Twisted: The Collected Stories - 1

  "Sometimes help just appears from the sky."

  This was an expression of her mother's and it didn't mean angels or spirits or any of that New Age stuff but meant "from thin air" -- when you were least expecting it.

  Okay, Mama, let's hope. 'Cause I can use some help now. Can use it bad.

  Sandra May DuMont leaned back in a black-leather office chair and let the papers in her hand drop onto the old desk that dominated her late husband's office. As she looked out the window she wondered if she was looking at that help right now.

  Not exactly appearing from the sky -- but walking up the cement path to the factory, in the form of a man with an easy smile and sharp eyes.

  She turned away and caught sight of herself in the antique mirror she'd bought for her husband ten years ago, on their fifth anniversary. Today, she had only a brief memory of that happier day; what she concentrated on now was her image; a large woman, though not fat. Quick green eyes. She was wearing an off-white dress imprinted with blue cornflowers. Sleeveless -- this was Georgia in mid May -- revealing sturdy upper arms. Her long hair was dark blond and was pulled back and fixed with a matter-of-fact tortoiseshell barrette. Just a touch of makeup. No perfume. She was thirty-eight but, funny thing, she'd come to realize, her weight made her look younger.

  By rights she should be feeling calm and self-assured. But she wasn't. Her eyes went to the papers in front of her again.

  No, she wasn't feeling that way at all.

  She needed help.

  From the sky.

  Or from anywhere.

  The intercom buzzed, startling her, though she was expecting the sound. It was an old-fashioned unit, brown plastic, with a dozen buttons. It had taken her some time to figure out how it worked. She pushed a button. "Yes?"

  "Mrs. DuMont, there's a Mr. Ralston here."

  "Good. Send him in, Loretta."

  The door opened and a man stepped inside. He said. "Hi, there."

  "Hey," Sandra May responded as she stood automatically, recalling that in the rural South women rarely stood to greet men. And thinking too: How my life has changed in the last six months.

  She noticed, as she had when she'd met him last weekend, that Bill Ralston wasn't really a handsome man. His face was angular, his black hair unruly, and though he was thin he didn't seem to be in particularly good shape.

  And that accent! Last Sunday, as they'd stood on the deck of what passed for a country club in Pine Creek, he'd grinned and said, "How's it going? I'm Bill Ralston. I'm from New York."

  As if the nasal tone in his voice hadn't told her already.

  And "how's it going?" Well, that was hardly the sort of greeting you heard from the locals (the "Pine Creakers," Sandra May called them -- though only to herself).

  "Come on in," she said to him now. She walked over to the couch, gestured with an upturned palm for him to sit across from her. As she walked, Sandra May kept her eyes in the mirror, focused on his, and she observed that he never once glanced at her body. That was good, she thought. He passed the first test. He sat down and examined the office and the pictures on the wall, most of them of Jim on hunting and fishing trips.

  She thought again of that day just before Halloween, the state troopers voice on the other end of the phone, echoing with a sorrowful hollowness.

  "Mrs. DuMont... I'm very sorry to tell you this. It's about your husband..."

  No, don't think about that now. Concentrate. You're in bad trouble, girl, and this might be the only person in the world who can help you.

  Sandra May's first impulse was to get Ralston coffee or tea. But then she stopped herself. She was now president of the company and she had employees for that sort of thing. Old traditions die hard -- more words from Sandra May's mother, who was proof incarnate of the adage.

  "Would you like something? Sweet tea?"

  He laughed. "You folks sure drink a lot of iced tea down here."

  "That's the South for you."

  "Sure. Love some."

  She called Loretta, Jim's longtime secretary and the office manager.

  The pretty woman -- who must have spent two hours putting on her makeup every morning -- stuck her head in the door. "Yes, Mrs. DuMont?"

  "Could you bring us some iced tea, please?"

  "Be happy to." The woman disappeared, leaving a cloud of flowery perfume behind.

  Ralston nodded after her. "Everybody's sure polite in Pine Creek. Takes a while for a New Yorker to get used to it."

  "I'll tell you, Mr. Ralston --"

  "Bill, please."

