Secret Santa Page 8

  Half the buildings along her two-block route were boarded up with graffiti-covered plywood. It was a tiny detail Lussi had missed the Monday she’d interviewed with Mr. Blackwood. When she was on a mission, she could be dangerously oblivious to the outside world. Someday, she was going to make the front page of the Post for falling into an open manhole and getting eaten by a sewer gator.

  A towering Black man in a fedora and wool trench coat stepped out from behind a stoop as she passed by. He jogged to catch up to her. “Ms. Meyer? Excuse me, Ms. Meyer?”

  Something about him was familiar. Lussi slowed. “Sorry, do I know you?”

  “Peter Faber,” he said, holding up an open wallet, showing off a brass badge. She stopped to look at it. She only got a quick peek before he snapped his wallet closed. “OSHA inspector. I was hoping we could chat.”

  He certainly sounded the part of authority, though he didn’t look much older than her. “OSHA? Like the posters-in-break-rooms OSHA?”

  “That’s us,” he said with a deep laugh. “Occupational Safety and Health Administration. It’s a little cold out here, though. Why don’t you let me buy you a coffee? There’s a Greek diner just around the corner—”

  “If this is about Cal, you’ll need to speak with my boss. I’m just an editor.” She paused. “Senior editor. Now, if you’ll excuse me…”

  “Cal?” he asked, blocking her again as she tried to round him. “Who’s Cal?”

  She ran her tongue over her front teeth. She could feel something stuck there, a piece of oatmeal from breakfast. “I’m sorry, what’s this about again?”

  “Every workplace injury is required, by law, to be filed with OSHA. Employers must notify OSHA when an employee is hospitalized or killed on the job. Also, when there’s an accidental amputation or optectomy.”

  “Opt…”

  He pointed one gloved finger to his eye.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “There’s been a string of accidents at Blackwood-Patterson,” Peter said. “We have documents dating back to the early seventies. Possibly, what’s been happening dates back earlier—that’s just when filing requirements were put into place. What we have on file, though, has raised some eyebrows around the office.”

  She realized where she’d seen him before. Across the street, in Tompkins Square Park last week. Watching her. Or was she imagining that? Two-way traffic passed them on Avenue A at breakneck speed. She’d about had enough of his questions.

  “I’m afraid I only started last week,” she told him. “I don’t see how I could help you with old reports. My boss just started, too—there was some…turnover at the top.”

  “Xavier Blackwood. Heart attack. I read the obit in the Times.”

  “His secretary is gone, too. Quit last week. I’m sure somebody at the office would be able to help you, though. If you want to follow me…”

  He looked her in the eyes. His gaze was colder than the winter wind. “There’s a reason I didn’t want to meet at your office. I didn’t wait out here for the past hour to ask for your help,” he said. He handed her a business card. “I’m here to warn you. I believe your life may be in danger.”

  * * *

  —

  Lussi slipped through the great iron doorway and shut the door with all her weight. Her breathing was heavy. A lump had formed in her throat, and she couldn’t get rid of it. She badly needed something to drink.

  “Everything okay, Lussi?” Gail asked.

  Life was beginning to return to Lussi’s frozen cheeks. After the OSHA inspector had told her to be careful, she’d run toward the building. Mr. Blackwood died of a heart attack. Perfectly natural—she’d witnessed it herself. Even Cal’s injuries weren’t suspicious. She didn’t know what other incidents had occurred over the years, but the workforce was old. The building was old. Fabien had been right when he’d called it a nursing home.

  “There was a man…” Lussi’s voice trailed off. She pulled the business card from her pocket. It wasn’t Peter’s—this was for a religion editor at Random House. She turned her pockets inside out, but all she found was an old movie ticket stub. Must have dropped the man’s card. “It was nothing. Probably.”

  From underneath her desk, Gail pulled out an impossibly large handgun. It gleamed silver, with black accents. It was the length of Lussi’s forearm and as thick as her wrist. A scope was mounted on a top rail.

