Things were on the slow side for Steve the next few days. He ran some daylight errands for Ann, which involved a couple of stops at a random library, mostly to check e-mail, but there was very little traffic. When he was at Uncle Homer’s, he spent a lot of time searching for information on Shawtex, for some angle to use on the company, or at least on its officers, but he didn’t come up with much that seemed to offer promise.

One evening the three of them sat down in the living room, where they usually held their discussions. While there were several things on the agenda, nothing seemed very pressing or needed any real debate. “I’m really not making any progress,” was his own simple report.

“I’m not either, sir,” Ann agreed. “In fact, I wouldn’t think it would be worth the effort if we had anything important right now.”

“Unfortunately, we don’t,” Uncle Homer agreed. “There are a few things off in the future that show signs of coming alive, but these things happen. We can’t be busy all the time, and I don’t think we’d want to be. I don’t think we want to drop our efforts because something may turn up. Are there any possibilities for getting an angle on them?”

“Sir, the only thing I can think of is to get hold of a majority of the stock. The problem with that is that there’s not enough stock on the market to make a majority.”

“Ann,” Steve spoke up, “You know more about the ins and outs of the stock market than I do. One of the things I’ve noticed is that the Shawtex stock is pretty stable. I’m wondering what would happen if we bounced it around a little?”

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying, sir.”

“Pretty simple, actually,” he smiled. “OK, look, let’s suppose we’re going to take a run on these jokers by getting control of the company. What happens if we quietly buy up as much of the stock as we can, and then bounce it around a little, run it up by trading back and forth among several accounts at a steadily rising price?”

Ann shook her head. “As depressed as the stock price is, it wouldn’t take a great deal to buy up most of the outstanding stock,” she pointed out. “It would cost money to run up the price, but to what purpose?”

“I’m just guessing, but if it were to go up considerably, it might just be possible that someone in the management would get greedy and cash out some of his stock. That might put enough into play to give us a majority. Yes, the price would go up, but not that much since we’d just be taking the money from one of our pockets and putting it into another one. If it works, fine. If it doesn’t, it hasn’t cost us much.”

“It might work,” Uncle Homer agreed after thinking about it for a moment. “It can’t cost us a great deal to try. If we can get our hands on the controls, there are a lot of interesting possibilities that come to mind.”

They kicked the idea around for a while, and some of the possibilities and ramifications, and finally they decided to pursue the idea, although not aggressively. “We might as well take our time on this,” Steve summed up. “We don’t want to spook them, even if it is Molly Carillo’s ghost doing the churning.”

After a couple of days Ann reported that the three of them – and some of their shadow companies – now owned about ten percent of the Shawtex stock and that the price hadn’t risen noticeably.

But at that meeting, Steve also reported, “I had a call from Phil Crocker today. He has a number of setup issues getting going. He and Craig are getting buried in them, and he wants to know if I could go down and help him out for a week or two. I don’t mind the idea, but I’d just as soon stay here if you’re going to need my help with something.”

“Actually, I don’t see any reason why you couldn’t take off,” Uncle Homer said. “Things still are looking like they’re going to be quiet for at least another couple of weeks. However, getting Crocker Quality Manufacturing going smoothly is going to affect your investment, so there’s a good reason to keep your finger on things.”

“I agree, but I hate to turn my back on this Shawtex business,” Steve pointed out.

“So don’t turn your back on it, sir,” Ann replied. “You can keep investigating them in your evenings down there.”

“If I have any evenings. If he’s that buried, I could find myself pulling some long hours.”

“It probably will be worth the effort,” Uncle Homer said. “You really aren’t picking up much here and you probably won’t until Chipperdude reports back in. The last report we had was that he was tied up on other things, and while was harder than it looked at first he doesn’t think it’s impossible. If he can crack their e-mail then we might really be able to get a handle on them. Until then, we’re just spinning our wheels, and that includes what Ann is doing to try to pick up some of their stock.”

“I would suggest a phone conference in the evenings, perhaps not every day, sirs. That would allow the young Mr. Taylor to keep abreast of developments.”

