Shades of Grey (22 page)

The big, maze-like space was quiet. Maybe Priority really was renovating the area? Taking courage from the silence, Dulcie looked around. Mr Grey was nowhere to be seen, but she knew where she was now and she walked up to what had been her area. She could hear typing, the quiet tap-tap-tap of fingers on a computer keyboard. The area hadn’t been completely vacated then. So why had they moved her? Water damage? Or – she thought of the phantom feline again – a rodent problem?

She shuddered and moved on until she heard a voice, vaguely familiar. Dulcie was about to call out when she realized she didn’t have any rationale for being here. Could she say she was looking for something? Her lost sweater, perhaps?

Armed with that idea, she walked forward. The voices were definitely coming from her former workspace. She held her breath, trying to eavesdrop. This must have been what Mr Grey wanted her to see, right? Did listening count? People tended to forget that the cubicles had no ceilings or doors – and that sound carried. But whoever was talking kept his – or her – voice low, and that made Dulcie’s curiosity stronger. Were some Priority minions searching for clues – or, worse, for some trace that would link Dulcie with the virus? She was only a temp!

With a gulp, Dulcie realized how perfect she could seem for this crime. She was an impoverished graduate student, someone with ‘higher goals’ than a mere corporate job. Someone who was new to Priority, who had arrived right before the problems started – and then disappeared for several days. She’d told them about Tim, about finding his body. But had anyone checked to confirm her reasons for absence? Maybe that would just make her more of a suspect. Maybe they’d wonder if she’d gotten him killed, through drugs or gambling or some other massive debt-related crime.

Dulcie’s head was beginning to hurt. The morning’s constant noise had taken its toll. The powers that were Priority couldn’t know that she was fundamentally honest, a scholar with a sense of honor. They couldn’t know that she was used to being poor, that all she really needed was library access and enough to pay the rent. No wonder they were investigating her. Didn’t she have a friend anywhere in this cold, corporate world? She closed her eyes and leaned on the grey carpet of a cubicle, shaking the thin wall.

Not ten feet down, a jet-black head of hair popped up and turned. Kohl-rimmed eyes blinked.

‘Joanie! I’m so glad to see you!’ Dulcie was almost shouting. But before her Goth friend could respond, another face appeared over the grey carpet. Tanned and sleek, Sally Putnam stared back, her basilisk glare fixing Dulcie to the spot.

‘Miss Schwartz, I trust you have a reason for entering a work area from which you’ve been expressly forbidden?’ Her dark eyes looked flat and hard. Dulcie felt they could see right through her.

‘I . . . I thought maybe my sweater had turned up.’ God, that sounded lame, but it was the best she could do under that gaze. The reptilian eyes blinked slowly, her excuse was processed and rejected.

‘Your
sweater
?’
The recollection of their last conversation must have surfaced, because those snake eyes narrowed. ‘You are not going to continue in that ridiculous accusation, I trust. But I must say, it is a convenient excuse for you, allowing you to cast aspersions and to snoop. I’m beginning to wonder if this sweater ever existed.’

The complete effrontery of the words sparked something in Dulcie. ‘Well, maybe you didn’t take it. But I liked that sweater.’ Her courage grew, and the words began to tumble out. ‘Joanie, you saw it, too. Right?’

Joanie stared back, mouth open. She was shaking her head slightly.

‘My mother knitted it for me, and it did go missing while I was away from my desk and I was hoping—’

‘You should be hoping you still have a job here, young lady.’ The HR boss was positively hissing now. ‘And you should be extremely grateful that we haven’t pressed charges. Not that that course of action isn’t still under discussion.’

Dulcie stepped back, her train of thought – and her courage – interrupted. Was this why they had brought her back to work? To keep an eye on her? And why wasn’t Joanie saying anything?

‘Now, if you know what’s good for you, you’ll go back to your workspace. Your
proper
workspace. We aren’t paying you to snoop, you know.’

Dulcie couldn’t think of another rebuttal. The reality of her position here – that they were keeping her, under glass, while they decided what to do – had driven all other thoughts from her mind. She stepped back. Sally Putnam kept staring. And so Dulcie turned and walked swiftly past the elevators, down the long hall, around the message center, and back to her new desk. The encounter had robbed her of any desire for lunch. But as she sat there, staring at the cursor blinking on her screen, waiting for her heart rate to still, another thought came to mind. Mr Grey had told her there was something she had to see. She’d seen her friend, Joanie. She’d asked Joanie for help; Joanie, who had nicknamed Sally Putnam ‘the Snake’ in the first place. And Joanie had said nothing.

