Free The Egg Code by Mike Heppner Page A

jacket. It looked old and out of style, something a college professor might wear.
    “It was my father’s. He wore it around the house. Like Glenn Gould. With the hat and the long coat. Even in the summertime.”
    “Which one is Glenn Gould?” she asked, thinking,
Personal assistant? Legal secretary?
    “He’s a piano player,” Derek snapped. “Look, do me a favor. Take a quarter, there’s a soda machine at the end of the hall, can you get me a Canada Dry? Just a Canada Dry, nothing else. I don’t think my throat’s going to make it.” He gave her a coin and slumped against a post in the middle of the room, already exhausted.
    Donna’s fingers closed around the quarter. She repeated the words to herself—
Canada Dry
—and left the room. Out in the hallway, she found the soda machine and dropped her money into the slot. A motor inside the machine grunted, pumping freon in and out of the refrigeration unit. Smiling, she pressed the button marked Sprite, then pulled the cold can from the base of the machine. It opened with a satisfying
crack—
metal shearing metal.

Break
    1989
    After sixteen years of marriage, Derek and Donna had finally decided (he’d decided and she’d gone along with it) to move out of Crane City. Big Dipper Township offered every luxury Derek had denied himself until now: clean country living, a huge house on the water, no neighbors, a decent school system (not that it mattered anymore). To Bartholomew Hasse, the decision represented much more than that. Derek had no idea what he was getting into. Kay Tree lived nearby; not Kay herself, but Kay’s daughter, and that was bad enough. The battle between the old and the new had started to shift. By the end of the decade, he’d seen the Internet grow from a small, academic enterprise to something more pervasive, more tied to the world economy. The federal government was interested. And now Derek! This was a betrayal. Trapped in Hedgemont Heights, he needed a new acolyte.
    Whenever they’d discussed it—Derek sitting on one end of the dining table, Donna and her father on the other—the same issue always came up. Derek had received an offer from the Gloria Corporation to conduct a series of lectures—the usual corporate rah-rah he’d been dishing out since the seventies. Drunk on three glasses of wine, he snarled, “Gimme a break, Bart. I could care less about the GC. I’m just trying to do a little consulting work.”
    Bartholomew kept silent as Donna argued on his behalf. “My father has given you so much,” she said, glaring at her husband. They’d all dressed up for dinner; with her thick brown hair stacked high, a pair of pearl earrings dangling from her chewy little earlobes, she looked privileged, easy to damage. “You owe him everything. Your career. Me.”
    Derek zeroed in on his wife; he’d hardly touched his lamb steak, which was served in a fancy green pesto sauce by Bartholomew’s live-in cook. “You agreed that the move would be good for us. Do you think that I don’t care about our marriage?”
    “No, Derek, I don’t think that.” She was crying again.
Tactics
, thought Derek.
Ignore it
.
    “Well, all right then.” Satisfied, he went back to his dinner. Between bites, he pointed at the old man with his knife. “I won’t let this guy ruin everything. We’ll go to the country. He can’t hurt us there. He’s too old to make the drive.”
    Bartholomew smiled at Derek’s bluster, at the pigheadedness of it all. Big Dipper Township was only an hour away, and the Hasse family had many servants. Chauffeurs. Messengers. Strongarms. Then there was Donna. She would be faithful. She would not forget her old home. Bartholomew might have kept her sheltered in her youth, but at least he’d made her take driving lessons.
You never know when you might not
have a man to depend on
, he once told her, thinking mainly of himself.
    “We won’t talk about it anymore,” Derek said. He ate aggressively, chewing with his mouth