Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

  It had been several days since Ames Garrett had jumped off the side of the building. Two men from the basement had used a jackhammer to claw the block of sidewalk from the ground and then used a spinning silo to pour fresh cement where the body had fallen.

  That was the day before Salomon passed the entrance exam into the private school program. Rosalita didn’t tell Ardie this: how the two events would always be linked in her mind, how they would matter in some way.

  After the two women had said all there was to say, which wasn’t very much given the momentous event that had happened between them, Rosalita left to do nothing but wait until dark.

  She collected Crystal without any of her usual grumbling. Tonight, she moved through the floors of the office with extra efficiency and even Crystal didn’t need prodding. It was payday. The promise of a full—or, at least fuller—bank account awaited.

  The evening passed in pleasant monotony. Thin carpet underfoot. Breathless halls blinking awake. The off-key hum of Crystal singing to herself. Or to a baby. Rosalita lost herself in her mind, wandering down happy passageways, most of which led to Salomon.

  She spotted a soggy paper in the men’s urinal on Nineteen, the last restroom on their shift.

  “Look.” Crystal had found another, clogged in the drain at the end of the row.

  Rosalita felt the outer edges of her nostrils pull up. She stretched plastic gloves onto her hands and plucked the fingertips to break the suction. She pinched the corner of the first piece of paper. On it, a smiling portrait of Sloane Glover, printed from the company directory, bled piss and printer ink. Rosalita extracted two others: the face of the new mother named Grace and, last, of Ardie. She dredged the photographs out of the urinal basins with the solemnity of one turning over a body found lifeless in shallow water, to find the mouth and eyes and skin bloated and waterlogged.

  “What is it?” Crystal asked, moving out of the way as drips of urine trailed the floor on the way to the trash can. Rosalita skinned her hands of the latex. The smell of ammonia thickened.

  “Target practice. It looks like.” Rosalita wanted to take a shower to rid herself of the ugliness of men—of the things they did when they thought no one was watching and, worse, when they didn’t care whether someone was watching or not.

  Rosalita and Crystal didn’t finish cleaning the nineteenth floor bathroom. Instead they rolled their cart back into the elevator and sank to the basement below ground, their backs throbbing, their hands dry from disinfectant, their feet tired.

  Rosalita stood in front of the foreman now. “You hear anything about up there—upstairs—recently?” she asked when he handed her the envelope made out in her name.

  “Other than a guy making ten times more money than I do offing himself? Nah. Don’t care to.” Rosalita thought about the vomit in the trash can in that man’s office, wondered if she alone had seen the first sign and whether that meant anything.

  Distracted, she took the envelope. Something was going on upstairs. She had caught the short-haired woman and the dead man doing … doing something. Seen the puke in the plastic bag. Found that the men on the executive floors had been urinating—literally pissing on—the likenesses of the women who worked for them, women she knew. For all three to happen so close in time, Rosalita thought, they had to be connected. But how?

  * * *

  Rosalita ripped the envelope with her pointer finger, a flap of skin opening up like a gill underneath the paper where it cut. She read the numbers once, twice, three times. She had never been good at math. But any way that Rosalita looked at the check, it was for less than half its usual amount.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  18-APR

  We lived with guilt the way other people lived with chronic medical conditions, only arguably, ours was the less treatable. We had guilt of every flavor: We had working-mom guilt, childless guilt, guilt because we’d turned down a social obligation, guilt because we’d accepted an invitation we knew we didn’t have time for, guilt for turning away work and for not turning it down when we felt we were already being taken advantage of. We had guilt for asking for more and for not asking for enough, guilt for working from home, guilt for eating a bagel, Catholic guilt and Presbyterian guilt and Jewish guilt, none of which tasted quite the same. We felt guilty if we weren’t feeling guilty enough, so much so that we began to take pride in this ability to function under moral conflict. Sometimes we went so far as to volunteer to cut our own pay simply to alleviate the guilt of having a job and being a mother at the same time.

