Uncharted (6 page)
“He must have been a kind man too.” Margie’s round face melted into a buttery smile. “Y’all must be Christians. I always say that wherever you find kindness, you find Christians.”
“I belong to First Community—the big church you passed right after you left the highway.”
“Well, isn’t that nice! Maybe we’ll run into each other at church. Maybe we’ll run into the Bennetts too.”
Susan pushed a smile to the corners of her mouth. “I doubt it. The Bennetts are Jewish.”
“Oh my.” Margie pressed a hand to her lips, then lowered it to whisper, “Have you told them yet about Jesus?”
Susan blinked, then leaned forward to respond in a confidential tone, “I’m reasonably sure they already know who he is.”
Cocoa Beach
Mark Morris wiped a line of sweat from his forehead, then picked up the phone and pressed the extension for Rick Gordon, the newest member of his sales team. He had tried to cut the guy some slack, but Gordon had been on the payroll for two weeks and hadn’t come within spitting distance of his sales goal.
“Rick”—Mark’s hand tightened around the receiver—“do you
see
the couple at the south end of the lot?”
“Well, um, no. I’ve been looking over the paperwork on that bronze SUV—”
“Paperwork can wait, you idiot. Get out there before those people think no one works here. They’ve been hovering around the new Titan for the last ten minutes.”
Mark slammed the phone down, then crossed his arms and glared out the window. The couple had already tried the car door and found it locked; in a minute they would turn and talk about grabbing something for dinner—
Rick approached on the run, buttoning his jacket as he scurried toward them. About time. Mark would have fired him by now except that—whether Rick Gordon realized it or not—he had what it took to be a successful salesman. With his baby face, he ought to be able to sell life insurance to Count Dracula.
Mark watched until he was certain Rick had engaged the couple’s interest, then he sighed and swiveled toward his desk. A stack of sales reports waited next to a brochure detailing the corporation’s latest campaign and grand prize: if the Mark Morris dealership sold two more new Titans by the end of the month, within eight weeks Mark and a guest would be sunning themselves on a Bermuda beach.
He might as well pack his bags.
Mark crossed his hands behind his head and smiled at the decorations on his office walls. The largest item, a varnished rectangle a full five feet long, was a custom-made art piece proclaiming his guiding philosophy:
Failure Is Not an Option.
To prove his point, more than a dozen engraved plaques hung beneath the rectangle; three were the coveted “Hot Mover” award from corporate headquarters. In the last five years, Mark had expanded north and south; his dealerships dotted U.S. 1 from Titusville to Melbourne, while the flagship site in Cocoa Beach had grown from two acres to ten. No one in Brevard County moved cars like Mark Morris.
He looked up as Jeff Pressler, another salesman, rapped on the open door. “Mark? The couple at my station has a question about their trade-in.”
“What are they offering?”
“A ’99 BMW, the 328i convertible.”
“Good shape?”
“Yeah—I figure we could move it for nineteen or even twenty thousand. Blue book trade-in value is fifteen.”
Mark pulled a roll of breath mints from his pocket, unrolled the foil, and popped a candy into his mouth. “Which car are they looking at?”
“The new Titan LE.”
“The green one? The loaded model?”
“They saw it on the lot. The wife’s crazy about the car, but the husband’s playing hardball.”
Mark chewed on the inside of his cheek for a moment. “Okay—offer them ten for the convertible. If that won’t seal the deal, you can take it up to eleven-five, but that’s it.”
Jeff made an okay sign with his thumb and forefinger. “Thanks, boss.”
Mark swiveled to look out the window again. The green Titan reigned over the lot from an elevated ramp, the primo location for cars he needed to move in a hurry. He’d driven the vehicle down from Chicago last month, then had his mechanic roll back the odometer. After all, transit miles didn’t actually age a car; they only broke it in. Any savvy customer would appreciate Mark’s act, but people could be funny—when they paid top dollar for a new car, they expected it to be as untouched as a virgin. They’d accept fifteen or twenty miles on the odometer because they figured a car had to be driven around the lot, but any more than that and they started making noises about the vehicle not actually being new . . .
As if it mattered.
He looked up as Janice Hudson, the receptionist, brought in a stack of mail and dropped it on his desk. Pretty as a prom queen, Mark would have hired her just to sit behind the desk and smile at customers, but the girl had turned out to be competent too. He congratulated himself every time Janice came into his office, because she was pleasant, she handled the phones better than the last cow he’d hired, and he’d never been tempted to kill her.
He gave her a smile. “Hey, Janice. Everything go okay today?”
“Sure, Mr. Morris.” She paused. “You need anything before I head home? Cup of coffee, something from the snack machine?”
He grinned, impressed with her initiative. “You’d do that for me?”
“Sure.” She returned his smile. “You’re the boss.”
Indeed he was. He considered asking for coffee simply to take her up on her offer, but he’d had three cups since lunch. He could feel adrenaline zipping through his bloodstream. Either he’d had too much caffeine, or the thought of killing Janice had tickled a pleasure center in his brain . . .
“I’ll take a rain check.” He picked up a stack of envelopes. “Thanks for the mail.”
“No problem.”
She walked away, exuding a whiff of floral perfume. For an instant he considered calling her back and asking her out, but Allison, the woman he’d been dating for the last six weeks, probably wouldn’t appreciate that.
Besides, he disliked mixing business with pleasure. Work belonged in one compartment, fun in another. Fantasies belonged to the night; ordinary life to the day.
Compartments kept things nice, neat, organized. Everything remained under control.
He flipped through the envelopes, ignoring letters for the business and records departments. Five envelopes were from the Department of Motor Vehicles, three from corporate headquarters. The last envelope was from the IRS.
