Page 49 of Best Offer Wins
“Oh, you will,” she says. “You guys have always been so great together.”
She’s right. The last year and a half may have been terrible, but every couple has their ups and downs. And we’re almost throughit—I can feel it. Dottie is the key. And people don’t just up and disappear. I know I can find her. I know she can get us into the house. And once that happens, everything will be fine. No one could be unhappy there.
“How’s the decorating with Zoe Estelle coming?” I ask, suddenly feeling charitable.
“She’s amazing. Seriously, she’s so creative, I would never be able to come up with half the stuff she does.” Erika pauses to check her phone. “She was just over yesterday showing me some fabric swatches for the drapes in the living room, and you’ll never guess the crazy story she told me.”
“What?”
“Do you remember the Murder Mansion? From, gosh, it must’ve been six or seven years ago?”
“Wow, I’d forgotten all about that. But yeah, that was a huge story.”
“I know. So huge. She’s done a ton of houses in our neighborhood, so I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. But she told me she redid the kitchen there.”
“Shut up.”
“For real. Right before those poor people got killed. She said they were the nicest clients.”
“Ugh, that’s so sad. I don’t think I realized that happened so close to you.”
“Yeah,” Erika says, nodding. “They only lived a street over.”
We chew in silence for a minute, polishing off our grilled cheeses.
“So,” Erika breaks in, “are you going to tell me what the deal was with the IP address stuff?”
“That perfectly normal request?” I say, laughing. “Yeah, it was sort of a big deal that it came from campus, so thank you again. Off the record, we’d already heard a rumor about some possible harassment with a student there.”
“Really? That’s terrible.”
“I’m pretty sure your email came from her, too—Dorothy Ross. We found some other stuff she’d posted under her real name on Reddit, though she didn’t identify the professor she was accusing there.”
“Wait, Dorothy? Like, a girl?”
“Yeah, a twist, right? Which means it might all be bullshit. Or Bradshaw isn’t as gay as you thought.”
“Huh. That’s so odd. I know he had a husband,” she says.
I shrug. “Like I said, it might be nothing. We’re just doing our homework.”
“But why do you care so much?” Erika presses. “He’s just an investor in a restaurant that you may or may not take as a client?”
“I really can’t get too far into the details—Jordana would kill me if she knew I was telling any of this at all to a reporter—but we had a disaster with another new client last year. Sank a ton of money into a whole campaign for them, only to find out there was a similar problem with one of their backers and the woman in that case was threatening a lawsuit. We had to take a bath on the campaign and walk away before they even opened. So now we try to be a lot more careful on the front end.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Erika says slowly.
“My problem now is I can’t find Dorothy to confirm any of this,” I say, beginning to drop the breadcrumbs that will lead Erika to do what I want. “These guys would be a big get for us—a few of the other partners have some really hot restaurants in other cities that you would probably recognize. So we need to be pretty confident that we’re dealing with something real before we throw in the towel, you know?”
“What do you mean you can’t find her?”
“It’s like she just disappeared,” I say. “I can’t find any current info for her online. And there are about a million Dorothy Rosses, as it turns out.”
“Well, I could run the name for you,” Erika offers. “What other details do you have?”
Gratitude wells up inside me. I knew she’d come through. At thePost, I always had Erika’s back and she always had mine. Even when that idiot councilman called my editor to accuse me of stalking him, she didn’t flinch. In fact, it had been her idea to involve our union rep. He made the case that I’d only been doing my job—I needed the interview and that asshole had been ignoring my calls—so wasn’t waiting for him outside his house just dogged reporting? The councilman claimed he’d seen me in his backyard, but he had no proof that I’d trespassed. So, that had been that. My editor had to drop it.
I rattle off the other attributes that will make the right Dorothy Ross easier to isolate: “She was born in 1997, so she’d be twenty-four or twenty-five now. And she’s lived in both Florida and DC.”
