Chapter 1: Badge In

The rain had run for three days and quit on Sunday night, and Monday came up bright enough that people on Corbin had their coats open, the city in a hurry for summer.

At 8:32 Willa Kern was third in line at the deli. By 8:39 she had a sandwich, a coffee, and nine dollars and fifteen cents less in her checking account. She ate half the sandwich at the bus shelter, took the 7 one stop — four minutes, counting the wait — and got off in front of Grandview with the coffee still too hot to drink.

Grandview didn’t open until ten, and neither did the Harlow store at the east end of it, which was the reason anyone came to the building at all. She went around the north side, past the dock where a truck was already backed in, and badged through the employee door there. The guard had the clipboard out and liked the sheet signed whether or not the system already knew, so she signed it and took the service elevator up.

On four, the doors opened onto a dark corridor with a floor buffer parked against the wall, and she let them close again. On five, the lights came on in sections as she walked, one panel ahead of her and one behind.

The suite had glass-walled offices along the windows where the managers sat and low partitions in the middle for everyone else, and by 8:52 it already smelled like coffee and the hot dust off a printer that had been running since seven.

“Morning,” Willa said.

“Morning.” Tessa Boone turned away from the machine with her cup already in her hand. “Did you go anywhere?”

“No.”

“Nowhere?”

“Nowhere.”

Tessa made a face over the top of her coffee, the way she did about most answers she found insufficient, and carried it back to her desk. Willa hung her coat, put her bag down, and woke her computer. There was a stack of paper on the left corner of her desk that had not been there Friday — three onboarding packets, a sticky note on top in Renee’s handwriting: signature pages — and under them the folders for the weekly meeting. She flipped through the packets, set aside the two that were missing a page, and started pulling what she’d need for nine thirty.

Behind her, the gossip had started without her.

“The store manager,” somebody said. “Downstairs, just now. Him and both assistant managers.”

“Waiting for who?”

“New marketing director,” a voice from the far row said. “Doesn’t he start in May?”

“He does.” Barb Kessler stood in the doorway with her coat still on. “Mickey’s been out front since ten to eight. You don’t stand out front for a marketing director.”

“Then who?”

Barb came in and hung her coat on the back of her chair, and took her time about it. “The owner’s son.”

Somebody laughed once and stopped. “Harlow has a son?”

“Everybody has a son,” somebody else said.

“He’s been in London,” Barb said. “He came back in January. That’s why the store manager’s out there in his good shoes.”

“What’s he do?”

“Nobody’s said.”

“What’s he like?”

“Corporate says he’s good-looking,” Barb said. “In a way that causes problems.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means what it means.”

Willa had known for a week. Renee had stopped at her desk the Monday before — new boss coming, no announcement yet, keep it to yourself — and she had kept it. Whether the man was good-looking had nothing to do with what she had to finish before lunch.

Tessa swiveled around. “Willa. You hear anything?”

“Not more than Barb has.”

“You’re no fun at all.”

“Mm.” Willa looked at the clock on her second monitor, then at the room. “It’s nine twenty.”

Chairs went back, monitors woke, Barb said, “She’s right,” and the suite turned into the sound of paper being sorted.

Willa went to the workroom for the sign-in sheets. The printer had already run them, twenty copies, and she squared the stack against the table edge before she carried it down the corridor. Tessa was still at her keyboard with two windows open and the print queue frozen on her screen.

“Go,” Willa said. “I’ll set up.”

“You’re an angel,” Tessa said. “An actual angel.”

It was more than the projector deserved. Willa said, “Take your time,” and went.

The conference room held ten and the department was seven, so the table had room at both ends and the chairs were pushed in tight from whoever had used it last. She set the sign-in sheets at the head, opened the blinds because the overhead lights alone made everybody look sick, and woke the projector. It threw its menu onto the whiteboard at an angle. She fixed the angle. The laptop took its time shaking hands. The deck Renee had sent at 7:40 that morning had three slides in it, and one of them was blank.

By the time the room started filling, the coffee in her cup had gone from too hot to drinkable to something she was drinking anyway.

Renee Alvarado came in last with her laptop under her arm and a printed list in her hand and started before she sat down. “April postings. Where are we.”

“Two up, one waiting on the pay range,” Barb said.

“The pay range was approved Thursday.”

“Then it’s waiting on somebody telling the recruiter that.”

Renee wrote something down. “Safety module. Tessa.”

“Sixty-one percent.”

“That’s not what the report says. The report says fifty-four.”

“The report’s a week old,” Barb said. “Nobody’s finished it since.”

“Fifty-four, then.” Renee went down the list. Badges: two replacement ones for the contract crew, and security had been holding both since Thursday. The April schedule, which had one name on it twice. The training room, booked by sales for the last three Wednesdays, with a broken blind nobody had called facilities about.

Willa wrote names and dates in the margin and put a box around the pay range and the blind, the two items with no name on them.

Nobody mentioned the store manager standing out front, or the son, or London. It sat in the room the whole time, the way a phone on the table does.

It was 9:52 when Renee said, “That’s it,” and closed her laptop. The meeting usually ran the hour.

Willa stayed to shut the projector down. The lamp needed a minute, so she squared the sign-in sheets, wiped a coffee ring off the table with her thumb, and pushed the chairs back in, first with her foot and then, because that wasn’t working, with her hands. When the light on the projector had gone from green to nothing she coiled the cord, put the remote in the drawer, and turned the blinds back down to where she’d found them.

At her desk she typed the minutes in eleven minutes, because it had been that kind of meeting, read them once, corrected a date, and sent them to Renee at 10:19. Then she started on the signature pages, and behind her the printer woke up and began pushing out pages for something due before lunch.