Behind my closed eyes, images shimmered into existence.
Two women — one with a glossy fall of black hair, the other with short, mousy-brown curls — sit opposite each other at a long table. In a boardroom.
Laini’s face is drawn tight with concern. Denise’s is flushed a dull red.
“How long has this being going on?” Laini asks. Her voice is low, controlled.
“It’s nothing. I told you I just borrowed it until the end of the month.”
“Denise, I suspect this” — Laini taps a spreadsheet lying on the table between them — “is the least of it.”
“Prove it!”
“I don’t need to prove it. I’ll leave that to the experts. I just need to tell Bethany.”
“She won’t believe you. You think you’re so special because you’re pretty, because of your past? Lipstick and sequins!” she sneers. “Well, you’re not special. I’ve been here since this business started. She trusts me. She needs me!” she hisses, sending a drop of spittle onto the polished surface of the table.
“I really think it’ll be best if you tell her yourself. Come clean. She’ll let you go quietly — she won’t want any negative publicity.”
Denise’s hands bunch into fists. For a moment it looks like she’ll hit Laini. But then her face crumples, and her head sags onto her hands.
“I can’t lose my job. I can’t. Please, Laini, please. My son …”
“You tell her, or I will.”
“What are you doing?” a loud voice intruded.
The keys were snatched out of my hands, and I blinked my eyes open to see Denise staring down at me in deep suspicion.
“Sorry, I– I …” I couldn’t think of a plausible excuse. I just looked at her, open-mouthed.
“What are you staring at?” she demanded.
A thief, I think.
Eager to get away, I stood up. “Mind if I have a stroll around the yard downstairs while I wait for Kennick?”
“Knock yourself out,” she said, stashing the bunch of keys in her desk drawer. “But don’t annoy Jim.”
As I left, my gaze was drawn to a collage frame of family snaps. One photograph caught my attention.
“Is this your son?” I asked Denise.
Her face softened. “Yeah, that’s Christopher, my baby boy.”
The kid in the picture — seventeen if he was a day — was laughing. He sat strapped in a wheelchair, elbows pulled tight against his body, wrists bent downwards, spasmed hands contracted all the way back against his forearms.
I glanced back at Denise, but she said nothing, and I left.
Downstairs, outside the office building, I headed straight for the sugar shack and slipped inside, keeping a sharp lookout for Jim. Enveloped in billowing clouds of fragrant steam, I looked around. Maybe, judging by the vintage exterior, I’d been expecting peachy-cheeked lasses in gingham dresses stirring copper pots over open log fires, because the sleek array of hi-tech equipment came as a surprise. There were huge stainless steel tanks filled with clear sap, tall machines labeled “Reverse Osmosis” and “Filter,” a huge open pan bubbling over an iron boiler with closed doors — that must be where Jim shoveled in the wood — and multiple closed vats with pipes running to a room on the right-hand side of the building. Through the glass partition, I could see bottles on a production line being filled with amber liquid, sealed with lids, and wrapped with labels before being stacked in boxes by two workers.
A voice behind me asked, “Can I help you?”
A woman wearing a white coat and a protective net over her hair was smiling at me expectantly.
“No, thanks. I’m just waiting for Bethany and Denise,” I said, trying to sound like I was inside the shack on official business. “They said they’d only be a minute or two.”
“Okay, then. Please don’t touch anything.”
I forced a laugh. “I wouldn’t dare! I know how Jim hates that.”
She nodded, checked a reading on the boiler, made a notation on her clipboard and walked to the bottling room. Knowing that Jim would be back at any minute to feed the fires, I crept past the boilers, heading deeper into the factory. There wasn’t much more to see, though, and the sweet smell of boiling syrup was beginning to make me feel sick. I was about to turn back when I spied a room in the far corner of the building. “Custodian’s Office”, read the sign on the closed door. When I got no answer to my knock, I checked that no one was watching and went inside.
If a person’s working space is any reflection of the inside of their head, then Jim was one crazy, mixed-up fellow. The room — more workshop than office — was a mess. Tools, pipes and the assorted innards of machines lay scattered on workbenches and the floor. A pinup calendar hung lopsidedly on one wall. Above the dates circled in thick red marker and the indecipherable notes scribbled in its margins, Miss March — a lissome redhead with breasts as large as cantaloupes — gazed out at the mess. Against the far wall, a filing cabinet with papers spilling out of its open drawers stood alongside a tall steel locker which had coils of blue tubing stacked on top.
With no clear idea of what I was looking for, I snooped around — touching a wrench and the calendar, riffling through the paperwork, poking through drawers. One of these was stocked with breath mints, gum, a comb, a nail grooming kit, a tube of industrial-strength hand cleaner and two cans of spray deodorant. Did Jim spruce himself up for a special lady before he left work at the end of the day?
I had just opened the tall locker and was staring at the coats and overalls hung on the rail inside when I heard the trilling of Jim’s alarm from nearby. A quick glance around the office confirmed that the only possible hiding place was inside the locker, so I climbed in, pulling the door closed behind me. It was hard to keep from falling back out because the uneven contents of the base of the locker, which I figured to be boots, made my balance precarious. The door wouldn’t shut all the way, but that was probably a good thing because it was suffocating inside, with a funky odor that made me switch to mouth-breathing.
As quietly as I could, I slid some of the hangers aside to make room for my face between the coats. Then I froze. Someone had come into the office. Low mutters and metallic clanging followed. My fingers, gripping the sharp inside rim of the door, started to cramp. Something soft and silky brushed against my cheek, but I didn’t dare brush it away for fear of making a sound. Every time I moved my face, even a fraction, it tickled my cheek or lips. I could only hope it was a spider’s web, and not the critter itself.
One final loud clank and then silence. Had he left? I forced myself to count to thirty before opening the locker door another inch and peering out. The room was empty, the door ajar. Time to get the heck out of here.
I stepped out and, wanting to arrange the hanging coats back in their original positions, turned back around. Then I gasped and shuddered as though a bucket of icy water had been hurled in my face. The back of this closet was strange and unusual, but it sure as maple sugar was not a magical doorway to Narnia.
And what had been tickling my face was no spider’s web.