Things were definitely looking up.
“I need another panic bar,” Sandra said to Dr. Lee. “In my left ear this time.”
“Miss Vanderslice, it does not work that way. There is only one spot for that anxiety, and we are utilizing it. I assure you one is sufficient.”
“I think I am noticing a difference,” she agreed eagerly. “That’s why I want another one. Because I’m not quite there yet, you know? But maybe another one would tip me over the edge.” Make me normal again, she thought, but she couldn’t voice something quite so pathetic.
Dr. Lee looked her over doubtfully, and she remembered her green hair. Did she need to explain? Nah. He probably saw weirder things than that on a daily basis.
“Miss Vanderslice, we can do another acupuncture therapy, since you’re here, but your auricular therapy is perfectly set.”
She nodded. “Okay, I understand. I was just so excited about the way this was working that I wanted more.”
He nodded, and smiled kindly. “It will continue to get better.”
He proceeded to perform another acupuncture treatment on her, and she left feeling like a million bucks. She couldn’t wait to tell Dr. Ratner. It had been a long, long time since she’d had anything good to report in the way of progress.
Finally she did.
Chapter
12
Fortunately, when Joss found the torn top of a condom wrapper on the floor, under the lip of the kitchen cabinetry, she was alone.
Now, what she was doing under there made sense—Deena Oliver had, as usual, left her dishes in the sink with detailed and painstaking instructions on how to wash each piece by hand so when she’d dropped a small sterling silver mustard spoon, she had to retrieve it—but what any kind of contraceptive evidence was there for, it was hard to imagine.
The idea that it had anything to do with the Merry Maids who came twice a week was absurd, so Joss dismissed that thought as soon as it occurred to her. And the boys had revealed that Kurt Oliver had had a vasectomy. Which left her with only one conclusion, since she knew it wasn’t herself: Deena Oliver was having an affair.
And when she’d gotten careless and left the evidence of it under her bed—or her safari vehicle, if the thong had been indicative of a theme—her first defense had been a pretty decent offense: blame the nanny. Right to her face.
Just in case push came to shove.
Heaven knew if Kurt Oliver had found them, but if he had, the elusive yet vaguely intimidating man of the house thought Joss was screwing around with some guy when the family wasn’t home.
He might have thought they were Joss’s, too.
The potential was humiliating.
But, like so many other humiliating aspects of this job, it didn’t allow for an easy way out of her contract. Getting fired would have getting sued tagged on, Deena had made that clear, so Joss could only guess that displeasing Deena by breaking the contract in any way would end in the same result.
She was stuck.
And everything Deena Oliver did made her even more aware of that uncomfortable fact.
“I don’t want you talking to my friends. It’s a bother for them to have to take the time to be polite and chat with the help,” she’d chastised one day after one of the mothers at Colin’s overly elaborate birthday party had asked Joss where the bathroom was.
“Would you go pick up Kurt’s dry cleaning? I can’t find the ticket, but don’t worry, they always know which stuff is his.” It had turned out they didn’t always know which stuff was his, or even who he was, so, after six calls back to Deena, they had finally found the brown Armani suit…only it wasn’t a brown Armani suit but a gray Prada jacket.
“Merry Maids had to cancel today because of the weather or some other nonsense. When you’re finished cooking dinner, would you please go clean the bathrooms? With this flu that’s been going around, they’re a mess.”
And then there was Joss’s most reviled interruption:
“Are you almost finished in there?” Deena had asked from outside the bathroom door one day when Joss was changing a tampon. “The boys are waiting for you.”
It was a living hell.
So Joss returned, over and over, to the quest to find Something Else To Do on her time off, and of the offerings she had found for Tuesdays, Shoe Addicts Anonymous had seemed like her best bet.
Which meant she had to get out there and get her first real look at designer footwear.
