Security: A Novel

by Gina Wohlsdorf

  SECURITY

  A NOVEL

  Gina Wohlsdorf

  ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL 2016

  For Sara, Jen, and Dani

  You know.

  “That feast was laid before us always, and yet we ate so little.”

  —DAPHNE DU MAURIER

  CONTENTS

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  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  About Algonquin

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  The maze is twenty-five hundred yards square. Destin Management Group planted hedges before they even began construction on the hotel, since plants can’t be paid to hurry like contractors can. The hedges are twelve feet tall, lush, rounded smooth as sanded wood, and currently a dark black green. This is because the hotel is straight and monolithic, a stark white block on a flat stretch of Santa Barbara beach, the kind of building that inspires arguments about whether its simplistic appearance is a great leap forward in design, or whether a child with a crayon and a napkin could have drawn it while waiting for a five-dollar grilled cheese. It’s visible from the Pacific Coast Highway but only just. The driveway is quite long so as to accommodate the hedge maze, which is the size of half a football field, and it is darkening, now, in the hotel’s shadow.

  In the maze’s center, the dark red roses are immaculate, thanks to four hours of grooming and possibly because Sid, a freckled and obese landscape technician, is singing “O Danny Boy” in his surprisingly gentle tenor. He told the landscape architect that romantic serenades are the secret to growing flawless red roses; fragile flowers need to know they’re loved. He also told the landscape architect he hated the hotel and would take the contract on the condition he never had to go inside. “It looks like a goddamn tooth. Like a tooth somebody yanked out and stuck on the beach.” He pointed at the hotel and spat in its direction, unaware anyone was listening. “Like it’d bite you when you weren’t watching close.”

  Manderley Resort does look somewhat like a tooth. Kinder metaphors like “jewel” and “main sail” are more prominent in the marketing materials. Ads in every medium have ensured that Manderley is the talk of its demographic. Every third billboard in Los Angeles splashes a quote from Travel magazine about how tasteful, how opulent, and how special Manderley will be once it opens in August. It is now mid-July. More tasteful and more opulent invitations arrived at the households of L.A.’s elite yesterday. It’s going to be the Party of the Year. It says so on the invitation. Charles Destin—owner of Destin Management Group, owner of Manderley Resort—does not know how to throw a party that is anything but the Party of the Year.

  Destin’s father was a diplomat who died in a hotel in Sierra Leone because a waiter agreed to take a contraband tray to Lamont Destin’s room. The waiter agreed to do this for seventeen American dollars. The tray had a bomb glued underneath it—a cheap bomb, composed of household products. Charles Destin was notified of his father’s death after a lacrosse match. He was ten years old. He won the lacrosse match, and he always includes this detail when the subject of his father’s death meanders into conversation. He also always mentions that the bomb was cheap, and the spray-tanned skin around his capped teeth tightens when he says this, as though to be incinerated by an expensive bomb is somehow less offensive.

  In the maze, Sid’s wrist beeps, signaling the end of his workday. He croons his final verse to the dry, rose-heavy air—“For you will bend”—snipping deep into a hedge so that a perfect bloom’s absence isn’t blight on the foliage. He slides his large clippers through a fat loop in his tool belt and takes a smaller pair from a thin loop, trimming the thorns from the rose’s twelve-inch stem. Sid goes to the fountain at the center of the maze. Immense, made of stone, themed on fruit and hummingbirds, it sits dank and murky, its wide rim holding the detritus of Sid’s labor: excised leaf clots and thorny branches overflowing a black bucket, and plastic sandwich bags bunched in a rusted silver lunch pail. Sid tweezes the rose between thumb and forefinger, setting it on the fountain’s rim with exaggerated care. Using a schmaltzy pianissimo for the final strains of his ballad, he picks up the bucket, shuts his lunch pail and locks it, and departs from the maze’s center, taking the first right turn in his favored route, which is effective but not remotely efficient.

