I dozed on the couch to reruns of Masterpiece Mystery when Vanessa called. I wondered when Tommy Lynley had replaced Hercule Poirot. She thanked me for sending a bouquet of lilies that morning. I’d sent the flowers because I didn’t have words for how much I appreciated her help with the car, and Letitia, and in general. She said she’d had a long meeting with accounting and still needed some more time to figure out what to do with me. She told me to take yet another day off to get my strength back and meet her in HR at 10:00 the following day. I didn’t argue with her. I could barely lift my head.
By Friday morning, I was less exhausted and more anxious. Vanessa had scheduled a meeting between her boss in Human Resources, Frank Mariano, and me in one of the glass conference rooms. I didn’t know Frank Mariano. All I knew was that he was Letitia’s boss and that she was afraid of him. I hoped he wasn’t as awful as she made him out to be.
When I got off the elevator at 9:50, Vanessa was pacing in the HR foyer. “Is that what you’re wearing?”
“Yeah, what’s wrong with this?” I looked down at my grey trousers and white blouse. I hadn’t spilled Ensure down my front or rubbed up against a dirty car while walking in. I thought I looked fine.
“Boring!” Vanessa chirped. “Thank God I saw you first.” She pushed me into the ladies room, slipped off her cobalt blue blazer, and threw it at me. “Put that on.”
“Why?”
“Look, Lara. I’m not going to let you go in there looking like a nun. Both our necks are on the line here.
I pulled on the blazer and held my arms out. The sleeves covered my hands. Vanessa tugged on the lapels and buttoned all five of the oversized silver buttons. “You don’t have my assets to fill this out, but it sets off your blue eyes nicely. You have pretty eyes, Lara. You should wear more color.” She rolled up the sleeves and folded the cuffs of my white shirt to the outside. She then took off her narrow silver belt and wrapped it around my waist.
“There, that gives you more definition.” Vanessa stepped back and looked at me. “That hair,” she tsked. She rolled an elastic band off her wrist and pulled my hair into a loose bun. “That will have to do,” she sighed. “At least we can see your face now.”
“I like my hair down,” I protested. I reached up to pull out the elastic, but Vanessa slapped my hand away.
“Tough patooties. Maybe Frank won’t notice those shoes.”
I looked at the sensible black loafers on my feet. “I like these shoes. They’re comfortable.”
“That’s all you can say for them.” Vanessa tugged and tucked the blazer’s fabric a few more times. She looked dowdy in her black knit dress without the belt and blazer. She pulled out a few tendrils of hair around my face then said, “Now go in there and act all brilliant.”
When Vanessa and I entered the conference room, Vanessa’s boss, a laconic man with a potbelly hanging over his belt, was talking on his cell phone. He hung up and extended his hand. “So, you must be the Lara Blaine that’s been causing all the ruckus.”
“I’m sorry. It’s just that Letitia—”
Vanessa kicked me in the ankle and said, “It has come to our attention that Letitia has not been giving Lara enough credit for her work product. I felt we should discuss that with Letitia’s supervisor before we take any action.”
I sat down in one of the chairs while Vanessa’s boss flipped through the file folder in front of him. He took a sip of his coffee. “It’s all coming back to me now; you’re the gal who wrote the pomegranate report that Vanessa was going on about.”
“Yes, sir,” I replied. I got the impression I should say as little as possible at this point and let Vanessa do the talking. She seemed to have a plan. A man I recognized as the balding man who drove the green sedan stepped off the elevator and walked toward me. He came in and was introduced to me as Frank Mariano. When I shook his hand, he blinked at me for a moment then exclaimed, “Red VW. You tailed me the whole way to work the other day.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to. I was just trying to keep heading east.”
“Me, too, but I got totally lost in West Latham. I recognized your car from the parking lot, so when you kept going the same way, I felt better.” He accepted a cup of coffee from Vanessa and smiled at me. “Boy, was I glad you turned out to be the same red VW. I could have gotten completely lost.”
I didn’t know what to say. I never considered that anyone would have recognized my car. Vanessa kicked me again and grinned at me. I smiled back at Frank and said, “Good thing we both kept going east. You’re Letitia’s supervisor?”
“Yes,” Frank said as he turned to Vanessa. “So, why are we here? Did you figure out what’s going on with the eighth floor?”
“Again, as I told John yesterday, it has come to our attention that Letitia has been taking credit for Lara’s work product.” Vanessa went on to give Frank all the particulars of Letitia’s and my arrangement while I sat there silently trying to look brilliant.
“So, let me get this straight,” Frank said when Vanessa was finished. “You did all the research, analyzed it, and prepared the presentations for the board? All Letitia had to do was show up and talk at our meetings?”
“Pretty much.”
Frank took a sip of coffee. “Does everyone on the eighth floor do that?”
“Oh no,” I said, perhaps a bit too loudly judging from the way Vanessa’s boss started. “The others just do the research part. I put everyone’s stuff all together for Letitia before your meetings.”
“What do you mean, you put it all together?”
