It took me three more days to finish unit 234. The last two days were a lot more bearable, since I wasn’t as blindingly hungover as I had been the first. CiCi even came by on Sunday and helped out. I didn’t hear a peep from her all day Saturday, other than a pitiful text letting me know she was alive, marred with autocorrect mistakes. I’d imagined her typing it out with one hand in bed with her eyes closed, and she informed me later that this was accurate.
I’ve now moved on to new units, our brush with blackmail all but forgotten. The first unit after 234 was full of bags of old clothes and most were in relatively okay condition, so after clearing it with Charlie, I arranged to have someone from the homeless shelter a few blocks over come pick them up. Maybe a little philanthropy will help undo some of my bad karma.
My phone rings just as I’m finishing loading up Brutus with what appears to be cases of old mechanical parts and waiting for Charlie to come look at a few financial-looking things I found in an old lockbox. I think there might be a couple of ancient savings bonds here, but honestly, Charlie seemed more excited at the prospect of the engine stuff when I told him.
I pull the phone out of my pocket to answer. “Hello?”
It’s Charlie. “I’m running late, so just leave everything in the unit. I’ll come by when I’m done here and check it out.”
“Okay,” I say. “It’s unit 159. I’ll lock it up before I go.”
“You can leave the truck, too. I’ll take it over tonight. I want to see if there’s anything worth saving in those parts.”
“I can wait around so you don’t have to!” I say, not wanting him to think I’m shirking my duties.
“Nah, go home. You’re doing good. Take a night off.”
“Thanks, Charlie.”
I hang up and think of Charlie as a friendly grandpa type again.
Then my brain jumps right into wondering what’s got him tied up at the moment. Fixing up cement shoes, perhaps? I keep meaning to Google Charlie. I also make a note to look up if people really do the cement-shoe thing. I’m not sure how practical that would be as a means of offing someone, but the phrase had to come from somewhere.
It’s dark out, but I’m still getting home earlier than I normally would. And, lucky me, Tom and Trina are off on one of their painfully sweet date nights, which means I’ve got the place to myself for the evening.
Riding the train home, I do the math in my head and realize I’ve only got eleven units left before I can collect my five thousand dollars. That’s a nice thought.
What’s less nice is that, after that eleventh unit, I’m out of a job again. Other than a few vague emails acknowledging the receipt of my résumé and promises to contact me if I seem like a good fit, I’m not getting anywhere with my job hunt. Which means I’m also no closer to moving off Gertrude and out of Tom’s house.
My brain is telling me to be fiscally responsible for dinner and stop off at the market to buy things to cook for myself.
My stomach and my depressed self both agree I should order in curry and chalk it up as a mental tax write-off.
Back at the apartment, I race into the shower to wash the storage stink off myself and yank on my cozy space-cat pajama pants and favorite threadbare T-shirt that has the Tenth Doctor on it. CiCi gave it to me for my birthday years ago, and it always puts me in a good mood.
Curry ordered, mindless television on in the background, I scour Tom and Trina’s bookshelves to find something to read. Aside from packing up my mattress, having to part with most of my books was the worst thing about losing my apartment. All the copies I couldn’t bear to do away with were divided up between one of my closet suitcases, CiCi’s apartment, and a big box sent to the storage unit. Several more boxes that wouldn’t fit were sent back to my parents in Buffalo. My mother seemed to find this encouraging, in that it meant I’d probably come crawling back to stay, since I’ve always said home is where your books are.
It’s hard to argue with that logic, but still no. Nope.
The doorbell rings, and I grab money from my purse and glomp to the front door. I open it to find a man on the other side. A man who isn’t holding curry.
“Um. Hi,” I say, feeling more than a bit confused.
The man stares down at me with unusually pale blue eyes. He has hair so dark it’s almost black and is a good foot taller than I am, and he looks a little familiar, but I have no idea why. He doesn’t seem pleased at all, and it’s just occurred to me I’ve opened the door to a stranger in New York City. I very carefully pull my phone out of my pocket just in case I need to speed-dial 911.
“Can I help you?” I ask tentatively.
“I’m looking for Clara Montgomery,” the man says with a thick English accent.
The voice does it. I do recognize this person.
Caspian Tiddleswich is standing at the door.
I gasp and—dropping my phone and the curry money—clap my hands to my mouth. “Oh my god. You’re...you’re... Oh my god...”
