John Lutz - The Ex

The elevator stopped again on the fifth floor, but the man and woman standing there wisely decided not to try to board.

When the elevator reached the lobby, Traci was practically propelled out of it.

The lobby was large, with street entrances at each end, and lined with shops. All hard, marble or wood surfaces, it echoed with footsteps and voices. It was crowded not only with the building’s occupants on their way to lunch, but with pedestrians cutting through to the next block.

Traci was bumped by a large man in a blue suit. She made sure she still had her purse, then turned to make her way through the mass of people toward the East Fifty-sixth Street exit. A woman walking in the opposite direction, part of the flow of the crowd, caught her eye, but it took a few seconds for recognition to register on Traci.

She stopped and looked in the direction the woman had gone, craning her neck. Almost at once she spotted the woman’s green dress only about twenty feet away.

“Molly!” she called. “Mol!”

The woman didn’t turn around. Instead she glanced at her wristwatch and began walking faster, elbowing her way through the crowded lobby.

“Molly Jones!” Traci yelled. “Hey! Molly!”

Still she wouldn’t turn around.

Traci took a few running steps then stopped, realizing the hopelessness of trying to catch Molly or attract her attention. Actually breaking into a run in this mob was impossible, Traci thought; they were likely to turn on her if she tried. And maybe the woman wasn’t actually Molly. Traci really hadn’t gotten that good a look at her, and she’d been thinking about Molly because of Winston Delacort’s phone call.

Either way, by now the woman would be out on East Fifty-fifth Street, lost in an even larger mass of people.

Someone clutched Traci’s elbow.

She jerked away with surprise, then turned and saw it was Beverly Malcolm from the art department.

“Sorry, Trace,” Beverly said, dropping her hand from Traci’s arm. “Didn’t mean to stop your heart. I need to talk to you about that Civil War manuscript when you get back.”

“Sure, Bev.”

“Who were you shouting at?” Beverly asked.

“I don’t know for sure. Somebody I thought I knew. Guess I was wrong”

“Guess so. See you later.”

“I’m going to lunch at a new place around Fifty-seventh and Lex,” Traci said. “They’re rumored to serve food with their drinks. You want to come?”

“I’d like to, but I’ve got a meeting. Next time.”

Traci nodded, then continued on her way toward the exit opposite the one used by the woman in the green dress.

Molly stood before her closet and shuffled through her clothes, first slowly, then so fast that the wire hangers sang on the metal rod.

She withdrew an empty hanger from the end of the closet she only half-jokingly thought of as her dress-up side, where her more stylish and expensive outfits hung.

Feeling anger, puzzlement, and a creepy kind of fear that itself alarmed her, she stood holding the empty hanger and staring at it. She was positive it was where her green dress had hung.

The dress that was definitely missing.

The dress she was sure she’d seen Deirdre wearing earlier that day.

That evening, Molly watched David as they ate a dinner of pizza and salad delivered from William’s Takeout over on Amsterdam. He seemed preoccupied, worried in a manner he wouldn’t share with her. When she tried to enter and understand his concern, he would deflect her with inane conversation about work, or friends they hadn’t seen for weeks and sometimes months. It occurred to her that they hadn’t seen many people or gone out much with each other since Deirdre had arrived in New York.

Molly waited until they’d had dinner and Michael was asleep before telling David about seeing Deirdre wearing her green dress.

He sat in the chair opposite the sofa and stared at her in a way that angered her. As if she’d become ill and had great bleeding sores on her face and he was too polite to mention them.

He obviously wasn’t going to say anything, so she would.

“Dammit! Stop looking at me like that! I’m sure she was wearing my dress.”

“But you told me you didn’t actually see her face.”

“I saw the rest of her. I saw my dress.”

Now he furrowed his brow in concern, adding a decade to his face. “Maybe you’re imagining things, Mol. You’ve been under a hell of a strain, you know.”

“I also know what I saw.”

She realized she was becoming more convinced as she spoke that the woman had been Deirdre; she was digging a foxhole in the face of David’s disbelief and patronizing patter. Well, maybe she was being defensive, but that didn’t alter what she’d seen this morning.

He smiled and looked curious as well as concerned. Infuriating.

“Why would Deirdre wear one of your dresses?” he asked.

“Why would she wear my perfume?” Molly said in exasperation.

“Anyone can buy any kind of perfume, Mol.”

Molly stood up from the sofa. It made her feel better to be looking down at him. “Do not treat me as if I’m some kind of mental case. If Deirdre didn’t take the dress, then where is it?”

He turned his hands palms up. “I don’t know. Maybe you forgot it at the cleaners.”

“Come off it, David. I’d know if it was at the cleaners. I always put the receipts from the cleaners in the same place, under a magnet on the side of the refrigerator, so I remember to pick up whatever’s there. There are no receipts. Right now we have nothing at the cleaners.”

“So maybe you misplaced the receipt. Or it somehow slipped out from under the magnet and fell beneath the refrigerator.”

Molly shook her head no. “I had a dress, David. Now I’ve got a hanger.”

He let his hands float up and then dropped them down on the chair arms. “Well, I don’t have an explanation, but the dress will turn up.”

“Bullshit, David.”

Instead of getting angry with her, he stood up from the chair and walked over to her. He hugged her, but she merely stood with her arms at her sides.

After a brief, final squeeze, he released her and stepped back. He was looking straight into her eyes. He’d been doing a lot of that lately, when the situation called for it. Heart-to-heart time.

“I don’t believe you’re a mental case,” he assured her. “But I do have a suggestion. I have a friend named Herb Mindle. A doctor.”

It took Molly a second to realize what he meant. She was incredulous that he would suggest such a thing.

“A shrink?”

David pursed his lips in disapproval of her denigrating a noble profession. Looking pained, he drew his glasses from his pocket and put them on, as if to read her more clearly.

“You could talk to him, Mol. Maybe get something to help you through…whatever it is you’re going through.”

“Oh, really?” She almost actually sneered.

He acted as if he hadn’t noticed the sarcastic quality in her voice. “I mean, with Bernice’s death, everything else that’s happened, what could it hurt if you went and saw the man? He’s got a reputation as a superb analyst.”

Molly had nothing against the art of analysis, but she certainly didn’t think she was in need of it. “No, David,” she said patiently, “I’m not going to a psychiatrist. It isn’t necessary.”

“You can’t be the best judge of that, Mol.”

“But I can be the only judge.”

He pursed his lips again, then parted them and blew out air. She knew it was his way of showing disapproval along with his resignation. She was being unreasonable, he was telling her. “Okay, then. No it is.”

“We won’t talk about it again,” she said, driving home the finality of her decision.