The Shares

Winnie had carried two messages on Friday, and Camille had answered both at the bench without putting down her palette knife.

The first was that he would be at the end of the dock at eight, as before, by the cedars. The second was longer. Pike meant to tell the board who Tilly was. Gideon wanted to say it first, with his own name on it. He also wanted to lay the three envelopes on the table, fronts up, with nothing taken out of them. If she said no to either, he would keep quiet and let Pike do his worst.

“Tell him yes to both,” Camille had said. “The fronts only. And she won’t be in the room.”

So at five to eight on Saturday she was on the kitchen porch with a tray in her hands, and her daughter was sitting on the top step with the jar between her red boots.

It was a clear morning and already warm. The wedding tent stood on the lawn, white and enormous, with a hundred and twenty chairs set out in rows in front of it. The window had been open an hour. Nadia had both ovens and Josie had the till, and the line went down past the lilacs as usual.

“There,” Tilly said.

He had come out of the cedars. He wore the navy jacket over a white shirt and dark trousers, which were the bottom half of a suit. He walked the dock without turning his head and sat down at the end.

“Mémé?”

“Seven fifty-eight,” Lucille said from the bench.

Tilly unscrewed the blue lid. She held her fist over the jar and moved her lips. Camille put the tray on the rack and stood still. She had four tiers of cake in the cold pantry, a board at eleven and a bride at four. She gave this the minute it needed anyway.

“Eight.”

The glass rang against the other four.

“That’s five,” Tilly said. She screwed the lid down and looked at the small figure on the dock. “I can’t ask him today, because he’s too far. But it’s the day he knows. Will you ask him for me?”

“I’ll be in the room when it’s decided. I’ll tell you myself, at lunch.”

“A real answer.”

“I’ve never given you the other kind.”

Tilly nodded. She sat on the step for the whole hour with her chin on the lid. At nine he stood and went back by the cedars, and she carried the jar across the flagstones in both arms.
***
At eleven o’clock Camille walked into the dining room in clean whites, with her name over the pocket and the blue binder under her arm.

Bea’s painters had finished on Wednesday. The walls were Meadow Light, and with the west windows open the room did look as though outside had come in. The tables had been pushed into one long one. Eight directors sat at it with bound books in front of them. Four of them held every share in the company. Three were grey men from banks and boardrooms, who by the company’s rules advised and did not vote on a sale. The eighth was a lean woman with cropped dark hair and a legal pad, who sat at Gideon’s left hand and kept the minutes. Camille guessed that she was Imogen Farr, and that she had once written I am not sure he does.

Gideon was at the head, with his back to the lake. He stood when she came in. She let him.

Bea sat on his right in a striped shirt, turning a pencil. Desmond Pike was halfway down in the charcoal suit, with the green pen in his pocket. At the foot, facing her son down the length of the cloth, sat a woman with silver hair who did not let her back touch the chair. She looked at Camille for exactly as long as was polite. Camille looked back for the same time.

Behind her the pass was full. She did not need to turn round. She had heard them come in, Arlo and Doreen and Emmett with his hat off, Shelley and Curtis at the back, Winnie in the green cardigan with the wooden buttons. Lucille had Tilly behind the tool shed with two baskets, choosing strawberries for the top of a cake.

“Chef Bouchard will present the kitchen,” Gideon said. “The figures are hers. She’ll take questions from any shareholder.”

He sat down. It was the first time she had heard his voice in twelve days.

She did not open the binder. She had gone over it for a week and knew every line.

“Turn to page nine,” she said. “I’m going to give you what has already happened, and then what I think will happen, and I’ll tell you each time which one you’re hearing.”

Pages turned.

“There’s a window on the kitchen porch. Last year it was open fifty-two mornings and took ninety-six thousand dollars. It was the only line at this inn that made money. Your memo didn’t mention it, because the last owners kept it off the website. This year it opened on the first of May, in the mud, and took two thousand three hundred and ten dollars. That was a record, and it has been beaten since. As of last week it’s open five mornings. I’ve planned the weekdays at seven hundred dollars and so far they’ve done better. That last part is ten days of evidence, so don’t lean on it.”

One of the grey men smiled at his book.

“Two cafés in Burlington take forty dozen pieces a week from me, since the first of June. The price is two seventy-five for a croissant and three fifty for a kouign-amann, with no sale or return. The orders are in the appendix, signed. One of them has raised hers. The delivery costs nothing, because your linen van was going up there empty.”

“Who found that?” Bea asked.

“Mr. Hallett did. He read the linen contract.” Camille went on. “Memorial Day weekend. Twenty-two rooms sold out of twenty-two, for the first time since 2019. Ninety-six dinners on the Saturday. The building took sixty-one thousand four hundred dollars in three days. That isn’t a forecast. Mrs. Ostrander ran the tape twice and so did I.”

