The Receptionist

by Kate Myles

  “I have to tell you the truth,” Emily says. “I’m scared of Doug. He’s a coke addict. He’s out of control and he rages, especially now that everyone knows he’s a criminal.” She thinks Doug has a private investigator on her. She tells Chloe she’s scared to leave him. “He told the dog breeder I was dead,” Emily says. “Sometimes I think he wants to kill me.”

  As Emily tells her these things, Chloe looks to the dead bolt to make sure it’s locked. She tries to remember her time with Doug. She doesn’t recall him doing drugs or having a bad temper, so this is surprising.

  “He gets death threats too,” Emily says. “It’s a nightmare. They even threaten me and the baby.” Emily comes back and sits next to Chloe on the carpet. “Honestly, I think it would be best if someone actually did just come along and kill him.” Emily pauses for just a moment before going off again. She’s on a tear. “Do you know I actually found his drugs? He’s hiding them in the cabinet. In this dummy can of baking powder.”

  Emily sidles up closer to Chloe. She points at the laptop on the floor, just out of Chloe’s reach. “Can you google that? Google hiding place baking powder false bottom.” Chloe opens her laptop and searches. “That’s it!” says Emily when the image results load. The picture is from a spy shop. “Can you follow the link?” she asks.

  There’s other stuff they sell in the spy shop, like hidden cameras and keystroke loggers. “Let me see what the GPS trackers look like,” Emily says. “I know he’s tracking me. I keep my phone at the house, so I think he put something on my car.”

  “You think?” Chloe asks. It’s the first thing she’s said in the last half hour.

  That night, after Emily leaves, Chloe has dreams about GPS trackers, about a malevolent force following, controlling, her every move. She texts Emily as soon as she wakes the next morning:

  Did you find tracker?

  Yes.

  Chloe backs up to the head of her bed, panicked. If Doug put one on Emily’s car, he must know where she goes every day.

  “What is happening?” she whispers. This isn’t the same Doug Chloe remembers. He’s a shadow Doug. Menacing. Violent. Chloe knows she should check her car too. She looks up the spy shop again. She studies the picture of the GPS tracker.

  She doesn’t think it will be hard, going down to her parking lot, not until she tries it. As soon as she steps out her door, as the breeze hits her skin, it feels like she’s being splashed with scalding water. She looks past the gate to her parking lot and almost loses her balance. A man is standing near her car. He’s in his thirties and has wavy brown hair, and she doesn’t recognize him from her building. He stares at her. He raises a vape pen to his mouth. A cloud of steam escapes from his face.

  Chloe backs up inside. She slams the door and locks it. She looks out the peephole. The outside walkway is empty. She stays there for a few minutes, checking to make sure the guy isn’t coming for her. She texts Emily:

  Will I see you today?

  Emily doesn’t text back for a whole hour.

  Yes. Later. Visiting Bella.

  Everything okay?

  Chloe thinks. The guy in the parking lot, should she tell Emily about him? She crawls to the living room window and peeks out the bottom blind. She can see the street from here. A neighbor she knows is walking her dog. A car with a loud radio whizzes by. Chloe reaches for a slim ray of sunlight. No, she won’t say anything to Emily about the guy. It will make her sound crazy.

  The guy in the parking lot worried her; that’s all. Chloe needs to leave her apartment; she knows this. She needs to get used to seeing random people she doesn’t know again. She opens her blinds. She opens her windows. The air smells like spring.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  EMILY

  I shouldn’t have left Chloe alone for a full day. But circumstances forced me to stay away. First, I had to see Bella. She’d attacked another dog at the ranch, and the breeder’s daughter, who’d been fostering Bella, wanted money. It was an opportunity to introduce my dog to Grace, to see how she reacted. I had to make sure she was okay around the baby before I brought her home.

  The place was an hour away. I brought my regular cell phone and my burner phone and parked at the edge of the driveway. I could hear Bella as soon as I started down the patchwork of uneven pavement leading toward the breeder’s daughter’s ranch house. Bella must have seen me through the slats of the side yard fence, or maybe she caught my scent. I recognized her bark. I started running toward the gate. Grace’s stroller wheel caught in a mini pothole, almost toppling her.

