Today there was an old woman sitting on a garbage can outside my Williamsburg apartment building, next to the auto repair shop. She sang softly to her bags of junk, a chaotic pile of blankets, clothes, newspapers, and food wrappings. Off-key and missing some teeth, she swayed gently to the rhythm. A scraggly white dandelion dancing in the wind, hairless in a few places but undaunted nonetheless. The upturned hat in front of her gleamed inside with a few coins. As I passed her, I realised one of the bags was actually a small child. The girl, maybe aged ten or so, had old, old eyes. She didn’t smile at me or the woman beside her. She stared into the distance.
I swayed along with the song for a few moments, before dropping a few notes into the hat. That earned a wide, toothless grin.
Look after her, I thought.
As I walked away, I wasn’t sure which of them I’d meant.
CHAPTER 2
Tales from the Dark Side
Elena Bartell’s lips curled as she listened on her phone to the witless prattling of her allegedly top editor-in-chief of her Australian fashion magazine. It might be just after four in the morning in Sydney, but she had questions that needed answers. She was being whisked away in her car from the commuter rag to which she’d given a stay of execution. Although if that disastrously dressed reporter in the elevator was the standard of staff they employed, Elena probably shouldn’t have bothered.
Her gaze slid out the window, as she reviewed the odd meeting. The reporter had an expressive face beneath her pixie-cut titian hair. Elena had recognised the intelligence behind her intense, green eyes. They were also the only eyes that had lit with recognition at her choice of date on which she would announce the fate of the paper.
Still, it seemed the woman’s appreciation of history might be her only redeeming feature. In fact, Graveyard-Shift Girl was lucky to still be in her employ, but Elena had been too astonished at being insulted to do anything more than walk away. Not that it mattered. The insolent Australian would be unlikely to survive the axe any more than her underperforming colleagues would.
Speaking of cursed Australians… Elena pursed her lips and moved the phone away from her ear a little. Jana Macy was still jabbering away, trying to cover her ass.
“Enough!” she spat down her phone. “Your excuses are inane. There is no sound reason Style Sydney’s circulation should be in a death spiral. Turn the circulation figures around and quickly. Try to remember you’re supposed to be part of the world’s premier fashion magazine imprint. Run some actual in-depth fashion stories. I wouldn’t paper the staff bathroom with the features you’ve been commissioning. And make some hard budgetary decisions, or I’ll come down there and make them for you, starting with your contract. We’re done.” She ended the call with a vicious punch of her thumbnail.
“Felicity,” she said, not glancing at her chief of staff, who was on the other side of the spacious rear seat. “I believe I told you I wanted a new PA by the time I reached the Hudson Metro News. And yet all I see in this vehicle is you. Was I not clear enough? Did you feel keeping me fully staffed was somehow optional?”
“No, Elena. It’s just, she got lost.” Felicity began tapping on her phone. “Or something. I told her when,” her voice rose to a desperate height, “I told her where. I told her not to be late. And she keeps texting me with updates on her attempts to get here. And she’s miles away—still.”
“Fire her. Get me a new assistant who is not geographically challenged. We’re a global company, so one would think grasping how a map works would be a prerequisite.”
She flicked a glance at Felicity, who showed no reaction to the order. Why would she? PAs were changed like heels when they failed to meet her standards.
The record for the longest-lasting assistant was still sitting at a year, nine months, and two weeks, or so she often heard Felicity tell the new PAs. The title holder was Colleen, a sweet-faced, plump Scottish girl with an impenetrable accent, blinding red hair, and an eidetic memory. Elena had personally written the girl a reference when she’d moved on. The event was so rare that the astonished woman had cried great, gulping, alarming sobs that made Elena regret her largess instantly.
Elena scrolled through her text messages and stopped on one. Her husband wished for her presence at yet another party. The health insurance company Richard worked for had more parties than lawsuits against it. She sighed as she studied the invitation. It all became clear.
She typed out her reply.
I’d rather see flares make another comeback. Besides, I thought you had a convention on then? Miami? What changed?
