Chương 5
“What happened to the rejected glass?” Alvarez asked.
“It stayed at the station.”
“Did anyone collect it?”
“I don’t know.”
Alvarez made a call from the hallway.
The unused glass was found forty minutes later in a rack of dirty stemware. It contained no residue beyond champagne.
At four in the morning, Celeste left the hotel through a loading entrance to avoid the reporters already gathering outside. Martin Sayer walked beside her. She wore a black coat over the wine-colored gown and kept her face lowered.
A guest’s video of the confrontation reached the internet before her car cleared the garage.
The clip began with the sound of breaking glass.
It showed Mara gripping Daniel’s wrist and shouting about an execution. It showed Celeste asking for security. It did not clearly show the smartwatch screen. It ended before Daniel said nobody leaves.
By sunrise, Mara had been called a hero, a stalker, a jealous employee, a radical activist, an unstable waitress, and a hired corporate saboteur. Someone found an old photograph from her public social account in which she held a kitchen knife beside a birthday cake. The image was reposted with the caption THEY LET HER NEAR THE BILLIONAIRE WITH THIS?
Daniel was not a billionaire, but nobody corrected that part.
Mara slept through most of it.
She woke shortly before noon with her mother sitting beside the hospital bed.
Ellen Quinn was sixty-one and had the suspicious expression of someone who believed hospitals inflated bills by hiding charges in the blankets. Her gray-brown hair was clipped at the back with a plastic barrette. She held Mara’s paperback in her lap.
“You look terrible,” Ellen said.
“So do you.”
“I was asleep when the police called.”
“That explains it.”
Ellen touched the bandage near Mara’s temple, then withdrew her hand before making contact.
“Did you really break a glass out of a man’s hand?”
“Yes.”
“Was there no less dramatic option?”
“I tried running.”
“You were always bad at that.”
Mara laughed once and regretted it when her head throbbed.
Ellen’s mouth trembled. She looked down at the book.
“People are outside the building.”
“What building?”
“Our building.”
Mara’s smile disappeared.
“Reporters?”
“Two. Maybe three. Mrs. Alvarez from upstairs poured mop water near their shoes.”
“She likes you.”
“She likes the hallway clean.”
Ellen folded the corner of a hospital receipt, then unfolded it.
“What happened?”
Mara told her.
Not everything. She left out the moment Grant pressed her wrist against the console, because Ellen would imagine the pain too accurately. She left out the way Celeste had looked at her after the video played, because that look had followed Mara into sleep.
When she finished, Ellen stared toward the window.
“You can’t come home yet.”
Mara had expected concern. The practical sentence hurt more.
“I know.”
“I don’t mean I don’t want you there.”
“I know.”
“He knows where you live?”
“Probably.”
“Does the woman?”
“She can find out.”
Ellen rubbed her thumb against the paperback’s torn cover.
“You could have looked away.”
Mara said nothing.
“I’m not saying you should have.”
“You are a little.”
“I’m saying I wish doing the right thing came with less paperwork.”
That sounded enough like her mother that Mara’s breathing eased.
The hospital discharged her at two-thirty. Daniel’s company had arranged a room at another Mercer property under a false name. Mara refused it.
Then Alvarez explained that Grant had not returned to his apartment, had withdrawn twelve thousand dollars in cash two days earlier, and had accessed Mara’s staffing file the week before the gala.
“The week before?” Mara asked.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“We don’t know.”
That frightened her into accepting the room.
The hotel was in Brooklyn, modest by Mercer standards but still grander than anywhere Mara would have chosen. The suite contained a sitting room, two bathrooms, and a bowl of fruit arranged as if pears had social rank. A security officer remained in the corridor.
Mara placed her work bag on the carpet and stood without moving.
Ellen opened the minibar, examined the prices, and closed it with offended care.
“Eleven dollars for almonds.”
“Don’t eat anything.”
“I wasn’t going to.”
“You were thinking about it.”
“I was thinking about stealing them.”
“Please don’t commit a crime in the safe hotel.”
Ellen sat on the edge of the bed.
“What happens now?”
Mara looked at the television. Her face appeared on the muted news channel. The image showed her bloodied, hair disheveled, mouth open in the middle of the accusation. Beneath it ran the words GALA CHAOS: ATTEMPTED POISONING OR PUBLIC HOAX?
“I think everyone decides whether I’m lying,” Mara said.
Her staffing agency made its decision at four.
The manager, a woman named Denise who had once praised Mara for working a fourteen-hour wedding without complaint, called to say Mara was suspended pending investigation.
“I saved a guest’s life.”
“That has not been established.”
“I broke the glass before he drank it.”
“You also entered a restricted security office, recorded private footage, sent confidential material from an event, physically grabbed a guest, and disrupted service.”
“There was poison in the glass.”
“The police have not confirmed that.”
“So I should have waited for the lab?”
Denise sighed.
“This is not personal.”
“It is happening to me.”
“The agency is receiving threats. Clients are canceling. One says you planned the whole incident for publicity.”
“Which client?”
“I can’t discuss that.”
“Was it Mercer House?”
“No.”
The answer came too quickly.
Mara pressed her fingers to her eyes.
“Am I fired?”
“You are suspended.”
“Without pay.”
“Yes.”
“That is fired with future tense.”
Denise was silent.
Mara ended the call before either of them said something worse.
Daniel called twenty minutes later. She let it ring.
He called again.
Ellen watched the phone vibrate across the bedside table.
“You’re going to answer that.”
“No.”
“He owns the room.”
“That doesn’t make him interesting.”
“He has information.”
Mara answered on the fourth call.
“What?”
May you like
Daniel paused.
“I wanted to tell you the preliminary test found a toxic compound in the champagne residue.”
