Bess uncapped it and recoiled in horror. “How is that possible?” she asked in amazement. “How did we not smell this already?”
“The ones we had before smelled like tangerine. Vittoria didn’t use it on us,” Cat said. “Who could have put this here?”
“Bibi? Edith?” Bess said.
“My instinct is no. Why would they want us to get sick?”
“Molly?!? She wouldn’t. She loves us…doesn’t she? Or…did she want us out of the way? Did she want to take over the shoot?”
“No…no,” Cat insisted. “She worships us. I don’t think she would harm us.”
They sat there dumbfounded. Cat slumped onto the floor.
“I am so fucking high right now,” she complained. “And so fucking tired. And so fucking hung over.”
“I can’t think right now either,” Bess finally said, her head in her hands. “I need to eat something. Get dressed. I’ll make coffee. The food is on the way.”
Cat walked into the closet, pulling on the first clothes she found, black leggings and a white cotton T-shirt. She caught her reflection in the mirror. Her leggings were baggy and wrinkled—like when she was a child—and the shirt dwarfed her, her arms and neck poking out of the holes like wire hangers. Cat felt a rush of satisfaction at the sight of her emaciated frame. I need help, the rational part of her mind screamed. Another part sighed with happiness, telling itself Now that is a textbook thigh gap.
The doorbell rang. Cat marched over to the oversized wooden front door and opened it. A tiny waiter with a waxed mustache stood on the other side, pushing a wide cart loaded with silver-topped dishes. She ushered him in, and he laid out the plates rather ceremoniously, setting the table with fine linens and polished silver.
Bess immediately sat at the dining table, shoveling steak and salad into her mouth. “No excuses,” she mumbled through a mouthful of meat. “You have to eat.”
Cat rolled her eyes but sat down on the upholstered dining chair, crossing her legs underneath her. She plunged her knife into the fillet, its center so rare it glowed purple, and cut off a small piece. The beef felt fleshy, alive; when she put it in her mouth she nearly gagged, but she forced herself to swallow the bite—and the next, and the next, and the next after that.
Half a dozen bites later the steak was nearly gone. Cat found herself luxuriating over the peppery, winey fat coating the sides, and took forkfuls of salad in between the few final bites in order to sustain the meal. Bess pointed to the plate on the other side of the table.
“Go ahead,” Bess said with evident joy. “I ordered that one for Molly, but she’s obviously still out and about.”
Cat stood up and walked around the table, where she sat down at the opposite seat and repeated the process, devouring Molly’s steak with a pleasure she hadn’t known for months. It was real food, not just a half-cup of rice consumed alone in her apartment with a dash of hot sauce. The blood from the meat drained down her throat, its fat melted on her tongue, and the salad leaves bloomed in her mouth; by the time she’d polished off the second plate, she felt alive for the first time in weeks—and deeply exhausted. Cat looked up and across the table. Bess smiled and popped a final bite of steak into her mouth like it was a piece of popcorn.
“So. Who drugged us?” Cat asked, her mind finally clear.
“Who else has access?” Bess responded.
“Who gains from hurting us,” Cat said thoughtfully, “is maybe a better question. Hutton told me in the summer that solving a crime is about drilling down on the details. What would happen if we kept using all those products without knowing what’s in them?” She opened a window and lit a cigarette.
“We’d ruin the shoot tomorrow,” Bess said slowly. “Somebody else would have to take over.”
“Who?”
They sat there for a moment while Cat smoked, each thinking to themselves, until they both spoke at the same time:
“Lou,” they said together.
“Her ex-husband’s company manages this hotel,” Bess said. “She has access.”
“I’m sure she thought this shoot was supposed to be hers,” Cat realized. “She wants it back.” She exhaled a long, thin stream of white smoke.
“But,” Bess asked, “just to play devil’s advocate here for a moment, is that really worth poisoning your coworkers? Let’s be realistic. She has so much money. She doesn’t have to work.” She shook her head. “I agree that she wants you, both of us, out of the way. I’m sure she wants to take credit for our work. But I just don’t understand why.”
