by BobMathews
that wanted to argue with her, that wanted her to wait before she made any rash conclusions. She knew it was Don, and to deny it would mean lying to herself. Maggie was good at lying—she’d done it to others for years—but long ago she’d promised to never lie to herself.
All right, so it was Don. So what?
So make sure the doors are locked. Throw the bolt, put the chain on. Arm the security system. Make sure the windows—especially the one that opened onto the fire escape—were locked. Once Maggie had done that, she re-checked everything, just in case. Then she went back through the apartment and turned on every light in each room.
She ate her now lukewarm pizza on the couch, watching the door. She chewed each slice without tasting it, swallowing automatically. The wine buzz wasn’t gone, exactly, but it had been replaced by a feeling of dread, a lead ball in the pit of her stomach that rolled continually.
When she finished her pizza, Maggie went to the bathroom. She took off her makeup and put on yoga pants and a tee shirt. When she went to the bedroom, she dropped to her knees and fished around for the baseball bat she kept under the bed. She slept uneasy, with the bat next to her, until her alarm clock went off on Wednesday morning.
No skirt for Maggie this morning. She wore a man’s white Tattersall shirt, open at the throat, with the cuffs rolled neatly to the elbows and dark blue slacks. She dug around in her closet and found her old steel-toed Doc Martens and laced them up tight over her feet. When she left the apartment, she took the baseball bat along with her.
She listened to a podcast on the way to work, an earbud in her left ear and her iPhone in the cup holder next to the gear shift. But the words just flowed past her with no effect. The bat—a Louisville Slugger—lay on the passenger seat. It felt good to be able to look at it, to see the grain of the wood and the solid weight of the thing when everything else in her life seemed like it was spiraling out of control.
Never should have done that movie. Maggie checked her makeup in the rear-view mirror. The money was too good. Ten thousand dollars for four hours. A one, followed by four zeroes, in cash. It was like the answer to a prayer, only the answer came with a catch. The video went online, and she’d begun to get calls almost immediately.
First, it was ex-boyfriends. She could lie to some of them, but not all. These were men who had seen her naked, who had closely observed the contours of her face while she was in the throes of passion. They knew her. No amount of fake tattoos and piercings would hide Maggie from those who really knew her.
“I don’t mind,” one of her exes said. “It brings back some good memories. You know, if you’re ever free—” And that was where Maggie hung up. She didn’t mind her exes knowing. She didn’t even care if they got off to it. Some of them offered her money, but she shut those offers down in no uncertain terms. She wasn’t a whore, and she wasn’t going to let anyone treat her like one, no matter what they thought.
More calls came. Her brother, a couple of friends from college. A professor who might have been more, once upon a time, emailed her. These inquiries were always tentative, and she always responded decisively. No, she always said, she was not the woman in the video.
But sitting in Don Adams’ office the day before had put her near the brink, and seeing him on the street had sent her over it. His car was in the lot when she pulled in, and she marched through the lobby to the elevator, but changed her mind. The elevator would only slow her down, stop the progress of her steady stride. She took the stairs, four floors up, feeling the steady burn in her quads and butt as she neared the landing. Through the door and down the hall, past her workstation and into Don’s office, where he was reading reports from the previous day.
“What the hell are you doing?” she asked when he looked up. His face was blank, a mask made up of the absence of emotion.
“I’m sorry, what?” Don peered over his glasses at her.
“Don’t play with me,” Maggie said. “I saw you last night.”
Now Don leaned back in his chair. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I saw you outside my apartment last night, Don. Don’t get cute. What the hell were you doing?”
Don grinned, a wolfish little crescent smile that blinked on and off again like a light.
“That wasn’t me,” he said. “You must have been mistaken.”
Maggie ran her fingers through her hair, let her arms fall to her sides. She’d come in here to kick some ass, but it wasn’t working out that way. She didn’t know what to say next, so she back away from Don’s desk.
“If that’s all,” he said, “you can go back to your desk now.”
