by Maia Ross
Jaydyn drops her death stare at Douglas and turns her icy gaze to me. It bounces off me like I’m wearing a forcefield. I smile at her.
“Douglas is getting Bailey’s presents this year,” Jaydyn says, “I’ve been so busy with other things. You know how it is.”
“Mmmhm,” Douglas says, bent over his papers. The expression on his face says he doesn’t even know what day it is. He might not even know it’s Christmas, for heaven’s sake.
“Douglas.” Jaydyn growls a little when saying his name this time. There’s a cloud of tension in the room now, not that Douglas would notice.
He looks up, then glances around the room, like he can’t quite figure out where he is. Jaydyn cuts a length of handmade ribbon, her oversized scissors catching the light and glinting. Shink. “You were supposed to pay for our gala tickets. Darling.”
“I did.” He blinks.
“Then why is Irma saying she doesn’t have it?”
“I wrote the cheque,” he protests, “and Harriet dropped it off.”
“HARRIET!” Jaydyn shrieks. She stands and drops her scissors, which lodge in the thick pile of their $250 a yard beige bespoke carpet.
Feet come running down the hallway and Harriet’s head pops out from around the corner. “Yes, ma’am?”
Jaydyn points at me. “She says the gala tickets haven’t been paid for. Is that possible? How is that possible? I know Douglas gave you the cheque, so it seems impossible to me.” There’s a smile at the end of it that makes her look a little like a piranha. A piranha with an overbite.
Harriet starts to stammer. “I’m so, so sorry, Mrs. Marshall.” She turns to me. “I’m so sorry, Irma.”
I should feel terrible. This is all my fault, after all. But I don’t. Regret really is a wasted emotion, and now I have a better picture of what’s going on in this house. And they’ll never fire Harriet even if she did forget to drop off that cheque. Everyone knows she makes a coffee cake that can’t be beat, and I don’t even eat sugar.
I put my teacup down and stand up. “How unfortunate. I’m sure there’s been some sort of mix up on my end. If you say it’s done, Harriet, I know it’s done.” I try to imbue the last line with a meaningful tone that’s completely lost on Jaydyn.
I stand, and Harriet sidles up beside me, which believe you me, means she has something to tell me. “Thank you so much!” I wave at Jaydyn and Douglas. Jaydyn smiles, the rest of her face unmoving, and Douglas makes a grunt while scribbling away.
I pick up my cup and saucer and follow Harriet into the kitchen. She plucks them from me neatly, places them on the kitchen island and keeps going. And, really, I have no choice but to follow her.
She walks briskly up the back staircase to the second floor. There are two main wings of the house: the family’s residence and the servants’ quarters. For some reason, Harriet is leading me to the servants’ living area. At the end of a long hallway, she stops in front of a closed door. The hallway isn’t bad, per se, but there’s no comparison to the great room’s gaudy furniture and mile-deep carpet.
Harriet’s hand is on the doorknob, but she isn’t opening it. I look at her face. She’s trembling. I look closer. It’s anger, not fear. Then she opens the door, saying nothing.
I suck in a breath and peer in. Then I push the door open a little more.
The room is tiny, less than a hundred square feet. There’s a single bed with plain sheets and a white coverlet, the bed made with hospital corners. The room has no closet and no armoire. A metal rack has some clothes hanging on it, beside what looks like a laundry basket, a rickety side table and an empty desk. There are no pictures on the wall, a smidgen of a window, and bare hardwood flooring.
I’ve seen prison cells that were homier. I’ve been in gulags with better decoration. I’ve seen interrogation rooms with more pizazz.
The next moment is not a good one. I’m used to encountering difficult things in my professional life. One endures them. But this is personal, and it hurts, somewhere in my innards between my spleen and my liver. It’s a sharp, fresh ache that knifes through me when I breathe. I do not like this feeling.
I look at Harriet and she looks right back at me.
A small, shallow breath helps calm me down. “Bailey’s room?”
Harriet’s lips press together so hard they disappear. She’ll have an NDA, of course. Then, she nods briefly.