Joss wandered slowly through Something Old, a used and vintage clothing shop in Georgetown. The bus ride down had taken almost an hour, so she was going to take her time. After all, she had the whole day to kill until seven thirty, when she was going to Bethesda to the Shoe Addicts Anonymous meeting. She figured as long as she made it out of there by ten, she’d be able to catch a bus back to Connecticut Avenue in Chevy Chase, and walk the rest of the way to the Olivers’ house.
Surely by then Deena would be asleep and unlikely to request any additional work. Unless, of course, she walked in her sleep. Which, given the volume of her requests, didn’t seem out of the question.
“Can I help you find something?”
Joss turned to see a slight girl with long straight hair and the kind of billowy, flowing shirt and skirt that Joss used to call “gypsy clothes” when she was playing dress-up or getting ready to go out on Halloween.
“Thanks,” Joss said. “I was just browsing, but I was hoping to find some shoes. Like, designer shoes? Size seven and a half?”
“Designer?” The girl looked as blank as Joss felt. “I don’t know what kind of shoes we have, but they’re all over here.”
Joss followed the girl, catching a faint whiff of pot trailing behind her.
She stopped in front of a wall of shelves with shoes arranged on them like books. “This is what we have.”
“Thanks,” Joss said, spotting a price tag that read seventy-five dollars on what looked like a pair of her grandmother’s old cast-offs.
“Sure,” the girl answered faintly, and drifted back where they came from.
As soon as she was gone, Joss began digging through the shoes for something cheaper—she had to find the right price first, then she could look at the make—but there wasn’t one pair under fifty dollars. She recognized the names on some of them from her Internet research: Chanel, Gucci, Lindor. Finally she settled on a pair of slightly scuffed Salvatore Ferragamos—a name that had come up repeatedly in her research—and handed over the fifty dollars plus tax.
It was an expensive initiation into this club, but she didn’t have time to look around more. She’d figured it would be easy to find cheap designer shoes. Her mistake had been in going to a vintage shop in the most expensive part of D.C. Next time she’d go farther out, maybe to West Virginia, and find a true thrift store.
She was getting on the bus when her cell phone rang.
“Where the hell are you?” Deena snapped at her, so loudly the woman next to Joss turned and looked at her.
“I’m on a bus in Georgetown,” Joss said quietly, trying to counterbalance Deena’s volume.
It didn’t work. “What?”
“I’m in Georgetown,” Joss said, a little louder.
“Georgetown! What about your job?”
The people around Joss weren’t looking at her, but she felt like they could all hear Deena, which was embarrassing in the extreme. “The boys are in school,” she said.
“Does that mean you get the day off?”
Joss was confused. What did Deena want her to do? Sit in on their classrooms? And, if so, both? At the same time? “No, I’m going to get Bart in an hour and a half, then—”
“Get back here immediately!”
Joss’s face burned hot. The bus pulled to a stop outside one of the fussy little shops on Wisconsin Avenue, and Joss made her way off, too humiliated to continue this conversation in front of everyone. “I don’t understand,” Joss said, wincing inwardly because she knew she’d get a lashing for it. “The boys ar
en’t there, so—”
“So their laundry is! It’s piled halfway to the ceiling in Colin’s room.”
A lie. Joss had done the boys’ laundry yesterday and, as of last night, each of them had had only one day’s outfit in the hamper in the bathroom. “He must have taken clothes out of his drawers and put it on the floor instead of putting it away.” And he’d probably done it on purpose.
There was a seering silence; then Deena said, “You’re skating on thin ice, you know that?”
Why? Joss wanted to scream, but she knew there was no point. Logic didn’t work with Deena Oliver. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Oliver. I’ll be right there.”
“You’ve got fifteen minutes.”
That wasn’t possible, even given the cab Joss was already hailing. But she said, “I’ll be there.”
The driver pulled over to the curb, and Joss was opening the door when her phone rang again. She was tempted not to answer it, but it could have been anyone.
It could have been an emergency.
But it wasn’t. “Stop at the Safeway,” Deena barked before Joss even said a word. “Pick up milk and those Lean Cuisine dinners I like. That way your little excursion won’t be too big a waste of time.”