So Maggie did. She sat at her desk and fumed for the rest of the day, handling emails with blunt, ruthless efficiency. Don never called her on the intercom. He only stepped out of his office for lunch, and he ignored her when he left and when he returned. At five p.m., Maggie whipped her jacket over her shoulders and set out. Her steel-toed boots boomed hollow in the stairwell as she marched down to her car.
Roses awaited her, a dozen long-stemmed white beauties sprayed with baby’s breath. They were tucked beneath the windshield wiper of her twelve-year-old Honda. Maggie wrenched the wiper up and grabbed the roses, pawing through them. No card, no nothing.
But it was Don. She knew it had to be him. She called security, who sent a car around, a pair of old cantankerous men, ex-cops, maybe. From the first, they didn’t take her seriously.
“You wanna report a bouquet with intent to romance?” The older one asked. The patch on his uniform said his name was Zabriskie, and his face was just as wrinkled as his uniform was starched.
The other one stifled a laugh, picked up the roses from where Maggie had thrown them.
“Hey, you don’t want these, can I take ‘em home to my wife?”
Maggie just stared at him. Her hands curled into fists at her side. “Shouldn’t that be, I don’t know, evidence or something?” she asked.
The two guards looked at each other.
“Evidence of what?” Zabriskie asked. “You got an admirer? That’s a nice thing for a girl your age.”
“He’s not an admirer,” she spat through gritted teeth. “He’s my boss, and this is sexual harassment. You’re not going to do anything, why don’t you call the real cops, for fuck’s sake.”
Now Zabriskie drew his withered frame up to its full height and stared down his nose at Maggie.
“I was a cop a long time,” he said. “Seen a lot of bad shit. This ain’t it. You and your boyfriend have a spat, you leave us the fuck out of it.” Zabriskie and his partner moved back toward their car. The other one still held the roses.
“You sure you don’t want these?” He said. Maggie shook her head. She got in her own car and resisted the urge to flip the old men off. Instead, she rolled down her window and called to Zabriskie.
“Hey, can you guys look on the video and at least confirm who put them there?” Zabriskie gave her a long look, but eventually reached for the radio console. He keyed the mic, spoke for a few seconds, then listened. Eventually he turned back to Maggie.
“About two o’clock, a van from Tri-Corner Florist come in. Driver looped around twice, found your car. Put the flowers on, then left. You good now?”
Maggie nodded. “Thank you.”
Zabriskie tipped his hat to her and put his car in gear. By the time he circled back around out of sight, Maggie was Googling Tri-Corner Florist.
She got lucky. The guy who answered the phone was the same on who made deliveries.
“Can you tell me who bought the flowers you delivered to MultiCorp., Inc. today?” she asked.
“You the lady that owns the Honda?” the driver asked. “Those were some really nice flowers. I hated to leave them out there like that. You know, people will steal just about anything that’s not nailed down—”
Maggie cut him off. “I’m sure they will,” she said. “But what I really want to know is who bought the flowers.” She let her voice hesitate for
a moment, made it a little softer. “I’m single, and I guess I just wanted to know whose eye I had caught, you know?”
“Sure,” the driver said, though he sounded doubtful. “But I really couldn’t tell you who bought them. It’s against company policy. And, well, even if I could tell you, I took that order. It came online from a prepaid Visa card.”
“Oh,” Maggie said. “I see.”
“I wish I could be more help, but I gotta go. Good luck with your secret admirer.”
“Thanks,” Maggie said, but she was talking to a dead line.
She drove home with the accelerator to the floor, zooming past slower traffic, repeating “son of a bitch, son of a bitch” every time she passed another vehicle. She made herself slow down when she sonofabitched by an out-of-county cop cruiser, who blinked his lights to warn her.
At home, Maggie wasn’t surprised to find more roses outside her door. These were yellow, set in a heavy crystal vase. Maggie kicked the vase—she’d been dying to kick something ever since lacing those boots up—and listened to the satisfying sound of glass breaking. She tromped the roses and the glass into the hallway carpet, grinding the stems and the petals down into unrecognizable pulp, pulverizing the crystal. She stomped and stomped until she realized she was leaping high into the air and bringing her feet down hard again and again.
A couple of her neighbors opened their doors to peek from the cracks left by their security chains.