Steve really wasn’t very happy about being back in his apartment. It had never really meant much to him and now it really didn’t seem like home at all. Given a choice, he’d really rather have been back at Uncle Homer’s, even with things being slow there – at least he felt like he was working toward something. Granted, a Hardin or Hansen-Baldwynn deal didn’t come along every day, but they were exciting when they did. He was learning a lot about Uncle Homer, who seemed to have led a very interesting life, and who always seemed to have a story or two to illustrate the point he was trying to make.

Then there was Ann. Once in a while she opened up her human side, and it was always fun to watch her do it. Granted, she was very businesslike and often rather cold, but he had a lot of respect for her intelligence, her competence and her loyalty. He was coming to like her, in spite of everything, although he couldn’t see it ever going anywhere beyond that.

The bottom line was that he missed being there at the old mansion on the hill. Haunted though its reputation may have been, it was an interesting place. Coming down to work with Phil and Craig seemed like a step backward.

As it turned out he wasn’t doing that much. He was busy all day long, picking up loose ends left behind in the rush to get production under way, but since he wasn’t in charge and wouldn’t be, his long-range interest in the actual manufacturing was limited. It was still too early to render a final verdict, but there was no reason things shouldn’t go all right once they got the worst of the kinks ironed out, and there would be some room for expansion if somehow Phil could snag the third contract he’d been pushing after.

Steve was working full days, and sometimes two or three hours over that, but it wasn’t the sixteen- or eighteen-hour days he’d been expecting. In all the time he’d lived there, he had never developed many outside interests, which made the interesting things happening at Uncle Homer’s seem all the more appealing by comparison.

About all he had going for him was to call each evening to have long discussions with Ann and Uncle Homer. Ann reported continual steady growth in their holdings of Shawtex, which now were close to twenty percent of the stock – nowhere near enough yet to think about a try for control, and until something broke there wouldn’t be, unless something else happened. Ann reported that the stock price was rising a little, showing a slight reaction to her purchasing campaign.

There still hadn’t been any report back from Chipperdude, but she told him that sometimes it took him weeks to turn up what they needed, so she wasn’t very worried about it. Despite spending some time looking most evening, Steve wasn’t turning up much that he hadn’t already found in Wychbold. Perhaps when they could get into Shawtex’s e-mails and the personal e-mails of the company officers a lead might show up. If not, they could fade away, and they wouldn’t really have lost anything much.

That was almost always his most enjoyable part of the evening, just talking with the two, occasionally making plans or picking at problems. Somehow he’d come to realize that both of them had become very good friends.

But there was a limit to the business they could do on the phones – friendly business, perhaps, but there were limits. It was after the phone calls were over with that things got boring – but at least Steve had brought his toolbox with his engraving tools. He spent sometimes as much as three or four hours each evening hunched over his desk, working in the light of his desk lamp. Over the course of a week he chewed up perhaps a dollar’s worth of nickels, but by the end of the period he was starting to get a little more skilled at what he was doing. He still wasn’t anything like what he considered good at carving the hobo nickels, but at least his more recent efforts weren’t absolute hack jobs.

One night toward the end of his stay he started doing something different. He’d seen a web site with skulls carved into nickels, rather than just a picture of a bum that would have been traveling in boxcars a hundred years before. It seemed like something different to do, so after three or four tries he produced one he considered almost acceptable. It really did look like a skull, something horrifying. While he didn’t really care for the subject matter, this one he thought he’d keep.

That skull nickel was something of a turning point; the next night he took another swing at a hobo nickel, and this time it turned out pretty good. It was not a master’s job by any means, or not the job some hobo might have done nearly a hundred years before with no more tools than a nail or two, but he felt like he was on his way. Engraving nickels wasn’t exactly what he wanted to do with his life, but it accomplished what he wanted to do, which was spend the evenings doing something that involved skill and craftsmanship, rather than just finding some bar to while away the hours.

Finally the long, dreary period at Crocker Quality Manufacturing dragged to a close. Early production was under way by now, and things were going smoothly. It was time to head back to Wychbold, so he loaded up the LaCrosse with some more things from his apartment and headed back north.

