by Sheila Agnew
Outside the elevators on the forty-first floor were two doors, one for the ladies’ restroom and the other for men. Past those doors, two ladies dressed in matching pale blue blouses and navy blue blazers sat behind a reception desk.
‘I’m here to see Leela Patel.’
The curly-haired lady looked down at a logbook.
‘Where is Mrs Pensevie? Your stepmom, right?’
‘Yes, she’s just gone into the bathroom,’ I said, gesturing behind me, ‘and she’ll be right out.’
‘Ok,’ she replied. ‘We’ll let Ms Patel know you are here. Go ahead and wait in the Thomas Jefferson Conference Room. Take a right at the end of the hallway and it is the first door on your left between the Lincoln and the Roosevelt rooms.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
I headed to the conference room. The atmosphere in the law firm was quiet and still like a church. All I could hear was the faint hum of hushed voices. The corridor was lined with vases of artificial flowers and paintings of vases with artificial flowers. I peeped through the open doors of the Ronald Reagan Conference Room. Inside was a long table with at least seventy people in dark suits sitting or standing around it. They had laptops and BlackBerries and stacks of papers in front of them. On the sideboard sat a buffet breakfast spread: bagels, doughnuts, jellies, fruit salad, rye bread, triangular pieces of toast, little plastic tubs of whitefish. I walked quickly past the open doors, found the Jefferson room and pushed open the door. It was much smaller than the Ronald Reagan room, with a table and four chairs in the middle. On the sideboard, there were bottles of water and soda and a pot of coffee and glasses and china cups and saucers. I took a bottle of water and sat down. Then I decided that could be stealing, so I put it back. I tried each of the chairs and finally decided on the one facing the door. I sat down, put my right hand in the right pocket of my white cotton cardigan and waited.
The door opened and there was a loud gasp.
‘Evie! What are you doing here?’ asked Leela.
‘I wanted to talk to you about doing a deal,’ I said calmly, as if I visited law firms every day.
‘I don’t believe this,’ she said. ‘I don’t have time for your little girl games. You have to get out of here right away. I am meeting with a potential client.’
‘I am Mrs Pensevie,’ I said.
‘What?’
‘I am your potential client.’
‘How did you get past security?’ she asked.
‘That doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I want to do a deal with you. I heard what you said to Kirsten on the phone a couple of weeks ago about getting Scott to do that stupid TV show and about how, because of me, Scott is going to go bankrupt.’
‘Evie,’ she said, folding her arms, ‘you are in extremely serious trouble for trespassing like this. If you don’t leave right now, I will have to call security to come in here and get you.’
She strode across the room and picked up the phone on the sideboard.
‘I don’t think you want to do that,’ I said quietly. ‘There are a lot of very important looking people in the Ronald Reagan room who I’m sure would find it very weird to see a screaming kid dragged past their door by security guards.’
Leela put the phone receiver down with a click, stalked back across the room, shut the door, and stood in front of me.
‘What have you got in your pocket?’ she said, eyeing my right hand, which still lay in my cardigan pocket.
‘Nothing,’ I responded.
In an instant, she reached down into my pocket and pulled out a mini tape recorder.
‘Evie, Evie,’ she said with a fake giggle, ‘that is the oldest, most obvious, trick there is.’
I stared down at the mahogany table.
‘What do you want?’ she asked, putting the recorder carefully in her handbag and sitting down in a black swivel chair across from me.
‘I want you to stop trying to get Scott involved in TV programmes. That’s all. And if you do that, I won’t tell Scott about your stupid plans and I will go back to Ireland on the flight Scott has booked for me.’
Remembering the tagline from a movie trailer, I added, ‘Because if you don’t, I will be your worst nightmare.’
Leela leaned back in her chair and laughed long and hard. She suddenly stopped laughing and snapped, ‘Do you know what I do all day long?’
She continued without waiting for an answer.
‘I chop little kids like you in half.’
