by Sadie Rabbit
Olivia sighed and stretched out on the dusty wooden floor. Can you be an adulterer by email? She stared up at the ceiling, phone at her ear while she waited for Charlotte to answer. As soon as she did, Olivia told her everything, saving the kicker for last: “He said I need to stop talking to Thomas,” Olivia said.
“No!” Charlotte said. “He may as well have told you to saw off one of your legs.”
Olivia shook her head, grinning. “I don’t need to see him that badly, but I did tell him I would meet him on Friday to give him that package.”
“I’ll do it,” Charlotte said.
“I’m not sure it’s that simple,” Olivia said. “Mr. Albion thinks Mike has private detectives tailing me and Thomas. If that’s the case, someone’s going to follow him to Starbucks. They’ll see you meet with him.”
“Ewwww,” Charlotte squealed. “I loooooove this. It’s like the Bourne movies or something. I’ll so be your spy.”
“And what does my spy propose in this situation?” Olivia asked.
“A spy never gives away her secrets, does she?” Charlotte asked. “Just give me the package, and I’ll make sure Thomas gets it without anyone finding out.”
Olivia smiled despite herself. “You’d better be careful.”
∞
Charlotte chewed her gum nervously. She’d ditched the Beamer in favor of her husband’s SUV. An SUV just feels right when you’re doing reconnaissance work, she thought.
Her parking spot gave her a good view of both entrances to Starbucks. She checked her watch again. It was 6:48 p.m. That meant she’d been sitting there for 48 minutes with no sign of Thomas. She held her smartphone in hand and wore a giant pair of Gucci sunglasses that covered half her face. I’ve got to look like a rich lady sending text messages, she thought smiling. No one would think little sexy Charlotte’s a spy!
At precisely 6:53, a red Tacoma pickup pulled into the parking lot. She recognized Thomas before he got out. He held a bouquet of flowers wrapped in newsprint. Poor guy, Charlotte thought, he’s going to get stood up.
She tried not to crane her neck while she looked for anyone following Thomas. That was easy, she thought, as a non-descript Lincoln Towncar with tinted windows pulled into the parking lot.
Bingo. Charlotte chewed her gum even faster. A few seconds after Thomas went into Starbucks, the Towncar driver emerged. He was a short, stubby man who covered his bald spot with a mismatched toupee. The toupee was too blonde to blend in with the browner hair clinging to the sides of his head. Charlotte shuddered involuntarily when the man walked past her car. He sauntered casually toward the Starbucks entrance, not bothering to look back.
After he was out of sight, Charlotte scanned the parking lot again. All the cars were empty. Two students walked hand-in-hand on the sidewalk, but they were too far away to make out Charlotte’s face.
Chewing her gum even faster now, she reached into her purse and pulled out a rusty nail. She’d found it on Kenneth’s workbench in the garage. Hastily, she unbuckled, climbed out of her SUV and jogged to the Towncar. She stopped in her tracks when she realized she couldn’t see inside the car. The tint on the back windows was so dark it could have hidden anything. Do private eyes work with partners? she wondered. She deliberated as she got closer and closer. Finally, in a moment of snap judgment, she decided to knock on the back window. If someone’s inside, they’ll just roll down the window.
The knock immediately triggered the Towncar’s alarm system, though. Charlotte gasped. The horn blared, and all the car’s lights started flashing. Charlotte couldn’t move. She stood there with her hands balled into fists near her chest. A few moments ticked by before she realized she needed to hide — fast. She ran and crouched behind a nearby dumpster. Jesus, I’m an idiot.
From her hiding spot, she saw the Starbucks door swing open. The private eye came running out, his face red. He threw his cup of coffee on the ground, cursing. Interesting, Charlotte thought. There must be someone or something in there he doesn’t want anyone to find.
The detective opened the door to the backseat of the car. Dammit, Charlotte thought, I wish I could see inside. Whatever the detective saw gave him comfort, though. Tension evaporated from his shoulders. Without a word, he slammed the door shut, turned off the alarm and headed back toward Starbucks scanning the parking lot as he went.
