Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

  But then she saw the two building employees carting boxes from Katherine’s office and her heart began pounding in her chest—Knock, knock, knock, who’s there, Grace?

  Grace bustled over. “Excuse me.” She flagged them down. “What exactly are you doing?”

  They had fired Katherine. Grace didn’t want to believe it. Katherine had been right not to want to risk going up against the company. She should have joined the lawsuit or kept quiet. HR is not your friend! She had read that somewhere but never really suspected it to be true.

  The building employees eased a cart off its wheels and onto its flatbed. A man with biceps thick as her thighs looked back at her, at all of her, she noted. “We’re moving Ms. Bell’s belongings to a temporary office upstairs.”

  “Upstairs?” Grace wore a look of concern that was both honest and put on. Her tension eased. Her spike of guilt fell to its previous elevation, which was high, but at least she’d been bearing it.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Why upstairs?” she asked.

  The man cleared his throat. “I assume because that’s where Ms. Bell’s going to be sitting. This is the right office, isn’t it?” He squinted, smudging his finger over the first letter on the nameplate, the rest of which clearly spelled out: KATHERINE BELL.

  “That’s right,” she said and he shrugged and hiked the boxes off the ground again. She didn’t try to stop him.

  A man in a damp-looking polo shirt stood in front of her office when she returned. “Grace Stanton?” He wore pleated khakis and his forehead was shiny.

  “That’s me,” she said. He held a packet at waist level and she registered it with the surreal panic of someone registering a gun barrel pointed at her head.

  “Grace Marie Stanton.” He raised the packet and she had a self-preservation impulse to run and never look back. “You’ve been served.”

  Deposition Transcript

  26-APR

  Ms. Sharpe:

  State your name, please.

  Witness:

  Katherine Bell.

  Ms. Sharpe:

  What is your occupation, Ms. Bell?

  Witness:

  I work as an attorney at Truviv, Inc. in the corporate and transactional practice, primarily.

  Ms. Sharpe:

  Did you know Ames Garrett?

  Witness:

  Yes, I knew him. Only since I began working at Truviv. He was the General Counsel. I reported to Ames as well as Sloane Glover, who worked directly below him.

  Ms. Sharpe:

  What was your impression of Mr. Garrett? How was your experience working for him?

  Witness:

  I thought he was extremely sharp. He recruited me from a firm in Boston and I was grateful for the opportunity. I hadn’t worked in-house prior to this position, so he was willing to mentor me to help get me up to speed. He provided interesting work assignments for the attorneys under his watch. I was really excited to hear that he would possibly be promoted to CEO of the company. I figured this would be viewed as a net positive for the legal department.

  Ms. Sharpe:

  Did he ever make unwanted advances toward you? Did he ever touch you in any way?

  Witness:

  No.

  Ms. Sharpe:

  Did you witness him making such advances to other women in the office? Did you witness any behavior from Mr. Garrett that you might call “sexual harassment”?

  Witness:

  No.

  Ms. Sharpe:

  Were you aware that there were other women in the office who felt differently and who, in fact, planned to sue Mr. Garrett and Truviv, Inc.?

  Witness:

  I was.

  Ms. Sharpe:

  How did you become aware of this?

  Witness:

  Since I started there, it was pretty clear that Sloane and Ardie hated Ames. I wasn’t sure how Grace felt about him, but Sloane was definitely the ringleader, so we all had to kind of go along. It felt like, you were either in or you were out. You were with them or against them. I felt like, to be part of the group I had to be willing to listen to them complain about Ames. It was very much a groupthink mentality. Sloane was my direct superior so I wanted to be on her good side. I went to lunches and hung out with Sloane, Ardie, and Grace—I was new to the office—and it became clear to me that they had fashioned a sort of personal vendetta against Ames. It was like a pastime for them. Practically all they could talk about. I want to believe women. I do. But when Sloane added Ames’s name to that BAD Men List, she was so gleeful about it. It was like she was bragging.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  20-APR

