“So you’re dedicated to this Pharminex story, correct?” Gabe said. “Like I am? You’d do anything to reveal the false promises and deception this company has perpetuated, the profits it has made from the harm it’s done.”
“Yup.” She put the owl down. Maybe they could still be a team.
“And you have the inside scoop for a blockbuster story. And our lawsuit.”
“Yes, because I’m about to do an interview with—” Ellie stopped.
“The light dawns.” Gabe exploded his fingers across his face—voilà, a magician illustrating a secret. “Since you’re Nora, what’s this bull about you doing an interview with her? Ellie, are you using yourself as your own source?”
CHAPTER 28
ELLIE
Ellie clicked her key and her car beeped open, but she didn’t reach for her door handle. Gabe leaned against the passenger door of his Jeep, hands stuffed into his pockets. They both wore black parkas, plaid mufflers and black wool watch caps, like yuppie cat burglars. Gabe’s somber expression in the WorkHere parking lot matched how her own face must look. She’d figured she could pull off the Nora deception. And she had. Until Gabe.
They stood face to face, almost toe to toe, on either side of a yellow parking space line. His battered brown Timberlands, her snow-splotched black boots.
“If only I had stayed home. Not gone to Seaboard that first night, never talked to strange men. And by strange, I mean you.” Her words puffed into the cold. “I should know that trying to have a personal life is never a good thing.”
“Well, come on, sure it is.” Gabe shifted and leaned against his car, stuffing his hands into his parka pockets. “We connected, didn’t we? That was real, to me at least. And we’re still those people. Guy and Nora. It’s just best to be honest about your identity.”
“Like you were?”
“We all have our reasons for being who we are.”
Ellie stared at her feet, past the pavement and into the future.
“What is identity, though, you know?” She looked up at him, shading her eyes as the sun glared on the snow, and thinking out loud. “We’re all only who we say we are. Everyone’s hiding something. Everyone’s undercover, struggling to be who they want to be in public, only being themselves when they’re alone.”
Ellie thought about the puzzle pieces of her life. “Gabe? What if I stayed Nora now? No one knows but you.”
“How about your researcher?”
“Meg’s never met her.” Ellie shook her head. “You’re the only one who’s ever seen me as Ellie and Nora.”
Ellie watched three dark crows soar in the clouds above the bleak parking lot, silhouetted against a stretch of spackled mackerel sky. Then, in an instant, they simultaneously changed their minds and swooped in the opposite direction.
“I needed being Nora to get me inside. Get the proof I needed,” she went on. “I just got caught too soon.”
“Way it goes.”
“But we have the Abigail interview, anyway.” Ellie held up a gloved forefinger, reminding him. One way or another, she didn’t say.
“Your phone is buzzing.” Gabe pointed to her tote bag.
“I’ll let it go to—wait.” Her Pharminex ring? She looked at Gabe, perplexed. “Hang on,” she told him. Then into the phone, “This is … Nora.”
“It’s Detta Fiddler, Nora.”
Ellie imagined the woman behind her big desk, gardenias scenting the room. Her mind raced in the silence. Had something gone wrong? They’d bought her bogus story, even signed an agreement saying so, and she’d have bet anything Detta and Allessandra—and all they represented—were gone from her life. Until, of course, she had to approach them for reaction to her TV story. But that would be as Ellie Berensen, the reporter who would make their lives miserable.
“Hello, Detta.” She repeated the woman’s name for Gabe’s benefit. No use hiding anything from him now, unless she had to, and this might also prove her honesty.
“I tried to text you, but you didn’t reply. So, Nora? I’ve thought about you ever since our meeting,” Detta said. “Worried how you’d relied on us for your livelihood. And realized it was only your false name that put us in an untenable position. In fact, other than your Hawkins mistake, you were good at the job. I’m sorry we had to let you go.”
“You’ve thought about me? Good on the job?” Ellie repeated. Gabe hadn’t taken his eyes off her, as riveted to this conversation as she was. “You’re sorry?”
