Snake (Signal Bend Heritage #2)

Prologue

the previous fall

––––––––

Drumming her manicured nails on her leather-wrapped steering wheel, Autumn Rooney watched the twenty-something try to navigate her way into her Mini Cooper while juggling her phone—on which she was holding an animated conversation—and a cardboard tray barely containing four large coffees.

She stopped, set the tray on the top of her Cooper, and leaned back against it to settle in for her gabfest. In the only potential spot anywhere near the coffee shop.

Autumn was going to kill her. She was going to step calmly out of her own car, stroll placidly to that bright red Cooper, and waterboard the inconsiderate twit with those coffees.

With an agitated flip of her arm, she checked her watch. Oh. Actually, she had almost ten minutes to spare. Rather than perpetrate her first homicide, Autumn took a long, deep, cleansing breath and tried to find a drop of serenity somewhere in her head while she waited for the twit to clear out of that spot.

Not actually late but stressed as though she might fall into a hole in the space-time continuum and lose the time she needed was Autumn’s steady state. From the moment her eyes popped open in the morning, usually three minutes before her alarm, to the moment the melatonin kicked in at night, she ran at full speed, trying to do everything, be everything, get everywhere. Even things she did for herself—salon days, yoga, twice-weekly lunches with her dads, monthly trips to The Fashion Mall with Ida—had all the relaxation of a cage match ... at least until a couple glasses of Jameson were warming her insides up.

Worried about her stress, her dads each had a regular lecture about ‘work-life balance.’ They weren’t wrong; she’d read all the same influencer posts, seen all the same videos. She knew all the same trendy buzzwords. But they’d also pushed and supported her all her life to chase all her dreams, be all she could be, kick the Man straight in the face with the Louboutins they totally expected her to be able to afford.

Guess what? You couldn’t both grind your way to the top and kick back and smell the flowers. And Louboutins only came with the grind.

Autumn had decided to wait and smell the flowers at her funeral.

On some days she thought that lengthy rest might not be all that far off. She was thirty-four years old, and she was exhausted. Though she loved food and made a fair effort to eat healthy, really she lived on caffeine and protein bars. But she was building the life she wanted, so she kept going.

The spoils of the daily cage fight that was her life: in addition to several pairs of Louboutins and a wardrobe full of designer labels, she had a gorgeous condo (in a historic school building!) in Broad Ripple Village, she’d already paid off her grad-school loans and repaid her dads for the down payment on said gorgeous condo, she paid off her credit cards every month, and she drove a BMW i5.

A few months ago she’d been made Vice President of Commercial Development at MidWest Growth her poor bio-mom wanted no contact, and Autumn had never felt a need to meet her, nor any shame about her conception. She knew who she was: the daughter of Eliot March and Richard Rooney.

She adored her fathers, and she felt blessed that they’d chosen her. They had given her a wonderful life full of love and joy, and with plenty of privilege. But as a child her very existence had always been perceived as political. In the suburban Indianapolis town she’d grown up in, and the private school there she’d attended, she was almost always the only one in her class with even one gay parent (who were out and proud, at least), let alone two. At home and at school, anywhere and everywhere, there were always people who believed she shouldn’t have the home she had. People who accused her dads of being ‘groomers’ and other terrible things. People who called out nasty slurs while she and her dads were just trying to walk by. Conversely, there were people who looked on her family like a museum—or a zoo—exhibit, with little condescending smiles and unwarranted, unwanted comments about how ‘brave’ or ‘inspiring’ it was for her dads to be out in public with her like a family.

Autumn was used to being a token. Now she meant to make it work for her. So if the Charlton Isleys II and III wanted to consider her a ‘diversity hire,’ she didn’t care. When Chase got drunk and commented on the sleek fit of her skirt or the neckline of a blouse, she smiled and let it pass—and wore that cut more often. He liked her hair long and loose, so that was how she wore it.

If he ever actually touched her, she’d put the heel of her Louboutin So Kate black-patent pump through his jugular, but he could look all he wanted, and she’d give him something to look at.

Taken as a whole, people were jerks. Straight men, additionally, were mostly libido-addled morons. Autumn would use whatever tools she had at her disposal to climb over every lump in her way.

––––––––

~oOo~

––––––––

Autumn finally entered the coffee shop with almost five minutes to spare, but her dad Eliot was already seated and had been there long enough to have ordered, collected the order, and arranged their table into his own personal nest. He sat there, posed like he was sitting for a painting, and sipped his coffee. Another coffee and what Autumn hoped was a pumpkin muffin sat before the empty chair across from him.

His face lit up like a spotlight when he saw her. “Gingersnap!! There’s my girl!” Her father had dozens of nicknames and endearments for her and added to the list regularly, but ‘Gingersnap’ was one of the oldest and most common.

