Not in Time Read online

  NOT IN TIME

  By Shawna Seed

  Copyright © 2013 Shawna Seed

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Genevieve McKenna realized – too late, as usual – that she’d made the wrong call.

  She’d seen the traffic on the 10 freeway backing up and debated with herself for the last quarter-mile before the exit, then decided against the side streets at the last minute.

  Now she was stuck.

  She'd be late to work.

  Normally, the unpredictability of Los Angeles traffic made the concept of “late to work” somewhat elastic. Ten minutes past the hour was essentially on time; 20 minutes was still within the margin of error.

  But late on the day the boss had requested her presence in his office at 9 a.m. sharp?

  Late on the day she was probably getting laid off?

  Even LA’s elasticity on tardiness would not stretch to cover that.

  Just thinking the words “laid off” made her feel sick. Her skin, normally pale, flushed from her chest to the roots of her hair. She concentrated on breathing – in through the nose, out through the mouth. She reminded herself that no, she was not having a heart attack and no, she would not die.

  She’d been having these panics since the first rumors that the grant funding her job was in jeopardy. She’d be busy with something else, and out of nowhere, terror would grip her. Her vision narrowed, her pulse raced, and her stomach dropped. It was a little like a roller-coaster ride, but without the comforting restraint of a harness.

  Now she knew what people meant when they said “my heart sank.”

  Genevieve surveyed the sea of idling cars and reviewed the mistakes that had brought her to this point in life.

  Should have set her alarm 15 minutes earlier.

  Should have circulated her résumé the minute she heard the rumors about the grant.

  Should have pursued her doctorate. Should have majored in something more practical than Art History. Should have chosen a more prestigious college instead of settling for one close to home.

  She could see an endless string of mistakes stretching from her childhood in Wichita Falls to this moment on the 10.

  People were always stressing the value of a positive attitude, and she supposed they were right – she shouldn’t be thinking these thoughts. But the habit was comforting in its own destructive way, like biting her fingernails.

  Suddenly, traffic began to flow, like a drain unclogged. She glanced at the Camry’s dashboard clock. 8:38 a.m.

  She wouldn’t be late after all.

  Genevieve’s employer – for the moment, anyway – was the Hilliard Museum, a private institution firmly stuck in the middle tier of the LA cultural hierarchy. It had an excellent collection of Etruscan funerary art that almost no one came to see and an eclectic (some would say poorly curated) assortment of European and American paintings, mostly from the 19th and 20th centuries.

  She’d been hired six years earlier, fresh off a professional triumph at a small Pasadena museum. A painting there had a puzzling gap in its chain of ownership – provenance, in art-world parlance – and Genevieve solved the mystery. Her discovery earned a mention in a professional journal, and the Hilliard had come calling.

  Leaving the freeway well before she reached the touristy part of Santa Monica, Genevieve drove past the public face of the museum, a white stucco modernist structure, and into the parking deck. She waved her security card in front of the electronic gizmo and waited for the gate to lift.

  As she parked and shut off the car, it hit her that she might be going through this routine for the last time. She took a deep breath, swung her bag out of the passenger seat and started up the ramp toward the employee entrance.

  She’d been so excited when she landed this job. It wasn’t the Getty, sure, but she knew she’d never get a spot there, not with her diploma from Texas Tech and no Ph.D.

  At the time, the Hilliard desperately needed someone to straighten out its provenance files, which had been neglected for years. Like a lot of museums, it had come under pressure to scour its collection for anything that might have changed hands during World War II and make sure those pieces had been transferred legitimately, not looted from their rightful owners and then sold to unsuspecting – or unquestioning – museums.

  Genevieve was supposed to make sure the chain of possession for each work of art was documented. She thought she’d be sort of an art detective, helping avenge old wrongs.

  But the project hit snag after snag, and she never really did any detective work. It had taken forever to get the records organized, and she’d only recently begun to identify anything that had changed hands during the war and enter those pieces in an international database. She hadn’t even made it halfway through the collection.

  And now it seemed that whatever urgency the Hilliard once had on the topic had dissipated. Genevieve wasn’t sure why. She knew the museum’s endowment had shrunk with the economy, and her slow progress probably didn’t help with donors.

  Rumors had been swirling that the Hilliard had lost a big grant and that provenance research would be cut. Then, she’d received a memo asking her to report to the museum director’s office at 9 this morning, no further explanation offered.

  She paused at the employee entrance, juggling her coffee and bag so she could show her museum ID. The security guard, Bill, patiently held the door.

  “Good morning, Miss Jenny.”

  Bill, unfailingly pleasant, always mangled her name. She’d given up correcting him.

  “Morning, Bill.”

  “Hang in there,” he called as she headed down the corridor toward her cubicle.

  The security guard who couldn’t even get her name right seemed to think she needed encouragement. That couldn’t be a good sign.

  She dropped off her purse and coffee at her desk, took a minute to compose herself, and then headed to the office of Malcolm Stewart, the museum director.

