In the parking lot outside the MGM hotel, Charlie got ready as quickly as she could. Primer over the lid, a smoky dark brown shadow in the crease. She drew liquid liner over the lash line on top, pressed white pencil to the tear line on the bottom, and black pencil lining the rest of her eye. She finished off with mascara—gobs of it, going over the lashes three times, four times. Then fake ones glued on top.
Blinking at herself in the rearview mirror, she smeared on foundation two shades lighter than her skin, blending it out with her fingers, added contouring under her cheekbones and along the sides of her nose with a brush, followed by more blending, blush, and highlighter. When she was done, her nose looked narrower and her cheeks fuller, changing her face. Finally, she put on her wig, pinned it, and brushed her red hair around a bit with her fingers until it looked as natural as she could get it.
When she looked in the mirror, Charlie Hall was gone. It was more of a relief than she liked to admit.
The hotel at the MGM Springfield was about twenty minutes from Easthampton. The casino had opened a handful of years ago, on the theory it would bring money into a city sorely lacking for it. Despite endless editorials in the local paper on how it was likely to make things worse for residents instead of better, nothing could stop the wheels of industry once they had whirred into motion.
The result was a football stadium–sized warehouse of slots, complete with flashing lights, multicolored carpet, and almost-all-night cocktails. But as Charlie walked into the hotel, she was surprised to find it to be both industrial and cozy.
Bookshelves covered the brick walls, with a balcony library suspended over the front desk. Oversized printer blocks hung behind the receptionists, and the couches were of brown leather, the kind you’d expect to nap on in a professor’s study. The whole place had a Vegas-meets-train-station feel that Charlie didn’t mind at all.
One look around, though, and she could tell it was populated the same way as any other casino hotel, people there to party with friends or to step away from their lives for a few hours, surrounded by grifters hoping to leech off any winnings. Charlie didn’t mind that either.
An afternoon wedding must have just concluded in one of the ballrooms, because kids were running around in white dresses, their hair in puffs and their braids dressed with flowers. A few elegant sequined and suited individuals—including two women in magnificent hats—stood at the edge of the bar, talking.
Charlie sat in one of the library chairs, far enough from people so as not to be heard, and called Adam’s room. It rang five times before it went to messages. He wasn’t there.
Then she checked discreetly for the positions of the security cameras and got on the elevator. As she did, Vince’s words came back to her.
I wish I could say I was sorry, that I wanted to be honest the whole time, but I didn’t. I never wanted to be honest. I just wanted what I told you to be the truth.
She’d thought some variation of that before herself, and never admitted it to anyone.
In the elevator, Charlie was carefully not meeting the eyes of the other passengers—a pizza delivery guy and two girls with wet hair and towels, coming from the pool—while cultivating a demeanor of boring and slightly dissipated benevolence. On the eighth floor, she stepped out and followed the signs until she counted her way down to room 455.
A “Do Not Disturb” card hung from the handle of the door. Charlie pulled it off and stuck it in the pocket of her coat. For good measure, she knocked. There was no sound from within.
Better and better.
Charlie was well aware she’d missed her chance for the quick in-and-out of two nights before. This was going to be a bit trickier. Still, it was one door between her and success.
She knew a woman who’d stumbled into a lobby in lingerie, with an ice bucket, stinking of liquor, claiming to have locked herself out of her room. It had gotten her a “replacement key,” but Charlie wasn’t sure she could pull that off, nor was she sure she wanted to be quite that memorable. Her current scheme was less flashy but had a lot less potential for humiliation.
In all but the fanciest hotels in the biggest cities, there’s a room with an ice dispenser and, if you’re lucky, a soda machine. They never have cameras in them. She slipped into the one on the eighth floor, and from there, called the front desk.
“Hello,” she said. “Could you transfer me to housekeeping?”
“Just a second,” said a man’s voice.
The phone rang twice and picked up. A woman this time, who grunted out a greeting.
“This is Shirley in 450,” Charlie said, affecting a thick Long Island accent. “Can you send someone up to clean the room?”
The woman said she would. By the time Charlie disconnected the call, an anticipatory thrill sped her pulse, not unlike that from a downed shot of espresso. It was the worst cure for a bruised self-esteem, to test your mettle and wit against the universe.
The universe was always going to win, but maybe not today.
At her most depressed, Charlie had seen a therapist to whom she’d admitted a very abbreviated list of problems. She’d been told to practice “mindfulness,” which involved “being present in the moment” and “not dwelling on all your past mistakes,” as well as “all the mistakes you plan to make in the future.” Charlie had not been very good at doing that in the therapist’s office, nor had she been good at the mindfulness app she’d downloaded, but in the middle of a con, she felt as though she might understand what mindfulness actually felt like.
She was fully present in this moment.
A tense twenty minutes later, a young woman with purple hair pushed a cart full of towels out of the elevator and down the hall.
Charlie took a breath, stepped out, and passed her. As she did, she made herself stumble. One bump with her elbow as her fingers snatched the universal key card from the pocket of the woman’s housekeeping shirt. Dropped it into her own pocket and took out a cinnamon hard candy, just like Ms. Presto had taught her.
It was possible that when the young woman noticed her key card missing she’d connect it to Charlie, but by the time a security team decided to knock, she planned on being long gone.
“You okay?” the woman asked.
Charlie laughed. “Got a little tipsy at the wedding,” she said, and then she was three doors down and into Adam’s room.
It was clear that the “Do Not Disturb” sign had been hanging on the door for some time. Clothes covered the wooden floor and a large plastic bottle of cheap vodka, half-empty, cap off, sat beside the sleek television in its modern frame. The air smelled of stale cigarettes, and wires hung from the smoke detector Adam had disabled.
Now she just had to find the book.
The side table next to the bed was empty, save for a box of condoms. In the bathroom, she found an array of hair products, aftershave, and cologne. The drawer held a gold vape pen and nothing else.
As she moved around the room, she was uncomfortably reminded of going through her own bedroom just a day before.
That memory brought her to the closet. She opened it to find only a coat hanging inside. She shoved her fingers into the pockets. Just some paper.
She unfolded that and found herself looking at the receipt for a ring, from Murray’s pawnshop. Adam had gotten seven hundred for it. Huh. The description read: Woman’s cocktail ring, antique red gold, replacement stone. Doreen had a ring like that, passed down to her from her grandmother.
Charlie shouldn’t have been surprised that Adam was stealing from Doreen. Once you started light-fingering things, once you realized you could get what you wanted by saying what other people liked to hear, it was easy to make excuses and hard to stop.