  “I keep this holstered underneath here,” Gail said, setting it on her desk to let Lussi have a look at it. “A .357 Magnum, semiautomatic pistol with a nine-round capacity. Telescopic sight with red-dot optics. They call it the Desert Eagle.”

  “It’s not for deer hunting, I take it.”

  “Heavens, no. There wouldn’t be anything left to mount on your wall.”

  Lussi started for the stairs, then paused. “Do I need to fill out any paperwork for Cal’s injury? At my last job, if there was an injury…”

  Gail was busy wiping down her gun with a rag. “An OSHA report needs to be filed within twenty-four hours. I faxed it over Saturday morning. Nothing you need to worry about.”

  “You’re sure?”

  Gail trained her gun at the Christmas tree, squinting to see through the scope. “Trust me, it’s all routine. You need to understand, this is an old building. Accidents happen. Nothing too serious. We’re covered by insurance.”

  “What about Frederick?”

  An eardrum-bursting thunderclap rocked the building. Lussi shrieked—or at least she thought she did; all she could hear was the ringing in her ears. The glass angel tree-topper lay in glittering pieces on the floor of the lobby. The bullet had practically turned it back into sand.

  “Do we need to report that?” Lussi asked. Her voice sounded distant, underwater.

  “N-no,” Gail said, the Desert Eagle shaking in her hands. “I’ll cl-clean it up.”

  Several of the staff had rushed to the balustrade in the interim. They were already beginning to file back to their offices, apparently having lost interest once they’d seen nobody had been grievously wounded. Suddenly, Lussi didn’t feel quite so safe inside the Blackwood Building. She wasn’t sure she was safe outside, either. If this Peter Faber was really an OSHA inspector, wouldn’t he have known about Cal’s accident? Unless Gail didn’t file it, Lussi thought to herself as she walked up the spiral staircase to her office. She looked at the iron bars on the windows. For the first time, she wondered who the iron bars were really there to protect. Were the barbarians outside the gates, or inside?

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  For the second workday in a row, Lussi’s door was already open upon her arrival. And, as on Friday morning, there was a man sitting in her chair. At least this time there were no feet on her desk.

  “I suppose you’ll be wanting your chair back,” Digby said, taking his headphones off. He’d been listening to a Walkman at full blast. She’d let someone else tell him about the accidental discharge in the lobby.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said. She was about to launch into an excuse, but her new boss had a keen eye for bullshit. He also didn’t seem to care. “Did we have a meeting scheduled?” she asked.

  “No, no. Don’t worry, I was just keeping your chair warm for you,” he said, jumping to his feet. He caught her staring down at his Gold Toe socks. “Oh, that. I stepped in something in my office. Your intern is off cleaning my shoes. He should be back soon.”

  “You found me another intern already?”

  “Same one,” he said. “I wasn’t going to clean my own shoes. Not when we have someone paid to do it. Or not paid, as is the case.”

  “Wait, what’s Cal doing here? I assumed he’d never want to come back.”

  Digby chuckled. “What can I say? The kid’s a trooper. He’s hobbling around somewhere on crutches as we speak.”

  Lussi shook her head. “He told me the other night he’s a fi
lm major. Doesn’t even want to work in publishing. At least he’s got moxie.”

  “No one wants to be in publishing, darling. Yet here we are,” Digby said, gesturing around grandly.

  Lussi let the comment go. “I stepped in something on Friday, too.”

  He met her eyes, and she could tell they were both talking about the same type of something. “You should have told someone,” he said. “Don’t worry, though. I’ve got an exterminator coming tomorrow to take care of the problem.”

  “An exterminator?”

  “If there’s a more humane way to handle her, I’ll look into it.”

  Lussi set her handbag down on her desk. “I’m sorry, did you say her?”

  “Cyndi Lauper.” When she didn’t respond, he added, “The raccoon. The one that’s been running loose in the building.”

  Damn The Raven. Why had Lussi believed her when she said it was Alan?

