“She’s disappeared into thin air,” Baylor said. “I don’t see her anywhere.”
“How’d you let her get away from you?”
“Because you called me!”
“Davis?” It was Birdy. “You need to see this.”
I stepped over fishing gear, dodged a beautiful Goyard handbag (who lost that?), and hopped over what looked like a saxophone case to get to Birdy. In the Hot Wheels backpack, money. Lots and lots of money. Probably five million dollars. On top of the money, a note. If anything happens to me, whoever finds this money, get it to Gray Donaldson in Casino Credit. And please, I beg of you, find someone who will take care of my mother and my son. Don’t try to identify, locate, or contact my baby’s biological father. Do not let that man raise my child.
To Baylor, I said, “Find Clone. And when you find her, stay with her. Don’t let her out of your sight.”
I hung up.
I pocketed the note and zipped the backpack.
I clutched it to my chest.
I stood at the edge of Birdy’s desk. “Birdy, is this the blue bag you found at your door Friday morning?”
“This Friday?” she asked. “Last Friday? Is today Friday?”
“Birdy.” I reworded the question. “Does this look like the blue bag you found at your door last Friday morning? The blue bag so full of money you couldn’t pick it up? The blue bag you told me you put in a black suitcase?”
She scratched her wig. “Did I tell you that?”
I made one last-ditch effort at getting through. “Birdy?” I leaned over to stab the Birdynote on her Incident Report. “Does the M in your note stand for Megan?”
“Who?”
No Hair’s words came back to haunt me again. And again, and again. “Something’s going to happen, Davis. Something’s going to happen Old Bird can’t handle, or mishandles, or panhandles, and when it does, it will be on you.”
FOURTEEN
Clone’s stage name was Sawyer James.
I didn’t know and didn’t want to know where Bianca’s personal attorney found the rest of Bianca’s lilapsophobia-friendly staff. Sara Z. had unceremoniously replaced me and filled the Penthouse with new and decidedly unfriendly employees so quickly after the storm, it was probably online. At Indeed. Or Misdeed. Or Potential Serial Killers for Hire. Dot-com. (Bianca’s new secretary was atrocious, her new chef, terrifying, her new personal trainer, unnerving, and the worst, her new butler, so, so, so creepy.) Other than the few who remained of Bianca’s former staff, which was only the Penthouse nursery employees, I knew next to nothing of the people who worked above my home. It was my job to run background checks on the Bellissimo’s employees, not Bianca’s, especially given I wasn’t one any longer, so I’d ignored them mightily with one exception: Clone. Sawyer James. When it came to her, I couldn’t stop myself. When it came to her, I knew too much.
Sara Z. Stone, Esquire, found my celebrity double replacement through VIP Talent Agency in New Orleans, where Sawyer worked the Gulf Coast tradeshow model circuit between unsuccessful reality television auditions, which was to say her life’s work before stealing my job was luring convention attendees to manufacturer’s displays with kielbasa sausage bites on confetti toothpicks, passing out logoed mini flashlights, and standing beside cars wearing cocktail dresses in convention centers up, down, and around the Gulf.
The first time I saw her was when the Bellissimo website relaunched after Hurricane Kevin. Five weeks after Bianca fired me, from my sister’s creepy attic in Pine Apple, I logged on after receiving notification the site was live to check for implementation issues, broken links, or missing metadata descriptions. What I found was her back. My replacement’s back. On the Bellissimo landing page. The whole landing page. Through a very filtered lens, the shot showed Clone barely glancing over her shoulder as she entered the luxurious bedroom of a Jasmine Suite, presumably skipping her sultry way to the blurry outline of a turned-back king-sized bed. There were fuzzy images of flickering candles, a shadowy outline of a bottle of champagne in a silver bucket, and the silhouettes of two tall, stemmed, cut-crystal champagne glasses on the nightstand. Behind the suggestive scene, a deep orange Gulf sunset. Text floated across the bottom of the screen in a sexy phantom font: New Day, New Bianca. Join Her, Won’t You? Valentine’s Day. Come Feel the Love.
