Page 100 of The Maid

She waited a moment, then asked, “Can I help you?” She reached out her hand.

I put my unsteady hand in hers and with her assistance, I was soon standing beside her. The room came into sharper focus. The ground was solid beneath my feet.

We stood there beside the bed, looking at each other for a moment, neither of us daring to look away.

“We don’t have much time,” she said. “Do you know who I am?”

I studied her more closely. She looked vaguely familiar, but she also looked like every other middle-aged female guest who frequented the hotel.

“My apologies, I’m afraid…”

And that’s when it hit me. From the newspapers. From our one brief encounter in the elevator. It was Mrs. Black. Not the second Mrs. Black, Giselle, but the first Mrs. Black, the original wife.

“Ah,” she said as she neatly tucked the chocolate wrapper into her pants pocket. “Recognition dawns.”

“Mrs. Black, I’m terribly sorry to intrude, but I do believe that your former husband…I believe Mr. Black is dead.”

She nodded slowly. “My ex-husband was a cheater and a thief and an abuser and a criminal.”

I started to put it together then, only then. “Mrs. Black,” I asked. “Did you…did you kill Mr. Black?”

“I suppose that depends on your point of view,” she said. “I believe he killed himself, slowly, over time, that he became infected by his own greed, that he robbed his children and me of a normal life, that he modeled corruption and evil in just about every way a man can. My two sons are his clones, and they’re now drug-addled slobs who flit from party to party, spending their father’s money. And my daughter, Victoria, all she wants is to clean up the family business, to run it with some decency, but her own father wants to disown her. He wouldn’t have stopped until Victoria and I were both destitute. And he did this even though she’s a forty-nine-percent shareholder. Well, shewasa forty-nine-percent shareholder. She’ll be more than that now….”

She looked at Mr. Black, dead on the bed, then back at me.

“I came only to talk to him, to ask him to give Victoria a chance. But when he let me in, he was drunk, popping pills, slurring his words, muttering about Giselle being a gold-digging bitch, just like me, how we’re both good-for-nothing bimbo wives, the two biggest mistakes of his life. He was obnoxious and a bully. In other words, he was his usual self.”

She paused.

“He grabbed me by the wrists. I’ll have bruises.”

“Just like Giselle,” I said.

“Yes. Just like the new and improved Mrs. Black. I tried to warn her. Giselle. But she didn’t listen. Too young to know any better.”

“He beats her too,” I said.

“Not anymore,” she replied. “He would have done worse to me, but he started to heave and pant. He let go of my wrists. Then he stumbled to the bed, kicked off his shoes and lay down, just like that.”

Her eyes darted to the pillow on the floor, then away. “Tell me,” she said. “Do you ever feel like the world is backward? Like the villains prosper and the good suffer?”

It was as though she were reading my deepest thoughts. My mind flitted through a short list of those who had taken from me unjustly and had caused me to suffer—Cheryl, Wilbur…and a man I’d never met, my own father.

“Yes,” I said. “I feel that way all the time.”

“Me too,” she replied. “In my experience, there are times when a good person must do something that’s not quite right, but it’s still the right thing to do.”

Yes, she was right.

“What if it were different this time?” she asked. “What if we took matters into our own hands and balanced the scales? What if you didn’t see me? What if I just walked out of the hotel and never looked back?”

“You’d be recognized, would you not?”

“If people actually read the newspapers delivered to their doors, but I doubt they do. I’m largely invisible. Just another gray-haired, middle-aged woman in loose-fitting clothes and sunglasses walking out the back door of the Regency Grand. Just another nobody.”

Invisible in plain sight, just like me.

“What did you touch?” I asked her.

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