by Skylar Finn
I glanced up at this. “Oh, really? What has she been doing?”
“Just talking to me about stuff,” she said, twirling her hair around her finger. “She went through the same thing, but for her it was really serious. She said it damaged her, till she realized no one could define you and you have to do that for yourself. So that’s been helping me.”
“That’s good.” I rested my head against the back of the tub. I’d been expecting something more along the lines of teaching me dark magic to overthrow the world order.
“That’s what I’m going to tell Kimmy when we see her today,” she said.
I sat up with a splash. “Wait, what?”
“Margo wants a back-up vocalist,” explained Bridget. “Kimmy’s been trying to put out a tape mix for like, eons now. She’ll probably quadruple her followers by working with Margo.”
“Kimmy’s coming here?” Whatever this bath had done for me was quickly slipping away, like water down the drain.
“No one will work for Les anymore,” she explained. “I mean, we could definitely find girls to work for Margo, for sure, but everybody knows Les is producing her next album and nobody wants to work for him. Not even indirectly.”
“What do you mean?” I popped my head up above the water like a curious otter. “I didn’t know people even knew who he was.”
“Yeah, it’s probably gonna be an issue for you when the album comes out,” she said. “But I told Margo you could spin anything, so don’t worry about it.”
“Worry about what?” I was already worried.
Bridget bit her lip and held out her phone. I looked at a shot of Margo I’d never seen in spite of having spent four straight hours scouring her social media. She was drinking a glass of champagne with Ferrari Xmas and Tapia in a hot tub, accompanied by a single hashtag: #boycottlesrodney.
“When did this happen?” I stared at it.
“The photo is old, like a throwback Thursday thing. But last night, Ferrari Xmas posted a video of Les declaring his undying love for her, and then so did Tapia, and so did Margo. Margo started the hash tag. It’s trending like crazy. Supermodels, actresses, senators. He’s been with everybody. And everybody’s boycotting Les Rodney.”
“I was just on her account!” I tried to get out of the tub, but the chocolate cherry sea salt bomb left me slippery as an eel, and I immediately slid across the porcelain back into the water, thrashing like a barracuda. “I didn’t see any of this!”
Bridget shook her head. “It’s not on her Miss Behavior account,” she said. “It’s on her other Insta. Her secret one.”
“How can she be boycotting him if he’s producing her album?” I demanded. I fully understood her inclination to publicly shame Les, if that’s what fried her grits, but right now I was mostly concerned about myself, currently faced with a public relations disaster.
“It’s getting mad press,” explained Bridget. “Margo thinks she’ll be a hero to women everywhere. Her plan is to release the album, then get out from under Les and make all this money. It makes a lot of sense, if you hear her talk about it.”
I scratched my wet head, utterly baffled. If Margo was social media-shaming Les while taking money from him, wouldn’t her fans find it hypocritical? And what was to prevent Les from pulling her backing? “What’s Les said about this? Where is he, even?”
“Les went back to the city with his tail between his legs,” she said. “He’s hiding. He’s guilty times like eight because of all the women who are currently mad at him. I got a raise. Kimmy’s doing back-up vocals. Margo is getting a didgeridoo player from the Australian Outback. He’s pretty much agreeing to anything right now, like when you’re mad and he’ll buy you diamond earrings and a Rolex and a Burmese Mountain puppy.”
“Wait, what?”
She cocked her head at me. “Didn’t you get anything after you argued?”
“No, I didn’t get anything,” I said, irritated. “I got him out of my life temporarily, which I guess you could argue is priceless.”
Bridget shook her head.
“You can’t exchange Les being gone for hard cash,” she said.
I agreed to go with Bridget to the train station to meet Kimmy. I didn’t trust her to operate a stick shift in platform stiletto heels, and by this point I was resigned to the situation. Soon, Paulina would arrive to take over as Margo’s new paleolithic pastry chef, and there was no sense in pretending otherwise.
Mount Hazel had no train depot, so we went two towns over to meet Kimmy’s train. I made sure we got there early. Kimmy didn’t suffer fools gladly. Two minutes of her waiting in the cold and we would have been road pizza.
