Patterns of Swallows (30 page)

Mom was in an extraordinarily
chatty mood. Ruth let her words spill out largely uninterrupted.

Half-conscious questions nagged
at her.

But there was a fair-sized
settlement for Mrs. Weaver. I saw the agreement myself. So where
did all that money go?

But still, the nagging of the
half-conscious questions didn't break the surface, and so Ruth could
ignore them.

*
* *

Personally, I'm not able to
believe in coincidence though many thinking people do.

I can't stretch my imagination
to believe it was the hand of coincidence that pulled the settlement
agreement out of the Weaver file for Ruth to see. Or that laid up
Marcie sick at home on that certain day some weeks after that first
small incident. Or that mixed the fate-bearing letter in with all
the mail addressed to the mill which had fallen upon Ruth to sort on
that particular day, seeing Marcie was at home sick.

Ruth barely glanced at the
envelope when she opened it.

When she came back to look more
closely at it later, she saw the return address was a Vancouver one
but there was no name to go with the return address. It was just a
plain envelope, and the address was typed. There was no handwriting
to give any hints as to the importance of its contents.

From the envelope, she could see
how the mistake had been made. After all, it was addressed to A.A.
Turnbull. And Angus Andrew Turnbull was certainly Gus Turnbull's
name – as it had been his father's before him and his
grandfather's before his father's ... though in real life, the
surviving Angus Andrew Turnbull was simply Gus Turnbull, and A.A
Turnbull was usually used only in reference to the business –
A.A. Turnbull Enterprises.

It had been sent to A.A.
Turnbull's home address rather than the mill address, but seeing that
it was addressed to A. A. Turnbull, from a quick glance at the typed
envelope, Gus must have understood the missive to be
business-related.

So as he often did whenever
business-related mail arrived at his home address, Gus had gathered
the envelope up without opening it to bring to his secretary for her
to open and sort and deal with. Gus couldn't be bothered with his
business mail until after it had run the ice-blue gauntlet of his
secretary's eyes. So much of his business-related correspondence was
unimportant and a waste of his time.

But not that particular letter.

And if Marcie had been the one
to open the letter, being the loyal, businesslike, no-nonsense
secretary that she was, very likely nothing more would have come of
the it.

But it wasn't Marcie's icy blue
eyes which had chanced to read the letter. It was Ruth's warm
(sometimes fiery), brown ones. And something more did come of it.

And I can't convince myself that
it must all have been coincidence. Maybe with only two or three of
those elements, but not with all of them taken together. The timing
of all those events should make even the hardiest adherents to a
coincidental view of the world suspicious of their creed.

Before Ruth was able to take in
that she was reading something she was never meant to read, she was
far enough along that she found herself powerless to stop. Or at
least, she thought, there would be no point in stopping. She knew
enough of it. The damage was done. She might as well know all of
it.

Gus
,
the letter began in a large, upright handwriting.

This is the last time I plan
to write to you about this matter. If you don't follow through on
our agreement, I'm going to have to take action. I know you think
you're safe and that I won't take any steps forward for fear of
incriminating myself. It's at the point where that doesn't matter to
me. Even if I'm disbarred for it, I'd like to see justice done in
this case.

It was never my intention to
see you get off scot-free, living in fine style while a widow and six
fatherless children practically starved on the streets. Or worse.

I admit, I always knew better
than to believe your sob story about not having the money, about how
the legal fees almost broke you, and about needing to pay off the
amount over time and all the rest. The offer to double my fees in
exchange for a little more time told me you had more money than you
claimed. I admit, greed played some part in my decision. But more
than greed, it was cowardice.

I admit, I was a coward. At
that time, being young and reasonably inexperienced, I thought you'd
be able to make good on your threats, that you really did have that
kind of power in the town.

But in the end, it wasn't you
that ran me out of Arrowhead. It was conscience, and conscience has
had me running ever since, but I'm tired of running from conscience.
I've had enough. Act on this matter as you agreed. Or I'll act.
This is my last word on the subject.

Yours Truly,

M. Seneca

By the time Ruth reached the
bottom of the page, the story was told. Her half-conscious, nagging
questions had never fully surfaced till then, but they were answered
at the exact moment they reached her consciousness.

The reason Rahel Weaver and her
family had never lived as though they had received the large sum of
money from the out-of-court settlement with A.A. Turnbull Enterprises
was because they had never received the large sum of money from the
out-of-court settlement with A. A. Turnbull Enterprises. A
self-confessed greedy and cowardly (yet not entirely unconscionable)
lawyer had wheedled her into pursuing the case in the first place.
Then, he had been alternately bribed and bullied into ceasing to act
for her once he'd received his cut. Until a belated conscience
jabbed his memory.

How much of this had Rahel
Weaver understood? Very little, Ruth suspected. Or if she'd
understood the terms of the agreement and the money that was owing
her, doubtless she had felt herself unable to take any steps toward
seeing it collected. She'd had to lean all her weight on the broken
reed of an untrustworthy lawyer. A circumstance Gus Turnbull had
obviously counted on in his calculations.