“And now, I know this seems … unlikely. But we need your help, Nora. As of yet, no one but the three of us—you, Allessandra and I—know the circumstances of your departure.”
“And those security guards,” Ellie couldn’t resist adding, remembering to put a hint of a Southern accent in Nora’s voice.
“They know what we tell them to know.”
“And you’re saying—you need my help?”
As Gabe moved closer, Ellie turned the cell phone so they both could hear. They stood, parkas touching, her hat against his in the otherwise deserted parking lot, only the slim cell phone separating them. She tucked herself into the curve of Gabe’s shoulder to keep close enough. He didn’t move away.
“I’m sorry, Detta,” Ellie said. “The connection is iffy. Can you say that again?”
“We’ve heard a reporter is looking into … something,” Detta said. “Apparently she’s approaching our sales reps, so says our anonymous phone caller. She’s pretending to be a patient, hanging out in doctors’ offices searching for women to tell her who knows what. We need to find out if it’s true. And what else she’s doing. Could you come back, Nora? Be our eyes and ears? No one would notice you in doctors’ offices. The award gala’s soon, so the timing could not be worse.”
A dark sedan drove by, tires slushing through the ice-melt scattered on the pavement. Ellie glanced at the person in the driver’s seat but didn’t have time to see if she’d recognized him. Or her. Talk about paranoia. She looked at Gabe, wondering what he thought of Detta’s proposal.
Pretending to be a patient. But Ellie hadn’t done that. Then she knew: Meg.
“I was in a lot of waiting rooms too,” she said as Nora. “What does this reporter look like? What story do you think they’re working on?”
Ellie’s brain raced with possibilities, the unpredictability and the risks. Nora hadn’t been gone from Pharminex for long. Not long enough, Ellie hoped, for any of her colleagues to notice. For all they knew, Nora might be out of town. Sick. Or on a different schedule. Nora’s cleaned-out locker could be restored by the time business opened Monday.
“It’s a woman, that’s all we know,” Detta said. “And as for what story, we have no idea. We’ve done nothing wrong.”
Gabe pulled away from the call, rolled his eyes in derision, then pressed back into place beside her.
“Really? No idea? That seems unlikely.” Ellie decided to push her. “It’d be helpful if I had some inkling of what to look for. A disgruntled employee. A whistleblower, maybe. But disgruntled about what? Whistleblowing about what?”
Detta ignored Ellie’s questions. “Can you come meet with us? Maybe later today?”
“Today?”
Gabe was waving a finger at her: no.
“How about Monday?” she suggested. There was no way to get answers without having a meeting, but she’d need to reorganize into her Nora self. “And I need to bring someone. My…”
Gabe pointed to himself.
“My lawyer. I—” She could tell Gabe was calculating as fast as she was. “I want to make sure it’s legal. That our confidentiality deal holds. And maybe we need another contract.”
Gabe nodded in agreement as she continued to spin out the story.
“Including your acknowledging that I was—and am—using a pseudonym.”
“Understood,” Detta said. “Monday, my office, nine?”
“Monday, nine?” Ellie repeated. Gabe nodded okay. “Got it.”
After she hung up, the two of
them stared at the phone in Ellie’s hand.
“Whoa. Did that just happen?” Gabe asked. “Does this make any sense whatsoever?”
Ellie stashed her phone into a pocket. “This is their total MO. Spying. P-X is all about slimy corporate tricks. Fraud, duplicity, lies,” she told him, deciding not to reveal her own entrapment by Dr. Hawkins. “And I still can’t get their possible connection to Kaitlyn Armistead out of my head. But this gives us more access to the company than ever. And with two of us, we’ll be…” She tried to choose a word. “I was going to say ‘safe.’ Safer, I guess. So—you’re in?”
Ellie waited for his answer, realizing her new power position.
“So funny. Now I’ll be undercover-undercover,” she said. “I’ll be investigating Pharminex with a signed contract from the company saying I can do it. That’s got to be a first.”
“We’ll know more once we talk with them. As your lawyer, I might have to say no.”