  “Shit,” I said. Grace started to wake. Bella’s barks grew more urgent, hoarse even. I could hear her desperation as I unbuckled Grace from her stroller. “Come on, Grace,” I said. Bella jumped up and pawed at the wood.

  “Hi, Bella!” I called from the driveway. “Hi, baby!” She gave a happy series of barks. Grace began to cry. “No, Grace,” I said. “This is a good sound. Good girl, Bella!” I wanted to run to Bella, but I had to give Grace a gentle introduction.

  The breeder’s daughter joined me. She had a nose ring and wore flowy purple pants. “Pup remembers you,” she said.

  “Of course she does,” I said.

  The breeder’s daughter considered me. “You want me to hold the baby?”

  I looked at Bella. She was jumping, happy, not at all threatening. “No, it’s better if I have the baby with me when I approach.”

  I shifted Grace to one arm and leaned my opposite side toward Bella. I let my dog lick my cheeks. I scratched her ears and welled up and started laughing, remembering a dream I had a month after my mother died. I dreamed she came back to visit. I held her hands in the dream and said over and over, “I’m so happy to see you.”

  “Do you want to meet Grace?” I took a step back. “Sitz!” I said and showed her the baby. Bella stayed seated and gave a high-pitched moan, no growling, no showing her teeth. This was a good sign. I spent an hour with Bella, playing fetch, lying together on the grass, giving her a minute here and there to investigate the baby. I took a picture while Bella nuzzled Grace’s belly. “We’re going to be a family,” I said. “Just the three of us.”

  Before I left, I gave the breeder’s daughter $1,200 cash for the other dog’s medical bills and asked if I could see the receipt from the animal hospital.

  “Sure,” said the breeder’s daughter. She started into the house. Then she stopped. She turned to me. “My mom told you what your husband said?”

  I raised my eyebrows. “About me being dead?”

  She put a hand on her hip. “He’s that guy that ripped off Dr. Maryn?”

  “That’s him.”

  “He’s going to jail, right? Is that why you’re keeping Bella here? You’re waiting?”

  I shook my head slowly, giving nothing away. “I have no idea what’s going to happen.”

  She stepped closer, assuming a more intimate tone. “You know, there are places you can go.”

  I tilted my head. “What places?”

  “You know . . . shelters.” She gestured to Grace. “They’ll take both of you.”

  I smirked. All I knew about this woman was that she was bilking me. In a month she’d make up some other phony reason for me to fork over $1,000. And yet she thought it appropriate to give me advice. “Don’t you worry,” I said. “I have it under control.”

  I left. I was going to visit Chloe later that morning. The plan was for me to meet the nanny at my house, drop off Grace, and hide my iPhone back under the mattress.

  I was almost home when I saw the news vans. There were three of them, parked across PCH from our house. Five police cars were in front, blocking my neighbor’s driveway and flanking a navy-blue armored truck with the gold lettering of FBI.

  I kept driving.

  I drove for ten minutes, thinking of Doug’s computer, the one he’d used to transfer money into my Nauru account. We’d destroyed it only a few days before, along with my laptop, smashing them to bits with hammers and dropping the pieces in
to the ocean from our kayaks. Even if some of it washed ashore, the data was unrecoverable.

  And I’d already moved the money to a Swiss bank. I’d memorized the account numbers, the complicated password. They were in only one place: my head.

  Grace started crying. I was still on PCH. “Not now, Gracie,” I said. She kept crying. “Not now!” She wailed even harder.

  I pulled over and fixed a bottle for her in the back seat. I called Doug’s cell. It rang once before a heavy male voice answered, “Agent Schroeder.”

  “Hello?” I said. “Can I speak to Doug?”

  “Not on this phone.”

  I heard Doug’s voice in the background. “Is that Emily?”

  “That your wife?” asked the agent.

  “Tell her to call the office line,” said Doug.