“Hi, Pom.” She kissed his cheek and got two brisk pats of her cheeks in return. “You look good.”

He did look good. Pom (a portmanteau of Papa and Mom that she’d come up with when she was still in Pull-Ups) was a slender, beautiful man who had no doubt been considered a twink back in his youthful clubbing days. Though he was past sixty, he was fighting the natural aging process with all he had, and he still had a Timothée Chalamet thing going on.

It was cliché, and of course it didn’t work this way in all or even most queer families, but her family had a pseudo-traditional aspect to it. Neither dad had been the ‘wife’ in the relationship; that framing was reductive and offensive. But one of her dads had strong, stereotypical Mom energy—that would be Pom—and the other had strong, stereotypical Dad energy: Richard, whom she called Pops.

Autumn had not lacked for a parent to help her learn makeup or fashion or any of those so-called ‘girly’ things. Her ‘motherly’ advice had simply come with a twist. And she’d learned how to change a tire, chop wood, take care of minor home repairs, and all those so-called ‘manly’ things from Pops.

They’d divorced during her senior year at Cornell, and she hadn’t been surprised. They’d done all they could to shield her from the crumbling of their marriage, but last few years had been noticeably tense, and Autumn was no fool. Their breakup had had traditional Mom and Dad energy too, she thought. All about who was or was not supporting and appreciating whom.

Those who thought same-sex marriage was an aberration or abomination had clearly never really known one. Marriage was marriage, just as love was love. It succeeded or failed for the same set of reasons, no matter the gender and genitalia involved.

“Thank you, lovey,” Pom said as he drew a hand through his (now artificially) dark locks. “You look tired. You’re sagging around the eyes. But you wear that Chanel like Coco herself designed it for you.”

That was Pom: a dollop of criticism sweetened with a dusting of praise.

Autumn ignored the criticism and smiled at the sweetening. She smoothed her hands over the tobacco brown skirt of the 1990s suit. As a natural ginger, she stuck primarily to neutrals and earth tones. “Thank you. It’s vintage. Just got it last week.”

Pom gasped with dramatic flourish. “You went to the Toggery without me?”

Autumn laughed and sat down. She took a long, grateful sip of her flat white before she replied, “As I recall, someone left me on read for eight full hours last week. I can’t be held culpable for anything I might have done without that someone during those hours.”

“I was with a client who needed handholding through a complicated wallpaper selection.” Pom was an interior designer. “If you’d said in your text that you were planning a pilgrimage to the Toggery, I would have gotten rid of her sooner!”

Autumn smirked and took a bite of the muffin Pom had bought her. “You schmooze, you lose.”

He sighed theatrically. “The corporate world is making you hard, Ginge.”

Probably he meant it as a lighthearted poke, but his tone was serious. That criticism was less a dollop and more a bolus, and it hadn’t come with a sugary layer. Autumn swallowed thickly and had another sip of coffee. She let the hurt roll through her and out, and she didn’t draw attention to it by countering.

He wasn’t wrong. She’d worked hard to turn her skin to steel so she could move through the world without bleeding. But she didn’t want her dads to bounce off.

They sat in quiet for a minute or two. Then Pom made a wry rhetorical pivot. “Speaking of hard, how is your Pops?”

An affectionately irritated chuckle and an eyeroll were Autumn’s first reply. Her dads had been apart for a decade, but as long as she was between them, they’d grab her arms and play tug of war. Pom in particular. “You promised not to do that to me anymore.”

“I promised not to pull you into the middle again,” he clarified. “I’m just asking how he is. Because I care. I’m a very caring person, you know.”

“Yes, you are. But you’re not a big forgiver and forgetter.” She let that sit until he shrugged petulantly. “Pops is good. I’m having dinner with him tomorrow. I’ll tell him how much you still care.”

“He gets dinner? When did he graduate to dinner? Why do I only rate coffee?”

“Pom.” She filled those three letters up with a lecture and wrapped them in a boundary.

And he backed off. “I’m sorry. Truly, Ginge. That was a crappy thing to say. Not an excuse, but I’m greedy for every moment I can get with you, and it feels like that’s less and less time every year. These thirty-minute coffees are great, but ...”

Something she suspected was true for every divorced family, no matter the orientation of the parents: fighting over the kids didn’t stop when the kids grew up. Instead, it became their problem to handle.

“It’s dinner this week because I had to cancel our coffee on Monday,” she explained. “An important meeting went long, and I couldn’t get away. But it’s not a regular thing. My regular thing with you both is coffee every week and dinner for holidays and special occasions. I won’t let us lose that, no matter how busy work gets. I promise.”

Pom reached across the table and picked up her hand. “I worry about you, Gingersnap. You go-go-go all the time and never rest.” He sighed. “Remember when you wanted to be Patti LuPone?”

