Beauty: A Novel Read Free Page A

channel that made Elizabeth Island, she saw signs to the industrial park, which was not big but which was real enough to look familiar. It had an engineering group and a circle with medical offices; it had professionals and contractors and somebody’s little tech component division. It had the new plant for Elizabeth’s Fish and its latest corporate mask, Elizabeth Seafood Products.
    Carol drove past the corporate offices and the executive parking. She drove around behind the plant itself, which was a good-size box.
    Here was a two-hundred-year-old company, originally a family company, with brand-new parking for at least a hundred cars, all the lines still bright and white on uncracked asphalt after a first winter, the earth still raw where the edges met the woods and where the snow was gone except for the plow leavings. It was very nice and very ample parking for a very shiny new plant that Carol knew had state-of-the-art equipment, from its processing lines to its wrap-and-stack to its cold facilities, which included some tricky automated truck-to-freezer cold receiving and pallet-to-truck cold load. It was a new turnkey plant with great employee parking.
    And twenty cars in the lot. More parking lot than employees. More building than employees.
    Carol would have expected the plant to have lost a shift or two, but she had also assumed there would be a sizable workforce to keep the place generating the profits, however meager, it was declaring. Whatever their respective faults, the Germans and Japanese were not likely to have been knowing stewards of a completely fraudulent factory. They would both, however, have relied on the operational reports from the local management.
    Carol came to any burial with questions. This time she had more than usual because Baxter Blume had bought the company so cheaply and so quickly that due diligence had gone out the window. But Carol’s strength, “her meal ticket,” as Baxter liked to say so frequently, was her “knee-jerk” sense of things. That was Baxter’s way of saying that it didn’t matter if Carol couldn’t read a sophisticated balance sheet because at the undertaker level of things, common sense was more useful.
    What was her knee-jerk here?
    On the map, Elizabeth Island was a small fist of land that pushed out of far northeast Massachusetts into the Atlantic. It had a harbor that used to support a substantial fishing industry, but that industry had been declining for more than twenty years and had been all but gone for at least five.
    Yet here was a brand-new, state-of-the-art fish plant, in the woods no less, all but idle.
    Carol would have to bury the company no matter what, but she’d want to get senior management away from the cash register in the next ten or fifteen minutes.
    She circled back to the front, where the executive parking lot was sparsely but expensively stocked and where six landscape guys with a flatbed and a pickup and a mini-backhoe were getting the Elizabeth Seafood Products (ESP) public grounds ready for spring sod.
    And here came—who? The president of ESP? She thought so. Another call came in from Remy, but she didn’t answer. She was into it now, whatever the problem might be. She took her time getting out of the car and putting on her jacket, and she locked the car before facing the president. She let him come to her.
    She smiled and walked a few steps to meet the president, to show him some respect, to honor the fact that he’d come out in shirtsleeves on a cold afternoon.
    “Carol,” he said in a good imitation of a down-market Baxter, and they met beside a midsize Mercedes. Maybe it was his Mercedes, and maybe, Carol thought, that made him feel okay. He smiled and held out his hand.
    She shook it and said, “Mr. Mathews?”
    “Pete, please. We didn’t think we’d see you until tomorrow, but I’ve had my assistant keeping an eye out the window for prowlers. Nice little vehicle you have. How do you like the looks of our new home?