Chapter 17: The Investigation
Rosa arrived at Tessa's door with a grocery bag, a gossip harvest, and the expression of a spy promoted beyond her dreams.
"You are supposed to be invisible," Tessa said. "If Regina sees you here, you are suspended too."
"Regina is in the back office with the loss prevention man, being investigated at." Rosa set the bag down and began unpacking soup, bread, and a rotisserie chicken. "Everyone is being investigated at. Blair cried. The shampoo girls cried. I did not cry. I listened. Sit down and eat, you look like a ghost with rent due."
"Tell me."
"Mr. Pruitt has a list. He asks everybody five questions, and he writes down nothing, which is the scariest part. When did you last see the shears. Who has storage access. Who holds a grudge against the company." She tore the chicken apart with her hands. "Then he asked who benefits if Tessa Boyd is fired, and the room went so quiet you could hear the color processing."
"Who benefits," Tessa said.
"Now comes the part you repeat to no one until I say." Rosa leaned in. "Yesterday I was in the break room, behind the lockers, tying my shoe. And Chase came in with his phone, and he was talking low, and he said, and I quote him exactly: 'I told you, Friday. The commission lands Friday and I redeem them Friday. They have been in that case eleven years and nobody on earth misses them yet.'"
The kitchen seemed to tilt, very slightly, like a boat.
"Redeem them," Tessa said.
"Pawnshop," Rosa said. "He pawned the founders' shears, Tessa. For cash. He owes money on that car he leases to impress girls, and the commission was late, and he needed four hundred dollars by Monday. Four hundred. He sold the crown jewels of Velour for four hundred dollars and a ticket he can buy back on Friday."
"Does Regina know?"
Rosa's face changed. "That is the second part, and it is worse. This morning I heard her in the dispensary with him, door almost shut. She said, 'Your ticket stays in my drawer until after the gala, and your name stays out of Pruitt's mouth, because you are my top earner and I am not losing you over a pair of scissors nobody uses. The Boyd girl is already suspended. Let the story rest where it fell.' Those words, Tessa. Where it fell. She aimed it. It did not fall. She aimed it, at you, like a lamp off a table."
Tessa sat down slowly. The soup steamed between them, untouched.
"She knows I did not do it."
"She knows, and it does not matter to her, and that is the part I cannot get out of my head. You are not a suspect to her. You are a solution. A suspended thief is a story she can tell the gala people. A golden boy pawning the furniture is not."
Rosa pushed the soup bowl toward her. "Eat. Then tell me what we do. Because we are doing something. I know that face, it is the face that carried a homeless man's dollar like it was communion."
What they did, in the end, was nothing, and it was the hardest work of Tessa's life. She explained, as much as she was allowed to explain, which was almost nothing: that help was real, that it had a date, that the date was the gala, and that Rosa's one job was to keep her eyes open and her mouth shut and her friend's name clean in every room she entered.
"That is not a plan," Rosa said. "That is a weather forecast."
"It is the only one I am allowed to give you."
Rosa studied her a long time. "You know who he is. The porter. You know, and you are sitting in this kitchen eating my soup and letting them hang you, because you know."
"I know that help is coming," Tessa said. "Eat your chicken."
That evening, a letter arrived from Halcyon Beauty Group, delivered by hand, which is how a company tells you it wants you to feel the weight of the paper. Her disciplinary hearing was scheduled for the Thursday of event week, two days before the gala. The letter used the words final determination. It used the word theft three times and the word alleged not once.
Tessa put it under the magnet, beside the eviction notice, where the two countdowns could keep each other company, and she went to the window and looked across the city toward a street where a porter was sweeping in the dark, and she said out loud, to the glass, to herself, to him: "Two days before the gala, George. You had better be as exact as you promised me."
Chapter 18: Vivian's Tea