“May I come in, please?” Caspian fucking Tiddleswich asks. His voice is even more godlike in person. I can’t feel my legs.
Can Caspian Tiddleswich come into my brother’s apartment? My hands still clamped to my face, he can’t see my mouth hanging open. Sure. Sure, he can come in. I nod, and slowly shuffle to the side so he can enter. As he passes by, he swiftly picks my phone up off the floor.
I shut the door behind him and finally drop my hands. I’m having a hard time remembering how to breathe. There’s a voice in my head wondering if I’ve had either a stroke or an unforeseen psychotic break, since I’m obviously hallucinating the movie star currently in Tom’s living room.
“I assume you’re Clara,” he says. Oh god. He says my name like Cl-AHR-a. English accents really do make everything better.
I nod, trying with everything I have not to squeal like a tween at a boy band concert. “Would...would you like to sit?” I glance at Gertrude and make a face. I wave my arm toward the charcoal-gray stuffed chair across from the couch, and he glides over to claim the seat. Jesus, he walks the way he sounds.
Caspian sits back in the chair and stares at me as I carefully lower myself onto Gertrude’s cushions. I notice he’s still holding my phone. “Um,” I say. “I’m not trying to be rude, but why in the world are you here? I’m a little concerned I’ve had an aneurysm.”
He scoffs, his face a mask of bitter amusement, and I’m so shocked I almost flinch. “You’re not trying to be rude? It’s rather late to be bypassing rudeness, don’t you think?”
“Excuse me?”
“It’s unfortunate enough you’ve gone to the lengths to extort money from me, Miss Montgomery. Let’s not add in the embarrassment of your pretending to be an innocent at this stage in the game.”
I blanch, but my heart is racing. He knows. That has to be why he’s here. But how the hell could he know? Did CiCi do something with those pages? As far as I know, they’re still locked up tight in the bottom of my suitcase in the coat closet.
“I’m sorry,” I say, trying to keep my voice level. “But I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, for god’s sake,” he growls. Caspian reaches into the inside breast pocket of his jacket and pulls out his own phone. He scrolls for a moment and then holds it up in front of him. A second later, my slurring voice comes through the speaker.
“Hello! My name is Clara Montgomery, and this message is for Caspian Tiddles... Tiddles-something. Tiddles-something.” My hands slap back to my mouth, and I make a panicked sound. “You don’t know me, because why should you? But I know youuuuu. Well, I don’t actually know you. But I’ve seen you on stuff. In stuff. Grammar is hard. I’m an editor. Or I was. I’m not right now. But I clean out storage units and whatnot now, so that’s fun. No, actually, it’s not fun.”
Caspian is staring daggers at me from across the room, and I think I’m going to throw up as my drunken voice rambles on. “So, anyway, I found this stuff from, like, waaaaaaaaay forever ago when you worked for Cranson. Did you really cuddle people professionally? That sounds like a cool job. But I don’t think you tell people you used to be a professional cuddler. I don’t think I’d tell people if I cuddled professionally. But I wanted to let you know that I found your, like, résumé thingy, and I’ve got it. But it’s okay, because it’s really safe and I’m going to take care of it. I’m on the case! Like Poirot.”
Past me’s voice devolves into giggles. Present me wants to burst into flames. “My friend is really into you in the dressing gowns, by the way. She wanted you to know that. Personally I prefer the suits, but that scene without the shirt, whoooooo-boy. I don’t think you look like a lizard. And if I weren’t totally completely broke, I’d hire you for cuddling. The number three, right? Or hell, after the shirtless stuff, I can see why people would shell out for the role-playing, damn. I’d order a number six with a side of three.”
More giggling. I’m going to die.
“So. There’s that. But anyway. I’ve got the thing, and I’m going to take care of it. You watch. I’ll take care of eeeeeeeeeeverything, sir. Sir Tiddles. TIDDLESWICH! Ha! I knew I’d get it. That’s a funny name, though. Caspian Tiddleswich. Kind of sounds like the noise a bare ass makes on a leather couch in the summertime. So. Yeah.”
The sound of a very drunken me fiddling with my phone echoes out through the room, and the line suddenly goes dead.
I can’t breathe. He calmly places his phone back inside his jacket pocket and stares at me.
“Oh my god,” I groan into my hands. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. This isn’t happening.”
“Naturally, I waited for further instructions from you,” he says evenly. “And when none came, I decided not to sit around waiting for you to sell the information to the highest bidder.”
