Chapter 11
Also, Molly had a machete.
It was braced over her head, ready to strike. Her fiery hair had once been slicked into a ballerina bun, but loose ends freed themselves into a stark red mane. A fat smudge of maroon inked her cheek—lipstick, Fletcher hoped.
A feeble, Victorian waif of a hope. But still.
“It’s just me!” Fletcher shrilled.
Momentum had taken hold of the machete. The blade sliced downward, snagging on the weave of the tote as Fletcher spun out of reach. A few clementines rolled out of her bag as she threw her arms up to shield her face.
“Me,” she tried again. “Fletcher.”
Her chest heaved with labored breaths. There wasn’t any blood dripping off the machete blade, but that was Fletcher’s only solace.
Molly’s eyes stayed blank. Dark. Wild.
It took all Fletcher’s strength not to race down the hall in a blind panic, but she vaguely remembered learning it was bad to run from predators. Weren’t you supposed to punch sharks in the face? Was this a shark-punching situation?
No, surely some sense could be talked into Molly.
“Spence. Fletcher Spence. We had drinks together last night. You did my onboarding three years ago. That’s pretty much the only real time we ever spent together, but I still don’t think I deserve to get macheted.”
Nothing. Maybe Molly had been possessed by Dyer’s vengeful ghost. He was probably mad Fletcher forgot to instruct the staff to fold the towels like giraffes instead of swans.
Come to think of it, he hadn’t had the chance to ream her for using the breakfast napkins last night at dinner.
A poltergeist-haunting-worthy offense in his book.
“Molly, the heat’s gone to your head. Put the knife down. You don’t have to do this.”
Molly’s glare said otherwise.
“Shut up!” Molly groaned as she reeled her sharpened knife back like a baseball bat. “I can’t stand it anymore.”
“Okay, sure. Shutting up.” Fletcher ducked as the blade swung overhead. Maybe even trimmed a few hairs.
As calmly as she could, Fletcher inched down the hall, hands still framing her face to block Molly’s next swing. Her shoestring budget did not have any extra room for an emergency rhinoplasty.
Except the thing about being nervous was that her mouth had a mind of its own.
“I’m great at shutting up. If you need someone to shut up, I’m your girl.” A credenza rammed into Fletcher’s spine. Ow. “Actually, I feel like that would make me great at HR. Do you need more help on the People team? I could put in a transfer request.”
Molly’s jaw unhinged, and a banshee-loud cry filled the hall. “I’m so sick of listening to you people yap if you aren’t going to say anything interesting.”
“I’m not yapping,” Fletcher whispered, skidding down the hall to stay out of reach of Molly’s blade. How far was the garage? She couldn’t remember.
“Day in. Day out. All I hear is: Molly, can you approve my PTO? Molly, does calling the custodian’s facial hair a ‘porn star mustache’ count as sexual harassment? Molly, Slater from IT is purposefully clogging the thirty-ninth floor toilets. Again.”
Slater from IT historically had unpredictable bowels and a penchant for vengeance. Fletcher wouldn’t put it past him.
“If I have to listen to one more sob story about how Rick’s fifth grandmother died in her sleep and he needs to take a week of bereavement, I’m going to build a time machine so that he never has a grandmother to begin with.”
The tip of Molly’s blade swung perilously close. Things were devolving faster than Fletcher’d hoped—her schedule hadn’t included a Molly Meltdown until at least nine p.m. Unlike Sales, Marketing, and the C-suite, she didn’t have a team to rely on. She’d gone totally rogue.
Fletcher needed something she could defend herself with. Desperately. Anything would be better than bruised produce.
“Russo and Dunlap are in their own little Brian echo chamber, where nothing is their fault, and I’m never approving them to be hiring managers because the last thing this godforsaken company needs is more Brians.”
Retreating, Fletcher’s hands spread wide behind her, searching for a weapon or an exit route or both.
Of all the things she’d thought to prep for this week—the welcome gifts, the hors d’oeuvres menu, the cocktail hour playlist—she hadn’t devoted every inch of the estate’s floor plan to memory, and it was about to bite her in the ass. Or stab her in the neck.
“Hiring Sheila was a paperwork nightmare. But you.” Molly’s stare was white-hot and fixed on Fletcher with the kind of intensity typically reserved for serial killers. “Little. Miss. Perfect.”
Fletcher smiled. The habitual movement vanished when she realized Molly definitely hadn’t meant it as a compliment. Steam practically poured out of her ears. Her face had gone as red as her hair—if one of their demented coworkers didn’t kill her, an aneurysm might.