“Where did she meet Les, anyway?” I asked. I knew Bridget met him at a sorority party at his alma mater (what Les was doing pushing forty at a sorority party was anyone’s best guess), but Kimmy was a mystery to me.
“I asked her that once,” said Bridget, watching the train pull into the station. “She said ‘the Internet.’ So I asked her, you mean like Tinder? And she said, no. So I said, on Bumble? And she said no to that, too. I would have kept guessing, but she was like, ‘it ain’t exactly an app, hun.’” She lowered her voice, as if Kimmy could hear her from the snack car. “I think she used to be an escort.” She bit her lip, as if afraid she’d betrayed a confidence. “A high-end one, of course,” she added hastily.
The train pulled to a stop and the passengers piled off. Most of them were commuters, migrating from jobs in the city, in their dark overcoats and muted scarves. Kimmy, not so much.
Kimmy wore white fur and a leather minidress. Her mirrored sunglasses were the size of salad plates and her earrings were the circumference of a doorknobs. Her lip gloss was thick and shiny as shellac. Her nose ring glittered in the late afternoon sun.
Kimmy looked at Bridget’s Jeep over the top of her sunglasses before tossing her Louis Vuitton in the back and climbing in next to it.
“You still whippin’ this ’96 Clueless-mobile around, shawty?” she asked.
Bridget blushed. Bridget and Kimmy were usually friends until Kimmy clashed with Paulina, whereupon Bridget became a Switzerland-like pawn the two dueled over.
Kimmy looked me over briefly. She shook her head. She thought I was a buttoned-up schoolmarm.
“Whaddup Nancy Drew,” she deadpanned. “I see you got your Carolyn Keene game on, as per usual.” Kimmy was street tough and well-read, like a lovable Oliver Twist with a lit grille. Hers said BAB.
In lieu of answering, I shifted into first and pulled out of the parking lot.
“Are you coming back to the house with us?” Bridget inquired brightly.
“Hell no,” said Kimmy. She sounded insulted that Bridget had even asked. “I looked that place up online. You know it’s some kinda spook house, right?” She reapplied her lip gloss in the mirrored surface of her phone’s case. “Plus, I bet the central heating sucks. It looks like it’s a thousand years old.”
“It is just a tiny bit drafty,” Bridget admitted. “Where are you staying?”
“That bed and breakfast, where all the people with brains are posted up at,” said Kimmy. “It’s on your way back to the murder shack.”
According to Cameron, most of Margo’s entourage refused to even come to the house, which was why they were staying two towns over. This could be my opportunity to meet them and find out why they refused to come to Mount Hazel. Maybe they would know what happened to the employees who left.
“Do they have food?” I asked.
Kimmy shrugged. “They have breakfast. Must be a kitchen. I’d say, yeah. Prolly.”
Bridget shivered with anticipation. “Oooh, I’m starving. All I had was a raisin scone this morning. With cream cheese. And an omelet. And a bagel.”
Kimmy shook her head as she tapped at her phone with a glittering, Swarovski-covered finger nail.
“You bring up your ten-year-old girl metabolism one more time,” she said, “I’ll throw you out the Jeep.”
The bed and breakf
ast, pleasantly named the Briar Rose, was everything the manor wasn’t: warm, welcoming, inviting, and quaint. It was well-lit, with twinkling white lights leading up the front walk. Wall sconces blazed on the front porch, on either side of an old wooden swing.
Kimmy wrinkled her nose. “Ugh. Check out Grovers Corners. Population, us.”
She hauled her suitcase up the steps and kicked the front door open with her red-bottomed heel like a SWAT team member kicking down the door of a bath salts dealer. Kimmy had the aggression of a very large man compressed into the body of a slight young woman. It was interesting to see, like watching an ant carry a breadcrumb five times its size.
Bridget scurried up the steps behind her, presumably to look for scones. I started to follow them when something caught my eye.
It was the lit glow of an ember at the edge of the porch. Someone was outside, smoking. I went over to the railing to investigate.