‘I can’t believe I didn’t turn her in,’ Dulcie was muttering to herself back at her new desk. The message center was so loud, nobody would hear her anyway. ‘I could have told them that
she
had access to my machine.’

The forms were beginning to blur: George Esposito, claimant code 278; George Espossita, claimant code 366. She slammed one form on top of the other and reached for a third. The pile might not have grown during her brief absence, but at this point Dulcie wasn’t putting anything past Priority. ‘I could have told them that
she
was there sometimes when I wasn’t. And she’s had that job longer than I did.’

Dulcie stopped typing. Maybe that was it. Here she was, blaming Joanie for some kind of treachery, when maybe she was simply next on the list to be investigated. Why else would Sally Putnam have been down by her old workstation, anyway? The grey maze of cubicles was hardly upper management territory. Kicking herself for jumping to conclusions, she reached for another form. Quiroga, Michael, claimant code 887. Were these forms in any kind of order? Almost without thinking, she looked over at the code key: 887, accident in home. A wave of nausea hit her. Tim. Just when she felt she’d gotten over it – over that awful, awful day – it would come back. She remembered how tired she had felt that day, how hot and depressed. And how the sweat on her back had gone cold when she realized what she was seeing: the hand, the spreading puddle. The horror of it all. She opened her eyes and realized she had crumpled the form in her hand.

What had gotten her through that? Had it been the grey cat, appearing first on her doorstep and then, mysteriously, inside her kitchen? And now she was seeing him, hearing him even, in this corporate hell-hole. Had she in fact been seeing visions, seeing the ghost of her beloved pet? Or had the pressure finally pushed her around the bend? Dulcie found herself thinking about Lucy’s ‘visions’, her mother’s so-called psychic moments. For too long now Dulcie had dismissed them as New Age puffery, a lonely middle-aged woman’s solace. But was there something else at work here, and was it hereditary?

She smoothed out the form and began to type. She wouldn’t find the answers here at Priority. And if there was something unbalanced in her supposed visions, maybe it was passing. She hadn’t had a detailed vision just now: she’d only seen a tail. And, well, she had heard a voice. But her ears had been almost ringing with all the noise of the day. It could have been her imagination. Just like the toothbrush. Dulcie sighed. The evidence was mounting. She was developing a mental illness – or she had a spectral pet. Finishing Mr Quiroga’s claim, she began on that of a Ms Levinson; a nice normal code 333. Industrial. Maybe before Luke came over tonight, she’d call her mom and try to make some sense of all of this. Maybe they were both just lonely ladies in need of a chat.

But four hours later, she was in no mood to call Lucy. The constant noise and the lack of lunch had given her a throbbing headache. She needed aspirin, a drink, and a good friend. As she queued for the elevators – there was always a crowd at five o’clock – Dulcie looked around for Joanie. Her earlier suspicions now seemed foolish. She would drag the black-clad girl over to Foley’s, get the dirt, and still be home in time to meet Luke. But even though she waited for two elevator cars to go past, her eyes strained on the far corridor, the Goth girl never appeared.

‘Maybe they’ve taken her in for questioning.’ Dulcie said, without realizing she was talking out loud.

‘Excuse me?’ She jumped. Next to her, a queen-sized older woman in tiger-striped polyester was staring. ‘You said something?’

‘Sorry. I’ve been sitting at a terminal too long.’ She tried a smile. ‘Talking to myself.’

Tiger-stripes pushed ahead, her wide hips herding Dulcie into the elevator. ‘You’re the new girl. The one they have seated by the message center.’ She said it as a statement of fact, not a question, but Dulcie nodded.

‘Yeah. They moved me from the cubicles. Might be for repairs or something.’

Overplucked eyebrows rose up. ‘Could be,’ she said, her doubt clear, and Dulcie recognized her as one of the phone operators.

‘Why, can you tell me anything? Would you tell me what you’ve heard?’ But the elevator had reached the ground floor, and the fat woman had pushed through, leaving Dulcie in her wake. Dulcie stepped into the lobby and looked around. Still no sign of Joanie. Should she head to Foley’s? No, she decided. The sky outside looked too threatening to make a walk anywhere feel like fun. Besides, she really needed to talk to someone with some sense. Suze, maybe, if she wasn’t tucked away in the library.

Dulcie reached for her phone just as it began to ring.