  We never understood the tendency to underestimate us, we who had been baptized and delivered through pain, who grinned and bore agonies while managing to draw on wing-tipped eyeliner with a surgically steady hand. We plucked our eyebrows, waxed our upper lips, got razor burn on our crotches, held blades to the cups of our armpits. Shoes tore holes in the skin of our heels and crippled the balls of our feet. We endured labor and childbirth and C-sections, during which doctors literally set our intestines on a table next to our bodies while we were awake. We got acid facials. We punctured our foreheads with Botox and filled our lips and our breasts. We pierced our ears and wore pants that were too tight. We got too much sun. We punished our bodies in spin class. All these tiny sacrifices to make us appear more lithe and ladylike—the female of the species. The weaker sex. Secretly, they toughened our hides, sharpened our edges. We were tougher than we looked. The only difference was that now we were finally letting on.

  Ardie fully expected the meeting ahead to be painful. Cosette Sharpe sat across the table from them, her pointed elbows jutted out to either side as she folded her hands in front of her. With eight people in the room, Ardie thought she could actually feel the oxygen dwindling.

  “Wrongful death, Cosette.” Sloane slapped her hand over the stack of documents. She had a tendency to overenunciate when she got heated, as though the whole room suddenly spoke English only as a second language. “You’re suing us for wrongful death.”

  For the record—and, as a matter of fact, Ardie would have liked some credit on this point—she’d never liked Cosette Sharpe. New York lawyers, as a rule, thought everyone who was not a New York lawyer was an inbred idiot. They ended calls with “Sorry, but I have to jump off.” Cosette Sharpe was guilty on both counts and yet she wasn’t the one on trial here.

  “I’m glad we all have an opportunity to gather and talk.” Cosette’s eyes were too close together for her to be pretty. Ardie wasn’t in the habit of picking apart other women’s appearances, especially when it wasn’t relevant, but she could indulge from time to time when the occasion and the person warranted it.

  “Why sue us? What’s the point?” Grace asked, softly.

  A countersuit meant not only that Truviv wasn’t considering a settlement payout on their sexual harassment claim, but that they were, in fact, prepared to demand money from Grace, Ardie, and Sloane on behalf of themselves and the Garrett family for Ames’s death. The amount owed if found responsible in a wrongful death was based off the literal value of the life lost. And Ames Garrett, to put it mildly, was very valuable.

  Damages could include the cost of his education and training, plus the salary he would have made over the course of his career (raises and promotions included), then add on stock options and bonuses, pain and suffering, and whatever else Truviv might decide it had cost them to lose their next CEO and, in short, they would be asking for millions of dollars.

  “At companies like Truviv, while we take sexual harassment claims very seriously, we’re not going to kowtow to women who think that making a false allegation is a path to a quick paycheck. It sets a poor precedent.”

  Ardie pushed her sleeves up her arms. “There’s no ‘we’ that you’re a part of, Cosette. Truviv is your client. We are part of Truviv—Sloane, Grace, and me. We are taking this very seriously. Right now, it feels like you’re attempt
ing to turn this case into a journal article that you can add to your byline.” Ardie hated outside counsel that inserted themselves into the clients as if they were all part of the same big, happy family, when, in reality, those same attorneys billed their clients up the nose for every six minutes spent typing out an email. “Ames jumped off of an eighteenth-story balcony, leaving behind a wife and two children, and you’re suing us for wrongful death?”

  A woman to her left, round-faced and probably one all-nighter away from dying of exhaustion in her office, pushed a notepad with something scribbled on it to Cosette’s attention. She glanced down her straight nose and nodded. “Allegedly. But yes, that’s the theory we’re working under.”

  “What on God’s green earth.” Sloane pushed her back into the chair. It wasn’t a great sign that this early in the game she was already reverting to Southern grandmother sayings.