“Maybe it’s not hers, you know? Rich people never have their own money. It’s always tied up in investments and overseas accounts and whatever.” Cat took a long drag of her cigarette and lit a fresh one from its burning embers.
“Lou is a permalancer,” Bess replied thoughtfully. “It’s basically like being an undocumented worker. That’s certainly motivating. But if Lou knows October and November were both flops, why does she still think there’s a staff job waiting at the end of the rainbow? Why is she bothering to come to Paris?”
“Because this is her first job,” Cat realized. “She must not understand. Nobody in her family works. None of them. What is it they say on Lake Como: the grandfather starts the business, the father builds it, and the grandson goes snowboarding? Lou is a seventh-generation snowboarder.”
“That seems awfully naive, though. Even for Lou.”
“November isn’t out yet. Maybe her hopes are still high. What was it they put on the cover instead? Princess Sophie’s Bavarian castle—where Bormann slept?” Cat spit with disdain. “What’s next, Leni Riefenstahl’s gown collection?” Skillfully imitating Lou’s posh Home Counties accent, she continued, intoning, “Here is the Schiaparelli worn during the award ceremony for Triumph of the Will: a crepe-and-satin gown cut on the bias, with genuine ruby beadwork along the collar and repurposed baby teeth sewn onto the bust.”
“I don’t know,” Bess realized. “Nobody’s mentioned anything about November. We never even had a meeting about it. I didn’t even think about it. Honestly…I’ve been preoccupied with Jent.”
“I’ve been working on December and January. I didn’t think about it either. I didn’t want to.” Cat stubbed out her cigarette.
“Let’s find out what Lou’s been up to,” Bess said, grabbing her laptop off the counter and cracking it open.
“I already checked Photogram,” Cat said. “Nothing.”
“No. At work. Her password is ‘password,’” Bess said, laughing. “She told me when I showed her how to use CoopDoc. Let’s see if she has any pitches.”
Cat pulled up a chair to Bess’s side of the table. They didn’t find any pitches, but they did find an email to Margot, Paula, and Courtney Sacks from Legal, marked with the subject line THE FINAL DAYS OF CALLIE COURT.
When they finished reading the attachment, Bess cried.
“Callie went to Hampshire. We hung out a few times freshman year, she lived on my floor,” Bess said. “We drove to a party at Bard once, and he was all she could talk about in the car. I had completely forgotten.”
“This is the cruelest thing I’ve ever seen,” Cat agreed. “Look at Margot’s stone-cold response. She called it ‘perfection.’”
“How could they publish this?” Bess asked. “I mean…Jesus, her poor parents.”
“It’ll move,” Cat said sadly. “People will buy this. They’ll love it.”
Bess looked stricken. She suddenly looked up and met Cat’s eyes. “I just realized something,” she whispered. “What did Callie smell like before she died?”
Cat paused and tried to remember.
“She smelled like juniper,” she finally said. “Just like Christmas.”
Lou, clad once again in her incognito cat sweatshirt and Skechers, waited in the dwindling crowd outside the Mania presentation. She’d been looking for Cat and Bess for the past hour but couldn’t see them. They must have slipped out, she realized. Off to another party.
&n
bsp; Her muscles twitched. Time for bed, her body screamed. She started walking swiftly back to her apartment, and recalled how Cat and Bess had looked the night before, lurching around their bathroom, with a deep satisfaction.
Stocking the room had been the easiest part. All she’d had to do was tell the concierge over the phone that she was thinking of investing in Panacea, the heritage brand from the United Kingdom used by the hotel the past hundred years. Would he mind switching out the bottles of what they had in stock with another, slightly cheaper option the Panacea board was presenting her with? She wanted to know if anyone could tell the difference, she’d insisted—and if anyone could, it would be the staff of RAGE. It was to be their little secret. I’m sure you understand.
He happily obliged. Anything for Madame Lucas.
So there was now a very potent mixture of uppers and downers in the bath gels, the shampoo, the conditioner, the moisturizers and perfumes, the linen sprays, the shaving cream, everything. Lou laughed just thinking about how easy it had been. She’d put more energy into choosing this stupid cat sweatshirt. She was so grateful for Bedford Organics. What had started out as a mere investment had gone on to pay dozens of dividends, not the least of which was an enormous profit.