It was wrong. All the way wrong.
The impression I’d spent years making for the First Lady of the Bellissimo was that of devoted wife, loving mother, caring humanitarian, committed civic leader, and (her favorite) cutting-edge fashion icon. The new website said the opposite. The accompanying copy could have read Come Back to the Bellissimo When We Reopen and Climb into Bed with the Owner’s Wife.
Had Bianca approved of this woman? Had she sanctioned this media campaign? Had she signed off on the photoshoot?
I wasn’t sure what I thought would happen after Bianca fired me, except not that.
That’s not true.
I thought we’d work it out.
I’d picked up the phone to call her almost every day for weeks to do just that but stopped myself every time. I was in Alabama, she was in Germany, and I could never get the time right. Two, it was during the short weeks between Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s; I was busy. Three, I was waiting on her to call me. For her to come to her senses and agree that a magazine cover with her in the woods with alpacas wearing red lights wasn’t the image she wanted to project, not only of the Bellissimo, but of herself. Just when I’d talked myself into believing it would all blow over and when the Bellissimo reopened everything would be like it was before, in the process of doing my satellite job and checking the relaunched website, I learned that I’d been replaced. By a clone of Bianca. By a clone of myself.
I turned my laptop around.
Bradley startled. Then his jaw dropped. He zoomed in. “That’s not you.”
Thank goodness.
“Did you know about this, Bradley?”
He shook his head. “I didn’t, Davis. I did not.” He pulled the laptop closer. “Is she about to strip in a Jasmine Suite?”
“I wonder if Bianca’s seen this.”
Bradley didn’t respond. He was too busy staring at…not Bianca.
“Do you think Mr. Sanders has seen it?”
Bradley, still unable to tear his eyes away from the screen, shrugged he didn’t know just as a text message buzzed in. My phone vibrated on the old dining room table. It was Fantasy. Don’t look at the new website.
I texted back. Too late.
Who is that?
I told her I had no idea.
Whoever it is, she barely looks like Bianca. Has Bianca seen this? Has Mr. Sanders? Is prostitution legal in Mississippi, Bianca’s the new Madame of the Bellissimo, and I didn’t get the memo?
I texted back it was all news to me, I’d look into it and let her know what I found, then asked Bradley if he’d at least talked to Mr. Sanders. He hadn’t. While his wife was otherwise indisposed having a head-to-toe makeover in Germany, Richard Sanders and their two sons were waiting out the hurricane cleanup in a six-bedroom suite at Chalet Zermatt Peak in Zermatt, Switzerland. He was swooshing the slopes and sipping peppermint Schnapps while Bradley and I put his casino back together and his wife’s new personal attorney ruined her reputation.
I gently closed the laptop. Bradley fell onto the cracked red pleather back of a kitchen chair from my childhood. “Davis, this isn’t on you,” he said. “This is no reflection of you.”
But it was. If only in my heart, it was.
“Well,” I forced myself to sound lighter than I felt, even though there was no fooling my husband, “there isn’t a thing we can do about it. And I need to get back to work.” And by get back to work, I meant get back to studying my replacement. He took a steel beam call from the general contractor of the Bellissimo remodel, giving me the chance to lo
g onto the website again and torture myself more.
Sawyer James was obviously a work in progress, because, like Fantasy said, she didn’t look a thing like Bianca, which was to say she didn’t look a thing like me. I was certain a slew of cosmetic tweaking had happened or was happening. It would have to. Because the clone woman didn’t look like either of us except for maybe her stature, which was spot on, and her body type, which was exactly the same, and the tip of her nose, which was all I could see of her filtered face, her nose being the only distinguishable feature between the saucer-sized Balenciaga sunglasses covering the top half (at sunset) and windswept locks of sunshine blonde hair across the rest.
I bolted upright and zoomed in.
Was the clone woman wearing my Bottega Veneta suit?
She was.
Which meant someone had been in my home to confiscate my Bianca wardrobe.
