Marooned in Manhattan (15 page)

Chapter 27

A
shimmering heat haze blanketed the
city early the following morning with still no sign of the long predicted thunderstorm. Even Frank had abandoned his customary cheeriness. I dressed carefully that morning, choosing the navy polka dot dress I had worn to Mum’s funeral. It was the only outfit I owned that seemed appropriate. Over it, I put on a white cotton cardigan. I brushed my hair for much longer than usual and then I combed Ben’s hair too with a wire-mesh type comb. His nails made a clip-clipping sound on the floor so I took him down to the clinic where Joanna helped me trim his nails. He didn’t like it much.

Lucy and Greg walked with me to Leela’s office building on Sixth Avenue. We took Ben too because he had a way of making me feel brave. We stood outside the glass turnstile doors, craning our necks to try to see the top of the building.

‘Good luck,’ said Greg.

‘I feel all jangling inside,’ said Kylie, ‘more nervous than before a skating competition.’

‘Let me come with you!’ pleaded Greg.

‘No, but thank you,’ I said. ‘You have hockey practice this
morning. And, anyway, one kid is suspicious enough. Two kids would attract too much attention.’

‘Text me if you need help,’ he said.

I handed over Ben’s leash to Kylie.

‘I’ll wait right here in front of this main entrance,’ Kylie said.

I nodded and slipped through the revolving glass doors.

In the middle of the gigantic marble lobby stood a high and narrow desk manned by two security guards. In front of the desk, a line of people waited impatiently. A sign said, ‘All Visitors Must Sign In Here.’ Nobody took any notice of me as I joined the back of the line. When I reached the top, a fat female security officer barked at me.

‘ID.’

I handed over my passport.

‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

‘To see Leela Patel,’ I answered.

‘What company is she with?’

‘Oh, Lansing, Drucker and Wallis.’

I waited for a few seconds as she made a call. I interrupted her, panic-stricken because the company would not have any record of a meeting for Evangeline Brooks.

‘I’m joining my stepmom, Lucy Pensevie. She is the one meeting Ms Patel. I forgot something I need for my summer day camp.’

The security guard acted like she didn’t hear me, but she said into the phone, ‘Lucy Pensevie is meeting Leela Patel this morning. Her stepdaughter, Evangeline, is here. She
needs to see her stepmom.’

I felt sweat at the back of my neck drip down my back despite the arctic air conditioning.

‘Stand to the left,’ the security officer instructed.

I took two steps to the left as a male security guard positioned a tiny camera. Click. He handed me a badge with my photograph on it.

‘Forty-first floor,’ he said.

I noticed most of the other visitors sticking the badges on their suit jackets. I stuck mine under the collar on the left side of my dress.

I walked towards the first set of elevator banks. There were three electronic barriers and a security guard. I watched two men in grey suits swipe their badges at one of the barriers and walk through. I pulled off my badge and did the same. My triumph was brief because I noticed almost straight away that the elevators only went to the eighteenth floor. I headed back out the barriers.

‘Where are you going, kid?’ asked the security officer.

‘The forty-first floor.’

He pointed across the floor.

‘Last elevator bank on the right.’

‘Thank you.’

Seven people rode up in the elevator with me – four men and three women. None of them spoke, or looked at me, or at each other. They all tap-tapped rapidly on their BlackBerries, only looking up when it was time to get off at their floors. It was almost like everybody was wearing invisibility cloaks.

Outside the elevators on the forty-first floor were two doors, one for the ladies’ restroom and the other for men. Past those doors, two ladies dressed in matching pale blue blouses and navy blue blazers sat behind a reception desk.

‘I’m here to see Leela Patel.’

The curly-haired lady looked down at a logbook.

‘Where is Mrs Pensevie? Your stepmom, right?’

‘Yes, she’s just gone into the bathroom,’ I said, gesturing behind me, ‘and she’ll be right out.’