“But it’s a way to reveal what they’re doing! They’re dangerous and destructive. Criminal. They’re essentially murderers, and they know it.”
“I agree. But it’s risky, Ellie. The stakes are colossal.”
“Listen, I’m freezing.” The stakes were colossal, that was the point. “I can’t even feel my toes. And I’m starving.” She clicked open her car door. “You want to get some food? Talk about this someplace warmer?”
“Sure. But speaking of ‘some place,’” Gabe said. “I’m still wondering if whoever broke into your apartment thought they were in Nora’s place.”
“I thought of that too,” Ellie said. “If it was P-X who did it.”
“Who else would it be? And if Nora wasn’t their target, maybe they’re on to you. As Ellie. Could your researcher—Mary?—have alerted them to you, somehow, even inadvertently, without you knowing it?”
“Meg.” Ellie, scowling, kicked at one of her own tires, punctuating her anger. “You know, Meg actually offered to masquerade as a patient. She brought it up in the news director’s office.”
“Exactly as Detta Fiddler described.”
“Yup. And she’s incredibly pushy. Overeager. Warren told her in no uncertain terms that pretense was forbidden.”
“Would she have ignored that?”
“Who knows. She’s either trying to take over my story or ruin it. She’s always looking at my notes. Offering to ‘organize’ my files. Probably trying to steal my job.”
Gabe nodded. “Possibly. Or maybe she’s just on your team. Trying to help. Right? But if it’s Meg going rogue, at least you know who to look for.”
CHAPTER 29
ELLIE
She’d never seen Gabe in a suit before, or in his navy overcoat and polished shoes. Monday morning, eight thirty, and Ellie needed to reassure herself yet again as the shiny silver doors closed them into the Pharminex elevator. This was as undercover as it got—pretending to be someone she wasn’t, but now in service of the same enemy she was working to destroy. She felt poised on the edge of a chambered nautilus shell, about to wind deeper and deeper into its dark center. She hoped she’d be able to find her way out. Now she was taking step one, and with someone she wasn’t certain was a reliable guide.
“Fiddler and Lewes have never met you, right, Gabe?” She could hear the apprehension in her own voice. “They have no idea you exist. Not in any way. Tell me the truth. You can only be my lawyer if they have no idea who you are.”
“Stop worrying,” he said. They both moved to the back of the empty elevator, leaned against the brass rail. Both looked up, watching the green-lighted floor indicator. They were on the way to twelve, not the company’s main floor reception area but the more exclusive executive suites up above. A uniformed guard, after a smile of recognition at Nora and a check of a logbook, had key-carded them access and, since they were early, told them to wait in the upstairs reception area until they were summoned. Ellie knew that this floor, higher than where she’d first met Detta and Allessandra Lewes, was off-limits to most people.
She and her sister reps had once speculated about what might be going on there. Wild parties and debauchery, Lydia Frost had suggested. “Secret experiments!” Jenn Wahl had guessed, eyes widening. Christine, always the serious one, had put a stop to it. “I’ve been there. It’s offices. Where they don’t have to deal with the piddly likes of us.”
Ellie now scanned the elevator for surveillance cameras, scanned for microphones, surprised at her own unease. Stop worrying, Gabe had instructed her. As if.
Talk about worry. Ellie had texted Meg that she was out doing research and asked her to check in. So far, she’d heard nothing back. If Meg truly was masquerading as a patient, in direct disobedience to Warren’s instructions, that’d yank the career rug out from under her.
“What if Detta looks you up, Gabe?” she persisted now. “After they meet you?”
“They’ll see me listed as a lawyer,” he said. “Chill, Ellie. I mean, Nora. It’s only a meeting. We’ll handle it.”
“What if—” She looked at the indicator, five floors to go. “What if this is a trap? What if they know I’m Ellie Berensen and—”
“How would they?” He turned to her. “You’re Nora Quinn. That’s all you have to remember.”
The elevator pinged, stopped. The polished silver door shuddered.
“Shush. Someone’s getting on.” Ellie pulled out her cell phone. “This is Nora,” she said into the cell.