Charlotte let out a long deep breath.
It’s now or never. She walked swiftly toward the car, then crouched near the rear tire. She tried pushing the roofing nail into the side of the tire, but it didn’t budge. Why is everything harder than it should be? She wasn’t strong enough to puncture the rubber. Frantically, she searched the ground for a rock. She found one near the dumpster, snatched it and used it as a hammer to drive the nail into the rubber.
Once the nail was in, she expected the tire to go flat immediately. Nothing happened, though. The tire held air just like it had before the hole. If she pulled the nail out, it wouldn’t look like an accident anymore. She needed to let the air out herself.
She peered around the car at the Starbucks entrance. No one was coming or going. Her hands shook as she untwisted the cap on the air valve. She used her thumbnail to let air out of the tire. The hissing was so loud she thought everyone inside of Starbucks would hear it. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, she kept whispering under her breath. Hurry.
When the tire was so low that the rim almost touched the ground, Charlotte stopped letting out air and twisted the cap back onto the valve. She stood up and tried to walk casually back to her car, tucking her dirt-caked hands into her pockets as she went. No one took any notice of her.
The perfect crime, Charlotte thought. Now, all I have to do is wait.
∞
Thomas left Starbucks at 8:05 p.m. Not bad, Charlotte thought. He waited a full hour and five minutes before giving up on Olivia. Before he got to his car, Charlotte drove out of the parking lot and headed South on Brown Street. She wasn’t sure that was the direction Thomas would go, but she knew two things: Thomas’s apartment was that direction, and she didn’t want to be around when the private eye emerged from the coffee shop.
Charlotte pulled to a stop on Brown and flipped on her hazard lights. She watched her rearview mirror carefully, sighing with relief when Thomas’s red truck pulled out a few minutes later.
She grinned as Thomas veered around her SUV, then she anxiously checked her rearview for signs of the Towncar. A few moments passed, and nothing happened. The private eye must have found his flat!
Charlotte clicked off her hazard lights and started following Thomas. As she suspected, the sex whisperer drove straight back to his apartment. It was a square two-story box of a building, the sort that dot the landscape throughout Kettering and Oakwood. Charlotte had been in one of those buildings before, and she knew all of them had the same floor plan: eight apartments that shared a common hallway and stairwell; one apartment for each corner of each floor. Charlotte parked in front of the building, checked her rearview, saw nothing and rolled down her window. She called out to Thomas as he walked toward his front door. He looked suspiciously at her SUV.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Charlotte recognized his voice immediately. She might not admit it to anyone, but she had listened to the whisper Olivia gave her several times.
“I’m a friend of Olivia’s,” she said.
“Ah,” Thomas said. “I was supposed to meet her tonight.”
Thomas was just a few feet away now, his hands tugging nervously at the hem of his t-shirt.
“I know,” Charlotte said. “She sent me as her emissary. I’ve got your package, though, and I think she explains everything in her letter.” She reached into the backseat and produced the package. Olivia’s handwritten letter was taped to the top of the box.
“Charlotte at your service,” she said.
“Charlotte?” Thomas said. “You look familiar. I don’t understand, though. Why couldn’t Olivia meet me in person?”
“Let�
�s just say it’s complicated,” Charlotte said.
Thomas shrugged his shoulders, clearly unhappy with the answer. Charlotte looked at her watch. “I better be off,” she said. “You never know who’s watching.”
She winked conspiratorially at Thomas, then drove away, leaving him alone under the streetlight, a large package in hand. Damn, I’m a good spy, Charlotte thought.
∞
Thomas shut and bolted the door to his apartment. He even slid the chain lock into place. Things are getting weird, he thought. He carried the package to his coffee table, sat it down and tore into the letter.
Dear Thomas,
Please excuse the theatrics tonight. I really wanted to meet you at Starbucks, but when I found out I had to cancel, there wasn’t a good way to communicate that to you. Believe me, though, when I say I’ve been thinking a lot about how nice it would be to sit down for coffee with you. I really mean that. There’s so much I want to say! But Charlotte’s waiting on me, trying to sneak peeks over my shoulder.
