Allie settled straight into her job. When she arrived the following morning, several binders full of orientation information were stacked neatly on her desk along with a memo detailing her salary, hours requirement and job description. She was to report to Pat Walden, the Life editor, at 11 o'clock, leaving her two hours to go thoroughly—that was the word in Walden's memo—through the orientation materials.
Pat Walden wasn't an easy woman to get along with; she was an obsessive perfectionist. She was pleasant enough in conversation and was receptive to Allie as her new grunt worker—that's what any writer was to her editor in this business—but Allie quickly learned that to have to rewrite your piece seven, eight times over to suit what Walden had in mind was routine. Parrella was serious about his warning: The work was relentlessly dull and the hours were long. Allie grooved into a routine of leaving her home in Columbus at 6:30 in the morning, sometimes sooner, arriving at the office at around 8:00 if she was going there that day; as often as not she was running around Broxton doing minor interviews, often for another, more senior writer, or checking facts for stories or somesuch. She would arrive home at 7:30, 8:00 many evenings. It was only five weeks before she moved into a small apartment in Broxton, four blocks from the Record & Courier building. She would live there by herself, and it was a tearful farewell with Clara. The two had roomed together for more than two years, dating back into college, and Allie missed having a roommate. But this was her job, and she moved right into Broxton because she intended to stay for a long while, and because she wanted to announce to everyone around her that she was there to stay.
Allie had no difficulty settling into the office culture. She was a very big hit with her male colleagues, not quite so much with some of the females. Pat Walden dumped all the work on Allie she could; her style was to test the limits of a new worker right off the bat. Allie was, in Walden's words, “a bulldog”. She was all smiles for everyone that came across her path, no matter how badly her day might be spinning out of control. When she was overloaded with simply too much work—and Walden saw to it that she was—she did what she judged most important, explained her reasoning when challenged by her boss or colleagues, kept on smiling, and never yielded an inch. She was good at her job, and she knew it, and though she never spoke an unkind word to anybody about anybody, she knew what she was worth and backed down from no one.
Allie quickly made one close friend, Valerie Nierholt, a single 31-year-old mother of one working anonymously in graphics. She went out for drinks with various groups of coworkers on several occasions in those first few weeks and soon enough became an accepted fixture around the office, though everyone she went out with socially noticed she didn't drink; she pleasantly explained she simply didn't care for alcohol, though she didn't mind being around it. She got by with it.
It didn't take long to figure out that the taciturn and often surly Olin Pond was the resident office enigma. No one liked him, but he didn't mind. His manner of speaking—to everyone—was rough and sometimes downright rude, and he carried himself squarely and with his head up. He was not a man to be trifled with, and he had demonstrated so in several incidents that had, during the five-plus years he had been with the paper, passed into office legend.
Those who aggravated him were treated to a display of venomous rudeness that was spectacular in its very subdued nature, in the calm and detached attitude with which he delivered it. There was the time a reporter stood at Pond's desk and shouted at him to hurry with a particular report; Olin tiled his monitor so the gentleman could see it, allowed him to watch as he deleted the report in question from his schedule for that day and rescheduled it for the following day. The furious reporter demanded to see Parrella; Olin called him immediately, and the editor-in-chief told the reporter to learn from this helpful example of why it didn't pay to jump on the secretary's case. That got around the office in a hurry.
Another time, an overworked reporter, who left the paper immediately afterward, exploded in a violent, shouting, semicoherent tirade at Pond when Pond told him his request to Parrella would be handled precisely whenever he got around to it. The poor man ranted and raved for ten solid minutes while Pond continued with his daily duties as though he had no idea anything out of the ordinary was happening. Finally the reporter leaned over the counter and grabbed hold of Olin's keyboard, tore it away from the computer and hurled it across the newsroom. Olin sat back and kicked his feet up on his desk for another five minutes before the reporter stormed off, and then silently retrieved his keyboard. “I could hear it all from my office,” Parrella recalled, “but I learned quickly not to worry; Olin had everything under control. He always did.” There were some rumors that Pond had, once in a great while, been caught being kind to someone, but most everyone agreed he was best left at a safe distance, like fifty yards minimum.
No one knew where he'd come from; that was another subject of much water cooler speculation. He'd shown up not quite five and a half years ago, the veteran workers said, but no one had any idea from where. Those who asked him were told he was from a small town in Michigan, but he refused to identify which town, and rumors developed that he was a reformed criminal or in the witness protection program or such, rumors he found amusing and never took any steps to refute. More than one intrepid researcher had attempted to track him down using the powers of the internet, and had come up empty. Pond was almost never seen in any extra-office social setting, although he did attend company functions and apparently wasn't as unpleasant as expected to have at your table. He simply sat silent and pensive, and no one tried to strike up much conversation with him.
As she’d been everywhere she’d gone in her life, Allie was a tremendous hit among her single male colleagues, to the point that she figured that a fourth, maybe a third of the time she was in her cubicle, some guy was there chatting with her. She didn’t mind the attention and made herself a conversational pleasure. People finally, after a week or two, began to ask what happened to her hand, and she told them she’d lost it in a car accident when she was a child. Normally someone with such an obvious deformity was intimidating to the opposite sex, but Allie was so attractive it didn’t matter. Valerie reported that one man had inquired about Allie’s availability two days after she started, and it took only five before she was asked out by a fresh-out-of-college guy who worked in the print shop. She was impressed by the invitation – normally she would be out of the league of a guy working in printing – but wasn’t interested, and politely said so.