“Not once has anyone ever come to HR with a complaint against you. Don’t you think that’s a little weird?”
“Isn’t that a good thing?”
Desperate, Fletcher jiggled the nearest door handle, the knob of the gazelle room. Damn it. Sheila must have used her one functioning brain cell to remember to lock it.
“You show up from the middle of nowhere, with all this small-town charm like you were plucked out of a fucking Hallmark movie, and Dyer was obsessed with you.”
“But not in, like, a creepy way,” Fletcher clarified. The hallway was running out. Soon, Molly would have her out in the open foyer. Nothing to hide behind, nothing to protect herself with.
“You’re always early. You stay late. You’ve never even taken a sick day,” Molly said. All the machete swashbuckling kept Fletcher from ruminating too hard. “Three years, and not a single cold?”
“This feels like a super weird thing to be mad about.”
Molly snarled. Snarled.
Okay, plan B.
Peeling through her memory, Fletcher fought for every last scrap of information she knew about Molly Bradhampton: at thirty-four, she wasn’t that much older than Fletcher.
Single but wrote a Substack about her dating escapades.
Fletcher could picture her catching an Uber outside the office doors, touching up her lip gloss in her front-facing camera.
One time, Fletcher had glanced a Manhattan Plaza Racquet Club card on her desk and a Lululemon duffel at her feet. That explained her killer backswing.
She was so wrapped up in her thoughts, she didn’t notice Molly’s machete winding up until the blade thwacked against Fletcher’s ridiculous pith helmet. Her eyes shot wide open, but Molly’s narrowed with determination.
At this range, she couldn’t fight her off. She needed to appeal to Molly’s most primal sense. Gossip.
Before Molly could strike again, Fletcher asked, “What do people say about Waylon?”
“Don’t get me started on Waylon,” Molly said, but unlike Fletcher predicted, the machete arm didn’t relax by her side, placated.
If anything, the rumor mill only riled her up.
“He was bad enough when he worked under Dyer, but he’s been a nightmare since the whole Eliza fiasco. But you know that. You were there.”
She…definitely wasn’t. But Fletcher didn’t have the bandwidth to unpack that. Right now, her body was too focused on not getting stabbed through the spleen. Molly’s advances were getting harder and harder to defend. Every step brought a new frenzy.
“But do I miss the way he used to storm around the office in a testosterone tornado?” Molly fake retched for dramatic effect. “No. He deserved to get kicked out of the company as far as I’m concerned. And he knocked over Ferdinand.”
“Ferdinand?”
“My ficus!”
“How dare he?” A woman’s ficus was precious.
Molly’s focus shifted. “Why? Are you…interested in him?”
Fletcher flinched backward, closer and closer to the foyer, where sunlight glinted off the ormolu chandelier, shooting little rainbows from the parquet floor to the catwalk balcony between wings.
Jacquard curtains draped around the windows, woven with threads of gold, and beyond that waited the flat expanse of wilderness.
Fletcher made a fast break for it, and the foyer opened around her. Something wavered in the corner of her eye, but when she pivoted, no one was there. Just the taxidermied lion with its polished white teeth and hollow eyes, overseeing everything?
There wasn’t much to work with: a baby grand piano; a side table with neatly arranged vases of cut flowers and stacked coffee table books; a leather settee. But this was the estate’s main artery—if she could shake Molly off her tracks, she could lose her in the halls.
“We’re not finished here!” Molly shouted behind her.
Pounding footsteps grew louder. Every thud against the hardwoods ticked Fletcher’s pulse up a notch. Oh, god. With a jolt, Fletcher lunged toward the curtains, burying herself in their pleats.
Buttery smooth fabric enveloped her. Sweat dripped down her neck, equal parts from blind fear and the sunlight beating against the window and cooking her alive.
Carefully, Fletcher slipped her feet out of her pumps, blisters already forming on her heels.
With the points of her shoes sticking out beyond the veil, Fletcher shimmied behind the curtains to the other side of the foyer.
This time, Molly acted exactly as Fletcher expected. In the seam between drapes, Fletcher watched the People team lead circle, searching for any trace of Fletcher. Sniffing the air for a hint of her vanilla perfume, even. When her eyes locked on Fletcher’s empty heels, Molly grinned.
Without waiting, without thinking, Molly hacked at the fabric. “You think you’re going to run away with Waylon and live happily ever after?” she raved, even though Fletcher never said anything even remotely like that.
Eventually, the machete ripped clean through the curtain.
Only then did Molly realize her mark was missing.
Quieter this time, closer this time, Molly said, “You think that because you spent every day at Dyer’s side that you’re better than the rest of us? That you deserve everything?”