  Malcolm, a hotshot with an Ivy League pedigree, was hired a year before Genevieve. He was an expert on the Etruscans with an international reputation and a mandate to elevate the museum’s profile. She got off on the wrong foot with him almost immediately, when her proposal for digitizing the provenance records and creating an internal database sat on his desk for months. Then, after finally approving the project, Malcolm halted it midway through because he found a process he thought was better. She’d been forced to start over and had been playing catch-up ever since.

  As it turned out, Malcolm wasn’t in his office when Genevieve presented herself at 8:59. He was running late.

  Carol Gladstone, Malcolm’s assistant, apologized for the delay, as if it were her fault. She said she would call when he arrived.

  Genevieve went back to her desk. Five minutes passed, then 10, and she was so nervous she could barely stay in her chair. To distract herself, Genevieve decided to sign on to her computer and see whether there were new listings in the international provenance database.

  She typed her user name and password.

  “INVALID PASSWORD” flashed on the screen.

  She tried again, making sure the caps lock key was off. Another error message. Her fingers were poised to try again when it hit her: They’d already disabled her login.

  The phone rang. It was Carol. Malcolm was ready for her.

  Or almost ready for her. Malcolm was on the phone when she was shown into his office, tilted back in his ergonomic chair, nodding along as he listened to whomever was on the other end. He waved Genevieve into a chair opposite
his desk.

  She perched nervously on the chair’s edge. She had no idea what to do with her hands, which were shaking. She wished she’d brought pen and paper, something to make her feel less naked.

  An unmarked manila folder, closed, sat precisely in the center of Malcolm’s desk. It seemed very thin. If he truly were laying her off, wouldn’t there be reams of paper involved? Maybe that was an encouraging sign. Maybe this would be another situation where she anticipated the worst and things turned out just fine. Borrowing trouble, as her grandmother used to say. Catastrophizing, her best friend called it.

  On his laptop, she could see an email Malcolm had begun but not sent. The subject line said MEMO TO THE STAFF. Malcolm loved sending memos – in fact, he communicated almost exclusively through memos, something his employees mocked mercilessly. Genevieve wondered what this one would be about.

  Malcolm caught her eye and angled the laptop screen away.

  Oh. Of course. The memo would be about her.

  Feeling her chin begin to tremble, Genevieve turned her head away. She focused on a family photo on Malcolm’s credenza – him, his (much younger, very beautiful) wife and two adorable children on a beach, posed in the shade of a palm tree.

  They’d gone somewhere tropical for Christmas, Genevieve had heard. Fiji? Tahiti? She refused to be drawn into office gossip about Malcolm’s lifestyle. His wife supposedly came from money; how they spent it was none of Genevieve’s business.

  “I apologize for keeping you waiting.”

  Genevieve lurched a little in her chair. She took a deep breath and turned toward Malcolm.

  He pushed back a shock of blond hair that had fallen over his forehead. Although he was at least 50, Malcolm cultivated a certain boyishness. He pulled a pair of rimless reading glasses from his desk drawer and opened the manila folder on his desk.

  “Due to a recent drop in funding, your position with the museum is being eliminated, effective immediately,” he began.

  It was a script. The folder held a script, and he was reading it. Word for word, Genevieve supposed. He wasn’t even making eye contact.

  “You are entitled to eight weeks of severance pay and to continue your health insurance under applicable law. Those benefits...”

  Malcolm stopped. “This is awful,” he said, finally making eye contact. “The HR people insisted I recite this as written, but that seems inhumane.”

  He shoved the folder across the desk to her. “Do you want to just read it?

  Genevieve accepted the folder and began silently reading where Malcolm left off.

  “...will begin once you’ve signed the necessary paperwork, although you are not required to do so today. Once you’ve cleaned out your desk – boxes will be provided to you – you can leave your badge with the security desk. Only personal items should be taken. Anything relating to your work is the property of the museum and must remain. The museum thanks you for your contributions and wishes you well.”

  He removed his glasses, setting them carefully aside. “Any questions?”

  Numb, Genevieve shook her head.

  “Carol will have the details on the paperwork,” Malcolm said. “And I’m going beyond what I’m authorized to say here, but of course we’ll give you a good reference, one that will put the progress of the provenance project in the best possible light, given the obstacles.”

  Obstacles. That was one way to put it. The false start on the database. The year she’d done Carter’s job while he was on sabbatical in Ravenna. The nine months spent covering for Samantha during her maternity leave. The endless requests that she pitch in here, pick up an unrelated duty there. Obstacles.

  Malcolm stood, signaling that the meeting was over. “Do you think you’ll go back to Kansas?”

  “What?” It came out a little sharper than Genevieve intended, but she resisted the temptation to apologize. The man had just fired her, after all.

  “I thought you were from Wichita,” Malcolm said. “I could check my contacts, see if I know anyone there...”

  “I’m from Wichita Falls,” Genevieve said. “Texas.”

  Malcolm slapped his hand against his forehead. “Of course. I’ve only lived on the coasts. I’m shamefully ignorant about the middle of the country.”

  He offered his hand. “I’m not supposed to say this, either, but I’m sorry to see you go.”

