Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

  Sloane, Grace, and Ardie had hired Helen Yeh from Scott, Wasserstein, and McKenna. Really, Sloane had called in a favor. Sloane had hooked Helen’s son up with an internship at Jaxon Brockwell a year ago and he was now starting his first year at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. From the start, Helen had agreed to take the case on contingency, which meant that if they’d won anything, she would take home 40 percent. They didn’t have to pay a dime up front, though it was quickly starting to look like there wouldn’t be a dime to take home, either, and Helen was probably starting to wonder how much her son’s legal education was really worth to her.

  Truviv’s strategy, it appeared, was to methodically chip away at the women’s credibility—mostly Sloane’s. To make their claims sound hypersensitive. To draw as clear a line as possible from the spreadsheet, to the lawsuit, to Ames’s death. Hours passed, punctuated by lukewarm coffee drawn from a stationed carafe, during which Sloane had to watch every word that came out of her mouth. In the late afternoon, they broke for the day and Sloane, Ardie, and Grace reconvened at one of the many salad shops that populated downtown Dallas. During those meetings, Sloane attempted to fortify morale. She went over the line of questioning—the affair was irrelevant, Grace’s note was written under pressure, which could actually be read as a point for them. They’d been responsible, longstanding employees with a knockout record of loyalty to the company.

  But there was no easiness to this time spent together and anyway, Sloane’s tone gave her away. A dull edge of hurt still pressed on her that Ardie would complain about her. Was Sloane someone about whom people complained? She worried. She worried Derek was preparing to leave her. (What was he doing all those hours up in the guest bedroom alone?) She worried she would lose her job.

  Still. “How can they say that something we did made Ames kill himself?” Sloane would say over an unappreciated mix of purple lettuce and goat cheese.

  But then the conversation always returned to Katherine.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  27-APR

  Grace wrote the nanny a check when she returned home from the third day of depositions. She had found her nanny, Julieta, through a volunteer-run shelter that helped immigrant women find work. Julieta was close to the same age as Grace, with two children of her own and a moderate grasp on the English language—not that Grace could judge, seeing as how she spoke no Spanish at all. Grace felt her usual twinge of guilt when she wrote out the sum she owed for the week. Women like Grace were supposed to want more time to mother, and women like Julieta wanted more money, also to mother. The relationship should have felt more symbiotic than it did.

  With Julieta gone and Liam not back from work, the house was quiet. Emma Kate lay on her back, staring up at the ceiling fan, while she kicked her legs. The television was off because Grace had made sure Julieta signed something Grace’s friends referred to as a “nanny contract.” Apparently it was an absolute necessity unless you wanted your nanny to melt your baby’s formative brain with television waves or shove Oreos into their toothless mouths while you were at work. Grace had four Nest cameras set up throughout the house that cost $199 apiece and a monthly subscription that allowed her to rewind the day’s tape to make sure that Julieta wasn’t pinching her daughter or kissing her on the mouth. She never checked. For what it was worth, she did believe that Julieta was meeting all of their agreed-upon requirements: playing classical music for at least fifteen minutes a day, reading two books before each naptime, never microwaving breast milk, speaking Spanish, sterilizing bottles, scheduling two hours of tummy time, and holding up black-and-white images for her baby to stare at.

  Grace still felt like a terrible mom.

  She sank into the sofa and turned on the TV straight away. Emma Kate tilted her head, her eyes staring up at the flashing images, while Grace mentally quoted the message from Dr. Tanaka’s pamphlet: No screen time before two!

  If asked about it, she would lie.

  What if we miss our old life? Liam had asked when she was four months pregnant. The sweet freedom of taking walks around the neighborhood after dark was the thing Grace didn’t know she would long for afterward. What if I love my job as much as I love my baby? she should have asked back.