“Well,” I said, looking to Vanessa for direction. She gave me a tiny nod. “Every week, we have a staff meeting, then everyone mails me their weekly reports that I aggregate into a presentation for Letitia. That is, until the last few weeks.” I played with the buttons of the blazer. “I’ve been sick lately and missed the last few meetings.”
“That’s why her presentations haven’t been making sense lately.” Frank spoke to Vanessa’s boss. “One person is out and the whole house of cards falls apart?”
“This is all very disturbing,” the head of Human Resources agreed. “Especially after her numbers didn’t balance last quarter.”
“That wasn’t Letitia’s fault. Garlic Breath fudged the numbers.”
Three heads whipped in my direction as they all said, “What?” in unison.
“Excuse me, Greg.”
“Greg Blankenshipp?”
“Yeah, I think that’s his name. He sits next to me. I heard him telling one of the other people that he had fudged the numbers on his monthly report. That’s why the department’s numbers didn’t balance. That wasn’t Letitia’s doing.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?” Vanessa mumbled out of the corner of her mouth.
“You didn’t ask me,” I said.
Frank Mariano leaned back in his seat and steepled his fingers. “Part of me would like to wring Letitia’s neck right now, but from what you told me the other day,” Frank said nodding to Vanessa’s boss, “Letitia hasn’t actually broken any rules?”
Vanessa’s boss shook himself out of his lethargy. “Since Lara here never lodged an official complaint and Letitia didn’t use company money to keep her quiet, Human Resources can’t take any official action. Letitia’s damaged her reputation around here, but that’s about it.”
“Whatever,” Frank said. He turned back to focus on me. I tried to arrange my features to look friendly and intelligent. “So what are we going to do with you? You obviously do excellent work, but you can’t work with Letitia anymore. Vanessa mentioned you have a background in geology?”
“Yes, sir. I double majored in economics and geology in school. I’ve always been fascinated with minerals.”
“Was the bauxite report one of yours?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We have a few new markets that we’re looking to get into. I’d like to set you up in a Special Projects capacity. You’d report directly to me on those markets. I can give you six months to either succeed or fail.”
Vanessa kicked my chair.
“Thank you, sir. What are the areas you want me to research. I have some ideas—”
“Where will she sit?” Vanessa interrupted.
“There are empty offices on the ninth floor and on the sixth floor. She can take one of those,” Vanessa’s boss chimed in. “Vanessa, why don’t you take Ms. Blaine to go look at those, then supervise getting all her things off the eighth floor? I’d like to discuss Letitia’s future with Frank a bit more.”
Vanessa and I left the room. As soon as we were out of earshot, Vanessa turned to me and said, “You know Special Projects can be the kiss of death, don’t you? If you don’t perform, you are out of here.” She stabbed the elevator button with her long fingernail. “Well, let’s go pick out an office for you and hope for the best.”
We went up to the ninth floor first. The empty office there was near Frank’s office and across from the large conference room where the board met. Vanessa thought I should take that office because it would give me lots of visibility and opportunities to interact with the mucky mucks. That was why I didn’t want it. I didn’t want to be running into executives and be forced to make small talk. Also, all the offices on the ninth floor had one glass interior wall to let light into the central area. I couldn’t work in a fishbowl.
Vanessa thought the empty office on the sixth floor was atrocious; I thought it was perfect. The sixth floor was split between accounting and IT. Neither group was particularly chatty, but everyone was respectful. The room had previously been used as an auxiliary server room so it had four solid walls covered with sound proofing tiles.
“This room is on the west side of the building,” Vanessa said. “It’ll be dim and depressing in the morning and have blaring sun in the afternoon. You’ll have to pull the shades after lunch.”
“I can accept that.”
“If you really want this room,” Vanessa sighed, “I’m sure we can rustle up a desk for you and we can get maintenance to take this ugly foamy stuff down.”
“Do I have to?”
“Why would you want drab walls like these?”
“It’s not the color,” I replied. I picked up a loose staple from the floor, straightened it out and poked it into the wall. “They’d be like one big giant cork board.” I looked around the room and tried to imagine it without cords snaking across the floor. It was a twelve by twelve space that would be private and quiet. Perfect.
“Instead of a desk, do you think I could get two of those wide file cabinets like you have in your office?”
“Sure, there’s a bunch of old file cabinets in the basement. What would you use for a desktop?”
“A big piece of glass. Easy to clean and you can write on it with china pencils.” Vanessa just shook her head and called maintenance to make the arrangements.
Maintenance needed a few days to get the office together. In the meantime, Vanessa supervised Garlic Breath distributing my file boxes to the other people on the eighth floor. She reported back that he grumbled under his breath and that Letitia pretended to be on the phone the whole time Vanessa was there. Frank Mariano sent me an email asking me to bone up on zinc futures and to expand on my last bauxite report while working from home for the rest of the week. When Dr. Obatu’s office called and scheduled me for another CT scan later that week, I didn’t bother telling Frank that I would be spending a day at the hospital. I didn’t need three full days to do the work he’d asked of me.