Whisper Network

by Chandler Baker

  CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

  18-MAY

  Grace killed Ames. Had Ardie misheard her? Grace. Grace said she had killed Ames. Sloane had spouted wine like a whale, which Ardie couldn’t even pass off as Sloane overdoing it, because Grace Stanton had confessed to killing Ames Garrett. Which wasn’t at all true, of course. Had Grace actually met Grace before?

  “Why would you say that?” Ardie asked, tentatively.

  Grace’s eyes were slightly unfocused, as though the wine were working double-time. “Because I did. I was the last person to see Ames,” she said. “I—oh—” The word escaped as a sad, little moan. An animal giving up the fight.

  “Grace, you’re not making sense.” Sloane’s chest rested against the tablecloth as she tried to get as physically close to Grace as possible.

  “I am,” Grace said. “I finally am.” She pinched her chin down for a moment, collecting herself. “I was so angry with him, for being fooled into believing that he actually cared about me. Or maybe it was just my pride hurt that he thought I could be fooled. Anyway, I told Sloane that much. But then … but then that morning—the one that he died—he messaged me, something ridiculous, baiting me: I thought we were friends. That was what he said. It should have been me saying that to him, you know? So I went up there.” She tilted her head back now, for a second, stared up at the exposed beams of the ceiling. “When I couldn’t find him in his office, I knew he was up on the balcony, smoking. And I swear, I just thought, I’ll go speak my mind to him. Well, I did. Or I was and I was smoking and I felt very together. I mean, I was sort of shaking but I felt good. Strong. You guys have always been so good at standing up for yourselves and I just wanted—”

  Ardie let out a burst of laughter. “Really? After what I just told you? You think that?”

  Grace looked sober. “Yes. I know that.” And in response Ardie just pinched her lips together and felt an uncharacteristic squeeze on her heart, because they would never see themselves the same as they saw each other and that was a gift. “Anyway, I was talking and he sort of leaned in to light his cigarette off of mine and—I don’t know—I freaked out. It spooked me. I had this weird spasm and I don’t know how but my ring snagged his eyebrow. One of the prongs was loose.” She examined the shiny rock on her left hand that sparkled brightly in the natural light. Ardie missed wearing a ring. She’d sold the diamond and wished she hadn’t. “Gosh, there was this bright gush of blood on his face.” She covered her eyes, recalling. “Seriously, it dribbled down.” And Ardie wondered: Had she seen the gash on his eye? “He wiped it with his thumb and smeared it all over the railing and he called me … he called me a bitch. No one’s ever called me a bitch before. At least not to my face. I still don’t know what came over me. It was like I was a different person. I saw black. I said, ‘Go take a flying leap.’ Who says that? On a balcony?” Grace wiped the film of tears from underneath her eyes. “I was afraid maybe Katherine saw us talking out there, saw me hit him. Then I left. Well, anyway, you know the rest of the story.”

  Ardie did. But not the same one that Grace knew.

  Sloane hadn’t touched her wine since Grace started talking. “You cannot put that on yourself, Grace,” she said. “We have no idea what was going through his head.”

  “Sloane’s right.”

  “Trust me, I—”

  “You weren’t the last person to see Ames,” said Ardie.

  Sloane’s glance quickly tracked up, the question written clearly on her face: What had happened on Floor Eighteen?

  Ardie only knew for sure what happened to her, because of her, and what might have happened without her, after she’d, by chance, gotten on an elevator with Katherine and seen her get off on the eighteenth floor.

  She only knew this: A payroll officer would confirm that Ardie had received a signature on payroll tax documents around 1:30 P.M., although the payroll officer hadn’t checked the exact time, which would explain why, shortly after Ames’s death, she would be seen riding an elevator and she would be cleared of any possibility of wrongdoing. Ardie, on the other hand, knew that she’d received the signature of the payroll officer closer to 1:25 PM, a discrepancy of five minutes.

