Chapter 19
"It's out," Veronica said.
Cordelia had her coat half on. She'd picked up the phone thirty seconds earlier to see whether Wren had written back overnight, and then Veronica's name had come up on the screen instead.
"How much of it?"
"Enough that I'm already in the car." The indicator ticked under her voice.
"A reporter called the duty line at seven.
She knows somebody's buying Hale Capital and she knows it's supposed to be finished by the fall, and as far as I can tell that's all she knows.
She hasn't got a name for the buyer or a number.
She has no idea when we signed anything, which is the only good news I have for you this morning. "
"Who called?"
"Annika Lindqvist. She does finance for the Pacific Ledger, and she's good, which I wish she weren't. Seven o'clock on a Sunday, Cordelia. Nobody makes that call unless she thinks she's holding something."
"Who answered the call?"
"Dinah. She gave her the line about not commenting on speculation, and Lindqvist thanked her very politely and said she'd be running the story either way." Veronica paused. "We've got until four."
Dinah had run communications for four years and had never once needed to be told a thing twice. Cordelia got her other arm into the sleeve. Nine hours, but it was Sunday, which meant half the people she needed were at their kids' softball games and the other half were asleep.
"Has she actually seen something, or is this just talk?"
"Just talk, I think. She didn't read anything out and she didn't quote anybody at me. She was fishing. Somebody's told her something and she wants to know if it's true before she prints it."
"Then it's fixable."
"That's a very calm sentence for ten past seven."
"It's fixable, Veronica." Cordelia had already planned two calls ahead.
Etta Iverson first, because she needed a lawyer's answer on what they could and couldn't say before anybody opened her mouth.
Jo Ferrante at Northstar second, because if Jo heard about this from her own people before she heard it from Cordelia, eighteen months of goodwill went out the window in an afternoon.
"Get Dinah and Lauren Pike into the office.
Petra Voss can work the inside of the building from her kitchen, I don't need her here.
Etta's in Seattle, so she'll have to join by phone. Everyone by eight."
"On a Sunday?"
"Tell them I'll make it up to them."
"They'll come. They always come, that's not the part I'm worried about." The indicator stopped. "Are you all right? I'm only going to ask you once today, so you may as well answer it."
"I'm fine. Eight o'clock." Cordelia put the phone in her coat pocket and went down.
It was already warm outside. It was the second week of June, and the peonies and sweet peas along the harbor walk had bloomed all at once, four blocks of them. She walked past them without turning her head, working out what she was going to say to Jo Ferrante when Jo picked up.
She was at the office at twenty-five past seven, and Wren was already there.
Only the antechamber was lit. Wren had the desk lamp on and both screens up, and her hair was pushed back off her face.
Cordelia had never seen her in jeans in the office before.
There was a news alert open on the left-hand screen.
She'd seen it herself, then, and come in.
Wren looked up when Cordelia came through the door, and for a second she didn't say anything.
"A reporter called us at seven this morning," Cordelia said. "Annika Lindqvist, at the Ledger. She knows somebody's buying the company. She goes to print at four. I can’t stop it, but maybe we can slow it down."
Wren pulled a pad toward her and wrote the name down.
"Then between now and four, the only thing that actually matters is that nobody outside this building finds out she called.
Because the second Northstar hears it from anyone but you, they'll start protecting themselves instead of us, and then we're negotiating with them and the Ledger at the same time. " She looked up. "Have you told them?"
"I'm calling Jo Ferrante within the hour."
"Good." She turned the pad over. "Do you want the deal file pulled out of your office, or do you want it left exactly where it is?"
It was the right question. Paper that stayed put stayed quiet. "Left where it is. The minute it moves it gets copied, and then it's sitting on somebody else's desk."
"Understood.” Wren paused for a beat. “Did you get home all right last night?"
Cordelia looked at her. "Fine. Get me Etta on the phone."
By nine they were all in. Lauren arrived in tennis whites and did not apologize for it. Veronica looked her up and down over the top of a legal pad. "You didn't have time to change?"
"I had time. I chose not to use it." Lauren dropped into a chair. "I have been trying to get on that court since March. Do you know what the waiting list is on a Sunday morning in June? I want it noted somewhere permanent that I was up four-two and serving."
"It's noted," Dinah said, without looking up from her screen. "I'll work it into the statement. Hale Capital does not comment on market speculation, and Lauren Pike was up four-two."
"That's all I ask."
Petra worked from home, calling about every half hour to rule out one more person within Hale Capital who could have talked, and apologizing each time for the dog barking.
Lauren called around, six women she and Cordelia knew between them who might have picked up the same rumor, while Dinah wrote the statement they'd release if the story ran.
Etta stayed on the speaker from Seattle, in and out all morning, her keyboard going underneath everything.
Just after nine, Wren brought coffee in, then left without lingering.
Cordelia was on the phone with Jo, working out how much Northstar's board needed to be told and when.
She put her hand around the mug and drank it while Jo talked.
It was good, the same as always, and some part of her noticed that Wren knew exactly how she favored her coffee.
At half past ten, Dinah's statement came through, and Wren read it before delivering it to Cordelia.
"Third paragraph," Wren said, setting the page down at her elbow. "Any transaction of this nature would be disclosed at the appropriate time. That tells her there's a deal. She'll take that sentence and run with it, and the narrative will be out of control."
Cordelia found the line and read it to herself twice. Wren was right. It admitted too much and would have to change. “Rewrite it. Take out any transaction of this nature. Say we don't comment on speculation and stop the sentence there."
"Taking it out," Dinah said. "That was my oversight."
Wren had left the room by the time Cordelia looked up, and she continued reading her paper. At a quarter to twelve, the room emptied out for lunch, the first gap all morning, and Wren came in with the afternoon's call sheet.
