The Receptionist

by Kate Myles

  “No,” says Chloe. She’s not. She’s not even tearing up.

  “You look like you’re crying,” Emily says. “Your eyes are all red.”

  Chloe’s not crying. She knows this. But she swipes her fingers under her eyelids anyway. She sniffles.

  “Sit,” says Emily.

  “There was a guy in my parking lot yesterday,” Chloe says. “He was acting like he just went out for a vape, but something about him was weird.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He was white, light-brown hair. Maybe six feet.”

  Emily rushes to the window and spins the blinds closed. Chloe puts her hands out in front of her, panicked, like she’s about to be hit by a car. “Why are you doing that?”

  “Just in case,” Emily says.

  “Just in case what?”

  Emily puts her hands on Chloe’s shoulders and talks square in her face. “Chloe, listen to me. I’m not going to let anything happen to you. We’re gonna fight this. We can beat Doug.”

  Chloe leans forward. It’s almost as if she can’t stand up under her own weight anymore. She’s in Emily’s arms now. And she doesn’t know what’s happening.

  “I didn’t get any sleep last night,” she says.

  “Take a nap then.”

  Emily leads Chloe to the bedroom. She lays her down and shakes out the comforter. The top sheet falls over Chloe, reminding her of a safe sensation, except it’s not really a memory of something that happened to her. It’s more like a thing she saw in a movie once. Emily smooths the covers snug across her shoulders and whispers, “Do you want me to stay until you fall asleep?”

  It’s dark when Chloe wakes. Her flip phone is on her nightstand. Chloe didn’t put it there. Emily must have moved it for her. Chloe opens the phone. There is a text from a number Chloe doesn’t know. She doesn’t even recognize the area code.

  What do u think u r doing?

  Who is this?

  Don’t you dare talk to police.

  Chloe sits up. Doug must have found Emily’s phone. She hears glass shattering a second later, in the front of the apartment. She doesn’t scream. She bolts. She runs. She’s running into danger, she knows this, but she’s not thinking, she’s just running, and there’s nowhere to run to but the front of the apartment. Her kitchen window, the one facing the alley, has a hole in it. There is a rock in her sink the size of a fist.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  EMILY

  I heard somewhere that the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful is a willingness to have difficult conversations: breakthrough, next-level conversations. Successful people are okay with discomfort.

  Of course, I didn’t start my relationship with Chloe by asking her to kill Doug. I worked up to it. I laid the foundation. I scared her. I improvised. That story about the witness protection program and Doug being gangster-level dangerous: I made it up on the spot. It was exhilarating, delving into a lie, realizing I was better at it than I thought. Doug must have felt that way all the time.

  I broke Chloe’s window. And I helped her clean it up the next morning.

  “He knows about us,” I said. We were both kneeling on her linoleum floor, wearing dish gloves and wiping up the last of the glass shards with wet paper towels.

  “We should call someone,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “We have to think through our options.”

  She stood and threw her paper towel away. “I want to call the police,” she said. She was shaking.

  “And say what, Chloe? You got a prank call on your burner phone?” She opened her mouth, shocked. I pushed harder. “You know, they always go after the mistresses.”

  “Who does?”

  I reached into my purse for the masking tape I’d bought and unfurled a large piece. I climbed on the counter and placed it diagonally over the hole, creating the silhouette of a no-smoking sign.

  “We have to deal with Doug,” I said.

  I stopped what I was doing then and stared at her hard, thinking my intentions, transmitting without words. I waited for her eyes to clear, to show some understanding.

  She wrapped her arms around her torso. “Oh,” she said.

  “You understand?” I asked. She nodded, staring off to the side. “We can sabotage his plane.”

  Her body gave a tiny jerk. She smiled, and her voice came out distracted and dreamy. “I always thought I’d use poison.”

  “Can you help me look it up?” I took off my gloves and pointed to her computer in the living room. She turned to it like a robot, like a dog I’d just commanded. I followed and sat next to her on the carpet.