Let me tell you this: my husband and I are getting a divorce. He found out about our communication (yes, your sex whispers, too!), and he’s trying to use that as leverage in the divorce proceedings. He wants me to willingly agree to a divorce where he keeps all the assets. In exchange, he says he won’t make your sex whispers public record. I won’t let that happen. You’ve got to trust me on that.
Until we get it all sorted out, my lawyer asked me to cut off communication with you — no email, no whispers, no phone calls. He seems to think my husband hired a private eye to follow you and gather more evidence. Because of that, I’ve asked Charlotte to deliver your package and this letter. I trust it finds you safely, and I apologize for dragging you into a mess that you don’t need to be a part of. When this is all over, I’ll find you. I promise :)
xoxo,
Hawaii Girl
PS Please dispose of this letter. Burning perhaps? Or flushing it down your toilet? Ha. I bet you’ve never had a relationship like this, have you? It’s kind of exciting.
Thomas stood up and ran a hand through his hair. Indeed, he’d never had a relationship like this before. He walked to the window and pulled the blinds down slowly. He didn’t see anyone suspicious on the street. No pedestrians, no cars he didn’t recognize. He reread the letter twice, then grabbed a lighter and burnt it over the sink in the bathroom. The fan in the bathroom sucked the smoke away. He used toilet paper to wipe up the ashes, throwing the remains into the toilet so he could flush them away. He thought about Olivia’s handwritten words rushing through water pipes under the streets of Oakwood. Then, he went to the living room and approached the package. He needed to see what was inside.
∞
Olivia met Olivia at last. The other Olivia dressed sharply, almost scandalously, in a short black skirt. The skirt was so short, Olivia thought she’d be able to see the woman’s panties if she craned her neck a bit. The other Olivia was bony, too, her large eyes accentuated by wireframe glasses that looked 60 years old.
“I have to say that I’m more excited about this show than any I’ve put on since I joined the CAC,” the director said.
Olivia grinned. “Please tell me you’ve worked here 30 years.”
The director smiled. “A year and a half,” she said. “This is my third show. But still, we’ve done Warhol since I got here. That’s saying something, isn’t it?”
Olivia nodded, smiling. Does she really like my photos that much?
The director’s office was covered in beautifully grotesque paintings. There were red-eyed unicorns, sneering elves and dogs with hooves for feet.
“My latest obsession,” the director said. “They’re by a Japanese artist who hasn’t sold a single painting in her home country. Americans can’t seem to get enough of them, though.”
“They’re incredible,” Olivia said.
The director didn’t hear her. She was pulling a long cardboard tube out from behind a filing cabinet. She tucked it under her arm and asked Olivia to follow her. They walked through the main gallery, heels echoing loudly off the walls. They got to an area cordoned off with a thick white curtain. The director pulled a flap aside and motioned for Olivia to go inside.
Both women grabbed hardhats off a nearby stand and strapped them on. “So this is it,” the director said. “We embellished your idea a bit. We wanted to go with a hotel theme.”
Indeed, Olivia could see they were constructing a building inside a building. The director unfurled blueprints from her cardboard tube.
“This will be the front of the hotel,” she said, pointing at the drawing. “We’re standing in it. Guests will file through the front door there and wait in line to approach the front desk. We’ll have someone staffing the desk. There will be a bellhop, potted plants, luggage racks, industrial carpet, the whole nine yards.
“Each guest will deal with the front desk one at a time,” the director said, resting her elbows on the unfinished wood. “They’ll sign their name in the guest book, get a key, and then they’ll they get escorted here.”
The director led Olivia down a short hallway and opened a door. Inside, there was a ladder, and she motioned for Olivia to climb it.
“I’d go first but I wore a skirt today,” the director said.