  "Bill... It's second nature down here. Being polite. My mother said a person should put on their manners every morning the way they put on their clothes."

  He smiled at the homily.

  And speaking of clothes... Sandra May didn't know what to think of his. Bill Ralston was dressed... well, Northern. That was the only way to describe it. Black suit and a dark shirt. No tie. Just the opposite of Jim -- who wore brown slacks, a powder-blue shirt and a tan sports coat as if the outfit were a mandatory uniform.

  "That's your husband?" he asked, looking at the pictures on the wall.

  "That's Jim, yes," she said softly.

  "Nice-looking man. Can I ask what happened?"

  She hesitated for a minute and Ralston picked up on it immediately.

  "I'm sorry," he said, "I shouldn't've asked. It's --"

  But she interrupted. "No, it's all right. I don't mind talking about it. A fishing accident last fall. At Billings Lake. He fell in, hit his head and drowned."

  "Man, that's terrible. Were you on the trip when it happened?"

  Laughing hollowly, she said, "I wish I had been, I could've saved him. But, no, I only went with him once or twice. Fishing's so... messy. You hook the poor thing, you hit it over the head with a club, you cut it up... Besides, I guess you don't know the Southern protocol. Wives don't fish." She gazed up at some of the pictures. Said reflectively, "Jim was only forty-seven. I guess when you're married to someone and you think about them dying you think it'll happen when they're old. My mother died when she was eighty. And my father passed away when he was eighty-one. They were together for fifty-eight years."

  "That's wonderful."

  "Happy, faithful, devoted," she said wistfully.

  Loretta brought the tea and vanished again with the demure exit of a discreet servant.

  "So," he said. "I'm delighted the attractive woman I picked up so suavely actually gave me a call."

  "You Northern boys are pretty straightforward, aren't you?"

  "You betcha," he said.

  "Well, I hope it's not going to be a blow to your ego when I tell you that I asked you here for a purpose."

  "Depends on what that purpose is."

  "Business," Sandra May said.

  "Business is a good start," he said. Then he nodded for her to continue.

  "I inherited all the stock in the company when Jim died and I became president. I've been trying to run the show best I can but the way I see it" -- she nodded to where the accountant's reports sat on the desk -- "unless things improve pretty damn fast we'll be bankrupt within the year. I got a bit of insurance money when Jim died so I'm not going to starve, but I refuse to let something my husband built up from scratch go under."

  "Why do you think I can help you?" The smile was still there but it had less flirt than it had a few minutes ago -- and a lot less than last Sunday.

  "My mother had this saying. 'A Southern woman has to be a notch stronger than her man.' Well, I am that, I promise you."

  "I can see," Ralston said.

  "She also said, 'She has to be a notch more resourceful too.' And part of being resourceful is knowing your limitations. Now, before I married Jim I had three and a half years of college. But I'm in over my head here. I need somebody to help me. Somebody who knows about business. After what you were telling me on Sunday, at the club, I think you'd be just the man for that."

  When they'd met -- he'd explained that he was a banker a
nd broker. He'd buy small, troubled businesses, turn them around and sell them for a profit. He'd been in Atlanta on business and somebody had recommended he look into real estate in northeast Georgia, here in the mountains, where you could still get good bargains on investment and vacation property.

  "Tell me about the company," he said to her now.

  She explained that DuMont Products Inc., with sixteen full-time employees and a gaggle of high school boys in the summer, bought crude turpentine from local foresters who tapped longleaf and slash pine trees for the substance.

  "Turpentine... That's what I smelled driving up here."

  After Jim had started the company some years ago Sandra May would lie in bed next to his sleeping form, smelling the oily resin -- even if he'd showered. The scent had never seemed to leave him. Finally she'd gotten used to it. She sometimes wondered exactly when she'd stopped noticing the piquant aroma.

  She continued, telling Ralston, "Then we distill the raw turpentine into a couple different products. Mostly for the medical market."

  "Medical?" he asked, surprised. He took his jacket off and draped it carefully on the chair next to him. Drank more iced tea. He really seemed to enjoy it. She thought New Yorkers only drank wine and bottled water.