  Digby went to the window and stared toward the park. “I never got to thank you for taking charge of that whole situation on Friday night, by the way. I’m afraid I wasn’t much help. I can usually handle my liquor, but that punch…whoa, baby.”

  Lussi gently cursed Fabien in her mind. Of course that was why he was hallucinating his father’s ghost. The little green fairy had gotten to him.

  There was a six-inch stack of envelopes on her desk. “It was nothing, really,” she said absently, shuffling through the pile. They were all addressed to the submissions editor. The mailroom was now rerouting the slush to her instead of hauling it to the basement.

  “Nothing?” he said, turning. “You also helped my father. For what it’s worth.”

  “Right place at the right time. That’s all.”

  “Speaking of my father, his funeral is scheduled for tomorrow. It took forever to find a venue with enough seats.”

  “Madison Square Garden?” she said, joking.

  “Carnegie Hall.”

  She laughed, but he wasn’t smiling. “You’re serious.”

  “As a heart attack.” Digby picked up a book off her shelf, flipped through it. “Bad choice of words. He left behind money earmarked for his funeral, but no trust fund. How’s the search for the next Stephen King going?”

  It was December 15. She’d been on the job for exactly one week, but the month was already almost halfway over. So far, she hadn’t found a single publishable novel, let alone one with the potential to turn around an entire company’s financial outlook.

  Before she could reply, Cal clambered into the office, limping on crutches. A cast covered his shin and his ankle. He said hello to Lussi and handed Digby his loafers. They were polished and did not smell like excrement. Digby slipped them on and told Lussi he’d catch up with her later.

  Lussi cast an eye over her bookshelf as she shrugged off her coat. Something didn’t look right, and it took her a few moments to realize why: Perky was missing. First her fruitcake, now Mr. Blackwood’s doll. Did she have to start writing her name on her stuff with a Sharpie, like her mother had when Lussi was in grade school?

  Cal carefully lowered himself into the chair across from Lussi’s. He leaned his crutches against her desk. At least he wouldn’t be putting his feet up there anymore.

  “Thank you for staying with me on Friday,” Cal said.

  “Thank you for coming back,” Lussi said, smiling warmly at him. “Say, when you came in, did you see a doll about yea tall on my shelf this morning?” she asked, holding her hands a little less than a foot apart.

  “A doll? Like Strawberry Shortcake?”

  “Not quite. It’s got horns and teeth and—”

  “I think I’d remember that,” he said, “even with all the painkillers I’m on.”

  Lussi wondered who else had been in her office. Alan, emptying the trash over the weekend? That theory went out the window when she noticed her wastebasket was still full. She would worry about it later.

  She handed Cal a thick stack of manuscripts. “Get comfy. You can sit here and read all day. I’ll get you trained on the phone tomorrow.”

  There was a knock at the door. Cal reached for his crutches but Lussi waved him off. “Come in,” she shouted.

  The Raven craned her head through the door. “Would you mind if I borrowed this young gentleman for a bit?” She gave Lussi a crooked smile. “I’ll try not to break his other leg.”

  Cal’s brow furrowed in confusion, trepidation, or some combination of both. He looked to Lussi to save him, but she would be of no help. She’d already promised the editor in chief that she’d lend him out. What sort of labor The Raven had in mind for a one-legged twenty-one-year-old, Lussi didn’t know.

  “Absolutely, Mary Beth. I’ll send him over in a minute.”

  The Raven nodded curtly and left.

  Lussi gave Cal a stern look. “If anything weird happens, or if you need to take a moment for yourself, don’t hesitate to speak up. Everyone seems to think it’s normal for you to break your leg on a Friday and show up on a Monday, but I don’t. This is above and beyond—and I don’t want you to get hurt again.”

  Cal tucked his crutches under his arms. “Don’t worry, boss. I’m just going down the hall. What could happen?”