A man in a pressed dark suit and black leather gloves smoked a cigarette in the shadows of the porch. He glanced up at my approach.
“Hello,” I said. “You don’t by any chance work for Margo Metal, do you?”
He tapped his cigarette ash onto the frost-bitten ground in front of him.
“Unfortunately,” he said. “I been stuck at this joint for like two weeks now, just in case Her Highness needs a ride back to the city, but she ain’t never left yet. It’s boring AF here.” He put his cigarette out on the ground and extended a gloved hand over the railing.
“Manuel Rodriguez,” he said. “But everybody calls me Manny.”
“Hi Manny, I’m Sam,” I said, shaking his hand. “I do PR for Margo.”
Manny snorted. “Then you know how it is, working for the Beast.”
“Yeah, I do. I was actually wondering what happened to some of the other staff who don’t work for her anymore. Do you know?”
“No, but I got a pretty good idea,” said Manny. He took a miniature lint roller out of the inside pocket of his jacket and rolled it up and down his suit. “They ran screaming into the night.”
“But why?” I asked.
“Have you seen that house? Lookin’ like somethin’ outta Halloween Horror Nights? Google that jawn and see what comes up. Nothing good, that’s for sure.”
“People think it’s haunted?” I asked.
“I don’t think it’s haunted,” said Manny. “I think it’s possessed.”
“Possessed?” I said, confused. “How can a house be possessed?”
“Ain’t you ever seen Amityville Horror, sis?” he asked. “Flies comin’ out the walls and shit? Not that I ever seen no flies; I wouldn’t set foot in that place. I was raised Catholic. Plus I seen The Exorcist like eight hundred times. I’m not going into no devil-house, nah-uh, no way. No how.”
He put his lint brush away and took out a vape pen, glancing around first before pressing the button. “Anybody coming?”
I looked over my shoulder. No one emerged from the Briar Rose, shaking a rolling pin and yelling.
“No,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said, taking a lengthy drag and blowing it into the night. He offered his pen to me. I shook my head.
“The old lady who runs this place is super strict,” he explained. “I gotta sneak out and hide behind the house if I want a cigarette. Or whatever. You know what I’m sayin’?” He chuckled, then coughed.
“Do you think anything happened to any of the people that quit?” I asked.
He frowned, contemplating. “Well, DJ Swann definitely went back to the city. He won’t even talk about it. He told me I should leave as soon as possible. I said I wasn’t staying at the house, so I wasn’t even worried about it, and he was like, ‘nah bro, don’t work for those people, period. Something ain’t right.’ But I’m staying at this here Briar Rose for free, eating for free, and I don’t have to do anything, so I’m not that worried about it. Back in the city, I’d be like, driving Miss Daisy all day long, you get me?”
“I get you,” I said. “What about the others?”
“Well, some of the people I never met, like I didn’t talk to them,” he said. “But that one dude, that little college kid—Connor or something? I forget his name. Colin, Colm, something like that. He up and disappeared. Nobody’s heard from him. We ain’t exactly travel in the same circles, but I reached out just to make sure he got home okay. Never heard back.”
“You think something might have happened to him?” I asked.
Manny shrugged. “He might be busy with school, he might not be. I dunno. He was a little bookworm, just doing it for college credit.”
“This was the personal assistant,” I said slowly. “The one before Bridget?”
“Bridget!” Manny placed a hand on his chest, his eyelids fluttering. “Oh my gawd. Is she here? I gotta say hi to my girl.”
Manny cleared the railing like an Olympic hurdler and disappeared into the bed and breakfast in a matter of seconds. Bridget had that effect on men.
I stayed on the porch, trying to process the information I’d just heard. Where was Margo’s previous personal assistant? What happened to him? Where had he gone? Had he really just quit and gone home, severing contact with Margo and the rest of her entourage?
Or had something more sinister happened?
20
Fight or Flight
Bridget decided to stay at the bed and breakfast in order to have a “spa night” with Kimmy, whatever that entailed. I imagined them in green masks and short silk robes in front of the fireplace, discussing their respective vision boards. Bridget told me to take her Wrangler back to the manor, and that Manny would bring them to work tomorrow.
