Phantoms, Ghosts & Other Heartbreaks
Chapter 1
MOST TWENTY-FIVE-YEAR-OLDS did not spend their Saturday nights at high-end opera fundraisers. Most twenty-five-year-olds would never punish their hair—and head—with an elegant updo consisting of exactly twenty-seven bobby pins and half a bottle of Aqua Net. Most twenty-five-year-olds wouldn’t be caught dead wearing sensible pumps and their late mother’s pearl necklace.
But as Christine put the finishing touches on her makeup and admired the sophisticated adult result of her efforts, she knew this was what the situation required: poise, professionalism, and perfection.
Tonight, she needed all three. After eleven months of toiling as a foundation assistant at the Gardner Opera House, she’d put it all on the table tonight. He would be here. The Erik Gardner—the chairman of the board of the Gardner Opera House and CEO of Gardner Industries—aka the home of her dream job. She dreamed of getting hired there once she secured her MBA— if she could make the right first impression. In ninety minutes, she’d do just that—when she successfully coordinated the annual masquerade gala and fundraiser .
Make-up and hair complete, she turned to her wardrobe choices. With no black-tie gowns of her own—unless she counted the bridesmaid’s dress she wore to her foster sister Theresa’s wedding, and there was no way that lime-green monstrosity was touching her body again—she’d asked her friend Meg Giry to provide a few dresses.
Meg had come through with three beautiful options. The first was a floor-length black velvet gown that was perfect—if Christine could’ve forced the zipper up. Meg likely forgot Christine was two cup sizes bigger in the bust area than she was—an understandable hazard. As a dancer, Meg’s figure tended toward lithe, whereas Christine was decidedly curvy. The black dress was out.
The next option was an adorable navy dress with a faint metallic sheen that made it dressier than a typical cocktail-length dress. Unfortunately, Christine knew she would never hear the end of it from her supervisor, Cynthia, if she appeared inappropriately dressed at the black-tie fundraiser. Dress two was a no-go.
Which left dress number three. Christine unzipped the garment bag.
“Shit.”
Of course the last dress was red.
Not that red was bad. Red was her color. The fit was undeniably flattering, setting off her dark-blonde hair and blue eyes. The bold crimson silk hugged her curves before landing attractively at her ankles in a slight flare. It was the kind of gown women fantasized about wearing after watching Julia Roberts go to the opera in Pretty Woman . Except Christine Derring wasn’t here to make goo-goo eyes at Richard Gere, and Cynthia tended to punish Christine whenever she showed up looking better than average.
“Nice manicure! By the way, the copier isn’t working. Can you get in there and take out the broken ink cartridge?”
Christine sighed at the memory. That once-in-a-blue-moon manicure had lasted all of one day. She studied herself with a kind of resigned apathy. Cynthia would make Christine pay for looking this good. Like most women, she wanted to look her best, but tonight it was inconvenient. Perhaps she could stay out of Cynthia’s line of sight until the evening was over, and Cynthia would either be too tired or too elated at the event’s success to take action.
Christine closed her eyes and took a deep breath to center herself, only to be disrupted by her cell phone alarm.
“Shit!” she said for the second time in ten minutes. Time to get downstairs. She turned around in the private office she’d commandeered to change in and grabbed the large box of auction clipboards and pens. The silent auction always drew the most significant contributions to the evening’s bottom line. The items were displayed on tables in the mezzanine—a 15-karat diamond tennis necklace by Tiffany & Co. with its own security guard, courtside seats to a Knicks game, and a dozen contributions from Prada, Gucci, and Ferragamo. Each company fell over themselves to contribute to anything attached to the Gardner name. Tonight’s glitterati would happily overpay for each item in a game of oneupmanship that was as fun to watch as it was mind-boggling. Why not pay retail for the purse and donate cash to the foundation?
Maybe one day, Christine would be rich enough to understand the behavior of the exceedingly wealthy.
With her arms wrapped around the giant box, Christine could barely see in front of her, but she was familiar enough with the hallways on the upper floors of the opera house to feel her way to the elevator. She sidestepped a water fountain and vending machine. The elevator was a few steps down from the women’s restroom, and as she strode past the door, she caught her first lucky moment of the evening—the elevator was already open. While the offices of the opera house were renovated somewhere in the late 1990s, the elevators reflected the opulence of the Gilded Age, even if that look was a cosmetic addition done in 2017. Who knew how old the elevators were? Perhaps their exteriors were older than the interiors pretended to be. After all, the opera house was nearly one hundred years old.
As if the elevator could hear her private thoughts, its doors closed and started a plodding descent from the seventh floor to the lobby. When the decline stopped, it was sudden, partnered with a complete blackness that brokered no question that things had gone quite wrong.
“Shit,” she said, much louder this time. She dropped the box, beyond caring about its contents. “Shit, shit, shit !”
“Agreed.” A smooth male voice spoke from the darkness behind her. She hadn’t even noticed there was anyone else there because the box blocked her line of sight.
Shit.