisco, was Madelaine Elringer, Gary’s mother. Maddie was sixty-two, and after fighting plumpness for most of her life, had finally given up the battle, only to find that when she stabilized again she had a new figure, not altogether unpleasing, she thought secretly. She was busty, with a waistline still defined, and shapely legs, nice wrists and ankles. Not bad at all, she had decided, and had colored her hair strawberry blond—pink champagne, the shop called it. She used makeup with a deft hand and bought very nice clothes, all in keeping with her role in life as mother of a millionaire genius. She sat in her B.M.W. smoking cigarette after cigarette waiting for the arrival of her daughter-in-law. A front had come in, bringing erratic winds that were frigid, not at all Maylike; the small terminal was dreary, and she was too worried to be pleasant to the few others who were awaiting the plane. The weekend was a ghastly mistake, she had known that from the start. Bringing together nine of the shareholders, even Beth, and heaven alone knew what was on her mind these days, and Bruce being a real shit about the whole thing. She dreaded the shareholders’ meeting on Monday more than she had dreaded anything in years, or maybe ever. She lighted another cigarette from the butt of the last one and flicked that one out the window, then felt a start of guilt and looked around hastily to see if anyone had noticed.

At last the plane was down and three passengers appeared on the tarmac; she left the refuge of her car to enter the terminal. To Maddie’s eye, Beth looked exactly the same as she had when she and Gary had first met. Boyish, with short dark hair that was instantly windblown, she was too lanky and long-legged to be really pretty, and made no effort to pretend anything else. She was wearing black jeans and a gray sweat shirt, for heaven’s sake, Maddie realized. She had not approved of her daughter-in-law, but neither had she caused Beth and Gary trouble, so why did the girl seem to go out of her way always to look just a little wrong? Not quite proper…

“Beth, I’m so glad to see you! I’m so glad you changed your mind!” They both stopped advancing simultaneously, suddenly awkward with each other.

“Hello, Maddie. You look great! How are you?”

To the considerable surprise of both women, Maddie burst into tears.

Now Beth closed the gap between them and embraced Maddie; she rubbed her back gently, making soothing nonsense sounds. Maddie fought to regain control, aware of eyes watching her in amazement. People often cried at meeting after a long absence, or at parting with a loved one, she told herself. Let them stare. She took a shuddering breath.

Beth had only her carry-on bag and an oversized canvas purse. They left the small terminal. Beth whistled at the sight of the new automobile and Maddie said almost apologetically that Gary had bought it for her for his birthday. She groped for her keys and sighed when Beth pointed to them in the ignition. “He thinks all children should give their parents presents when it’s their birthday, the children’s birthday, I mean. To say thank you, I suppose. Bruce was furious about it.” She blinked back tears. “Oh dear, I didn’t realize I was this upset with it all.

“Maybe we’d better have a little drink before we go back,” Beth said grimly, “Bruce always was a pain in the ass, even if he is your son. What’s going on, Maddie? Why a three-day get-together? What’s Gary up to?”

Maddie started to drive jerkily, then jerked even harder when she hit the brake. “A bar, a tavern or something,” she said. “We have to talk about it all. Then you can drive. The car hates me.”

Maddie drove them to a tavern that also served seafood. The odor of frying fish, rancid oil, and onions was stifling. Beth ordered coffee and listened to Maddie ramble as she gulped bourbon on the rocks. Everyone else was already there, she said. Bruce, her other son, six years older than Gary, the boy genius. Rich, Harry, Laura… She did not know what Gary was planning; no one did, but Bruce was trying to organize a palace coup, she said ominously. He would approach Beth, she warned. And he might even have the votes.

Beth listened and tried to rearrange the nearly incoherent information. There were too many bits and pieces, with too much left out. The Bellringer Company, Incorporated, had nine shareholders, but it was Gary’s company undisputedly, and he ran it as he saw fit. During the last few years he had been totally preoccupied with creating Smart House, a computerized, automated house that until this weekend no one had seen except those who had worked there.

“I hate it!” Maddie cried. “It knows where you are every minute! It spies on everyone all the time, listens to everything you say, turns the lights on and off, and heats the bath water and the temperature in the greenhouse. It does everything, and I hate it!”

