Page 17 of Oleander

Hollis remained outside. A discreet speaker beneath the awning carried her voice across the deck.

“Then you’ve had nine minutes to reconsider,” he said.

“Reconsider what?” asked Peter Vale. “The stock opened down forty-one percent. The banks suspended the revolving facility. Three insurers issued reservation letters before lunch.”

“Numbers recover,” Hollis said. “People panic. That is what you are doing now—mistaking panic for judgment.”

He went inside long enough to turn the volume higher, then returned to the deck without appearing on camera. The salon reflected him in black glass: silver hair combed straight back, linen shirt open at the throat, the face of a man who had spent decades arranging photographs so the light caught only what he wanted seen.

Evelyn leaned toward her camera.

“Twenty-seven men and women died on Platform Nine. The preliminary records show the first emergency call was minimized by your coordination office. We are not discussing a temporary confidence problem.”

Hollis’s glass stopped halfway to his mouth.

“Preliminary records show whatever frightened bureaucrats need them to show. Platform Nine was Dorothy’s program. Her contracts. Her people. Her precious modernization plan.”

Several faces on the display went still.

“Dorothy Martin has been dead for two weeks,” said Calvin Moss, the oldest shareholder on the call. “She cannot answer you.”

“That never stopped her when she was alive,” Hollis said. “She signed the automation vendor. She demanded remote monitoring. Every executive in that building learned to say yes when she raised an eyebrow.”

“You approved every capital request,” Evelyn said.

“I approved recommendations presented by Graham Sloane, the chief operating officer, who assured this board the system was reliable. Dorothy kept inserting herself into the process and treating every disagreement like a catastrophe.”

Peter looked down at something offscreen.

“The correspondence says Dorothy requested a shutdown after the failed pressure test six months before the accident. You denied it because the quarter was closing, and Sloane signed off on keeping Platform Nine online.”

The faint hum of the yacht’s climate system seemed suddenly loud. Hollis set his glass on a side table with excessive care.

“Private correspondence,” he said. “Spousal correspondence. Written during one of her episodes.”

“Do not do that,” Evelyn said. “Do not smear a dead woman to save your voting control.”

Hollis crossed the salon and opened a walnut cabinet built to resemble a ship captain’s chart table. Inside were cut-crystal decanters, a humidor, and a silver-framed photograph of Dorothy at the christening of Platform Nine. He’d begged her to take it on, to be present for it. Not as his wife, as a shareholder.

She had one hand on the ceremonial bottle and the other raised against the wind, smiling toward someone outside the frame. Hollis turned the photograph face down.

“Voting control is the only reason any of you are wealthy,” he said. “You were schoolteachers, dentists, regional bankers. I gave you rigs. I gave you leases. I gave you a company whose name opened every door from Houston to Baton Rouge.”

“And now that name is on every news alert in the country,” said Lila Chen. “My fund began selling at the opening bell. We will be out by tomorrow.”

Hollis faced the blank camera tile as though it were a mirror.

“You cannot sell that position without triggering the poison clause.”

“The clause protects against a hostile acquisition,” Lila said. “It does not chain us to a collapsing company.”

“Collapsing?” Hollis laughed once. “Look around you.”

Evelyn’s expression hardened.

“We cannot look around you, Hollis. You will not turn on the camera.”

He looked instead. The salon was paneled in pale oak imported from Finland, the bar faced in onyx, the carpet woven with a pattern copied from Dorothy’s favorite evening dress. Beyond the glass doors lay the aft deck, the tender, the polished steel rails, and the dark water holding each light in a trembling reflection. The yacht had cost more than the original Platform Nine safety refit.