What You Don't See by Tracy Clark

Author:Tracy Clark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2020-03-12T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 20

Peets’s inner office was even more depressing than the space out front—a cheap desk; two cane-back chairs, one behind the desk, one in front of it; and boxes upon boxes of forlorn Veritas issues left to rot, as if they couldn’t find a home anywhere. Peets caught me looking. He slowly maneuvered around the boxes and sat down behind the desk, wincing as he did so.

“It ain’t much, but it coulda been,” he said.

I eyed the lumpy chair in front of me, then sat down on it. “You and your son sued her. I know why. But you lost your case, and she got rich. You’re still angry about that.”

“There you go again, trying to tie me up. I haven’t laid eyes on that woman in over four years. I took my last look on the courthouse steps. Henry was there with me.”

“Your son.”

He nodded. “We watched her prance down those steps, all high and mighty, cool as anything, and then slip into a long black car and drive away. We took the bus home, poor as a couple of church mice then, and now.”

“You haven’t seen her, but have you reached out in any way? Letters maybe. Flowers?”

His laugh sounded like it rattled something in his chest. “Send that harlot flowers? I wish I would. And there isn’t a thing I need to put in a letter that I didn’t say in my court papers. She knows where the Peetses stand, yes, ma’am. She knows for sure.”

“You couldn’t prove she stole your ideas.”

“Fancy-talking lawyers and tricky statutes and such. Peets versus Allen, this and that. When it came down to it, it was a ‘he said, she said’ thing.”

“How’d she steal from you to begin with?”

Peets leaned back in his chair, repositioned his leg. “Henry met her at some community meeting. She was big into public relations then, working for some fancy outfit and all. The way he told it, they started talking about what each of them could do for the community, and Henry started in on his idea for Veritas. He said she seemed real interested in how it could all go. Thought she might agree to back us. Turns out she was interested, all right, only not for us, for her. She took everything but the name and beat us to market by six whole months. By the time we got out there, she had already pulled in most of the advertisers and the readership we were counting on. We were dead in the water. We couldn’t get nobody interested in Veritas—sponsors, ads, nothing. The community could maybe keep one magazine going, not two.” He looked around the ratty office. “I can’t afford to keep people on full-time, even part-time. One ten-page issue four times a year, that’s Veritas now. Meanwhile, she’s living high on the hog, the money just rolling in for her. I hear now they’re giving her her own show, which will suit her just fine. High and mighty, yes sir. Always at the center of everything.

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