“She was a patient of Dr. Randall McGinty’s—you must have heard of him, big Monifan advocate. Anyway. Kaitlyn Armistead was killed in a car accident right after leaving his office the other day. It’s in the police report.”
“That’s so sad.”
“It is. But we’d been wondering if Monifan might lead to suicidal thoughts or actions. So after the crash, I put doctor and patient together, and theorized Kaitlyn might have been a victim of that lethal side effect. Which, from our perspective—I know, lawyers, disgusting scum—might mean a potential lucrative settlement for her estate. Not to mention for the lawsuits we’re researching.”
“She killed herself? Because of the drug? Huh. I read that, in the Pharminex FDA submissions. They’re fighting about whether to put it on the label. Jerks.” Ellie realized, tragic as it was, if Kaitlyn Armistead was a victim of her medication, that could be a key part of Ellie’s investigation. It could provide evidence that Monifan was dangerous, and that Pharminex had known that fact and sold it anyway. Her mind accelerated, planning. “I see what you mean. I know it’s horrible, and I guess reporters are scum too. That’s precisely what I’m looking for, too, and—”
“Maybe,” Gabe interrupted her. “But here’s the thing. My sources are saying the police aren’t sure her death was an accident.”
“Not an accident?”
“Listen. They know from the staff at Dr. McGinty’s office that Kaitlyn and Nora Quinn sat together, and were talking the morning Kaitlyn died. Apparently, they knew each other. And, or so I’m told, Kaitlyn was upset. Crying. There’s clearly way more to Nora Quinn than we know.”
Ellie sat at her battered wooden desk in her tiny makeshift office, the one she’d been assigned only a few weeks ago when she’d been buoyed by determination and infinite drive to change the world, and wondered if that world was about to fall apart. She thought, as quickly as thoughts can pass through a human consciousness, of how long she’d worked on this investigation, and how much it meant to her.
“So you think—” Ellie began.
“It’s not what I think, Ellie. It’s what the police think.”
“That Nora Quinn…” She had to say it. “That this pharma rep—or whatever Vanderwald relative she is—caused Kaitlyn to crash her car, and now she’s going to blame it on the medicine? And Pharminex? To ruin them?”
Silence on the other end of the line.
“That would be…” Ellie searched for words, trying to fathom the twisted imagination of someone who would consider such a thing.
“No,” she said. “I don’t believe that. She’d kill some stranger to make a point?”
“You don’t know her, Ellie. You don’t really know anything about Nora Quinn. Do you?”
“Well—”
“She’s an amateur, if you ask me.” Gabe’s voice was dismissive. “Hair, accent, all that. Phony as a—”
A knock at Ellie’s door made her jump. It opened. Meg.
“Sorry to bother, but ready to talk to Warren about our story? I told him about our Abigail interview—that’s okay, I hope.” Meg had a yellow pencil tucked through her ponytail. “Oh, you’re still on the phone? Is everything okay?”
CHAPTER 20
NORA
She’d waited until darkest of dark to lug the box of evidence upstairs to her apartment, so late on this too-cold March evening that every window in her building was a black rectangle, with not one light glowing through slotted blinds or filmy curtains or bare glass. Nora heard her own booted footsteps on the sidewalk, crunching through remnants of the blue snowmelt that she’d been warned would blanket every pedestrian surface in Boston until April.
Her goal was to haul this box inside from where the cab had dropped her without being seen. She feared the clack and clatter of the front door, when she finally got there, would be loud as fireworks in the building’s stillness.
Nora shivered, the wind biting at her, but she couldn’t delay. She had to get this stuff inside. This had been a difficult day, a revealing day, an unsettling day.
Her Saturday evening with Guy—five days ago now—had been unsettling as well. It ended so late they’d closed down the restaurant. Then they’d gone their separate ways, with Nora none the wiser, no matter what techniques she tried, about Guy’s true motives. Which made her even more suspicious. The next day, Sunday, he’d texted her. Hearing the ping, she’d tried to prepare for his next move—but he’d only typed “great night” and that he was “headed out of town again.” She shook her head.Did he think she was stupid? “Safe travels,” she’d typed back. Two could play this game.