She saw Rosalind Hallett look down at the page and then, briefly, out of the window at the tent.

“Weddings. With the north wing shut, this inn turned away six last year. With it open there are eleven on the book, deposits paid. The first one is on that lawn at four o’clock today, and I’d be grateful if we finished by noon, because I have a cake to fill.”

Somebody behind the pass coughed to cover a laugh.

“Now the part that hasn’t happened. The plan asks you for one point nine million dollars in repairs over two years. That’s bathrooms, wiring, the boathouse pilings, the kitchen and a generator. I lost power for six hours in May and saved three thousand dollars of dough with picnic coolers. On that money, with every line cut by fifteen percent from what we honestly expect, this inn loses ninety thousand dollars this year. Last year it lost four hundred and ten. It breaks even in 2028.”

She closed her hand on the back of the empty chair in front of her.

“Against that, Alder Shore will pay you six point four million dollars, once, by Wednesday. It’s a real cheque and I won’t tell you it isn’t. You’d get it one time. After that you’d have fourteen houses here and no inn, and nineteen people behind me would be looking for work in a county that hasn’t got it. I’m not asking you to vote for them. I’m telling you they’re in the number.”

There was silence. Pike had uncapped nothing. He raised one long finger.

“A question, Chef. Your window, your wholesale, your weddings. A fair reading of page nine is that the plan rests on one pair of hands. What becomes of it if those hands leave?”

“Most of the window would follow me down the road,” Camille said. “Mr. Hallett asked me that in April and I gave him the same answer. It’s a risk, and it’s written on page fourteen, because I put it there. Since the fourteenth of June there’s a second baker in that kitchen who laminates as well as I do. Every month she’s there, the risk is smaller.”

“And do you intend to leave?”

“I intend to bake tomorrow at five. I don’t make promises past what I can see. You of all people know what I do with an offer I don’t like.”

Pike inclined his head and lowered the finger.

Winnie gave the bookings from the end of the pass, in four minutes, without notes. Then it was the rooms and the roof, and Gideon stood up.

He did not open his book.

“Before I say a word about rooms, the board is owed a disclosure,” he said. “Chef Bouchard has a daughter. She was five in March. She’s mine.”

He said it plainly, to the whole table. Behind Camille nobody at the pass moved. They had passed the bread on it six weeks ago, but none of them had heard it said until now.

“I spent the summer of 2021 at this inn under my mother’s name. I learned in April that I had a child here. I put this property on the acquisition list myself, before I knew, and I’ve spent eleven weeks on it since I did. I have a conflict, and it’s as plain a one as a director could have. So I won’t vote my forty-five shares on the sale. Miss Farr will record me as abstaining.”

Bea’s pencil stopped. One of the grey men said, “Gideon,” under his breath.

Camille’s fingers had tightened on the chair. She had agreed that he could say the first part. Nobody had mentioned the second. Forty-five was every vote he had, and he had just set it down. If I find you’ve kept nineteen people in work as a present to me, I’ll despise you. She had said that across this same room’s width of steel, in April. He had found a way to make sure it could never be so, and it left the inn hanging on a woman at the foot of the table who had not spoken.

“There’s a second matter, and it concerns an officer of this company.”

He took three envelopes from his inside pocket and laid them on the white cloth, side by side, fronts up.

“In the autumn of 2021 Chef Bouchard wrote to me three times at my mother’s house. The second letter told me she was pregnant. I never saw any of them. They were taken out of the post in the front hall and returned to her unopened, with those four words across them. The ink is green. Everyone at this table has had a memo in that hand.”

Every head turned. Pike sat with his hands folded and looked at the envelopes.

“It’s mine,” Pike said. “I’ve admitted it to both of them. I believed I was protecting a young man and a company in a bad season. I didn’t know what was in them.”

“He also told my mother that nothing had come. Twelve days ago he took Chef Bouchard an offer of two million dollars for her silence. She sent it back.” Gideon’s voice had not risen. “And the board will have my own part, so that nobody can hold it over this vote. I gave Chef Bouchard my word in writing that there would be no lawyers. I had papers drafted behind her back within five weeks. When she showed me those envelopes, I knew the hand at once. She asked me whether I did, and I said no. I let that stand for six days. Miss Farr holds the file. That’s the whole of it.”

He sat down.

Camille heard Arlo breathe out through his nose behind her. She kept her eyes on the cloth. The envelopes lay there in her own blue ballpoint, in front of eight strangers, and she found that she could bear it. They had been a secret for almost six years. Now they were evidence, and she preferred them that way.

Pike cleared his throat.

