Page 10 of I Need You to Read This
“I’m not sure, Alexis, I get a bad feeling,” Raymond says.
“You always have bad feelings,” Janice snips. “You’re practically one big bad feeling.”
“How do you think I became a detective? You’ve got to have instinct.” He taps his chest proudly.
“I always assumed the murder was personal, that it had to do with her, not her job,” Alex rationalizes. It is what she’s been telling herself in an attempt to calm her nerves. It hasn’t done much to help.
“Of course, honey. I just can’t believe our girl is going to be the new Dear Constance. Giving advice to the masses,” Janice says wistfully.
“Unless she gives the wrong person the wrong advice and then, boom, dead at her summer house.”
“Well, luckily I don’t have a summer house,” Alex reminds him. Though she has begun to feel queasy. She puts down her bagel, unable to take another bite.
“Don’t scare the girl! She’s excited! And besides, you don’t think anything is safe,” Janice says, clearing plates off the counter.
“That’s because the world is a dangerous, terrible place.” Raymond’s hand comes down on the counter, rattling everyone’s plates. “You need to be vigilant.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Janice interjects, rolling her eyes.
“You don’t know the things I’ve seen in this city, the messed-up, crazy things—”
“What, in the eighties? Things have changed a little since then, if you haven’t noticed. New York has changed. And Alex is going to be up in that big building with the security guards. She’ll be protected.”
Raymond shakes his head. “No one is protected twenty-four hours a day. Nobody.”
Janice rolls her eyes. “Ignore him, Alex, he reads too much of theDaily.It makes a person paranoid.” But deep down Alex knows Raymond’s right. She won’t be protected. Her current life is a knownquantity. She can control who she interacts with and when—but at the office she will be putting herself out there, unable to hide when she wants to. Or run.
“I’ve got to go,” she says, sliding off her stool and grabbing her purse from its hook. As she makes her way to the front of the diner, Raymond calls after her: “They never found him, Alexis! Remember that!”
SEVEN
Later in her apartment, computer on her lap, a bowl of popcorn balanced next to her on the sofa, Alex googles Francis Keen. How sad that her death is the first thing that comes up, pages upon pages of tabloid and news articles detailing the nightmarish circumstances of her murder. Most of them are highlighted, indicating she’s read them before. It is far from her first time googling the crime scene. She knows the contents. Francis goes alone to the house and after spending one day there is brutally executed with a knife.
She clicks on an article several pages in. It describes how an anonymous source close to Francis said that she had been stressed about work and had gone away to try to relax. In the middle of the article is an image of Francis Keen’s idyllic cedar-shingled beach house with its stacked-stone fence and sprawling English gardens. It would look like the setting of a fairy tale were it not cordoned off with crime tape and surrounded by emergency vehicles.
She reads the caption.The grisly scene where Francis Keen’s body was found by longtime editor Howard Demetri.She stops, startled. So Howard was the one who found Francis. She read it before, but now that she’s met with Howard, Alex can imagine it. The way she must have looked. How awful it must have been for him. Alex tries to clear the horror of it from her mind.
Now she types her new boss’s name into Google. Her search brings her to a series of photos of benefits and charity balls. Howard, tall and dignified with a swoop of salt-and-pepper hair and sophisticated glasses, a scattering of gray stubble across his square jaw. There he is on his way into the Met Gala, looking dapper. A woman stands beside him, her delicate hand clamped onto his arm. Alex remembers the wedding band Howard spun on his finger. She zooms in to read the caption.Howard Demetri attends the Met Gala with his wife, Regina Whitaker. She’d heard Howard’s name before but never his wife’s.
She is an impossibly glamorous woman, the kind who feels to Alex like she might be her own separate superior species, wearing a gown that looks to be made from row upon row of overlapping tabs of silver. They catch the light like beautiful fish scales. Her perfect lips are parted to reveal a set of flawless white teeth.
Alex broadens her search online to include Regina Whitaker and finds a tour of her and Howard’s West Village brownstone inArchitectural Digest. In the first photo, Regina lounges sideways on a wide white sofa in a room so luxurious, so rich with dark woods and veined marbles, that it looks like a movie set. She scrolls through the photos of their home, absorbing the expensive antiques alongside minimal, modern art. All of it in perfect refined taste. Alex allows herself to imagine living there, the plush feel of the throw pillows, the perfect warm lighting in each room. Isn’t this what New York does to people? Make them long for things? She stops on a photo of Howard Demetri in his home office. He sits stiffly behind an expansive desk, an antique globe and a Pulitzer Prize medal side by side on a bookshelf behind him. Alex zooms in on the image. Howard’s fingers are clenched unnaturally in front of him, a small tight smile on his face telling her that, despite all of the trappings, the awards, and material success, Howard Demetri is not a happy person.
There’s a sharp yell from somewhere out on the street. Startled, Alex pushes her computer off her lap and stands. Her ears prick like a wild animal listening for danger. She hears it again. A man’s voice, low and angry, shouting something unintelligible. She moves to the livingroom window, carefully pulling aside the blackout curtains. Across the street the Bluebird Diner is already dark, closed for the night. A man stands in front of it on the corner. His back is to her, but her chest tightens. There is something familiar about his stance—the slightly bowed legs, the broad shoulders. He paces, his face turned away from her. What is he doing out there? He’s stopped yelling but continues to pace, a few yards up and down the block, saying something ferociously into the his cell phone.
He turns finally, the side of his face catching the streetlight. Alex realizes that she has never seen it before. She releases a breath as the man crosses the street, disappearing around the corner and into the night.
She goes back to her computer. Another result farther down the page catches her eye.
Meet the New Dear Constance
She clicks on the link. It takes her to a press release. A photo of her own face stares back at her.
EIGHT
On Monday Alex anxiously reports to the Herald Building for her first day of work. Her heels click against the marbled floor, the sound echoing up through the glass of the atrium. At the entry desk she collects her badge from a security guard. She looks down in wonder at the stiff plastic card attached to a lanyard.ALEX MARKS, THE HERALD. On the right side of the badge is a small photo, taken quickly by Jonathan on her way out of the office the last time she was here.
In it, Alex is looking into the camera, a stunned half smile crookedly plastered onto her face. Will everyone else see the absolute terror in her eyes? She flips the badge over and waves it in front of the electronic sensors, watching in awe as the plexiglass gate parts for her. She slips through the opening silently, nearly expecting the security guard to leap over the barrier and confront her, to tell her there’s been a terrible mistake. But no one tries to stop her as she continues to the bank of modern silver elevators. One of them opens on cue, and when she steps inside, the number49appears on a screen without her pushing anything. She looks into the mirrored brass of the ceiling, looking down on herself in the reflection. She takes in the somewhat crooked part in her brown hair. She’d brushed it back into a tortoiseshell clip, but now she wonders if she looks ridiculous, like someone pretending to work at a newspaper.
