Storm clouds grew darker overhead and I decided to skip the subway and take a taxi instead. I didn’t want to see other people. I didn’t want them to see me.
As we drove through the rain, it occurred to me that Kitty was going to fire me. She must have found out I’d been deleting her email, or maybe she knew I’d given the addresses to Julia. No matter what the reason, I knew it was over.
The taxi driver was eating sunflower seeds. The sight of his stubbled jaw moving up and down, his Adam’s apple jutting outward when he swallowed, was disgusting. The sight of a man eating anything was something I couldn’t bear. I wanted to roll down the window, but it was raining too hard, so I wiped the fog from the glass and peered outside. We were crossing the Williamsburg Bridge, heading into Manhattan.
The driver turned up the radio. “We know Jennifer cannot be a single person. She has to be a group,” said Nola Larson King.
He dropped me off near Times Square, as close as he could get to the Austen Tower given the barricades. As I walked toward the building, my feet plunging into deep puddles, I heard someone call my name from behind. It was Kitty.
I turned to face her, but I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. She’d been caught in the downpour. Her hair was wet and flat, the ends of it resting against her white blouse in sharp points, like snakes’ tongues. I had only ever seen her with her red curls in their trademark formation, the carefully formed ringlets like a great strawberry bush.
“Kitty?” She was barely recognizable, a superhero without her cape.
“Let’s go down the street,” she said, motioning to a coffeehouse. She didn’t want me in the office in case I made a scene when I was fired. I followed behind her and noticed she wasn’t carrying an umbrella. She was glum and I wondered if her mood, and her indifference to the rain, and most of all her hair, were because of me. She must have felt betrayed. I didn’t know what I would say when she confronted me about the deleted messages. I looked at the sidewalk. Julia was down there beneath the wet concrete of Times Square, which now reflected a pretty pattern of neon light.
Kitty was far ahead of me down the sidewalk, and I considered turning around and running away. I hadn’t committed a crime, after all, and maybe it was better to go home and send her a letter of resignation in the mail. Then I wouldn’t have to face her. I slowed my pace, about to change direction and blend into the crowd, when I saw something ahead that made me stop and suck in my breath.
Leeta’s face was on the side of a building.
I lifted the hood of my raincoat and wiped the wet hair from my face. The rain continued to splatter, but even through the water and the fog I could see Leeta’s face.
Kitty noticed I wasn’t beside her and started walking back toward me. “Hurry up, it’s pouring,” she said, but I was frozen in place. It was really Leeta.
“Plum?” Kitty said. “What’s wrong with you?”
I pointed to Leeta on the screen. “Do you see that?”
There was her face, then the faces of the Dirty Dozen, then the faces of Stella Cross and her husband, then the other faces associated with Jennifer, all flashing on the jumbo screen in Times Square. Leeta, with her thick black eyeliner and long dark hair, was staring out at the New York masses the way she’d stared at me in the café. It was her face on the screen, and now everyone was looking at it.
“Plum?” Kitty said again, but I was walking back to the Austen Tower and into the lobby. I went through the metal detectors and asked the guard to call Julia Cole in the Beauty Closet, but he said there was no answer. I could have used my employee ID to go past the guard and find Julia myself, but Kitty was behind me. “I’ve had enough,” she said. “You’re fired.” Her words echoed around the marble lobby. Fired, fired. People turned to look.
“I allowed you to write in my voice. I trusted you to pretend to be me,” she said, “and you threw my girls in the trash. Thousands of them.”
There were things I could have said to Kitty, but without the hair she had lost her power. I pushed past her, heading out into the street to find a taxi.
“Did you hear me?” Kitty shouted, but I had already left her behind.
When I arrived at Calliope House, I was in a state of near panic. I opened the door without knocking and was enveloped by the comforting red walls. Verena came from the back of the house, her pale hair and skin a light moving toward me through the long, dark hallway.
“I’ve been trying to get in touch with you,” she said.
“Leeta.” That’s all I could say.
“You’ve seen the news.”
“This can’t be happening. Is this real? I don’t know what’s real anymore.” I went into the ruby red living room and sank into a chair, wetting the fabric.
“No one knows what’s happening,” Verena said, with Marlowe at her side. “Leeta’s wanted for questioning, but she’s disappeared. The police are looking for her. I’m sure she hasn’t done anything wrong.”
“Then why are the police looking for her?”