I hadn’t noticed, Olivia thought, as she climbed the ladder. The metal was cold on her hands, and she could taste sawdust in the air. She kept wondering how much money the museum was sinking into the exhibit. Why do they think my work’s worth all this effort? She asked exactly that when the two women stood on a platform above the ladder.
“People forget we have bills to pay,” the director said. “Unless you’re showing Ansel Adams, photo exhibits don’t get people into the museum. If you give them an experience, though, they can’t stop talking about it. People have so few experiences anymore. That makes it easy to give them a fake one. And they’ll pay you for it, too! We’re projecting we’ll get at least 200,000 visitors to your exhibit at $18 a head. That’s more than $3.5 million. And, of course, you’ll get a dollar from each of those tickets.”
Olivia felt herself gaping, but she couldn’t help it. $200,000! And that’s before any print sales!
The director didn’t skip a beat. She spun around on the platform, arms extended. “Each of these doors will be labeled with deceptions,” she said. “Instead of a lever, we thought a key might work better with the theme. The same key will fit every door, and the guest can choose the door they’d like to open.”
The director chose a door at random and walked down a narrow hallway.
“Here, we’re going to simulate the effect that the guest is between the walls of a hotel,” she said. “We’ll have fake spider webs, a single light bulb hanging on a cord. Then, just as you described, the guest can peer through holes in the wall and see the rooms on the other side. Your photos will be on the walls, of course. They’ll be the focal point, but in some of the rooms, we plan to have paid ‘hotel guests.’ They’ll be doing innocuous things: reading the paper, watching TV, sleeping. You know, the sort of things we all do in hotels.”
At the end of the hallway, the women came to another door. “Here’s where things get interesting,” the director said. “We’ll have a TV playing back footage like you described. We’ll have the phone, and the buttons, too. People will be able to see themselves choosing a door of deception. Then, the phone will ring, and they’ll be told they can delete or donate the footage. That was a brilliant stroke, by the way. It pulls them into the exhibit; makes them a part of it. After that, we’ll lead them to the reception hall where guests can mingle, look at larger versions of your work and see which doors got picked the most.”
Olivia was speechless. And yet she could feel the director’s eyes on her waiting for some sort of response.
“It’s perfect,” she said. “When do we open?”
“Six weeks from today. It’s an aggressive schedule, I know, and we still have some kinks to work out — like making sure people mov
e through the exhibit quickly enough — but we’re confident we’ll be ready in six weeks. The show will open early for you, 6:30 p.m., I think. The media will be allowed in, too, and your friends and family.”
Olivia nodded. “I’ll be here,” she said.
“Come ready to answer some questions about your work,” the director said. “The reporters are going to have a field day with this. Here’s a little cheat sheet with some of the questions you’ll probably get asked.”
Olivia glanced over it.
“Wow, preparing for an interview never crossed my mind,” she said.
“Trust me,” the director said. “You’ll be glad you did for this show. And you have to tell them that every single aspect of this show, the placement of every nail, was your idea. They’ll think you’re the next Warhol.”
Chapter XVII: Forcible Entry
Olivia and Charlotte sat on the kitchen island in the dilapidated Cat Lady’s House. They swung their feet back and forth as Charlotte recounted her tale of espionage, and Olivia talked about her upcoming exhibition. Night had fallen, and they were working their way through a bottle of Malbec.
“I’ve been thinking about that package you brought back for Thomas,” Charlotte said. “What if it was something illegal like drugs or a gun?”
“I don’t think so,” Olivia said. “Airport security would have found it.”
“Maybe it was money,” Charlotte said. “That’s it. You’re part of a money-laundering ring that stretches from the Midwest to the Pacific. The sun scarcely sets on your nefarious empire!”
“I think spying knocked something loose in your brain,” Olivia said.
The wine was warming her now, and Olivia was starting to feel really good when her phone rang. It was Mr. Albion’s number.
What the hell?
“I apologize sincerely for calling you at such an unprofessional hour,” Mr. Albion said on the other end, “but I have a question that I would like to pose to you. Might I inquire as to whether or not you, or perhaps someone you know, went to the Brown Street Starbucks this evening?”
