The Passions of Chelsea Kane Read online

  There was more, a thought that lingered in her mind long after she’d mollified Carl with a few light words, blown him a kiss good night, and hung up the phone. If she owned the granite company, she would be the town’s major employer, in and of itself a position of power. If she rebuilt the company so that it brought a new prosperity to the town, she would be the local hero.

  That would be a switch from the infant who’d been given away. She would be in a position to learn whatever she wanted and do whatever she wanted with what she learned. For all she knew, she might simply turn around, sell the company for a profit, and walk away without a single look back.

  BY MID-APRIL BOB MAHONEY HAD ENOUGH INFORMATION TO tell Chelsea that although Plum Granite wasn’t shaky to the point of impending demise, there had been no growth for nearly a decade. According to his sources, the company might have been in more dire straights had it not been for the high quality of the granite, the care with which it was quarried, and the fact that every order was filled and delivered on time.

  “Then the company isn’t in debt?” she asked as they walked leisurely around the Inner Harbor.

  Carl hadn’t come along. Since her return their relationship had grown more rocky. There were highs and lows now. Inevitably the lows had to do with Chelsea’s feelings about herself and Norwich Notch. They were critical issues for her, and there was no resolution in sight. Carl couldn’t understand—and she couldn’t explain—her compulsion to do something for, about, or with Plum Granite.

  But the compulsion was there, which was why she listened closely to Bob’s answer.

  “The company is in debt,” he said, “but only to the local bank. Oliver Plum is ultraconservative. He won’t go to another bank, and maybe that’s good. His debt is manageable. But the banker, Jamieson, is conservative, too. He won’t advance Plum any more money. Plum will have an increasingly tough time meeting his expenses unless he makes a change of some kind.”

  “Does your source think he will?”

  Bob shrugged. “He’s not imaginative. He’ll start with layoffs.”

  Chelsea thought of the parents who couldn’t afford to keep her, perhaps because one or both of them had been out of work. “There has to be another way.”

  “Not without money, and where that’s concerned, the guy’s backed himself into a corner. He has to modernize. He needs new equipment and new facilities. He has to go looking for work, rather than waiting for it to come looking for him. From what I understand, his men are good. He’s the one who’s the problem. He resists change, and that includes looking beyond Norwich Notch for the money he needs.”

  “How much?” Chelsea asked, squinting up at him. The sun was bright and full of promise. It was a perfect day to discuss a challenge. “How much to update equipment, build an on-site prep shed, and establish a system of delivery?”

  Bob slipped a piece of paper from his blazer, unfolded it, and passed it to her. “This list is crude.”

  She looked at the bottom line. The figure was high, though not prohibitive. “What did your source think of the potential for a company like this?”

  “He didn’t think you’d lose money on the deal. Prudently done, there could be a profit. With luck, the profit could be a nice one.”

  Chelsea liked the sound of that, but there was a more immediate issue. “And Oliver Plum? Will he sell?”

  Bob scratched his head. “That’s a hard one to call. The company’s been in his family for a long time. He takes pride in that. The whole town does. Plum Granite is an institution there. But he has four daughters, all married, none of whose husbands want anything to do with the business, so in essence he has no heir.”

  “Why can’t one of the daughters take over the business?”

  “Women don’t do that in places like Norwich Notch.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s a patriarchal society. Women follow their husbands.”

  Chelsea made a sound that gave her opinion of that. Walking on, she said, “Suppose I wanted to buy the company. What would be the best way to approach it? Since it isn’t a public company, there aren’t any stockholders to buy out. It’s just Oliver Plum. How would we get him to sell?”

  “For starters, we ask him outright. It may be as simple as that. He knows the company’s in trouble. He’s not stupid.”

  “And if he says no?”

  “We ask ourselves if it’s worth the effort trying to change his mind.”

  “It’s worth the effort,” Chelsea said. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she was. “I can do something with that company, Bob, I know I can. I have money, and I have know-how.”