“None of that alters the arithmetic,” he said. “The chief executive has told you himself that he can’t be trusted to weigh it. I move that the company accept the offer of Alder Shore Homes, six million four hundred thousand dollars, before it lapses on the thirtieth. I vote my ten shares for the motion.”

“Ten for,” said Imogen Farr, writing. “Miss Hallett?”

Bea put the pencil down.

“I spent a week trying to get under her numbers,” she said. “I rang the cafés. I rang the roofer. I took another ten percent off on top of her fifteen, to be unpleasant, and it still breaks even in 2029. I’d back that from a stranger. Twenty-five against.”

“Twenty-five against. Mrs. Hallett?”

Rosalind Hallett had not opened her board book for some minutes. She was looking down the table at the nearest envelope, the one with the deepest dents. Camille watched her read it. Jamie Rourke was written there in a young woman’s hand. Rourke had been Rosalind’s own name once, and her father’s, and REFUSED was printed across it in the ink of forty years of Christmas cards.

She raised her eyes to Pike.

“No,” she said.

“Twenty against,” said Imogen Farr. Her pen moved. “Ten for. Forty-five against. Forty-five not voting. The motion fails.”

The noise at the pass started and was hushed at once, by Winnie, with one hand.

“I have a second motion,” Gideon said. “I’ve no conflict on this one. I move that Desmond Pike be removed as chief operating officer and as a director of this company, as of now. I vote forty-five for.”

“Twenty-five for,” said Bea.

Rosalind did not look at Pike this time. “Twenty,” she said.

“I vote ten against, for the minutes,” Pike said quietly.

“Ninety to ten. Carried.”

Pike stood. He was the tallest person in the room, even bent. He took a brass key and a plastic card from his waistcoat pocket and laid them on the cloth beside his unopened book. He looked once at the envelopes. Then he turned toward the foot of the table.

“Rosalind.”

“You told me nothing had come,” she said. “I repeated it to my son. Good morning, Desmond.”

He went out through the lobby. Nobody watched him go except Emmett Delisle. Emmett had put a bundle of forty-one stakes by the front door that morning, with a label on it for Alder Shore to collect.

Camille turned round to the pass.

They were all there, crowded shoulder to shoulder along the steel, and every face was fixed on hers. She had promised them at a table of chicken pie that they would hear it from her.

“It stays,” she said. “The inn stays. That’s a real answer.”

Arlo whooped. Doreen had both hands over her face. Emmett put his hat back on, indoors, and took it off again. At the back Shelley Gebo was pushing through to Winnie.

“My envelope,” Shelley said, crying and laughing. “Winnie, give it back. Don’t you open it.”

“It’s the twenty-sixth. I said the twenty-seventh,” said Winnie, whose own eyes were streaming. “I’ll burn it tonight and save you the trouble. Curtis?”

“The cheese plant can whistle,” Curtis said.

Camille let it go on for a full minute. Then she said, “We’ve a hundred and twenty for dinner,” and they scattered.

When she turned back, the grey men were shaking hands, and Rosalind Hallett was standing three feet from her with a handbag held in front of her like a breastplate.

“Chef Bouchard. I am Rosalind Hallett. I have been instructed not to write to you or call on you, and I have obeyed. I should like to know what you permit.”

She did not smile. She was plainly a woman who hated to ask, and she was asking. Camille thought of Lucille on a folding stool with a thermos.

“My daughter sorts lake glass on the kitchen porch in the afternoons,” she said. “She hasn’t been told who anybody is, and today isn’t the day. There’s a bench. If someone sat on it, she’d probably explain the colours. She won’t want to be argued with.”

“I have recently learned to listen,” Rosalind said. “Thank you.” She inclined her head and went to find her daughter.

The room had emptied. Imogen Farr was capping her pen. Gideon came round the end of the table alone, with the three envelopes in one hand and something red and gold in the other.

He stopped a yard away, which was as near as he had been since the fourteenth of June.

“You wrote that I should bring them back when you said where,” he said. “You haven’t said. I thought it had better be here.”

He put the envelopes into the tin, in the order of their postmarks. He pressed the lid until it clicked and held the tin out across the yard between them.

Camille took it. It weighed what it had always weighed.

Each envelope had been slit along its top edge, neatly, with a knife. Her mother’s address was unbroken on the back of every one.

“You abstained,” she said.

“Yes.”

“She might have said yes to him.”

“She might. Then it would have been sold on true numbers.” He looked very tired, and quite calm. “I couldn’t be the one who kept it for you. You told me that in April.”

She did not answer. She had strawberries coming in two baskets, and vanilla cream to whip, and a child to tell at lunch. She put the tin under her arm with the binder.

“I have a cake,” Camille said, and went through the swinging door. Her face was hot, and she kept her hand tight on the lid.
***