Calice’s mouth fell open. “All right,” she said, shouting with the first syllable, already calming with the second. She stopped her tongue between her big square teeth. “I don’t know what your problem is,” she said. She came right up to McGee’s chin, so close she could smell the citrus in the woman’s shampoo. “I don’t know what country you’re from that you don’t understand no. Babies understand no. Dogs understand no. Are you dumber than a dog?”
McGee didn’t know whether it was the chemicals in the air or the misery of the charade, but she suddenly felt like crying. Yellow drops were streaking down the glass.
The woman opened the glass door, and the yellow drops swerved toward the bottom.
The scene McGee overheard Calice narrating into the receptionist’s phone was not flattering, but there was nothing she could think to do to about it.
Then the numbered lights above the elevator fell—3, 2, 1, B. And then back up they came, 1, 2, 3, and McGee felt her pulse rise with each digit. The elevator doors parted, and Dorothy burst between them, unbuttoned plaid shirt flapping behind her.
Throughout the cursing and pointing that followed, McGee stood silent and dumb, offering nothing in response.
Was it minutes? It felt like hours. She didn’t know. Eventually Dorothy and Calice gave up and went away. They must have decided it was easier to retreat.
McGee waited alone in the reception area a short while longer, wobbling in her orthopedic shoes, but the women never came back.
She needed to get moving. Too much time had already slipped away. Skipping the cubicles, McGee headed straight for the corridors of private offices. As she went, she read the etched bronze nameplates on the thick oak doors. None of them belonged to Ruth Freeman. So back she went again to the beginning, but she was finding it hard to focus. The names passed under her eyes, and she forgot to read them.
Back to the beginning again, once more. Slowly, slowly this time. Concentrate. Nameplate after nameplate, but it still wasn’t there. No Ruth Freeman.
Fitch had been useless. She’d interrogated him repeatedly in the days leading up to this. But he’d been such a wreck when he’d been here before, he couldn’t remember anything about the layout. They might as well have blindfolded him.
McGee wilted backward into the spongy wall of the nearest cubicle. Was it possible Fitch had given her the wrong floor number?
On her way back to reception, to the cleaning cart she’d left behind, McGee passed a poorly lit corridor in a corner far removed from the other offices. In a glance, it looked unused, if not forgotten, space set aside for some unknown future. Most of the doors along the darkened corridor were unlabeled. Only a few of the rooms had windows overlooking the hall. Peering inside as she went, McGee saw conference rooms, long tables circled with chairs.
She was moving quickly, not watching where she was going, and as she turned a corner, she slammed her shin at full stride into the metal leg of a desk. The pain was so exquisite, she couldn’t even cry out, her breath stuffed in her mouth like cotton. She crumpled to the floor, holding her leg, biting her lip until she tasted blood.
She stayed there several minutes, squeezing her knee to her chest. When the pain finally subsided enough that she was able to lift her pant leg, she found a scarlet welt along the ridge of her shin. What kind of place was this for a desk, anyway — this dim, narrow hallway? Had it been left there to be thrown away? And would she be the one responsible for getting rid of it? But no, the computer on top was hooked up and plugged in, as was the phone. There was a pile of papers in a metal tray. A rubber stamp lay on its side in the center of the desk. McGee picked up the stamp and held it before her eyes. The letters were a backward-slanting cursive. Ink had rendered them almost indistinguishable from the background. McGee pressed the stamp into the pad and untucked her shirt. On her belly, she tattooed herself with Ruth Freeman’s signature.
Of course. Of all the offices, this one, tucked away in the shadows, was by far the most villainous.
She left the desk limping, but she’d already forgotten the pain in her shin.
McGee’s training had consisted of an hour spent sitting in front of a TV/VCR combo in the basement. On a tape drained almost entirely of color, a pair of actors in extravagant perms had demonstrated the art of dusting and vacuuming and mopping (coil the head before pressing!), and when it was over, Dorothy had turned the lights back on and handed McGee a flip chart full of colorful pictures and a schedule of which things she was supposed to clean on which night: light switches, light fixtures, keyboards, computer screens, telephones, windows, floors and carpets, door handles, door frames, windowsills, blinds.
McGee made her way back toward Ruth Freeman’s office, in what she hoped would appear to the guards watching on the security cameras as a natural progression, touching her cloth to everything in sight but never stopping.
In the private offices, with no cameras, she skipped steps that seemed unimportant. But in these places there were far more steps to begin with. The executives had bookcases and shelves and tables and chairs and file cabinets, collections of glass elephants and tennis trophies, awkwardly posed family photos with the same frosty blue backdrop — as if the rich all lived somewhere up among the clouds.
And then at last, McGee stood in the doorway of Ruth Freeman’s office. The office was less spacious than the others but had the same furniture: the polished tables and chairs, the hardwood desk so large it looked like an aircraft carrier. The room, at least, was just as Fitch had described.
Ruth Freeman didn’t decorate. Little in the office suggested anything about the woman who worked there. But that in itself said a lot. The anonymity could have been a sign of bland taste. But more likely it was the hallmark of a woman who liked to keep secrets. The only object at all revealing was a small photograph in a simple cherry frame propped up in one corner of the desk. In it a man and woman posed on a cliff overlooking the ocean. Behind them the sun was setting, the sky streaked with crimson. McGee had long imagined Ruth Freeman as middle-aged and underfed, desperately trying to cling to her youth, a wearer of pantsuits with shoulder pads and too much makeup, hair chemically stiffened to the texture of funnel cake. But as Fitch had said, the woman in the photo was older than middle age, her hair gray. She’d made no attempt to color it. Her skin collected in wrinkles around her mouth and eyes. Her smile was friendly. But of course, the Ruth Freeman in the picture was on vacation. The Ruth Freeman who sat in this chair, at this desk, was someone else entirely.
The man standing beside her in the picture was younger, lean and handsome, dressed in khakis and a white linen shirt, the top three buttons undone. On his face McGee recognized the smile of someone at ease with himself, someone well acquainted with comfort.
As she’d expected, Ruth Freeman’s file cabinet was locked. In vain McGee searched the one unlocked desk drawer for a key. But as it was, she didn’t yet have a plan for handling the files once she found them. And not until dawn was blandly announcing itself though the tinted windows of the corridor and it was time for her to move on to the next floor, did McGee come across the room housing the photocopier. By then all she wanted to do was go home to bed.
Myles didn’t even roll over when she came in. There were no grunts when she fumbled to join him under the covers, still dressed in her horrible jeans. She was too tired to deal with zippers and bows.
Sometime later — hours later, maybe — McGee became aware of Myles’s lips on her forehead, but she had no strength to do anything in return. And then he was gone.