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II. K&K

Ellie Knight-Cameron oversaw the suggestion box at Kolodny & Kolodny, a small insurance brokerage company, and in all the many years of discharging this humble task, she’d never come across a suggestion like the one she discovered Monday nestled in that cardboard container: If they’re going to close lanes on the parkway, they ought to actually repair the goddamned road.

K&K, as they abbreviated themselves, were located in the sprawling suburban municipality of Stamford, CT, a mile or so off the High Ridge Road exit of the Merritt Parkway, and for some years now this verdant stretch of pavement had been a maze of lane closures, especially west of town. The majority of K&K’s ten employees commuted into town against the prevailing traffic, and it was here that they often encountered the dreaded file of orange cones.

Without a doubt, this suggestion she found was reasonable. Excepting the split infinitive and the profane language. People complained about traffic. It was one of the things they talked about. Still, it was hard for Ellie Knight-Cameron to imagine what she, as office manager, was supposed to do about it.

Ellie had nothing much in the way of organizational power. In fact, the suggestion box existed mainly to enforce camaraderie at the K&K coffee station. Usually, therefore, the suggestions were kind of routine. Can we possibly get a blend with a little hazelnut in it? Just once in a while? Even if Dolly Halloran hated the vanilla hazelnut variety that Ellie later selected, the suggestion in this instance had met with general favor in the office, bringing good cheer to the lounge area.

Ellie Knight-Cameron was thirty-four, and she was a bit heavy for her age, or maybe it was just that despite years of workout regimens and exotic diets she had never once resembled a svelte, cosmopolitan type of woman, and she was a little self-conscious about this, despite her brown ringlets, which took an awful lot of work to maintain, and the mole above her upper lip that she thought was one of her best features. Her eyes were as gray as flagstones. She had an easy smile. People liked her, just not in that flinging-off-clothes kind of way.

Ellie’s hyphenated surname, to broach a sore subject, was the creation of her parents, who were as yet unmarried. These free spirits had met in the early seventies, out in the Sun Belt. The conception of Ellie Knight-Cameron, according to the story, had taken place during a festival gig by the venerable Allman Brothers Band. There’d been a particularly adventurous solo by Dickey Betts. In the far distance, beneath a tattered blanket, love conjoined the not terribly illustrious families Knight and Cameron.

Every Saturday, Ellie cleaned her apartment in Rye, and she started in the bedroom and worked her way north in order to avoid disturbing her cat, Nails, for the longest possible time. Ellie had ridiculously strong feelings about her vacuum cleaner, which was British, purple, and designed by an aeronautical engineer. Her excitement about vacuuming depressed her, though if you are going to be depressed about your enthusiasms, you should at least have a reliable vacuum cleaner as consolation prize.

On Saturdays she cleaned, and then she went to the organic market, and then she tried to arrange pastimes that involved her friends from the office or from college. She’d gone to school in the early nineties, those go-go years, as far away from the Southwest as she could get, which turned out to be Westchester County. What she liked to do with her friends from college — most of whom had crazy, arty ambitions — was play miniature golf. She also loved minor league baseball. At some hazy point in the future she intended to learn the tango.

Because Ellie Knight-Cameron was orderly in her habits and in her thinking, she’d been a natural hire for Kolodny and Kolodny. The name of the firm was a little misleading, actually, because there was only one Kolodny, and that was Duane, who had long ago hoped to lure his boy, Mark, into the business. Mark had gone into real estate instead, though he nonetheless presumed to inherit the business, perhaps so he could sell it off. Duane Kolodny had begun life as a contractor in Fairfield County, but he’d become fed up with the lawlessness and Darwinism of contracting. The gravel business was controlled by the mob, the cement business was controlled by the mob, the building permits were controlled by the politicians, the politicians were on the take, and so forth. Duane was a low-key person. He’d settled on insurance because it was pragmatic. He didn’t have to sell too hard; he just had to believe in his product. Which was another way of saying that Duane believed that you should take care of yourself and your family and move gingerly through life, on the lookout for trouble.

According to Ellie Knight-Cameron’s K&K psychological profiling, it was extremely unlikely that Duane Kolodny, who was seventy years old and couldn’t bring himself to retire, had written the petulant suggestion about the lane closures on the Merritt Parkway. Duane kept to himself. For example, no one had known about the problems between Duane and his wife, not until that rash of days when his office door was very firmly closed. Duane had emerged one afternoon complaining of allergies and gone home early. Not long after, he was a bachelor.

It wasn’t clear that Duane even knew there was a suggestion box. The aforementioned Dolly Halloran, Duane’s executive assistant, knew there was one. She’d lobbied for it in the first place. Ellie herself knew about it, of course. She checked it every day or so. As for the rest of the staff, they knew of the suggestion box because it was sitting right there, enfolded in pink wrapping paper, by the coffee machine. It had originally served as a box of bathroom tissues and would have been recycled as such had Ellie not plucked it from obscurity and festooned it.