To Catch the Moon (23 page)

A good part of Joan didn’t care to deal with
any of it, but she had to. Not only to wipe the smugness off her
mother’s face but to investigate taking over Daniel’s job as CEO.
Somehow that whole idea felt different now, though. When she’d
thought of it originally, it had seemed bold and sexy: take over as
chief executive, showcase her talents, lay the groundwork for her
entree into politics. In other words, prove that what Daniel had
done, she could do. But now, after that dreadful conversation with
Gossett, she felt she had to take over as CEO to keep getting
Daniel’s salary and deal with the unbelievable cash-flow
problem.

Having to work for money?
Joan
clutched the steering wheel. It was extremely distasteful. She just
prayed Gossett was right and cash flow would be only a short-term
difficulty.

No one could know about it. Not Milo, not
anyone. Thank God no one outside the family knew how Daniel had
acquired the company in the first place. He’d even tried for a
while to keep the facts from her, but he’d spilled them eventually.
She’d been enraged, of course. He never appreciated how much her
father had done for him, never.

Well, that was over. It was all over.

One traffic light later, Joan made a series
of zigzag turns to escape the tourist logjam. Finally she arrived
at Headwaters, only to be stunned into immobility by what she saw
through the windshield.

Parked on the street out front was a small
moving truck, its ramp deployed. Men in orange shirts bearing the
words
Fine Art Capital
were walking between the adobe office
building and the truck carrying what were obviously oil paintings
wrapped in brown paper.

Carrying them
away
.

She abandoned the Jag by a fire hydrant and
raced inside, where several employees were emptying the contents of
their desks into cardboard boxes.

“What on earth is going on?” she demanded of
the woman closest to the front door, a hefty middle-aged creature
with red-rimmed eyes and the most hideous floral-print dress Joan
had ever seen. Immediately the woman burst into tears, ran right up
to Joan, and grabbed her arms with such ferocity Joan couldn’t
shake her off.

“Mrs. Gaines! Mrs. Gaines!” she kept
shrieking. “I am so glad to see you! Maybe you can stop this from
happening!”

“Stop what from happening? And where is Mr.
Barlowe?”

“He’s firing people! He’s in his office
firing people.” That seemed to deflate the creature. She let go of
Joan to extract a wadded-up tissue from up her short tight sleeve,
a place Joan was most surprised to see it. The woman blew her nose
noisily, the flesh on her upper arms shaking with the effort.

“I’m one of the first he fired,” she went on.
“Today’s my last day. ‘Have to rein in expenses,’ he said—that’s
why the art’s going, too. Three weeks’ severance I got, that’s it.
The economy the way it is, I don’t know what I’m going to do.” She
sniffled and rubbed the tissue against her reddened nose, then
before Joan could step away again grabbed Joan’s arm. “I’m so sorry
for going on like this, telling you my troubles.” Her watery blue
eyes again filled with tears, making Joan think of the pools in the
aquarium a few blocks away. “After what you’ve been through, losing
Mr. Gaines the way you did, you shouldn’t have to hear about my
problems. But I wonder if you couldn’t just”—she stepped closer and
Joan cringed at the nearness of the woman’s wet, mottled, flabby
cheeks—“just talk to Mr. Barlowe and see if maybe he doesn’t really
have to let me go?”

The woman’s eyes were importuning, but all
Joan wanted to do was shake her hands loose and escape outside. How
her father had spent all his adult life—as mayor, governor, then
senator—not only listening to people’s sob stories but actually
doing something about them, amazed her.
Maybe
, she thought
fleetingly,
politics wasn’t her game
…

“What’s your name?” she asked the woman.

“Dolores Hartnett, ma’am.”

The way she said it, Joan thought she might
bob a curtsy. “All right, Dolores.” Joan pulled her arm free but
tried to put a comforting look on her face. “I intend to speak with
Mr. Barlowe right now. Will you remind me where his office is?”

“I’ll do better than that. I’ll take you
there.” The woman wedged her body between the packing boxes and led
Joan to a closed oak door at the rear of the adobe’s main level, on
which Craig Barlowe’s name was spelled out in gleaming brass
letters.