She trudged up the sidewalk, counting new worries with every step. Dr. Hawkins was a spy for Pharminex. What a jerk, trapping her like that. She recognized that the situation had its own irony, but Nora had thought she had been so careful. Now she wondered how many other spies the company had. Who they were. What they might be doing.
Almost to her apartment. Half a block to go. She adjusted the heavy box in her arms.
Then the confrontation in Detta Fiddler’s office. That had surprised her. Shifted her focus. Forced her to improvise again.
To Nora’s relief, the security people Fiddler had summoned this afternoon had not been cops but rent-a-guards. She instantly nicknamed them Tug and Boat, each one with a shiny shaved head, a charcoal shirt with a Pharminex logo on the front and SECURITY across their broad backs. With Tug on her left and Boat on her right, they escorted her toward the warren of lockers on the ninth floor. As the elevator carried them up, the two stared straight ahead.
The doors slid open. At five thirty in the afternoon they were alone, since the genuine pharmaceutical salespeople all left at five. Lydia and Jenn and Christine and Gerri, the ones who seemed to honestly believe the Monifan they pitched was a miracle.
As Nora marched to her locker, feeling the heat from the guards’ bodies close to her, she channeled her newest role: an embarrassed victim. Turned out, to extricate herself from this, she’d had to play yet another persona.
She’d explained to Detta and Allessandra—tears in her eyes—that she changed her identity because she was an abused woman on the run, hiding from a dangerous husband. Sure, it was a nasty sort of lie, but Nora was out to help women in a different horrific situation. People like poor Kaitlyn Armistead, who had put her trust and her soul into the desperate need to have a child. Whose family was probably now planning her funeral.
“Golly,” she’d said to her two inquisitors back in Detta Fidler’s office, “I thought Dr. Hawkins was genuinely interested in me, the person.” She’d played it wide-eyed, shocked, feeling her way into the new role. “I guess I’m still vulnerable. Damaged. Still looking for a man to protect me. So stupid.” Channeling shame and humiliation, she concentrated on the plush carpeting for a moment, giving her tears time to form. Looked up at the two women, mortified. “He’s quite a good actor. But I suppose you know that.”
Fiddler and Lewes seemed almost sympathetic—enough to help Nora engineer a swift but unexplained exit from the company and a confidentiality agreement about the circumstances.
“We cannot have the slightest suspicion of unprofessional behavior, Nora.” Fiddler had shaken her head, as if reluctant to pronounce this unemployment sentence on such a pitiful creature. “But we won’t reveal why you changed your name. I wish you had told us, but I understand why you couldn’t. Still. Dr. Hawkins. That’s a transgression no matter who you really are. We’ll just say you had another opportunity.”
“Thank you.” Nora had been acquiescent. Cutting her losses.
Later she pointed her two security guards down corridor five. “This is mine, locker seventeen,” she said. She looked up under her eyelashes at Tug, the guard who’d seemed more susceptible, trying for sympathy. “Was mine, I suppose.”
“Three minutes, ma’am,” Tug said.
She spun her lock and clacked open the metal locker, then stopped; first surprised, and then calculating. The institutional tan cabinet contained only a
cello-wrapped tin of mints, a can of hair spray and the mirror she’d attached to the door. Everything else was gone. The binders of pharmaceutical specifications and drug interaction information, the Pharminex pads and pens and company swag. And no blue and white sample boxes of Monifan were stacked square in the corner of the top shelf. Not one. Her locked leather detail bag was gone too. She turned to Tug.
“Where’s all my stuff?” Were they trying to trick her again? Accuse her of stealing? But they would have played that card by now.
“Not your property, ma’am,” Tug said. “Your supplies were removed earlier this morning. Lucky for you, your sample count was correct.”
“Seen what happens when it isn’t,” Boat said.
“Mighta gone different,” Tug said.
