The Wicked Redhead Page 2

  Ella tried the latte. Too hot. She set it down and checked her watch—seven forty-eight—and decided she might as well get it over with. Lifted her laptop bag from the counter stool and walked out the door, forgetting all about the latte left on the counter until she was pushing her way through the glass revolving door of the Parkinson Peters building on Fifty-Second Street and Sixth Avenue and wondered why her right hand was so empty.

  TO ELLA’S SURPRISE, HER security pass still worked. She spilled through the turnstile, in fact, because she’d been expecting it to stay locked. So maybe forgetting that latte was an act of mercy; it would have sloshed right up through the mouth hole and over her suit if she’d been holding it. What a disaster that would have been, right?

  Fortunately, the lobby was still empty at this hour, and only the security guy noticed Ella’s misstep. Most of the Parkinson Peters staff wandered in around eight thirty, though you were expected to stay as late as it took, and certainly past six o’clock if you wanted a strong review at the end of the year. And that was just when you were on the beach, between assignments, performing rote work in the mother ship. (The cabana, if you didn’t want to mix your metaphors.) Ella crossed the marble floor like she owned it—that was the only way to walk, Mumma had taught her—and pressed the elevator button. While she waited, somebody joined her, and for an instant made eye contact in the reflection of the elevator doors. A woman Ella didn’t recognize, dressed in a charcoal-gray suit similar to hers. Nice suit, Ella wanted to say, a final act of transgression while she still had the chance. But of course she didn’t say it. There was no point. Ella thought she had a finite amount of rebellion inside her, which she had used up considerably on Saturday night, and she didn’t want to waste any of the remainder. Unless rebellion was the kind of thing that fed on itself. Unless breaking the minor code of elevator silence—they had boarded the car by now, rushing upward to the thirty-first floor, where Ella was shortly to be made an ex-employee of Parkinson Peters—unless committing that misdemeanor gave her the courage to break other, larger rules, a courage that she was shortly going to need in spades. In which case—

  But it was too late. The elevator stopped at the twenty-fourth floor and the woman and her suit departed forever. Ella continued on to the thirty-first floor and unlocked the glass door to the Parkinson Peters offices with her pass. Strode to an empty cubicle, dropped her bag by the chair, went to the kitchen, and poured herself a cup of coffee to replace the one she had left behind at Starbucks. The room was in the center of the building and had no windows. The fluorescent light cast a sickly, anodyne glow, so that even the new granite countertops looked cheap. Ella was stirring in cream when an apologetic voice called her name from the door. She turned swiftly, spilling the coffee on her hand.

  “Ella? I’m so sorry.” It was Travis’s assistant, Rainbow, crisp and corporate in her Ann Taylor suit and cream blouse. Ella always imagined a pair of hippie parents serving her Tofurky at Thanksgiving and wondering where they had gone wrong. “Mr. Kemp asked me to send you to his office as soon as you came in.”

  Ella turned to reach for a paper towel. “I’ll be just a minute, thanks.”

  She took her time. Cleaned up the spill and washed her hands. Stuck a plastic lid on the coffee cup and took it to her desk, so she could drink it later. Her hand, carrying the coffee, setting it down on the Formica surface, remained steady. The nausea had passed. She unzipped her laptop bag and took out a leather portfolio, a yellow legal pad, and the Cross pen she used for business meetings, the one her father had given her when she first landed the job at Parkinson Peters, and as she walked down the passageway between the cubicles, it seemed to her that she could hear his proud voice as he gave it to her, Ella, his firstborn. Use it for good, he’d said, wagging the box. There’s power in this.

  She reached Travis’s office, which was not on the corner but two offices down—he’d only made partner a few years ago—and knocked on the door.

  “It’s open,” said Travis, in a voice that was neither stern nor angry, and in fact sounded as if he’d just been sharing a joke.

  So Ella pushed the door open and discovered she was right. He had been sharing a joke—or at least some pleasant morning banter—with a muscular man sitting confidently in the chair before the desk.

  Ella’s husband.