  “Try sabotage Cessna 172,” I said.

  She typed. She tried to hand me the computer so I could read the results. I wasn’t touching it. I’d been so careful. I wiped down everything. I wore a baseball cap whenever I entered her apartment, parking out of view of any cameras.

  “Cut the fuel line?” she said.

  I read over her shoulder. The fuel line wasn’t easily accessible. We couldn’t cut it without drawing attention to ourselves. And it might not cause a crash. It would most likely just prevent his plane from starting.

  “Loosen the wings?” she asked.

  “Maybe. I feel like that’s one of the things he consistently checks.”

  “Sugar in the gas tank?” She clicked on the link. This was a good one. It would let the plane take off, but eventually, the sugar would dissolve and turn to sludge, gunking up the engine in midflight.

  Chloe slid her computer off her lap. We both sat, not speaking. I put my arm around her and dug in my pocket for cash.

  “We can do it tonight,” I said. “We’ll need sugar. One-pound bags should do it.”

  She pulled away and faced me. “Wait,” she said. “Are you serious?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  She rose to her feet. “I thought we were fantasizing.”

  I stood to meet her. I had to keep talking, make it sound inevitable. “We’ll go in from Clover Park. Doug’s plane is parked along the fence next to the baseball diamonds. You know the area?”

  “No,” she said.

  “It’s off Ocean Park Boulevard. You can park in the lot near the playground. There’s only one camera there, in the southeast corner. Get some electrical tape. You can tape the letters on your license plate to obscure them. If you have a J, you can turn it into an O, got it?”

  Chloe nodded.

  “You have the puffy coat I got you?”

  She nodded again.

  “Wear it. It’ll obscure your figure. And tuck your hair into the hat I bought you. They’ll think we’re men.”

  She backed against her window, into her blinds, and picked at her thumb. “You’ve thought this through,” she said.

  “There’s a small wooded area where Twenty-Fifth and Hill Street intersect. Meet me there at two a.m. I’ll be lying against a tree, pretending to be a homeless person.”

  She pushed off from the windowsill and moved into her empty dining room. “I need to think about this,” she said.

  “No. You need to decide.”

  She started pacing, in quick pivots. She shook out her hands. “This is really heavy.”

  “I can’t do it alone.”

  She hid her face in her hands.

  “Chloe, you have to help me!”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

  I grabbed her arms. I pulled her hands away from her face. “People push you around, Chloe! People take advantage of you! Aren’t you sick of it?” All my life I’d been able to get people to do what I wanted, through charm or the threat of social isolation. “Are you my friend?” I asked.

  She stepped back. “Of course I’m your friend.”

  This wasn’t working. I realized it would take months. I’d have to induce some kind of psychological breakdown to compel someone to help me kill.

  But it didn’t matter. I could steal the box of sugar from
her cabinet, the one labeled S!!!! Her fingerprints were all over it. And she’d just done the internet search I needed. Even if she erased her browser history, her internet service provider would have a record of it.

  Still, it would be helpful to have her there, to direct her in front of the cameras. I pointed at her. “You emailed me,” I said. “You started this.”

  She stared at me, wide eyed and panicked.

  “He’s evil,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  “You’ll come?”

  She nodded swiftly, tensely. I wondered if she even knew she was lying.

  “Good,” I said. “Now give me your burner phone back.”

  At nine p.m., I called my father. It wasn’t that I thought I would be arrested or hurt that night. But I was uneasy, being the sole possessor of account information for millions of dollars.

  “I’m sending you a letter,” I said.

  “I love letters.”

  “Dad, you have to promise me you won’t open it. I just need you to keep it safe, okay?”

  My dad was the only person I could think of to trust, the only person aside from my mom who truly loved me. He exhaled a phlegmy rattle. “Everything okay, Em?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You can come stay here, you know. You and the baby.”

  “Dad, I’ve got it under control.”

