Free Polterheist: An Esther Diamond Novel by Laura Resnick

Constance, soon spiraled into notorious public quarrels, private mutual loathing, and blatant infidelities.
    It was through that hellacious marriage, followed by the divorce settlement a few years later, that Constance changed the balance of power by acquiring company stock that had always belonged to the Powells. That gave her the foothold she needed to start gradually squeezing them out of the business. Her strategy included taking their name off the company, which she reorganized as Fenster & Co. It took years of additional maneuvering to achieve her goal; but finally, the Iron Matriarch, who was by then in her seventies, ejected the Powells completely from the retail company which their family had co-founded and helped build into a business empire.
    Ever since then, according to Jingle, “Around here, it’s not a good idea to say a word that even
rhymes
with Powell.”
    Predictably, Constance’s coup led to years of legal battles between the two families. But the Iron Matriarch fought the Powells so shrewdly that all their efforts eventually floundered. In the final years of her life, Jingle said, Constance seemed to have beaten them.
    However, the Powells may have been biding their time rather than accepting defeat. They were reputedly planning a new legal assault on the Fensters, now that the Iron Matriarch was safely in her grave and the company was in the hands of her bickering heirs, none of whom had inherited her cool-headed business acumen (though I thought some of them had probably inherited her highly flexible morality). I suddenly realized, based on something he had said earlier, that Preston considered a new lawsuit a serious possibility.
    But I wondered why the Powells would bother? It had all occurred years ago, and the woman behind those events was dead now. Why not just let the past go and move on? What could the Powells hope to gain from yet another legal battle after all this time?
    Money and power,
said a killer’s voice in my head.
It’s
always
about money and power.
    That was probably an accurate assessment of the bitter Powell-Fenster feud in all its permutations; but I recognized that voice and didn’t like hearing it in my imagination. So I gave myself a hard mental shake and tried to think of something else. Nothing else came to mind, though.
    Months after she had tried to kill me on a storm-swept promontory in Harlem, that
awful
woman was still haunting me, I realized. She had murdered three men, and she came far too close to killing the man I . . . Well, she came far too close to killing him, too. Because of me.
    “Be honest with yourself, Esther,” she said. “Would he be lying in agonized paralysis awaiting his death now if not for
you?
”
    “He’s still alive, and you’re not,” I muttered aloud to my private demon. “So get out of my head already, would you?”
    Feeling a little shaky, I splashed cold water on my face in what had once been the private Powell bathroom. I supposed the stress of this weird day was getting to me, and the result was that
she
crept into my head again. Or maybe I’d opened the door to her by thinking about Constance Fenster, who was a similarly merciless woman (though presumably not a similarly homicidal one).
    As I washed my hands in what had been the private bathroom of the last Powell who’d been a partner of the Fensters, I reflected that I wasn’t sorry that the Iron Matriarch had died a few months before I ever came to work here. Jingle said she succumbed to pneumonia, a complication that arose after she’d undergone surgery to remove a cancerous tumor. I suspected that, although very ill and in her eighties by then, she had been a formidably ruthless employer, enemy, and mother right up until her dying breath.

5
    I took Satsy’s new costume back down to the men’s locker room on the fourth floor, where I tapped on the door and called hello before letting myself in. Life in the performing arts forces you to shed conventional physical