Chapter 36: Flagged

By the time the cab dropped her in Scarsdale, Rachel had worked out the whole ugly arithmetic of it, and the answer was that Chloe Sutton owned her.

She’d worked it through in the back seat with her forehead on the cold window and her cheek still throbbing. Chloe had seen the ultrasound ten days ago. Chloe had sat on it. Not out of mercy; Chloe didn’t have a mercy setting. She’d sat on it like a winning scratch-off you hold until the rent’s due.

Michael doesn’t know about the baby yet.

So Chloe was keeping secrets from Michael now. The fiancée with the cough-drop ring was keeping a card in her bra, and Rachel didn’t know what game it was for. Only that she was in it.

Fine. Then Rachel would play her own cards.

Kessler had gone straight from the courthouse to another hearing in Yonkers, barking “Do not do anything stupid” over her shoulder. Rachel decided a police report wasn’t stupid. A police report was paperwork. Paperwork was her whole thing.

* * *

The Scarsdale police station was red brick with white trim and a fat Christmas wreath on the door, like a bank in a Hallmark movie. Inside it was gray linoleum and a flyer for a lost beagle named Waffles. The desk officer was young, buzz cut, a coffee sweating a ring onto a stack of forms. He was nice, at first.

“Stolen jewelry,” he repeated, typing with two fingers. “From 14 Linden Court.”

“A strand of pearls, a diamond ring, and the box they were in. Inlaid wood, about this big.” She showed him with her hands. “My mother’s. There’s a court record from a supervised retrieval saying the box was supposed to be there. And there’s this.”

She slid her phone across the counter. Chloe in the mirror. The pearls. The timestamp.

He whistled low. “That’s a nice picture. Okay. Spell your last name for me?”

“Hayes. H-A-Y-E-S. First name Rachel. Middle initial M.”

He typed and hit enter, and then he stopped typing.

His two fingers lifted off the keyboard and hovered while his eyes moved down the screen and kept moving. More than one line. He scrolled.

“Huh,” he said. Not to her.

“Is something wrong?”

“No, ma’am. Can you have a seat for me? Just one minute.”

He picked up the phone and turned his shoulder to talk into it, but the lobby was small. “The one Manhattan put in,” she heard. “Last week of November. Says call before any contact.” Rachel sat down on a molded plastic chair the color of a dentist’s bib and watched him not look at her.

Manhattan. Last week of November. Somebody in the city had typed her name into a computer while she was scrubbing Julian’s floors.

One minute became ten. Ten became twenty-five. She read the beagle flyer six times. Waffles was afraid of men in hats. Rachel’s ear had stopped ringing, but her cheek had swollen enough that she could see the top of it at the bottom of her vision if she looked down, a pink shelf.

Fifty minutes. Kessler didn’t answer. She texted Tessa, at a police station, I’m fine, don’t come, and Tessa texted back WHICH ONE and Rachel shoved the phone in her coat pocket.

At an hour and six minutes a man came through the side door in a navy quarter-zip and khakis and a lanyard he’d tucked inside his collar so she couldn’t read it. Forties. Pleasant face. A Mets travel mug. He pulled a chair around knee to knee, like a guidance counselor.

“Mrs. Hayes. Sorry about the wait. Busy day.” He didn’t give a name. She noticed. “Just a couple quick questions and we’ll get you on your way. You’re employed currently?”

“I’m a housekeeper. In Manhattan.”

“Housekeeper.” He nodded like that was fascinating. “Full-time?”

“Yes.”

“And outside of that? Any side work? Consulting work, that kind of thing?”

The word dropped into her like a stone into a well, and she listened to it fall.

RM CONSUL. Torn letters on a shredded statement on Julian’s study floor. An account ending 4471. A banker in a Scarsdale branch asking which of her business accounts she’d like to discuss.

“No,” she said. “I don’t have any consulting work.”

“Never done any? Bookkeeping for somebody? You studied accounting, right?”

She hadn’t told him that. Nobody in this building knew that.

“For a year and a half,” Rachel said. “At Westchester Community College. Twelve years ago. I dropped out. Why are you asking me about consulting?”

He smiled, real friendly. “Just routine, Mrs. Hayes. When another agency puts a name in the system, we have to make a call. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred it’s a clerical thing. Typo. Same name as somebody else.”

“Is this one of the ninety-nine?”

He took a long, unhurried sip from the Mets mug.

“You’re free to go,” he said. “Your report’s been taken. Somebody’ll follow up on the jewelry.” He stood, tucked the chair back exactly where it had been. “Clerical. Have a good night.”

She stood up on legs that didn’t feel like hers. At the door she turned around, and he was back by the desk with the young officer, both of them looking at the screen, and neither of them looked up.

* * *

Metro-North back to Grand Central. She sat facing backward and watched Westchester slide away in the dark, and she thought: somewhere there’s a file with my name on it, and I don’t know what it says. She’d been in one of those before. At least that one, she’d gotten to read.

She’d been broke, homeless, slapped. She had never been a name that made a cop stop typing.

The cab let her off on Central Park West a little after seven. Jeffrey, the night doorman, older, in the Yankees cap he wasn’t supposed to wear on shift, came out from behind the desk with a padded envelope.

“Came for Mr. Cross about an hour ago, Ms. Moore. Courier. Said it was personal, hand delivery only, but he’s not back yet, so.” He shrugged. “You want to take it up?”

A yellow bubble mailer. JULIAN CROSS, in purple ink, no return address.

“Sure,” Rachel said. “I’ll take it up.”

The elevator doors closed. Forty-two floors. She told herself she was not going to open his mail.

She made it to eleven.

She slid her finger under the flap. Inside was a single glossy photo, four by six, the kind you print at a CVS kiosk for thirty-nine cents. It took her a second to understand what she was looking at, because she’d never seen it from this angle.

Her own hand. Her own chipped thumbnail, the one Tessa hadn’t fixed yet that week. Holding a curling black-and-white strip with a white arrow and a word in capitals. BABY.

Taped to the back was a note card, cream, heavy, the expensive kind, in a looping, girlish script that dotted its i with tiny circles. Three words.

Ask her whose.