‘I will tell you what you are going to do. You are going to keep your mouth shut and get on a plane to Ireland. Because if you tell Scott, guess what? He’s not going to believe you anyway. What we have here is a textbook case of step-parent alienation syndrome. I will explain to Scott that you are so jealous of me that you made all that stuff up to try and turn him against me, and Kirsten will back up my story.’
I stayed quiet.
‘It’s really a very sad syndrome,’ she said sweetly. ‘Just last month, I represented a mother. We claimed parental alienation, which means that the father deliberately tried to turn the children against my client. And just like that,’ she snapped her fingers, ‘we got an order from the judge preventing the father from even seeing his own children, except once a month for two hours at Chuck E. Cheese.’
‘That’s a load of rubbish,’ I scoffed. ‘Scott’s never going to believe that I am alienating him from you. You have no evidence.’
Leela laughed again.
‘You are so naïve, sweetie. You don’t need evidence. You just need to keep repeating the word “syndrome”. We could even send you off for evaluation. I have a number of child psychologists in my pocket who would be more than happy to write a very damning report about you and your crazy, sad little orphan efforts to alienate Scott from me.’
I stood up, walked to the door and opened it.
‘Are you finished?’ I asked.
‘I think I’ve said all I needed to say,’ she replied, still smiling.
‘Good,’ I said, and on a stupid, irresistible impulse, I leaned down and pulled a tiny miniature recorder out of my left shoe, ‘because I guess that means I can switch this off now.’
Sidney’s warning echoed in my head, ‘Make sure the big recorder is obvious so when she “finds” it, with any luck it won’t occur to her to look for a second.’
Thank you, Sidney, I thought and I didn’t wait for Leela’s reaction. I ran as fast as I could, down the corridor past the conference rooms and the very surprised-looking receptionists and out to the elevator banks where a bunch of people were waiting for an elevator. They stared at me, BlackBerries frozen in their hands. I glanced behind and saw that Leela had reached the reception desk. Panicked, I pushed my way through the crowd and pulled open the heavy door under the red neon-lit sign, ‘Emergency Staircase’.
It was dark and deathly quiet inside the stairwell but there were emergency light strips on each stair so I could see enough to half-run, half-stumble my way down, clutching the iron railing. Forty. Thirty-Nine. Thirty-Eight. Thirty-Seven. Gasp. Thirty-Six. Thirty-Five. Thirty-Four. Thirty-Three. On the Thirty-Second floor, I halted to catch my breath and to listen for sounds of anyone following me, but I heard nothing. I resumed my downward escape, able to take the flights of stairs faster now that my eyes had adjusted to the semi-darkness, counting each floor as I descended lower and lower. It took about half an hour to reach the second floor, which is when I heard a door opening a floor above me and the sound of quick footsteps and the beam of a torch. I glanced up to see a brown-haired security guard.
‘Evelyn,’ he called out in a thick New York accent. ‘Stop! Stay where you are.’
I grabbed the handle of the nearest door, yanked it open and continued to run. I found myself in a large room, filled with people sitting at desks with computer screens, separated from one another by thin, flimsy, white partitions. I dodged around the partitions, the mini-recording device tightly clutched in my sweaty right hand.
‘Stop her!’ yelle
d the security guard, reaching the entrance to the floor.
A tall skinny guy with glasses made a grab for me but I ducked under his outstretched arms and continued running, unsure what direction to try. I caught sight of a glass door and swung right towards it. A few seconds later, I reached the door and pushed, then pulled, but it wouldn’t budge.
‘Stop running!’ called the security guard from close behind me.
I spun around and ran off in the opposite direction. Half-way down an aisle, I tripped on a potted plant and grabbed at the corner of a desk to stop myself falling, sending stacks of papers and pens and boxes of paperclips crashing to the floor.
‘Hey!’ yelled a red-haired woman sitting at the desk.
‘Sorry! I gasped, starting to run again.
The security guard was so close now he could almost touch me. I reached another door and again it was locked. I pushed a red button at the side and the door slid open and I bounded inside. I found myself in a large room with white-paintedwalls, filled with nothing but large plastic rubbish bins. There was no way out except the way I came in, which was now blocked by the bulky security guard.