  “And, I’m sorry, but how do you plan to argue that three women are responsible for a grown man killing himself?” A note of exasperation ran under Grace’s question. If one of them was most upset by Katherine’s betrayal, it was Grace. She’d been steely ever since learning that Katherine would be a witness for Truviv.

  Why would she do this? I talked to her. She said she would tell what happened. Why? Grace. Spinning. Disbelieving.

  So why, then? Ardie could invent reasons. Truviv had promised her something. She was scared. She was a fair weather fan and had chosen who she believed would be the winning team (she was a Red Sox fan, after all). Or maybe there was something else.

  Ardie should have talked to her before. Or else they never should have let Katherine get involved. But that was hindsight talking.

  “Actually”—Cosette wielded the word like a knife—“we have Ardie and Sloane to thank for that.” Sloane’s eyes flitted to Ardie’s. And Ardie’s back straightened infinitesimally. “We were able to pull the complaint that Ardie penned regarding the treatment of Sloane’s daughter at school, which was actually very well done.” Cosette pushed three copies of another document across the table to them, a letter on official Truviv letterhead, the signature block on the third page from Adriana Valdez, Attorney-at-Law. Of course, Sloane had written that. Not Ardie, but they must have known about it from … It had to be from Katherine. Her heart skipped as she started to draw an uneasy line from here to there. “The Laney Presper case, Jackson Worrall, and even now, the Matt Renard law. These all relate to incidents in which people were held criminally and civilly responsible for the deaths of suicide victims as a result of systematic harassment that pushed the victim over the edge, so to speak.”

  Sloane scoffed. “Come on, Cosette. These aren’t fair comparisons.”

  It had seemed like such an inconsequential thing to vent to Katherine, and Katherine had seemed just enough outside of their inner circle to feel safe. Ardie hadn’t meant to sound so bitchy. She recalled now, with a flush, that she had.

  “The harassers in your complaint were mostly teenagers. They hardly knew the seriousness of their actions; they were only beginning to understand consequences. But you?”

  Ardie felt the sizzle of rage in her veins. “We weren’t harassing Ames.” Her voice was reserved, not quiet, but those at the table had to lean toward her to hear.

  Cosette lifted her eyebrows. “The BAD Men List to which Sloane added the name of Ames Garrett is a form of online harassment in our view. As of today, it’s been shared on social media over three thousand times. Given the unsubstantiated nature of the spreadsheet, it serves little purpose other than to publicly shame those included on an online forum.” Cosette had put on her I’m-from-the-most-prestigious-law-firm-so-I-am-obviously-correct tone. Truviv had already put some money into this. Cosette and her team had been paid. They were beyond the fact-finding expedition. They were formulating arguments. Ardie, Sloane, and Grace were in trouble.

  “The parallels don’t even stop there,” Cosette continued now with the inflection of a Realtor showing off an impressive listing. “As with the Sedwick case, the bullying started when the bullied girl began dating the bully’s ex-boyfriend.”

  “We’re not in middle school, Cosette,” Sloane said, evenly.

  “But isn’t that more or less what happened, Sloane? Didn’t you get upset when you thought that Ames, someone with whom you’d had a relationship, became interested in a younger woman—Katherine?”

  It was as though Ardie had stepped into an alternate universe. If there was an opportunity for Ardie to have handled matters differently, to speak up, she’d missed it. She had never wanted to end up here, and now she had.

  “How’s your daughter doing, though, Sloane? I think we’re all sorry to be here under these circumstances.” She gave sympathetic looks to her team and Ardie saw Grace press her hand into Sloane’s thigh to hold her. “Still, I’m afraid we can’t ignore that asking Ardie to provide legal representation to you is a material breach of company policy. I’ve asked Truviv to table that issue for now until the matters at hand are resolved, but I’m sure you appreciate that this is a serious matter. A fireable offense, actually, and Truviv’s agreement not to take immediate action is extremely generous, under the circumstances.” Sloane pressed her lips together and gave nothing while Cosette blinked, waiting, as though for a thank-you. “Right. Well. Let’s all take out our calendars and start penciling in depositions,” suggested Cosette at last.

