Once Bitten - Clare Willis

by Unknown

“We need to be sure we got a team over here that’s gonna run our ball into the end zone, if you know what I mean.” Barry pointed his open palm at Dick in a “now it’s your turn” gesture.

  Dick cleared his throat and straightened some papers that were already straight. “Angie, after some discussion with Barry this morning, we’ve decided that Kimberley is going to manage the Tangento account, with your assistance. We’ve just been discussing some of the particulars.”

  On Thursday Dick had told me that Kimberley couldn’t handle Tangento. Now it seemed Kimberley had blackmailed Barry into making her the manager of his account. But was Dick in on it too?

  “Well, that seems logical,” I said, deciding to play along. “After all, Kimberley is the one most familiar with the account at this point. I’ll be happy to assist her.”

  Dick nodded, drumming his fingers on the table. “Kimberley brought some of the materials. She was just going to bring us all up to speed. Kimberley?”

  Kimberley passed me a folder embossed with the HFB logo, a duplicate of the ones everyone else already had in front of them. I opened it and saw it contained graphs and pie charts assembled from the focus group information that I had seen in Lucy’s Tangento file.

  Kimberley spoke in a high, clear voice. “The last time we met with Barry, we presented the findings from our focus groups, namely that 65% of the people are not familiar with the Tangento name. On the other hand, 78% were familiar with Mercury sports apparel and 28% had purchased a pair of Proteus athletic shoes in the past three years. While only 15% had purchased an item from the Venus line of ladies undergarments, 60% of women were familiar with the brand and had a positive opinion.”

  Barry nodded and winked at me.

  “In our preliminary meetings we discussed Tangento’s desire for an umbrella campaign such as the ones currently being run by Pacific Electric, Apex Industries, and many drug companies. The goal of the advertising would not be to sell a particular product line, but to increase familiarity with Tangento’s range of products and to develop positive associations with the Tangento brand in the mind of the consumer.”

  Kimberley pursed her lips. “You may be aware, Angie, that there has been some negative press associated with Tangento in Southeast Asia.”

  I looked over at Barry, trying to read his expression. When I asked him on Friday he had claimed to know nothing.

  “We all know these are gross misrepresentations of the facts, perpetrated by muckraking journalists who hate big companies.” Barry said this calmly and we all nodded like we knew it was the truth.

  Kimberley shuffled her stack of charts. “The story had already broken in several newspapers when we were doing the last of our focus groups, so we were able to assess the impact.”

  That hadn’t been in the folder Kimberley gave me. She must have been withholding the information until now.

  “It never appeared on the front page of any American newspaper; it was always relegated to the World news section, which it appears no one reads.” Kimberley smiled brightly to show what a lucky break this was. “Only 12% of our focus group members were aware of the articles.”

  Barry said, “So as long as none of these rabblerousing groups get their hands on the story we’ll be all right. Our PR department has advised us to deal directly with the stories if they get enough ink, such as issuing press releases rebutting the accusations, but otherwise to continue as if nothing had happened. Let a sleepin’ dog lay, my mama always said.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, “since I just came on to the team, I hope you’ll forgive me if I have to ask you to bring me up to speed on what exactly the negative publicity is about.” Even though I thought I knew, I wanted to hear it from one of them. I looked at Kimberley as the most likely one to answer the question. She fidgeted and stole a look at Barry.

  Barry coughed into his hand. “Angie, Tangento is a big company. Sometimes the right hand don’t know what the left one is doing. It seems that there were some of our contractors in Southeast Asia were using labor that wasn’t exactly voluntary. I stress the word ‘contractor.’ We’re moving to disassociate ourselves from those plants, in fact it’s probably already been done.” He brushed his hands together to indicate a fait accompli.

  Steve had told me once from his neurolinguistic programming training that people will often look up when they are lying, as if trying to find the source of their inventions in the sky. I hoped Barry would do something obvious to show me that he knew more than he was telling, but his gaze was steady and his hands didn’t fidget. Either he was telling the truth and this was all he knew about Tangento’s troubles, or he was a practiced liar.