“It has real cocaine in it,” Bitsy Peters had whispered to Bettina Simpson-Travers, Lou, and Ilsa Ravenshall. “It’s this woman that I played tennis with in Portofino last summer. She’s from Brazil, but she’s opening up shop here. She’s going to make a billion dollars.”
Lou, still married at the time, had just caught Alex getting pegged by a cocktail waitress in their guest bedroom during Jane’s third birthday party. He’d apologized with some sincerity, but in the end Lou’s attorney at Cavendish Crane had needed to step in to resolve it.
Now, thanks to Donal Windsor, Esquire, Lou—or rather, the LLC registered to a storage unit in Jane’s name on the west side of Manhattan—owned four percent of Lucas Holding, BV, free and clear. The shares, a payment for that onetime forgiveness, were hers to do with what she liked. She’d been looking for ways to invest and—bam! Bedford Organics and its marvelous hand cream—so much better than a cup of coffee, no calories whatsoever—had fallen right into her lap.
So Lou sold a tenth of a percent in Lucas Holding, BV, and used Donal to invest anonymously in Bedford Organics. She’d paid $6 million to buy five percent of Vittoria’s company, then watched her fellow socialites get hooked left and right, while Vittoria slowly bought her shares back from Lou at nearly double the price. Vittoria was just another single mother trying to make it in the world, she’d rationalized; who knew how long Lou’s own marriage would last, or what would become of her when it was finally over. She would need her own money someday, so that she could really and truly be set free with an investment that Alexander couldn’t touch. Vittoria had been the perfect opportunity: someone who had just as much to lose as she did. For nearly three years Lou was very careful never to actually touch Vittoria’s product, enter the premises, or call her on the phone—until the day she started working at RAGE.
Lou simply hadn’t anticipated how stressful it would be to work. After day one, she definitely needed a little pick-me-up, but she felt self-conscious about asking her doctor for a prescription. Surely this kind of stress was something she could handle on her own. So she’d asked Donal to contact Vittoria, who enthusiastically messengered over everything—dozens of boxes of the entire line for her mystery investor to choose from at her leisure. Lou had squirreled it away, storing the boxes in the panic room that Alex had once built into their apartment, taking out two bottles once a week and a tube of hand cream every other month: the jasmine lotion for energy, the honeysuckle for happiness, and the wonderful eucalyptus hand cream to suppress the appetite, and sometimes the juniper, just at night, for comfort.
“Is it possible to overdose on this stuff?” Lou had once overheard Hillary ask Constance Onderveet at Hillary’s ski cabin back in Idaho, through the door of a bathroom that reeked of jasmine and honeysuckle. They had all flown there for a girls’ weekend last March.
“Margot gave it to me,” Constance had assured her. “It’s perfectly safe. It’s simply South American.”
Three days later, Hillary had been so gloriously high that she’d told Lou all about her wedding dress idea for the Christmas issue, about the special 3-D printer she’d found. Lou had thought that was simply marvelous, and she’d also felt a teensy-weensy bit jealous that Hillary just really goddamned had it all—beauty, brains, respect. Lou hinted to Hillary that she’d love to work at the magazine, too. Just a thought—if anything opens up, I could really help with the wedding shoot; we could use my hotel in Paris. That kind of thing. And they’d made a deal to use the hotel, but then, months later…Hillary died.
I know where she got that face cream, she’d whispered to a jasmine-scented and red-eared Margot at the funeral. Do you think it had anything to do with her death?