Laughing with true amusement, Autumn squeezed her dad’s hand. “I was ten, Pom. Besides, I don’t think the life of a Broadway legend is filled with a lot of lazy days and hammock naps.”

––––––––

~oOo~

––––––––

For decades, MidWest Growth then the Work from Home movement had gained enough momentum to fundamentally change corporate culture. Nowadays, most corporate workers in the United States were at least hybrid if not fully WFH. Less than twenty percent were fully in the office Monday through Friday.

The giant skyscrapers of most American downtowns had stood empty or close to it for years, but eventually the moribund commercial real estate market—of which MWGP was a commensurately moribund participant—had finally figured out how to pivot. Now most of those once-empty offices were apartments and condominiums, shops and markets, entertainment and dining venues. America’s downtowns had come roaring back to life, and the corporate real estate landscape had been remade.

MWGP had leased out two of their own floors and now called only the top floor of their building home. The other floors were a mix of smaller corporate headquarters, a boutique executive hotel that claimed five floors, several floors of luxury condos, and three floors of mixed-use space.

Half of the penthouse floor, the half overlooking the White River, was the MWGP executive suite, where large, windowed offices were a perk, even if they remained empty most of the time. The other half of the floor was a ‘bullpen’ situation, an arrangement of ‘work stations’ that could be claimed by anyone working in the office, bordered by a dozen closed-door offices available for meetings or work that needed to be done in some privacy.

Autumn now had one of those large, windowed offices in the executive suite but she, like most of her peers, was generally there only a couple days a week. Mondays started with an executive breakfast meeting, which usually ran almost to lunch; since she had to be in the office for that meeting, she generally stayed through the day. And Thursdays she led her own meeting in the bullpen suite, gathering all her direct reports together to keep track of their projects and discuss future plans (something like that could be done remotely, in Teams, except that the Isleys wanted them done in person). She hung around the office on that day as well. Otherwise, she worked from home or, much more likely, in the field. Real estate, whether you were selling a suburban rancher for $350,000 or building a forty-story corporate headquarters for $350,000,000, was not really an at-your-desk kind of job.

Which was ironic, considering the industry’s decades-long devotion to building offices few corporations had really needed to use since the birth of the digital era.

As Vice President of Commercial Development, Autumn generally kept those thoughts to herself with her colleagues. Her job was to make more commercial buildings, not make a case they weren’t necessary. However, when she needed to drag a wooly mammoth of a C-level exec into the modern era, she did not shrink from making her case, in clear, direct language, that the age of giant steel and concrete penises was over.

After coffee with Pom, since she was within fifteen minutes of the office and had the time before her next meeting, Autumn swung by. Chase spent a lot of time in the office—most of it spent wandering aimlessly about, seeking someone to be in awe of him—and he owed her a decision on her latest project proposal.

As she set her Coach satchel on her desk, she paused and looked around. The office was technically unnecessary, yes. However, it was hers, and she’d worked her ass off to get here. Her life had been nothing but work and her dads for years. Even her nightlife was mostly entangled with work; she was far more likely to be at a show or a pricey restaurant with a client than with an actual date. Between the demands of her job, her own expectations for a potential partner, and the legion of losers flooding dating apps, her dating life was a corpse. She hadn’t had sex in almost two years.

But she had this: mahogany furniture, leather chair, lush carpet, a beautiful view. It would do.

––––––––

~oOo~

––––––––

She spent about twenty minutes going through her email, mainly so she could enjoy her hard-won office for a bit, then went out and across the suite to Chase’s corner office. In the traditional model, his assistant sat guard at her desk outside his door.

“Hi, Ms. Rooney.”

“Hi, Lisa. Is he in?”

“He is.” She leaned in with a conspiratorial hunch. “And just between you and me, he’s bored. I keep hearing his putting toy thing.”

Autumn grinned. Her boss belonged in the 1960s. “I’m just gonna knock.”

With Lisa’s permission granted in a nod, Autumn went to the wide, beveled door and knocked, then ducked her head in. He was indeed playing with his putting toy thing.

Charlton Isley III was forty-five years old and had the good looks that only great wealth and a mother chosen for her ‘good breeding’ could create: thick, dark hair, going silver at the temples and stylishly shaped by a monthly $700 cut; broad shoulders and a flat stomach shaped by a fully equipped home gym and full-time personal trainer and nutritionist; a ruddy bronze complexion shaped by thirty-six holes every week the weather allowed and two weeks at Telluride every Christmas; perfect, blindingly whitened teeth and Lasiked blue eyes. His nose was getting a little veiny and ruddy, shaped by a weekly consumption of probably three or four bottles of obscenely expensive scotch, but otherwise, he was pretty much the alabaster pinnacle of handsome wealth and privilege, and the top of Indianapolis’s ‘Most Eligible Men’ list.