  “So that means we’re going to move on developing the ads for the campaign.” Kimberley was back in presentation mode. “The only difference is that instead of trying to identify Tangento with the names of all of its subsidiaries, we’ll conduct a campaign aimed at raising the general positive association with the Tangento brand.”

  Barry leaned forward eagerly. “You know this song?” In a strong tenor he sang a jingle about a certain chemical company that had been flooding the airwaves. I knew every word, as I was sure everyone at the table did. The song was like a dental filling, once they’d drilled it into your head it wasn’t going anywhere.

  “That’s what we want. A catchy ditty that people will sing in the shower.” Barry looked at his watch, a gold Rolex with a face the size of a hamburger. “I’m afraid I’ve got to be leaving soon. Do we have all our ducks in a row?”

  Kimberley looked momentarily annoyed, but regained her composure quickly. “Yes, I think so, Barry. Our next meeting will be to deliver some options for you in terms of slogans and songs.”

  Barry patted me on the back. “Glad to have you on the team, Angie. I think this is going to work out great for us all.” He stood up and shook hands all around. After he left the room seemed twice as large.

  Dick stood up. “It looks like you’ve got this well under control. The next step is to reconnoiter with Creative and begin work on those slogans. Put Web Northrup on it today, will you, Kimberley?”

  Kimberley smiled. “Already in the works, Dick. Angie, are you coming?”

  “You go ahead, Kimberley,” I answered. “I’d like to talk to Dick about the Unicorn account. Something’s come up.”

  “Fine. I’ll catch up with you later, Angie. Maybe we can do lunch.”

  I closed the door after Kimberley left, then sat down.

  “Is there a problem with Unicorn?” Dick asked.

  “No, Dick, I just wanted to ask what was going on here this morning. Quite an about-face from last week, when you were begging me to take Tangento.”

  Dick rubbed his face, making it even redder. “Tangento is a high-profile company for us, and we want to keep the client satisfied. Barry was simply relaying the desires of his higher-ups at Tangento that, in order to maintain continuity, Kimberley must manage the account.”

  Dick wasn’t about to let any cats out of the bag, so I expressed hopefully convincing delight about the direction everything was going in, and said good-bye.

  Between my office and Dick’s I was surprised to find Barry, leaning with one arm against the wall, taking up half the hallway. I walked around to see who he was talking to and saw Lakshmi Roy, practically hidden under his arm, laughing uproariously at some joke he had just told.

  “Hi Barry,” I said. “I thought you were in a hurry to get somewhere.”

  “Well, I was, Angie,” Barry answered without looking at me, “but then I ran into this exotic flower in the hall and plumb forgot where I was going.”

  Lakshmi giggled, a sound I’d never heard from her before.

  “Well, don’t let me interrupt you,” I said.

  After returning to my office I turned off the overhead lights, gulped four Tylenol straight and put my head down on my desk. I was massaging my temples when Theresa called from the reception area.

  “Hello Angie, I just wanted to let you know that Lucy’s sist
er is here. Mary from HR brought her over to meet you.”

  “Thanks, I’ll be right out.”

  As I turned the corner I was stopped in my tracks by a vision of Lucy come back from the dead. Even though I knew it was Lucy’s sister, I still felt a wave of shock from seeing her standing there with Theresa just as I’d seen Lucy almost every day for the past two years.

  Up close it was obvious that Morgan Weston was not Lucy’s twin. They had the same tall, reed thin body and heart-shaped face. They both had straight brown hair, but Lucy’s had been cut in a chin-length bob and highlighted with blond while Morgan’s was cut short. Lucy had worn stylish black-rimmed glasses. Morgan wore no glasses, no makeup, no adornments whatsoever. She looked reliable, honest, and very midwestern.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Morgan.” I found her handshake firm and warm. “I’m sorry it had to be under these circumstances and I’m very sorry for your loss.”

  I wished there were better words to use than these old chestnuts, but I don’t suppose it really matters what you say. All the words in the dictionary won’t bring back a loved one.