But no matter. All she’d needed were three or four sample packs a day, and those had been easy enough to swipe and hide in a safe place, a few at a time. She was sorry, or maybe a little sorry, that someday, possibly, an inventory of her customers’ supply cabinets might come out the tiniest bit wrong. And doctors may not have found as many samples in their gold plastic P-X goody bags as they’d expected. But it was all for a good cause.
And Nora had copied her detail book, page by necessary page, sneaking a few at a time in the office copier. After each meeting, she’d used a copy place to duplicate every single order from every single doctor. She had a stack of pads, boxes of pens, cello-wrapped stickies and, most damning, a stash of preprinted prescription pads, already filled out for Monifan and waiting for a doctor’s signature. When the legal guns moved in, they’d surely subpoena that evidence from the company.
But to do her job, Nora needed her own proof of original packaging, as well as internal documents like class instructions and the damning sales pitch materials Allessandra Lewes had confidently distributed to her new recruits. All that was now in this box she’d retrieved from where she’d stashed it, and it would soon be safely hidden in her apartment.
The streetlights glowed orange-white in front of her, every parking place taken, every car dark inside, no interior lights revealing watchful eyes. She crossed the street, narrowing her shoulders, drawing her arms closer, carrying the brown cardboard box like a shield between her and the dark. No headlights in either direction.
The moment she got inside, she’d get her new show on the road.
“Mighta gone different.” She whispered Tug’s final words now. “But it didn’t, Tug. It went precisely the way I wanted.”
Balancing her box of legal ammunition on one hip, she dug into the pocket of her handbag for the front door key.
“Thanks so much, Nora,” she whispered, as she clicked open the door to her apartment building. “It’s been nice being you.”
BEFORE
CHAPTER 21
LACEY
“You’ll make a beautiful bride, dear. No matter what dress you choose.”
Lacey saw Brinn Vanderwald’s smile reflected in the mirror behind her. Lacey’s future mother-in-law, wearing winter-white wool trousers and a blouse set off with strappy bronze sandals and an elaborately buckled belt, had draped one arm over the back of the gold damask chaise where she sat, lush and languid. Glittering, like everything else in the opulent ivory dressing room, off-limits to all but the privileged. The massive rococo mirror mounted on the elegantly papered wall at Sonnenfield’s was the store’s iconic gilt-flowered symbol of access and power. Those lucky brides who were framed in the gold, the store’s legend had it, were the fairest of them all, and destined to live a perfect happily-ever-after. Brinn—more and more Lacey’s best friend forever—had whispered to her that she believed in the promise.
Happy endings were for fairy tales, Lacey knew that. But out loud, as she and Brinn whispered like teenage confidantes as they’d set up the place cards for last year’s Vanderwald Thanksgiving table, Lacey had said she believed it too.
Shiny white clamps, like glorified clothespins, now held the sample-size gown of snow-white lace taut to Lacey’s waist. Fluttering beside her, arranging hemlines and fiddling with the fit, were Colomba and Artemis—so read the name tags on the sales clerks’ sleek pink sheath dresses, just uniform enough to be uniforms. Together they’d lifted the gossamer train, then let it float to the carpeted floor, gasping at the beauty of it.
“You’re making me blush, you two. It’s so difficult to choose,” Lacey, smiling, said into the mirror. Her entire life had been difficult, and when things worked, it was because she had made them work. Willed them to work. When things didn’t work, it wasn’t her fault. But then she’d simply try again. There was always another way.
“I’m so disappointed your mother can’t be here to share this.” Brinn crossed her slim legs, took a delicate sip of the pink drink shimmering in her tall glass. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime event. My only son, my darling son, marrying the girl of his dreams. You’re both so lucky. And young enough to give me many, many grandchildren.”
Lacey smoothed the lace at her waist and caressed the fabric over her hips. “You’re so generous, Brinn,” she said. “I’ll tell Mother all about it, of course. Every single wonderful thing. And how lovely y’all have been.” Y’all. Now and then Lacey wondered if she was laying it on too thick.
