Page 20 of Drop Dead
We don’t go ahead until we figure out how to do it fairly. Deal?
It made sense.Deal.
She sent the text with a little thrill to know they were secretly working together. Then she shook her head. God, she needed to get out more if she considered working with Wes exciting.
***
He was officially involved in a covert investigation with Nadine Barbault.
Sitting on his bed, Wes listened to the sound of his mother grumbling at the TV from the living room. Ma wanted to make it clear that although she wanted to talk, she was very specifically refusing to talk to him, although he came straight from the café to fix the dripping tap. He tried pinching his earlobes to reduce the headache that threatened. No go.
He waited.
Three, two, one.
There it was. The guilt. It was the last stage in the cycle of doing his best to please her, failing, and losing patience. If he tried harder to be a good son, perhaps she’d be less…he hesitated over the word, but his sister Amy’s dry voice supplied it in his head.Miserable?
He winced away. His mother had told him countless times over the years that he was the man of the house since his father went back to Singapore when Ella was a baby. He barely remembered his father, except for the smell of his Irish Spring soap. He hated it, although he didn’t hate his father. On bad days, he understood why his father had simply walked out the door and never looked back. He wished he could himself.
On other days, he thought about his sisters and pitied his father for what he was missing.
A new message came.See you Sunday.Then Nadine was gone. Wes stared at the phone for a few more seconds, wishing she was there to talk to about Dot before he came to his senses. Nadine was his competition and only temporarily his collaborator. The fact that they’d had a relatively civil interaction meant nothing. He pulled out his copy ofThirty Pieces of Silverand started taking notes.
Politician James Walton wearing a sand-and-brown-spotted tie. Likea hyena? Opportunistic backstabber from the beginning or terrible 1970s fashion?
He had reached the scene where Walton’s mother says he’ll never fill his famous father’s shoes—Dot had written it with a pathos that made him feel for Walton even as he was disgusted at his arrogant entitlement—when he received a text from Caleb.I’m in town for the weekend. You free Friday for drinks?
It would be good to see Caleb, who was in Calgary for a long-term project for his management company. Wes alternated his Fridays with Amy so one of them was always available to keep their mother company as she watched TV, and this was his week off. Amy insisted an adult woman didn’t need her grown children at her beck and call, but she was a good sister and watched three hours of a Turkish soap opera every second week to give Wes a break.
He set a place and time to meet Caleb, and got back to work onThirty Pieces of Silver. Four hours later, when he pulled up their shared document, it was to find Nadine had entered tabs for the book as well as Voline’s other works. He clicked onThirty Pieces of Silver.
Her first note wasHyena tie. Get list of disgraced politicians from 1950 to 1988 (publication date). One might be Walton.
Goddamn Nadine, always one step ahead.
Then he pasted in the list he’d generated of every publicly embarrassed politician at the federal and provincial level from 1950 to 1988.
Check and mate.
Eight
Nadine sat on the couch nursing a cup of tea and listening to her grandmother and mother chat as they finished preparing lunch. Or as Pohpoh finished, because she took over the cooking whenever she came to visit. Her father passed by with a stack of plates to set the kitchen table since the larger one in the dining room was covered with her brother’s latest school project, which seemed to involve a lot of wires.
“Hey, sis.” Noah poked his head into the room.
She checked out the contraption he was wearing. “Are those welding goggles for that bomb you’re constructing?”
“Funny. It’s a VR headset. Wanna try?”
She shuddered. “No thanks. Those make me nauseous.”
Noah nodded, sandy hair bouncing over the top of the headset. “Motion sickness happens in about a quarter of users, and women are generally more susceptible.”
“And why is that, brother dearest?”
He looked astonished. “Gender bias in engineering, of course. Like most things, VR tech is designed with a man’s perspectives, experiences, and measurements in mind.”
She toasted him with her mug. “Tell Preeti I love her.” Noah’s girlfriend of a decade—they met in eighth grade, and Nadine didn’t know if it was weird or sweet that they’d been together for so long—was brilliant, ambitious, and kind. Nadine loved her.
