Angel Falling Softly (28 page)

She figured out the motion after a few tries and fell into step just behind the elder Lang. Darren Wylde watched her over his shoulder. He raised an eyebrow and nodded. She’d made an impression—the right one, she hoped. At the end of the row, he said, cranking the tractor around, “You might want to take off that jacket, Miss Daranyi. You’re gonna give yourself sunstroke.”

The sun was blazing down by now, all the more reason to leave on the jacket. Not taking the man’s advice would require a suspicious amount of prevarication. Taking the man’s advice would put her in good stead. So she took off the jacket and handed it to Blake, who hung it on the top spike on the rack.

They worked down the next row. “That should do it,” said Wylde. He wheeled the tractor around and drove to the edge of the property line, marked by a line of oak and box elder. They offloaded the bales onto a round slab sheltered by a concrete umbrella.

“What you got there is a stressed rebar frame,” explained Darren Wylde. “We poured her the same time we did the footings for the cabin. Hoisted her up with a hydraulic jack. Textbook structural engineering. Did it for my senior thesis.” He said to the Langs, “Thanks, Terry, Blake. You need anything, let me know.”

Father and son walked back to the driveway and drove off in the Sierra.

“Miss Daranyi—”

“Milada, please.”

“I go by Jack. I guess you did grow up on a farm.”

“The sisters at the orphanage believed we should earn our keep by the sweat of our brows.”

“Where was that? You don’t sound American. Sorry if that’s not a good way to put it.”

“Hungary. But I’ve been an American for at least a lifetime.”

“We’re all immigrants one way or another. C’mon, I’ll show you the burros.”

He stopped at a weeded-over garden. “Here we go. A few old carrots.” He knocked off the dirt, gave her a bunch. When they approach the paddock, the burros came trotting over to the fence. “You can’t ask for a better pack animal.” He patted the muzzle. The huge ears swiveled from side to side like radar dishes. The other burros crowded in to get their fair share. Milada was glad she still had on the heavy gloves.

“We lend them out to the scout troops. Good camping in these hills here.”

The carrots gone, they retreated to the porch. The old man shadowed his eyes and stared up at the sky. “Looks like a front’s moving in.”

Milada followed his gaze. A towering column of cumulonimbus advanced on the valley from the south. Not quickly enough. A wisp of cirrus momentarily dimmed the sun. Milada felt the refreshing shadow on her face.

Darren Wylde lowered his gaze and gestured expansively at his property. “We bought this land while we were going to the Y. Started off with a hundred acres. Had it in mind to build some equity, graduate with something in the pocket other than a diploma. Took us that long too. Dug the foundations, did all the framing ourselves. Then we liked it so much we couldn’t bear to let it go.”

Milada recalled her biographical notes. “You studied mechanical engineering.”

“That’s right. But when my dad died I took over the funeral home. There was just one at the time. I taught myself what I needed to know and grew the business. Then I ran into an old classmate of mine, Clayton Reid, about twenty years ago. He had a startup going out of the University of Utah School of Medicine and was looking for venture capital. Clayton knew the biology, I knew the tech, so we leveraged the business and here we are today.”

He checked his watch. “Look at that, half past eleven. I caught some rainbow trout this morning. Thought I’d fry it up with a little rice. Come on in.” He got up and opened the sliding glass doors.

It was pleasantly cool in the cabin. Wylde could not resist commenting on that fact. “Yep, these mountain valleys heat up fast and cool down fast. You see twenty, thirty below in the winter on a regular basis. I got high-R insulation in here”—he smacked the closest wall with the palm of his hand—“and double-glazed windows. I can heat her year round for a hundred dollars of Carbon County anthracite.”

With that bit of show and tell, Darren Wylde disappeared into the kitchen.

Milada paused to take in the interior of the cabin. It was the definition of what antique dealers meant by “original condition.” Nothing tattered, but well worn.

Wylde called from the kitchen, “If you need the bathroom, it’s up the stairs and at the end of the hall.”

The floor plan divided the cabin along the frame of the A. The living room faced north. The kitchen faced south. The staircase wound up to an open hallway, the bedrooms over the kitchen. A basketball hoop was nailed to the banisters. It’d probably been there forty years.

In the kitchen, Wylde had gutted and filleted the trout. A daub of butter melted in the frying pan. He tossed in a handful of mushrooms and sliced summer squash. A pot of rice bubbled away on the stove.

“Plates in the cupboard there,” he said, with a nod of his head. “Silverware in the drawer next to the sink.”

So Milada set the table. When the rice was just about ready, he fried up the trout, a few minutes on each side. He placed the frying pan on a hot pad on the table next to the rice. He couldn’t find any napkins, so he tore a couple of sheets from a roll of paper towels.

They sat down. He said a quick grace and then served the trout. “Got yourself a bit of a sunburn there,” he said. “On a clear day in these high, dry valleys, it’s easy to overlook the UV.”

“I don’t get out much.” Milada took a bite of the trout. “This is quite good.”

“Keep it simple, and you can’t go wrong.” Then he said, “Seems you did some profit taking the other day.”

“Do you believe your stock is worth forty dollars a share?”

“Of course not! But better if some people found out more gentle-like, not with an uppercut to the jaw. I’ve got too many relatives who think a stock certificate is money.”

“My broker says we lost almost as much as we made.”

“And acquired another ten percent of outstanding shares in the bargain. By my calculations, you could acquire us outright. You don’t need me at this stage of the game. So I have to wonder what you’re doing here.”

“There’s more to running a company than electing the board,” she said with a small shrug. “And it’s not always the CEO who’s the problem.”

“In any case, this CEO’s not going to be around forever.”