  I wrote out instructions on how to access the money in case anything happened to me. I wrote that I loved him and asked him to make sure Grace was taken care of. There was a mailbox just up the road. There were no houses, no cameras, near it. I held my breath as I dropped the letter inside.

  I drove to the airport at midnight. I parked a mile away and jogged on quiet residential sidewalks lined with jacaranda trees and middle-class-looking homes priced in the millions. I wore all black, with the same kind of black down jacket I’d bought Chloe. I hid my hair in a hat. I had gloves on and a backpack with two pounds of sugar in it.

  Running made me feel like I belonged in the area, like I was participating in some boot-campy trend, even at this odd hour. The two people I passed on the street didn’t even look up. But the sugar in my bag grew heavier, slipping to lopsided and smacking the right side of my back. My C-section scar, which was supposed to be completely healed, began aching.

  I slowed to a brisk walk. I was only a few blocks from the park, but slowing down made me feel like a target, a suspicious person. I approached a car parked at the curb. A man was inside, looking at his phone. He glanced up, and we made eye contact.

  What if he called 911? I was dressed like a cat burglar. What if the cops asked to see inside my bag? It would get messy. The sugar, I could explain. I could say I’d just gone to the store. The funnel, maybe. It was the wire cutters and the duct tape. There would be questions about that.

  Fucking Doug. Making me do this. Fuck him.

  The park was empty. I decided not to wait for Chloe. I went to the fence and hid, crouching between two weigela shrubs. I waited a half hour for a Santa Monica Police SUV to make its slow patrol down the tarmac. My heart dipped and hollowed out my chest as it passed. I didn’t dare turn my head to check the SUV’s progress. I waited until twenty minutes after the air had gone still and quiet. Only then did it feel safe to breathe, to move my head and fingers.

  I unzipped my backpack. The sound of it seemed to echo across the park. I pulled out Chloe’s crumpled sugar carton with the S!!!! on it. I had to hide it somewhere, out of plain sight. I didn’t know when Doug would be flying next, and I didn’t want it to be picked up by a litter collector. I shoved it deep in the bushes and looked up. I was still alone.

  I repositioned myself in one swift move so my back was against the fence post and went still again. Anyone nearby, who might have noticed movement in their periphery would now see only shadow. I sat in the dirt, acclimating myself to my new surroundings. My bag was in my lap, unzipped.

  I took out the fence cutters. I only needed to clip a few of the wires near the ground, just enough to peel it back and crawl through. I slid the blades into position and paused. I hadn’t committed a crime yet. I could still go back.

  Fucking Doug.

  I clenched my jaw and grabbed the handles in each hand. I felt the blades sink into the metal. They didn’t go all the way through. I bit my lip and tried harder. Snip. I worked my way up, cutting about two feet of chain link. I tried to peel it back. It wouldn’t move.

  Fucking Doug.

  Never had I had so much riding on an act of physical fucking labor. I pried. I peeled. I stood up, committing a felony, a possible act of terrorism, out in the open. I didn’t belong here.

  Fucking Doug.

  I braced my foot against the fence pole and yanked the hole wide enough to shove my backpack in, to shimmy through. As I did, the ragged edge of one of the wires snagged my jacket pocket, but I wasn’t letting that stop me. I clawed at the dirt and kicked and shoved myself through. The wire ripped my jacket and my black yoga pants. It scraped my leg, drawing blood.

  Fucking Doug.

  I could explain my DNA being all over his plane. I couldn’t explain it on the fence. I looked back, to see which wire had done it. I retraced my moves and decided on a culprit. I clipped it shorter and put the metal shaving in my pocket.

  The rest was simple. I’d hoisted myself onto Doug’s wings before. Once on top, I lay on my stomach and arched my upper back to reach the fuel tank. I uncapped it, inserted the funnel, and tore open one corner of the sugar bag I’d bought. The sweet crystals dissipated into the air like talc. I blinked them off my eyelashes and licked my lips.

  Before I screwed the cap back on, I took out a Ziploc bag. It had Chloe’s leg hair in it, the stuff I’d scraped from my razor. I tucked it in the threads of the screw cap.