Ruth was left momentarily
stunned. She hadn't trusted Gus Turnbull, but she hadn't thought he
was as bad as this. She'd had very little previous contact with
out-and-out corruption, and she didn't know what to do about it –
what she could do about it, what she should do about it.

After replacing the letter of
revelation in its envelope, without bothering to analyze why she did
it, she reached down below her to slide the letter between the frame
and the seat of the office chair she was occupying. It was almost an
instinctive action.

She couldn't take the letter
with her when she left for the day. Yet she couldn't give it to Gus,
either. Not right away. Nor could she leave it lying around. Her
only option seemed to her to hide it in the office, and the chair was
handy.

She had to think it out, what
she was going to do.

*
* *

The knowledge of the letter
burned a hole in her conscience that evening. Mom noticed she was
preoccupied and asked what was the matter.

"Just something that
happened at work," Ruth answered. "I have to think it
through is all."

"Something bad that
happened?" Mom asked, concerned.

"I don't know. Maybe.
Yes, probably. I'm sorry. I can't talk about it. I wish I could."

Mom respected her answer, and
the subject was dropped.

But the subject wouldn't drop
out of Ruth's mind. As welcome as it would have been to do so.

I can just
forget about it
,
she told herself.
I
don't need to say anything about it. I'll slip the letter into the
pile of mail tomorrow, let him find it on his own, and then I won't
have to think about it anymore. It's not my problem, anyways.

The
Weavers have endured everything they've endured because of other
people's apathy or fear. Are you going to add your own to the pile
of injustices that have been heaped on them?
another
voice in her head asked.

But it's none of my business.
I wasn't supposed to read that letter. I can just pretend I didn't.
It would be all the same as if I never had.

But you
did,
said
the other voice.

But they're managing fine,
now, anyways. And it's just money. It can't bring Joe Weaver back.
It can't do any real good.

It's not just the money.
It's the injustice.

And at that juncture, her eyes
landed on the plaque that Mom had hung on the kitchen wall. It was
meant to be a soothing scene, a waterfall in lush woodlands. The
scene may have been soothing, but the Bible verse beneath the
woodland scene wasn't. At least not to Ruth, at least not then.

But
let judgement run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty
stream – Amos 5:24,
it
said.

But what can I possibly do
about it? There's nothing I can do.

You could show him the
letter and let him know someone else knows about it. Threaten him
with exposure if he doesn't pay all he owes them.

That's blackmail. That's
just as wrong. That's stooping to his level.

That's an excuse.

Haven't I gone through
enough? Why this, too?

But she had no answer for
herself on that point. Just the inexorable knowledge that a courage
beyond her own was required to live this life of hers.

I'll lose my job!

At that point, the first voice
of her internal dialogue took the wrong tack by speaking out its main
argument openly.

If that was all the fight was
about, there was no fight. The fight was over. There were certainly
bigger things at stake than her own job and her own skin.

She read the verse on the plaque
one more time and knew what she had to do. None of this had happened
by accident, and the next move was up to her.

She had a small moment of
feeling a kinship to a certain biblical queen.

*
* *

"Mr. Turnbull, do you have
a minute?" Ruth asked, peering around the door of the inner
office. It was the very start of the day, but she wasn't going to
waste time. If the thing had to be done, it wouldn't get any easier
by postponement.

"I am in the middle of
something."

What Gus appeared to be in the
middle of was leaning back in his chair and gazing out his window
with a self-satisfied expression. He was almost smiling.

"It's important."

"Oh well, come in then.
This can wait till later, I suppose."

He turned his attention to her,
then, still looking pleased about something. It wouldn't last long,
Ruth knew.

She took a deep breath. She'd
stayed awake half the night rehearsing what she was going to say.

"When I was opening the
mail for the mill yesterday, there was a personal letter in with it.
It was from Manuel Seneca."

"And?" the pleased
look was gone. An alert one took its place. But not an anxious one.
No doubt, Gus saw her as no threat. Not yet.

Ruth's prepared speech had never
gone much farther than its opening line. But she kept on, trusting
the words to be given to her.

"I didn't realize it was
the kind of letter I shouldn't've been reading. I wouldn't have if
it hadn't been in with the mill mail ..."

"Look, Ruth," Gus
interrupted. "If you're worried you'll be in trouble, don't
give it a thought. Just give me the letter, and we'll say no more
about it."

It wasn't too late yet. She
could still turn back. But she knew in her heart that she couldn't.

"No, I'm not exactly here
to apologize for reading it. It was a letter you gave me to open and
read, so I did. I realized after I'd read it that you wouldn't have
given it to me if you'd known what was in it, but that wasn't my
fault ..."

"What is this all about,
then?" Gus said, his manner moving from avuncular to brusque.

"Well, maybe I should
mention first that before I'd read this letter I'd also found the
settlement agreement you have on file that Turnbulls' had made with
Mrs. Weaver. That was just by accident, too."

"Ohhh, I see," said
Gus, exhaling the first word in a long, perceiving breath and leaning
back in his chair, eyeing Ruth from under slitted lids. "Come
now, Ruth. Come down off your high horse, and let's call a spade a
spade. This is about blackmail, is it? Funny! I didn't think you
were the type, always pretending to be so honourable and all the
rest. Guess it just goes to show ..."