I immediately shot off an email to Sara Z. Stone telling her I’d have her charged with trespassing if she dared enter my home or touch my personal possessions again. She responded immediately that had she or any of the lilapsophobia-sympathetic staff she’d hired for the Penthouse entered my home, which they hadn’t, they had every right to. Bianca Sanders’s wardrobe was not mine. It was Bianca’s. Nor was the Bellissimo mine. As owner, Bianca was in effect my landlord, and could come and go on her own property as she pleased. Then she said I had some nerve accusing her of breaking and entering.
I’d accused her of trespassing, but I liked breaking and entering even better. Because she had. Broken and entered and swiped. There couldn’t possibly be two of the Bottega suits. I’d worn it a month before the hurricane hit. Bianca had me addressing the Junior League of Biloxi. I had to write my own speech—Women Building a Better Community—because Bianca’s (then) secretary handed me a thirty-minute speech about microblading. It was a desperate plea for the women of Biloxi to get on the eyebrow microblading bandwagon, because, according to Bianca, they desperately needed it. Before the luncheon, I’d snipped the tags off the Bottega—$5,000 for the blouse that went under the $9,800 jacket. I was afraid to look at the price of the matching tuxedo pants.
Seeing Bianca’s new clone just the one time wearing my suit was all it took.
I stopped watching network television, afraid I’d see Clone in Bellissimo commercials, I stopped reading the Sun Herald and cancelled my online subscriptions to Southern Star, Magnolia, Gulf Living, and Babybugs, the last one, not because I was afraid I’d see Clone, but because Bex and Quinn had outgrown it. Returning to Biloxi for the reopening and knowing there’d be no avoiding Clone in person, or worse, Bianca, who, at that time, I still hadn’t heard a single word from, was one of the hardest things I’d ever done. Avoiding Clone turned out to be not so hard, because even when I wasn’t working from home or my team’s office-office in the basement, I never went anywhere Clone would be caught dead. Like Materials Management. Avoiding Bianca, with our homes separated by nothing more than my ceiling and her floor, was much more worrisome. After a week of no Bianca, I let out a puff of the breath I’d been holding. Another week passed, I exhaled another puff, then two more weeks, exhaling two more puffs, until it was announced in a security brief that Bianca wouldn’t be returning anytime soon, at which point I let the breath all the way out. And with my very next breath, I let everyone know—my husband, my boss, and my team—I was fine. I couldn’t care less. And by couldn’t care less, I meant don’t talk to me about Bianca or Clone, don’t expect me to carry out a job that even remotely had anything to do with Bianca or Clone, and don’t put me in the same room with either of them, which was how I wound up being in charge of Internal Departments.
Then I moved on with my life. As much as someone whose workday consisted of tracking down a missing delivery of queen-sized memory foam pillows can move on with her life. Until Clone somehow acquired Casino Credit cashier Megan Shaw’s cell phone. Bradley leaving me in charge of the Bellissimo in his absence hadn’t put me back in the game. Clone, having something or everything to do with missing Megan Shaw and five million dollars, had.
I knew that woman was trouble the first time I saw her in my Bottega Veneta suit.
I knew it.
FIFTEEN
At six forty-five Central, which was four forty-five Pacific, I stepped into the casino without my guard up. I breezed through like I owned the place, wearing a red velvet Elfis costume under a fifty-pound cape (the rhinestones…) and red velvet booties. My hair was stuffed in a pointy Elfis hat and my face hidden behind official Taking Care of Business sunglasses. Beside me, in the exact same getup, was my official taking-care-of-business partner, Fantasy. Between us, an official Bellissimo VIP leather weekender bag from Player Services. Full of money.
“Clone’s still MIA,” Fantasy said.
“I know,” I said. “And she either ditched Megan Shaw’s phone or it’s dead, so there’s no tracking her.”
“She’s been missing for hours. Where do you think she is?”
“We have the money, Fantasy, so I don’t really care where she is.”
“Do you care how she got Megan Shaw’s phone?”
That I cared about. But I cared more about the fact that we found the missing five million dollars before she did and were about to wire it to Seattle than I did about her stealing jobs. I meant phones.
