Amy Keaton was number one on her list of people to contact today. Lacey tried her number. No answer. It was early, probably too early for theatre folk. Lacey tapped the picture on her desk. What did Keaton’s desire for this dress have to do with LaToya’s break-in?
Not for one moment did Lacey think that Amy Keaton could pull off a completely silent breaking-and-entering operation, not to mention the weird silent wardrobe tableau someone had left for LaToya’s edification. Nor did she seem the type to know someone who would or could commit that kind of crime. The theatre world was about the illusion of action, not actual action. Wasn’t it?
On the other hand, Keaton did not act in the theatre, or even run the lights and sound, direct, design sets, or create costumes. She had said she was a stage manager, maybe with some vague additional duties. Lacey called again and this time left a message requesting a call back.
Lacey rubbed her still-chilled neck. Trouble was heading her way, she could feel it. She looked up. Harlan Wiedemeyer, The Eye’s death-and-dismemberment beat reporter, was bearing down on her. The stranger and more bizarre the story, the happier he would be. But this morning, he was far from happy.
“Smithsonian.” His round face was pinched in misery. “We need to talk.”
Lacey slipped Hansen’s photo into her top desk drawer.
No sense in leaving potential blackmail material lying around.
CHAPTER 8
Harlan Wiedemeyer would normally be flirting with his fiancée, food editor Felicity Pickles, whose desk was across the aisle from Lacey’s. But she was nowhere to be seen, and Wiedemeyer slumped over the divider of Lacey’s cubicle.
“It’s a bad news day today, Smithsonian. It’s no good. Very bad. I feel it in my bones.”
“This is a story you’re working on, Harlan? This no good, very bad thing?” She waited for one of Wiedemeyer’s usual news items, like a crazy murder or a worker ground up in a sausage factory.
“It’s my story! Marriage, alleged connubial bliss. The truth is, I don’t know about this marriage stuff, Smithsonian. Maybe it’s not for me. I’m a jinx! Did you know? Bad things happen around me. How can I do this to my beloved Felicity?”
Wiedemeyer was in the midst of a panic attack about his impending marriage to Felicity, and the office A/C was freezing cold. Lacey could check those off her list of things to expect today.
“Did something happen, Harlan?” He nodded miserably.
“A tree. It fell on someone’s car. Because of something I said. It was just a joke, but I said it, and a tree fell on his car. It’s all my fault.”
“Was anyone in the car?”
“No. Thank God.”
“Did you chop down the tree, Harlan?”
He shook his head in sorrow. “It was dead. Wind blew it down.”
“Did you make the storm happen, Harlan?”
“Maybe.”
“Harlan. You are not a jinx. You don’t conjure up tempests. You didn’t make the tree fall on the car. These things just happen. Besides, even if, uh, certain things happen, the way they’ve happened in the past, they only happen that way that once. Right?” She knew this logic was faulty even as she said it, but maybe Wiedemeyer would buy it.
“So you say.” He wasn’t buying it. “What about what I almost did to you?”
“It was lightning, Harlan. Not you. And it only happened once. Bad things happen every day to everybody. Lightning striking a giant neon Krispy Kreme doughnut sign could happen to, well, anyone.” She paused. She knew they were both reliving the fateful moment.
The day she met Harlan Wiedemeyer, Lacey barely escaped death by doughnut sign. He had insisted on giving her a ride home from the office, because there was a downpour. He also insisted on detouring to the Krispy Kreme doughnut shop near her apartment building. Harlan loved doughnuts. As he and Lacey emerged from his Volvo, a lightning bolt hit the illuminated two-story doughnut sign and sent it crashing down onto his car, barely missing them.
“You told me that day you were not a jinx,” Lacey pointed out.
“I know, I know. I didn’t want to believe it.” He cradled his head in his hands. “But what if I am? What if I’m some genetic anomaly of doom? A harbinger of disaster?”
He was clearly thinking of other incidents said to be jinx-related. When Wiedemeyer first came to The Eye, he had lit up at the sight of Felicity Pickles hoisting a tray of tarts. There were sparks between them, shy, awkward sparks, but sparks nonetheless. Shortly thereafter, her minivan was blown up by a bomb meant for Lacey. A former editor got into a tiff with Wiedemeyer and was later found dead with a bullet hole in his head. Wiedemeyer wasn’t the killer, but he and Lacey found the cold dead body. There was more.