Joan made her voice dismissive. “Thank you. I
appreciate your help, Dolores.”

The woman nodded and backed away, with such a
naked plea in her eyes that Joan wished she’d just go, already.
Finally she did. Joan leaned her ear against Barlowe’s door,
through which she could hear the murmur of male voices.

It didn’t take her long to decide that it was
just too damn bad that he had somebody in there with him. Now that
Daniel was dead, she was the lone shareholder of this company. This
company that was losing money.
Her
money.

Joan felt an icy nervousness wash through
her. Daniel screwed this up, too. He got too aggressive and screwed
up, first the trust and then Headwaters. She had a sudden strong
physical memory of her husband, as if he were standing right there
in the hall with her. Watching. Waiting. Wondering what she would
do next.

She shivered, then forced herself to get a
grip. One thing she would not do was wait in this corridor until
Barlowe freed himself up. She needed answers now.

She rapped sharply on the heavy oak door,
then twisted the knob and pushed it open. Craig Barlowe half rose
from behind his desk, the eyes behind his wire frames widening in
obvious shock at the identity of this unexpected guest.

Quickly he masked his reaction and strode
toward her. “Joan!” he said, his tone falsely hearty. He was a
paunchy man Daniel’s age who looked at least ten years older. He
grasped her hand. “It’s a pleasure to see you, as always, but you
should have called first.”

“Today isn’t a bad day for my visit, I
trust?” She glanced pointedly at the man still sitting in the chair
facing Barlowe’s desk, assuming him to be another employee getting
the ax.

“Not at all.” Barlowe included the man in
that reply, then introduced him as a banker and swiftly got rid of
him, with best wishes for a happy New Year. From the grim
expression on the man’s face, that didn’t seem likely.

Barlowe waved Joan to the seat the banker had
vacated, then returned behind his desk. “May I offer you coffee or
tea, Joan?”

“No, thank you.” She set her handbag on his
desk. “Craig, what in the world is going on here today?”

“Oh”—he made a dismissive gesture—“it’s
nothing to worry about. Just some minor cost cutting.”

“Minor cost cutting? I see paintings going
out the door and people losing their jobs.”

Barlowe’s face assumed a somber expression.
Did he learn that from Henry Gossett?
Joan wondered. Perhaps
law and business provided essentially the same training. “It’s
always very, very difficult to let people go, Joan. But we have to
keep the bottom line uppermost in our minds.”

“I agree.” She was a great fan of a healthy
bottom line, particularly her own. “But is there some pressing
difficulty at the moment?”

“Not pressing, no.” Barlowe shook his head.
“I simply judged it prudent to trim a few expenses before the end
of the year. Which is tomorrow, of course.”

“Of course.”
He’s feeding me the party
line, as if I’m the stupid wife who doesn’t deserve the true
story.
She stiffened. “Craig, you realize, of course, that I am
the sole shareholder of this company and as such am entitled to
full disclosure of its financial state.”

He looked startled. “Joan, I am providing
full disclosure. I just don’t want to worry you unduly.”

“Let me decide how worried to get.” Briefly
she wondered if she should fire this Craig Barlowe when she took
over. He annoyed her, but then again he did know how to run the
place. Or did he only know how to run it into the ground?

She had a sudden thought. One thing she knew
for sure was that Daniel and her father had acquired Headwaters in
a leveraged buyout, meaning the company assumed a great deal of
debt on which regular interest payments had to be made. “Does all
this cost cutting have to do with servicing the debt?”

She felt a thrill of pleasure watching
Barlowe’s eyes once again widen with surprise.
No
, she told
him silently across the expanse of his antique desk,
I am not
the stupid wife. In fact, I know a great deal that even
you
don’t.

“The debt payments are substantial,” he
allowed. “The regulatory constraints on what we can harvest seem to
be getting tougher all the time. And it doesn’t help that lumber
prices have dropped as the economy has slowed down.”

Here we go again
, she thought. “Is
Headwaters experiencing a cash-flow problem?”

He hesitated, then, “A small one, yes.”

Damn
. That would mean she’d have
trouble hiking the CEO’s salary when she took over. Daniel had paid
himself only half a million dollars a year. She’d been toying with
the idea of doubling it. “How many people are you laying off?” she
asked.