  For a few minutes, Grace sat glassy-eyed in front of a Friends rerun that she could quote by heart, reminding herself how, in a few months, when Emma Kate was just a little older, she’d stop doing this. Bobby pins dug into the back of her skull as she relaxed her head into the couch cushions and kicked her bare feet onto the leather ottoman that she’d recently purchased from Pottery Barn for a thousand dollars.

  This reminded her: she still needed to set up Emma Kate’s college fund.

  A commercial came on at twice the volume, technically a regulatory violation that Grace thought deserved a lot more enforcement than Dodd-Frank. She muted it and crawled on her knees to where Emma Kate was sticking her tongue out and drooling. If there was one thing that Grace reliably loved about her daughter, it was her breath—inexplicably sweet. She pressed her nose to Emma Kate’s face and her daughter pushed her feet in the air and smiled.

  Emma Kate looked like Liam. Everyone said so. Grace had read in one of her prenatal books that it was an evolutionary adaptation, meant to reassure the father that the child was his, so she had decided not to take it personally.

  Rug fibers were already collecting on Grace’s black dress. If she’d been wearing pants, she would have already changed by now. Emma Kate seemed to be having a burst of unexpected energy and she was scooting along her back and then crossing one leg over the other. Her tiny face wrinkled in concentration, her mouth puckered into the size and shape of a single Cheerio.

  “You’ve got it,” Grace found herself saying. She watched her baby kick and wrestle, trying to make her body do what she wanted it to do. How hard it must be to have so little control. Grace gripped the threads of carpet, realized that she was resisting helping Emma Kate not because she didn’t want to but because she was rooting for this moment of tiny triumph for the little person beside her.

  Emma Kate squirmed. Her onesie bunched. And then, in slow motion, Emma Kate flipped onto her stomach and Grace clapped. Unintentionally. She was applauding Emma Kate, who looked disproportionately pleased with herself, and then—because, why not—Grace lifted Emma Kate and spun her around shouting, “You did it! You did it! You are the champion!” in that whispery baby voice that she’d previously believed was only mildly less obnoxious than when moms spoke to their children in syrupy tones at a decibel level designed specifically to invite eavesdropping: Oh, no, Timmy, decorations are to enjoy with your eyes not with your hands!

  Grace pressed her hand to her baby’s in a miniature high five and—she didn’t want to jinx it, but she thought that the two of them had possibly shared what some might call (not Grace, Christ) a “moment.”

  Without feeling guilty, she turned the volume back up on Friends and relaxed into the sofa again, this time with Emma Kate’s chin on her shoulder.

  The doorbell rang. Grace bounced her baby as she padded still barefoot over to the door and slid open the lock. On the other side, Detectives Martin and Diaz stood, wearing matching slack faces, as though those were also department-issued.

  If you think of anything else, give us a call, Detective Martin had said.

  Well Grace had thought of something. She had thought and thought and thought.

  Detective Martin blinked. A shimmery blue powder coated her eyelids. Brown hair burst like cotton candy out of the back of her head. “You said you remembered something that could be relevant, Mrs. Stanton?”

  Transcript of Interview of Grace Stanton Part I (B)

  27-APR

  APPEARANCES:

  Detective Malika Martin

  Detective Oscar Diaz

  PROCEEDINGS

  DET. MARTIN:

  Mrs. Stanton, you called us because you remembered something that may be relevant to Ames Garrett’s death. Can you repeat for the record wha
t you told us?

  MRS. STANTON:

  Right before the time Ames died, Katherine came into my office to tell me that Ames wanted to talk to her.

  DET. MARTIN:

  Do you know what Mr. Garrett wanted to speak with her about?

  MRS. STANTON:

  Not exactly, no. But she implied that it was related to a falling out the two of them had recently when, as I understand it, she rejected his advances.

  DET. MARTIN:

  You’re aware that Katherine contends that no such advances were ever made.

  MRS. STANTON:

  She’s lying.

  DET. MARTIN:

  You believe she’s not telling the truth and that Ames Garrett made sexual advances to her.