As she settled into the torn cloth seat in the back of the cab and looked at the meter, it occurred to Joss that this hour she’d spent out of the Oliver house would, when all was said, done, and paid for, have cost her about seventy-five bucks.
It was a pretty big investment in a group she wasn’t actually interested in. She could only hope it would be worth it.
Shoeho927.
It had a certain ring to it. Lorna entered a brand-new password into ebay to go with her new user name, waited for a confirmation e-mail, clicked the hyperlink and got the message, WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO FIND?
Could it be this easy?
She typed in the words Marc Jacobs.
Bingo, 450 hits in women’s shoes! She scanned the page for size 7.5 and immediately saw Bone Leather Boots NYC Marc Jacobs. She clicked the link and read the description:
Brand-new in box. Sexy leather boots feature a rounded toe, side lace-up detail, side zipper closure, and chunky stacked heel. Leather lining and insoles. Size 7.5 M. Heel 3.75”, shaft height 18”.
Oh, my.
The starting bid had been $8.99, and for a moment Lorna felt like she couldn’t breathe—$8.99 for genuine Marc Jacobs boots? They had to be fakes, or—Oh, there it was. Bidding had escalated the price considerably. It was now at $99.35. But that was still a savings of, what, five hundred bucks or so.
Worth it. So worth it. Good lord, if she needed to, she could sell them back, maybe even at a profit. She could certainly sell something else she had, if she absolutely needed to.
This was bargain shopping. The shoe-shopper’s equivalent of Sav-A-Lot Foods. She eagerly typed in $101.99 as her top bid and beamed as the screen changed and said, YOU ARE NOW THE HIGH BIDDER.
If things didn’t change, in one day, two hours, and forty-six minutes, the boots would be hers. At an amazing price. It was practically stealing, but it was legal.
Phil Carson would be proud of her.
Well, okay, Phil Carson wouldn’t exactly be proud of her. He’d probably think this was another extravagance, but he just didn’t understand. It was cheaper than therapy.
She’d maintain that to her dying day.
EBay was awesome. If she’d discovered it years ago, she probably wouldn’t have gotten into that financial mess at all.
For the rest of the afternoon, Lorna kept finding herself drawn back to the computer, clicking the REFRESH button over and over to see if she was still the high bidder. Every time she did, there she was: High bidder, Shoeho927 (0). And the time clock kept ticking down.
She couldn’t wait to tell the other shoe addicts tonight.
But just after five o’clock—with twenty-three hours and eighteen minutes left in the auction—the message on her refreshed page switched to, YOU HAVE BEEN OUTBID.
For one ugly moment, Lorna sat there, feeling like Snow White’s stepmother being told, “You’re okay, Your Highness, but frankly someone better has come along.”
Who had outbid her?
Lorna scanned the page—she was quickly becoming an eBay expert—and saw that the new high bidder was Shoegarpie (0). The zero in parentheses, Lorna had learned, was for new users who didn’t yet have feedback from other users.
So she’d been outbid by a newbie! Never mind that she was a newbie herself, the sight of Shoegarpie (0) really ticked her off. Especially since the bid that trumped her was $104.49.
A piddly two dollars and fifty cents higher than her own bid.
Without thinking too much about it, she raised her bid. $104.56. A nice, weird number. If her anonymous opponent had bid $104.50—as most people would—she’d beat her by six cents. Ha! Take that Shoegarpie! And take your (0), too!
But instead of the blue YOU ARE NOW THE HIGH BIDDER message she’d been hoping for, Lorna got a dirt brown YOU HAVE BEEN OUTBID.
Shoegarpie!
A competitiveness she didn’t know she possessed took over Lorna, and she put in her maximum bid at $153.37, still feeling like odd numbers would work for her.
And they did. She immediately got the YOU ARE THE HIGH BIDDER message and, with a satisfied nod, left the computer—on—to get ready for her guests.
As before, Helene was the first to arrive, dressed impeccably in an olive green linen suit that made her look positively vibrant. Her shoes were leather strappy sandals, in a green so deep, it was almost black.
