Beauty: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

drove off, and Carol was glad to be alone. Parks seemed a straight-ahead guy, and she liked him. She thought she trusted him. He had flipped a switch on the past, but that wasn’t his fault. The switch had been there. Dominic was always there if she let him be there. She switched herself back into focus.
    Now that her eyes were more accustomed, she spotted a gap in the plant’s façade. She saw that the fencing had been bent up enough for someone to slide under. She lay down on her back, reached under, and got a grip on the fence from the other side. She pulled herself through until she could stand. She was in a tunnel of darkness between two of the buildings.
    She walked toward a pale glow of lights and what she thought would be the harbor. At the end of the tunnel, water spread from beneath the edge of the dock she stood on. The lights of town stacked up the hill to the left. A dozen small working boats, docked one to another, floated beyond the pier. One fair-size boat on the other side of the harbor had serious, blue-bright lights shining down to the machined clutter of its deck.
    Carol didn’t know fishing, but she knew the feel of living business, and there was hardly a pulse here, which she half loved. And not because a pulse going away meant a job. The deserted plants and factories had always been sadly beautiful to her, museums of echoes and iron.
    Someone came out on the deck of the lighted vessel across the way, and she could hear him talking to someone else inside the boat. The water carried the sound to where she stood. She couldn’t make out what he was saying, but he spoke slowly enough that his words, whatever they were, came singsong.
    She walked back through the tunnel to the security lights and pulled herself under the fence again. She swiped sand off the back of her suit and got in her car and dialed Remy.
    She would find out what he had been doing at the meeting, what he’d learned about her company, what the problem was earlier in the day when she’d been trying to bring her focus together for this one last burial.
    Remy picked up and said, “Listen, Carol.”
    Carol was not somebody who ordinarily needed reassurance, but she had needed it just now, and she liked hearing Remy’s voice and imagining him at his desk in New York. She could manage to bury one more body, for God sake. No sweat, as Baxter liked to say. Now she waited for Remy’s actual news.
    When he didn’t say anything, she said, “What?”
    Remy said, “Baxter was trying to give you a heads-up with his ‘Beast’ and his you-don’t-belong-here. Because Blume is pushing you out. It’s done.”
    She wasn’t hearing this right, and she didn’t believe it.
    She said, “No.” But she’d been afraid of it since before Battle Bay, almost since Baxter first proposed giving her a company to run.
    “You’re out, Carol. It’s done.”
    “Baxter’s unloading me?” He was, and now, when it was already done, her stomach knotted with fear, as if the possibility was just ahead.
    “Blume, but yes.”
    “Blume?” Oh, Jesus. What had she done wrong? Nothing.
    “He wanted Susannah to babysit the stand-alone division they’re picking up, the one you were supposed to get. It’s a little bigger than they thought. Blume got cold feet about giving it to you. He thought you were too old a zebra to get bigger stripes was the way he put it.”
    Carol sat in her car and felt her company being pulled out of her belly. It felt horrible, and it felt right, as if it was what she’d asked for.
    Remy said, “I’m sorry.”
    “This means I’m an undertaker for life.”
    “No, Carol.”
    “I thought Baxter was testing me with the ‘Beast’ and all his bullshit about belonging in the room. I was sure that if I stood up to it, I was home. Blume looked at me like it was any other day. Did I fuck up?”
    “Carol, you’re not an undertaker anymore, not for Baxter Blume. Or you won’t be as soon as you finish out the fish.”
    Carol had