  On the nineteenth floor, Tessa is boarding the elevator. Its soft ding carries to the ballroom’s ceiling, thirty feet above her, and bounces off the mural there: a sunset sky in muted pinks and oranges, playing host to a dozen subtle, and subtly modern, cherubim. Their fleshy faces all stare down instead of up. The ballroom’s enormous west-facing windows trap the earliest phases of an actual sunset. Bars of light and shadow crosshatch tables set with china finer than bone. White napkins are folded in the shapes of swans, magnolias, seashells. Only a few are folded in the shape of napkins. A clutch of red roses serves as each table’s centerpiece, and if a guest asks, staff is to confirm that the roses are from Manderley’s garden, though they’re not. Tessa placed a standing order with a florist last week to deliver fifty dozen every Monday.

  She holds the elevator’s glass doors open with her left boot and takes a final look at the southeast corner of the ballroom, where Jules is holding the base of a twenty-foot ladder. Jules’s husband and catering partner, Justin, is finishing the pyramid of a thousand champagne flutes they began at seven this morning. At the Party of the Year, Charles Destin intends to climb this ladder and pour a bottle of champagne, the fizz of which will overflow the glass at the apex, to the four glasses under it, and so on, into a thousand glasses. A thin plastic hose worms up through the pyramid. The hose runs to a storage room, where four large tanks of champagne will finish the work that Destin’s pouring will start. Destin compared the illusion of the single bottle of Cristal filling a thousand glasses to the miracle of Jesus and his disciples feeding the five thousand with five loaves and two fish. When Destin made this comparison, Tessa rolled her eyes so hard, one of her contact lenses fell out.

  In the elevator, she presses the button for the eleventh floor. The glass doors slide shut, the nineteenth floor rises in front of her, and Tessa’s posture slackens, an exhale showing in her shoulders. She’s pretty, but not an obvious pretty. She tried modeling in college (“Because I’m a twig,” she said once), and the photographers told her she only looked right in three-quarter profile, due to a face that’s a little long, a chin that’s weak, and cheekbones that don’t protuberate. Tessa’s the kind of person who latches onto criticism thankfully and treats compliments like insults. It’s infuriating.

  She makes a check mark on her clipboard as the eighteenth floor passes, and another as the seventeenth floor appears underneath her. The elevator is excruciatingly slow. This is because it is diamond shaped and made of glass. Every day at five o’clock, Tessa descends from the ballroom to the foyer, scrutinizing each floor for problems, and the process takes an hour. She usually walks the halls, but she doesn’t have time for that today. Her view from the elevator consists of the long hallway that links the north and south wings of guest rooms—the middle stem of a letter “I”—and this doubtlessly grates on her, to check off the premises as passing inspection without inspecting them thoroughly. The front sheet of her clipboard shows a diagram of Manderley’s layout with floors numbered one through twenty. The
twentieth floor is shaded.

  Tessa makes a check mark on her diagram for the sixteenth floor. She taps her boot impatiently. Before the fifteenth floor appears, she makes a check mark in its space. She pinches the bridge of her nose, her eyes falling shut and staying that way, which means when the fifteenth floor does appear, and Vivica in the bright white hallway spies Tessa in the elevator and waves, Tessa doesn’t see her. Vivica is carrying a purple bottle of carpet cleaner and a white cloth, which she flaps ineffectually until Tessa sinks out of sight. Vivica’s mouth draws down in disappointment. She walks toward the north end of the hall, turns left, and sinks to her knees in the entryway of Room 1516. She sprays the carpet cleaner on a round, red stain the size of a quarter and curses it in a flurry of Spanish. She thinks an electrician cut himself. This is not what happened.

  The Killer is on the seventh floor. He’s washing his hands in Room 717, scrubbing vivid red from his nail beds and knuckles into the bathroom sink. He picks a fine, light hair from his shirt cuff, studies it with brief interest, and flicks it behind him. It lands on the white bath mat. The water in the sink is paling from a strange, swirled red orange to a shade that matches the gold leaf of the taps. A knife the length of an average man’s forearm is drying on a white towel beside the basket of assorted guest soaps.

  Tessa opens her eyes at the fourteenth floor, nods, and makes a firm check mark.

  She waits, and makes another for the twelfth floor.

