Betty Margrave listened with increasing displeasure to the account of the incident in front of the dining commons entrance. As if things weren’t bad enough already, now she had to deal with some kind of adolescent squabble, with no understanding of why it should even be going on.
When both of her security people had given their accounts of the incident, she looked directly at each of them in turn. “This puts me in something of a pickle. Since I’m married into the Shepard lineage, I have to be very careful to avoid any appearance of favoritism, but equally I don’t want to appear to be excessively harsh simply because of that. It may be best if I handle it as little as possible, and allow someone else to take disciplinary authority. In the meantime, I need both of you to keep a close eye on the situation in case we have another flare-up of whatever’s going on.”
They both promised they would, and she had good reason to expect they’d give a heads-up to the rest of the security team. But as she watched them leave, she realized just what a sour taste the whole thing left in her mouth.
Strictly speaking, nothing about the incident merited a formal investigation. Even trying to treat the Chaffee’s words as a threat would be stretching things, and Betty had a good reason to think that she’d get some strong push-back from the departments he was associated with. Overreacting to a little tough-guy talk would probably be the least of it, like as not accompanied by a little eye-rolling.
Guys go for the direct confrontation, she reminded herself. And often as not it doesn’t even come to blows. They size each other up, talk smack to each other, and then something clicks and one of them backs down. Make a formal Issue out of it, and all you end up doing is disrupting a social process that works, and creating a hell of a lot of resentment.
All the same, it bothered her that she had no idea what had happened to lead to the incident. This sort of thing didn’t come out of nowhere, and she had good reason to believe there was something a lot deeper than she was seeing.