By Sunday morning, the word was broken.
Not the Accords. The Accords held. Nobody at Camp Tamarack laid a finger on my brother for the rest of the weekend. Ruth had made it clear at breakfast that the napkin was binding, and that she had a pen and was not afraid to use it.
But the word itself had escaped. Thirty people had heard it shouted across a bonfire, and thirty people now said it to Elliot at every opportunity.
"Morning, pineapple," said Marisol, passing him the coffee.
"Pineapple," said Dmitri, holding the dining hall door.
"Pine-apple," sang Grant, from the top of the bus steps.
And every single time, my brother laughed.
He tried not to. I watched him try. His jaw locked, his eyes narrowed, and then the corner of his mouth went, and the goose came out.
Not the full honk from the bonfire. A smaller one, a gosling. But it came out every time, as reliably as a doorbell.
"It's conditioning," Dez explained to me on the bus home. He had drawn a diagram in his notebook. "Twenty-six years of that word meaning safe, over, you can stop holding it in now."
"So he hears it," I said.
"And his body stops holding it in." He tapped the diagram. "I'm calling it the Pavlovian Pineapple."
"Please don't call it that."
"I've already opened a market on it."
Dez had spent the night not sleeping. He was investigating Mr. Ananas.
He had a list. It ran to two pages. Every person at Camp Tamarack was on it, with odds beside their name. He showed it to me somewhere around the second hour of the drive.
Ruth Castellano: 3–1. Knows everything. Does crosswords. Suspicious.
Grant Holloway: 80–1. Cannot keep a secret. Cannot spell "ananas."
Marisol Ortega: 12–1. Was in the canoe. Has access.
Nora Vance: 2–1.
"Two to one?" I said. "I'm the favorite?"
"You knew. You're his sister, you joined three weeks ago, and the pot went crazy." He lowered his voice. "Also, Mr. Ananas bet in March, when you interviewed."
"I didn't bet anything. I didn't even know the Board existed until my first day."
"That's exactly what Mr. Ananas would say."
I looked out the window at the passing trees. Then I looked at the seat in front of Dez, where my brother sat alone, reading. He had brought a paperback about maritime law. He turned a page.
"Do you speak French, Dez?" I asked.
"Four years in high school. I can order a croissant and apologize for it." He frowned. "Why?"
"No reason."
There was a reason. There was a small itch at the back of my mind, like a word on the tip of your tongue. But Dez was already writing again, and the bus hit a pothole, and the itch went away.
The meeting with Bertrand Szabo was on Monday at eight in the morning. Ruth called me at six-fifteen.
"You're in the room," she said.
"Me? I've been here three weeks."
"You read the camp sign. You knew when it was founded." There was the scratch of a pen; Ruth was doing the crossword. "Szabo pays attention to who pays attention. Bring a notepad, and say nothing unless you're asked."
"Whoever speaks first loses," I said.
"Whoever speaks first," Ruth said, "is usually Grant."
The Dunmore Room was Ashgrove's largest conference room. It had been named after the client, eight months earlier, in what Ruth called "an act of optimism." It had a long walnut table, a pitcher of water nobody touched, and a framed print of an orchard.
Grant was in the hallway outside, holding a box of donuts.
"Big day, big game," he said. "I brought fuel." He saw Elliot coming down the hall and lit up. "Hey! Pine—"
Elliot raised one finger without breaking stride.
"Not," my brother said, "before Szabo."
Grant shut his mouth so fast I heard his teeth. Then he gave a solemn thumbs-up and backed away down the hall, holding the donuts in front of him like a shield.
Bertrand Szabo arrived exactly on time. He was sixty-one and built like a mailbox, short and solid and square. He was bald, with eyebrows so thick and white they looked like they had been installed.
He wore a brown suit with a knitted vest beneath it. He carried a canvas tote bag with a picture of a plum on it.
He shook hands with Ruth. He shook hands with Elliot. He looked at me for a long moment.
"New," he said.
"Three weeks," I said.