  We wondered constantly: Were we doing the right thing? Were we screwing it all up? We wished we could say that, in light of everything, this had changed, that we acquired some fresh perspective. Instead, we would merely slather on another layer of deodorant, open a tube of Tums, prepare our lying faces, and refine our skill set.

  Because one of us, we would learn, really was guilty.

  * * *

  “Honk, honk!” Sloane rolled down the window of her Volvo SUV, the newest model. Her fist pushed into the soft spot of the steering wheel, which gave like the spongy point in a baby’s head. The car blared. It was her mother who had always put words to noises—knock, knock, honk, honk, bang, bang—and Sloane had dutifully rolled her eyes until she’d given birth and had promptly begun to do the same thing for Abigail. It had become second nature and so it went; she was turning into her mother, day by day by day.

  She came to a lurching stop in the pebbled drive of Grace and Liam’s house. The front door—Farrow & Ball, Hague Blue—cracked open and Grace appeared on the porch.

  A white pashmina draped around her shoulders, giving her the delicate look of a piece of origami, arms tucked around herself. “I told you I wasn’t sure that I was feeling well enough to come to work today.” She squinted like the sun hurt her eyes.

  Sloane had never asked Grace to join the lawsuit against Ames, but recently she’d been struck by the niggling worry that Grace might have felt pressured to, given that Sloane was her superior just as much as Ames had been. Sloane hated worries, especially those that niggled.

  Still, it hardly mattered now, Ames being dead, the lawsuit having been filed. Sloane just felt the pressing need to gather her friends up, to collect them, to keep them under her wing. The edge felt so close these last few days. A beam had materialized and all four of them—Sloane, Ardie, Grace, and Katherine—were now balanced on top of it. One foot in front of the other, the concrete spiraling dizzyingly below. A fatal fall, she worried, might be contagious.

  As might be a push.

  “Grace.” She projected over the low purr of the engine. “You know we need you in the office. It looks … odd.”

  Grace, for her part, didn’t argue. She wasn’t an arguer.

  Grace dipped inside the house and returned with her purse. In the passenger seat, Grace drew the buckle across her chest and sat gingerly beside Sloane, her fingernails plucking at the leather stitch seams.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” Sloane asked, reversing the car into the street and pushing the gear shift into drive. Sloane eased the SUV down the wide streets of Highland Park, where cops had nothing better to do than pull people over for failing to come to a complete stop at an empty intersection. They had passed Highland Park Village, the neighborhood shopping square, with its unattainable storefronts like Carolina Herrera, Fendi, and Balenciaga, before Grace said anything.

  Her gaze pierced through the windshield. “I’m fine, really, I am. I’m sorry. You remember what it was like when you had Abigail.” Her eyes flitted for the briefest moment over to Sloane: hope and accusation. “The combination of everything going on—Ames, the company, it’s just a lot. It’s catching up to me.”

  “You feel … responsible?” Sloane asked, knowing that could mean so many different things.

  “No.” Grace stilled her hands. “I don’t know. Detective Martin called me at home. I feel bad. I didn’t have much to tell her.”

  These angled glances at one anothe
r were so tricky.

  Sloane twisted her grip around the steering wheel and wetted her lips. “I think it might be time for you to talk to Katherine.” She’d been gearing up for this conversation, weighing the best time to have it and with whom. Grace needed a purpose and they needed Grace.

  Sloane was fairly certain that Ardie had lied to her now. First about believing the company had brought in Cosette because they were considering bowing to the women and second about something else. It was the way she’d said “honestly” that had raised Sloane’s antennae. Ardie knew something about someone; Sloane just didn’t know what or why Ardie wouldn’t tell her. Sloane had done a bit of snooping and Ardie had not been lying about getting the payroll form signed, but then again, why would she lie about payroll forms? So, Sloane wondered, what would Nancy Drew do next?

  Nancy Drew wasn’t middle-aged, you idiot.

  Still, she wanted to be the first to talk to Grace.