As the doors slid open, Ellie pretended to focus on her call. Gabe created his own role and stepped away from her, turning his shoulders and telegraphing to the newcomer that they were strangers.
“Nora?” A woman stepped onto the elevator, smiling in recognition. “Happy Monday. Been a while. On your way to the lockers?”
“Lydia.” Ellie held up a finger, pointed to her phone. Lydia Frost from her training class. As far as Lydia—or anyone else—was concerned, there’d been no accusations, no firing, no cleaning out of Nora’s locker. This was just another day at the office. As the doors slid closed, Lydia pushed 9, where the lockers were.
Ellie continued her pretend phone conversation and noticed Lydia eyeing Gabe. She was probably wondering what this handsome man was doing in the Pharminex building, and how to meet him.
She pretend hung up the phone from her pretend call. Lots of pretending going on this morning. “Sorry, Lydia. You know how it goes.”
“Yeah.” Lydia hitched her tote bag onto her shoulder. Gabe edged farther away. She smiled at him, engaging and almost inquisitive, but he simply acknowledged her, then seemed more interested in watching the lighted elevator numbers changing. The elevators were the office joke, notoriously slow.
“Lyd, weird question for you,” Ellie said. “I was, well, approached, in a doctor’s office, by a person who said they were a reporter. Wanting to know about—” She stopped, pretended to change her mind. “Of course, I told them to call public relations, like we’re supposed to. But it freaked me out.” She pretended to look at Gabe, pretended to gauge his level of interest, pretended to sound cautious. “And after we talked about the, you know, the people who might also be where we are?”
“Yeah.” Lydia drew out the word. “I remember the conversation with Jenn and the gang at the lockers. About the cute—”
Gabe took off his glasses and put his phone up to his ear, covering the left side of his face. As if he were trying to hide? Oh. No. Cute doctor, Lydia was about to say. Who, Ellie realized with a lurch of her stomach, might have been Gabe.
“Not that person,” Ellie interrupted before Lydia could say more. “This was a woman. She acted like a patient. Asking questions about … stuff. You see anyone like that?”
Lydia frowned. “No. And I’d remember. You did the right thing, Nora, obvs. Telling her to call PR.” The elevator bell pinged, the light for 9 went green, and Lydia cocked her head toward the opening door. “This is me. You getting out? No? Okay, then, keep me posted on the reporter or whoever. See ya.”
Ellie sagged as the door finally closed them back in. “You. Dressed in that white coat. I forgot about that,” she said. “What if someone recognizes you? What if Lydia—that woman was a rep named Lydia Frost—goes and rats you out?”
“Ellie.” Gabe put his glasses back on. “Look. We’re about to have access to everything we need to know. I’m Gabriel Hoyt, your lawyer. You’re Nora Quinn. And we’re about to enter the inner circle of the very company you’re investigating. What’s more, they invited us in. We got this, Ellie.”
“Nora,” she corrected him.
“Nora,” he agreed. “For now.”
The elevator doors opened into the wide reception area on the twelfth floor of the Pharminex building, and then closed behind them. Ellie—Nora—saw a familiar shape ahead: ponytail, dark overcoat, fringed tote bag, canvas briefcase.
Meg.
CHAPTER 30
ELLIE
“Hide,” Ellie whispered. “Right now. Do it.” She grabbed Gabe’s arm and dragged him around the corner of the hallway.
Meg. Who did not know, and could not be allowed to know, that Ellie and Nora Quinn were one and the same.
Meg’s back was to Ellie and Gabe, and she stood, apparently waiting, facing a polished mahogany reception desk with a massive Pharminex logo on the wall behind it. The desk was unoccupied, and no one else was in the room. A long gray flannel couch sat empty, as did the taupe paisley side chairs across from it. A round coffee table, supported by what looked like oversized glass laboratory beakers, was positioned between them, a faceted-crystal vase of spidery white mums in the center.
Ellie yanked Gabe behind her, and it felt like the times, so long ago, when she and her brother had played hide-and-seek in the corridors and crannies of their father’s office. But the stakes were much higher now.
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