The following week, Lou had Hillary’s job, though she wasn’t a staffer. Look, you’ve never had a job, Margot had said. I can’t make you staff right away, everyone else will resent you. Work with me here. All I can do is give you the chance to earn it. Come the end of her contract, Lou thought she might be able to leverage it into a staff position, but then Bedford Organics had gone tits-up in July, and Lou had very briefly felt depressed, though she’d already made back double her initial investment. After a quick call to Donal—who assured her that her company was a shell within a shell within a shell, that Vittoria had never known her name, that the only way to associate her would be for him to break attorney-client privilege, which would never happen—well, then she’d simply put the whole thing out of her mind. It had been easy to pretend to herself that none of it had really happened, that none of it was connected to her or to the lotion she slathered on every morning—and by September, every night. The whole office depended on it: Margot and Constance Onderveet had reeked of jasmine all summer, Rose Cashin-Trask of honeysuckle, and Janet Berg of both, with some juniper thrown in. They all pretended together. It was easy.
The panic room where Lou kept her stash was concealed behind a bookcase in her private study. When Callie had died right there in front it, she’d been simply terrified that they’d somehow find her cache, that it would get taken away, that she’d lose her job and go to jail, that she’d be shamed.
But Cat had fixed it all; I saw Callie sniffing drugs, Cat had reported. And I saw her choking. Nothing anyone could do. Certainly nothing about the bookcase and nothing about the juniper-scented lotion.
When Lou got back to her apartment, she checked the Eurydice Suite one more time, just to be sure, but the lights were off. The girls were still out somewhere, embarrassing themselves. Perfect. Lou coated herself in her evening application and climbed into bed.
Detective Mark Hutton sat in Premiere Classe berth number 4—the last seat available for purchase on the entire goddamn flight—and stared at Mania. There were hundreds of pictures of Cat on the map. She looked increasingly thin and disoriented, including a series where she was covered in paint and kissing—were those mimes?—yes, kissing mimes. The photos made him uncomfortable. He knew this wasn’t like her. Something was wrong.
But there was no way to resolve this on the flight, and so he clicked off the phone, cracked his briefcase, and opened envelope after envelope, trying to distract himself with a backlog of banal paperwork. He flipped the pile over and started from the oldest first, adding his signature to dozens of hardcopies bound for interoffice mail upon his return before filling out an updated insurance form and reading through two new manuals on handgun protocol. It was meant to be reassuringly tedious. He looked at every scrap of paper in the briefcase, including the white index card covered in Hillary Whitney’s handwriting:
the ribbon is the key to everything
He traced the handwriting with his fingertips. The amount of belladonna-derived atropine present in Hillary Whitney’s body—built up for so long that she’d stopped prod
ucing antibodies for it—had been enough to give her recurrent hallucinations, the coroner had said when Hutton showed him the note, enough to make her deeply paranoid. Maybe the note really didn’t mean anything, he told himself.
Hutton opened his computer and connected to the airplane’s Wi-Fi to begin sorting through the emails he’d received in the past few days. Most were work-related, but after a few minutes, a new message appeared at the top of his in-box from an anonymous remailer, the subject line reading “urgent re: callie court.” He opened the email to find an attached PDF. As the document downloaded, it was Callie’s face that appeared inch by inch, her gray irises glowing with a violet tinge, her face smeared with mud, flames licking behind her head.
The text below her face read THE FINAL DAYS OF CALLIE COURT—apparently he was looking at the cover of the November issue of RAGE. Next, a series of photographs of Callie from all over New York—the most beautiful pictures of her that he’d ever seen—loaded, followed by an accompanying text that was four solid pages long. The byline read “Whig Beaton Molton-Mauve Lucas.”
As his eyes adjusted to the small print, he saw the same three words right there in black-and-white—written over and over and over: “Detective Mark Hutton.”
His heart stopped for a moment. Thinking the plane had suddenly nose-dived, he looked up, expecting to hear screaming, to see smoke and flames, but the plane was quiet and calm, trucking along at 38,000 feet, level and pressurized.
Hutton scrolled to the beginning of the article and started reading. It was a lurid tale of a small-town girl in love with an indifferent city boy, using details from their relationship that even he barely remembered. In the story, the girl turned to drugs to forget him and then modeling to attract him. The climax began with a blow-by-blow account of the shoot responsible for the photos throughout the article, the author praising Callie’s fearlessness and bravery—“As she scaled the walls of Belvedere Castle, a passing runner remarked that she must have a death wish”—and heavily implying that she’d committed suicide.
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