“I see.” Poor Bailey. This is no way for someone young to live. For anyone to live.
Harriet turns and silently leads me back down the staircase to the kitchen. I put my hand on her shoulder and squeeze it. She’s been looking after Bailey since she was a child.
“I’m going to fix this,” I say quietly.
Harriet exhales like she’s been holding her breath since the 90’s. And then a beautiful smile breaks over her face. Relief and hope follow, and I can see she thinks she can depend on me. Bloody well right she can. She follows me as I make my way to the front door.
Jaydyn is standing there, hands on hips, and she shoos Harriet away. “Thank you so much for coming to check on us, Irma,” she sing-songs, saccharine sweet. “Okay, bye bye now.” She goes to open the door, but I push it closed and wedge myself against it so she can’t shove me outside.
After putting on my boots I pull my gloves on slowly, one finger at a time. I can almost feel the tension rolling off Jaydyn. This, of course, makes me want to linger longer. I’ll bet she wants to get back to wrapping that mountain of toys. I’d also wager there will be no presents under that tree for Bailey. When Douglas’s first wife was alive, their house was filled with love. It wasn’t this house—it was much smaller, less flashy.
“Was there anything else?” Jaydyn says, her teeth gritted.
“No. Thank you, and so sorry to have taken your valuable time.”
“Apology accepted. Goodbye now.” She opens the door for real this time and I slide sideways through it.
I snap my feet into my skis—with no melodrama this time—and head to the Club. I have to confirm some details about my solstice dinner, not to mention Christmas Eve and Day. And then I’ll be doing some more digging into Bailey’s unfortunate situation, you can be quite sure of that.
Chapter Four
I ski to the back of the Club and enter using a doorway that’s for employees only. After stamping the snow off my skis I caucus with the kitchen staff about the final numbers for my solstice party. I add five more seats to the total—it’s a buffet—just in case, and then ensconce myself upstairs in the tiny office I use on occasion. There’s a phone and a computer my friend, Violet Blackheart, set up for me, with the pewter coloured doily I use as a coaster next to it.
I pick up the phone and dial her. The computer, I ignore like usual. If there’s something nerdy to be done, I’ll dispatch it to Violet, a fortysomething tech guru who wandered onto the island last summer and rented an apartment from me. As soon as I found out she was a girl genius, I put her to work helping me with some of my investigations. Lovely girl. Very attached to the indoors.
“Irma.” Violet’s voice is flat.
“You don’t sound very happy to hear from me, dear. That hurts Irma’s feelings.”
She laughs. “You know I hate the phone.”
“Yes, but I know you love making an exception for me.”
“Can we talk again about email, texting, WhatsApp, Facebook messaging—”
“We can if you want me to strangle you in your sleep.”
She laughs again. “That would make you a very bad hostess, Irma, and I know you’d never allow that. And yes, I’ll be at your dinner. I can’t wait.”
“Don’t let work keep you in the city. Having your first Christmas in the country will be just…magical.” I sigh happily.
“Uh huh,” she says wryly. “You do understand we have Christmas in the city too, eh?” Violet is a city slicker, a lifelong Toronto girl.
“If you say so, my dear. Look, I need your help with something.”
“Shoot.
”
“I have a friend here, a young lady. It looks like someone has stolen her identity, racked up a good deal of debt, and ruined her credit.” I explain the rest of what’s happened.
“Ugh,” Violet says, an old anger wrapping itself around her words. Violet grew up in a much more unforgiving environment than most people, always on the edge of foster care, but sneaky enough to be living on her own at sixteen. I do so admire sneakiness. She also understands the value of a good education. She has a master’s in computer science from U of T and runs her own company, something complicated to do with solar power, saving the planet, and computers. If I had to put my money on someone solving this whole global warming thing, it would be Violet. Plus, she’s a natural, if somewhat reluctant, investigator.
“Best thing to do is take a look at the loans that killed her credit rating,” she says.
“How can we find out who took them out? I’d like to have a word with them.”
