Chapter 20
Twenty
Now
Wyatt
One thing I know for sure: If Howard has any kind of evidence about what’s been happening tonight, I’m the only one involved. Not my brother or sisters, not my friends, and sure as fuck not CJ.
I’ll burn this whole place to the ground if it keeps her out of trouble.
Howard’s paunchy belly squishes against me as he crowds close and hisses, “Where the fuck is Maxine?”
Immediate mental gear shift. If he’s looking for Maxine, he’s still in problem-solving mode or he’s looking for someone to dump blame on. My alarm ratchets down by at least eighty percent.
I steer Howard toward the edge of the room for this conversation.
“I’m assuming she’s at home,” I say. “Yesterday was her last official day.”
“But she was here,” he says, looking around frantically. “I had her activate the employee phone tree.”
As fun as it would be to try to convince him that Maxine was never actually here, I’m not sure that serves the immediate goal.
“I did see her earlier, but I think she only stopped in to say goodbye to everyone, then headed home.”
“Get her back,” he snaps.
“I can’t, and neither can you. She’s not a Sounder employee anymore.” My patience for this man is gone. “We had a retirement cake for her yesterday, remember? You took the biggest piece and gave her a brass clock.”
Howard’s eyes sweep back and forth over the carpet as he sorts through his memories to confirm that I am, in this one instance tonight, telling the god’s honest truth.
“Dammit.” He slumps, looking defeated for the first time in all the years I’ve known him. “How are we going to fix this?”
“Fix what?” I ask, playing dumb. “So far so good, right? The food’s been great. The drinks are creative. The potential investors seem to be getting along, other than Bethany’s husband not liking birds.”
“The birds!” Howard explodes, apparently past caring who overhears his distress. “The fucking birds! Who puts birds in the middle of a Christmas party?”
“That was all you, though, wasn’t it? The architect.” I hide my smile and tilt my head in an expression of concern. “Maxine said you signed off on every contract. “
“Yes, but—but—I’m very busy!” He sputters. “I trusted Maxine.”
“Of course you did,” I say soothingly. “We all did. She’s going to be impossible to replace.”
But he’s already on to the next complaint.
“And what do you mean the food is great? The food is torture! Who’s the chef? I want him fired!”
“I’m sure Legal can review the contracts to see if he failed to deliver on his one-night contract, but—“
“Fuck,” Howard seethes.
He’s a man at the end of his rope. Time to keep fraying it.
“Okay, I tell you what,” I say soothingly. “Why don’t I come back to your table and see how it’s going?”
He looks at me with naked hope, and I could almost feel bad for him, if not for every retiree whose savings he stole and the millions he pocketed in kickbacks. And, oh yeah, that time he manipulated CJ into nearly destroying my division, almost destroying her career in the process.
We make it to the back of the room where I find one of the private equity bros missing and the other passed out, fast asleep, or faking death on the table, while the rest of the group looks even more miserable.
“Jesus, Howard.” I have to cover my nose with the crook of my elbow as we approach. “What happened back here?”
“I don’t know,” he whines. “There’s nothing wrong with the plumbing. No other part of the room smells like this. It’s like a portal to hell opened up and death poured out.”
It’s the most poetic this man has ever been, and I clasp his shoulder in faux sympathy. “Well, we only have two ‘Twelve Days’ verses and one dessert course left, then you can seal the deal and call it a night.”
He exhales hard, straightens his shirt cuffs, and proceeds, with me breathing shallowly behind him and reminding myself to never get on CJ’s bad side again.
“What an evening,” Radha says when I take the seat next to her and Gerry.
“But memorable,” I say. “Looks like dessert’s rolling out soon, though.”
“How can anybody eat in these conditions?” Bethany mutters.
Franklin, who’s green-tinged despite his ruddy face, brightens and pats his belly. “Never turn down a dessert, I always say.”
Howard laughs weakly along with him and like magic, Drea appears with a tray in hand.
“Mexican chocolate torte. Flourless and delicious.” Her delivery is flat, and it doesn’t change as she deals with the stench and the vehement “no’s” from Bethany and Joanne.
The rest of the table opts for cake, and my tough, tenderhearted sister even leaves a piece next to the possibly dead Dillon or Dale.
Howard’s covetous eyes have followed her progress around the table, and if necessary, I’m ready to haul his ass outside for being inappropriate with another of my sisters. But he’s more excited by the dessert than the server.
“Chocolate cake! My favorite!” He makes a yummy sound and, true to form, grabs the largest slice on the tray.
Oh, Howard. Hopefully by the end of the night, he’ll finally have learned that greed always gets you in the end.
I’m the last person Drea serves, and she taps the side of her nose twice when she sets the cake in front of me.
I return the gesture with a smile, tickled to see her finally getting into the saboteur spirit.
Before we can pick up our forks, Max and company play the second-to-last verse of “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” A murmur sweeps the room when the lights dim, the service entrance door opens, and a man in a cream-colored tunic steps out.
He’s followed by another man in the same pale tunic, then another and another, until eleven men in total form a semicircle on the stage, staring out at the crowd in absolute silence.
If their identical shirts, tan leggings, and hand-sewn leather boots weren’t unsettling enough, each man’s straight, pale hair is styled into a bowl cut.
“What in the fucked-up Renaissance fair?” calls a voice from the opposite side of the room, creating a wave of nervous laughter. None of the performers react in any way, which doesn’t help dispel the culty vibes they’re giving off.