  I was almost back through the fence when I heard her voice: a stage whisper, crawling up the hill to me. “Emily!”

  I checked my watch. It was 2:00 a.m.

  “Shhh!” I said.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHLOE

  Emily’s smile is animated. Her teeth are white and perfect and the first thing Chloe sees as she approaches through the dark. “I’m so happy to see you!” Emily says in a high whisper. She hugs her tight.

  Chloe hugs Emily back. It feels right, being here. She can trust this exuberance. She can trust Emily’s embrace. Chloe means something to Emily. She hadn’t been sure until just now.

  Earlier, at her apartment, when she was going over the plan, it was like Emily needed Chloe too badly. It was the first time she’d ever seen Emily want anything, and it was savage and desperate and suddenly unveiled, like she’d been keeping it from Chloe the whole time. Like she’d been hiding the fact that she needed Chloe’s help to murder—not just talk about it but actually kill—Doug.

  It was enough to make her want to skip tonight. She almost did. She was listening to this part of herself that kept saying, Get out of this situation. Just get out. She called two restaurants that had posted want ads. She lined up waitressing interviews.

  But then later, when she went to bed, she couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t stop thinking about Emily waiting all alone in the middle of a park, in the dark. How long before she realized Chloe wasn’t coming? Chloe wanted to text her, to apologize, to ask if Emily had really just been using her this whole time, but Emily had taken her flip phone.

  And Doug. Chloe can’t stop picturing him. He’s awful, yes. He’s a terrible person who’s done terrible things to Chloe and Emily and all of Dr. Maryn’s customers and who knows how many other people. But death, making him dead, when she can’t stop visualizing him as this person just like her who thinks and squirms and doesn’t want to die any more than she does. The image in her head of him realizing that his plane is crashing, that he’s about to die, it makes her feel like she’s suffocating.

  She’s had that terror before, and it’s not a feeling or anything human. It’s monster claws. It’s running through glass. She can’t bring that
horror into the world on purpose.

  No one wants to be a murderer. It’s one of the basics. You’re not supposed to kill other people. And the solution is simple. If you don’t want to be a murderer, all you have to do is not murder. She’s been repeating the phrase in her head all night.

  Chloe grabs both of Emily’s hands. “I need to talk to you,” she whispers. “I don’t think you should do this.”

  Emily waves her off with a satisfied grin. “It’s done.”

  “What?”

  Emily holds up her arm. “It’s all over my jacket.” Chloe swipes her index finger over Emily’s sleeve and rubs it against her thumb. The powder is stiff and grainy. She puts her thumb in her mouth.

  “Holy crap.” Chloe glances in the direction of her car. She has an idea that maybe she can walk back to it, rewind, erase herself from the moment, but Emily grabs her arm.

  “Stay with me.”

  “I wasn’t going to come,” says Chloe.

  “I know.”

  Chloe doesn’t know if it’s worth saying now. She doesn’t know what to do. The sugar is in the gas tank. There’s no way to take it out without getting in trouble. Emily reaches into her backpack, around the sharp point of a cutting tool. She pulls out a spool of silver duct tape. “You can help,” she says. “See where I cut the fence? We need to tape it together so there’s no obvious tear. It’ll take them longer to notice the break-in.”

  She hands her the roll of tape. Chloe rubs the outside with her thumb. The tape is so smooth it feels wet. She puts it down on the ground between them.

  “Emily,” she whispers. It’s not too late. “I’ve been thinking about this.”

  “Nope. No thinking now.”

  Chloe shakes her head. She has to say it. “When my mom stabbed me, when I thought I was going to die, I knew—I mean, my soul knew. It was terrifying. I kicked and bucked and fought because my soul knew it was headed toward nothing.”

  Emily grabs Chloe’s wrist, tight. Chloe tries to pull back, but Emily doesn’t let go. “There is nothing,” Emily says. “There’s just us. Now, whose side are you on?”