“My sister would run the company, meaning the primary WMI assets.”

“Your sister?” Then he nodded. “She made quite an impression on Dr. Brickey.”

“Kamilla has an M.D. in pediatrics and a Ph.D. in biochemistry.”

“Impressive. But that’s not all the company does.”

“I’ve looked over the numbers. For a mortuary business of its size, you should be netting a good fifty percent more.”

“There’s no easier way to make good money in a bad way than with a funeral home, guilting people with a lot of grief in their hearts into burying a goodly part of their inheritance six feet under.”

“I can respect that. Frankly, I have no plans of interfering with the operations of Wylde Funeral Homes as long as it earns its keep. I’m more interested in the potential of your genealogical database technology. The problem is, you’re undercapitalized. The informatics business pays its own way, but there isn’t enough left over to fund R&D without leveraging the mortuary business. You push one at the expense of the rest.”

“I’m not arguing with you about that,” said Wylde.

“So this is what I propose. We split off a tracking stock, call it Daranyi Medical Informatics.”

“Like selling off the division.”

“Yes, but not quite. It will still fall under our corporate umbrella. The Daranyi name will give you considerable leverage in the financial markets when it comes to raising new financing.”

Wylde sat back in his chair and folded his hands on his stomach. He nodded. “Yes, I can see how that would work.” He leaned forward. “You realize that what makes the data so valuable is its home-grown roots. Public domain genealogical records aren’t enough. Getting the rights to the gene surveys requires a delicate touch and a lot of personal trust, the kind of thing easily lost in a business acquisition. Turning the hearts of the fathers to the children and the hearts of the children to their fathers, that’s the way people around here see their genealogy.”

“That’s from Malachi, isn’t it?”

Wylde smiled and nodded. “Every good Mormon knows it by heart.”

Milada smiled as well. She’d made exactly the impression she’d intended. “I don’t see a problem with that.”

“Then I think we have something to negotiate about.”

I
t was past three when Steven picked her up. She and Darren Wylde had spent most of the afternoon discussing this child they had given birth to: Daranyi Medical Informatics. He felt enough enthusiasm that she thought it might warrant incorporating as a separate entity. It was something to think about, the sight of this old man, at three-score and seven, so invigorated at the prospect of initiating a radical change in his life. Michael would do himself some good to spend time around a man like Darren Wylde.

“Miss Daranyi.”

She opened her eyes. They were back in Sandy, on Larkspur Lane, in front of her house. She’d fallen asleep.

“Thank you, Steven.” She got out on her own accord and stopped at the driver’s side window. “I’ll not be coming into work on Monday. So I shall see you on Tuesday.”

The sun was well gone, hidden behind the roiling charcoal sky. A hot sirocco coursed along the Salt Lake Valley, churning up a dirty yellow curtain of dust. Virga fell like veils across the horizon. In the house, Milada turned on the swamp cooler. But the wind whipped at the curtains, and she tasted the grit in the air. So she turned off the cooler and closed the windows.

She took two hundred milligrams of fexofenadine to retard the histaminic reaction to the sun, then stripped off her clothing and took a long, cold shower. Besides washing off the dust and sweat and oil, the water fixed the reaction in the skin, kept the burn from spreading. In a few hours any pressure on her skin would become unbearable.

Milada examined herself in the mirror.
What a mess.
Darren Wylde was right about the incidental ultraviolet. And her shoulders—she should have kept on the jacket—were just as bad. It would look like hell soon enough, and her skin would hurt even worse until the damaged flesh scabbed over. And then another twenty-four to thirty-six hours until it shed.

She showered, toweled off, and tied her
yukata
loosely around her waist. She gathered up her collection of drugs—antihistamines, codeine, ibuprofen, cortisone cream—that she always kept handy just in case. With her metabolism, it was a trick to take any drug with the right timing and in sufficient amounts to be effective.

In the kitchen she filled a liter bottle with warm water. She had to keep hydrated as well. In the family room, she spread out a bath towel and lay down. Then she called Jane.

“Are you okay?” was Jane’s first question.

“Do I not sound okay?”

“You sound—stressed. You’re sure you’re okay?”

“I’m okay, okay?”

A suspicious tone crept into Jane’s voice. “Did you get sunburned up there?”

“A little.”

“A little?”

“Okay, a little more than a little. I shall recover.”

“Do you have enough codeine and cortisone on hand?”

Milada sighed. This was why Jane needed to get married, so she could have a child of her own to bestow all her mothering instincts upon. Jane took the cue and moved on. “How’d the day go?”

The day had started with her sending a kid into the ICU.
Aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln.
She composed herself before she spoke. “The meeting with Mr. Wylde went better than expected. We are going to have to pull a few rabbits out of a few hats, but I am optimistic.”

“Anything you want me to relay to Garrick?”

“No. I shall write up a memo and e-mail you tomorrow. I’ll call the two of you Monday.”

“From home or the office?”

“Home, most likely.”

“So you got burned pretty bad then.”

“Jane—” Milada said with tender exasperation.

“Someone has to watch out for you girls.”

“I appreciate it, Jane. I promise to lie very still and think calm thoughts and take lots of drugs.”

“If you promise.”

“Good-bye, Jane.”

“Good-bye, Milly. And take care.”

Milada clicked off the phone and tossed it aside. She uncapped the water bottle and washed down two codeine tabs and a thousand milligrams of ibuprofen. Then she lay very still on the floor and thought calm thoughts. Spinning off Daranyi Medical Informatics as an independent company could prove quite lucrative. No debt financing, a pure intellectual property play. She would have smiled if it didn’t hurt so much.