Without warning, the men lift their arms in unison so the objects they’re holding are perpendicular to the floor.
“What are those?” Elaine whispers.
“Panpipes,” I whisper back.
The smallest of the eleven instruments is made up of eight hollow wooden tubes lashed together and arranged in a gently curving line from shortest to longest; amusingly, it’s held by the man in the group who looks like he might’ve played Big 10 football in his youth.
The biggest of the instruments is over twenty tubes long and is held by a man who could give Kevin Hart a run for his money in a short-off.
The other nine panpipes vary in size, as do the men who hold them.
But they’re all radiating the same creepy intensity that has partygoers shifting nervously in their seats, their chairs audibly creaking.
The man in the center, whose sand-colored hair is the darkest in his troupe, lifts his panpipes to his lips and blows one quavering, sustained note. The others join in one by one down the circle until all eleven are holding on the same note.
They hold it for a long, long, long time.
“This is the strangest thing I’ve ever heard,” Radha murmurs, “and we once saw Philip Glass perform ‘Einstein on the Beach’ in a converted warehouse at two a.m.”
“Without intermission,” Gerry adds.
The single note builds and builds as the audience squirms in their seats, everyone’s desserts forgotten, until the man in the center nods, the sustained sound breaks, and the group slides into the opening notes of“Greensleeves.”
After the high-energy performances that came before, nobody in the room is physically or emotionally prepared for the frail, haunting sounds coming from this hive of musicians.
Despite the number of performers, the ethereal music is so quiet that every shuffle, cough, and whisper in the room is audible in the spaces between notes.
When the men perform a key change, I swear to god, a chill goes down my spine.
The song begins to wind down, and everyone at our table relaxes into their chairs with a relieved sigh until the cult leader in the middle drops his chin and the brigade starts the song again, but this time, in the round.
“Dear god,” Gerry whispers as the layers of the song build and build. Just as the intricacy of the music becomes borderline unbearable and the creaking of chairs grows, one of the geese honks.
The music cuts off into abrupt silence, and the smallest piper steps forward to glare at the offending bird in utter contempt for a solid fifteen seconds.
Message delivered, the man slowly steps back to rejoin the group, which seamlessly resumes the song before finally, mercifully, the performance draws to a close.
When the final notes fade away, there’s scattered, uncertain applause, and the pipers file out with the preternatural calmness they walked in with.
“Interesting, uh, choice,” Franklin says as the lights come back up and he tucks into his cake.
The increased brightness in the room rouses the sleeping Dillon or Dale, who snaps upright like a vampire waking at sundown. Without missing a beat, he grabs the dessert Drea placed near his left ear and wolfs it down in two bites.
“Flavortown!” he says with a fist pump.
“Oh good,” Howard says, looking cheerful for the first time in hours. “I love Flavortown.”
He’s about to take his first bite when he pauses and holds the fork away from his mouth, eyeing the dessert warily.
I can practically see the cogs in his brain spin into motion.
On one hand, most of the things he’s eaten tonight have punished his mouth.
On the other hand, no sane chef would put hot peppers into chocolate.
Therefore, his favorite dessert is safe to eat.
Poor Howard. He’s mired in level-one thinking, but my girl’s playing level-three. She anticipated both his sweet tooth and his ignorance of the Mexican tradition of chili and chocolate, and now I get to watch him be taken completely by surprise yet again.
I always did tell him he needed to brush up on game theory.
As Howard lifts the fork the rest of the way to his mouth with an anticipatory smile, I wait with satisfaction for the ultimate betrayal as even chocolate turns against him.
“Heavenly!” he says with a beatific smile when the first morsel hits his tongue.
He swallows with delight and goes back for more, getting several bites in before he jumps to his feet with a noise even more startling than the goose’s song-stopping honk.
“What the fu—” He manages to stop himself from finishing the curse when every single head in the room whips to him. Sucking air through his teeth, he chokes out an apology and grabs a napkin to mop his sweaty brow, knocking the rest of his dessert to the floor in the process.
“Apologies,” he says again, but we’ve all turned to watch the missing private equity bro pick this moment to stroll back in with his hands in his pockets and no explanation for his whereabouts for the past hour.
“What’d I miss?” he asks his partner.
“Dessert,” Dale or Dillon tells him. “Due diligence done?”
“Due diligence done. Strip club time?”
“Strip club time! Who else is in?” Dillon or Dale points at each of us around the table in turn, and we all decline with various levels of firmness.
Howard, who’s now using his napkin to scrub at his streaming eyes and drippy nose, stands to follow them.
“Does this mean you’re still considering investing in our… our…”
His face contorts in pain, and drops his napkin to frantically claw at his eyelids and nostrils.
“Oh my god. Oh my god!” With a bellowed, “Fuck!” he bolts for the restroom.
“That is it.” Bethany tosses her napkin onto the plate. “The birds were already a problem, but this…” She waves at the bathroom door. “I’ve seen enough. My bank will not be investing in this venture, and I suggest the rest of you think long and hard if you’re still considering it.”
Gerry watches her go, then pops one final bite of cake in her mouth.
“Chili and chocolate with just the right amount of heat,” she says placidly. “Flavortown indeed.”
I use Bethany’s dramatic exit and the resumption of the polka-tinged holiday music to slip back to the table with all my friends. CJ hasn’t been kissed in at least twenty minutes, and that simply cannot stand.