The Keychain

Chapter 10: Secondhand

She was outside my building on a Tuesday, and then on Wednesday, and then for a while after that. She worked a rotation on the sidewalk in front of the entrance — one hour standing, doing nothing, then twenty minutes in the coffee shop across the street, then standing again. By the third day the coffee shop's barista was telling our receptionist she'd been in four times and left one dollar tips.

I didn't go down to her. In the morning I came out through the service side, or around the block, and got into my car and drove to work. Twice I came out that way and she was already on the other end of the block, having figured out the route. I didn't slow down and I didn't look back.

Some of the team noticed before I did. That was how it worked with them — they watched me to see how I was taking something, and then they went and took it the way I'd taken it.

By the second day Rob said something. "She's out there again."

"I know."

"You want me to say something to her?"

"No."

That was all. He nodded and went back to his desk and nobody brought it up again in front of me.

On the fourth day two of them went down at lunch and came back up looking pleased with themselves. Whatever they'd said had worked, because she wasn't there after that. They didn't tell me what it was and I didn't ask. I hadn't sent them. I hadn't stopped them either.

That was the last of it. I never saw her again.

---

The rest came to me secondhand, the way most of it had by then.

Her company went into a payout period, and the payout period ate the company. The clients who'd signed with her and then watched their projects fall apart had sued for breach, and the contracts carried a liquidated damages clause, and the clause held. The judgments came down one at a time. The house in her name was mortgaged to cover the first of them, and the rest went to the firm handling the suit.

Then the accountants went through what was left and found that half of what she'd had was gone. Not spent. Moved. There was a set of papers in her desk drawer that had looked like titles to properties she'd never owned, and three more in a safe deposit box, and none of them were real. The car was gone too — the one she'd bought him, the one he'd been driving around in when I saw him pull into the lot with her in the passenger seat. He'd sold it out of state and taken cash.

So when the clerks and the lawyers and the bank were done, the woman who used to run a company had a suitcase and a step to sit on.

Somebody two doors down from that house saw her out there most of a night. It wasn't a story anybody told me directly. It came up the way that kind of thing does — one person to another, and then to Rob, and Rob to me in an elevator, plainly, the way you'd tell somebody which exit to take.

I said, "Huh."

Rob said, "Yeah."

The doors opened and we walked to the meeting.