‘Bag, please?’ She opened her bag for the guard, retrieved the phone and flipped it open.

‘You’re all clear.’ The noise in the lobby and the guard’s voice obscured the line on the other end. Beyond the glass doors, Dulcie saw pedestrians scurry as the clouds opened up.

‘Excuse me? I didn’t hear you.’ Dulcie stepped toward the revolving doors to look at the downpour. Two burly guards, new since that morning, stood on either side, ignoring the soaked pedestrians coming in.

‘Dulcie, this is Helene. I found your number. I thought you’d want to know.’ Dulcie looked around the lobby. What could be so important that her neighbor would call her twenty minutes before she’d be home? ‘The police have been all up and down the block, Dulcie. They talked to Bob next door and he came over right before they rang my bell. I didn’t answer, but I thought you should know. They’re talking to everyone – and they’re asking about you.’

Twenty

Never mind the downpour. Dulcie ran through the rain, desperate to get home and – what? Confront the police? Find out what her neighbors were saying about her?

At least Helene had called, though if her neighbor’s intention was to warn her to stay away, it had the opposite effect. Dulcie was sick of being acted upon. As she descended into the T, she realized she wanted to do something,
anything
.

By the time she surfaced at Central Square, the two uniforms were long gone, of course. But at least the rain had ended, and Dulcie was able to fold up her umbrella before knocking on Helene’s door.

‘They were asking about visitors, friends.’ Helene handed Dulcie a towel. Even with the umbrella, she’d gotten soaked. ‘Boyfriends – you know.’

‘Great.’ Dulcie rubbed her hair down, hiding her embarrassment in the fluffy terry. ‘Like I have any boyfriends.’

‘Well, that’s the problem.’

Dulcie looked up. Helene wasn’t smiling. ‘My stupid ex, Duane? He’s been hanging around. I think he’s seeing that slut, Marcella. Anyway, Bob says he saw Duane actually run after the cops – and this is when it was raining. They ducked into a doorway, and Bob says Duane talked to them for, like, five minutes. He kept pointing to your door, too.’

‘Why would he do that? What does he even have to say about me?’

‘I don’t know. Men. He’s a loser.’ Helene made a face and then a decision. ‘Truth is, he knew you never liked him. He used to say you were a man-hater; that you were trying to break us up. He even said you planted cat hair in my place so he couldn’t stay over, what with his asthma and his allergies and all.’

Dulcie hid her face in the towel and closed her eyes. ‘That’s crazy.’

‘I know, and I figure the cops have enough sense to suss that out. I just thought you should know, too.’

It was all too depressing for words. But just as she was about to hand the towel back, Dulcie felt a familiar warm pressure on her ankle. She looked down to see a small, orange-coloured back. ‘Helene? You got a cat?’ In her present state, Dulcie wasn’t quite sure she was seeing a real feline.

‘Yeah, this is Julius. Get it?’ She lifted the kitten with a smile, revealing a fluffy white belly. ‘I went to the shelter last night, picked out this little fellow and his brother, Murray. Cute, huh?’

‘Adorable.’ Dulcie reached out to take the kitten, which began kneading in satisfaction. ‘By any chance, the brother isn’t grey, is he?’

‘You’re still thinking of your old kitty, aren’t you?’ Helene smiled. ‘No, sorry. He’s orange, too, all over, with the cutest pink nose. But striped more, like a tiger.’

Makes sense, thought Dulcie, holding the kitten up to her neck. If this little fellow was so young, and had such a neat, short coat, what were the odds he had a long-haired, full-grown sibling? ‘Well, I’m thrilled for you.’

‘Thanks. Better two good cats than one bad man. Which reminds me, have you given any thought to getting a new cat in your life? There are a lot of great animals down at the shelter.’

‘I know,’ said Dulcie, enjoying the warmth of the kitten. ‘I’m just not ready yet.’ Up close to her face, she could feel the soft vibration as the kitten began to purr.

The brief feline interlude was wonderful, but Dulcie had a visitor coming over. Once back in her own place, the full weight of Helene’s words hit her. Kicking off her sodden shoes, she hit ‘play’ on her answering machine and heard two more call-and-hang-ups. Great. She just managed to dial Suze’s number before collapsing on the sofa. The heat was still suffocating, sapping the energy from everything except her out-of-control curls. The rain had failed to break the hold the humidity had on the city. Drained by the subtropical conditions, Dulcie peeled off her pantyhose and propped her bare feet up on the back of the sofa to air dry. What was happening to her life?