  "People think it's just a paint thinner. But doctors use it a lot. It's a stimulant and antispasmodic."

  "Didn't realize that," he said. She noticed that he'd started to take notes. And that the flirtatious smile was gone completely.

  "Jim sells..." Her voice faded. "The company sells the refined turpentine to a couple of jobbers. They handle all the distribution. We don't get into that. Our sales seem to be the same as ever. Our costs haven't gone up. But we don't have as much money as we ought to. I don't know where it's gone and I have payroll taxes and unemployment insurance due next month."

  She walked to the desk and handed him several accounting statements. Even though they were a mystery to her he pored over them knowingly, nodding. Once or twice he lifted his eyebrow in surprise. She suppressed an urge to ask a troubled What?

  Sandra May found herself studying him closely. Without the smile -- and with this businesslike concentration on his face -- he was much more attractive. Involuntarily she glanced at her wedding picture on the credenza. Then her eyes fled back to the documents in front of them.

  Finally he sat back, finished his iced tea. "There's something funny," he said. "I don't understand it. There've been some transfers of cash out of the main accounts but there's no record of where the money went. Did your husband mention anything to you about it?"

  "He didn't tell me very much about the company. Jim didn't mix business and his home life."

  "How about your accountant?"

  "Jim did most of the books himself... This money? Can you track it down? Find out what happened? I'll pay whatever your standard fee is."

  "I might be able to."

  She heard a hesitancy in his voice. She glanced up.

  He said, "Let me ask you a question first."

  "Go ahead."

  "Are you sure you want me to go digging?"

  "How do you mean?" she asked.

  His sharp eyes scanned the accounting sheets as if they were battlefield maps. "You know you could hire somebody to run the company. A professional businessman or woman. It'd be a hell of a lot less hassle for you. Let him or her turn the company around."

  She kept her eyes on him. "But you're not asking me about hassles, are you?"

  After a moment he said, "No, I'm not. I'm asking if you're sure you want to know anything more about your husband and his company than you do right now."

  "But it's my company now," she said firmly. "And I want to know everything. Now, all the company's books are over there." She pointed to a large, walnut credenza. It was the piece of furniture atop which sat their wedding picture.

  Do you promise to love, honor, cherish and obey...

  As he turned to see where she was pointing, Ralston's knee brushed hers. Sandra May felt a brief electrical jolt. He seemed to freeze for a moment. Then he turned back.

  "I'll start tomorrow," he said.

  *

  Three days later, with the evening orchestra of crickets and cicadas around her, Sandra May sat on the porch of their house... No, her house. It was so strange to think of it that way. No longer their cars, their furniture, their china. Hers alone now.

  Her desk, her company.

  She rocked back and forth in the swing, which she'd installed a year ago, screwing the heavy hooks into the ceiling joists herself. She looked out over the acres of trim grass, boarded by loblolly and hemlock. Pine Creek, population sixteen hundred, had trailers and bungalows, shotgun apartment buildings and a couple of modest subdivisions but only a dozen or so houses like this -- modern, glassy, huge. If the Georgia-Pacific had run through town, then the pristine development where Jim and Sandra May DuMont had settled would have defined which was the right side of the tracks.

  She sipped her iced tea and smoothed her denim jumper. Watched the yellow flares from a half dozen early fireflies.

  I think he's the one can help us, Mama, she thought.

  Appearing from the sky...

  Bill Ralston had been coming to the company every day since she'd met with him. He'd thrown himself into the job of saving DuMont Products Inc. When she'd left the office tonight at six he was still there, had been working since early morning, reading through the company's records and Jim's correspondence and diary. He'd called her at home a half hour ago, telling her he'd found some things she ought to know.

  "Come on over," she'd told him.

  "Be right there," he said. She gave him directions.

  Now, as he parked in front of the house, she noticed shadows appear in the bay windows of houses across the street. Her neighbors, Beth and Sally, checking out the activity.

  So, the widow's got a man friend come a-calling...

