Angela Hunt - The Elevator

I pulled his file and left it on my desk—he’s using the name Marshall Owens, but he writes his column under a Greg Owens byline. You might want to look him up.

Michelle swallows hard as her stomach tightens. Her agency does find jobs for clients, though not as often as their brochure claims. And while their advertising states that they typically place people in positions with salaries ranging from seventy thousand dollars to seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, she can’t remember the last time they referred a prospect to a situation worth more than eighty grand.

If she doesn’t find an appropriate position for this columnist, he’ll be all over Tilson Corporate Careers. If any of their procedures arouse his suspicions, he might dig deeper and investigate her.

Reporters ask questions; they verify facts and check entries on résumés. If she doesn’t find Owens a job, he could crucify her.

She presses her hands to her eyes as dread whirls inside her stomach. Only one thing to do, then—find the fake applicant a real job, and pretend to be surprised when he doesn’t take it.

That part, at least, will be easy. She’s been pretending all her life.

Isabel Suarez drives the vacuum across the carpet, her hips working to a disco beat as Donna Summer sings in her ears. She maneuvers the machine around a desk chair that has rolled off its plastic mat, then stops to flip the power switch. A candy wrapper has drifted beneath the file drawer, out of the vacuum’s reach.

Unlike the others in this tidy office, this employee—Waveney Forester, according to the nameplate—obviously enjoys eating on the job.

Isabel crouches and pulls the crinkled wrapper from its hiding place, then yelps when someone yanks the earbuds from her ears. Her forearms pebble in the sudden silence, but when she peers over the edge of the desk, she finds she is still alone.

The speaker cord has caught on a drawer handle.

Exhaling, Isabel releases the cord, then dumps the employee’s trash into the receptacle attached to her cleaning cart. A load of printed forms, typed pages and soft-drink cans tumble into the bin, followed by a rainbow of cellophane squares—the secretary’s guilty secret. Every Tuesday and Friday night Isabel finds dozens of candy wrappers shoved to the bottom of Waveney Forester’s trash. The sight never fails to make her smile.

Isabel returns the trash can to its hiding place in the desk’s kneehole, then lifts her gaze to the wide windows along the east wall. A sprinkling of lights still sparkles in the skyscrapers of Tampa’s downtown district, a waste of electricity no one seems to mind. The sun has begun to rise, but only a glimmer of light penetrates the cloudy eastern horizon. Carlos warned her to be careful on the way home because a storm is on its way, a huracán.

Because her fellow custodians like to complain about the weather, Isabel knows Florida has suffered many hurricanes in the last few years, along with states called Missis-sip-pi and Lou-i-si-ana. She doesn’t know anyone in those places, but the people she knows in Florida are rich beyond imagining. They complain if their roof leaks—¿por qué? At least they have a roof. And homes. And a government that hands out money and food to anyone who asks for it.

She presses her hand to the cool window and feels a shiver run down her spine. America. Home of the blessed and the free. Home to runaways and castoffs and so full of people a girl could get lost forever…if she has reason to hide.

A flag on a nearby rooftop snaps in the rising wind, but Isabel can’t feel even a breeze in this fortress of steel and glass. At this daybreak hour, in this towering perch, she can’t help feeling safe. No one from México can touch her here. Even if her enemy manages to track her to Tampa, she will not surrender. She has Carlos and Rafael now, and she would rather die than lose them.

She catches sight of her mirrored reflection, gives herself a relieved smile, and nudges the earbuds back into her ears. Leaving the vista of Tampa behind, she powers on the machine and hums along with Donna Summer as she vacuums her way toward the executive’s inner office.

Tucked into the corner of a wing chair, Gina Rossman lifts her swollen eyelids and stares at her unrumpled bed. The report, in a manila envelope, still rests on Sonny’s pillow. She spent the night in this chair for nothing.

So much for dramatic gestures.

She lifts her head and glances at the clock, then frowns at the view outside the bedroom window. The sun is usually brighter by seven-twenty…but how could she forget Felix? Destructive hurricanes are nothing new for Florida; in the past three months Hillsborough County residents have anxiously monitored the paths of Alberto, Chris and Debby. The local weathercasters, who would probably lash themselves to a wavering flagpole if the stunt would get them national airtime, are positively giddy about the latest patch of weather heading directly toward Florida’s central west coast.

Sonny will blame his absence on the storm, of course. He’ll claim he didn’t come home because he had to single-handedly prepare for the hurricane. He sent his employees home Thursday afternoon, he’d remind her, because he wanted to give them time to leave the state. His act of generosity left him with a stack of declaration pages that had to be faxed to frantic clients who needed to know the limits of their coverage. Besides—and at this point he would give her an easy, relaxed smile with a great deal of confidence behind it—he hadn’t built a Fortune 500 company by limiting himself to a forty-hour workweek.

She used to accept his excuses, used to be proud of him for putting in more hours than the average husband. But no longer.

Now she knows where he’s been working overtime.

She pulls herself out of the comfortable depths of the wing chair and smooths her slacks. She wanted Sonny to find her awake and still dressed when he came through the door, but if he didn’t come home last night, he won’t show up this morning. He’ll be at the office, feeding papers into the fax machine.

An alarming thought skitters across her brain. What if he doesn’t come home at all? He might want to protect that woman, so he could be planning to ride out the hurricane in whatever rathole she calls home. Later, when the weather has passed, he’ll claim he was slaving at the office until the power went out and he had to evacuate to the nearest shelter.

Last year, she might have believed his lies. This year, she has rebuttal evidence waiting in the manila envelope, along with a private investigator’s report. A list of places, dates and times; eyewitness accounts of intimate dinners and lunches; even a receipt Sonny dropped outside Foster’s Jewelers.

The amount on the receipt nearly buckled Gina’s knees: forty-three thousand dollars for a diamond bracelet. Forty-three thousand that must have been siphoned off the company books. Forty-three thousand—money that should be part of her children’s inheritance—has been wasted on baubles for some tart’s wrist.

How much of his children’s future has Sonny squandered?

A flash of grief rips through her, one of many that has seared her heart in the last twenty-four hours. How could her husband turn his back on the wife who’s loved him faithfully for more than two decades? How could he neglect his precious children? Matthew is supposed to take over the business in a few years, but at the rate Sonny is spending, how much of the business will remain? These are lean days for insurance companies, especially in Florida. The bad weather of the past has devastated the industry.

The investigator included a photograph of Sonny walking down Ashley Street with the woman on his arm, her head brushing his shoulder. Sonny’s face, visible at an angle, is marked by an expression of extraordinary tenderness. The object of his inappropriate attention is not facing the camera, but the photo reveals a tall, lean creature with a striking sense of style, a floppy hat, and a youthful body that has not borne three children and invested its best years in Sonny’s dreams.