  The meeting ended with all the warmth of a hostage negotiation. Grace, Ardie, and Sloane slipped into the elevator. The doors closed and no one moved to press the button.

  “So you told Katherine about Abigail,” Sloane said. “About the memo?” Sloane asked, a false lightness to her voice.

  “Yes.” Ardie stared straight ahead.

  “When?”

  “After Michael’s party, I guess.”

  Sloane nodded, pushing her jaw into an underbite. “So, what, you were complaining about me to Katherine, then? Your annoying boss, Sloane? Your horrible friend, Sloane?” She dropped any hint of levity. “I don’t know why you would have brought Abigail into it. Client confidentiality. Didn’t you tell her that, Ardie? Didn’t you say to my daughter’s face that you wouldn’t tell anyone anything? And this will be public record now, you know. They’re going to admit that memo into evidence. People will think that … people will say that Abigail was actually suicidal.” Sloane breathed heavily. “The whole school will know how mean those kids were to her, the things they called her. As if things haven’t been hard enough for her this year. She trusted you, Ardie. Not to say anything of the fact that I may not have a job now.”

  Ardie knew she shouldn’t feel defensive, and yet … “I didn’t write that memo, Sloane. You wrote it. And you didn’t even ask me. You know that’s not how I operate. If they didn’t have that memo, we wouldn’t be here.”

  “That’s not the point right now,” Sloane said, with actual volume control. “You had no right.”

  “Well, you had no right to hang out with Tony. And Braylee.”

  “I wasn’t hanging out with Tony and Braylee complaining about you, Ardie. I wasn’t talking shit about you,” she snapped. “I actually like you.”

  A smudge of mascara smeared a light black line along the top of Grace’s cheek. A few overprocessed strands of hair fell from behind her ears. “And it seems they know about the affair.” Grace gently held up her finger to interject.

  “Don’t look at me like that. You can’t blame that one on me,” Ardie said.

  She was just now registering that the speakers in the elevator were piping through a peppy radio edit of “Cheerleader.”

  The elevator began to descend, the electronic red lines reconfiguring themselves into smaller and smaller numbers until they vanished and were replaced by an arrow.

  Sloane tapped her ridiculous red pump on the floor. “I never would have complained about you, Ardie. And I definitely wouldn’t have brought Michael into it if I did. And I never would have jeopardized your job. You really went for the trifecta, there.
”

  “And I never would have cheated on my husband.”

  “Ha! Glad you finally got that off your chest,” Sloane said, without malice, which was why, at the very core, despite all indications to the contrary, Sloane really was the better person between the two of them.

  Sloane fished out her jangly keys—with at least six key chains acquired for her by Abigail and Derek from family vacations to places like Atlantis and Jackson Hole and Big Sur. “I guess we’re even now?” She stepped out of the elevator without giving Ardie the opportunity to respond.

  The lobby was big and airy and disconcerting. When Grace made an excuse about needing a salad—or maybe it was a hamburger—Ardie made no effort to go with her. A message had buzzed in Ardie’s pocket and, when she retrieved it, the fire emoji blazed on her screen. Without any ceremony, Ardie swiped her thumb to open it.

  SMUalmn75: Hi, I like your profile, do you want to meet up?

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  26-APR

  After that, they didn’t see Katherine. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t there. She became like a ghost, haunting them. She loomed all the larger in their imaginations because she had all at once become so intangible. Incorporeal. Ferreted away. A blank space to fill with perceived motivations, backstory, and cunning. In the absence of her, they questioned their judgment. They questioned themselves.

  The depositions began, it having been several days since Sloane last heard from the detectives without any hint as to where the investigation stood.