  “What know-how? You’re an architect, not an entrepreneur.”

  “I have contacts. I can drum up the clients that Oliver Plum can’t, and I can do it with phone calls, that’s all. Do you know how many architects I know, all as hungry as I am for high-quality stone? Same with contractors. And talk of national monuments and war memorials and government buildings, all made of granite, do you know how many congressmen I know?” She had her parents to thank for that. True, Kevin would be furious if she used those contacts to make a go of a business in Norwich Notch. But Abby had been the one responsible for her learning about Norwich Notch, and if she turned a failing business into a profitable one, who could fault her?

  “What about your own work?” Bob asked.

  “I can do both.” Hadn’t Carl said as much when he’d made an argument for her investing in marriage and motherhood? “So. If Oliver Plum refuses to sell, what do we do?”

  Bob gave her a chiding look but said, “Up our offer.”

  “And if he still says no?”

  “We thank him for his time and leave.”

  But Chelsea didn’t want to do that. “What if I want a piece of that company any way I can get it?” She didn’t care whether Carl did call her obsessed. She wanted into Plum Granite. “Come on, Bob,” she coaxed. “This is your thing. If Oliver Plum digs in his heels, what do we do?”

  He sniffed in a breath. “We try some creative compromising. We wheel and deal. We give him an incentive to go for our plan.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like leaving his family name on the company. Like buying him out but letting him stay on as titular head with a specified salary for X number of years. Like paying him off, plus giving him an interest in the company. There are all kinds of possibilities.”

  “And if he still refuses?”

  Bob stopped walking and turned to face her. “Then we drop it. And I mean that, Chelsea. I know you have a special reason for wanting the company. I don’t know what it is. That’s your business. And it’s your money that you’re spending, both on Plum Granite and on me. But I’m no Don Quixote. If we give it our all and still Oliver Plum refuses, that’s it. I won’t go tilting at windmills. You’ll just have to find another outlet for that passion of yours.”

  Chelsea heard him, but she wouldn’t consider failure. Tucking the shopping list he had made into her pocket, she squeezed his arm and grinned. “Oliver Plum will sell. I feel it in my bones. You’ll have him in the palm of your hand in no time.” She took a deep breath. “So.” She steepled her fingers in anticipation. “When do you make the first call?”

  “HE’S A TOUGH GUY,” CHELSEA TOLD CYDRA AS THEY RAN, one early morning, two weeks later. “He hung up on Bob the first time. The second time, he said no before he hung up. The third time, he said no, then listened to Bob’s arguments, then hung up.”

  “Sweet.”

  “But we’re making progress. Bob and I are going up there next week.”

  “He’s willing to talk?”

  “I don’t know talk. Listen. That’s something.”

  “How about Carl? Will he listen?”

  Chelsea brushed sweat from her forehead with her wristband. “Not yet. I’m not pushing it. Things are too indefinite.”

  “But he knows you’re going to Norwich Notch.”

  “Yup. And he knows why,
vaguely. We don’t discuss specifics. He gets uptight.”

  “What’s his problem?”

  Chelsea had been asking herself that a lot lately. Carl was moody, something he never used to be. She couldn’t believe that it all related to Norwich Notch, but when she asked him if there was something else, he denied it. She felt awful. She didn’t want him angry, any more than she wanted him hurt. She didn’t see why he was either. She didn’t see why her interest in Norwich Notch bothered him at all, since anything that came of that interest would only enrich her as a person.

  “Maybe it’s loyalty to my father,” she said, because that was the only thing she could think of. “He reacts to my dad like he does to his own. There’s the same need to please.”

  “And your dad doesn’t like what’s happening?”

  “Not much.” They rounded a corner and separated to skirt a row of trash cans. When they were running in tandem again, Chelsea said, “Actually, that’s an understatement. Norwich Notch is a thorn in his side. A very sharp thorn.”

  “That’s a sign.”

  “Could be,” Chelsea conceded.

  “Why do you tell him about it?”