She already knew the answer. He was busy sucking up to the new vice-president, a man who had yet to forge alliances, so they’d all be sniffing around to toady up to him. Richard was singular in his hunt for status and power. There was no way he’d miss the opportunity. Ironic that people thought he was the charming, less ambitious one of their coupling.
Elena hadn’t felt the need to share that she knew the VP’s wife, Annalise, because Richard would insist she make use of the connection. She and Richard saw power differently. For her husband, it was about boosting his ego, getting attention, and having people admire him. For Elena, power was finding a company on its knees that everyone said was worthless or a lost cause, and resurrecting it. Breathing life into a corpse? Creating a heartbeat from absolute death? That was power. Her ability was in seeing the possibilities and talents buried in a forest of media deadwood. But most people only focused on the destruction, the dying products she pulped, not the ones she pruned to allow fresh growth. What she did was a skill that few could understand.
Elena dropped her phone in her handbag. Her mind wandered to the usual place it did when she recalled her underappreciated abilities in times long past. Times best not raked over.
“I will temporarily base myself at Hudson Metro News,” she told Felicity. “I’ve informed them I’m giving them six weeks to prove themselves. You will work from there, too.”
There was no disguising the confusion on the woman’s face. “Seriously? Oh right, sorry, I mean of course you’re serious. When are you not?”
Her chief of staff gave Elena a pained look. Little was hidden on the woman’s face—and right now it bore dismay, shock, and a hint of revulsion.
“Problem?” Elena asked in a warning tone. She did not have to explain herself to anyone, although Felicity had been with her long enough to raise the occasional question. But not today.
“No,” Felicity said quickly. “It’s nothing.”
“Are you quite certain? I’d hate for you to withhold your insightful thoughts,” Elena said in her softest tone. Only a fool would take her words at face value. And Felicity was no fool.
The other woman’s eyes widened. “N-no. I would be honoured to work with you out of a building the size of a fish tank with an equivalent aroma,” she said politely, her voice clipped.
Surprise jolted Elena. “You’ve been inside?”
Felicity nodded. “It smells like the Hudson it’s named after. I mean just the lower floors—the advertising and finance departments. Our accounts team members were green at the gills when I had to visit them there last year. It was right around when you first bought them out. There were some due diligence papers I needed to collect.”
“Maintenance costs…” Elena said under her breath. “Add it to my list of pending issues for that little rag.”
“Yes, Elena.” Felicity’s head bobbed up and down. “May I ask…you say you’ve informed them you’ll assess them for six weeks. What are you really going to be doing there?”
Elena regarded her, impressed at how nimble her chief of staff’s mind could be at times.
“Why do you ask?” she said.
“On most new acquisitions you know in days or a week what their future is. Usually just from going over the books. I mean, I know you got the Hudson in a bundle of other commuter papers, so maybe you don’t know enough about them, but still…six weeks?” She petered out under Elena’s intense scrutiny. “It’s just, um, interesting…”
“Yes, it is interesting, isn’t it? Any further questions?” She injected steel into her voice, and Felicity shrank back at the tone, shaking her head.
“Good. I need you to get one of our lawyers in London to lean on my useless ex-husband and get him to grasp the importance of not mentioning my name to talk himself up in interviews.” Her voice dropped to chilly. “Remind dear Spencer that the confidentiality clause he signed upon our divorce has teeth. Expensive ones. Oh, and if he takes credit for my career one more time, I will have him blacklisted. He’ll have to get his next book reviewed by a non-Bartell Corporation publication. And how many of those are left on either side of the Atlantic these days?”
“Yes, Elena.” Felicity scribbled a note. “And I’m not sure. Not many.”
“Mm. Contact the Australian executive team, as well as their national accountant, lawyers, and Don McKay on the board, and tell them all to examine the spreadsheet I’m emailing them. Something’s going wrong at Style Sydney, and the rot needs to be stopped before it gets worse. I need explanations. I want Don in the loop in case I have to do something drastic…and expensive.
