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Page 5.
Chapter 4.
 Lexa Whiston hesitated a moment, then knocked on Grandfather's office door.
"Come in!" the familiar voice shouted. As she opened the door, he was fanning away the smoke from a hastily doused cigar. "Turn on the fan!" he added cantankerously.
She turned a wall rheostat, and somewhere behind the mahogany paneling of Grandfather's huge office, fan blades chirred into life with a faint sound like knives being sharpened.
"Sit down," he said. Then, as she sat on the edge of an uncomfortable seat, he kept his face turned away from her. His jagged profile was a shard of disappointment. "You deceived me."
She twisted her fingers together. No matter how often she'd rehearsed this meeting, in whatever heroic colors, she now felt, as always, awed and terrified. She fought to keep a quaver from her voice. "I tried to tell you a hundred times, a hundred different ways."
"You deceived me," he repeated.
"Grandfather," she said, "I never deceived you. You paid for my college education, and you insisted that I major in business, which I did."
"You minored in English, knowing you would never come to work for me."
"I never planned that. I minored in English because, well, it's my life and my education, after all, and I wanted some part of my education to be mine. Not yours. And I didn't plan this all along. I was just keeping my options open."
"Options!" he exploded softly, glaring at her. "I structured an entire corporation for you so you could get in and move up quickly, as I have done for Arthur. You could be a vice president in less than five years. You could earn ten, twenty times what that sweatshop will pay you. Didn't I teach you any common sense?"
It was Lexa's turn to grow hot. "Oh, first you didn't teach me to be honest. Now you didn't teach me any common sense. Why would you want a person like me to work for you in the first place?"
"Don't twist my words around," he said. "Lexa, I love you." He implored: "Why don't you reconsider? I could buy you a publishing company, a small one, that you could run as a hobby. That was Arthur's suggestion when he heard."
Arthur Robinson was Lexa's fiancée. She had stalled her return from her final summer term at SUNY until yesterday expressly to avoid a scene with Arthur.
"We both care greatly for you," Grandfather said clumsily.
She gritted her teeth. They were both suffocating her. What Arthur did not, and must never, know was that she'd just nearly had a summer affair with a young literature professor named Xavier Stinson.
"You have changed somehow," Grandfather observed, chagrined and clueless. "Is something the matter?"
"No," Lexa breathed, "for the first time, nothing is the matter. I know what I want to do, and I know I have the right to pursue my dream."
Grandfather shook his head, regarding her painfully. His anger seemed to have lapsed momentarily. "Maybe you will reconsider," Grandfather said softly. "My dear little Lexa, you don't know..." He shook his head, overcome by some dark, secret emotion. Pain glittered in his eyes. "Even Max Dusenbery indicated that you would be best to stay in business with me for the immediate future."
Lexa curled up a corner of her mouth. "That old faker. Are you still listening to his nonsense?" She did not want to press it, or insult Grandfather, but it had always struck her as unfathomable why a tough old pragmatist like her Grandfather would dote on a penniless old clairvoyant, a senseless hanger-on to the Beering money ride.
Grandfather said darkly: "Max Dusenbery has been like family to me most of my life. He has a lot of things to say that make good sense."
She sighed. She knew from long experience that there was no sense in arguing with him on certain subjects. Politics, religion, business, and Max Dusenbery were four such subjects. "So Max Dusenbery has his nose in my business too."
"He had a terrible dream," Grandfather said. His eyes glittered wetly. "He saw a series of women killed by being thrown into clocks. He was certain one of the faces was yours. For heaven's sake, Lexa, listen to me. Do as I say. Don't take that job."
Lexa snorted. "Grandfather, that's the oldest scam in the book. A woman dies in a mysterious way, and he sets up a prediction to scare you. Or me. Or both of us." She lifted her briefcase, getting ready to go. "I'm sorry, Grandfather, I already took the job. I start tomorrow."
Grandfather turned away again. He looked furious. The anger was back in his eyes.
"Won't it be enough," she pleaded, "that Arthur will be working with you?" Arthur Robinson was already on the fast track in Beering Robinson, a special subsidiary investment brokerage Grandfather had created.
"You deceived me," Grandfather repeated dully.
"We'll all play our roles," Lexa said hotly. "Arthur can be the grandson you never had. I don't make a very good grandson, Grandfather, no matter how you push me." She reflected on that for a moment, in the icy silence. She'd been a tomboy anyway, and he'd pushed it further by buying her only boys' clothing, no dresses; until puberty, when she'd rebelled, abetted by her mother, and that was where the growing apart had begun. "I can be Arthur's loyal artsy little wife," Lexa said. "I'll put to use all that breeding I learned in those summer camps Mommy sent me to. I'll hold parties, serve coffee and cookies, keep lists of everyone, pick who is invited and who isn't, who is promoted and who is assassinated. Isn't that enough?"
He turned only his face toward her and said with that horrible crazed Beering power look she feared: "I'll have to think this over very carefully, Alexa."
She picked up her briefcase. "I'll go now, Grandfather. I'll... I'll call you soon."
His silence, raking her back with deadly claws, seemed to say: We'll see, my dear. He had never spoken it outright, but the threat had been there before on one or two irrational moments, like the time she'd run away during high school, and the time she'd been caught hosting a marijuana party for her college friends, in his summer home on Montauk: "Push me, Lexa, and I may just disown you. This is a vast fortune, and I want to be sure it gets passed on into responsible hands."
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