  She heard the crunching on the gravel before she could see Ralston approach through the dusk.

  "Hey," she said.

  "You all really do say that down here," he said. "'Hey'"

  "You bet. Only it's 'y'all.' Not you all.'"

  "Stand corrected, ma'am."

  "You Yankees."

  Ralston sat down on the swing. He'd Southernized himself. Tonight he wore jeans and a work shirt. And, my Lord, boots. He looked like one of the boys at a roadside tap, escaping from the wife for the night to drink beer with his buddies and to flirt with girls pretty and playful as Loretta.

  "Brought some wine," he said.

  "Well. How 'bout that."

  "I love your accent," he said.

  "Hold on -- you're the one with an accent."

  In a thick mafioso drawl: "Yo, forgeddaboutit. I don't got no accent." They laughed. He pointed to the horizon. "Look at that moon."

  "No cities around here, no lights. You can see the stars clear as your conscience."

  He poured some wine. He'd brought paper cups and a corkscrew.

  "Oh, hey, slow up there." Sandra May held up a hand. "I haven't had much to drink since... Well, after the accident I decided it'd be better if I kept a pretty tight rein on things."

  "Just drink what you want," he assured her. "We'll water the geranium with the rest."

  "That's a bougainvillea."

  "Oh, I'm a city boy, remember." He tapped her cup with his. Drank some wine. In a soft voice he said, "It must've been really rough. About Jim, I mean."

  She nodded, said nothing.

  "Here's to better times."

  "Better times," she said. They toasted and drank some more.

  "Okay, I better tell you what I've found."

  Sandra May took a deep breath then another sip of wine. "Go ahead."

  "Your husband... well, to be honest with you? He was hiding money."

  "Hiding?"

  "Well, maybe that's too strong a word. Let's say putting it in places that'd be damn hard to trace. It looks like he was taking some of the profits from the c
ompany for the last couple of years and bought shares in some foreign corporations... He never mentioned it to you?"

  "No. I wouldn't have approved. Foreign companies? I don't even hold much with the U.S. stock market. I think people ought to keep their money in the bank. Or better yet under the bed. That was my mother's philosophy. She called it the First National Bank of Posturepedic."

  He laughed. Sandra May finished her wine. Ralston poured her some more.

  "How much money was there?" she asked him.

  "Two hundred thousand and some change."

  She blinked. "Lord, I sure could use it. And soon. Is there any way to get it?"

  "I think so. But he was real cagey, your husband."

  "Cagey?" she drew the word out.

  "He wanted to hide those assets bad. It'd be a lot easier to find if I knew why he did it."

  "I don't have a clue." She lifted her hand and let it fall onto her solid thigh. "Maybe it's retirement money."

  But Ralston was smiling.

  "I say something silly?"

  "A four-oh-one K is where you put retirement money. The Cayman Islands isn't."

  "Is it illegal, what Jim did?"

  "Not necessarily. But it might be." He emptied his cup. "You want me to keep going?"

  "Yes," Sandra May said firmly. "Whatever it takes, whatever you find. I have to get that cash."

  "Then I'll do it. But it's going to be complicated, real complicated. We'll have to file suits in Delaware, New York and the Cayman Islands. Can you be away from here for months at a time?"

  A pause. "I could be. But I don't want to. This's my home."

  "Well, you could give me power of attorney to handle it. But you don't know me that well."

  "Let me think on that." Sandra May took the barrette out of her hair, let the blond strands fall free. She leaned her head back, looking up at the sky, the stars, the captivating moon, which was nearly full. She realized that she wasn't resting against the back of the porch swing at all but against Ralston's shoulder. She didn't move away.

  Then the stars and the moon were gone, replaced by the darkness of his silhouette, and he was kissing her, his hand cradling the back of her head, then her neck, then sliding around to the front of her jumper and undoing the buttons that held the shoulder straps. She kissed him back, hard. His hand moved up to her throat and undid the top button of her blouse, which she wore fastened -- the way, her mother told her, proper ladies should always do.

  *

  She lay in bed that night alone -- Bill Ralston had left some hours before -- and stared up at the ceiling.