Mark’s stomach tightened. The envelope was addressed to Mr. Mark Morris, not Morris Luxury Motor Cars. What did the Internal Revenue Service want with him?
He tapped the letter against the edge of his desk, then tossed the unopened envelope into the trash can. If the IRS wanted to talk to him, they could come see him.
After all, they had his address.
Seattle
While Lorinda Loving smiled in the arms of her lover on the TV screen, Lisa crossed her arms and watched Mr. Blond Beard set two foil-covered trays before her parents. The slender man kept up a steady stream of chatter, his voice smooth and sing-songy as he extolled the virtues of green peas and processed turkey.
“It’s three-stinkin’-fifteen,” she said, lifting a brow. “My parents are starving.”
“Sorry.” He pulled the foil from her mother’s tray. “Got held up by traffic, but I knew your folks would be okay. It’s not like you’re going to let them starve, right?”
Lisa scowled and curbed the words that sprang to her lips:
You’re
hired to deliver meals on time. Why do you expect me to cover for you?
She moved to the window, barely managing to quell her anger. What was with this guy, anyway? Why would an able-bodied forty-something- year-old choose to spend his day delivering meals to old people? This guy seemed intelligent, he wasn’t bad looking, and he didn’t bite his nails. So why in the world had he taken this gig?
He was looking at her when she turned, probably hoping to make conversation, but she shook her head and moved into the hallway that led to the bedrooms. She wasn’t about to get caught up in small talk with this guy—besides, other people were bound to be waiting for their dinners. If this man had any social sense, he’d realize that for people like her parents, the arrival of the Meals on Wheels volunteer was the high point of the day.
She walked into her room and turned on the CD player, then sat at her computer desk. The machine had been humming ever since she checked her e-mail that morning. Her in-box had filled, undoubtedly with messages from mortgage brokers, drug dealers, pornographers, and weight-loss coaches. She received little personal e-mail; if not for spam, she’d get almost nothing. But occasionally a genuine communication did slip through—mostly notes from her clients or prospects who’d seen her Web page and wanted to inquire about her day-care program. Because the ringing telephone bothered her parents, she always asked her preschool clients to contact her via e-mail.
She scrolled through the list of messages, then smiled at a familiar name: David Payne. She clicked on the post and braced herself for disappointment—every time she saw his name, she hoped for a
personal
letter, but every correspondence to date had been part of a mailing to the entire FSU group. She was grateful for those messages, but it’d be nice to know David thought of her as an individual.
She skimmed the message. This would be the last note from David in some time, she realized; this was the standard last pitch for his annual Trip to Help the Underprivileged. Every spring David picked some godforsaken part of the world and headed out to Do Good; every year he invited his old college chums to join him.
And to every invitation she sent the same response:
Thanks, David,
good to hear from you, but I can’t go. My parents are old, you see, and I’m
running my own business . . .
She typed her usual reply, hoping it sounded breathless and important and vaguely mysterious. She
was
running her own business—David didn’t have to know it consisted of babysitting six kids in a converted garage at the side of her parents’ house. She earned a whopping four hundred fifty dollars a week, plenty to live on when you resided with your parents in a house that’d been mortgage-free for years.
She paused at the end of the e-mail. How should she close? Affectionately? Sincerely? Best wishes? None of those seemed quite right, so she settled for the neutral “Always” and zapped the message through the cable modem.
An image of David rose on a wave of fading memories as she leaned back and closed her eyes. Of the three guys in their group, David was the
last
one she’d have envisioned as a globe-trotting philanthropist. She’d have nominated Kevin for that role; he had the look of a tireless hero. Mark never cared about anything but having fun and making money, while David had been so intent on keeping his academic scholarship he’d had little interest in extracurricular activities. If he hadn’t been as poor as Lazarus, they might never have met him.
Were any of the others joining David on this trip? She considered the question, then laughed. David would have mentioned anyone who joined him last year, so apparently she wasn’t the only one who wasn’t thrilled by the idea of laboring in some un-air-conditioned wilderness. Kevin and Karyn had to be too involved in their careers and in raising their daughter to take off on one of David’s junkets. In an undeveloped culture, Susan would be as out of place as a bucket under a bull, and Mark . . . well, who knew what he was up to? Who cared?
As for her, she might have been persuaded to go on one of David’s trips if she were unencumbered. And if Kevin were going . . . without Karyn.
All of the others had married—Karyn and Kevin a week after graduation; Susan had gone back to Texas, waited two years, and found herself a wealthy older man who died not long after their wedding. Mark walked the aisle a few months after Susan, and in the following years Lisa had received four other wedding invitations embossed with his name—each arrived without fanfare; each invited her to a celebration of eternal love. She sent a KitchenAid mixer to his first bride, a set of steak knives to his second, a collection of dish towels to his third. The fourth bride received a card, the fifth a mumbled prayer for health and happiness. Serial marriage, Lisa figured, was nothing to celebrate, especially when the groom was an old boyfriend.
Twenty years ago, when the group shared a hopeful toast before moving into the line of black-robed graduates, she’d never imagined she’d end up back in Seattle, unmarried and incomplete. That day she covered her broken heart with a wide smile; she wore that same smile throughout Karyn’s wedding and even toasted the beaming couple. As she watched Kevin and Karyn drive away in a clattering convertible, she consoled herself with the hope that she’d soon find a man whose perfection would eclipse Kevin Carter’s.
She never found that man, though she looked for him at sporting events, bars, and church functions. After learning that the ratio of single men to single women in Alaska was 114 to 100, she spent one summer tutoring children in Fairbanks, but Mr. Right never showed up. If he had, she now realized, she probably wouldn’t have noticed him. The aura that encased her memories of Kevin Carter blinded her to every other man.