  Grace spit up. I unbuckled her from the car seat and wiped her neck, some of the sour liquid seeping into her shirt, onto my jeans. I called Doug’s office number. “Oh, good, you have your cell phone on you,” he said.

  I blinked. I didn’t have time to process what he was saying. “Are you getting arrested?” I asked.

  “No,” said Doug. His voice was matter of fact, accepting. He’d already lost about 70 percent of his clients. His employees were quitting en masse. “My lawyer says it might take them months to build a case.”

  “The FBI is at the house,” I said.

  Doug lowered his voice. “I can’t really talk right now.”

  He hung up. My rage spiked. I dug through the diaper bag for a clean shirt for Grace. The nanny hadn’t packed one. I looked back, in the direction of my home. I couldn’t even get a change of clothes. I cursed Doug and blotted Grace’s spit-up off her shirt. I buckled her back into her car seat and spoke to her in singsong. “We’re going to a park now. You like that? There’ll be grass there and other babies.”

  I got back in the driver’s seat. I couldn’t see Chloe now, not while I had Grace with me. And my regular cell phone would ping at her place. But there was still work to be done. I reached into the glove compartment for the burner phone and texted her.

  Something’s come up. Can come tomorrow.

  She didn’t write back.

  I drove south, to a park in Santa Monica next to the municipal airport where Doug kept his Cessna. I took Grace out of her car seat and carried her to the playground, blending in with the other moms and kids. I carried her through the playground, past the tennis courts and baseball diamonds, to the barbed wire–topped fence separating the park from the airport tarmac.

  “Look!” I bent and pointed to the dozen small jets and prop planes parked just a few feet away. “That one in the middle, that’s Daddy’s!” Grace reached forward. “You want to touch the fence?” I squatted with her next to the weigela bushes lining the fence. I pulled my sleeve over my fingers and felt the slim steel weaving into chain link. I looked for wires or an alarm-company insignia. There was only a battered and bent NO TRESPASSING sign.

  “Do you see the trees?” I asked Grace. I pointed up to the nearby treetops and scanned for surveillance cameras.

  I stayed at the park for an hour afterward, making myself appear as normal as possible. I even spread out a baby blanket on the grass. I put Grace on her back and kissed her. I rolled her over onto her tummy. “This is how you roll over,” I said. The most advanced babies were able to roll from back to front by three months old.

  “See? You roooollll over.” I rolled her over again in slow motion and laid her on her back. “Now you do it,” I said. “Roll over, Grace.”

  “Awooo!” she said and pumped her fists in the air.

  I opened my flip phone. Chloe still hadn’t texted back. All I needed was a Google search, inspiration for how to sabotage a plane. I couldn’t do it myself. I texted Chloe:

  I’m scared.

  What’s wrong?

  Search warrant on my house.

  Oh no.

  FBI was there.

  Geez.

  I’ll see you tomorrow?

  She didn’t write back right away. She hadn’t responded earlier. Something was going on.

  How are you btw?

  I had a good day.

  Went for a walk.

  I think I’m ready to find a job.

  “Fuck,” I said. A nearby mom of a toddler flashed me a look. One day. I spent one day away from Chloe, and suddenly she was feeling empowered. That wasn’t going to work for me. For now, though, I had to play along. I picked up my phone and texted:

  Go Chloe! Amazing!!!!

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHLOE

  Emily texts at 8:00 a.m. She’s on her way over. Chloe ventures out to wait for her. It doesn’t frighten her as much anymore, the idea of being outside. She sits on the front steps of her building and slips her hands in her sweatshirt pockets. Chloe has been thinking. She’s been up most of the night, going over everything. She has a plan now, for her life. Or the beginnings of one, at least.

  The fact is, she’s been drifting, relying on Emily, and Emily has been so helpful. Chloe will tell her that. Chloe rehearses what she’s going to say. She’ll tell Emily how grateful she is. But it’s time for Chloe to stop hiding. She’s going to look for a job. A waitressing job so she can be on her feet and talking to a million different people, and she’ll be rushing around, not giving anyone time to settle into hating her. Then, once she starts making money, once she gets a little stability, she can start thinking about what she wants her life to look like.