Cordelia went down the sheet. A call with Etta at one-forty that was blocked off til one fifty-five, and a call with Jo was scheduled at two. That was too close. "Move Etta up. Half past one."
"That's right after Teague. Even if it doesn’t run over, you’ll barely have space to breathe between calls."
"I can get off the phone with Teague. I need those extra minutes with Etta."
"Half past one." Wren wrote it, but she didn't leave right away. "The Foundation sent their final numbers over this morning. There were three hundred and four guests, and they cleared their financial target by about eleven percent.”
"Good."
"It was a good night," Wren said, almost as an afterthought.
Cordelia looked up at that. "Yeah, it was. You should be proud of yourself. It went smoothly because of you." She flicked her eyes back down to the sheet. "Send the figure to Dinah, she'll want it Monday."
"I'll send it now." Wren took her pad and left the office.
This was the part Cordelia had always been good at.
Harriet Teague had been an editor for eleven years and owed her nothing at all, which was why she took the call.
Cordelia didn't ask her to kill the story; it wouldn’t have worked anyway.
Instead, she told her the two things Lindqvist had gotten wrong.
She guaranteed that when there was finally something to announce, the Ledger would have it first and hear it directly from her, on the record. Harriet gave her two days.
Jo took it better than she'd feared. Etta used every one of her fifteen minutes. By two, Petra had been through everyone in the building with access and came back with nothing, which made it an external leak—Northstar's own lawyers, most likely, somebody junior who'd talked over dinner.
Etta came back on at half past two. She wanted the date Cordelia had signed the sale, because the clock on how long they could stay quiet started that day.
Cordelia was reading back through the papers and put her hand out for the last page. It was there before she'd finished the movement, open and facing her.
"October third," she said into the phone, and kept reading.
Dinah had the Ledger's business page up on the big screen, and at four o'clock the top story was still about a shipping merger nobody cared about.
Cordelia watched the clock go to five past and then ten past, and something let go in her chest that she'd been carrying since the phone rang that morning.
Nine hours. Thirty years of this, and it still felt like getting away with something.
"Close it," she said. "You'll drive yourself mad."
At half past four, she asked Wren what she thought of the revised statement.
"It looks fine," Wren said.
That morning she had read the same page once and found the sentence two lawyers and a communications director had walked straight past. She'd been like this in April, over the Halvorsen business.
She got very quiet when she was working at the top of her ability, and Cordelia had learned to leave her alone in it.
At five, Lauren asked whether anyone would think less of her if she went home and changed, and nobody would.
"Half past six," Cordelia said. "All of you back in here. Twenty minutes and then I'll let you go."
Somebody ordered in Chinese food at around six, and by half past the cartons had been pushed to the far end of the table.
Lauren had changed out of her tennis clothes and looked worse for it.
Petra was on the speaker. And Etta had stayed on call past nine her own time to be there for it.
Cordelia sat at the end of the table and looked at them for a moment before she started.
Nine years with Veronica and she had never once had to ask her for a thing twice.
Dinah, she had hired out of a dying newspaper and had never regretted a day of it.
Lauren was forty-one and would be running a third of this place within a year, and she was sitting there in a sweatshirt eating out of a carton with her feet on a chair, and Cordelia thought, with the particular satisfaction of a woman who had spent thirty years choosing people: They'll be fine.
Whatever else happens, the people in this room will be fine.
"I won't keep you," she said. "But I've never seen a Sunday go the way this one went, and I want to say so while you're all still in the room. Veronica, you had the news at seven and you were in the car before you called me. Everything ran through you today and nothing dropped.
"Dinah, a reporter called you with no warning at all, and you said exactly the right thing in the first eight seconds. Most people would have tried to be helpful. Then you rewrote that statement four times in five hours and didn't complain."
"I complained."
"You complained beautifully. Lauren, you got off a tennis court to call six women you'd rather not owe anything to, and that's how we found out how little Lindqvist really had."
"Four-two," Lauren muttered, to nobody in particular.
"Petra, you'd ruled out everyone here by two o'clock, and that's the only reason we knew to start looking outside. Etta, you kept us legal all day from three states away, and it's after nine there, so go to bed."
"Going," Etta said, and the line clicked off.
Cordelia looked down the table at each person.
Wren had the day's pages in front of her and a pen in her hand.
"Wren. There was one sentence in that statement this morning that would have handed her the story, and you were the only one who caught it.
You were at your desk at half past seven without anybody calling you.
Every single thing I needed today was in front of me before I asked for it.
I don't know what I would have done today without you. "
"Of course, ma'am."
"Right." Cordelia pushed her chair back. "Tuesday. Dinah, statement final by noon tomorrow. Veronica, twenty minutes for the two of us before the board call. Everybody else, go home and don't answer your phones."
Chairs scraped against the floor as everyone stood up. Lauren took the last of the food with her, and somebody laughed out in the corridor. By the time Cordelia looked up, the room was empty.
She stayed, even though there was no particular reason to.
She sat down again at the end of the long table with the far end of the floor dark and the sky still orange outside and wrote the Monday note.
She'd written one after every difficult day for twenty years, and the trick was to do it before it flattened out into everyone worked very hard, which had never inspired anybody.
She read it back, cut two sentences, and put Wren's name in with the rest of them, because Wren had earned it more than any of them.
She liked it, which she almost never did.
Then she took her phone out of her coat pocket, where it had been since ten past seven that morning, and opened the thread with Wren.
The last two messages in it were still the ones she'd sent the night before.
Wren hadn't answered either of them. It had been a long day for everybody. She'd talk to her tomorrow.
Cordelia sent the note, hung her coat on the back of the door, and sat down to start on Tuesday’s tasks.