Chapter 14: Missing Gold
The display case by the register had stood open for eleven years, and in eleven years nobody had ever looked inside it twice.
It held the salon's ceremonial shears, gold-plated, heavy as a paperweight, presented to the flagship by the founders. Clients photographed them. They were the closest thing Velour had to a crown.
On Thursday morning, the case was empty.
"Do not move," Regina said. She stood behind the desk with her hand flat on the marble, and her voice had the bright, careful quality of a woman who has already decided everything. "Nobody move, nobody touch anything. The founders' shears are gone."
"Gone?" Blair said. "Gone where?"
"That is what we are going to find out." Regina's gaze traveled the room like a searchlight and stopped on Tessa. "Who was last in the storage room?"
The storage room was where the display case's cleaning supplies were kept. It was also where Tessa had spent most of the last two weeks, on punishment duty, with the 1975 carton and a mop.
"I was," Tessa said. "Yesterday. On towels. You assigned me the towels, Regina. It is in the log you make me sign."
"It is in the log," Regina agreed. "Thank you for establishing that."
"Having a log entry is not the same as being a thief."
"No. But it is the same as being the person a thief would want us to look at, if the thief were clever, or the person who took them, if she were not." Regina came around the desk. "Your bag, Tessa. And your locker. Company policy during an inventory incident."
"You cannot be serious."
"Open them, or I open them with security on the phone."
Rosa stepped forward so fast her shampoo apron swung. "This is insane. Tessa has been in that room a hundred times. Half the salon has a key. Chase was in there Tuesday looking for his cape clips, I saw him."
"Rosa," Regina said, "if you speak again, you will be suspended beside her, and I will accept your resignation as a bonus."
The bag held a paperback, a sandwich, a bus pass, and forty-one dollars folded into a pharmacy receipt. The locker held a sweater, spare shoes, and a photograph of a younger Tessa standing behind her mother's chair in a Cleveland salon, both of them laughing. Regina held the photograph a moment too long, as if it were evidence, and then set it down with exaggerated care.
"Nothing," Blair reported from the locker, almost disappointed.
"Nothing in the bag," Chase said. "Nothing anywhere."
"Stolen goods are rarely kept at the scene," Regina said. "That is the entire point of stealing them."
She picked up the phone and dialed with one acrylic nail, and Tessa listened to her own life being rearranged in the calm, reasonable voice of a woman ordering lunch. Yes, an inventory loss. Yes, a staff member under suspicion. Yes, suspension pending investigation, effective immediately, revisit after the gala cycle. No, no police yet. The company preferred to handle its embarrassments internally.
"You are suspending me," Tessa said. "For a pair of display scissors I never touched, because I folded towels in the room where the cleaning spray is kept."
"I am suspending you because trust has been compromised. The investigation will decide the rest. Leave your station keys on the desk."
"My rent is due in nine days. You know that. Everyone in this room knows that."
"Then you should have thought about your rent," Regina said, "before you started treating this salon as your personal charity ward. Perhaps your friend across the street can employ you. I hear he has pull at the hotel."
There was a silence in which the dryers seemed very loud.
Tessa put her keys on the marble, one by one, the way George had laid down his dollar and his quarter, because she would not give Regina the satisfaction of a clatter. Then she took her coat from the hook, and Rosa, crying now, hugged her in front of everyone, which was against three separate pages of the employee handbook.
"Do not cry," Tessa whispered. "Crying is what she is charging admission for."
"You did not do this."
"I know. Hold the floor for me, Rosie. Watch everything."
She walked out through the glass door with the whole salon watching, and crossed Newbury Street with her head up, because her mother and Evelyn Alden and every woman who had ever held scissors over a stranger's head had taught her how. On the far sidewalk she stopped beside the Beacon Grand's steps, where an old porter was sweeping, and she looked at the hotel's warm windows and did the arithmetic of ruin on her fingers: nine days, forty-one dollars, and no idea at all how the story could possibly end.