“What exactly are you worried about, Harlan?”
“Our children.”
“Children?” Oh my God. Are there children I don’t know about?
“The children we haven’t had yet.” He hung his head in remorse. “What if I jinx them? What if they hate me?”
“You’re just borrowing trouble,” Lacey said. “Children always hate their parents. They get over it.”
Wiedemeyer looked up. He mopped his sweating brow and his eyes got misty. “I wouldn’t hurt Felicity Junior and Little Harlan for the world.”
“Did you say Felicity Junior and Little Harlan?” Lacey tried to keep her face straight.
“They haven’t been born yet, but we have plans. I can see them now.”
So can I. Oh, the horror. “Harlan, chill. These are pre-wedding nerves. Everyone gets them.” Lacey felt as if the Wiedemeyer-Pickles nuptials had been the topic of newsroom chatter forever. The wait was endless.
“I suppose. But how many poor bastards have nearly died, or actually died, because of me?”
“No one! No poor bastards have died because of you. You didn’t cause the lightning that struck that sign. You didn’t fire the gun that killed Walt Pojack.”
“Maybe I’ve got some kind of force field or exotic chemistry that just, I don’t know, makes bad things happen.”
“You told me you were one lucky bastard.”
“I did, didn’t I?” Harlan plopped down in the infamous Death Chair decorated with skull graffiti, so named because the former fashion editor Mariah “the Pariah” Morgan had died in it. Lacey kept trying to ditch the stupid chair, but it always made its way home to her cubicle. “I am a lucky bastard. Felicity. The Eye. My friends. My band. I have a great life. But what about all those other poor bastards who come in contact with me? Those poor saps. They never saw me coming. Like that poor bastard with the car and the tree.”
This isn’t getting any better. “Hey, where’s Felicity?” Lacey said brightly, hoping she could take this crisis off her hands.
“I don’t know.” His expression was tragic, yet comic.
Lacey’s frenemy on the food beat was nowhere to be seen. Lacey found Felicity’s relentless drive to overfeed everyone in the newsroom and make them her salivating slaves annoying—but other people adored her. The Eye’s Pavlovian dogs panted with anticipation for her daily food fest, supposedly prepared for the weekly food section, and whenever Felicity’s fattening food bombs went missing, there was sorrow in the land. Right now even Lacey would have been thrilled to see her hove into view. Harlan slumped down deep in the Death Chair. Lacey grabbed her coffee mug and stood up.
“I need some bad java. At least it’s hot.”
He looked up at her sadly. “That stuff will kill you. And it’ll be my fault.”
THE NEWSROOM KITCHEN was empty. Sometimes Felicity used the full kitchen on the sixth floor, where the executive offices were located and executives were rarely seen working. Lacey rode the elevator up and discovered the entire floor seemingly abandoned. Not even a receptionist in sight. The office where Walt Pojack had been found with a bullet hole in his head remained conspicuously unoccupied. Publisher Claudia Darnell hadn’t arrived yet. Lacey realized she’d seldom been upstairs this early. Perhaps executives started t
heir day at noon, she thought, instead of the plebian morning hours they kept down in the newsroom. It was warmer upstairs, too.
Lacey rode the elevator back down to the third floor and finally spotted Felicity, efficiently putting another quiche on a platter in the newsroom’s small staff kitchen. The thirty-something food editor wore a shapeless pink dress and a matching pink sweater with embroidered pink roses, a sort of “grandma-chic” look. All that pink highlighted her chubby-cheeked, demented-doll look, as did her long chestnut hair, creamy skin, and round blue eyes. Felicity marched to a different fashion drummer than the rest of the reporting staff. Together, Pickles and Wiedemeyer looked like a pair of well-fed Kewpie dolls. Lacey thought they suited each other, in a weird way, and they obviously suited no one else. It was imperative, she decided, that they work out this bump in the road to the altar.