“I bet you would,” she drawls, “but it’s probably someone on the other side of the planet. It could be anyone, anywhere.”
Despair lodges itself inside me. If the thief is chuckling away behind a screen in the middle of nowhere, I’ll never find them. “Can’t you just…I don’t know…hack into something? Or somewhere? Somebody?”
“Irma, I hate to tell you this, but nerdy people aren’t a hacking army. Hacking is illegal. I really just get up and go to work like a normal person and—”
“Alright, alright. Is there anything you can do?”
“—and half the internet is down. Haven’t you heard? There’s a massive DDOS attack going down right now on the DNS servers on the east coast and—”
“I don’t know what any of that means, dear.” I think of myself as a level-headed woman, a reasonable person. But computers make me anxious. I hate that they’re such a huge part of the world these days, and that I just can’t seem to make heads or tails of them. When I was working there was nothing about the world that required you to squeeze your whole working day into a tiny screen. Of course, I did do a lot of fieldwork.
“Ah. Well, it’s all very complicated I’m sure.” It also feels precarious. If part of the internet can just be taken down on a Wednesday, isn’t that…bad?
“It is indeed. But anyway, best thing to do is follow up with her bank or credit card company, see if they can track whoever’s done this.”
“Right.” I sigh. “How would whoever did this have even known about Bailey? About where she banks and all that.”
“Her info could be in the cloud somewhere, Irma. Or on her computer, her phone, her backup services, in the budgeting app she uses. It’s everywhere these days. And that’s just if she hasn’t left it on a sticky note somewhere.”
“Do people actually do that? Sticky notes?”
“You have no idea.”
“Bloody hell.”
“Yup. I have to make the suggestion, Irma…you could go to the police.”
I make sure not to roll my eyes, which would be a most unladylike response. If our old police chief was still here, I might, but he’s been replaced by a young whippersnapper who’s a little too by-the-book for me. Plus, there’s so much procedure and paperwork when dealing with police, paperwork that requires so much sitting. Really, I can solve most problems better and faster on my own. “The bank will be filling out a report, I’m sure,” I say.
“I hear ya. On the bright side, if it is anyone your friend knows, the easiest way to solve it would be for you to threaten them until they confess. You have such a nice threatening way about you, after all.”
The Christmas spirit blooms in me again and I feel invigorated. “Thank you, dear, you always know the right thing to say to cheer me up.”
She laughs. “I’ll see you soon.”
We hang up and I sit back in my chair, frustrated. When I started working in the sixties, I didn’t want to be mistaken for the typing pool. It was an era when almost no women were in government work—the type I did anyway—and I wanted to be one of the boys, just like everyone else. How was I to know that one day the entire world would revolve around computers? I know how to check email, how to do the Google. I get by. But Violet is excellent with technical problems and if she can’t figure out what’s happened then that avenue really is a dead end.
I tap my fingers on the desk for a while, then pick up the phone and dial Roger to see what time he wants dinner. I roll my thoughts around as it rings. There’s something going on with Bailey’s father and stepmother, there has to be—all those gifts and not a single one for Bailey. And that room. And her father wouldn’t know what was going on if his elbow-padded cardigan burst into flames. But would Jaydyn ruin her stepdaughter’s credit? Why? To force Bailey into the family business? I fiddle with the doily for a moment, ruminating. And then the thought hits me: Why does Jaydyn insist Bailey go into the family business, if Bailey’s own father never did?
And if Jaydyn’s the culprit, she’d have to know she’d be found out eventually. Of course, if I had a dollar for every time I saw someone do something that seemed crazy, I’d be a rich, rich woman. People do so insist on being illogical when money and power are at stake.
The phone rings and rings. Finally, Roger’s voicemail clicks on and I leave a message.
Then I watch the big arm careen around my wall clock as I wait for a return call. Nothing. I pull a lipstick from my top drawer and paint my lips Seduction Red, which matches my tracksuit perfectly. I stare at the phone. Still nothing.
It’s so vexing, not getting my way, and a flush of something like anxiety makes its way through me. I fidget in my chair until I can’t stand it. Walking around will help clear my head and flush out my jitters.