It was good to be back, even though both Uncle Homer and Ann reported that it had been dull for them, too. Ann had been able to run up stock purchases to where they now owned almost a third of Shawtex, and they still hadn’t invested a great deal. Unfortunately, loose stock was starting to dry up and it was going to be hard to push beyond where they were without spending some real money on it, so she’d backed off on pursuing it in hopes interest would die back down over the course of a few days. “We still haven’t heard back from Chipperdude, sir,” she reported the first evening he was back. “I’m beginning to think he’s not going to be able to crack their passwords.”

“Well, it was worth a try,” Steve told her. “I guess my suggestion is that if he doesn’t find something for us in the next few days, we might as well give it up as a bad job.”

“I suspect you’re right, sir,” she replied. “Things often happen that way, and with the price of the stock a little inflated right now we might well be able to get out of it without it costing us more than a couple of thousand dollars. That appears to be the risk you take.”

“So have you been busy with anything else?” Steve asked, just trying to make a little conversation.

“I’ve been working ahead cataloging nickels and getting them ready to put on e-Bay, sir,” she told him. “As always, I don’t want to flood the market. If we have to sell the Shawtex stock, I’ll have to be just as careful for the same reasons.”

Steve was still more or less on a normal schedule, while Ann and Uncle Homer were up all night, as was usual. The next evening Steve was working in his office, trying to hunt around for any more information he could find on Shawtex’s officers. He hadn’t been able to figure out much; while it was easy to track down their names and addresses, there didn’t seem to be much that was useful to them. The company was headquartered in Delaware, and rather than just being a shadow Delaware corporation, they apparently managed things from there. More and more Steve began to think that it might be a good idea for him to go and scope them out on the ground.

Steve was aware that Ann was up the hall, working on her nickels, but on his way back upstairs after getting a soft drink from the refrigerator, he met Ann on her way down. As he went to his room he noticed the door to her nickel room was open, so he figured she would be going back to work shortly.

An interesting idea crossed his mind; it would be a fun way to tease her a bit. He went down to his room and dug out one of the hobo nickels he had made a few days before, went as quietly as he could down to Ann’s hobby room, and tossed it into the pile of raw nickels she was obviously working on. There was no way of telling if she’d find it right away, so he went back to his office and left the door open to await developments.

It was a while before he heard the tapping of her high heels going down the hall again. He waited with anticipation for her to find his hobo nickel, but nothing seemed to be happening. He went back to scouring the computer, looking at things he’d already seen before on the Shawtex officers, and not turning up anything he hadn’t already found.

However, he did turn up one thing, whether it might be of use or not – one of the officers, a man named Darrin Powell, seemed to be fairly prominent under his own name on a website forum that discussed vampires and werewolves. Steve had little interest in the subject but figured anything on a company officer might be worth looking at.

The website proved to be a little more interesting than he thought it would be. It was a load of bullshit, as far as he was concerned – the users on the site seemed to think that such things were actually real, and that they were everywhere, for much of the discussion was about ways for people to protect themselves from such creatures of the night. In a way, it was a little ironic, he thought, because there were in fact some creatures of the night, including himself, who were looking for a way to sink their fangs into at least one of the regulars on the message board.

Steve went over the website with an increasing disbelief that a sane human being could believe such tripe. He was especially unwilling to believe that a supposedly intelligent man such as Powell could believe such things! Finally, with some reluctance, he came to the conclusion that he had the wrong person, although internal evidence seemed to indicate otherwise. Why would a man like Powell be hanging around such a site and using his real name? It didn’t make sense.

He was trying to figure out some other way to find out what he needed when he heard an elated yell from Ann – “Oh, wow! Another one!” There was silence for a couple minutes before he heard the tapping of high heels coming down the hall – and they sounded angry to him. “Steve, you son of a bitch!” he heard her say from the door. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“Who? Me? What?”

“You had to be responsible!” she said, and not quietly. “No one besides you and me comes up here!”

“Responsible for what?”

“For this?” she snarled, holding out the nickel. “What is a hobo nickel dated 1997 doing in a pile of nickels no newer than 1928? Where did you get it?”

She had him and he knew it. “Oh, that?” he grinned. “I made it, and I thought it would be fun to see if you’d call me by my name if you were angry with me.”

