The Other Black Girl(110)
8/21/18. NR noticeably happy with Hazel. Seems like perfect match. Estimated time until cycle completion: ~4 months.
“?‘Completion’? Complete what?!” Malaika spat, causing the lady who was emptying the garbage a few feet away to pause her activities long enough to eye them questioningly.
But Nella lowered her voice and continued on. “?‘9/26. Accepted grease, no questions.’ And here, in smaller letters, ‘Mystery note seems to have her on edge—is it KP? Consider alt plan.’?”
Malaika scrunched her eyebrows. “That’s the same night we went to Curl Central, isn’t it? And wait, who’s KP?”
“I’ll show you in a moment,” Nella said, reading faster and faster with each new line.
10/16/18. Still concerned about notes. NR may know more about Hazel than she’s letting on. Working with KP?
10/17/18. Note-sender discovered to be Shani (Cooper’s). Confirmed NR still in the dark—more time bought w/ Jesse book & promotion talk.
“Hazel wrote all of this?”
That was the most unsettling part. She knew this handwriting, and it wasn’t Hazel’s.
Nella closed her eyes, picturing this cursive she’d seen a hundred times—the signature on every contract, every thoughtful holiday card written to Wagner’s authors. “Richard. This is Richard’s handwriting.”
“Richard, as in your boss?! I knew that man had skeletons,” Malaika breathed. “But why does Hazel have this?”
Nella covered her face. “Because she’s clearly helping him do… whatever it is that she’s doing. Maybe that’s why she’s at Wagner—to convince me to be ‘complacent.’ To… hypnotize me? I have no fucking clue. Whatever’s happening here, it’s terrible, and it’s big. Bigger than me, and probably even bigger than Hazel. Whoever she is.”
Nella stared out into the dark abyss of the train tracks to clear her mind. But she saw the bald-headed girl, the Black hand. The black sedan. If she’d spent more time looking through those files, she would have probably learned her name, too.
“Four months,” Malaika repeated. “That was written what—three months ago? What’s supposed to happen to you next month?”
“I don’t know. But if that’s not confusing enough… meet KP.”
Nella scrolled to the very last photo in her camera roll—the one she’d snapped of the Kendra Rae Phillips page. Judging by the quality of her wallet-sized picture, Nella guessed it had been taken around the time Burning Heart was published. It was maybe one of the last public photos the editor had ever taken. Beside it were more notes, also in Richard’s handwriting, with dates that went from the eighties all the way up to present day. Nella read a few of them out loud—Possible sighting upstate, 1/5/86. 1992—moved to Paris???—but the last one captured her attention and kept it there.
10/20/18, confirmed sighting of KP near 100th and Broadway. Took Shani’s phone, then went underground.
Something ice-cold shot through Nella’s veins. Adrenaline. Fear. Awareness. It was Shani who had been put in the black sedan.
So, then, the new nameless texter—the person who’d told Nella someone was coming for her…
You chose to deal with Kenny the way you did.
The words clipped Nella in the jaw, suddenly, as though she’d been socked. She tried desperately to remember where she’d heard them. Outside of Richard’s office, when she’d suspected he was speaking to his Black mistress.
“What does Kendra Rae Phillips have to do with you? Isn’t she basically, like, gone?”
Nella looked over at Malaika, who was sitting thoughtfully beside her, nibbling at her thumbnail. She wanted desperately to tell Malaika everything she was feeling—about how scared she was to go to work; about how she’d been talking to someone who was supposed to have been “dealt with.” And how she might soon be “dealt with” herself.
But she didn’t. She simply kept her eyes trained on the turnstiles through which they’d swiped, mulling it all over. Hazel might have pretended she didn’t suspect a thing, but Nella was fully aware that she’d disappeared for just a minute too long. Hazel was Hazel: If there was anything she was perfectly attuned to, it was timing.
“So, now what? You are going to quit, right? Or blow the whistle on the fact that Richard Wagner has been keeping tabs on you like this? You should write an article about this,” Malaika huffed, growing more and more indignant. “Would serve his guilty ass right. Maybe then he’d have to explain everything else here.”
Nella sat as still as stone. She inhaled slowly, then exhaled even more slowly, trying to think of a way to put what she was feeling into words. Something rotten resided within Wagner’s walls, and she’d been tracking that rotten something around on her shoe since Day Damn One. How many people had known? Everyone—it had to be all of them. Vera, Maisy, Amy… they all had to be in on it. How else would Richard have such copious notes?
Far down the track and into the tunnel, Nella could make out the lights of a slow-approaching train coming to take her away from Clinton Hill. After a few stops, she would transfer to another train and be swept into a different, less attractive part of Brooklyn, where few businesses were Black-owned, and brownstones became boxy, medium-sized apartments. Where there were no fancy vestibules to put her imaginary bike and coat rack in.