  There is no thirteenth floor; Charles Destin is extremely superstitious.

  As the eleventh floor grows beneath her, Tessa winds a section of her thick, black hair into a twist at the nape of her neck. She does this many times throughout the day. She says her hair is too heavy to tie it all up, but her neck gets too hot if she leaves it all down. The elevator dings, the tone soothing, but when the doors slide open, she cringes at the scream of a drill. She follows the sound to the south end of the hallway and turns right, where the thickset lead electrician lets off his drill’s bulky trigger. He smiles, showing bad dental work.

  “Dirtbag leave?” he says.

  Tessa cocks an eyebrow. She would look disapproving, except her lips curl upward on one side.

  The lead electrician laughs. “All right, sorry. Did Charles Xavier Destin the Third leave yet?”

  “Imagine going through life with that name,” says Tessa, glancing around Room 1109 to make sure it’s pristine. “I think you’re doing fine, Pat.” She glances at a few flecks of drywall by his feet. “Not great, but fine.”

  The lead electrician stoops. His meaty fingers look incongruous picking drywall out of carpet. “I thought Chucky wanted us to stay on till we finished. Actually, I think his words were, ‘You fucks can stick around until your old ladies seal the fuck up from waiting—’ ”

  Tessa holds up a hand. “Yeah, I know. But we’re only using luxury suites for the party. That’s fourteen through seventeen, and they’re done. Right?”

  “Yes. Yes, ma’am, floors fourteen through seventeen are good to go.”

  “Then there’s no need for you guys to pull overtime, unless you want to.” She backs up a step, says, “Let me know,” and heads for the elevator.

  “That’s an easy one,” the lead electrician says, following her. He unclips a walkie-talkie from the waistband of his jeans. “I’ll tell the guys we’ll knock off now, but only if you’re sure Chucky Destin won’t come yelling at you tomorrow.”

  “Let me tell them,” Tessa says. “And Charles doesn’t yell at me. He knows better.”

  Tessa smirks as she leaves the lead electrician laughing, satisfied she has undone the damage Destin inflicted when he threatened to fire the lead electrician and ruin his reputation by telling everyone who mattered anywhere that his company was a pathetic operation fucking incapable of following a fucking timetable and that he would have to relocate from California in order to ever work again. Destin made the same threat to every employee in the hotel. He does this whenever he visits. He is now very probably lounging in his limousine en route back to the city, on his cell phone to a business associate—Destin thinks he has friends, but he doesn’t—chatting about how scared employees are productive employees. There are apprentice electricians in Room 921, Room 525, Room 511, and Room 301, and Destin yelled at all of them. So Tessa visits all of them, one by one, and deploys her professional yet conspiratorial smile. She calls them each by their first names. She implies insults to Charles Destin without precisely insulting him. She is not above bending a shapely knee when the apprentice in Room 301 sulks that on top of everything, he lost his walkie-talkie today. Tessa relates a story about losing one shoe at a concert festival in college and hopping across the park like an idiot to buy flip-flops at Walgreens. She leaves him laughing, boards the elevator, and checks her watch when the third floor rises away.

  The Killer is in Room 717, sitting on the edge of the king-sized bed. A walkie-talkie crackles by his hip and says, “Okay, guys, you heard the lady. Pack it in and make sure you’re not leaving crap in the carpet. We’re outta here in twenty.” The Killer looks at the clock radio on the cherrywood night table. It’s difficult to tell where he’s looking, as he’s wearing a mask. It’s the same mask from the Halloween movies, the ones with Jamie Lee Curtis. He’s also wearing navy blue coveralls. He is an amazingly large man, and, one could tell even without firsthand experience, incredibly strong.

  Tessa does not exit the elevator on the second floor. When the doors slide open, familiar sniffs and squeaks reach her from the direction of the housekeeping storage area. There, among shelves of supplies, Delores, the head of housekeeping, is counting toilet paper and crying. Tessa stands in the yawning elevator, her right foot arrested in a step forward, her expression torn, then pitying, then decisive. She reverses and presses the button for the foyer. Tessa likes Delores, but Delores cries at pet food commercials, spilled all-purpose cleaner, surprise homemade birthday cupcakes—the list is endless. Delores is inconsolable for at least ninety minutes after a profanity-laden tirade from Charles Destin.