  What happened in those intervening minutes before Ardie inserted herself into the scene? She imagined Ames pacing the balcony, sucking on the end of a cigarette, an image that wasn’t difficult to conjure because Ardie had seen it before, though it had been years now. She imagined Ames trying to justify himself to Katherine, trying to explain how he’d never done anything that anyone didn’t want him to do. A speech that she’d also heard before.

  Ardie had felt uneasy the moment Katherine had left the elevator and had been thinking of Sloane when she made the life-altering decision to stop off on the eighteenth floor herself. She intended to ease her conscience. Just to check. She watched through the sliding glass door, drawn by the rising voices—or the rising voice, rather, which was Ames’s.

  Ames raked a hand over his face. Katherine tried to push past, but his arm went out, blocking her.

  The slap was a shock. Electric. Polarizing. Ardie’s chin flinched inward in sync with Ames’s own. Katherine’s hand had struck out like a viper.

  If Sloane had been accused or if Grace or even if Katherine had, Ardie would have told the next version of events. She would have said that it all happened so fast. She would have gone to the police then, no matter the fact that it was too late. She would have told all of it.

  But that hadn’t happened. Something more insidious had taken the place of those would-be events. Instead, Grace had been privately blaming herself, spiraling, and so the question became: What should Ardie do now?

  “You saw Ames?” Sloane asked and it felt as if the restaurant around their table ceased to exist. Grace’s tears stopped. She stared.

  “Not just me,” Ardie answered slowly.

  And it was then that the waitress showed up to take their orders. Ardie imagined how they must look to this poor woman with the green suspenders. The strange thing about delivering bad news was how it was rarely new information to the messenger. So Ardie had to allow for her words to take the color of revelation for the sake of Sloane and Grace. She had to choose what to say. Carefully.

  She ordered seared rainbow trout with soba noodles and sprouts.

  Meanwhile, Sloane and Grace held their breath until the waitress left. Ardie had meant to ask for another refill of her water.

  “What are you saying?” Grace’s fingers wrapped tightly around her cross necklace.

  “Ames asked to speak with Katherine and she went. When I found this out I was, understandably, concerned.”

  There was a fascinating tidbit Ardie had once heard: Women walked around the world in constant fear of violence; men’s greatest fear was ridicule.

  “And you’re sure that this was after I talked to him.” Grace’s forehead wrinkled. There was a new expression on her face: hope.

  In reality, it didn’t happen as fast as Ardie would have liked. When Ames’s hands were around Katherine’s throat and he was shouting at her, spittle flying into Katherine’s eyelashes, there must have been words, but Ardie couldn’t remember which ones. Katherine’s eyes bulged like a cornered deer’s, her back to the balcony’s cement barricade. The flare of heat in Ames’s face purpled.

  The sliding glass door peeled apart, the sound cutting like a blade.

  “Ames.” Ardie hooked him by the shirt collar, grabbed his elbow, and pulled him off. What on earth did he think he was he doing? She remembered, even knowing Ames the way that she did, being surprised by him in that moment. Like, Oh, and he’s capable of this, too. Katherine’s hands pressed to her windpipe, her chest collapsing.

  And in the next second, Ardie felt her insides explode. She wondered what he saw in that last second of his life. Blind rage, teeth bared, curiosity, cold intent, or pent-up frustration. She knew what she saw in his eyes—hatred and carnal fury and a how-dare-she. She felt the struggle. Felt his arms on her. Felt his strengt
h and her own and the fact that they were both holding back just a bit, out of some instinct that cleaved them to propriety.

  And then the thought struck her: there was no returning from this moment.

  They’d passed the point. The moment she had grabbed him off Katherine.

  She pushed him, again, this time with her shoulder in his chest. Grunting in surprise, he staggered. One leg left the ground as he struggled for balance. And then—and then—the weight of him simply dissolved.

  Gone, windmilling backward through space.

  Katherine kneeled down, panting where his feet used to be, and it seemed nearly impossible, too far-fetched to believe what she’d just seen: Katherine—a woman in a crisp black pantsuit—grabbing Ames’s standing leg and … heaving.

  She was actually trying to throw him over the ledge. Forcing his center of gravity too high.