  “I don’t. Carl does.”

  “Damn it, why does Carl do it?”

  “He says he’s trying to save me.”

  “By irritating your dad?”

  “Alienating is more the word. But when I said that to Carl, he brushed it off. He says Dad loves me. Like he does. That they both want me to be happy. That Norwich Notch is trouble.”

  “Sounds like they’re avoiding the real issue.”

  “Which is?”

  “Jealousy. They want your time and affection. They don’t want to share you with the past.”

  CHELSEA KNEW THERE WAS TRUTH TO WHAT CYDRA HAD SAID, and she was torn. She wanted to please Kevin. She wanted to please Carl. But she kept returning to the issue of pleasing herself, and selfish as it was, she couldn’t shake it. Norwich Notch represented everything she’d always wanted to know about herself but had deferred. After thirty-seven years, she was growing impatient.

  For that reason, with as little fanfare as possible short of slinking off in the dark, she joined Bob for a meeting with Oliver Plum in Norwich Notch. It was the first of May. Spring came later to New Hampshire than to states farther south; the buds on the trees were just beginning to open. The tulips were in bloom on the town green, though, as were lavender rhododendrons, pink dogwood, and white andromeda, and people were there, enjoying the sun.

  With Bob driving the rental car, Chelsea was free to look, and look she did, trying to take everything in at once. There were window boxes on front porches and swing sets in backyards. There were flags flying—some patriotic, some purely decorative—from many of the houses they passed.

  The street with the house marked PLUM GRANITE COMPANY looked different, too. The grass was greener, the locusts a pretty pale lime, the forsythia bright yellow, the evergreens fresh. In the driveway were the Escort and the Blazer. The motorcycle was missing, which meant that Hunter Love wasn’t there. Likewise Judd Streeter and the truck.

  Chelsea felt a trace of disappointment. She had pretty much guessed that Judd wouldn’t be there, since what they were discussing with Oliver was private. Still, a tiny part of her had hoped to catch a glimpse of him. Just a glimpse. That would be enough to jump-start her fantasies. Judd Streeter was potent stuff.

  Pushing aside the thought, she concentrated on the meeting with Oliver. He had his own lawyer along, a man named Jeremiah Whip, who, Chelsea decided immediately, was too young to have been involved in her adoption.

  Once they were all seated—Chelsea and Bob on straight-back chairs, Jeremiah on a folding chair that had been brought in from the front office—Oliver blurted out, “I won’t sell. You can make whatever offers you want, but if that’s all you got to say, you wasted your time on the trip. I won’t sell. And that’s that.” His face settled into the scowl that seemed its natural expression.

  Bob kept his cool. “Yes, Mr. Plum, you’ve already told me that. Actually, I’m surprised that you invited us up here.”

  “I didn’t invite you. You invited yourself.”

  “But you didn’t say no.”

  “It’s your time, your money. You want to waste it, that’s your choice.”

  “We don’t feel it’s a waste. The waste would be if this company went down the drain. That’s where it’s headed, and you know it. That’s why you’re listening to what we have to say.”

  “I’m not hearing much yet,” Oliver groused in a way that came close to being amusing. In fact, the more Chelsea thought about it, there was something of the caricature to him. With his beanpole build and the backward slick of his thinning gray hair, his bony nose and thin line of a mouth, he was the dyed-in-the-wool Yankee resentful of change.

  While Bob repeated the offers he had previously made and the arguments in their favor, Chelsea’s eye wandered to the photographs on the wall. All were black and white. Most had to do with the business. They had the primitive quality—thick dark clothing, facial expressions ranging from grim to grimmer, a certain technical flatness—that suggested they had been taken around the turn of the century. In one, half a dozen men were frozen looking up from the boulder they were getting ready to move. In another, a stiff row of workers stood before a dinosaur of a bulldozer. In a third, the quarry itself was the subject, a large gray striated canvas on which the men were little bigger than ants.

  Oliver’s voice cut into her study. “We boring you, missy?”