Beth nodded in sympathy. Bruce had called her months ago, had wanted to meet for lunch, and she had turned him down. She wished now that she had gone. A coup? It did not seem bloody likely, she decided, and tuned Maddie in long enough to know she was still going on about the house. The house must be the rabbit hole where all the money was vanishing, she realized. After Smart House had got underway, the company had stopped showing profits. AU the others, except Maddie and now Beth, were also employed by the company, and she had assumed their salaries had been adjusted upward when profits dried up. Now she doubted that such was the case, and it explained Bruce’s fury. Enough votes to override Gary? Beth’s one share gave her a single vote in whatever came up at the meeting on Monday, hardly worth anyone’s while to capture.

She was jolted from her own thoughts suddenly when Maddie put her hand on Beth’s and said, “Please promise you won’t tell him you want a divorce until after the weekend.”

“Who told you I want a divorce?”

Maddie looked about vaguely, as if searching for the informant. “You do, don’t you?”

“Has he been spying on me? Have you? Bruce?”

Maddie drained her glass and set it down hard. “Darling, it’s not a secret that you aren’t living together in any way. And it’s not a secret that Gary’s a little eccentric. I just want you to wait until after his party, that’s all. Don’t spoil his birthday party, please.”

“Eccentric! Maddie, he’s crazy! Your darling boy is a nut!”

Beth drove along a curving road lined with small buildings, shacks, frame houses weathered gray, auto shops, bait stores…. Neither spoke now except for the directions Maddie provided from time to time. The ocean was not visible, but its presence was there; the gusty wind off the sea was fresh and cold, bringing news of the East, news of the deeps, of passing ships and whales, shrimps and crabs. The sun made a brightened area in a thick cloud cover, then the woods closed in on the road, and even that timid bright patch was blocked. She turned off this road at Maddie’s instructions, onto a much narrower blacktop road with no markings, a private drive without shoulders, just woods that came to the edge of the black surface, that met overhead and turned the early evening into night. Still no sea. The road climbed steeply, became more crooked.

She slowed down more when she saw a sign, Stop Ahead. Around a curve there was a mammoth gate that looked like bronze. She came to a stop. No one was in sight; a high chain-link fence vanished among the trees on each side of the gate. A lighted sign asked her to open her window, and as soon as she did, a crisp male voice said, “Please identify yourself and your passenger.”

She looked sharply at Maddie, whose face had become pinched.

“Beth Elringer, Madelaine Elringer,” she said, raising her voice slightly.

“Thank you.” The gate swung open silently; the lighted sign went off.

“See what I mean?” Maddie whispered.

“I see that Gary’s being cute,” Beth snapped. “Is this what’s bugging Bruce? That Gary’s sinking company profits into toys?”

“He’s spent millions and millions,” Maddie said. “I don’t think anyone even knows exactly how much. That’s what’s bothering Bruce, I suppose, that there’s no real accounting. A talking gate! Talking doors! An indoor waterfall!” Her voice rose to a near wail.

Someone knew where the money was going, Beth thought, ignoring her mother-in-law again. Milton Sweetwater was the company attorney; he must know. Or Jake Kluge, a whiz kid in business affairs.

Or, for heaven’s sake, Harry Westerman, the accountant. Someone, maybe all of them, knew. If Bruce didn’t, it had to be because Gary did not want to tell him. The road started down, still narrow and as winding as before, but now the greenery looked planned, not the wild growth of the other side of the fence. Landscaping on a macrocosmic scale, she mused, that was her boy, her husband, Gary. Masses of rhododendron in bloom formed immense blotches of scarlet, rose, gold, fringed with lacy ferns that were so deeply green they looked black in the darkening shadows. She made another turn, and finally there was the ocean, a couple of hundred feet down, on three sides of this point that jutted out from the mainland like the prow of a ship. She had to drive another quarter mile before she got a glimpse of Smart House. She gasped and stopped the car in order to gaze at it.

Although the building was tall, apparently it had only two stories, with a gleaming dome on top and walls of glass and redwood and metal broken by a continuous balcony at the second-story level. The building appeared to be curved all the way around the front, with a straight cliff-like back wall made of stone. The dome did not cover the entire roof area; there were plants up there, a terrace? She drove on. The house was eclipsed by trees and shrubs; she drove past a tennis court, formal gardens that looked imposing, and finally a broad concrete approach to the house. Apparently every room in it had a vista of ocean. Behind the house a cliff rose almost straight up,