I half claw at my face. “Wait—what? What instructions?”
He huffs out a quick blast of air. “This will go a lot faster if you at least attempt some honesty. I can imagine it’s far less amusing to extort someone when they’re sitting in front of you. We can’t all hide behind the bravery of what I have to assume was an unhealthy amount of alcohol. But since you set this in motion, I intend to finish it. What is it you want from me, Clara Montgomery?”
His Cl-AHR-a is now considerably less endearing than it was a moment ago. I pull my hands from my face and wave them in front of my chest. “I’m so sorry. You’ve got the wrong idea, I swear. I wasn’t trying to extort you. I don’t even remember calling you! Oh my god, this is so embarrassing.”
“Come on,” he says acidly. “Don’t lose your nerve now. I can’t even fathom the lengths you must have gone to in order to find information about my time at Cranson. No sense clamming up now.”
His demeanor is so solid, it’s disconcerting. Add in his already dark features with an angry glare, the menacing voice, and I am either about to run screaming from the apartment or pee myself.
“Look, I understand why you’re upset. I do,” I say pleadingly. “But I didn’t go looking for anything, and I’m not trying to get anything from you. I’d thought about calling you that night, but I was planning to tell you that I’d found those papers and I was going to destroy them because I thought maybe you’d worried they’d get found one day or something. I promise, I was trying to do the right thing.”
He lets out a single laugh, and it’s terrifying. “Yes, of course. That all makes absolute sense.”
I stand up off the couch and decide against dropping to my knees to beg for understanding. “This looks really bad, but I wasn’t going to do anything with what I found! And the reason I wanted to call—well, technically I wanted to email you, but couldn’t find your email—was because I had considered seeing if there would be a way to sell the information, but then I realized how horrible that was, and this pigeon attacked me, and I wanted to restore balance to the universe. Confess my sins, you know?” I can hear myself stuck in a rapid-fire babble, so I wring my hands and add, “I swear I don’t usually talk this much. Except when I’m drunk. Evidently.”
“You’ve quite literally just admitted you’d intended to sell what you found,” he points out, shaking his head.
“God, no!” I say, hands flailing around my face again. “Why would I do that? Why would I call you to tell you I was about to out you to the world? That’s ridiculous!”
“To see if I’d be willing to pay more than whatever gossip rag you’d roped in.” He’s glaring harder now. “I’ve no intention of playing games with you, Miss Montgomery. Be glad that I’m dealing with this on my own, because I could easily involve the police. Still toying with the idea, actually. But if you’re willing to act sensibly here, I think we can leave them out of it for now.”
My heart sinks down onto the floorboards and stays there.
Then the doorbell rings, and I yelp.
“Are you expecting someone?” He frowns.
“No!” I insist. My head is spinning. “Wait—yes. Food. I ordered food.”
His expression turns to irritation mingled with a hint of abhorrence.
This is a nightmare.
I look over and see my dollars still lying on the floor. I scramble over and scoop them up, opening the door as narrowly as possible to prevent the delivery gal from having any opportunity to spot my visitor. I fling the money at her, yank the bag of food from her hands, trill, “Keep the change!” and slam the door in her face.
I turn around, clutching my dinner, and assume a deer in headlights stance.
“Um...dinner. It’s curry. Do...? Are you...hungry?”
He makes a confused face. “Are you mad?”
I’m completely exasperated. I stomp over and drop the bag on the coffee table and wheel around to face him. “I’m sorry! I was trying to be polite! I’m not hip on the proper etiquette for the moment when a famous person barges into your apartment and yells at you over a misunderstanding!”
“But this isn’t your apartment, is it?”
I freeze. “How could you possibly know that?”
“I looked into you,” he says coolly. “Former publishing employee, laid off several months ago, living with someone with the same last name. You’re unmarried, so I’ll assume your brother? Broke and desperate—the perfect combination to try your luck in the tabloid market.”
“Hey,” I snap. “You had no right to dig up information on me. That’s so creepy!”
He laughs another humorless laugh. “That’s your defense? After what you’ve managed to dig up on me?”
“I didn’t dig anything up!” I feel tears burning in my eyes. “I found it by accident and had a moment of moral weakness because for a second I thought it would be nice to be able to afford a place to put my goddamn mattress. But I never would’ve done it! I was trying to tell you I was going to destroy the papers!”
“And did you?”
“Did I what?”