  Chelsea’s gaze flew to his face, and for an instant she felt duly reprimanded. Then she caught herself and said without apology, “I’m admiring your pictures. They certainly give the feeling that this business has been around for a while. Who ran it before you?”

  “My older brother, for three years, until he was run over by a truck. And don’t say how sorry you are. It happened fifty years ago. I forget what he looked like.”

  Chelsea thought that either Oliver Plum was a sad excuse for a human being, or he was lying. She couldn’t imagine anyone being that hard. “Who ran the business before him?”

  “My father. And his father before him. And his uncle before him. Any more questions?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Who’ll run it after you?”

  His mouth spasmed in a perversion of a smile. “That’s what we were discussing. If you weren’t so busy sight-seeing, you’da known that.”

  She folded her hands in her lap. “You have my full attention now, Mr. Plum. Go on.” When he didn’t say anything, just continued to stare, she turned to Bob with both brows raised expectantly. “Was someone saying something?”

  “I want to know what’s in this for you,” Oliver snapped.

  Chelsea pointed to herself. “For me?”

  Silent and unyielding, Oliver held her gaze.

  Assuring herself that if he knew who she was and what she was after, he would have said something before, she said, “A profit. What else would I want?”

  “I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking. Seems to me if you’re after a profit, you can get it bigger and easier somewheres else.”

  “But I like granite.”

  He snorted. “What do you know about granite? You’re an artist.”

  “Architect.”

  “Same difference. You don’t know nothing about business.”

  “I daresay I know as much as you do.”

  “And quarrying? You know as much as I do about that? You know how to drive a crane? Or work a jack drill? Or get yourself down over a hundred feet of ledge without killing yourself? Know what a dog hook is? Or a wedge and a feather? Ever felt the heat of a cutting torch with a ten-foot-long flame?”

  Chelsea wasn’t put off. “I’m not proposing to work the quarry myself—“

  “I do,” he boomed.

  She ignored the interruption. “A good executive has good people for that. You have good people. What you lack is money and direction. I’m saying I can prov
ide both.”

  “I’m saying it doesn’t make sense. And don’t talk to me about a profit. Even if I did let you buy—which I won’t—it’d be a long time b’fore you saw any of that.”

  “A year,” she said. “I can turn things around in a year.”

  “Ba-loney.”

  “And in the process,” she went on, “I can employ a lot more of the men in town than you’re paying now. If you care about Norwich Notch, you ought to listen to what I’m saying. Keep on as you are, and in a year’s time Plum Granite will be even more of a shadow of its former self than it is now. There will be less work for fewer men, and less money for the town. Everyone loses. Sell to me, and everyone wins. You’ll have a tidy sum of money in your pocket, the people of Norwich Notch will have tidy sums in their pockets and in the bank, which will certainly please your banker. And Plum Granite will be on its feet again.”

  “ ‘T’ll take longer than a year for that.”

  She shook her head. “One year.”

  He made a short, shooing gesture, as he might to a fly. “Go home. You got no call to be here. You don’t belong.”

  Chelsea felt an irrational hurt, as though his telling her to leave was an echo of the rejection she’d suffered within hours of her birth. But she hadn’t come this far to suffer or to run. Determinedly she settled onto her chair.

  The room was quiet. Chelsea stared at Oliver. He stared right back, but she’d be damned if she would be the first to look away. Oliver Plum didn’t have a monopoly on stubbornness. She had plenty of her own, and she didn’t care what arguments he made, she wanted Plum Granite.

  Jeremiah Whip cleared his throat. He looked uneasily at Oliver, then at Bob. “There may be a way we can talk business with you,” he said in a timid voice. “We can’t deny that Plum Granite needs money.”

  “We can do fine without,” Oliver barked.

  Jeremiah shot him a nervous look. His fingers rose from his thigh in a furtive hushing gesture. He looked back at Bob. “My client is not prepared to sell the company at this time. It’s been in his family for too long. It’s his whole life.”