The subject came up in a conversation with Val a few weeks after Allie was hired. Two particular men were persistently hanging around, who didn’t like each other much and were now competing for her attention. One was Jeff Baker, one of the paper’s two primary sports columnists. Twenty-eight and having been a sports columnist since high school, he was a prototypically charming young man possessed of good looks, a 6’3” frame, and a muscular physique he painstakingly maintained. He was also possessed of all the smug cockiness that went with a guy who was used to having whatever, and whoever, he wanted, so Allie’s polite declines of his advances didn’t deter him.
The other guy involved was someone who had just been hired three months before as a staff local news reporter, Shawn Schwartz. He was bright and quick of wit, but, being from New Jersey, he was loud and boisterous, and still fond of the party-every-weekend lifestyle he had enjoyed so much in college. In crowds he was so, but he could be quite polite and charming in individual conversation, whether by nature or good acting skills, who knows.
“So how long did Jeff stay in your cubicle before he let you go home today?” Val asked Allie while they were jogging on a treadmill at the Summit Athletic Club.
“I cut him off after about ten minutes,” Allie said. “He was sure trying hard to be charming.”
“He’s kind of an airhead, but he’s cute,” said Val. “I’d at least go out with him once or twice, see if anything’s there.”
“I’m only a year removed from college, Val,” said Allie. “Guys like him are a dime a dozen. Not all guys just want to get in your pants, but his type gives the whole gender a bad name.”
Val laughed loudly at that. “No, I’m pretty sure it’s all of them, or at least almost all of them.”
Allie grinned. “Well, okay, but that’s not the only thing some of them care about.”
Val puffed for a moment as the treadmill’s speed increased a little. “But look at you, Allie!” she said at length. “You can have any guy in the world you could possibly want. What are you waiting around looking for?”
“That one guy in the world who’s interested in me for some reason other than my looks,” Allie said.
She paused.
“Is Olin Pond seeing anybody?”
Val was so stunned she stopped cold and fell off the back of the treadmill, just barely catching herself before she sprawled on the floor. She stood behind the treadmill and gaped at Allie as though she was completely insane. Who would even joke about that? There was an informal pool among some of the newsroom guys concerning when Olin Pond would finally be arrested for murdering two drifters somewhere in Kentucky eight years ago.
“What did you just say?”
Allie smiled bemusingly and stepped gracefully off her treadmill. “I asked if Olin Pond is seeing anybody,” she said as she dabbed her forehead with her towel and began walking toward the changing room.
Val laughed incredulously. “Olin Pond? You have to be kidding, Allie!” She was assuming Allie would now tell her she was kidding. Allie just smiled.
“Allie!” Val exclaimed. “I’ve been working for the paper for three years and I’ve seen that man smile all of never. He’s not even very cute!”
“I think he’s interesting…” said Allie with a twinkling eye. “What do you know about him?”
Val was walking out of the gym and heading downstairs to the changing room as Allie followed. “No one knows much of anything about him,” Val said. “He just showed up about five or six years ago, out of nowhere, and Mr. Parrella hired him as his personal secretary. Mr. Parrella says he doesn’t know anything about where he came from.”
“Yeah, that's the general consensus,” said Allie. “Mr. Parrella said all he knew about Olin was he was, quote, a damn good secretary.”
“Maybe for Mr. Parrella, but having to deal with him is like walking a bed of hot coals.”
“Oh come on,” said Allie. “He’s not that bad. He’s just aloof, that’s all. What’s so wrong with that?”
“You can’t have a conversation with him,” retorted Val. “At all. That’s what’s wrong.”
“Now, that just can’t be true,” said Allie, even though the several attempts she had already made at conversation had flatly failed. “There’s some way to get him talking. No one’s that cold. So you don’t know anything about him?”
“Well, he fights,” said Val.
“Fights?” Allie said.
“Boxing. The guys in Sports say he fights over at the Sixth Street Gym. You know that place?”
“I’ve heard of it,” said Allie in a somewhat detached voice, as though her mind was elsewhere. “I drove by it a couple of times. It looked kind of tacky.”
“Well, they have some pro boxing. They do fights every other Friday, I think, and it costs like ten or fifteen bucks to watch. I think Alan usually covers the fights.”
“Alan?” said Allie. “You mean Alan Vorstad?”
“Yeah.”
“Why does he cover local club boxing?” Alan Vorstad was the assistant sports editor, and had been with the Record & Courier for fifteen years. It seemed strange someone of his standing would do such a menial task.
“I think because he’s a big boxing fan. Oh! What a horrible sport!” Val shuddered. Who would pay actual money to watch two men try to kill each other with their bare bands? Okay, gloved hands. Not Val Nierholt.
“I used to watch it in school, actually,” said Allie. “Boxers are the best athletes in the world, they say. So Olin’s a boxer?”
“I guess,” said Val, who was now growing genuinely uncomfortable with her friend's bizarre fascinations. “I don’t know anything about it, really, that’s just what the Sports guys have said. It’s fitting for a mean, sulky guy like him.”
“I think there’s something underneath that meanness,” said Allie. “I don’t know if it’s good or bad or ugly, but I’m going to find out what it is.”
“Girl,” said Val, “If you can even so much as get half a smile out of him, I’ll be convinced you’re the most irresistibly charming female walking the planet.” She paused. “Seriously, what about Randy Topper?”
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