He spreads very long fingers out over the arms of the chair. “You say you meant to tell me the information was being destroyed. So I’m asking if you did. Destroy it, that is.”
I frown. “Well, no. I didn’t think about it again.”
The corner of his mouth curls up. This is a much scarier expression in real life than it was in Poirot. “Naturally not. So, let’s get down to business, shall we?”
“Jesus,” I say, losing my temper. “Enough with the Bond villain theatrics.” I stomp over to the coat closet, yank out my suitcase, and violently pull back the zipper. “I don’t want anything from you. I never did. I made a mistake, and I’d lost a potential job, and I was having a bad fucking day, okay?” I pull the papers I have on him—the résumé and the “menu”—out of the suitcase, double-checking to be sure they’re both there, and march over to his chair. I shove the papers into his chest. “Take them. I don’t want them. I didn’t do anything with them, and I never intended to. Take them and get out, please.”
He carefully gathers the papers in his hands and looks at them. A flicker of an emotion other than derisive resentment crosses his ice-blue eyes, but it’s gone again as quickly as it came.
Carefully folding them, Caspian tucks the pages into an inside pocket of his jacket. He takes hold of my phone again and very abruptly shoves it in front of my face.
“Excuse me. What the hell are you doing?” I ask indignantly.
He calmly pulls his arm back and starts silently scrolling, and I realize he used the goddamn facial recognition to unlock my phone. A moment later, he turns it back so I can see. A picture of the Cranson “menu” I’d taken and sent to CiCi.
“And how many more pictures do you have, Clara?”
I grab my phone out of his hand, and I feel the first of the tears falling down my cheeks, leaving a corrosive trail. I quickly delete the picture and show him the screen. “There. It’s gone. There aren’t any more. I sent it to my friend CiCi—just that picture, nothing about you—and I will make sure she deletes it, too. Okay?”
“Because I have every reason to trust you.”
I scream at him out of frustration. “God, shut up! I’m sorry! I’m really sorry! I screwed up, but I didn’t mean to do anything wrong!” Tears are absolutely everywhere, and he looks unnerved for a moment. “I don’t know what I can show you or say that will get you to understand I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. So if you’re going to call the police, just do it, okay? This playing-with-your-food game is getting old.”
He stands up in a quick motion, and I stumble backward a few steps. Famous person or not, I’m alone in the apartment with a very angry guy who is much bigger than me.
“I didn’t start this!” he yells back at me.
The front door bursts open, and quite suddenly, Tom is inside, Trina a few steps behind. “I heard shouting,” he says, assessing the room. His eyes fall on Tiddleswich, and Tom stiffens up. “Clara, what’s going on? Are you okay? Who is this?”
“Holy crap!” Trina gasps. “You’re that guy! That actor guy with the really long name!”
Tom’s face screws up in confusion. “Who?”
“The posters are all over the city! He’s the guy in the Nebula Force movie!”
My brother’s face goes blank for a moment while he processes. Then, a second later, “Well, why the hell is he in our apartment, and why is Clara crying?”
Trina stands there gaping, Tom is trying to hold his best tough-guy stance, and our visitor looks surprisingly contrite. And, even more alarming, possibly speechless.
“Um.” I clear my throat. “It’s actually nothing.” I quickly wipe the tears from my face and straighten up as much as I can. “Mr. Tiddleswich had been planning to write a book under a pen name for my old house, but it all went under with the merger. We ran into each other earlier and were talking about his options, and I got a bit overly emotional about not being able to do more since I’m still unemployed. Think I scared him a bit.” I add a pathetic chuckle at the end for good measure.
“Oh,” Tom says lamely, and stands down. “God, I’m sorry. We didn’t mean to interrupt anything. I heard all the yelling and got worried. We can leave you guys alone.” He starts scooting Trina, who is still gaping, back toward the front door.
“No!” I yelp. “I mean, that’s okay. He was actually just about to head out. I’ve taken up too much of his time tonight, anyway.”
“Are you sure?” my brother presses. “Don’t stop on our account.”
I shake my head, and I know I’m seconds from bursting into tears again. I turn to the celebrity in the room. “I think we’re finished, aren’t we?”
He looks at me for a moment, his expression unreadable. Carefully, he reaches down and buttons his jacket. “Yes, I think we are. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me tonight, Miss Montgomery.” He turns to Tom and Trina. “My apologies for the confusion.”
He gives me a quick side-glance and then leaves through the still-open front door.
Caspian Tiddleswich has left the building.