‘Calm down, kid,’ he said advancing towards me. ‘There’s nowhere left to run.’
I looked frantically around me. Without pausing to think, I opened the steel grey trap door and hurled myself into the rubbish chute, feet-first. I felt a hand grab me by the collar of my cardigan and, after a brief struggle, I pulled free and began to hurtle downwards at a pace way faster than any ride at Great Adventure.
Chapter 28
‘Owwwwwwwww!’ I exclaimed, as I landed with a heavy bump in a large metal rubbish skip filled with black plastic garbage bags. I scrambled to my feet, slipping on the plastic and rubbing my very sore head. I wondered if I had a bald patch where I’d cut my hair when I got trapped in the chute. My legs were shaking but I didn’t appear to have broken anything. I hauled myself to the top of the skip and peeped over the top. Nobody was in sight. I appeared to be in the basement of the building. I dragged myself up and over the top of the skip, losing the two middle buttons from my cardigan in the process. Letting myself hang down and preparing to drop to the ground on the other side, I thought gratefully of last summer’s tree-climbing practice.
This morning felt like a million light years ago.
I made my way across the basement and opened the heavy steel door cautiously and peered around it. Brilliant. It led directly outside, around the corner from the main entrance to Leela’s office building. I walked out into a day that had turned almost as dark as night and quickly made my way around to the front of the building, where I spotted Kylie and Ben on the corner, hiding behind a plastic and glass bus-stop shelter. Kylie waved frantically at me just as a very large and very bald security guard grabbed hold of me. He spun me around to face Leela.
‘That’s the one!’ said Leela to him. ‘She’s the daughter of a client of mine and she stole a tape from my office. Her poor mom doesn’t know what to do with her, she’s been in and out of trouble with the police for stealing since she was seven years old.’
‘That’s all total lies, I swear!’ I said to the security guard, but he didn’t appear to be listening as he was too focused on admiring the sexy lace black camisole that Leela was wearing under her now unbuttoned suit jacket.
‘She’s holding the tape in her hand,’ Leela said to him in a voice that sounded a lot more like a little girl’s than mine did.
The security guard prised open my clenched right fist, retrieved the mini-recorder with the tape still inside and handed it over to Leela.
‘Thank you, officer,’ she said, sweetly.
Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted Kylie holding up her hand to her ear in a phone sign. I knew what she was asking. Should she call Scott? I shook my head slightly. She pointed at herself and then at Leela and waited. I nodded my head slightly. Yes, she understood. I stuck out the three middle fingers on my right hand and mouthed the countdown. Kylie watched me intently and on three, she sprang into action with a speed that made the purple streak in her hair blur.
‘Owwwwww…’ yelled Leela, as a ninety pound girl-whirl pushed her with all her might so that Leela landed on her well-rounded backside on the pavement. At the same time, I pulled as hard as I could to free myself from the security guard as Ben launched himself at his ankle.
‘What the hell?’ said the security guard, as Ben’s teeth sank into a painfully fleshy part of his leg, causing the guard to release his grip on me.
‘Run, Evie!’ yelled Kylie, and, grabbing Leela’s bag from the pavement, I pulled out the recorder, tossed the bag back and legged it up the block, catching up with Kylie at the corner.
‘Ben,’ I gasped, looking back. The security guard had got hold of him by his collar and was shaking him like a rat. Ben yelped in pain and frustration.
‘We have to go back for him,’ I said, already running back.
‘Ben!’ I yelled. ‘Ben, come here, boy. You can do it.’
With a superdog effort, Ben slipped his head through his collar and ran up to me and began licking my outstretched hand. The security guard started to run towards us, calling to another guard to ‘go for the little Chinese girl’.
Kylie pulled me by my cardigan. I might as well bin that rag by this stage, I thought. The three of us headed uptown, zigzagging through the crowds, Ben acting like we were in the middle of a glorious game of chasing a cyberball.