“I don’t know what you thinkin’ stayin’ at that place,” said Kimmy, shaking her head. She took a bite from her cranberry scone, courtesy of the Briar Rose. “Like, it’s clearly haunted.”
As much as I would have liked to remain in the safety and warmth that comprised the bed and breakfast, working from a room with a fire, four-poster bed, and no demonic possession, my business was in Mount Hazel. To pretend otherwise would only be deluding myself.
I let myself into the manor cautiously, listening for any sounds of life. It was dark and no one stirred. I went up the curving staircase and into my bedroom. I thought maybe Martha would be waiting for me, but there was no one there. It was the most peace I had known since starting this job.
I burrowed under the thick duvet. My mind raced and I didn’t think I’d be able to fall asleep, but the nonstop, hectic events of the last several days caught up to me. I vowed that tomorrow I would get to the bottom of what happened to Conner/Colin/Colm, and as soon as I closed my eyes, I fell into a deep and dreamless sleep.
I opened my eyes and I was in a room I’d never seen: cream carpeting, white walls, sterile and immaculate. I was under a snowy white duvet. I threw the covers back and got out of bed. My feet sunk into a thick, piled white rug.
I sat at the vanity and brushed my long hair. I studied my face in the mirror: chubby- cheeked and cherubic, with full plump lips and long eyelashes.
They said I had the voice of an angel, but he said I had the face of one.
Sometimes he made me uncomfortable. The way his gaze lingered on me for too long during our afternoon sessions. The way he’d rest a hand lightly on my shoulder or against my back during my warm-up exercises.
If I was honest with myself, there was something about him I hated, but I was afraid. I was afraid that if I said it out loud, I might blow my one shot at the big leagues. And if he hadn’t actually done anything undeniably, obviously strange, weren’t these things minor compared to the opportunity I could have? The money I could make?
My parents didn’t seem to notice there was anything off about Paul. Of course, he always acted like the perfect mentor when they were around. He never came near me, let alone touched me. He couldn’t. They were paying him a lot of money to make me into a star.
I decided this would be the day I would say something. If he got mad, so what?
Let him. Paul was replaceable. That was what my mother said, when she fired one of the help for not getting all the micro specks out of the downstairs curtains or whatever. She would never admit that it was her OCD, not the housekeeper.
I told Paul I didn’t want to meet at his studio. I said I had a make-up quiz after school and that my chorus teacher gave me permission to use the music room for my vocal lesson afterward because I wasn’t allowed to walk home from the studio after dark, and the quiz would delay my lesson until late in the afternoon.
This is how I knew there was something off about Paul: instead of acquiescing to a reasonable request, he acted like it was this huge deal, that I was inconveniencing him: that not meeting him at his studio was the end of the world. Really, he was just throwing a pathetic little temper tantrum because he hated the idea of not having me alone in his creepy studio for the afternoon, but Paul was an expert at making up excuses in order to mask what a creep he was and blame everybody but himself.
I flat-out refused to go the studio. In fact, I decided right then I’d never go there again. If my parents asked why, wouldn’t listen to me, and tried to force me to go, I’d lie and say Paul had already done something he was obviously secretly planning to do, anyway, but hadn’t done yet. That would shut them up.
Besides, I shouldn’t have to make up a lie about why he made me uncomfortable. My word should be enough. I hated my parents sometimes. They were so blind, so stubborn about all the things they couldn’t see.
Even my parents wouldn’t be able to deny the long, rambling letter Paul gave me. It was hand-written and hidden in my jewelry box. At first, it was just him praising me for being talented, and talking about how much he admired me. Which had at first seemed nice to the point of flattering. Maybe even encouraging, or complimentary—I guess.
Then he wrote this like…poem, at the end of it. I don’t even know how you’d describe it. It was badly written, like something that makes you feel embarrassed for the person who wrote it. It was three pages long, and it was mostly about how my hair shined in the afternoon light. I was so disturbed I hadn’t known what to do with it. I thought about throwing it away, but it seemed important to save, like I needed it as evidence.