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Kill Well [The Steep Climes Quartet, Book One]
© David R. Guenette, 2023 (Revised December 2024)
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 979-8-9885055-0-1
LCC 2023911828

 

 

Davin likes going downtown to South County Interactive’s office in Great Barrington, even though he still more or less hears the quotation marks he puts around downtown. Boston has a downtown, Cambridge and other sizable towns and cities have downtowns, but the term downtown doesn’t feel like the right fit for Great Barrington.

He steps out of his old Kia, or really it’s more like he pulls himself up and out with grunts since the car’s not roomy and it’s low to the ground, and he’s less spry than he’d like. And the door handles have a tendency to pull right off, the exterior ones. He’s had to replace handles four times already. He hates the car, hates driving, hates the whole stupid idea of it, but then he’s not in Cambridge anymore.

What was I thinking? he asks himself, and not for the first time, but still, it’s a beautiful day, and the morning rain is gone and the day now hot enough, if perhaps too hot, but clear and sunny. He’s found a parking spot right on Main Street, not three doors down from the building entrance of the SCI office. Parking can sometimes be a problem during high season when the town is crowded with visitors, but it isn’t high season, even if the temperature and humidity feel that way.

He growls a howyadoin’ at a passerby, one of the many regulars he sees around and maybe has met, but he’s not sure. He then spots Deidre, the new house sharer-to-be, coming up the sidewalk, and he offers a half wave. The young woman has a nice smile.

He’s offered to help her move some of her belongings in early, after she told him her car is in the repair shop. He was coming downtown anyway, he’d told her, and she lived nearby, and was off work at the right time to meet up at the SCI office.

He knows Deidre works full-time at the crystal and tarot shop downtown and part-time at a restaurant as a server. He also knows from what she told him previously, that she thinks of herself as a writer—albeit, unpublished, she’d readily confessed. She’d told him she writes poems, or something akin to that anyway, as she had put it.

He hadn’t any response to that declaration. Deidre is young and may or may not yet know things take time, but it isn’t his role to tell her. She’ll figure things out.

As she steps close, Davin says, “Hey roomie,” and immediately feels stupid, so he adds, “Sorry. That was weird.”

Deirdre says, “Well, we are, right?” but Davin can see she feels a bit embarrassed, or maybe just shy.

Davin grabs the door and points upward. “Second floor. Shouldn’t take me long.”

Deidre steps through and starts up the stairs.

SCI is up the stairway, which is cool and dim with the sun already around the building, leaving the east-facing street entrance door in shadow. The SCI office door is open, and he steps in, but Deidre doesn’t follow. Instead, she takes a seat on a chair in the hall near the office door. He hears Alicia on the phone in her back office, so he goes to the banquet folding table that’s been set up in the front room as a work surface.

He sets his laptop down and logs into his Google account to look at the news. His Google News AI feed is well shaped and has some balance in sources so he can at least argue he’s avoiding bubblizing. Of late he’s been fine-tuning to see how good the local filters can get, although he more and more finds he’s in something of a feedback loop with a lot of SCI hits showing up.

He seems to always be upgrading his ad block extension. He’s noticed searches still increasingly slant toward results that clearly have some commercial benefit for Google, including the ever- plentiful Ads and Sponsored results that crowd out the actual search hits he’s pursuing. And despite his use of ad blocking, it seems like half of the links he clicks on go to pages that must be whitelisted to see the content he wants. So far, he’s managed to keep Alicia from making SCI demand whitelisting, and the analytics back up his argument that people mostly like to see local ads.

Or at least don’t hate them, he considers, thinking of his constant frustration with the state of the Web these days where everything is about monetizing and barely any attention paid to the initial promise of the Internet to make information discoverable and available to all. He mostly doesn’t like to think about the ever-expanding commercialization of digital content. The potential of more positive cultural benefits from developments like hypertext and wide accessibility to content had been a driving force early in his career, and he had moved away from book publishing to explore the emerging world of electronic publishing.

He’d finally canceled his several Facebook pages right after Harris and the Democrats had failed to keep Don the Absurd from regaining the White House.

He puts such an unpleasant thought away and starts reviewing the news.

The fires out west are at the top of his Google News, the sort of news items that are present nearly year-round these days with the enduring drought supplying fire conditions across much of the West. But parts of the Amazon are on fire too, and vast areas of Siberia are once again ablaze, already surpassing that region’s previous high mark of more than 50 million square miles burnt back in 2020, the now second-worst recorded.

Ah, 2020, the year that keeps on giving, he says to himself when he sees the year referenced in the story he’s skimming through. Neither Gwen nor Davin had anyone close to them die from Covid, but that year had been difficult in many ways, and he knows he’s still recovering economically.

Never mind recovering mentally, he notes silently, but he knows better than to dwell too much on that annus horribilis.

That year Siberia had burned an area bigger than the size of Greece.

And 2021 wasn’t really any better and the floods in Pakistan in 2022 had covered a third of that country’s land and a dozen monster storms had wreaked havoc in many places. He had been fascinated by the satellite images.

