Chapter 5: The Man With the Cane
The Grand Ballroom at the Langford Hotel seats two hundred. Patricia had filled every chair.
There was a string quartet. There was a cake shaped like a wedding cake, three tiers, with Bradley & Lena piped in gold across the top. Somebody had not taken my name off it after all. That told me she’d expected me to come crawling.
I wore the navy dress. The same one. Cotton, short sleeves, forty-two dollars. And pinned above my heart, the gold name tag. LENA, SALES ASSOCIATE.
Heads turned when I walked in. People had seen the video. Of course they had.
Patricia was at the microphone before I reached the dance floor.
“Well,” she said, with a sad little smile. “Some of you heard about the unfortunate incident at Halcott’s yesterday. I’m a forgiving woman. Lena, if you’ve come to make things right, the papers are on the table.”
Bradley walked toward me with the blue folder and the pen. He looked tired. He looked like a man about to close a deal.
“Sign it,” he said quietly. “And all of this goes away. I promise.”
“All of what?” I said, loud enough for the first ten tables. “The bracelet Vanessa put in my bag? Or page nine?”
His face went white.
Patricia nodded at the hotel guard by the stage. “I think she needs some air.”
The guard took my arm, apologetic, the same way the store guard had.
The ballroom doors opened.
A white-haired man stood in the doorway in a charcoal three-piece suit, one hand on a black cane with a silver top. Gloria stood half a step behind him, her folio under her arm.
“Take your hands off my daughter,” my father said.
The guard let go so fast I almost fell.
At table four, a man in a blue tie stood up. Ken Doyle, vice president of merchandising for Halcott’s. Patricia’s guest of honor.
“Mr. Halcott,” he said.
I watched Patricia hear the name. I watched her look at my father, then at me, then at the name tag on my dress. Her hand found her pearls, the triple strand, and stayed there.
“Halcott,” she said. “As in—”
“As in the building she works in,” my father said. “As in the store your company has sold sheets to for nineteen years. Her name is Lena Halcott. She took her mother’s name to find out who people really are.” He looked at Bradley. “It worked.”
Gloria walked to Patricia’s table and set down three pages, one at a time, like cards.
The investigator’s invoice, paid by Bradley Whitmore, dated two weeks before he proposed.
Page nine.
And a still from our cosmetics hall camera, very clear, of Vanessa Pryce’s hand dropping a strand of pearls into my tote bag.
Vanessa stood up and walked out without her purse. Nobody stopped her. The store has already filed its report with the police.
Bradley turned to me. “Lena. I loved you. I swear I loved you.”
“You loved a background check,” I said.
I took off the ring and set it on the top tier of the cake, right between our names.
Guests began to leave. Not dramatically. Just quietly, one table at a time, the way people leave a house that’s on fire. Ken Doyle went first.
On Monday, Halcott’s merchandising team declined to renew the Whitmore contract. Patricia resigned from two boards and the country club within the month. I hear the house has a sign out front now.
I asked my father for one thing, and he gave it to me: a ninety-day bridge order for the mill in South Carolina, while Gloria helped them find other buyers. Three hundred people didn’t need to pay for page nine.
I’ll take my seat on the fourteenth floor in January. My father wants it sooner. I told him I have one more season to work.
This morning I stood behind counter seven and lined up the testers. A woman couldn’t decide between two bottles of jasmine.
“Spray one on each wrist,” I told her.
She looked at my chest and smiled. “Lena,” she read. “Sales associate.”
“That’s right,” I said, and touched the gold name tag. “So I never forget where I’m from.”