He nodded, as if this were acceptable but would be monitored. Then he sat down. He placed the tote bag on the floor beside his chair.
Elliot took his seat across the table. He took the almond tin from his pocket, opened it, removed a single almond, and ate it. Szabo watched him do it. I had the sense this was not the first time.
Then they began.
I had read about Elliot's silences. I had grown up across a dinner table from them. But I had never seen two of them meet.
Szabo sat with his hands folded on his stomach and looked at my brother. My brother sat with his hands flat on the table and looked at Szabo. Ruth looked at her legal pad.
I looked at the framed orchard. The clock on the wall ticked very loudly, as clocks do when nobody is talking.
Five minutes passed. Ten.
At the twelve-minute mark, the air conditioning came on, and all four of us flinched slightly, and nobody acknowledged it.
At the eighteen-minute mark, Szabo spoke.
"The numbers are fine," he said. His accent was soft and careful, every consonant placed like a stone in a wall. "The terms are fine. Everything on paper is fine."
"Then sign the paper," Elliot said.
"I do not sell my company to paper." Szabo leaned forward. "Forty-one years. I start with one kettle in a garage in Ohio. Now I have nine hundred people, and when I am gone, they belong to your client."
He looked at my brother very steadily. "And your client sends you. Eight months, Mr. Vance. I have never once seen what is behind your face."
Elliot said nothing. Ruth wrote something on her pad. I glanced at it.
Seven letters. Starts with C. "What he needs to see."
I didn't need to solve it. I already knew the answer.
Szabo sighed. It was a heavy sigh, the sigh of a man who had expected to be disappointed and had been proven right. He reached down to his tote bag.
"I bring you a gift," he said. "Our best product. Number one seller, for thirty years. If you will not show me anything, at least you take something home."
He placed a can on the walnut table and slid it across to my brother.
It was a large can, the size of a coffee mug. The label was yellow and green, with a cheerful drawing of a sunrise. Above the sunrise, in big friendly letters, it said:
DUNMORE GOLDEN PINEAPPLE RINGS.
My brother looked at the can.
I watched it happen. His jaw locked. His nostrils flared.
His eyes went very wide and very still. He gripped the edge of the walnut table with both hands.
Ruth stopped writing.
The goose got out anyway.
It was not the bonfire honk. It was a strangled, desperate little hnk, squeezed out through his nose. Elliot put one hand over his mouth.
His shoulders started to shake. He looked at me, helpless, over his fingers.
"I'm sorry," he managed. "It's not you. It's the—" He pointed at the can. "It's the rings."
And then he was gone. He laughed into his hand, and then into both hands. Then he leaned back in the leather chair and laughed at the ceiling of the Dunmore Room.
The honk came back in full. Out in the hallway, I heard a box of donuts hit the floor.
Bertrand Szabo did not move. His eyebrows did not move. He sat with his hands folded on his stomach and watched the senior partner of Ashgrove Partners laugh at a can of fruit.
Then, slowly, something began to happen under the eyebrows.
His face cracked. A wheeze came out of him, rusty and low, like a gate that hadn't been opened in years. Then another one. Then Bertrand Szabo was laughing too, a deep, rumbling laugh that shook the knitted vest, and he slapped the walnut table with his palm.
"There," he said, pointing at Elliot. "There he is. Eight months!"
Ruth put down her pen. She was smiling. I had not known Ruth could smile without a crossword involved.
Szabo wiped his eyes with a handkerchief. He picked up the can and turned it toward himself, looking at it with great affection.
"In Budapest," he said, still chuckling, "we say ananász. Everywhere else, it is ananas. In French, in German, in Russian. Only English must be different."
He shrugged. "Pine. Apple. It is not a pine, it is not an apple. You English make no sense."
I stopped breathing.
Ananas.
I looked at my brother. My brother, still red-faced and gasping, had suddenly gone very quiet.
He looked at the can. Then he looked at me.
He knew that I knew.
Up next: Mr. Ananas
Continue to Part 6 →