These days the smoke particulates from the fires out west sometimes make their way to the east to provide haze and spectacularly reddened sunsets, but the smoke also has become a significant public health issue, and he well remembers last year’s warnings and advisories when a western weather system helped the smoke travel far. Those few days of mask wearing had produced a Covid memory for many people. So far though, this year the air quality this far east has not been compromised.

The year is young, he reminds himself.

He calls out to Deidre through the office entrance door. “Come on in. Make yourself comfortable.” But then he realizes she’s sitting on the same kind of chair he has to offer within, and then he realizes the chair near the door is the same type of chair because it comes from the office, it being the exact chair he had taken from the front office space and placed near the door the last time he was here when he’d gone out into the corridor to give Alicia some privacy as she talked. As best he’d been able to make out, she was talking with some financial advisor or another.

It’s not a fancy office, but he approves because it means Alicia is putting her resources back into SCI and not fancy furnishings or palatial suites.

Deidre comes in carrying the chair. He nods to a small pressed-wood table where two more matched folding chairs are nestled, and Deidre sets her chair close by the others and sits back down.

“Fancy office, huh?” Davin quips and Deidre is polite enough to smile.

He points toward Alicia’s office door, which is half open.

“She’ll finish up and I won’t be long.”

“No problem,” Deidre says.

“Which restaurant do you work at?” he asks her.

“Farm Table,” she answers. “The one toward the north end of Main Street.”

Davin knows it, likes the place, and is sure he must have eaten there more than once or twice, but he’s not one for dining out, especially if he’s alone.

Deidre tells him her evening shift is a Monday and everybody knows that to be the slowest night of any week, but she’ll do better during the high season when a Monday night can be busy and the tips not bad, and she may get more shifts too.

High season, Davin thinks, keeping his sarcastic reaction to himself, but then he realizes these days he often unironically uses this exact phrase.

She’s a good-looking young gal, Davin can see, with a nice head of black hair that curls to frame a symmetrical face, frank dark eyes and full dark lips, and skin that carries a hint of hard-to-determine ethnicity, but her age makes him feel like she is alien. She is younger than his youngest.

But she seems levelheaded. She’ll be living on the second floor, at the opposite end of the house, in a room with its own deck and outside entrance and about as far away from his second-floor office as is possible, the big library room separating the two spaces. Levelheaded, responsible, quiet, that’s what he thinks she will be.

Hopefully.

He’s got a security deposit from her, plus first and last month’s rents, already, something of a victory in comparison to Chaplin’s status. Maybe he’s getting better at this boarding thing.

Who the hell knows, he tells himself. Luck, more than anything.

He wants to ask her if she has a boyfriend but can’t figure out how to do so without it seeming weird, and besides, the rental agreement limits overnight guests, so he’ll just have to wait and deal with that problem should it arise.

“It doesn’t matter,” he asks, “but why are you leaving your apartment?” She hadn’t talked about her current rental, but then they’d talked about a lot of things when she’d been by the house to see the room, and there was his rambling on about the house and the lease, so it wasn’t like she hadn’t been forthcoming.

“Well, my landlord informed me and my roommate we had to be out by the end of the month,” she tells him.

It’s only a few days from the end of the month, he notes.

“Wow,” he says.

Deidre nods. “Yeah,” she says, “we got word nearly halfway to the end of the month, that’s when we were given this notice.”

That seems to be everything he’ll learn about it because she has stopped.

But after a moment, as Davin is about to get back to his news, she tells him she and her roommate were plenty annoyed by the notice, but in a way, it hadn’t really surprised her because it was just another instance of what has been happening to a lot of people she knows.

“Just one more homeowner changing the use of apartment for short-term rentals. He wanted us out early so he could fix up the place, which I’ll tell you, seems kind of like a Herculean task, the poor shape of the house outside and in,” she says, shrugging, and then she looks up at Davin, blushing. “I mean, I don’t have anything against Airbnb, and I love your house, I love that there’s a lot of space, a lot of yard….”

Davin smiles and waves away any concern she might have. “No problem,” he tells her. “Anyone who uses the term Herculean is good in my book.”

She smiles.

“The short-term rental situation is a problem,” he then adds. “I hear you. It’s just that these days with costs all up sometimes it’s an important piece of, the, uh, Berkshire Shuffle, right? That term still used?” Berkshire Shuffle was a colloquial phrase for the amalgam of part-time and second or third jobs a lot of people in the Berkshires were forced to pursue in order to make ends meet.

She smiles, then grins. “Oh yeah,” she says.

“The house is big,” Davin continues, “and it makes sense that more people use it, so house shares helps cover costs too, not”— and he is for a moment flustered—not that there’s any danger of losing the house or anything, but there is still some work I’d like to do with the property.”

Deidre nods.

Davin turns back to his laptop. Climate change is one of his alert filters, and greenhouse gases a selected subtopic, so he’s looking at a story in The Washington Post that has been following various NGOs’ efforts on the carbon tax bill that’s been mutating in the halls of Congress, although stillborn might be the better description, considering the state of Congress. Still, the mid-terms are coming up and there’s a lot of speculation about one or the other side of Congress slipping back under Democratic control.