  Before she even comprehended that it was Patrick, before her eyes connected with her brain and lit the red warning light, he was bounding up from the chair and kissing her cheek. “Well, hello there, Ella,” he said, just as if they’d woken up in bed together this morning, as if he still owned the right to her kisses.

  “Patrick? What the hell are you doing here?”

  There was a brief, nervous pause. Patrick took a step back and laughed awkwardly. Ella looked from him to Travis, Travis looked from her to Patrick. He was jiggling a pen in his left hand, and an artsy, black-and-white photograph of his family smiled over his shoulder. The sight of it, for some reason, maybe its black-and-whiteness, made Ella think of Redhead Beside Herself. She turned back to Patrick and said, Well?

  He tried to lay an arm around her shoulders, but she edged to the side.

  “I’m here for you, babe,” he said. “I heard what happened on Friday.”

  “How? Who told you?”

  He shrugged. He was smiling—Patrick had one of those room-lighting smiles, it was part of his arsenal—and Ella realized he wasn’t wearing a suit. Just a pair of chinos and a navy cashmere sweater over a button-down shirt of French blue. He looked like he was off to race yachts or something.

  “Just heard from someone at work,” he said. “I tried to call you this weekend, but you weren’t answering. So I came down here this morning to see my man Kemp and explain.”

  Travis had turned his attention to some papers on his desk during this exchange, making notes in his quick, tiny handwriting that had always confounded Ella. But she could see that his ears were wide open. His neck was a little flushed above his white collar. He was going to tell his wife all about this tonight.

  Ella folded her arms. “Explain what?”

  “I quit my job,” Patrick said.

  “You what?”

  “I quit. Tendered my resignation over the weekend.”

  “This is a joke, right?”

  Patrick shook his head. Still smiling. “Nope. I figured if one of us had to take a fall, it should be me. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “Neither did you.”

  “Well, then call me a gentleman.”

  “Ella,” said Travis, looking up from his papers, “I got your husband’s email over the weekend and discussed the matter on the partner call this morning, and we’ve agreed to keep you on at Parkinson Peters. You’ll be moved to a different project—”

  “No,” she said.

  If she’d taken a pistol from her pocket and fired a bullet through the window, the two men would probably have been less startled. The pen dropped from Travis’s hand and smacked on the desk.

  “No, what? No, you want to stay on the Sterling Bates audit? I’m afraid—”

  “I mean, no, I don’t want to stay at all.” Ella opened up her leather portfolio and removed a sheet of paper. Set it on the desk in front of her, edges exactly straight. “My resignation letter.”

  “Jesus,” said Patrick.

  Travis stared at the letter and said, Well.

  Ella snapped the portfolio shut. “So that’s that. I’ll stop by HR with a copy for them—”

  “Can I ask where you’re going?” Travis said, looking up from the letter. He gathered up the pen and started clicking the end. His eyes were bright and narrow. “Who’s recruited you? Deloitte?”

  “No one.”

  “You’re not moving somewhere else?”

  “No.”

  Travis sat back in his chair, still clicking the pen. He bounced a few times, causing the chair to squeak. His window faced east, and the gray sun balanced at the back of his head. Between the buildings, where Queens should be, there was nothing but cloud. His lips stretched into a smile.

  “Can I ask what you’re planning to do?” he said, in a tone of absolute pity.

  Ella returned her portfolio under her arm and smiled back. “Nope,” she said, and walked out the door, right past her dumbstruck husband.

  BUT PATRICK NEVER STAYED dumbstruck. He always had something to say. He chased her down the corridor of cubicles and caught up when she reached the one she’d claimed with her suit jacket.

  “Ella,” he said, “wait.”

  “I have nothing to say to you.”

  “Did you get my flowers?”

  She turned. “First of all, how did you get my address? From my family?”

  “No.” He hesitated. “From Kemp.”

  “Oh my God. How illegal is that?”

  “We’re still married, Ella. I have the right to know where you’re living.”

  “And I have the right to get a restraining order, if I need to.”