‘Ok,’ she replied. ‘We’ll let Ms Patel know you are here. Go ahead and wait in the Thomas Jefferson Conference Room. Take a right at the end of the hallway and it is the first door on your left between the Lincoln and the Roosevelt rooms.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

I headed to the conference room. The atmosphere in the law firm was quiet and still like a church. All I could hear was the faint hum of hushed voices. The corridor was lined with vases of artificial flowers and paintings of vases with artificial flowers. I peeped through the open doors of the Ronald Reagan Conference Room. Inside was a long table with at least seventy people in dark suits sitting or standing around it. They had laptops and BlackBerries and stacks of papers in front of them. On the sideboard sat a buffet breakfast spread: bagels, doughnuts, jellies, fruit salad, rye bread, triangular pieces of toast, little plastic tubs of whitefish. I walked quickly past the open doors, found the Jefferson room and pushed open the door. It was much smaller than the Ronald Reagan room, with a table and four chairs in the middle.
On the sideboard, there were bottles of water and soda and a pot of coffee and glasses and china cups and saucers. I took a bottle of water and sat down. Then I decided that could be stealing, so I put it back. I tried each of the chairs and finally decided on the one facing the door. I sat down, put my right hand in the right pocket of my white cotton cardigan and waited.

The door opened and there was a loud gasp.

‘Evie! What are
you
doing here?’ asked Leela.

‘I wanted to talk to you about doing a deal,’ I said calmly, as if I visited law firms every day.

‘I don’t believe this,’ she said. ‘I don’t have time for your little girl games. You have to get out of here right away. I am meeting with a potential client.’

‘I
am
Mrs Pensevie,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘I am your potential client.’

‘How did you get past security?’ she asked.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ I said. ‘I want to do a deal with you. I heard what you said to Kirsten on the phone a couple of weeks ago about getting Scott to do that stupid TV show and about how, because of me, Scott is going to go bankrupt.’

‘Evie,’ she said, folding her arms, ‘you are in extremely serious trouble for trespassing like this. If you don’t leave right now, I will have to call security to come in here and get you.’

She strode across the room and picked up the phone on the sideboard.

‘I don’t think you want to do that,’ I said quietly. ‘There are a lot of very important looking people in the Ronald Reagan room who I’m sure would find it very weird to see a screaming kid dragged past their door by security guards.’

Leela put the phone receiver down with a click, stalked back across the room, shut the door, and stood in front of me.

‘What have you got in your pocket?’ she said, eyeing my right hand, which still lay in my cardigan pocket.

‘Nothing,’ I responded.

In an instant, she reached down into my pocket and pulled out a mini tape recorder.

‘Evie, Evie,’ she said with a fake giggle, ‘that is the oldest, most obvious, trick there is.’

I stared down at the mahogany table.

‘What do you want?’ she asked, putting the recorder carefully in her handbag and sitting down in a black swivel chair across from me.

‘I want you to stop trying to get Scott involved in TV programmes. That’s all. And if you do that, I won’t tell Scott about your stupid plans and I will go back to Ireland on the flight Scott has booked for me.’

Remembering the tagline from a movie trailer, I added, ‘Because if you don’t, I will be your worst
nightmare
.’

Leela leaned back in her chair and laughed long and hard. She suddenly stopped laughing and snapped, ‘Do you know what I do all day long?’

She continued without waiting for an answer.

‘I chop little kids like you in half.’

‘I will tell you what you are going to do. You are going to keep your mouth shut and get on a plane to Ireland. Because if you tell Scott, guess what? He’s not going to believe you anyway. What we have here is a textbook case of step-parent alienation syndrome. I will explain to Scott that you are so jealous of me that you made all that stuff up to try and turn him against me, and Kirsten will back up my story.’

I stayed quiet.

‘It’s really a very sad syndrome,’ she said sweetly. ‘Just last month, I represented a mother. We claimed parental alienation, which means that the father deliberately tried to turn the children against my client. And just like that,’ she snapped her fingers, ‘we got an order from the judge preventing the father from even seeing his own children, except once a month for two hours at Chuck E. Cheese.’

