Chain of Fools - Stevenson Richard. Страница 3

Looking stricken, Timmy said, "Oh."

Skeeter gasped out, "I went up in the woods past Peterson's Bluff and screamed my head off. I pulled trees out by the roots. I cursed your name, Timmy. I despised you. I crushed your skull with rocks. When I got to forestry school, I cried half the night before I fell asleep. I lied to the other guys and told them my mother had died."

"Oh. Oh, Skeeter. God."

"I loved you and hated your guts for years, Timmy." Timmy looked away. "I never really got completely over you until I met Eric," Skeeter said, glaring at Timmy.

Timmy flushed scarlet and said, "All those years. Jeez, Skeeter. I'm sorry."

"Then and only then were you kaput, Callahan."

"Oh."

"And then it was Eric and I—in for however long it lasted, what with our HIV. Till ridiculous death do us part."

"I'm so sorry."

"I'm the one that got sick first."

"That was awful."

"But at least I still had Eric along for the idiotic ride—until they killed him."

"Who are 'they'?" Timmy said, seizing on this turn in the conversation toward behavior that was even more reprehensible in Skeeter's mind than Timmy's had been.

"That's what your boyfriend has to find out. Who they are. I can tell you this: They're in it with the bad chain."

I said, "The chain of fools?"

"Yes, yes, yes, yes."

"The business about the chains is still unclear to us, Skeeter. We might have to come back tomorrow to get that part of the story straight."

Janet said, "I can explain what Eldon is talking about. The Herald is on the verge of bankruptcy, and the family is being forced to sell out. One newspaper chain that's interested has made a low bid, but the advantage is that it would maintain the paper's high standards and progressive editorial page, especially on environmental matters. That's the good chain. The high bidder is a big chain run by a reactionary thug who would fire most of the staff, gut the paper editorially, and use it primarily as a vehicle for chain-store advertising. I guess that's the chain of fools. Some members of my family want to sell to the thug and walk away with a bundle. Others want to sell to the good chain, break even, and keep the Osbornes' good name. One vote for the good chain was lost when Eric "was murdered. Someone may be trying to kill me—this is Eldon's theory—and eliminate my vote for selling out to the good chain With my vote lost, the reactionary thug would win." A sheen of perspiration was visible now across Janet's forehead and around her pale eyes.

"Do you have any reason to believe that Eldon's theory is correct?" I asked

"I'm not sure," Janet said. "I hate to think that any of the Osbornes would murder someone else in the family for money, or for anything else, or would ever murder anybody for any reason. But, I also know

that—let's just say for now that what Skeeter is suggesting might be possible " She gave a wan little shrug, as if to apologize for any homicidal tendencies in the Osborne family.

Skeeter said, "They sent the Jetsons to attack her. Betski-wetski. Honk honk, she almost got conked."

Timmy looked blankly at Skeeter, but Janet seemed to know what this meant. "Last week somebody might have tried to run me over with a Jet Ski," she said. "On the lake where I live. That's what Skeeter is referring to in his overly colorful way."

"Might have?" Timmy asked.

"There are a certain number of hotdoggers on the lake, so it could have been carelessness," Janet said, looking grim. "Or it could have been deliberate. We just don't know "

"One's a good chain, and one's a bad chain. It was almost a tall doll with a fractured skull," Skeeter said, and rolled his eyes up inside his head and made his tongue loll idiotically. That's when we all agreed it was time for Skeeter to get some rest.

2

She was determined to stay calm—I'll bet she's a real rock—but you could see that Janet Osborne is frightened," Timmy said later, as we walked back toward our house on Crow Street.

A big red moon with an enormous blotch shaped like Sri Lanka hung in the eastern sky, and the August night air was as thick as black tea. As we headed down Madison, the Victorian-revival apartment buildings on our side of the street could have been overlooking an Indonesian waterfront instead of Washington Park. It was tropical Albany at its most intoxicating until we got to the donut shop at the corner of Lark, where the light was cold fluorescent and the smell was of powdered sugar and jelly filling and the illusion was lost.

"Families are supposed to be safe havens from the violence and irrationality of the larger world," Timmy said. "To suspect somebody in your own family of killing somebody else in the family must feel like having your soul poisoned."

I said, "Homicide is not one of the family values Pat Robertson would encourage, as a rule, but it does crop up from time to time. And that's not counting, of course, all the subtler intrafamily assassinations that don't involve bloodshed and therefore aren't against the law."

"Operating a family business must be particularly tricky," Timmy said, "since business decisions have to be fairly hardheaded and Freudian undercurrents can only muck things up. And then when the business starts to fail, all kinds of old family furies must be let loose."

"According to the literature—so I've heard—family businesses tend to fall apart, if they're going to, when the third generation takes over," I said. "The first generation founds the business, the second builds and

secures it, and then the third-generation fuckups arrive and run the whole thing into the ground. The Osbornes are not unique in this, although there's something especially ugly about a newspaper of the Herald's history and caliber being wrecked as if it were just a thoughtlessly situated Chinese takeout."

"How did the Herald end up near bankruptcy, anyway? Edensburg's economy should be solid—tourism and the canoe factory are both holding up—and there's no other paper up there to compete in any serious way."

We turned off busy Madison Avenue and onto cozy Crow Street, with its brick sidewalks and historically beplaqued town houses. "I'll find out more about the Herald when I meet with Janet tomorrow," I said. "But I know newspapers everywhere in the country are having a tough go of it with newsprint costs way up and ad revenues being drained off by junk mail, shoppers' guides, cable TV, and whatever else is hurtling down the information superhighway toward us."

"The trouble with the information superhighway," Timmy said, "is that it's a brave new highway mostly carrying the same tired information, and worse. And it's destroying institutions like the Herald, where the quality of the information is still considered more important than the extent of the profits that are piled up delivering it." A thoughtful pause. "I guess I'm beginning to sound like a fogy. Don, am I becoming a fogy?"

"You were always a fogy."

"I forgot."

"Gramps Callahan."

"Gramps when not Grumps."

"Except, Timothy, your fogyism is appropriate in this case—as it is, I've noticed as I get older, on any number of occasions. Commercial enterprises with social consciences are getting swallowed up by soulless conglomerates with superior technology, big bucks, and a habit of tossing workers by the thousands out on the street. And the Edens-burg Herald, if it's grabbed, will represent a classic example of the trend. It stinks. If somebody in or outside the Osborne family is using murder to hurry the process along, I'd like to interfere if I can."