  MRS. STANTON:

  I believe she’s lying to one of us. Either she wasn’t telling the truth to us back then or she isn’t telling the truth to you now. Which do you believe is more likely? Especially given that Ames was helping to pay for her hotel room at The Prescott. Did she tell you that? Not only that, but I saw a Prescott key in his wallet. I’m not sure if it would have still been there when he … when he died. But still. It was there.

  DET. MARTIN:

  Why didn’t you mention this bit of information in our initial conversation?

  MRS. STANTON:

  I didn’t remember until later. There was a lot happening. I hadn’t collected my thoughts. I did share it with my lawyer. Recently. The part, at least, about Ames paying for Katherine’s hotel.

  DET. MARTIN:

  So the timing has nothing to do with the fact that, since our initial meeting, Katherine sided with your employer, Truviv, and is providing witness testimony in direct opposition to your and your colleagues’ claims?

  MRS. STANTON:

  No, of course not.

  DET. MARTIN:

  Grace, do you smoke?

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  27-APR

  Sloane rarely came home to a dark house, one of the small luxuries of being the last one home, but tonight the house looked spiritless, as if it belonged to a family on vacation, a few lights left glowing in strategic rooms to ward off burglars.

  “Abigail!” she yelled.

  “Up here,” a faint voice called back. Sloane could hear the sound of a television. She stared up through the ceiling, as if she could see Abigail through it. Her mom brain filled with all the ugly things that a young girl might start to get into if left to her own devices. Forget baby-proofing, Sloane would like to pre-teen-girl-proof her home. She’d take out the razors, the scissors, anything sharp, the toilet bowls and trash cans, the girl’s magazines and instant messenger apps and cell phones and pills and liquor bottles and cameras.

  Sloane stripped off her blazer and kicked her shoes underneath the lip of a cabinet.

  “The school district superintendent called me.” At the sound of a voice, she spun around to the darkened living room, her heart thumping like a trapped rabbit’s.

  “You scared me,” she told Derek. The silhouette of her husband blackened the couch. The streetlights that filtered through the shutters lit the outer edge of a beer bottle sea-glass green. “He said he was disappointed to receive our complaint.”

  “I never said ‘we’,” said Sloane, resting her hip against the granite counter.

  “You know.” Derek raised the beer to his mouth. He always sounded more Southern when he’d had a beer or two. “He wished that we didn’t threaten litigation and he hoped we would change our minds. Change our minds. Ours.”

  “You didn’t see the text messages that Abigail was receiving.”

  “Yes, I did.” Derek pointed the bottle’s neck at her.

  “There were more.”

  He laughed and pushed himself up off the sofa to pace the rug. “And you hid them? Gee, Sloane, that’s so unlike you.”

  She would not take the bait. “I wanted to keep your hands clean,” she said. “I didn’t want to involve you. So … I made an executive decision.”

  “This is my job, Sloane.” He thumped his chest.

  “I understand that.”

  “Do you?” He twisted on his heel to face her. “Because I think that you think just because you make more money than I do, that makes you more important to this family. The executive decision-maker, right?”

  “I don’t think that.”

  “You may make more money, but we both work equally hard. We both have full-time jobs. You could work other places, Sloane.” He aimed his finger at her, tipped his chin. “You don’t want to, but you could. There aren’t a lot of other school districts in this town.”

  “They’re not going to fire you and even if they did—”

  “Even if they did, what? What, it wouldn’t matter?” He raked his hands over his face. He’d put together the swing set in the backyard with those hands.

  “Of course it would matter. I’m sorry. Like I said, I wanted to keep you out of it. The problem is not in the saying of the thing, Derek, it’s that the thing is happening in the first place.” Why did nobody seem to understand this?

