The Art Of The Next Best by Deborah Nam-Krane Read Free Book Online Page B

Transportation had been put on the defensive for
their shoddy service to Mattapan and the outer parts of Dorchester
and Roxbury. David was being whispered about as a potential
candidate for the City Council in the blogosphere within days...and
then just as abruptly the coverage stopped. Martin could have sworn
that he had seen David leaving the building that housed Lucy’s
office that week and looking as if he’d just missed having his head
handed to him.
    Jessie had snorted when Martin mentioned it.
“Should I call him and give him tips on how to blow off her
BS?”
    “Babe, if you can’t get that across to
Richard, I don’t think Hwang stands a chance.”
    Jessie shrugged. “Everyone has to learn
sometime how to tell people to screw.”
    Those words echoed in Martin’s mind a few
years later as he came across Alex Sheldon’s name while he was
doing research for his thesis. Jessie had had to put on that hard
shell of armor way too early, and it was Alex Sheldon’s fault.
    Michael Abbot had almost raped Jessie when
she was fifteen, but by the time Martin had met Michael, he had
already forgiven him. It wasn’t Michael’s fault that he had been
raised by the man who might as well have killed his parents, and it
wasn’t his fault that he spent every waking breath knowing that. It
wasn’t hard for Martin to see how that could twist someone. Michael
had shown remorse by putting himself in the line of fire to protect
Jessie (and Miranda), and he’d been working for two years before
that to get better. Now he went to AA and therapy regularly, and he
was a devoted husband and father. Martin could see that he was a
good man who had made mistakes, and it was a crime that he should
have had to have suffered as much as he had as a child.
    (It also didn’t hurt that Michael knew about
his confrontation with Detective Robert Teague, the scumbag who’d
seduced Jessie while running the most incompetent investigation
imaginable into her mother’s murder. Martin forgave Michael, but he
knew how to set him straight if the need arose.)
    Martin had not forgiven Alex Sheldon. It
hadn’t been enough to cause the deaths of four people and then
blackmail Lucy for most of her adult life; he’d also controlled and
damaged their children.
    But maybe he thought he was doing the right
thing...
    “For God’s sake, would you go to sleep
already?” Jessie murmured as Martin tossed and turned.
    Martin was grateful to stop hearing his own
thoughts. “Or we could do something else if we’re both up,” he
whispered in her ear.
    “There’s my smart guy,” Jessie said as she
giggled and rolled over.
    Martin hadn’t thought he’d be researching
Alex Sheldon, but he recognized the name of one of his holding
companies when he was researching the beginnings of the
gentrification of the South End in the early 1990s. He dug back
further and found the story of the leveraged buyout of the factory
in Mattapan in the late 1980s. It was one of Sheldon’s early
successes—and it had meant the loss of hundreds of jobs.
    Then there was another factory that had been
emptied out less than five years after one of his “investments”.
The building was still there on Washington Street, sitting there
like a dried out husk and reminding people of what it used to be.
The South End, in the perversity it liked to dress as nostalgia,
kept it there as part of its charade about keeping some of the
character of what the city used to be. “If they could declare it a
landmark, they would,” Martin muttered to himself.
    Much had been made about the difference
between Cervino and his predecessor Fletcher, and Cervino had added
to that with his flourishes about “cleaning house”. But what had
always struck Martin once he’d moved to Boston was that Cervino was
the guy who could make things run on time. If he thought it was
important- or if you could get his attention and persuade him that
it was- he could make it go.
    In many ways, a smart politician