CHAPTER 23

By the time Friday morning came around with no sign of Max, Beatrice was worried. It was as if she’d disappeared into thin air. Beatrice had expected a phone call, a note, something from Max to say she was sorry or at least ask how Aunt Doris was doing. Nothing came. Day after day her desk sat empty.

Beatrice kept busy filing for Mr. Halloran and avoiding going into his office. She’d taken to using the mailboxes outside Ms. Cunningham’s door to leave her work for him. He was hardly ever at his desk anyway, she noticed. The lunches had grown longer, and some days he didn’t come back to the office at all. That was fine with her.

She couldn’t stand not knowing what happened to Max any longer. After lunch, she walked over to Ms. Cunningham’s closed door.

A muffled voice behind the door said, “I need more time, Dale! You can’t expect me to trace thirty accounts overnight . . . I know we have time constraints. She missed the meeting . . . Well, I can’t take her statement if I can’t find her . . . Yes, the deposits are still there . . .”

Beatrice tapped on the door. She heard the dull thud of heavy footsteps on carpet, and then the door opened. Old Cunny stood blocking the doorway. “Can I help you?”

“I’m sorry, Ms. Cunningham, but I was wondering . . .” She bit her lip.

“Yes? What?” Her boss’s terse voice, along with the strange conversation she’d just overheard, almost made Beatrice forget.

“Umm. Do you know where Maxine McDonnell is?” Beatrice asked, and then felt like she needed to add some legitimacy to her question. “Mr. Halloran had a question about one of her assignments.” It wasn’t a complete lie, she reasoned.

“I’m sorry to tell you that Maxine resigned Tuesday morning.”

Beatrice’s mouth fell open. Max quit. But she had been hoping for a promotion after she finished Mr. Thompson’s secret audit. It didn’t make sense.

“Is that all, dear? I really need to get back to my work.”

“Okay. Thanks.” Beatrice couldn’t believe it. Max was gone. She hadn’t even said good-bye. And she still had her aunt’s key.

“You know, now that I think of it,” Ms. Cunningham said, “you should go check with Mr. Thompson to see if he needs any more help. Maxine leaving has left him shorthanded.”

With that, Ms. Cunningham closed her door.

Beatrice glanced down the hall toward Mr. Thompson’s office. She hadn’t seen him since he’d hired her. Now that she’d read his love letters to Aunt Doris, she didn’t know if she could look him in the eye.

His door was closed. She knocked softly, to no reply. Maybe he had left the office, she hoped. She knocked harder and waited. Just as she was turning to head back to her desk, the door swung open and she was face-to-face with “Bill,” as he was known to the women in her life.

“Can I help you, Bethany?”

Beatrice paused but didn’t correct him. “Ms. Cunningham wanted me to stop by and see if you needed any additional assistance.”

“Well, that was very kind of both of you. I’m doing just fine, but if I need some assistance I’ll let you know.” He started to close the door when something occurred to him. “Actually, could you please deliver something to Ms. Cunningham for me?”

He left the door open, and she followed him in. His office looked just as she remembered it. There was a photograph of a pretty woman and two smiling girls sitting on the bookshelf. Beatrice felt ill at the sight of his family, knowing he’d promised Doris he’d leave them.

He handed her a stack of files. “Thank you, Bethany. You have a good weekend.”

“Thank you, sir.” She couldn’t put into words what she really wanted to say. Looking at him, she never would have guessed he was the sort of man who would lure a woman into an affair. Mr. Thompson was paunchy with salt-and-pepper hair, and his kind eyes and warm smile were almost grandfatherly. She might have believed he really cared about her weekend by the way he talked to her, but he didn’t even know her name.

CHAPTER 24

Beatrice passed Max’s old seat on the way back to her desk. She stopped. Looking at the stapler still sitting there, Beatrice realized that Max may have left more things behind. Maybe Doris’s key was in the desk. Maybe Max had left a note or some sort of explanation.

Max did whatever she wanted, and no one ever said a word about it. Maybe it was time that she stopped worrying so much, Beatrice told herself. Her boss didn’t even know her name. Ms. Cunningham, despite her warning to Beatrice that she took everything at the office personally, barely stuck her nose outside her office door. The other secretaries ignored her. No one really cared who Beatrice was or what she did now that Max was gone. Maybe it was time to do what she wanted to do. At that moment, Beatrice wanted Doris’s key back.

At 5:00 p.m. Beatrice put her purse on her shoulder and followed the other women to the coatrack in the hall. She put on her coat, her hat, and her gloves alongside the other secretaries and walked to the elevator lobby. Just as everyone was climbing into an elevator car to go home, she stepped away as if it were an afterthought and headed into the ladies’ room. No one noticed.

The lavatory was empty and dark. The overhead bulb was off. Beatrice squinted in the faint light streaming through the window where Max would blow smoke. She stepped into a stall and sat down to wait.

For over an hour she sat still and quiet. She had to be sure that everyone was gone. It was a Friday, and even the managers who liked to stay late would surely be going home on time. The holidays were upon them. There was Christmas shopping to do and family to see. She had noticed all week how eager everyone was to leave work. The streets downtown seemed to empty early each night as she sat in the shelter waiting for the 82 bus to take her home.

Beatrice had no one to see and nothing to do but go to the hospital and watch machines move air in and out of her aunt’s withering body. Beatrice caught a glimpse of herself sitting in the stall in the dim bathroom mirror. Gaunt and pale, she looked like a ghost of herself.

The street noises outside grew quiet. She waited until it had been a full ten minutes since she’d heard the whir of the elevator in the hall and slowly crept out of the bathroom. The clicking of her boots on the tiles echoed off the walls. She slipped them off by the bathroom door and silently padded down the hall in her stocking feet.

No one was chattering on the phone or rustling through files. The floor was deserted. It was so quiet, she was certain that someone would hear her heart pounding against her rib cage. The hallway floodlights were still lit, but the big fluorescents that hung over the rows of desks had been shut off. The doors that surrounded her workspace were all dark. Only dim yellow lights from the street below filtered through the frosted glass.

The faint light from the hall was bright enough to see by as she sat down at Max’s desk and pulled open the center drawer. Instead of pens, paper clips, and other office supplies, it was filled with nothing but paper loosely scattered across the drawer. She felt around the piles for Doris’s key and found nothing but more paper. Beatrice pulled out a sheet and struggled to read it in the faint light. It was covered in scribbled shorthand. Beatrice squinted at the notes and finally gave up and switched on the small desk lamp in the corner. Max’s shorthand was not as neat as her own, but she could just make out the words among the ticks and curlicues on the page.