We coded ourselves into the short hallway between the main casino cage and the count room and stopped at the Casino Credit door. I gave it a tap. Gray Donaldson let us in.
“Cute outfits.”
We transferred the cash from the weekender to a large canvas money bag, then after snapping on latex gloves, gathered everything in and around Megan’s desk and lobbed it into the empty bag. Gray slipped across the hall to deposit the money in Casino Credit’s account. By the time we’d tossed Megan’s workstation a second time—over, under, around—to make sure we hadn’t missed anything, Gray returned. She set up a three-way call between Branch Banking & Trust in Philly and Nelson Title Company in Seattle. All parties logged on to a BlueJeans screen-sharing session and we watched over Gray’s shoulder as she hit enter—there went the money—at which point, it was done. The money we never should have received in the first place was back where it belonged.
I felt like I’d won a war.
Fantasy and I slipped out with the weekender bag, then passed it off to Baylor in the vestibule outside of the Convention Center tournament room.
“Have you found her?” Fantasy asked.
“No.”
“It’s been hours, Baylor. Have you checked all the bars?” I asked.
“No,” he said, “and I’m not going to.” He switched the weekender to his other shoulder. “What do you want me to do with this?”
“Don’t let it out of your sight,” I said.
“I don’t think you understand, Davis. I’ve been awake for three days. I’m not staying awake to find Clone, and I’m not staying awake to watch a bag.”
“Then drop it off at my house on your way to bed,” I said. “I’ll watch it.”
“Your house is past mine,” he said. “I’m going straight home. The bag’s going with me.”
“Give me the bag.” Fantasy yanked it off Baylor’s arm, then we pushed our way through all shapes, sizes, and eras of Elvii to the bar, ordered All Shook Up martinis (we’d earned them), then plastered ourselves against a back wall and tried to yell at each other over the Suspicious Minds din. The subject matter too sensitive, we reverted to communicating the old-fashioned way: smoke signals.
I’m kidding.
We texted.
Subjects we tried to cover with our thumbs: was Megan Shaw dead or alive? Clearly, since we found the money in her baby’s backpack, she’d been the one to hide it. From Clone? Clone knew about the errant wire and was after the money? How? And how were the two women connected? Was it Clone who’d coerced Megan into cashing the five-million-dol
lar wire, or did Clone know about it and was trying to steal the money from Megan? We discussed the timing of the heist we’d interrupted. Was it a coincidence the wire misfired just as the Elvis convention began, when the casino owner, president, and head of security were out of town at the same time? Exactly when Bianca Sanders returned? And what we really wanted to know: What happened to Megan Shaw that kept her from picking up Baby Oliver at Play? We were still poking away on our phones, bouncing Hallmark-mystery-worthy questions without answers back and forth, when the last tournament round ended and the banquet ensued. We stayed long enough to sign off on the scores, then hugged the back wall and escaped through a service entrance. The absolute quiet was unnerving as we made our way to the elevator.
“Should we look for Clone?” Fantasy asked.
“If she doesn’t show up by tomorrow morning, yes. Are you going home?”
She was digging for the buzzing phone in the pocket of her Elfis skirt was what she was doing. “I can’t wait to go home.” She studied the phone. “What about you?”
“I can wait.”
She looked up from the screen. “Either my phone has gone crazy or I have yours.”
I reached in the pocket of my Elfin skirt, and I had hers. I held it out to trade. I shook it. “Here.”
“Wait a minute,” she said, “I’m trying to read this.”
“Give it.”
“Wait.” She held up a finger. “It’s from your mother. Listen to this.” She read slowly. “Bibby whiff bull’s eye. Catbird, bay, hex, queen, gong to bad,” she read. “Wink going hark. Close dead room floors. Coping winders. Pear. Tout. Spouse. Leaf coping.”
What my mother could do with the twenty-six little letters of the alphabet was nothing short of amazing. And not in a good way.
We traded phones while stepping into the service elevator. “It says Baby Oliver is with July.”
“It does not.”
“‘Bibby whiff bull’s eye’ is ‘baby with July.’”
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