  Tessa never cries. She hardly ever lets herself look exhausted—at least, not in front of people. She frequently looks exhausted when she is alone—or, when she thinks she is alone.

  She leans against the elevator’s back wall and lets her neck go slack. Her head bonks against the glass, once. Twice, three times, while the first floor swells around her. In the morning, sunlight makes the glass elevator into a prism as it arrives in the foyer, but not now. Tessa shakes her head at the chandelier, a piece of modern art with white sconces in the shape of a pinecone. It cost seven million dollars. Even if it were lit, it would not prevent the foyer—which boasts east-facing windows every bit as long and impressive as the ballroom’s facing west—from looking like a gargantuan, vaulted tomb in the late afternoon, with its white counters, white sofas, and white marble floors. Tessa’s apartment is a one-bedroom in Anaheim—the good part of Anaheim, but still. Her apartment has indoor-outdoor carpet and a stove on which only three out of four burners work, and her savings account surpassed six figures long ago.

  As the main elevator slows still further to settle at its terminus, Tessa’s chin lifts. The elevator dings, and the doors slide open. Shoulders back, she walks to the manager’s office, where the lone person on the first floor sits behind a desk, holding his head in his hands. Destin really let Franklin have it. Franklin leaves his head in his hands, though he must hear Tessa’s boots clacking on the foyer’s Italian marble. She arrives at his office, leans in the doorway—clipboard held parallel to the crease in her black skirt—and waits.

  “Don’t tell me he didn’t mean it, Tessie,” Franklin says.

  Tessa doesn’t like being called “Tessie”—or anything other than “Tessa”—but she’s never told Franklin that.

  “I won’t,” Tessa says. “But I will tell you he barked at everybody in the hotel. Everybody. Including apprentice electricians he’d never met before.”

  Franklin raises his head, but keep
s a hand over his face. He does this to look silly. It is effective, but not in an endearing way. “He told me I’m not fit to manage a McDonald’s.”

  “Aw, Frank,” says Tessa. Her mouth twitches. “Of course you’re not.”

  Franklin reclines in his ergonomic office chair. He is short, muscular, hairy, and gay. “Shit on that.” Now he’s grinning. “I could manage the shit out of a McDonald’s.”

  Tessa said once that the trick to managing Franklin is to feign amusement at his moods and support his own bouts of insecurity so that his narcissism comes to the fore to galvanize his tenuous sense of self. She didn’t use these exact words. She said, “Tell an asshole he’s an asshole nicely and he’ll fight you.” But she also feels sorry for Franklin. She once said, “He has all the backbone of a jellyfish on a clothesline.” Her expression softens as he reaches to the bottom drawer of his desk and extracts a bottle of scotch and two cut crystal glasses.

  “Frank,” she says with a tone.

  He pours an inch of scotch. Tessa takes the glass he hands her, but she dumps the liquor in a potted banana tree by the door. Franklin knocks his back.

  Tessa says, “Charles thinks he understands people, but he doesn’t. Makes him dangerous.” She sets her glass on Franklin’s desk blotter.

  “Dangerous.” Franklin laughs, lightened by Tessa’s confession. “It surprises me you would use the word ‘dangerous.’ ”

  Tessa makes a mark on her clipboard. “It’s the right word.”

  “How are we doing? For real?”

  “We’re in great shape. We’re two days ahead on the ballroom setup, and housekeeping can’t do anything but stock counts until electric’s done on three through twelve—”

  “That’s not my fault.”

  Tessa’s posture stiffens, so slightly that only a knowing eye would see it. “It’s no one’s fault. Charles didn’t allow for overtime, Pat didn’t notify him the timeline got wonky because of it, nobody told me any of that, so how could I tell you?” She tucks a hair into the twist at the nape of her neck and doesn’t wait for Franklin’s answer. “I have to catch Sid before he leaves. I doubt Charles trekked all the way into the maze, but he might’ve.”