Lacey had introduced Felicity to Harlan, her true love. She had helped Felicity out of a jam in which she was the prime suspect in an assault on an editorial writer. She’d also helped Felicity shop for her wedding gown, a uniquely unpleasant experience. Felicity returned these favors by asking Lacey to be a bridesmaid at her wedding. Lacey suspected they were equally appalled at this prospect. Felicity didn’t really like Lacey, the feeling was mutual, and Lacey shuddered at the thought of wearing some ghastly bridesmaid’s get-up, which she had not yet even seen, to what was sure to be the tackiest wedding of the season.
No good deed goes unpunished.
The bride-to-be ordered the attendants’ dresses online, and she said the wedding style was a Big Surprise and she didn’t want to spoil it prematurely, so everyone would just have to wait. Lacey could only imagine the awfulness of such a dress. Right now, however, she couldn’t be happier to see the resident cookie baker.
“Felicity! You’re just in time. Harlan is looking for you. He’s at my desk. He’s feeling a little, well, blue. Why don’t you go cheer him up?”
She turned to Lacey, her eyes brimming with tears. “Oh Lacey! I don’t know what’s going on with Harlan. He’s having cold feet, we had a big fight, and the wedding is next month!”
Naturally. A July wedding in Washington, D.C., so the entire wedding party will melt in the heat and humidity. But at least their feet will be warm.
“Why? What’s going on with you two?”
“Nothing really. Just the tree thing.”
“The tree thing?” Lacey filled her coffee cup and waited.
“Remember the big storm that went through D.C. late Friday night?”
“Sort of.” Lacey didn’t, she lived across the Potomac in Virginia, but she nodded.
“Harlan picked me up at my apartment. As we were leaving, he said something about my landlord, George, who lives upstairs. George is raising my rent again and Harlan said something about how maybe a tree should fall on him. He was just joking, of course, but just then the storm picked up and as we pulled away, this big oak tree fell on George’s car.”
“Your landlord’s car?” At least it wasn’t a Krispy Kreme sign. “Was lightning involved?”
“I don’t know.” Felicity wiped her eyes. “I think the tree was just dead. And the wind was awful. Did he tell you about that?”
“Listen, Felicity, these things happen.” Although they seem to happen more often around Harlan Wiedemeyer.
“That’s what I told him. Right? But what can I do?”
“What you always do, Felicity. What you do best. Feed him. Love him. Take good care of him. And please feed Mac while you’re at it. Or else it’s going to be a grueling week here.”
“Oh Lacey. You’re so right. It’s my duty.” Felicity squared her shoulders and picked up the plate of quiche. “I can do this. I’m on it.”
“You go, girl. By the way, Detective Lamont enjoyed your quiche.”
“What? Why didn’t you tell me he was here? Are you in trouble again? What have you done now?”
“Nothing! I have done nothing.” Lacey felt her hackles rise.
“Really?” Felicity had a wicked Resting Bitch Face. “Detective Lamont only comes around here when you’re in trouble.”
“Except when you’re the suspect. Like last Christmas. Attempted murder, remember?”
Meow.
Felicity’s eyes went wide. She opened her mouth to speak, decided against it, and flounced out with her quiche to save the world.
Lacey drained her cup and poured herself the dregs from the pot. It was going to be a long week at The Eye.
And she was still freezing.
Lacey Smithsonian’s FASHION BITES
Summer Style Challenge: Sweltering Outside, Shivering Inside
Are these steamy summer days and nights playing havoc with your style? Of course they are. Washington’s heat and humidity coat your skin with sweat, transform your clothes into a limp mess, and explode your hair into frizz. A summer rain soaks even the most carefully curated outfit. You lost your umbrella on the Metro. Fun times.
As if that’s not bad enough, your workplace is ruining your attempt to enjoy sleeveless dresses and sandals and hot-day friendly hairdos. Not with their office dress code. No, they do it with that evil must-not-be-touched thermostat and A/C that would frost a polar bear.
The moment you step into the humidity outside, you melt into layers of wrinkles and soggy cotton. Then you return to the germ-infested icicle zone in your office, where you shiver in the air conditioning, which is blowing out of the vent above your head and whistling down the back of your neck. Hello, summer cold and flu.