I take a few laps power-walking upstairs and then go downstairs to the bar that takes up a significant amount of the first floor—a testament to the amount that our islanders drink. The furnishings in this room are coastal but substantial, with heavy wood and wide polished floorboards, an old-fashioned bar with brass accents, the walls crisp and white. It’s comforting. Like the newspaper. But then Snookie flits by with a few members of her cabal. All of them are fixated on her right lapel, where a sparkly new brooch is glinting in the amber glow of the Club’s dimmed lights. From here, the pin looks like an octopus mated with a didgeridoo. You just can’t buy good taste.
“Hi Irma!” Theresa, one of the bartenders, says. “Your usual?” She’s stout and sturdy, her brown hair pulled into a bun.
I grin at her. It’s after five somewhere. “Please.”
She mixes a gin and tonic with a twist while I climb onto a barstool. Out of the corner of my eye I see a flash of red hair. “Luna!” When she doesn’t reappear, I hop off my perch and go find her. I want to increase the amount of dessert she’s making for my party. I turn a corner and then another but I can’t see her anywhere. Bother.
Eventually I head back to the bar, and somehow Luna has lapped me and is sitting on my stool. “Luna!”
She puts down the newspaper she’s reading and smiles at me. “Hey there.”
“Hey there yourself, dear. I didn’t know that young people actually still read printed newspapers.”
“We don’t.” She grins.
I take a sip of my drink. It’s bloody strong and goes down beautifully. “Do you have time for a drink or are you being run ragged right now?”
Luna gives me a lopsided smile and then shakes her head. “Just finished delivering the Club’s desserts for tonight. I have to jet.”
Theresa pulls the newspaper toward her and makes a face when she sees what’s on the page. I pick it up and scan it. It’s the same one Mo had in his shop, the article about Marshall Industries continuing on page two with smiling pictures of Douglas’s uncles and aunts clustered together behind a boardroom table, champagne all around, with more snaps of the family lounging in high-end cars, New York penthouses. The article is gushing and light on facts. But there’s something comforting about looking at it in this format, ink smudges
and all.
I pull myself away. “Are you able to make—”
“Enough!” Luna laughs. “If this is for the solstice party, you’re about two weeks too late to make changes.”
“Can you just make more of the cupcakes you do every day at the café? Everyone loves them.” I add, “I’m happy to pay a premium, Luna. You know how much I value your time. And your goodies.”
She gives me a lopsided grin. “I’ll do it. But only because it’s you, Irma.”
I smile back at her.
“Do you mind coming to the café and picking them up? I won’t have my truck that day, I promised to loan it to my cousin.” She rubs her forehead like she’s got a headache, the poor thing. “He’s moving his girlfriend into his apartment. Says it’s his Christmas present to her. I hate to do this to you, but do you mind…?”
I pat her on the arm. “No trouble at all.”
The relief that spreads across her face warms my heart. “Thanks so much. I gotta jet, I’ll see you soon.” She smiles and hurries toward the employee exit, the same one I came in.
“Another, Irma?” the bartender asks and I nod. “On your tab?”
“Please.”
The rest of the drink slides down my throat, cold and crisp, and I ponder having another. Looking at the paper, I feel depressed, suddenly. Anyone—anywhere on the bloody planet—could have looked up Bailey’s famous family name and assumed they could steal her money without ever being found out.
“Irma!”
I turn. Roger is leaning on the bar. His salt and pepper hair is groomed to perfection and his suit is a Tom Ford, same as the ones they dress James Bond in. He’s tall and lanky, sophisticated, and unapologetically hedonistic.
“Roger, how wonderful to see you.”
He reaches forward and plants a kiss on each of my cheeks. He takes in my red tracksuit. It’s stylish, to be sure, but we’ll never get into the main dining room like this. I can see the same thought flit across Roger’s face. It ends in a smile.
“May we please get a table?” he asks Theresa, his East London accent shading his words. My own accent has flattened itself quite a bit over the years, probably because of all the moving around we did when I was growing up.