“Thanks.”
She hung up and dropped her phone into the thickly piled rug and willed herself to think. So he had come here. So they had spoken. So he really just wanted to talk to her boss. Big deal. So what if she had to wrap her arms around herself to make the quivering feeling stop, or that she wanted to run out and find him, follow him, see where he went and who he talked to and if the girls in his class were as pretty as they were in Scarlett’s nightmares. She had seen him, and she had lived. That made her strong, right? You didn’t win the war until you faced your foe, and she had just done some full-on foe-facing, which was both brave and alliterative.
The intercom buzzed, startling Scarlett so much that she popped up her head and whacked it on the underside of the table. Downstairs, Murray had to be holding his finger down on the buzzer on purpose, because it was a solid, unbroken sound, one that could rip any thought in two. No wonder Dog Murray looked the way he did.
Scarlett crawled out of her hiding space rubbing her head and answered.
“Messenger,” Murray growled. “You gotta come sign. I’m not sendin’ him up. He’s got a motorbike runnin’ outside. Can’t have that bike outside.”
When she got to the lobby, she found a motorcycle courier in a white helmet waiting for her with a clipboard. He tipped up the visor on her approach.
“AAA?”
“Yeah,” Scarlett said, taking the clipboard and signing. She was passed a thick envelope.
“Can’t idle that bike outside my door…” Murray was saying, as Scarlett crept off to take the package upstairs. She carelessly ripped it open in the elevator, remembering her last ride upstairs one hour before, when Eric had been by her side. So this was how her brain was going to be—constant replay.
She yanked out some papers as she reached the nineteenth floor and looked at them ruefully. Some other dumb script to file somewhere on Mrs. Amberson’s desk.
And then she noticed the front page: CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, EPISODE 391, “CROSSFIRE.” SHOOTING COPY, DO NOT DUPLICATE. There was another paper attached, a list of times and locations, and a name at the top: SPENCER MARTIN.
Demo version limitation
THAT SPECIAL SOMETHING
Scarlett showed up at the appointed time the next day, malice in her heart, and twenty-five of the promised fifty dollars in her pocket. Chelsea lived in an old building in the East Thirties. Not a massive, fancy one like Mrs. Amberson’s. A smaller one, with no doorman. The elevator was one of those ridiculously small ones that only held two people. The hall was dark, and there were only three doors. One had been left ajar, and Scarlett pushed it open, feeling it make cushy contact with what must have been a bunch of coats hanging on the wall behind.
“Is that Scarlett?” Mrs. Biggs said. “Come in!”
Scarlett stepped into a tiny hallway, which was halved in size by all the coats. The living room was absolutely packed, every inch of space used to death. There was a full-size sofa, bookshelves, a set of drawers, a crowded console with the television and stereo equipment, stacks of DVDs of musicals, and books on acting. The space around it was taken up by an electronic keyboard, an exercise ball, free weights, and piles of music. It seemed like an excessive amount of activity went on in here—a lot of living.
Mrs. Biggs was sitting at a tiny table over by the kitchen alcove, doing something on a computer. She was wearing the dress that Scarlett had seen Chelsea in when they met. It also fit her perfectly. She and Chelsea were almost identical in size.
“Chelsea will be home in a minute,” she said, waving Scarlett to the sofa without even looking up. “Give me just a second. Chelsea got two fan mail letters today. I’m just answering them. Have a seat.”
The sofa was crowded at one end with piled blankets and pillows and clothes. There was a strong plug-in air freshener at the end of the sofa—a sickly one that was probably supposed to smell like clean linen but smelled more like sticky, floral bleach. The scent rang a bell in Scarlett’s mind. She knew it.
This was Max’s bed. Max trailed that air freshener smell all day. That’s what it was.
Scarlett quickly turned herself away from the sofa she was about to sit on and made a circuit around the room instead, pretending to take an interest in the things on the walls. There was a clear theme in the decorating scheme, and that theme was Chelsea. Somewhere in Scarlett’s mind, where things she didn’t know she was thinking were being thought, this had been expected. It seemed like every inch of wall space was encrusted with a show poster or a photo. There was no sign of Max except for the pile of clothes and bedding. It was like some kind of nature documentary, where you had to hunt for evidence that the animal had a den nearby.