He hadn’t married yet and had no children, which vexed Charlton Isley II painfully, but Chase wanted no limits on his enjoyments, no siphons on his resources. He’d be one of those crumbling elderly magnates snagging a nubile twenty-something to spit out an heir at the last minute. For now, he was what happened when a Sigma Chi guy reached the corner penthouse office.

Autumn detested him. But she knew exactly how to manage him.

“Chase? Got a minute?”

He looked over his shoulder and grinned brightly. “Autumn! Always got a minute for you, beautiful. Come in!”

She came in, leaving the door ajar. “Working hard today, I see,” she observed with a smirk carefully calibrated to ride the line between flirtatious and snarky.

He chuckled and tapped his silvered temple with the hand still holding his ... putter? (she hated golf and strove to know nothing about it). “You know I do my best work like this. The brain needs room to think.” He swung around and headed to the credenza at the far side of the room. “Would you like a drink?”

“I like to wait until after lunch before I start boozing,” she answered, keeping her balance on that fine line that made her actual condemnation feel like play.

He checked his Panerai Luminor watch. “Oh, look at that. 10:50. Get us some coffee instead.”

Autumn kept her eyes on his, her smile in place, and said nothing. Nor did she go out for coffee.

“Actually ...” He went to his desk and picked up his phone. “Lisa, bring us some coffee ... please.”

That task appropriately handled, he returned his attention to Autumn. She could tell that he was starting to feel a little picked on, so she tossed him a treat. She asked, “How late in the season can you golf?” and sat before his desk as he launched into ten minutes on the trials and frustrations of loving golf in a part of the country where the weather was hostile to the activity a good chunk of the year.

They were halfway through their coffee before he finished his rant and said, “I know you didn’t come in here to talk about golf. What’s up, my sweet?”

She always let such offensive, totally inappropriate ‘endearments’ roll away unremarked and kept her focus on her goal. “Have you made a decision about my proposal?”

Chase relished moments like this. He leaned back in his throne-size chair and put his hands behind his head. “Right. Refresh my memory. You had a catchy name, right?”

“Heartland Homesteads. For the past decade or so of our small-town initiative, we’ve established dozens of properties, and we’re gaining purchase in those communities for further development, but it’s a constant fight with the residents. We’re spending too much on lawyers and PR just to get to the point where we can break ground. I think the problem is we’ve been using an outmoded idea of what kinds of developments small towns want. They don’t want fast-food franchises and auto-parts chains. They already have cheap restaurants and shops, owned by locals, and the owners and workers of those businesses feel threatened by our developments. My proposal is to develop what we call ‘lifestyle centers’ in urban and suburban areas, but with a more rural vibe. The kinds of shops that foster—”

“You’ve already given the presentation, hon. I don’t need it again.”

Autumn hated being cut off, and she detected some impatience in Chase’s tone. Shoot. He’d asked her to ‘refresh his memory’; now she understood he’d meant that as a power play. Was he turning her down?

“And where do you want to pilot this plan?” he asked.

She’d laid all that out in the presentation he’d just told her not to give again. “Signal Bend, Missouri.”

She stopped there. In the presentation, she’d given all her reasons it was a great pilot location: a historic town that had gone through a long cycle of decline, rebounded, and now was vibrant and bustling, with an impressively curated schedule of homey events through the year, and with some sightseeing cachet as both the shooting location of a major movie a couple decades ago and the actual location of the true events that inspired the movie. They had a quaint kind of retail, antique shops and the like, but residents had to drive twenty miles or more to reach other stores and services. It was a nearly perfect location for her project.

(There was one possible complication: her research indicated that the same motorcycle gang that had been at the center of the situation the movie was about was still calling the shots in Signal Bend. But Autumn wasn’t worried. If she could manage the corporate elite of a major city, she could handle a few ignorant biker apes.)

She was not about to give Chase another opportunity to cut her off and tell her she was repeating herself, so she didn’t ‘refresh his memory’ again.

Chase wanted his employees to be wholly committed to and deeply enthusiastic about all things MWGP. He often said if employees wanted his respect, he needed to see that they bled green and blue (the colors of their logo). He also wanted those employees to know—and to feel—how far above it all he himself was.

He sat in his leather throne and studied Autumn long enough to make it awkward. Understanding his ploy, she did not shift or fidget. She sat serenely still and watched him watch her. She’d sit exactly as she was for the rest of her life before she’d give the slightest impression that she was in any way uncomfortable.

Chase broke first. “Well, I didn’t promote you just because you’re such a lovely decoration. So let’s see what you can do. Go forth with this Homeland whatever, and let’s see what you can do.”

The jerk already knew what she could do, and not even Charlton Isley III would put someone in the executive suite because he wanted to have sex with her. She let all that roll past and smiled. “Thank you, Chase. I won’t let you down.”

His affable affect slipped from his face like a discarded Halloween mask. “If you do, you won’t get a chance to do it again.”