  Morgan said, “Thank you, Angie. God has her now, and she’s in a better place.”

  Mary from HR, a heavyset, middle-aged woman with the stern face of a middle school teacher, nodded sagely. “Are you ready to go to her office now?”

  A few minutes later Morgan and I were alone in Lucy’s office, Mary having been called away on some HR emergency. I was relieved when Morgan started talking.

  “Lucy and I hadn’t seen very much of each other since she moved away from St. Louis. She was so busy she often didn’t come back for holidays. Our mom has MS and has lived in a nursing home since my father died. She’s really broken up about this, of course, she wanted to come herself but she just couldn’t make it onto the airplane. I’m going to bring Lucy home so that we can have a funeral for her there. I guess I’m going to have to wait for a while until they release the body.” Her lips pressed together and tears welled up in her eyes.

  I responded, “Well, there are keys to Lucy’s house. I’ll be happy to tell you where they are, or go over there with you and help you pack things up, if that’s what you want to do.”

  Morgan’s glance took in all of Lucy’s office. “The police tell me they’re looking for someone who works here. Les Banks, I think his name was. They say he and Lucy were dating. I guess it was some kind of lover’s quarrel.”

  So the police hadn’t told her anything about the vampire angle, and she hadn’t read the newspapers, which made sense since she’d just come into town.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s what they say.” I caught myself fidgeting and picking my fingernails. I wanted to get out of Lucy’s office ASAP. “Would you like to start packing things up?” Mary had sent some boxes, which were stacked in the middle of the room.

  “That’s a good idea,” Morgan sighed.

  But when it came to actually packing Morgan sat like a lump watching me as I put things into boxes. Three coffee cups with logos from various conferences. A makeup bag filled with cosmetics. Several bottles of vitamins and aspirin. Morgan pointed to a framed collage of pictures of Lucy with various members of her family at a ski resort. As I handed it over my hand brushed Morgan’s.

  Suddenly there was a flash of light, and I heard Morgan’s voice in my head.

  Chapter 19

  Oh God, this is so like Lucy. She was always a troublemaker, always making Mom suffer. It’s like she planned this to make it as difficult as possible for us!

  I looked up at Morgan, who was blowing her nose into a tissue. “Uh, Morgan, did you say something to me?”

  “No, I was just blowing my nose.”

  The situation was too close to what had happened with my mother to be coincidence. I picked up a small glass vase and asked Morgan if she could read the inscription on it. As I handed it to her I made sure that my hand touched hers.

  I wonder how soon they’ll let me close out her checking account?

  I swept a carved granite paperweight and a Dilbert desk calendar into the box. I wanted to touch Morgan again and test my theory and I also wanted to run out of the room and never come back. The concept that I might be able to read people’s minds was both intriguing and repulsive. It was like the Midas touch, where everything Midas touched turned to gold. At first it seemed like a lucky break, until he turned his beloved wife into a golden statue.

  Then my confusion was magnified by a faint perfume that I began to notice in the air. Like a bloodhound chasing prey, I sniffed around the room without a care as to whether Morgan was noticing. The odor was coming from a green wool cardigan that Lucy often wore, now lying over the back of her chair. I put the sweater to my face. Faint as it was, it was unmistakable. The smell was Eric. Both my knees and brain turned to jelly as I sank into a reverie of longing, tempered only slightly by the fact that this odor meant that the vision I’d received from Eric was a fact, that he had embraced Lucy at some point in the not-so-distant past.

  Morgan coughed loudly. When I looked up she was staring at me, obviously wondering why I was caressing her sister’s sweater. I quickly thought up a lie. “Morgan, this is my sweater. Lucy borrowed it from me. I’m going to take it back, if that’s all right with you?”

  “Sure, no problem,” Morgan said, still eyeing me warily.

  As if she’d decided she wanted to get away from me as soon as possible, Morgan began helping to pack Lucy’s things. We finished quickly and I avoided touching her while we were doing it. As we said good-bye in the front lobby, she held out her hand to shake. I took a deep breath and grabbed her hand.

