Jenny Pox (The Paranormals, Book 1) (26 page)

Jenny followed her finger.  She turned her feet in that direction and wandered outside.  Dr. Goodling stood with her while the valet fetched her car.

“Young lady, you seem troubled,” Dr. Goodling said.

“
Actually, I’ve never felt this happy,” Jenny said.  She had eventually learned that her dad didn’t call Dr. Goodling a “carnie-booth crook” just as a slur.  Dr. Maurice Goodling had, decades ago, been an actual game-booth operator in a traveling carnival.

“
But that’s just the drugs, isn’t it?” Dr. Goodling asked. “How would you like to feel high all the time, without any drugs?  Do you realize how wonderful it feels to be born again, to be part of a new covenant with God through His Son?”

“
I’m okay,” Jenny said.  She watched for her headlights on the driveway.  She wanted to leave.  Something had gone wrong inside the house and she had to leave, but she couldn’t remember exactly what.  The details were fuzzy and wouldn’t sharpen in her mind.

“
Have you studied the Word of God?” Dr. Goodling said.

“
No,” Jenny told him.

“
You should come by my office,” he said. “Call the church and schedule an appointment.  We can talk about the way to righteousness.”

“
Okay.” Jenny watched her car arrive and she drifted toward it.  The valet smiled and gave a joking little bow as held the door for her, and then he closed her inside.

“
Thank you,” she told the valet.

“
Yeah, thanks for the tip, lady,” he muttered as she drove away.

Jenny swerved down the long brick driveway, occasionally slipping off the road into the lawn.  She made it out the gates and onto Barrett Avenue, then pointed the car towards town.   The Barretts owned a buffer zone of farmland around their house, so it was an empty drive for a few minutes.  She felt good inside.  She drove slowly through the night, thinking delicious thoughts about Seth and Ashleigh, images and fantasies full of longing and need.  She wondered when she could see Ashleigh again.

The day after the party, Seth’s father called him into the office, a spacious room located at the back of the first floor.  Seth had never liked the office.  It was well-lighted, but by small rectangular windows near the ceiling, giving the lower part of the room a stuffy, shadowy feel.  As a boy, Seth had been frightened of the collected trophies of past generations: the lion head mounted above the fireplace, the stuffed dead falcon perched on a lacquered limb jutting out from the wall, the big buffalo-hide rug, and the row of heads that looked down on you from the wall as you sat on the visitor side of the desk: jackal, hyena, jaguar, grizzly bear, snow leopard, a big black wolf that always reminded Seth of the Three Little Pigs.  Great-grandfather had been quite the skilled hunter, if by “skilled” you meant “able to hire a gang of men with high-powered rifles.”

Below the heads were a row of old photographs like the one in the back stairwell, depicting Seth’s grandfathers going back several generations, the same men immortalized in oil around the front stairs.  He didn’t know what scared him more as a boy, the dead animals or the stern looks of his ancestors bearing down on him and casting their judgment from beyond the grave. 

The rest of the room was dark wood paneling, like too much of the house.  One entire wall was taken up by rows of pigeonholes and wooden file cabinets.  In the back corner sat a liquor cabinet that looked like it came from an Old West saloon, every bit of it handmade, with no two pieces exactly alike: the rough-hewn drawers and shelves, the iron handles, the thick cloudy glass doors in front of the bottles.  Seth’s father stood there now, pouring amber whiskey from a bottle with a faded, illegible label into two 19
th
-century drinking glasses that had a primitive, not-quite-circular look.

“
Did you still want to talk?” Seth asked.

“
Close the door and have a seat,” his father said.  Seth took one of the chairs, which had wide arms and a hard back, upholstered in leather pinned by brass tacks.  The ancient material creaked under Seth, and it smelled like drunk old men.

