by R. R. Banks
I took as much time as I could cleaning the offices, hoping that by the time that I finished the lights in the office at the end of the hall would be off. That would mean that the group that took up that office would have left for the night and I wouldn’t have to deal with them. They weren’t all bad. Mr. Sommers was pleasant in that bland, somewhat distant kind of way that let me know that I was appreciated, but didn’t have me wanting to throw my arms open and pull him into a hug when I knew that he would be going away on one of his frequent business trips. His two children, on the other hand, gave me the compulsion to toss them out with the crumpled paper and the soup containers.
Threw the window if at all possible.
There was another one, though. He wasn’t a Sommers. I hadn’t had as much opportunity to interact with him as I had with the Sommers family over the years, but I had heard Willa Sommers refer to him as “Joshie” occasionally. Considering he was most certainly over the age of six, I assumed this was only a mildly sickening term of endearment that she used for him. There’s no way that I could ever bring myself to refer to him by that name. Of course, that didn’t really matter considering my interactions with him in the last few weeks since he had started spending days and late into the night within the confines of the large oblong office at the end of the hallway had been limited to mainly glances as I snuck in and out of the room. I hated that feeling. I much preferred to be by myself when I did my work. That’s why I refused to allow anyone else from the agency to come and help with this particular building. It meant a much longer night and sometimes I had to resort to conversations with myself or my own personal renditions of eighties power ballads to fill the silence, but at least I didn’t have to deal with anyone else interfering with what I was doing.
That was the primary complaint that I had about dipping into the lit office at night and trying to do my work without disturbing them. I hated having to try to blend in with the rest of the office surroundings and not do anything that would distract them from the work that they were doing. I figured that the business day ended in the evening and after that, the building was my domain. They should be more concerned about interfering with what I was trying to do than I should be about disrupting them. Whatever it was that was keeping them tied to the massive table in the middle of the room long after everyone else had left for the day, I always felt like they needed to get over it and leave me alone rather than embarking on the awkward dance that unfolded when I stepped into the room. They would turn and look at me, and I would stand and stare at them. A few uncomfortable seconds would pass when we seemed to be stuck in a stalemate. Finally, I would go into the room and start my way around, cleaning around them even though I was tempted to just add them to my cart and carry them out, too. While I cleaned, they would continue their meeting, but their voices would go strangely low, as though they were trying to keep me from hearing what they were talking about and bringing what I learned to the outside.
Because clearly, I am a corporate spy who has spent years undercover just to steal the information from these meetings.
While they muttered under their breath to each other, I went about my emptying, dusting, and wiping, pretending that I was so invested in my work that I couldn’t possibly be listening to them. As if they were fully aware of how it seemed when they muttered to each other rather than speaking out loud, occasionally the two Sommers children would turn and look over their shoulders at me, flashing me saccharine smiles when I caught their eyes. I would smile back at them, and they would slowly return to their work, reassured that I wasn’t taking notes and snapping pictures with a tiny camera embedded in my duster.
Up until “Joshie” showed up, only Wilton would acknowledge me when I finished and left the office. Now the gorgeous man would give me the hint of a smile and say goodnight after Wilton did, often earning a subtle glare from Willa. I wish I knew more about that relationship, though at the same time I wasn’t really interested in sitting down with a cup of coffee and having a chat with the princess just so I can get the details. I’d rather come up with my own version, which usually involved him being the only thing that she ever wanted but wasn’t allowed to have.
I finished the last of the offices before the big one at the end of the hallway and let out a sigh when I realized that the light was still on. They still hadn’t left. I did my best to not let my face show the pissed-off expression I knew that I had and made my way down the hallway toward the partially open door. Pausing just outside, I rapped my knuckles against the door and waited until I heard Wilton call me in before I pushed the door open and stepped inside. The older man offered me a slight smile.
“Looks like we stayed late again tonight,” he said.
I forced a casual laugh, hoping I would sound like I was just as surprised to find him as he was pretending to be to still be there. Wilton, or Mr. Sommers as I always called him, had been a strong and dignified man since I first met him, with far more energy than men half his age, but recently the years had started to show around his eyes and now I could see the tiredness pulling on his face. He was pushing himself harder than I had ever seen, and I had a dark feeling deep in my gut that there was a reason for it.
“Don’t mind me,” I said like I always did. “I’ll be out of here in just a minute.”
“No rush. We’re almost finished.”
I had already started my way across the room and had my back to the group when I heard the voice. It stopped me in my tracks and I glanced over my shoulder to see Josh looking at me. It was the first time that he had said more than a couple of words to me and they seemed to settle over me, affecting me more than they should have. I thought that I smiled. At least, I hoped that I did. I very well might have just stared at him for several seconds and then turned away from him and went to work cleaning the office.
I was still so surprised at him talking to me that I had forgotten to assume my customary disconnection from them and soon snippets of what they were saying drifted across the room to me.