“Prada,” Helene said, in answer to Lorna’s unasked question.
“Amazing.”
“New.” Helene smiled. “You may see them on the table in a few weeks.”
Lorna laughed. “I certainly hope so.”
Carrying on the green theme, Sandra arrived next, with startling green hair. Not that it was neon or anything—it was enough that it was green. And absolutely fried.
“I know,” she said, before Helene or Lorna could comment. Not that they would. “I had a little mishap with some home hair coloring.”
“My girl Denise could fix that right up,” Helene volunteered immediately. “She’s at Bogies, right on the northern end of Georgetown. I can give you her number….”
“Thanks,” Sandra said. “But this,” she gestured at her head, “is apparently how I have to look for a month if I don’t want to be bald. And, believe me, I’ve weighed the options. Green for a month versus growing out for two years…unless you can point out something I’m not seeing, I’m going with green.”
“I guess there is a danger of your hair breaking if you process it too much,” Helene said, nodding. “But when you’re ready, make sure you give Denise a buzz. She works miracles.”
And looking at her gorgeous auburn hair, with a cut so perfect that no matter which way she turned it fell in flattering layers, who wouldn’t take the chance to go to the same stylist?
If Lorna hadn’t just committed more than a hundred and fifty bucks to a pair of boots—she was beginning to have a little buyer’s remorse on that one, and was hoping Shoegarpie had outbid her while she wasn’t online—she would have made an appointment herself.
After a quarter of an hour or so, there was a knock at the door. Everyone looked to Lorna.
“I forgot to mention we have someone new coming tonight,” she said. “Jocelyn.”
“I hope she stays longer than last week’s addition,” Helene said, then explained to Sandra about the man/woman who had taken one look in the open door and had fled wordlessly. “We attract some weirdos,” she concluded. “I mean, apparently we’re weirdos, but that attracts even scarier weirdos.”
Fortunately, that didn’t appear to be the case this week, Lorna thought as she opened the door to a young woman with the fresh-scrubbed shiny-brunette good looks of the All-American Girl Next Door.
“Hi,” the girl said, her looks made all the more charming by a slightly crooked s
mile. “I’m Joss Bowen.” She held up a Pier 1 shopping bag. “I’m here for the shoe addiction thing?…” She followed Lorna’s gaze to the bag and quickly added, “Don’t worry, they’re not made of wicker. This was the only bag I could find.”
They both laughed, and Lorna, remembering her manners just a little late, stepped back and ushered her in, making introductions and explaining Sandra’s hair issue so that Sandra didn’t have to tell the story again.
Despite the fact that she was about ten years younger than the others, Joss fit right in, and they passed the evening gabbing away about their lives, loves, and jobs. Joss worked as a nanny for the Oliver family. Lorna had bought a car at Oliver Ford once—before they’d gone highfalutin and started selling only German “motorcars”—and had been so disgusted with the high-pressure salesman and total lack of support when she had mechanical problems that the very name Oliver made her shudder. She wasn’t surprised to learn that the Olivers themselves were as obnoxious as their sales staff.
“Why don’t you quit?” Lorna asked, though it had to be admitted that was pretty much her solution to any and all work woes. That was why she was working at Jico instead of, say, an office where she could use the English degree she’d gotten from the University of Maryland. “I bet there are hundreds of people in this area looking for a good nanny.”
“I’ve got a contract,” Joss said, the weight of her signature on that contract clear in her eyes.
“Break it!” Okay, so maybe Lorna wasn’t the best one to be dispensing work advice. It was better, only a little, than her giving financial advice, but it was still inappropriate.
Fortunately, clearer heads prevailed, in the form of Sandra and Helene.
“How much longer do you have on your contract?” Sandra asked.
“Nine months. Four days.” Joss smiled. “And about three and a half hours.”
“Have you shown the contract to a lawyer?” Helene asked. “Perhaps see if there’s a loophole that could get you out? I’m guessing cleaning and grocery shopping, and working after hours aren’t in your job description, so that might be your ticket right there.”
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