“Six. We were already fairly lean, so we’ll
really feel these cuts.”

They might have to get leaner still if she
was going to get her million a year. Too bad for Dolores Hartnett.
But this was business. Tough decisions had to be made.

“Craig, I would like you to walk me through
the profit-and-loss statements for the last year.” She rose from
her chair and walked toward his door. “First, though, I have a
quick call to make. I’ll take care of that in Daniel’s office and
return shortly. Please have the books ready when I come back.”

She couldn’t care less about the stunned,
barely hidden animosity that suddenly appeared on Craig Barlowe’s
wide, square face. Instead she laughed quietly to herself,
imagining his reaction when he found out she would be his new
boss.

Joan had almost made it to the stairs on her
way to Daniel’s second-floor corner suite when she got waylaid by
Dolores Hartnett, who again halted all forward progress by
attaching herself to Joan’s left arm.

“Mrs. Gaines?” the woman asked.

Again Joan was vaguely repulsed. The woman’s
lower lip was actually trembling. Joan twisted her features into a
regretful expression. “I am so sorry, Dolores,” she murmured. “I
did my best but I’m afraid I could not talk Mr. Barlowe into
retaining your services. I am so sorry.”

The woman nodded, looked again as if she
might burst into tears, then released Joan’s arm and backed
away.

“I’m sure things will look much cheerier for
you in the New Year,” Joan called, then turned her back on Dolores
Hartnett and ascended the stairs, her mind moving on to the next
item on her agenda.

*

Nothing like a Rotary Club lunch
, Kip
thought with satisfaction,
to raise money
.

He looked up from his roasted chicken, mashed
potatoes, and green beans to scan the crowded hall, a midsize
banquet room in the local Embassy Suites hotel. There were about
seventy-five Rotarians in attendance, grouped at ten round tables,
and they were Kip Penrose’s kind of folk—all male, all
conservative, and all primed to write a check to plump up his
campaign coffers. Not that they needed much plumping. He had about
a hundred and sixty grand in the bank; another thirty or so would
set him up just fine for November. Not to mention scare off Rocco
Messina or any other potential challenger who might otherwise think
he could match Kip Penrose’s war chest. Not likely.

Kip tuned in to the conversation going on at
his table. They’d already rated the San Francisco 49ers’ current
crop of receivers, denounced the University of California’s latest
admissions criteria—which all agreed smacked of hidden affirmative
action—and pondered the spotty record of the ongoing war on
terrorism. Now they had moved on to the never-ending debate over
whether part of San Francisco Bay should be filled in to expand
runways at San Francisco’s airport. Though Kip knew that in this
crowd there really wasn’t much to debate on that topic.

“Seems to me,” he informed his rapt
listeners, “this is an economic rather than an environmental issue.
Forget terrorism. Business travelers will shun the city in ever
greater numbers if we can’t improve the on-time record at SFO.”

Nods all around. Kip could almost see the
donation checks getting bigger. Man, he loved these people. They
were the kind he’d grown up with, outside Boston—small-business
owners, subcontractors, or insurance salesmen, like his dad. The
big dogs were dentists or owned car dealerships. He pretended Libby
and Joan Hudson were his kind, but that was all an act. They made
him nervous, truth be told. With these folks he could be himself,
or at least a more relaxed form of himself.

A Hispanic waiter came by to bus his empty
plate. Kip sipped from his coffee, which at Rotary lunches was a
thin, diner-style brew served alongside the meal, and prepared to
deliver his speech. It honed in on one topic and one topic only:
how Kip Penrose’s policies had single-handedly reduced serious
crime on the Monterey Peninsula. He’d just double-checked the order
of his index cards when his cell phone rang. He twisted his body
away from the table to answer. “Penrose,” he said.

“Kip, I am so pleased to have reached you.
It’s Joan Gaines.”

Kip’s heart rate ramped up, as if he’d just
increased the speed on the cross-trainer he’d purchased for the
renovated basement of his home. Immediately he rose from the table
to head to a private corner of the banquet room, putting an
expression on his face that might lead his tablemates to believe
he’d just been phoned by the governor. “What can I do for you,
Joan?”