Merry Christmas, Babies

"ANYONE HEAR FROM ELISE?" Joe Bennett walked into the lunchroom at the back of the suite of offices he and his partner--and the bank--now owned. Eating meals ranging from fruit and yogurt to homemade burgers, the employees Elise Richardson supervised sat at the long, elegant wooden table. "Not a word." Twenty-five-year-oldAngela Parks glanced over her shoulder at him from the granite-topped island marking the center of the full kitchen on one end of the room. She was making a salad. It was Thursday. On Fridays Elise cooked lunch for their nine-member staff. Maybe she was out grocery shopping for the next day's offering. But it would be the first time in the ten years they'd been in business that she'd done so during the workday. At night, while Joe left the job and lived a life, Elise worked at home--or shopped for the office. "She didn't say where she was going?" "I think she had a dentist appointment," Ruth Gregory said, straightening a stem in the silk flower centerpiece in front of her. At fifty, she was the oldest B&R employee. "No." Thirty-five-year-old Mark Oppenheimer popped the last of his usual peanut butter sandwich in his mouth and stood. "That was last month. Today she didn't say what kind of appointment, only that she shouldn't be gone more than an hour." "What time was that?" "Nine." As their chief financial officer, the skinny, bespectacled man was Elise's second in command and the source most likely to be up to date. Glancing at his multi-dialed designer watch--which his then-wife had bought him for Christmas a few years ago and which Joe wore because it would be a waste not to, even though he preferred the simple large-faced cheap number he'd worn in college--he frowned. "That was almost four hours ago." Mark wiped the crumbs he'd left on the table onto the floor--a man after his own heart. "I know," he said. "And she hasn't called?" "No." After another few seconds of standing there blankly, Joe started to leave. And then turned back. "Anyone think to call the hospitals to make sure she wasn't in an accident?" He was only half joking, but their chuckles followed him down the hallway. "I've got lunch with Anderson, Anderson and Bailey," he told his secretary on his way out. The law firm was the biggest in the state of Michigan--a six-million-dollar account--and B&R had been courting them for a couple of years. "Text message me the second Elise gets in, will you?" Bennett and Richardson Professional Employee Organization, or B&R PEO, offered companies a comprehensive package that included payroll, workers'compensation, tax compliance and group insurance, all at a rate lower than they could arrange for themselves. Joe Bennett was in charge of sales, and Elise Richardson, his best friend from college, oversaw virtually everything else. Normally his cell phone was in the Off position when he was in meetings--commonly disguised as social gatherings now that he had two salesmen who made the office calls to sit with managers and work out logistics. Today he turned his cell on to Vibrate instead, so he'd know if and when a message came through. He didn't have an urgent need to speak to his business partner. He just wanted to assure himself that she was going to be around at some point to nag him about something. THE LONG, FAMILIAR private road across the front of the cemetery was potholed and narrow, barely wide enough to fit the Corvette. Elise passed several lanes that sectioned off areas filled with headstones of varying sizes, many with urns bearing colorful floral arrangements planted on Memorial Day two and a half weeks before. As she rounded the back border of the carefully tended green acreage, she slowed to a stop, then climbed out of the car, wrapping her short, three-quarter-sleeved white sweater more closely around her. She'd thought this stage of her life was about moving on. Becoming. Yet it turned ouQuinn, Tara Taylor is the author of 'Merry Christmas, Babies', published 2006 under ISBN 9780373781263 and ISBN 0373781261.