  But the most important part is that Chloe has to get back to work. She needs to stop counting on others. They swoop in, these people, and they’re full of promises, but it never pans out.

  Chloe shivers. She doesn’t know why, but she has this feeling that Emily won’t like it, that she’ll get mad or be jealous. Chloe will have to speak gently, then. She’ll involve Emily in the idea. She’ll ask her for help. “Do you know any restaurants you think I should apply to?” she can say. She’ll ask Emily if she thinks she’s too old to be a model. Or maybe Emily can help her with commercials like they talked about.

  Chloe sees Emily’s car slow as it approaches the building. Chloe waves. Emily drives past her. Chloe watches her park up the block. Her flip phone vibrates. Emily is texting her.

  Go inside.

  Chloe gets a jolt; it’s fluttery and jittery, and it makes her look up and down the wide boulevard, makes her look into the passing cars. She texts back.

  Why?

  I think I’m being followed.

  She heads back upstairs and wonders, briefly, who would be following Emily. The police? Doug? She moves into her apartment. The lack of furniture is heavy all of a sudden, like it’s going to crush her. She doesn’t want to be here. And she’s starting to wonder why, if Emily has a bad marriage, if Doug might be going to jail, why that means that Chloe can’t be out in the fresh air.

  Emily locks Chloe’s dead bolt as soon as she enters. She’s breathing heavily. “Here,” she says. She has a plastic grocery bag in one hand and a debit card in the other. She slides the card into Chloe’s fingers. “It’s prepaid. I put fifteen hundred dollars on it. You can go to IKEA, get a futon, maybe even a couch. Let me know if things are more expensive.”

  Chloe brings the card to her chest. She’d given up on ever having a place to sit. “This is too much,” she says.

  “Chloe, you need help.”

  “I know, but I—”

  “Save your money. You’re going to need it.” Emily walks into the kitchen. She plops the bag on the counter. “Do you like couscous?”

  Again with the food. Chloe wishes she hadn’t told Emily about her mother abandoning her. “Emily,” she says. She clears her throat. “I was thinking of looking for a waitressing job.”

  Emily turns. Her gaze is like a tractor beam. “At a restaurant?” she asks. She sounds enthusiastic, with high, breathy words, like she’s happy for Chloe. But Chloe feels trapped. Emily’s personality is too strong. Chloe will never be able to escape
it. She brings the side of her thumb to her teeth.

  “Stop that,” says Emily. “Your cuticles are ragged.”

  Chloe pulls her thumb away. Emily considers the grocery bag on the counter before clapping her hands together. “Let’s get mani-pedis.” She raises her eyebrows at Chloe. “Would you like that?”

  An exuberant “Yeah!” bubbles up out of Chloe. She can’t believe Emily is actually suggesting they go out. “You’re not worried about Doug?”

  “I—” Emily cuts herself off and crosses her arms in a jerky motion. She tightens her lips and says nothing else.

  Emily is keeping something from her. Chloe moves to the kitchen. She puts her hands on the counter. “Emily? Is everything okay? Who do you think was following you?”

  Emily rubs her forehead with her fingers. “I can’t believe I’m about to say this.” She brings her hands to the other side of the counter, mirroring Chloe. “The FBI wants me to talk.”

  Chloe shakes her head. “About what?”

  Emily looks behind her, like she’s making sure there are no eavesdroppers in the vacant room. “Chloe, they want to put me in witness protection.”

  Chloe inhales, sharp and anxious. “Why? Why would they do that?”

  “Doug is a really bad guy.” Emily whispers this. It’s like she’s afraid to even say it. “He’s dangerous.”

  “How?”

  “I’m sorry. I can’t talk about it. But the people he’s involved with . . .”

  Chloe looks to her door. She looks to her window. The blinds are open.

  “Are you okay?” asks Emily.

  Chloe touches her palm to her own cheek. “I think so.”

  “I’m worried about you.” Emily comes around the counter and reaches for Chloe’s arm, steadying her with the lightest touch. “Are you crying?”