  Later—after all was said and done—she wished she could have gone back and told him to run from the Blackwood Building, broken leg and all.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  After lunch, Lussi ventured into the basement to assess the status of the slush pile. She had no interest in sorting things back into stacks—not by herself, at least. Not without someone to spot her in case the towers came crashing down again. At the same time, she couldn’t just leave the manuscripts all over the floor. That wasn’t how she’d been raised.

  Except someone had already taken the initiative. The papers spilling out of the cage had been rounded up. Everything had been restacked, same as before the accident. Not only that, the manuscripts were rubber-banded and paper-clipped together. The only sign that anything untoward had happened down here on Friday were the brick-red stains on the cement floor.

  Good enough for her. She turned to leave, and kicked something with the heel of her shoe. Perky. Strange—it hadn’t been there a moment ago, she could have sworn. She picked it up. Had she brought it down here Friday night when she’d gone looking for Cal? Not that she could recall. She hadn’t drunk that much—certainly nothing like when she’d ripped up the town with Fabien. That unsettling feeling that had begun last Monday returned full force. Somebody—or several somebodies—were trying to mess with her head. She hoped they were having a good laugh at her expense. Because she was going to have the last laugh when she singlehandedly turned this company around.

  * * *

  —

  Lussi stopped in the break room for another coffee on her way back up to her office. In just a week, she had tripled her caffeine intake. She couldn’t seem to stay awake unless she was in the direct sun, which only filtered into her office in the mornings. A third of the building’s bulbs were burned out; the rest might as well have been, for all the good they did. The only overhead lighting was in the basement. The halls and offices were lit with wall sconces, which threw shadows across the walls. On sunny days—like the day of her interview—sunlight flooded the building. On overcast days—and when night settled in—the Blackwood Building seemed to sag under the weight of its gloomy interior. The only way to fight back the darkness was with coffee—black coffee.

  Lussi had to brew a new pot. While she waited, she set the doll on the counter and checked out the message board. Somebody had pinned up Xavier Blackwood’s Times obituary. According to the paper of record, his “long-term personal secretary” had found him slumped in his worn leather chair, a red felt-tip clutched in his frozen left hand.

  Paramedics on the scene confirmed that Mr. Blackwood was at work on the next Pulitzer Prize–winning novel from the famously h
ighbrow independent publishing house that he founded and chaired for nearly forty years…

  She rolled her eyes. She’d learned over the past week that it had been years since anybody had seen the old man so much as touch a manuscript. The obit also mentioned that he was a veteran who had “seen action in the European theater during World War II.” Xavier had been critically wounded, and it was during his long convalescence that he first fell in love with books. More than 122 million paperbacks had been shipped overseas for servicemen. When Xavier returned to the United States, he had used family money to found Blackwood Books.

  Left out was the curious fact that it had never turned a profit in its nearly forty-year existence. Alleged fact, Lussi reminded herself.

  An arctic draft blew through the break room, followed by a metallic clanking in the hallway. Lussi went into the hall. The door to the fire escape was swinging open, banging against the doorframe every time the wind blew it closed. She’d seen a few coworkers sneak out the fire escape doors to smoke. It was the only place she’d worked in that frowned upon indoor smoking—something about the building being a tinderbox. The Raven, of course, played by her own set of rules.

  Lussi poked her head out the door. Whoever had been out here smoking was long gone, the only evidence a rusted Folgers can full of butts. A kitchen worker across the alley propped a door open. He disappeared back into the dim sum restaurant, then returned with a sack of trash that he heaved into the dumpster. How did he get by in this city? Easy, she thought: he wasn’t in publishing. It was rumored that the food service industry paid its workers living wages. Of course, she’d also heard that restaurants exploited their workers, many of whom were undocumented aliens. What right did she have to complain?

  The wind picked up. She was about to pull the door closed when she noticed she could see straight into the conference room from the platform. The blinds were angled in such a way that she had a clear view inside…and what she saw confused her. The entire editorial team was seated at the table, along with Cal. The sales team (all two of them) were there. Stanley. Gail. She couldn’t see the entire room from her vantage point, but it sure looked like an all-hands-on-deck meeting. All hands except for Lussi.