  He took her elbow and spoke in a low, heartfelt voice. “Don’t. It doesn’t need to be like this. Come home, Ella, please. I mean, seriously. You left our place for some shithole in the Village?”

  “I left you because you were cheating on me, and it’s not a shithole. It’s—” She stopped herself before she said magical. “It’s a special building.”

  “It’s a dump. You can’t live there. It doesn’t even look safe.”

  Ella removed his hand from her elbow and reached for her suit jacket. “It’s the safest place I’ve ever lived, and I’m not moving anywhere, especially not with you.”

  “For God’s sake, Ella. I just quit my job for you! Managing director at Sterling Bates, and I threw it all away just to prove to you—”

  “Look. I don’t k
now the real reason you quit the bank, Patrick, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t it. This conversation is over. You’ll be hearing from my lawyer pretty soon. As they say.” She dodged his reaching hands and slung her laptop bag over her shoulder. Headed for the elevators, followed by every pair of eyes on the floor, and she didn’t care! Maybe a little, but not really. Didn’t care, for once, that everyone in the office had just heard the soap opera that was Ella Gilbert’s life. That her husband had cheated on her—too bad she had no time to rehash for them the full story, the visceral details, the grunting-sweating-banging of an orange-skinned hooker in the stairwell of their own apartment building—and that, as a result, Ella was divorcing him. Omigod, poor Ella, did you hear? She passed Rainbow, whose awed eyes followed her all the way to the glass doors, while Patrick followed, saying something, some blur of words.

  As she found the door handle, Patrick reached out to cover her hand.

  “Ella, you can’t just cut me out of your life,” he said in her ear.

  She stared at Patrick’s hand, his left hand. The gold wedding band that circled his ring finger, engraved on the inside (she knew this because she had ordered it herself, picked out the Roman lettering as both traditional and masculine) EVD TO PJG, 6*13*96. He had nearly lost it on their honeymoon. Nearly lost it while they were swimming together off some beach in Capri, because a ring was such a new, unfamiliar object to him, and he kept jiggling it on his finger like a toy hoop. Off it came. He was distraught. Dove for it, again and again, even though Ella begged him to stop because each time he plunged under the water and the seconds ticked by, panic took hold of her stomach. Then he came up at last, triumphant, brandishing the plain gold band between his thumb and forefinger like he’d recovered some pirate’s diamond from the seabed. Salt water dripping from his skin. He handed Ella the ring and made her put it back on his finger, right there in the chest-deep water, and she did as he asked, wiggling it all the way down to his knuckle. He’d snaked his arms around her waist. “That’s the last time,” he said, when he was done kissing her, which took some time. “It’s never coming off again. You’ll have to bury me with that ring on my finger.”

  And now, here they were. Ella stared down at the shining band that reflected the fluorescent office lights, at his big hand covering hers, and she remembered thinking, in the sunlit moment while she kissed Patrick on that beach, how lucky she was. How lucky she was to have found a man who loved her so much.

  With her own left hand, which contained neither engagement ring nor wedding band, she plucked Patrick’s fingers away.

  “Honestly, Patrick?” she said softly. “I don’t think we have anything left to say to each other.”

  A QUARTER OF AN hour later, Ella pondered this lie as she sat on a Starbucks stool, drinking a fresh latte to replace the one she’d left behind earlier. Her phone buzzed from her laptop bag. She waited for the buzzing to stop, waited for another minute or two after that, and then she tilted the bag toward her and plucked the phone free. Hector again. She put her fingers to her temple and stared at the screen, Hector’s name—just that single word, Hector, formed of tiny green LED lights, followed by his phone number—until it blinked out. Until her ribs ached. Until the joints of her fingers turned white, she was gripping the phone so hard.

  She put it back in her bag and took out the note.

  You have to face him sometime, Dommerich, she told herself. (She was now addressing herself by her maiden name again—that was something, right?) If she couldn’t yet trust herself to listen to his recorded voice, to God forbid speak to him, she could at least do him the courtesy of reading the note he’d left behind for her, when he slipped out yesterday before dawn and caught his flight to L.A. The flight he’d already rescheduled in order to spend Saturday night in bed with her.