Davin’s not a Democratic, but he sure hopes this happens. Trump’s first two years this second time around have been even more chaotic than before, with his loyalist appointees commuting by clown car.

All news, including climate change news, has been hard for him to follow since the 2024 elections.

As if to prove his point, there’s a story in his feed that seems atypically sensational—a murder of a fossil fuel divestiture activist, a VP at Carbon’s End, a spin-off or new division of ClimateProgress.Org, or at least he’s pretty sure ClimateProgress.Org spawned it. He has an old colleague who switched over to climate technology and who may have had some connection to ClimateProgress.Org, although Davin knows that sometimes he doesn’t listen too closely when his friend gets going on the subject of his work.

He more certainly knows he’s got to do more work on the news filters because too many off-focus climate change–related news items are getting into the hit results, and he’s been spending too much time reviewing all of them, even if it’s just a fast skimming. The new AI feature is supposed to help by learning from the items he reads and rejects, and by judging duration of the read too, and by noting click-throughs, among many other factors, but as with a lot of other software and apps, he resents all the time it takes to purportedly save himself time and become more efficient.

Artificial, yes, he tells himself, intelligent, not so much.

Thefeed filter is natural language processing based, which Davin thinks heunderstands.

This AI needs a talking to, a joke he makes on a regular basis.

He clicks on the Response button for this murder story, and chooses Ignore, so the AI doesn’t get the wrong idea. He goes back to the results list, and a few topic headings down in the feed there’s a story about agricultural markets affected by the ongoing western droughts, and he thinks to suggest to Alicia that she be on the lookout for someone who can report on local agriculture since there’s been an increase in active farms in the region, but then again, it’s not his ambition to take the farm beat, which just might happen if he starts suggesting this sort of coverage.

He checks his email and notices he has new ones, and since he’s been actively advertising the second house share and is still thinking of taking in a third house share, he’s curious to see the newest responses. He’ll hold off on the third house share for a while though, because his son Jimmy is getting out of Chicago mainly because the city is in what looks to be a prolonged heat wave, one of those crazy one- thousand-year weather patterns that happen more and more. He assumes Jimmy won’t likely stay long, liking being on his own, but his son may be running out of money after getting laid off.

Davin will play it by ear on the third house share, considering the odd economic times, and Jimmy could well be around for some time. Family first, he thinks, even if the divorce has confused that guiding principle. Gwen’s new place in Lenox is small, so there’s no real option other than to have Jimmy stay with him.

Davin is glad about that.

He sees there are two new responses about the house share, but the first, from some guy named Willy, has little to offer, including the lack of a last name or any answer to either of the two questions Davin posted in the listing, which has him wondering, yet again, if people even read these days. On the other hand, the second inquiry is more interesting, with the email in good form and the content on target. He’ll reply to this one, letting the person know the offer’s been filled but that he’s happy to keep her on file if something comes up.

Davin sighs, and then stretches in the chair, his arms thrown widely, and slowly.

Alicia is still on the phone, trying to sell more ads to an event venue, if Davin’s eavesdropping skills are on point. All he is really listening for, however, is for Alicia to end the call, so they can get on with the business at hand, which is the attempt by Alicia to talk Davin into taking on an editorial role.

He’s tempted for the income, considering the consulting he’s doing for SCI these days is mainly tweaks of feed structures for the platform, mainly because the platform has matured. There’s the ad sales–related bonus payout, which, while growing, is still modest and his share will only likely grow modestly, accordingly.

And the Airbnb, he reminds himself, annoyed this is not now an active listing, waiting on repairs. He hadn’t and won’t make an insurance claim on the damage, as much as he can use the money for the renovation, but he doesn’t want to flag flood damage with the home insurance. A big increase in home insurance for some policy holders, mainly concentrated on Florida and California, has made national news any number of times, but the insurance companies are more and more on the lookout for flood danger everywhere, and he knows of several people right here in Housatonic who have houses close to the river now paying in big bucks these days.

The last time he looked at the water damage, he had seen some of the damage had gone into the apartment’s small bedroom’s back wall where it shared a common wall with the bathroom. The contractor Davin hopes to settle on keeps getting delayed in his start, and this could very well become a bigger project with some mold remediation. It’s this sort of thing, the unexpected cost, that can make him wonder just why exactly he bought out Gwen’s share of the house instead of them just selling the damn thing.

Money does seem always short, and thus Davin Caine, Cub Reporter, he muses, knowing he’ll let Alicia talk him into taking an editorial role, although he remains concerned there won’t be much of any income from it.

He turns back to his Google News feed, looking to see how the Red Sox’s early season struggles are going, but then Alicia steps out of her office, so he swivels in his office chair and points at her. “Alicia Soares, SCI Publisher”—he points to Deidre— “Deidre.” And then he stops still. “Uh,” he says, feeling embarrassed.

“Deidre Gustavson,” Deidre says as she stands up, her hand out. “I’m the new roommate.” She nods toward Davin.

“House sharer, he likes that term,” Alicia says, but she still has Deidre’s hand in hers and is looking at her, and for a weirdly long time, Davin can’t help thinking.