  “Yes,” said Grace, simple and elegant as the pearls around her neck. “I agree.”

  They came to a red light and sat for a moment in silence. Then Grace said, “He was trying to manipulate me, you know. That’s why I joined, really, in case you were wondering. I just wasn’t going to let him go around thinking that he’d pulled one over on me.”

  Sloane let out a heavy breath. “How?”

  Grace laughed quietly and toyed with the tip of one nail. “He asked me to smoke with him up at the balcony a few times. He”—a sort of hiccup or indigestion—“acted like he was genuinely interested in my career.”

  God, had Grace been smoking? Smoking with Ames? Sloane did a teensy bit want to judge her friend—gloat, more like. She imagined telling Derek: Can you believe it? Perfectly proper Grace Stanton smoking while nursing. I never did any of that. Now who’s the better mom? But, goodness, it was Grace and, well, Sloane wasn’t exactly a saint and Derek and Sloane weren’t exactly speaking, so it was all a bit moot, really. And still the news was, undeniably, salacious. Grace and Ames. Cigarettes.

  “Where did you smoke?” She thought she sounded casual. Mostly casual, anyhow. There was no delicate way to ask. Eighteenth floor? The balcony? Oh, see anything unusual up there? How’s the breeze?

  “On one of the smoking decks.” Grace crooked her finger and pressed it to her lips. “As soon as Katherine told us that she’d mentioned to Ames that she had seen me at The Prescott, I thought how stupid I was. I must have seemed like such an easy target to him. Butter me up. Offer to help my career. And then I’d be on his side and the sad part is that I was.” The edge of her finger came away with a violent shock of red from her lipstick.

  Sloane frowned. “It’s not mutually exclusive, you know,” said Sloane. “He might have really seen promise and offered to help.”

  “Maybe. I saw the room key, though. To The Prescott. When he showed me a picture of his kids. Even if nothing happened in that room at The Prescott, he kept a key because he wanted something to happen. I think that’s why he doubled down wanting me to write the letter. People try to take advantage of nice people.”

  “What were you doing at The Prescott?” Sloane asked.

  “Sleeping.”

  They drove past Dealey Plaza, the place where John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. Sloane had never passed by it without sparing at least a fleeting thought: blood and brain.

  “Did you ever see Katherine up there? On the smoking decks?” It was a long shot, but Sloane had no choice except to feel around in the dark, hoping to bump into something. She didn’t like the idea that the only person with opportunity might be Grace. But, no, that wouldn’t make sense at all because she’d never even heard Grace fail to say “please.”

  “I don’t think she’d spend time there. Katherine’s terrified of heights.”

  Nearly to the office, Sloane had another thought: “So now what? Why the disappearing act?” she asked. “You feel guilty? For what? For suing Ames? For believing him? For what?”

  Grace tilted her head back on the rest. “I’ve felt guilty about so many things in the past few months, where would I even begin?”

  Sloane reached across the cup holders, still occupied by two empty Diet Coke cans, and squeezed Grace’s hand. “Welcome to motherhood,” she said, and then: “Hey, where’s your wedding ring?”

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  18-APR

  Grace hesitated before Katherine’s office, just out of view, shielding herself from the relentless glass walls. She fingered the bare spot on her left ring finger. Dropped it off at the cleaner, she’d told Sloane, which, strictly speaking, had been true.

  Grace slipped into Katherine’s office and closed the door behind her back so softly it only made the faintest click as it latched into place.

  Katherine: “You’re back.”

  “I am.” Grace’s heart couldn’t decide what rhythm it wanted to beat in. She needed two things from Katherine. The question was which to ask for first. “Katherine, we would never want to ask you to do something you weren’t comfortable with.” This was, of course, the exact wrong way to begin. A version of those words had likely started this whole sordid affair in the first place.

  Katherine’s face became a question mark.

  It was important that Grace not screw this up. Any of it. But despite days’ worth of sleep, she struggled to think properly. She swore something had happened to her brain, something anatomical and quantifiable since Emma Kate.