“We can’t possibly sell those at that price point if you expect to make any profit,” Alvin Sommers said, scoffing. “I thought the whole point of this was that we wanted to make a bigger profit margin.”
“It is,” Willa said. “And that’s exactly what we’re going to do. Just because we say that that’s the price doesn’t mean that we’re going to be selling many of them at that price.”
“I don’t understand.”
Willa gave a long-suffering sigh that sounded like it was taught to her in the womb.
“Everyone is going to be looking at the sale ads weeks before Thanksgiving. We want to stand out from the crowd and get people into the store, right?”
“Yes,” Alvin said, not sounding entirely sure that he actually knew what to say.
“So, we get their attention and draw them in with a massive discount on something that everyone is going to want. If they see that we’re going to have TVs or video game consoles on sale for a fraction of what the other stores are selling it for, then they will come to our store. As long as we have one or two of those items in the store at that price, it’s not false advertising.”
“You want to advertise that we’ll have something, but then only have one or two?” Josh asked.
“Absolutely. It’s called motivation. Whoever gets to those items first, gets to buy them. If people don’t get there early enough or get to the item fast enough, then they don’t get to buy them. It’s just like any other product in any other store.”
“Except that in any other store there is at least the chance that a few people will get those items.”
“That’s not really our problem,” Willa said, her voice starting to sound icy. “It’s our job to provide products for consumers to buy. We don’t guarantee what products or how many of them.”
“But if the people are coming for that particular product, if that’s what catches their attention, but it’s not there when they get to the store, aren’t they going to be angry? Or at the v
ery least, won’t they just turn around and leave to go to one of the competitor’s stores?”
I was cleaning more slowly now, shamelessly eavesdropping on the conversation as I wiped a stapler sitting on a small work table to one side of the room to within an inch of its life. Suddenly I did feel like a corporate spy, but I wasn’t stealing information to bring it back to the competition. Instead, I was taking it all for myself. It might have only been September, but that didn’t stop me from thinking about the holiday shopping season ahead. This wasn’t just some little sale. This was Black Friday, the big time. This was what the women in my neighborhood saved and planned for months for, the official beginning of the Christmas madness. I knew that this was all business to them. They didn’t understand. None of the people sitting at that table had ever known what it meant to scour the advertisements hoping to find the right gifts for every member of the family, or getting creative with a budget. In fact, I didn’t know if they even knew what a budget was. Yet, there they sat, contemplating the shopping fate of people they saw as nothing more than dollar signs.
“They aren’t going to leave our store,” Willa said. “By then the concept store will be up and running, and that’s where we will concentrate all of our biggest sales. The customers will see the sales and come in. Even if they don’t get their hands on the big-ticket purchase that they wanted to make, they are already at the store. They will know that if they took the time to leave our store and go to another one, they will have missed all of the biggest discounts in both locations, so the best thing to do would be to just stay there and do their shopping. If nothing else, we will have removed another shopper from the lines at the competitors’ stores.”
Willa sounded extremely proud of herself, but I felt my stomach turning slightly. It wasn’t that I was naïve to the fact that businesses were businesses for one reason and one reason only, and that was to make money. I fully understood that while shoppers were thinking about the joy on their families’ faces on Christmas morning when they were planning their seasonal shopping these businesses were thinking about getting themselves fully in the black and getting ready for the next year. That didn’t change how downright shady this conversation sounded. It was like I was getting a peek at the next generation of the Grinch, and there wasn’t even a cute dog wearing an antler on his head around to soften the impact.
“That’s not going to work for everything,” Josh pointed out. “We have to have some legitimate deals or we’re going to piss off a lot of people.”
“Well, of course, we do,” Willa said. I was almost positive she was going to call him ‘silly’ and I was fully prepared to gag if she did, but she didn’t. “That’s where the rest of the strategy comes in. We have to figure out what is going to go on sale and where to put it in the stores.”
“Why does that matter?” Alvin asked.
I glanced over my shoulder again and saw Mr. Sommers giving his son the eye like I hadn’t seen since my great-grandmother tried to curse the next-door neighbor for letting their waving sprinkler splatter summertime fun all over her freshly hung laundry. My eyes drifted over to Josh and I saw him looking down at the papers on the table in front of him, his brow furrowed. I had the compulsion to go over and rub his shoulders until he relaxed.
No brow that sexy should ever furrow.
“The layout of the store is critical,” Wilton said. “You want to make sure that you get customers spread throughout the entire building. The more that they have to go through the displays, the more likely it is that they will make impulse buys. Also, the more spread out they are, the less busy the store will look, so other people will be willing to go further into it rather than just turning around and leaving because they see a huge crowd.”
I had run out of things in the office to clean, so I started back toward the door. When I reached it, I looked back at the table. Willa and Alvin were bent over a schematic spread out on the table, but Wilton and Josh were looking up at me.
“Looks like you beat us,” Wilton said, his voice sounding even more tired than it had when I first came in.