Seth’s father eased into a taller chair across the big black slab of the desk, which was carved entirely from petrified wood.  A blue iMac sat on top of the desk, as incongruous in the office as a Roomba sucking up bone fragments and rock chips on a Neanderthal cave floor.  They had a satellite on the roof for high-speed internet, since the TV and phone companies still didn’t offer that in Fallen Oak.

His father placed a glass of the old whiskey, neat, in front of Seth.  Then he raised his own glass.

“
To another year gone,” he said.

Seth clinked his glass against his father’s, and drank a sip.  It was smooth and smoky on the way down.  In his belly, it turned into a fire that burned up his esophagus and into his brain.  He wondered what whiskey became if it aged too long.

“So,” his father said. “Are you still thinking about medical school?”

“
I never was,” Seth said. “I think physical therapy is about my speed.”

“
We looked into that.  It sounds like you’re just a nurse and a personal trainer.  We don’t think you’re setting your sights high enough, Seth.”

“
You didn’t break out the good whiskey to have this talk again,” Seth said.

His dad looked at him for a minute.  He opened a wooden box, lifted out a cigar, and lit it with a match.  He offered Seth one, and Seth shook his head.  Whiskey and cigars, he thought.  The big guns.

His dad eased back in the office chair and smoked.  Eventually, he said, “You’re right.  This isn’t that talk again.  This is a bigger talk.  This is about responsibility.”

“
Okay,” Seth said.

“
It’s not a pleasant word, is it?” his dad asked.  He gestured at the row of dead men behind and above him. “When you look at those old pictures, you see it in their faces.  Makes them all sour.  Like they’ve been carrying a load of bricks on their backs.”

“
They don’t look happy,” Seth said.

“
You can feel the weight of them in this house, can’t you?  The old generations pressing down on you.  I never liked it here as a kid.  Don’t like it now.”

Seth smiled. “Me, neither.”

“We’ve been in Fallen Oak a long time,” his dad said. “The last of the great families, that’s what my father used to call us.  Most people who could leave, already have.  The horse market’s long ago abandoned.  The cotton exchange is just a roofless shell full of weeds.  The textile mill—you probably don’t remember that, either.  And this town really started dying when they built the federal highways.  We’re not any kind of crossroads anymore.

“
Your great-grandfather didn’t keep all his eggs in this henhouse.  He put money out in New York and London, kept the family diversified--he didn’t build this house with just farm mortgages and loans to haberdashers.  Now, we’re seeing some good things in Shenzhen and Bangalore.  That’s where you’ll want to focus during your life, China and India.” His father looked at him carefully, making sure this sunk in.

“
Okay,” Seth said.  He took another nip of whiskey, letting it burn him inside. “China and India.”

“
Now, we have a lot of legacy investments in this town, a lot of assets bringing in bad returns.  There’s negative growth.  There’s falling property values.  There isn’t much future.  So why do we stay here, with the old Merchants and Farmers Bank?”

“
Um,” Seth said.  He took another burning sip, stalling for time, but his father kept looking at him and waiting for an answer. “I don’t know, Dad.  So we can squeeze the last few pennies out of the people that are left?”

“
No.”  He puffed on the cigar, regarding Seth intently. “We could sell out to a national banking chain, if we wanted.  Wash our hands of all this bad debt, all the headaches.  But we don’t, and we won’t.  Because if we did that, one-third of this town—that’s not an exaggeration—would lose their homes or businesses tomorrow.  Most of them, within a few years.  The people would leave, property values would hit rock bottom, the town would implode.  There’d be nothing.

“
There’s a lot of leverage in this town, backed by shrinking assets.  The Merchants and Farmers Bank keeps the town alive on float, month to month, year to year.  We rework credit terms all the time.  We take what they can pay.”  His dad puffed the cigar for a minute. “Now, tell me why.”

“
Because we’re such generous, kindhearted people,” Seth said.