“You made this? Where did you learn to make these things?”

“Mostly from the web and from a guy I met when I was in Columbus that time,” he admitted. “I don’t think it’s all that great, but I’m still learning.” He got into one of the many small drawers in the roll-top desk and pulled out five other nickels he’d worked on, including the skull nickel. “It keeps me from hanging around bars in the evenings.”

“Steve, you almost gave me a heart attack,” she shook her head.

“See, I was right.”

“Right about what?”

“You’ve called me by name twice in the last few seconds, and you haven’t called me ‘sir’ once. See, I knew you could do it.”

“I ought to wring your neck, sir,” she replied, falling back into character, “but perhaps you’re right in that I do get a little too formal once in a while.”

“How about most of the time?”

“You could be right, but sometimes it’s very hard to help myself.” She obviously decided to change the subject. “Have you turned up anything new this evening?”

“Well, there is one thing,” he said, explaining the possible connection between Powell and the werewolf/vampire website. “But I can’t believe it’s a match.”

“It’s not impossible, but it seems like a pretty big reach,” she replied, her mind back on business now. “It would be interesting to see what connections show up in his personal e-mail.”

“That’s assuming we get the password from Chipperdude. Otherwise, I think we’ve pretty well done what we can.”

As luck would have it, Chipperdude’s response showed up when Steve went to harvest e-mails at a random library the next day, and that brought the frustrating days to an end. There were a number of e-mail accounts and passwords; all three of them started going through them to see what they could find.

The interesting thing about it, Steve thought, was that it quickly became clear that the Darrin Powell who was in charge of making supplier contracts at Shawtex was the same guy who hung out on the werewolf website. It was something he wasn’t just playing around with; he felt deeply paranoid about paranormal creatures stalking him. “Talk about out of touch with reality,” Steve commented as he, Uncle Homer, and Ann talked about it after breakfast one evening. “I can’t even imagine how he could manage to live a normal existence.”

“I’ve looked at some of the things the young Mr. Taylor has pointed out, sir,” Ann reported. “He does seem rather delusional to me, but I’m not sure how we could make use of it.”

“You have to figure that some of the other people at Shawtex know about it,” Steve shrugged. “They must just put up with it, or maybe use it for a handle on him.”

“Could be,” Uncle Homer replied thoughtfully. “What else have learned about them?”

“We know they’re a small outfit,” Steve replied. “Even smaller than we thought, at least in terms of people. We knew all along that there are only five major shareholders, but it looks like there’s only eight people actually working there.”

“Of course it’s small,” Uncle Homer snorted. “Why should it be big? They don’t actually do anything. They just buy people out at favorable prices, chew up the company, send the work overseas, and dump the capital for what they can get.”

“Well, yeah,” Steve agreed. “It’s too bad we don’t have a dummy company we could use for bait for a stock exchange.”

“It would never work, sir,” Ann pointed out. “They’d see through it in a minute.”

“Well, it was an idea,” Steve shrugged. “The other thing I came across is that there’s a vice president, who apparently concentrates on acquisitions, and I think has money trouble.”

“What kind of money trouble, sir?”

“The usual kinds of things, plus he’s into playing the horses, and not very well. He’s up to his ears . . . hey!”

“Have you got an idea sir?”

“It’d take some more investigation,” Steve replied. “You say the stock isn’t going anywhere?”

“Not really, sir. There was a little bump while I was still buying, but it’s stabilized.”

“So what happens if we pump the stock price up by trading back and forth among ourselves? He might decide to roll off some stock and dump it on the market, and we might be able to snap some of it up.”

“That could get a little expensive,” Uncle Homer pointed out.

“Well, yes, but if we’re mostly moving the money from one of our pockets to another, it’s not going to be that expensive.”

Ann shook her head. “Even if he dumped all his stock into the market and we picked it up it still wouldn’t be enough to control the company.”

“True,” Steve nodded, “but he might pass the idea along to someone else.”

“It’s not the best idea I’ve ever heard,” Uncle Homer summarized, “but it’s not the worst, either. And, as Steve has pointed out, it won’t be very expensive to find out.”

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