  Genevieve felt she had no choice but to shake it.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Genevieve walked back to her cubicle, head up, eyes focused on the distant wall. It was only 50 feet from Malcolm’s office to her desk, but it felt like a mile.

  She did not want to cry in the office.

  Fortunately, her colleagues seemed keen to avoid her. One picked up his phone as she walked by. Another pulled open a drawer and began a frantic hunt for something. A third seemed engrossed by the faux wood grain of his desk.

  At Genevieve’s cubicle, Carol was dropping off a stack of flattened boxes.

  “I’m so sorry,” Carol said, waving at the boxes. “This must seem heartless.” Why did the coldest bosses always have the nicest gatekeepers?

  “It’s fine, Carol. I’m not mad.”

  “You’ll land on your feet. I just know it.” Carol patted her reassuringly on the arm. “Malcolm said you don’t have to sign the papers today, right? I really recommend waiting.”

  “Thanks,” Genevieve mumbled. “I think I’ll do that.”

  Carol took the hint and left.

  Genevieve knew the best thing was to get out quickly, but she couldn’t fathom where to begin. She opened drawers, then closed them without moving anything.

  The shaved head of Thomas Monroe, her favorite co-worker, popped over the cubicle divider. His eyes narrowed at the sight of the boxes on her desk.

  “Damn,” he said, drawing the word out to the two syllables it merited in his native North Carolina.

  He came around the divider and sat on her desk. “How can I help?”

  Genevieve began folding one of the boxes into shape. “Some help packing would be great.”

  Thomas opened a drawer and began lifting out files.

  “I can only take personal stuff,” Genevieve told him.

  Thomas began scanning files. “What else did Malcolm say?”

  “I get eight weeks of severance, and I can pay to keep my insurance. There’s some paperwork, but I don’t have to sign it today. Everyone wishes me well and thanks me for my contributions. I can leave my ID with security.”

  “That’s it?”

  “There was a script, but he felt awful doing it and just gave it to me to read instead. I think if he could have figured out a way to lay me off by memo, he would have,” Genevieve said, hating the way her voice trembled.

  “Oh, Malcolm. Genius on ancient cultures, dolt dealing with live humans,” Thomas said, clucking his tongue. “Good thing he has that wife to schmooze the donors.”

  “Maybe she should be in charge of cutting the deadweight,” Genevieve said.

  Thomas pushed his glasses up on his forehead. “You know this isn’t about you, right? It’s just money. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  Genevieve took a deep breath, trying to maintain her composure. “Tell that to everyone else. They’re avoiding me like I have a communicable disease. Don’t they know you can’t catch ‘fired’ from casual contact?”

  “You’re not fired,” Thomas said. “You’re laid off. Huge difference.” He held up a piece of paper. “ARTnews is offering you 30 percent off a subscription. Keep or toss?”

  “Toss.”

  Ten minutes later, they had cleared the last drawer.

  “Thanks for helping me. I want you to know you’ve always…” her voice caught. She couldn’t finish.

  From the day she started, Thomas had been her biggest champion and best resource. He always seemed to know where to look for the file no one else could find, and more than once he’d run interference for her with Malcolm, who respected his opinions. Somewhere along
the way, he’d become one of her best friends.

  People sometimes called Thomas “Mayor of the Museum,” because he seemed to know everyone and everything. He’d been the one who warned Genevieve her job might be in jeopardy.

  Thomas put his hand on his hip and gave her a mock-stern look. “No farewell speeches. It’s not like you’re never going to see me again. In fact, you could have dinner with Philip and me tonight if you’re up for it.”

  He shoved the last drawer closed with the heel of his hand, but it caught.

  Frowning, he yanked the drawer all the way out and extracted a battered 8 x 10 manila envelope that was wedged in the back. He opened the envelope and read the title of the weathered pamphlet inside.

  “A 1939 catalog from the Galerie de l’Étoile in Paris? Where’d you get this?”

  “I forgot I even had that,” Genevieve said. “It just showed up in the mail one day.”

  Thomas began to leaf through the catalog, his art historian impulses momentarily trumping everything else. “I bet there’s some amazing stuff in here.”

  “I wouldn’t know,” Genevieve said. “I was so worried about not meeting my deadlines that I set it aside. Figured I’d look at it later. And now I guess I have to leave it, because Malcolm specifically said I could only take personal items.”

  Thomas flipped over the envelope. “It’s addressed to you,” he said. “That makes it personal, I’d say. And it’s a pretty cool souvenir.”

  Genevieve weighed the decision. “Oh, the hell with Malcolm. I’m taking it.”

  “That’s right,” Thomas said. “The hell with him. You should take it.”

  Thomas held out his arms, and Genevieve burrowed into the hug, aware that it was inappropriate for the office but not really caring.

  With that, she walked out of her cubicle for the last time.

  Genevieve was surprised to see Bill still working the employee entrance. Glancing at the clock, she realized she’d been at the museum only an hour.

  “Let me help you with those boxes,” Bill said. His tone was kind but urgent.