“
No.” He flicked his cigar into a big, wrinkled ashtray made out of a rhinoceros foot. “Because we settled this town.  My great-great-great-grandfather cut down the giant oak at the crossroads to make way for his farm and store.  He left it there as a landmark.  All that is forgotten now.  You don’t even learn about it in school.  No respect for your own history, no knowledge of it.  These kids all think everybody came over on the Mayflower.  And you remember why we moved you from Grayson Academy to Fallen Oaks High in ninth grade?”

“
Because it used to be Barrett Hall,” Seth said.  He remembered that talk very well, too, though it had been hot chocolate instead of whiskey.  “The school we built for the town children, back in the ye olden days—”

“
Back in 1873,” his father said. “The state didn’t take it over until 1941.”

“
But nobody at school knows that,” Seth said. “I doubt Principal Harris even knows.”

“
This town is our legacy,” his father said. “Whether the town remembers it or not.  Whether they think of us as just the mean old loansharks up on the hill.  We have a common history together, all the families, that nobody knows.”

“
So now we keep the town as a wildlife preserve for drunk rednecks,” Seth said.

“
We owe a lot to the families in this town,” his father said. “Their ancestors provided our first fortune, through hard work and diligence.  And suffering.  My grandfather, J. S. Barrett number one, extracted a lot of blood from a lot of stones.  He had his own effective ways of collecting debts.”

“
Sounds like a great guy,” Seth said.

“
Don’t be sarcastic.  We aren’t hunters and killers anymore.  We are investors who look for opportunities in emerging technology and international cost disparities.  But the world of global capital flow is full of con artists, bad information, and every kind of political intrigue.  It takes brilliant minds to cope with the complexity, and with the personalities.  You’ll face that across the world.  And you’ll still have to carry this town on your back.  And that’s why we need to talk.”

Here it comes, Seth thought.  He drank more whiskey to steel himself.

“These two girls you’re seeing,” his dad said, and Seth knew the conversation was about to get a lot more uncomfortable. “Look at Ashleigh.  Smart, ambitious, she knows how people work.  She’s crazy about you.  She would be a powerful ally at your side, a person who knows how to carry responsibility.  And beautiful, on top of that.  God doesn’t make many women like her.  You’d be foolish to throw her away.”

Seth thought of Ashleigh, and immediately the pangs began in his heart, and gut, and pelvis.  He thought of how her body felt in his hands, how her lips felt against his.  He thought of his fingers inside her, while she made Cassie give him head, and he shuddered.  He tried to push those feelings down, because if he let them rise, he would ache and burn to touch her, and he’d be calling her in an hour.  He wanted to call her now.

“But she’s manipulative,” Seth said. “She’s all about controlling people and making them do what she wants.  That’s her talent.”

His dad sighed, then drank, then smoked. “That’s just it, Seth.  That’s what you need.  Someone manipulative, because there are people to be manipulated.  Someone who can be ruthless, because there are ruthless choices to make.”

“I don’t know,” Seth said. “I might meet someone else.”

“
That’s true,” his dad said. “But that’s what you need to look for.  Good human material.  People who can go far with you.  Someone like Ashleigh can be useful.  And there won’t be many like Ashleigh.  Believe me, I’ve met a lot of women.  You shouldn’t be so careless with her.

“
Now, this Jenny Morton,” his dad continued, and Seth looked down at the buffalo-hide rug. “She’s cute, all right.  And she’s from a good family.  Small, tragic family, but a good one.  Her father’s probably the nicest, most honest, most hardworking man in this town.  I’ll bet a thousand dollars she’s the same way.”

“
She is!” Seth sat up, finally getting a chance to smile.  “That’s what I’m saying.  Jenny’s a good person.  Ashleigh isn’t.” 

“
That’s the trouble,” his dad said. “You don’t need nice and honest.  You need smart and manipulative.  You need a thinker and a ball-breaker.  Not a wife who’s just going to be a little pet in your bed.  You can have pets on the side, if you need them--but watch for danger there, too.  Jenny Morton.  What are her plans?  Is she going to college?”