‘That’s a load of rubbish,’ I scoffed. ‘Scott’s never going to believe that I am alienating him from you. You have no evidence.’

Leela laughed again.

‘You are so naïve, sweetie. You don’t need
evidence
. You just need to keep repeating the word “syndrome”. We could even send you off for evaluation. I have a number of child
psychologists
in my pocket who would be more than happy to write a very damning report about you and your crazy, sad little orphan efforts to alienate Scott from me.’

I stood up, walked to the door and opened it.

‘Are you finished?’ I asked.

‘I think I’ve said all I needed to say,’ she replied, still smiling.

‘Good,’ I said, and on a stupid, irresistible impulse, I leaned down and pulled a tiny miniature recorder out of my left shoe, ‘because I guess that means I can switch this off now.’

Sidney’s warning echoed in my head, ‘Make sure the big recorder is obvious so when she “finds” it, with any luck it won’t occur to her to look for a second.’

Thank you, Sidney, I thought and I didn’t wait for Leela’s reaction. I ran as fast as I could, down the corridor past the conference rooms and the very surprised-looking
receptionists
and out to the elevator banks where a bunch of people were waiting for an elevator. They stared at me, BlackBerries frozen in their hands. I glanced behind and saw that Leela had reached the reception desk. Panicked, I pushed my way through the crowd and pulled open the heavy door under the red neon-lit sign, ‘Emergency Staircase’.

It was dark and deathly quiet inside the stairwell but there were emergency light strips on each stair so I could see enough to half-run, half-stumble my way down, clutching the iron railing. Forty. Thirty-Nine. Thirty-Eight. Thirty-Seven. Gasp. Thirty-Six. Thirty-Five. Thirty-Four. Thirty-Three. On the Thirty-Second floor, I halted to catch my breath and to listen for sounds of anyone following me, but I heard nothing. I resumed my downward escape, able to take the flights of stairs faster now that my eyes had adjusted to the semi-darkness, counting each floor as I descended lower and lower. It took about half an hour to reach the second floor, which is when I heard a door opening a floor above me and the sound of quick footsteps and the beam of a torch.
I glanced up to see a brown-haired security guard.

‘Evelyn,’ he called out in a thick New York accent. ‘Stop! Stay where you are.’

I grabbed the handle of the nearest door, yanked it open and continued to run. I found myself in a large room, filled with people sitting at desks with computer screens, separated from one another by thin, flimsy, white partitions. I dodged around the partitions, the mini-recording device tightly clutched in my sweaty right hand.

‘Stop her!’ yelled the security guard, reaching the entrance to the floor.

A tall skinny guy with glasses made a grab for me but I ducked under his outstretched arms and continued running, unsure what direction to try. I caught sight of a glass door and swung right towards it. A few seconds later, I reached the door and pushed, then pulled, but it wouldn’t budge.

‘Stop running!’ called the security guard from close behind me.

I spun around and ran off in the opposite direction.
Half-way
down an aisle, I tripped on a potted plant and grabbed at the corner of a desk to stop myself falling, sending stacks of papers and pens and boxes of paperclips crashing to the floor.

‘Hey!’ yelled a red-haired woman sitting at the desk.

‘Sorry! I gasped, starting to run again.

The security guard was so close now he could almost touch me. I reached another door and again it was locked. I pushed a red button at the side and the door slid open and I bounded inside. I found myself in a large room with
white-painted
walls, filled with nothing but large plastic rubbish bins. There was no way out except the way I came in, which was now blocked by the bulky security guard.

‘Calm down, kid,’ he said advancing towards me. ‘There’s nowhere left to run.’

I looked frantically around me. Without pausing to think, I opened the steel grey trap door and hurled myself into the rubbish chute, feet-first. I felt a hand grab me by the collar of my cardigan and, after a brief struggle, I pulled free and began to hurtle downwards at a pace way faster than any ride at
Great Adventure
.