The Music of Bees by Eileen Garvin (free ereaders txt) 📗

against his thigh. Rich was a black hole of time on two legs. He could suck up the better part of an hour just stopping by your desk to shoot the breeze. Alice had felt uneasy around Rich even before the office Christmas party six years ago when he’d cornered her under the mistletoe. She jerked away, and his dry lips grazed her neck. Whenever she found herself alone with Rich, she remembered that—the feel of scratchy polyester, his aftershave that smelled like car freshener.

“Morning, Rich,” she said, faking a smile.

“Big day today,” he said, flashing a toothy grin. “You folks in planning ready for our meeting with CP?”

Alice kept the smile on her face and groaned inwardly. Like so many western towns, Hood River had grown with the arrival of the railroad in the nineteenth century. Cascadia Pacific, for its part, had developed from a rail line company into a huge conglomerate that now included fiber-optic lines and right-of-way contracts with tech companies as well as other seemingly unrelated twenty-first-century diversifications. Alice had completely forgotten that the Cascadia Pacific reps were coming that day for the annual interagency meeting. Representatives from Forest Service, farmers alliance, and the watershed group would be there too. Alice knew it was an empty gesture to show CP shareholders that they had good relationships with their small-town nodes, but it was mandatory.

“Ready as we’ll ever be, Rich,” she said.

Rich loved meetings. He took copious notes on his laptop and filed them away for who knew what use. Alice felt sorry for the employees in his department. Sifting through Rich’s constant email thread must be a part-time job alone. Alice stole a glance at her watch. She had a little over an hour to pull herself together.

“. . . Spent the weekend reformatting my reports,” Rich was saying, “so everyone can have access. I keep a master copy on the server. I’m grabbing a coffee at Ground. Care to join me?” He gestured down the street.

Alice couldn’t think of anything she’d rather do less. She held up her mug. “I’m all set. Thanks anyway.”

Rich made no sign of moving out of her way.

“Well, I’d better get to it,” she said, and stepped around him.

“Go get ’em, tiger!” Rich swatted her shoulder with the newspaper as she passed. Alice flinched and felt a lick of anger pass over her.

As usual she was the first one in the planning office. Nancy’s chair was empty, and Bill’s door was closed. She flipped on her computer and found the department profile, which she would need to submit for the CP meeting. She copied last year’s report and began updating it. It wouldn’t take her long. The financials were the main thing. She shot an email to Debi Jeffreys, the office manager, sweating as she typed and marking the subject line “urgent.” Debi was often crabby when asked for such things. Alice would have preferred to get the financials from the accounting department directly, but because Debi was also hugely passive-aggressive, she insisted that all requests go through her. In her email Alice apologized for waiting until the last minute. Debi wrote back immediately with the attached files.

“You’re not the only one who forgot,” she wrote. “But the only one to apologize for waiting until this morning! ;)”

Alice sighed with relief to have caught Debi in a good mood. She opened the spreadsheet, scanned it for the pertinent information, and cut and pasted it into her report, working quickly through the first three pages. The numbers were solid across the board—building permits, transportation filings, taxes. She could do this work in her sleep.

The Hood River County Planning Department was supposed to be a stepping-stone for Alice. But when she looked back, it was easy to track how she’d become lodged there. After high school, she went to OSU and double majored in ag and business. At home, Al was the tree specialist and Marina handled the books. Alice wanted to be prepared to do both. She had graduated with honors and worked for a couple of years at a wheat farm with a small cattle operation in the Willamette Valley as operations manager. By the time she went to Eugene to do her master’s, the little farm had been gobbled up by the booming wine industry. She didn’t think much about it because she planned to return to the orchard.

She moved home in 1996 and worked alongside her father on evenings and weekends. The planning department would be temporary until Al and Marina were ready to hand off the farm. Only that hadn’t happened. Alice had watched things get increasingly difficult for her parents—regulations, fees, and prices too low for the small producers. Then came the spraying regulations. When they decided to sell, she understood, though it pained her.

So she dug in. Her boss, Bill Chenowith, had made it clear that she was first in line when he retired. It was the one carrot Bill always held up—his position as county planning director.

At her annual review in March, he’d thrown it out as a parting salvo.

“You know I’m thinking of retiring soon, Alice,” he said. “I’ve always said you would be the best candidate for the transition.”

She was ready for that challenge. And this past year, work had given her something to focus on, disappear into. Her job might be boring and predictable, but it provided neat, safe borders to operate within. She took a sip of coffee and focused on the spreadsheets. Mindless, mechanical work—it was a relief.

In the conference room, Alice noticed that the Cascadia Pacific rep, a trim blond man from Seattle, was the only person wearing a suit besides Rich. He seemed like a nice guy, despite the meaningless corporate language: “community building,” “shared prosperity,” and “blue-sky thinking.” This was just a demonstration of a small town’s fealty to a big corporation that funded their local grants and made big donations to the schools and parks. In exchange, CP got the right of way to run their fiber-optic