I gave the same smile and nod that I had then.
“Have a good night,” I said.
“You, too,” Wilton told me. “Thank you.”
“Goodnight,” Josh said.
“Don’t work too hard, now.”
I slipped out of the room and closed the door before I winced and gave myself a moment of self-scolding.
Why the hell did I say that?
I sighed and headed down the hallway, ready to tuck my cart away for the night and head home.
Oh, well. He talked to me. I’m sure as damn going to talk back to him.
Chapter Three
Josh
I heard a slight rumbling sound coming toward me and I looked up from the papers spread across the table in front of me. My eyes immediately started burning and I rubbed them, trying to get rid of the gritty feeling behind my eyelids. The door to the office was halfway open and I saw a pale, shimmering figure lingering in the doorway. Bloody rags hung from its slight frame and one hand gripped what looked like a large wooden mining cart behind it. I felt my heart start pounding in my chest at the same moment that confusion started swirling through my mind.
Did they build this office on top of a mine? Are there mines in the middle of the city? Have I lost my ever-fucking-loving mind?
The door slowly opened the rest of the way and the figure stepped in. The glow from the lamp on the smaller table pushed against the wall was just enough to illuminate the figure as it came a few steps into the office and lifted its other arm. This was it. This was how all of the bad horror movies went. The ghost walks in and points at you, and then you die a horrible death that somehow relates to it.
So, I was going to get crushed by a mining cart? Buried alive? Pecked to death by a canary?
The figure’s arm moved up to its side and then pressed the light switch. Bright light from the overhead fixture was blinding against my exhausted eyes and I grimaced.
“You really shouldn’t sit here in the dark like that. It’s not good for your eyes.”
I peeled my eyelids apart and focused on the ghost in front of me. After a few seconds my eyes got accustomed to the blistering light and I could see that it was actually the beautiful woman who came to the office each night to clean. I had seen her for a few moments every night for the last several weeks when she slipped in and out of the office, but I had been too immersed in the endless meetings to have much interaction with her.
I know I don’t remember her being so pale and shimmery, though.
She looked at me about as strangely as I felt that I was probably looking at her and we stayed that way for several more moments, seemingly unsure of what we were supposed to do next. Finally, she turned and reached into what I realized now was her cleaning cart that had been wrapped in woodgrain fabric and lined around the top with large plastic gems. She tossed something onto the desk in front of me and I stared down at it, trying to process the little packages before realizing that it was a handful of tiny candy bars.
“Happy Halloween,” she said.
I looked up at her.
“Halloween?”
She nodded.
“It’s a holiday. Comes at the end of October. People wander around getting candy?”
I nodded.
“No, I’m familiar,” I said. “I just didn’t realize that it was Halloween.”
She looked me up and down like she was scrutinizing me.
“Doesn’t look like it.”
I glanced down at myself. I was wearing my usual suit, though I had relented to taking off my tie sometime in the evening after the Sommers family had left.
“Well, I don’t generally dress up in a costume when I come to the office.”
I regretted saying it as soon as it came out of my mouth, not wanting her to feel like I was making fun of her, but she didn’t seem at all fazed. She shrugged and reached into her cart, pulling out a piece of candy
and unwrapping it.
“I take any opportunity to dress up that I can. My son has outgrown trick-or-treating and would rather just throw on a t-shirt and go hang out with his friends, so I have to amuse myself alone.”
“You have a son?” I asked.
I didn’t know why that struck me as much as it did.
She nodded.
“Matteo. He’s thirteen and officially no longer thinks that his mother dressing up is cool.”
I laughed.
“Well, I think that you’re cool,” I said.
She laughed as she chewed the candy, then shook her head.
“I think the fact that my boss just told me that I’m cool makes me even less cool,” she said.
An uncomfortable feeling rippled through my stomach. I really didn’t like being referred to as her “boss”.
“Wilton Sommers is your boss,” I said.
“And his delightful children,” she said. Her eyes widened slightly, and she rolled them, her shoulders falling as if she was internally scolding herself. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that.”
“It’s alright,” I said hastily, not wanting the conversation to end. I lowered my voice conspiratorially. “You’re not exactly wrong.”
She laughed again.
“I’m a little surprised to hear you say that,” she said.
“Why?”
“I just assumed that you were…part of them.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that. Was I part of them? What did that even mean?
“I’m not a Sommers,” I said.
It came out sounding a touch more defensive than I had intended, and she had obviously noticed it.
“Well, that’s probably a good thing, considering it looks like you’ve been abandoned.”
I looked around at the empty office.
“Yes, I have,” I said. “Come to think of it, I do remember Willa mentioning that there was a party tonight. I guess it was for Halloween. She’s not going to be happy when I don’t show up.”
I realized that I was talking primarily to myself as I contemplated just how angry Willa was going to be the next time that I saw her. It wasn’t something I was particularly looking forward to.