  And Ardie understood that Katherine had experienced the same revelation. No going back.

  Thank you, Ardie had whispered, hands on her knees as she caught her own breath. Sweat coated her forehead.

  The truth: Ames might have caught himself. Or Ardie, with her hands full of his shirt, might have pulled him back. Were it not for that one. last. push.

  Afterward, they took the stairs.

  * * *

  “I’m absolutely positive,” Ardie said.

  Grace started to speak and then stopped herself.

  “Oh,” was all that Sloane had to offer.

  A bomb goes off and pieces fly out in unpredictable directions, causing destruction of varying degrees. Collateral damage.

  If she went over the story enough times, she could nearly convince herself that, in the end, he’d chosen to jump. Sloane stretched across the table and squeezed both Grace’s and Ardie’s hands, and Ardie felt a little sorry for men because they never got to hold hands with each other.

  EPILOGUE

  We had been programmed to trade in secrets. Our leading deodorant brand promised not to tell. Our magazine covers hocked the secrets to clearer skin, better hair, toned legs, and longer orgasms. Our mothers passed down recipes with secret ingredients. Even our feminism—second-wave, couched as it was in our feminine mystique—felt purposefully (smartly) veiled in secrecy.

  Our motto had long been: Keep it between us.

  And we did. For generations. Passing along old wives’ tales, telling each other how to relieve cramps, cautioning one another never to leave an open drink unattended, not to wear a ponytail, not to open the door to strangers, not to be in a room alone with him. Our tactic was avoidance, to mark landmines and encourage each other to step around them so that nobody went kaboom.

  It wasn’t only the warning that kept us safe but our ability to keep that warning quiet. Like secret agents operating behind enemy lines, we couldn’t afford to get caught. And yet we risked it anyway. With voices hushed, we reached out to each other to offer our knowledge. We tried. Because we’d always wanted the best for each of our friends.

  We wanted her to dump that loser. We wanted her to stop worrying about losing five pounds. We wanted to tell her she looked great in that dress and that she should definitely buy it. We wanted her to crush the interview. We wanted her to text us when she got home. We wanted her to see what we saw: someone smart and brave and funny and worthy of love and success and peace. We wanted to kill whoever got in her way.

  We started to wonder: By whispering, whose secrets were we keeping anyway—ours or theirs? Whose interests did our silence ultimately protect?

  The answer came to us gradually. As we began to strip off our pantyhose and ask for more money and march in pink hats and hold megaphones. As we built digital platforms and watched handmaids and demanded that companies advertise sizes that fit our bodies. As we took up space.

  As we grew tired of whispering because what were we hiding, after all? We had stories, all of us. Would speaking up cost us? Maybe. But maybe it would cost them, too.

  And so, when one of us spoke up, it was never just for her. It was for us. If anything, she was the willing sacrifice. Another log on the pyre stoked by us, our stories, our voices. And we would fan the flames. Spread the truth. Join the chorus. Burn it to the ground. Raze the earth, if we had to. Start over on level ground.

  Our legacy would be our words. Shouted out loud. For all to hear. We were done petitioning to be believed. We were finished requesting the benefit of the doubt. We weren’t asking for permission. The floor was ours.

  Listen.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I have been gifted with the most incredible network of people that helped dream this book into existence.

  A loud and heartfelt “thank you” to my agent, Dan Lazar, for opening (and holding) the metaphorical door like a true gentleman. After countless reads, notes, calls, and emails, Dan thrust my words into all of the right hands and I am eternally grateful.

  Of course, two of those hands belonged to my lovely editor, Christine Kopprasch, who asked all the smartest questions, in all the kindest possible ways, and understood right from page one how this book should feel when it ended (and how to help me navigate the in-between). By that same token, I feel fortunate to have landed at Flatiron Books for the opportunity to work with outstanding people including Amy Einhorn and Amelia Possanza. Thank you, also, to Bryn Clark, Robert Van Kolken, Nancy Trypuc, Katherine Turro, and the rest of the Macmillan team.