  I heard San Francisco was full of weirdos but you take the cake.

  When I was back in my office I closed the door behind me, wishing I could lock it. I sat down and put my face into Lucy’s sweater. The vision of Eric and Lucy in an embrace floated back into my head. I pushed it out in order to think about what had just happened with Morgan.

  If I used Nicolai’s information to analyze the situation, it was the vampire gene that was causing me to read minds. But why just my mom and Morgan? Why hadn’t I known about Lakshmi getting married, or Kimberley’s nefarious plot to take over Tangento? It had to be because Morgan had the vampire gene, as did my mother. That probably meant Lucy also had the vampire gene. Eric had been converting Lucy, the same way he was now converting me. She had broken up with Les to be with Eric. But she had died before she had a chance, and Eric had moved on to Bachelorette Number Two.

  It now made sense why Suleiman and Moravia had said they didn’t like Lucy’s concepts for their campaign. They were working for Eric (and that was probably where the money for their ad campaign was coming from). They had deliberately said those things in order to get me to come to the club so that Eric could get his hooks (or more accurately, fangs) into me.

  But what did he want me for? Oh, I wanted to believe that it was love, but the clinch with Lucy cast an awful lot of doubt on that theory. Could he have been in love with Lucy? One possible scenario was that Lucy had been Eric’s first choice to be his companion for life, but she had accidentally died in the conversion, as Nicolai warned might happen. An unfortunate event, no harm intended. The other one was that Eric had meant to kill Lucy, and been successful. Neither of these scenarios boded well for me.

  There were only a few possible outcomes to the journey I was on now. I could allow myself to be converted and become Eric’s companion for however long our lifespans ran, if Nicolai was right and that was what he wanted. In doing that I could be with the man to whom I was becoming increasingly (alarmingly) attached. I tried not to think about the other, more selfish perks, such as reading my client’s minds and giving them the ad campaigns they’d always hoped for, thereby becoming HFB’s star employee, or even starting acting again, reading the casting director’s mind for the exact kind of performance they wanted. But if I chose this I would have to live as a vampire, not the nicest choice of lifestyle for a perennial Girl Scout lik
e myself. I couldn’t imagine spending years on end hugging the fringes of human society, a parasite and a pariah, slinking around in the dark…

  Or I could just die, like Lucy.

  There was, however, one other choice. It was the one Nicolai the vampire hunter had begged me not to contemplate. I could kill the vampire before he killed me.

  I walked through the office like a zombie, not noticing if I passed anyone on my way. I was already at the parking lot before I remembered I hadn’t brought my car. I went around the corner to the Fairmont Hotel. Under an ornate porte cochere, a bellman dressed as an English Beefeater was holding a cab for a fat couple wearing sweatshirts that read: “I got locked up in Alcatraz.”

  I pushed in front of them and said to the bellman, “I need this cab. I’m pregnant and I think I’m having a miscarriage.”

  The couple backed away in horror and the bellman held my arm as he put me into the cab. I gave the taxi driver, who happened to be a middle-aged woman with a crew cut and a cigarette dangling out of her mouth, the address of Nicolai’s apartment. Through the haze of smoke she looked at me in the rearview mirror.

  “Don’t you want to go to the hospital?” she asked.

  I smiled apologetically. “I lied.”

  The driver shrugged her shoulders. “It’s all right. I don’t like tourists anyway. Are you going to score? Can you get me something?”

  I was about to be offended by her assumption that I was on my way to buy drugs, but then I thought about it. I looked like death warmed over, I was pushing in front of people to get a cab, and then wanted to be taken to an address in the Mission District that was on the corner of Heroin Street and Meth Avenue. All right, she had her reasons.

  “I don’t think you want any of what I’m going to get,” I replied.

  “Be that way.” We drove in silence the rest of the way. When we arrived at Nicolai’s apartment I gave her a ten-dollar bill.

  “Good luck,” she said, deadpan.