  Welcome to motherhood, Sloane had said.

  But was this really what everyone meant when they talked about “mom brain”?

  “Sorry.” Grace began again. “Sloane, Ardie, and I are figuring out next steps. The media, Truviv people, they’re all, you know, twisting the story, acting like Ames was a saint,” she said. “And now Truviv has called in a big New York law firm and we want to make sure that our side of the story isn’t forgotten in the mix. That we’re not vilified by the circumstances, I guess. With Ames gone, we thought that you might feel better about coming forward with your story.”

  Grace stopped herself before she could say anything like “brave” or “strong,” heaven help her. She also resisted the even more tenacious urge to say that she had “prayed on” this matter and was now coming to Katherine because she felt “called to,” which were popular methods of manipulation in her mother’s social circle.

  Katherine was doing a weird thing with her jaw and Grace thought she heard faint pops that managed to cause psychological hurt in her own mouth. “I—”

  “We think it could really help.” Grace started talking again at exactly the same time as Katherine and she generally made a conscious decision, when this happened, to finish her sentences to avoid the polite stop-start of two people trying to converse out-of-sync.

  “I understand,” Katherine said. “I’ll share what happened. It’s not a problem.”

  Ames had manipulated both of them. It was funny how, even if the thing people shared was an unpleasant one, the part that mattered more was that it was a thing shared in common. This was the theory behind hazing, Grace supposed, and she’d traded on it with Katherine, gotten her to agree to the thing the group needed from her.

  But there was more. There was what Grace alone needed. And what she needed was to stop dreaming every night that she’d jumped off a building, waking up a blink away from the moment her body crushed into the ground.

  “We never got to speak. After,” Grace said. A tag on her Tory Burch shift was making her back itch. Katherine’s eyes were big and brown and watchful. “Did you wind up getting to see Ames?”

  He wants to talk to me, Katherine had told her. Though Grace had been so exhausted from a week of Babywise sleep training at that point, it was almost possible she’d imagined it. Was Grace … was Grace paranoid? “I just wondered if you’d gone, you know, looking for him?”

  The women held each other’s stare for a heartbeat.

  “No. I mean, I tried to find him, but I couldn’t. We never got to talk.” Katherine’s smil
e was wan. “I guess he had … well, he must have had other plans in mind in the end.”

  Was Katherine telling the truth? Had Katherine, in fact, seen anything? What did she know?

  “Probably for the best,” Grace said, the air thick between them.

  When Katherine combed her hand through her hair, Grace noticed the watery line of blood, a red ribbon of raw skin spreading at the nail line on her pointer finger.

  * * *

  Sometime later, Sloane and Ardie gathered with Katherine and Grace to escort Katherine to the Human Resources department. Grace hugged Katherine, her slender shoulder blades poking into Grace’s hands. They told her the things friends said in moments in which there was little to be said. They told her it would be okay, that she was doing the right thing, that they were here for her, that she was amazing, and it was nearly impossible to imagine a similar event unfolding with a group of male friends or colleagues in even close to the same fashion. Grace watched Katherine disappear behind frosted glass and the remaining three waited a few extra seconds before it was clear they were no longer needed.

  Everything would be okay. She was doing the right thing. Grace’s friends were there for her. But when she stepped back on the elevator, her reflection obscured in the gray metal doors, Grace wondered when, if ever, she would stop thinking about the last words that she’d said to Ames Garrett up there on that balcony.

  * * *

  Three hours later, and Grace still hadn’t heard anything and neither had Ardie or Sloane, but it was easy enough to tell herself this was normal, however relative that term might be under the circumstances. She could assign reasons. The company was considering a settlement in light of Katherine coming forward. Perhaps even other women would share their accounts, too. Grace had heard of that happening at a national news station. A landslide effect. Maybe the board was waiting to announce the next CEO prior to finishing this harassment suit business—good news to buffer the bad.