Did you know that most offices’ temperatures are set for the comfort of men wearing suits, not women in their summer dresses? You aren’t surprised? Of course not. It is the eternal male-female struggle over climate control. The men who control the climate are comfortable and, if they aren’t, they can at least take off their jackets. And the women? Women suffer.
This is the curse of the modern, environmentally controlled workplace under the thumb of some petty office despot wielding the power of the thermostat dial. Some companies call him “the building engineer.” I call him “the devil.” He laughs at your discomfort. He doesn’t care about global warming. He just cranks up the cool another notch. Does the same devil run your office’s climate control? Here are some test questions.
Is your nose red from the cold and freezing to the touch? Your hands too stiff to type?
Do you run to the restroom just to run hot water over your frigid fingers?
Must you flee at lunchtime to a sidewalk café just to warm up, despite the noise, the humidity, the diesel exhaust, and the UV rays?
Have you sneaked a small portable heater under your desk, in flagrant violation of your office’s draconian policies against Personal Warming Devices?
Then yes, your office is too frigid for women to work comfortably. No one wants to wear winter woolies when the outside temperature soars past ninety degrees and the humidity is ninety-nine percent. But you can’t do anything about the weather outside, and your employer refuses to adjust the weather inside. What to do? Plan your strategy.
Have a light yet warm wrap on hand, a jacket, a sweater, a shawl, or a large scarf. Keep one in the office in a color that will go with most of your summer clothes. I suggest black, white, navy or even red. Ditto for a cardigan sweater, if that’s your style. My vote is for the easy-to-carry shawl or scarf, which can be folded up or even tied around your tote bag when you’re outside. It’s handy when you enter a chilly restaurant or shop on your lunch break in a frigid mall.
A pair of closed-toed shoes under your desk for when your feet are freezing. Fleecy Ugg boots? Fluffy bunny slippers to slide those frozen toes into? Comfort vs. style? Your call.
Fingerless gloves, a la Bob Cratchit. These are sometimes necessary in the frostier offices just to be able to type (or scrawl ledger entries with a quill pen, like Mr. Cratchit). Can’t find them? Find your scissors and snip the fingers out of a pair of old cloth gloves, or find a pair of fingerless athletic gloves. Believe me, they wo
rk.
The cozy heater under the desk. I’m sure those are allowed in your office, right? Oh, they’re not? Go rogue. The choice may come down to policy or pleurisy. Your decision.
Hats! A little extreme to wear in the office, but they do send a message that you are seriously cold. Even better, encourage all your female coworkers to wear hats and gloves to shame your management. (As if shaming them were even possible.) And if nothing else works, coming to work in the summer heat looking like a homeless waif out of Charles Dickens in the dead of winter may embarrass your bosses. Maybe they’ll finally give you a little heat.
The good kind.
CHAPTER 9
The Eye’s in-house online archive contained brief summaries of three articles about that legendary production of The Masque of the Red Death. Long before current publisher Claudia Darnell bought the paper, it had begun as a slightly disreputable arts and entertainment weekly, and nothing had been too sensational for it to cover. A lurid death at a local theatre? The Eye had been all over it. But no one had scanned these old paper weeklies into the digital database.
Lacey headed up to the paper’s library, where the hard copies resided in embossed leather binders and might have additional information that hadn’t made it into the online archive. And it would get her out of the newsroom and the tension of the Pickles-Wiedemeyer pickle.
The library was on the fourth floor overlooking Farragut Square. Some decorator had been turned loose and ditched the newsroom’s soothing green color scheme for stark gray and black. Through the glass doors the padded armchairs looked inviting, and most were occupied. But the space would have been nicer without the carpet’s dizzying pattern of swirls in black on gray.
The serenity was punctuated by the occasional snore of reporters on break, hiding away in the magazine alcove. A sports reporter was slumped in his chair, head back, mouth open. Lacey saw a female production assistant asleep, head down, a magazine on her chest. Obviously not a scintillating issue. The library was so cold Lacey could practically see her breath, but the chill wasn’t keeping these people awake.
The Masque of the Red Dress Page 7