‘TAXI!’ screamed Kylie, pointing at a yellow cab just ahead, its door open as a lady in a red bikini top with shorts stepped out. She smiled and held the door open for us. Kylie dived in first, with Ben and me on her heels.
‘77th and Central Park West, as quick as you can!’ I gasped.
‘We’re being chased,’ said Kylie, ‘by a racist pig security guard.’
The cabbie turned his turbaned head in our direction.
‘No problem,’ he said, and looking at me, he added, ‘are you ok, kid?’
‘Fine,’ I said, ‘more than fine.’
Chapter 29
As the cab made its way uptown, the long-threatened storm finally broke with a magnificent rumble of thunder and a series of dramatically streaked flashes of lightning. There were a couple of moments of eerie stillness when even the yellow taxis stopped honking their horns and then, a whooshing, crashing sound as the rain pounded down.
I pressed my face up against the misty window of the cab. This was completely different to the soft, lazy drizzle of Irish rain. This rain was so heavy that it sounded like it had murder on its mind. We stopped on the east side to drop Kylie off at her mom’s gallery.
Finally, the cab reached home. I dashed down the steps, tore past Karen sitting behind the reception desk, dripped my way down the corridor and reached the examining room, startling Joanna and Angel, the small yellow canary in her hands, which chirped and beat its little wings rapidly.
‘Where’s Scott?’ I panted.
‘Are you training for the marathon, Evie? Scott’s on his way to lunch with Leela.’
‘A special lunch,’ she added.
‘What?’ I said, horrified.
‘Evie, breathe! I didn’t mean to scare you. You should change out of that soaking dress. Apparently, Scott told Jake last night that he was going to break up with Leela today. Jake told Sidney, who told me, and she specifically asked me to tell you; she said it was important that you know.’
‘What?’ I said again, leaning back against the wall.
‘You heard me,’ said Joanna, puzzled. ‘Leela and Scott are no more, or at least, they will be no more by this afternoon.’
I stared at her with my mouth open.
‘Don’t look at me like that,’ said Joanna. ‘I’m trying hard not to be too celebratory.’
‘No, no, it’s not that,’ I said. ‘It’s … I have to go.’
‘What happened to your hair?’ asked Joanna. ‘There’s a big clump missing.’
‘Oh, em, it’s a long story. I have to go. Se
e you later,’ I said, backing out the door.
I towel-dried Ben and gave him three slices of salami from the refrigerator. Then I lifted him up, carried him into my room and began to wait for Scott. It felt like the afternoon lasted an entire weekend, the tedium broken only by texting with Kylie and Greg and by keeping Ben’s mind off the storm raging outside my window. I felt nervous about what kind of lies Leela might be telling Scott but I reminded myself over and over that I had the mini-recorder with tape intact.
At last, at around six, Ben perked up his ears, jumped off my bed and headed out the door. I quickly followed. Scott opened the front door to the apartment, set down a damp brown paper bag of food on the kitchen counter and stooped to greet Ben, scratching him behind the ears.
‘Hi,’ I said, nervously.
‘Hi,’ he said, as if nothing unusual had happened. ‘I’ve got empanadas for dinner, spicy chicken, cheese and chorizo. Take your pick.’
Together we laid out plates and forks and knives and glasses of iced water. It was maddening the way Scott kept yakking on about inconsequential things; he was finally going to fix his Harley motorbike, and he needed to order some more heartworm pills for dogs as stock was running low, and would the rains flood the entrance to the basement clinic?
‘How was your day?’ he asked, as we finished eating.
‘Um, ok,’ I said, watching him for a reaction.
He put down his napkin and said, ‘I have something to tell you.’
‘Yes,’ I said, trying not to sound too eager.
‘Leela and I broke up today. It was time.’
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘are you ok?’
He broke into a lopsided grin.
‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I think Leela and I … I think our relationship had run its course. She’ll be much happier with someone who is …’
‘Richer?’ I suggested.
‘I was going to say more like she is, but richer would help.’