“It won’t bite you. Take off your bra, and I’ll help you get into it,” Linda said.
“Are you crazy? I need a bra.”
“Oh, come on, it’s a halter. It’ll hold you up. I’m not on the ittybitty-titty committee either, you know. Besides, the FBI hunk’ll be on the edge of his seat, wondering if something’s gonna pop out.”
Melanie shook her head in disbelief.
“I’ll fix it so it works, promise,” Linda said, slipping the fabric over Melanie’s head and carefully adjusting the ties behind her neck. Melanie looked at herself in the mirror.
“Wow,” she said.
“Yeah. It’s amazing what the right outfit can do. It makes you beautiful, keeps you young. It’s almost like it cheats death.”
“Right. I’ll remember that the next time somebody shoots at me.”
“Very funny, smart-ass. Oh, wait, I have the perfect pants! I scored ’em at a fashion show after I talked up the designer on air.”
Linda disappeared back into the racks, emerging a second later with gauzy black chiffon pajama pants. Melanie stepped into them and zipped them up the side. They made her look thin and glamorous.
“Here, try these, too,” Linda said, pulling sexy satin pumps from a white box with MANOLO BLAHNIK stamped in black letters across the cover.
Maya put down the plastic ring she’d been chewing on and leaned forward on her diapered bottom. “Shoes!” she cried, pointing.
“She’s your niece, all right. That’s only her fourth word,” Melanie said with a laugh as she slipped on the stiletto-heeled pumps and studied herself in the mirror. Amazing what clothes could do. All of a sudden, she felt like a million bucks and life seemed full of possibilities.
Linda looked Melanie up and down approvingly. “You may or may not catch the bad guy, but I’ll tell you one thing, chica: This FBI agent better watch the fuck out.”
23
PATRICIA CHECKED HER WATCH for the fourth time. It was after hours. Holbrooke was deserted, and James-she hoped-was waiting for her at her apartment with a decent bottle of Bordeaux. The old building creaked and gasped all around her, steam radiators hissing, wind rattling the wavy glass in the ancient windows. Screw charm, this heating system was a goddamn joke. Patricia felt chilled to the bone. Who the hell did Hogan think he was, keeping her waiting?
Patricia was unpleasantly nervous. Her mind had been working overtime since this morning, when James had mentioned the so-called breach in their security. She hadn’t believed him at first. Now, having investigated further, she knew he was right. She’d pulled up the endowment ledgers on the computer, both sets of them-the real and the doctored. A clever plan, if she did say so herself. Nobody but Patricia knew the total sum of the contribution pledges. Her private ledger reflected all the pledge money, but the doctored books, the ones for public consumption, reflected only most of it. A little missing here, a little missing there. No individual donor could know that the total amount was wrong. And so the public ledger held, thus far, about four million less than had actually been contributed. Not such a shortfall that anybody would notice, mind you. Even after her skimming, there was still a substantial amount of money going to the school-more than enough to hire architects and structural engineers and get that new building going. And when the Van Allen pledge got wired in Friday night, all ten million of it…well, quite a lot of that was going to find its way into Patricia’s private ledger. The new building would still be called the Van Allen Upper School. It would just be a bit smaller in terms of square footage. That’s all. And Patricia would be Mrs. Senator Seward.
The problem was, the ledgers had been accessed-twice, earlier this morning, without her authorization. Try as she might, she couldn’t figure out how that had happened. Both sets of books were on the Holbrooke computer system, but both were carefully disguised and password-protected. Patricia had fired the school’s development director several months ago, for the very purpose of preventing anyone from discovering her scheme. Since then only one person other than Patricia herself had had access to the password. That person could not possibly have pulled up the books without her knowledge. So who had, then? James? But how had he managed? Someone else? Then who?
She checked her watch again, more anxiously this time. Patricia was in over her head, and she knew it. How had things gotten so crazy? She’d only intended to better herself, like any red-blooded American girl. Had she aimed too high? Twenty-five years ago, when her credentials weren’t strong enough to land a job in the public-school system, Holbrooke had hired her happily. All they cared about was her look-young, pretty, blond, and fashionably dressed, appropriate for teaching the daughters of the rich. She’d had no idea what she’d be exposing herself to. The money was unthinkable, overwhelming. It took years of watchful coveting before Patricia even comprehended the full scope of it. The most important clues were also the subtlest. The quiet Hermès handbag that only a connoisseur knew cost fifteen thousand dollars. The fact that all the mothers had the same perfectly sculpted arms, courtesy of a few pricey society trainers who wouldn’t work with outsiders even if they had the cash. The offhand mentions of staff, private jets, third and fourth homes that slipped out in casual conversation, things one toted up in full only after years of knowing a family. But over time she saw how it was, and the crush of jealousy just shriveled her.
Patricia’s own attempts to marry money had failed. Once she hit her late thirties and had pretty much stopped meeting eligible men, she’d had no choice but to admit that to herself. The game was up. Then the only thing that slaked her bitter disappointment was exercising power over the families at school. Fortunately, her power was limitless. She held their daughters’ futures in the palm of her hand. The mothers endlessly sucked up to her. It was not uncommon for families to let Patricia use their vacation homes, to give her a lift on their private jets and host her in Aspen or Bermuda, to take her out to lavish dinners or even give her expensive gifts at Christmas. They tripped over one another to do it, in fact, and nobody ever objected. Who’d make a fuss when Patricia had the final say on college recommendations? Everybody acted like it was completely normal. She’d even perfected the art-when college of choice hung in the balance-of wrenching nice, fat contribution checks out of the wealthier families. She’d simply drop a hint that a deficiency in the girl’s record could be counterbalanced by the family’s becoming more significant benefactors of the school. Colleges paid attention to the bottom line, Patricia would remind the parents, and were more likely to take on a middling student if the family were reliable donors. Patricia handled the whole process so deftly that families viewed it as realpolitik rather than extortion and even-pathetically-thanked her for her candor. When she skimmed money off those contributions, she was extremely careful. Nobody had ever so much as raised an eyebrow.
But ultimately her machinations were poor consolation. Patricia suspected that the mothers knew this as well as she did herself. When James came along and held out the hope of an eleventh-hour victory, was it any surprise that she leaped at the chance? That she fell hard? Did what he asked? And now, after she’d compromised herself, was it all to come to naught, because her plan had been discovered?
Patricia had no way of determining who had accessed the endowment account. If the Holbrooke computer system had some method of keeping track, she wasn’t versed enough in its complexities to know. Asking somebody else to explore the issue for her would just rouse suspicion. So she’d considered her options and decided there was only one way. She’d called all the suspects in one by one and reminded them to toe the line. Reminded them of the consequences if they didn’t. She had a little something on everyone. Teachers were human beings, after all, and human beings had their weaknesses. Holbrooke wasn’t any worse than the outside world in that respect, but neither was it any better.