Her own mother, back in Montgomery with Lacey’s stepfather, was “sadly unavailable.” That’s how Lacey had explained it to the disappointed Vanderwald family as they celebrated her engagement to Trevor in a private room of the country club, each place setting with a flute of chilled champagne and an array of silverware. They wouldn’t know what disappointment was unless they met her mother. Lacey was determined that would never happen.
She adjusted the puff of illusion veil, straightened the Alençon lace that draped from her bare shoulders, and in the mirror, saw her own future too. In tennis whites and jodhpurs, in cocktail satin and belle-of-the-ball brocade, she’d be—in five months and two weeks—Lacey Grisham Vanderwald. She’d keep the college nickname—why not? She’d be Mrs. Trevor Vanderwald, the beloved wife of the scion of Vanderwald industries and all they controlled.
Did she love Trevor? Of course she did.
“I do adore this one, Brinn.” Lacey tweaked her natural drawl to what she hoped was a more genteel and well-bred inflection, one befitting her soon-to-be stature. She turned from the mirror, smiling. “Don’t you, honey?”
“Honey” was directed toward that pill, Brooke Vanderwald. Sullen as always, she had insisted on sitting on the floor. Now the sixteen-year-old had the back of her grubby jean jacket plastered against the flowered wallpaper and her garish red Chucks planted on the taupe carpeting. And always with a book. Brinn had insisted on Brooke’s accompanying them, though from the girl’s hostility she might have been suggesting she stop breathing. Maybe the poor girl was jealous. Or thought Lacey was stealing away her beloved big brother. So silly. The girl was getting a big sister.
Brooke would feel better once she got those braces off, and when her zits cleared up. She had a pretty enough face and incredibly long legs. Lacey almost laughed out loud, remembering what people had said to her in her awkward days. Thinking they were being reassuring. Brooke had to learn to deal with reality.
“Whatever,” Brooke deigned to say.
“And you’ll be a lovely bridesmaid, won’t you, sweetheart?” Brinn stood, not taking her eyes off Lacey, positioning herself next to her in the mirror, the glass reflecting the two women, both in shades of white, both envisioning a future. “We’ll have Christmas, and New Year’s, and before we know it, a wedding. And you two will be sisters! And babies. Brooke, you’ll be an auntie!”
“Whatever,” Brooke repeated. “I had no idea you cared about grandchildren, Mother. How fascinating.”
In the mirror, Lacey caught the girl’s exaggerated eye roll. And Brinn’s worried frown.
Lacey smiled at the gilt-edged reflection, making herself their ray of sunshine.
CHAPTER 22
BROOKE
None of this mattered,
the money, and the stuff, and everything her mom and this Lacey seemed to care about. Brooke sat on the floor of the stupid wedding place’s dressing room. She’d only come because her mother had forced her to. Sisters, her mother had gushed. She’d rather die.
She was sixteen now, just, and wanted with all her heart to walk out the store’s front door and never see any of them, not ever again. She turned another page in her book to make it look like she was really reading. But there was no way to leave. She didn’t have money. She didn’t have anything.
She kept track, every day in her little secret diary, of how many words she said to her father, and how many to her mother. She could not go over one hundred. She had to live with the two of them because she needed food and shelter, and because she wasn’t stupid. But she wasn’t a pawn. They had actively tricked her, actively deceived her, and then, like, thought she’d just accept their murder of her child—because that’s what it was, wasn’t it? The murder of her very child? And their grandchild! Like it was nothing? She could feel herself getting angrier, but that’s not who she would be. She would not waste her energy on parents who thought she was invisible. She would use her power for something else.
She sighed, staring at the capped white toes of her red shoes. She’d loved Liam, though. And now her heart was too heavy to carry in her body. He’d ignored her. Erased her. I love you more than the moon and stars, he’d said. Something like that. But she guessed he had lied to her too. Everybody lied. Liam would never miss her, no matter how much she missed him. She turned a page in her book like she was turning a page in her life. She’d tear the Liam page out, if she could.
But. She thought about, really thought about, what her brother Trevor would do if she vanished. Her parents would get over it, pretend to be sad and then go on with their selfish dumb lies and lives. But not Trevor.
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