  “Right, well, I hope that Ardie and Grace know what they’ve gotten into with you.” And there it was. Her worst fear laid bare by her favorite person. She was a terrible ambassador for the cause. She was a liability. She had told herself that she might be an imperfect envoy for their message, but that she was the only one available and so she had to be better than nothing. But now there was a lawsuit, a counter lawsuit and, well, maybe even more. Maybe even real, permanent, life-altering ramifications for her or one of her friends. And she didn’t know how or where any of this would end. Only that it had just begun with Ames dying. And the women were left to deal with it, whatever it was. In the end, what if she was left with nothing? Nothing could be worse for her than nothing.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  28-APR

  She lived in a house that would cause Rosalita’s abuelita to exclaim, “But the property taxes!” as if it were the waste of exorbitant amounts of tax dollars that kept Rosalita’s family out of these neighborhoods. Rosalita’s car, a disintegrating ten-year-old Kia, looked out of place parked on the curb and she wondered how long it would take the neighbors to call the cops and, in turn, how long it might take the cops to arrive, given that they had nothing to do in Highland Park other than hand out speeding tickets. Rosalita stared up at the house. Charming white brick. Topiaries climbing out of terra-cotta pots. Iron lanterns that framed a cherry red door. A sweeping circle drive that didn’t even need to be used because of the attached three-car garage.

  But the property taxes!

  Rosalita set her mouth and dragged her heavy-bottomed purse off the cloth-covered passenger seat. Ivory curtain backs blocked the windows. Her sneakers had bitten through the hems of Rosalita’s jeans so that they scraped the ground with damp, white threads. The chafe of the denim was the only sound her shoes made up the walk.

  She tried to imagine the woman behind the cherry red door, who lived in the perfect white brick house with plants that received more grooming than Rosalita’s legs. Probably she brushed her teeth first thing in the morning, was purposefully loud during sex, wore matching pajamas, and read health food articles. Rosalita didn’t want this life, though she understood this thought was like calling to break up with a man who had already stopped calling her months earlier. It had never been offered to her.

  She clutched the heavy iron knocker—a ring through a lion’s mouth—and clomped it against the door. She waited, counting quietly under her breath. She knocked again. When no one answered, she shoved her thumb into the doorbell, which had a stretch of Scotch tape covering it. The chime reverberated through the house. Rosalita could hear it from here as well as the footsteps that followed. She glanced up idly and noticed a pinhole camera fixed to the corner of the door. Rosalita imagined the shape of herself reflected in the fisheye lens, warped and rounded, the opening shot of a true crime show.

  And then the door opened and the two women stood on opposi
te sides of the threshold.

  “My name is Rosalita Guillen. I need to talk to you.” She held out an envelope with clean writing on its face.

  The woman had pink skin covered in freckles. She had hair that looked as though someone gnawed on its ends. She looked at Rosalita once and, gently but forcefully, snapped the door shut.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  1-MAY

  Two news vans idled in the fire lanes with two different anchorwomen who were hooked to camera and microphone cords. Every female news anchor Sloane had ever seen, no matter the city, looked like she was from Dallas, but the Dallas news anchors were by far the Dallas-iest of them all. Big sprayed-in hair, pink lips, tailored dresses in one of four jewel tones, paired with platform heels that made them walk like baby deer. Sloane had once seen a segment on the Today show about how there was an online Facebook group where anchorwomen shared good deals on TV-appropriate dresses and, honestly, nothing had ever made more sense.

  Had it really been less than two months since Desmond’s passing? The words “shareholders hate hearing ‘no comment’” still rang fresh in her mind.

  Sloane covertly slipped a compact mirror from her purse and checked her teeth. The moment she began walking, the nearest anchor—a woman with voluminous black hair—started in at an angle to cut off Sloane’s course.

  “Sloane? Sloane Glover?” She pushed the bulb of a microphone out at Sloane. “How do you answer allegations that you and your co-plaintiffs are responsible for driving a man over the edge?”

  “I didn’t push anyone off the side of a building,” Sloane responded, a statement which she hoped would serve to be both thought-provoking—Well, of course, you didn’t—and sassy. People could get on board with sassy.