  Ella. Think I’m supposed to wake you up and say good-bye right now, but it might kill me. [There was a clumsy drawing of an arrow and a heart, with you written next to the arrow, and me written next to the heart.] Stay here, sleep in my bed, drink all my booze, play my piano, listen to my band watching over you. Think of everything we have left to do. Don’t be afraid. Back soon. H.

  Back soon.

  Today was Monday; Hector would return to New York on Saturday. On Saturday morning he was going to come bounding through the door, he was going to call her name anxiously, he was going to scoop her up and demand to know why she hadn’t returned his calls, hadn’t picked up the phone, hadn’t let him know she was okay, that she loved his apartment, she loved Saturday night, she loved him like he loved her.

  What was she going to say?

  Don’t be afraid, he wrote. My band watching over you.

  But Hector had it wrong. She was afraid, yes, but she wasn’t afraid of the band playing inside the apartment building on Christopher Street. They had kept her company Sunday night, when she had buried herself under the covers of Hector’s bed and wrapped her arms around her stomach and cried. The clarinet had played her something beautiful and comforting, until she loved that clarinet almost as much as she loved Hector himself. Then, as now, she had taken out the photograph of Redhead Beside Herself and stared at that image, that naked, wicked woman who had inhabited those walls over seventy years ago, and the sight of her—just as it did now—dried up Ella’s eyes and her despair.

  Don’t be a ninny, the Redhead told her. I got no time for ninnies. You got yourself in trouble, you go out there and figure out how to fix it. You go figure out what to do with yourself. Just go out there and live, sister. Live.

  Ella slipped the note and the photograph back into her laptop bag. Gathered herself up and walked out of Starbucks to start looking for her.

  For the Redhead, whoever she was.

  Wherever she was.

  Act I

  We Fly South for the Winter

  (better late than never)

  COCOA BEACH, FLORIDA

  April 1924

  1

  THE SCHOONER cruising before me looks innocent enough. I am no expert on maritime matters, having been reared up inside the walls of a mountain holler, yet still I can admire the beauty of her lines, can’t I? Lubber though I am, I can appreciate the sky’s pungent blue against the cluster of milk-white sails, and the way the dark-painted sides reflect the shimmer of the surrounding water.

  As we draw near, the ship grows larger, until the sight of her fills my gaze like the screen at a picture house. I am wholly absorbed in her, and she in me. She bobs and rolls, and I bob and roll in sympathy. The boards of her deck articulate into view, and it seems I see every detail at once: the seams sealed in tar, the coils of perfect rope, the black paint of the deckhouse, the wooden crates in stacks at the stern and the middle, each stamped with a pair of letters: FH.

  We come to board her, my companion and I, and I can’t say why I’m not alarmed by her lack of crew. Not a single man hails us as we pass over the railing; not the faintest rustle of movement disturbs the dead calm of the deck. I do understand she’s a rumrunner, this vessel, carrying liquor to America’s teetotal shore from some ambitious island, and it seems reasonable that the fellows on board might have gone into hiding at our approach. Why, even now they might crouch unseen behind those silent objects fixed to the deck, or wait speechless at the hatchways for some kind of signal. My friend hovers watchfully behind me, pistol drawn in case of ambush, but I don’t feel the smallest grain of fear. Anticipation alone drives the quick pulse of my blood. Something I desire lies below those decks, I believe, and I will shortly see it for myself.

  At what instant my anticipation transforms into dread, I don’t rightly notice. Maybe it’s the sight of the dark, irregular stain on a section of deck near the bow hatchway; maybe it’s the unnatural blackness that rears up from below as my companion tugs away the cover of the hatch itself. My breath turns stiff in my chest as I commence to descend those stairs, and I have gone no farther than the first two steps when my foot slips on some kind of wetness, and I tumble downward to land like a carcass on the deck below.