The Assistants(62)

“We have to get Emily out of there,” I said. “That’s what we should be focusing on.”

“We will.” Lily gripped the edge of her chair with both hands. “As soon as they actually charge her with something and set her bail.”

“If,” I said, because, again, I was afraid of what Robert was capable of. “If they set her bail.”

“Son of a bitch,” Wendi said.

“Emily’s screwed,” Ginger said.

“Oh aah well,” Lily said.

I was just about to give up on trying to find comfort in human contact and head home when my cell phone rang. I bumbled it to my ear. “Hello? Hello?”

All I could hear was measured sociopathic breathing on the other end.

“Emily?”

“We need to meet,” a brusque voice answered. “In an hour.”

“Who is this?” I took a few steps away from our table.

“Central Park, near the statue of the giant sled dog.”

I continued farther away from our table, holding my non-phone ear closed with my pointer finger. “Margie? Margie Fischer? Is that you?”

“Be there.” She hung up.

I slipped my phone into my jeans pocket and looked around. Ginger, Wendi, and Lily were waiting for me to return to the table, perched halfway out of their seats.

“Was that Emily?” Ginger asked when I reached them.

“No.” I grabbed my jacket and messenger bag from the back of my chair without sitting back down. “Wrong number.”

“Then where are you going?” Wendi squinted at me like she wasn’t buying it.

“I just can’t sit here anymore.” I threw my bag over my body like a sash. “I need some fresh air. I need to be alone.”

They believed me, because it was a very Tina Fontana reaction to have to the scalding disappointment of a wrong number when waiting for an important call. Still, I made sure none of them tried to follow me out of the bar.





27




I WENT TO MEET Margie because there’s just no negotiating with a mouth-breather, and because Margie Fischer was partly responsible for this mess to begin with. If she hadn’t blackmailed us into helping Lily, Emily and I would have stopped (I’m pretty sure we most likely would have probably stopped) fudging expenses before anyone noticed a thing.

Anyway, finding the statue of the giant sled dog took longer than I’d anticipated, but when I did, I wasn’t sure how I could have missed it. Margie was sitting on top of the heroic bronze husky, straddling it like a horse.

She disembarked at the sight of me. “I’m getting a windburn out here,” she said. “Where the heck have you been?”

“I’m sorry, I got lost. I’m sorry.” I apologized more than necessary considering Central Park was literally a maze. We sat on the rock landing beneath the statue.

“Emily got arrested,” I said.

“Did you think me asking you here had nothing to do with that?” Margie was sweating gratuitously in spite of the cool evening air. Her short legs didn’t reach the ground from the landing, so they just hung suspended, like two khaki’d hams.

I let my eyes wander in the direction of the prehistoric boulder where Kevin and I used to have lunch and I imagined I could still see us there now, laughing and eating, and him not hating my guts.

Margie tried to follow my line of vision, like she suspected I might have been followed, and it struck me how amusing it was, that this Humpty Dumpty of a woman was one of the few people on the planet Robert Barlow actually feared.

I’d managed to avoid her since our last, Rollerblade-themed encounter—she’d said she wanted to talk about the site, and I did not want to talk about the site—yet now here we were back in Central Park, together again, talking.

“I’ll get right to the point.” Margie smacked her palms together in a way that startled me. “I asked you here to give you something. Something that’ll save your pretty little asses from this pickle you’ve gotten yourselves into.”

She heaved herself back up to a standing position, wiped the dirt off the seat of her khakis, and reached for a knapsack she’d stuffed behind the bronze dog’s posterior. It was the kind of knapsack you see high school kids wearing, JanSport or whatever, and there was a button pinned to its front that read If You’re Not Outraged You’re Not Paying Attention. Beside that was another button, a close-up of Dolly Parton’s face from her Best Little Whorehouse in Texas era, or maybe Nine to Five.

Margie unzipped her fantastic knapsack and pulled out a thick manila envelope, which she tossed onto the landing beside me.

“There you have it,” she said. “The answer to your problems, right there in black and white.”

“You’ll forgive me if I find that hard to believe,” I said, ignoring the envelope.

“You don’t even know what’s in there.”

“Whatever it is, I’m pretty sure it’s not going to solve all my problems.”

“Right, I forgot. You’ve been brainwashed like all the men in that sausage-fest of an office into thinking Robert’s the second coming. That he’s just smarter than everyone else. What a load of BS.” Margie wiped her forehead sweat back onto her slicked ponytail and scanned the area for anyone in earshot, then lowered herself back down to a sitting position beside me on the landing.