  I deeply appreciate the input and hard work of my film agent, Dana Spector. (You and Dan make a formidable pair.) And to Jon Baker, for championing my book (and being patient when I accidentally made a beeline for Astoria…).

  Same goes for my foreign rights agents, including Maja Nikolic and Peggy Boulos Smith, who found Whisper Network homes across the globe. Speaking of “across the globe,” I’m particularly indebted to the Sphere and Hachette Australia teams, with special thanks to my biggest cheerleaders and savvy editors, Cath Burke, Robert Watkins, and Rebecca Saunders, as well as to Maddie West, Ed Wood, and Louise Newton.

  I have wonderfully supportive friends who read and commented on drafts: Wendy Pursch, Julia Jonas, Emily O’Brien, Lisa and Joyce McQueen, Charlotte Huang, Lori Goldstein, and Shana Silver—not sure what I would have done without you. In addition, I’m incredibly lucky to have the women in my book club, who embody sisterhood and women supporting women (and books!). Thank you to Jeremy Coffey, Elizabeth Stork, and Hue M. Flex for answering my research questions. And to the many, many women who shared their stories with me—writing this book has created its own quasi–whisper network and I’ve enjoyed getting the chance to lean in and listen.

  I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that I work at a law firm with amazing attorneys who have been kind enough to give me the time and space to write: Thank you.

  And finally, the biggest thanks goes out to my husband, Rob. Being a working mom is next to impossible without the full support of a partner. You continue to step up so that I can reach for my dreams.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Reader,

  I reaped the benefit of my first whisper network when I was a summer associate at a law firm. At a work event, a much older partner was giving me an uncomfortable amount of attention. The other associates were leaving, but this partner and his friends kept encouraging me to stay with them at the bar. “How old are you?” they asked. (Twenty-four at the time, while they were over fifty, in case anyone wants to do that math.) “Do you like older men?” I was in a tricky situation—a summer associate is sort of like a well-paid intern vying for a full-time position, and networking is key. But in that moment, I felt more like a target, someone they hoped—assumed, really—would be a “good sport.” I felt myself doing that smiling and fake laughing thing that we all turn to in these moments. I wanted to leave, but I also wanted a job. And wanted to make sure this man felt—I don’t know—appeased? At the very least, not rejected.

  Really, though, I remember less about those men and more about the woman who extracted me from the situation with a lot more gr
ace and social skill than I possessed at the time. She had a charming Southern accent, a big, shiny smile, and as she joined the group she put her arm around my shoulder and told me quietly, “Go ahead and leave, I’ll take care of this.” So, I listened and I let her. The next day, a senior associate, having heard a version of what had happened, asked if I’d like to speak to HR. Answer: Absolutely not! Sure, his behavior was bad, but—sorry—this very influential partner was about to take part in the decision to hire me—or not. I later learned I wasn’t the first young woman to have a run-in, but because of the kindness of a few savvy women, I—and my career—survived unscathed.

  It’s been like this as long as I can remember. Many years ago, I was the only woman on my college’s men’s rowing team. I was the coxswain (a.k.a. the person who yells at the rowers and steers the boat). As the only woman on the team, I was preoccupied with ensuring that I fit in. Nothing would ever bother or offend me. No way! Not me! One day, I sat around with the team. Admittedly, I’d gotten crossways with one of the boys over the previous few weeks and he’d been annoyed with me for reasons unknown. I reached for a slice of pizza and this boy—who was 6'5"—kicked me hard in the jaw, causing my teeth to snap together with a loud clack. His laugh was mean. Everyone else sat slightly dumbfounded, but silent. I was, of all things, mortified. As my eyes pricked with tears, I knew only that I didn’t want to do the “girly” thing—overreact. I clung desperately to the notion that I was the kind of girl who could hang. So I quietly got up, went to a different room, and never said another word about it. Little did I know that versions of this dynamic were playing out in bigger and smaller ways for so many women, and an echo of it would follow through my and every woman’s professional life—Play along! Don’t cause a scene!