Chapter 25 Taylor
Taylor
A week has gone by since Taylor resigned from the hospital, and, like clockwork, her aunt reaches out every other day.
What about a job in the IV clinic? Aunt Gigi texts.
No weekends, no night shifts, no holidays.
Easy peasy. Or labor and delivery? Do you like babies?
Or you could do research and work on clinical trials?
Or what about the West End Clinic, something in substance abuse (much help needed there!)?
Either Aunt Gigi is feeling guilty for getting on Taylor’s case a few times about her nursing performance, or she truly cares. Maybe a bit of both.
Occasionally, Taylor gets tempted. She’s been scoping out potential job opportunities—in something other than nursing—and the results have been disappointing.
A few openings in retail that won’t even cover her utilities.
A listing for a receptionist position at an art gallery, which doesn’t guarantee enough hours.
A dog-walker position with Peace + Paws, which requires prior experience.
A pharmaceutical sales position to which she applied on a whim but hasn’t heard back.
She’ll have to cobble something together soon; her savings are fast disappearing, and her bills continue to pile up.
One morning, a forceful knock on the door startles her. Taylor hopes it’s not her aunt, and she wonders if she should pretend that she’s not home. But the knocking persists, and so she cracks open the door.
To her surprise, it’s Anna, the landlord. Her cane hangs midair, and Taylor wonders if that is what she was using to rap on the door.
“There’s this place in Beacon Hill looking to hire someone,” Anna says. How Anna knows she needs a job, she’s not sure. It seems Boston is strange like that, people and channels interconnected in ways beyond her grasp.
There’s also the possibility Taylor’s dad reached out to Anna. Taylor hopes not; she’s not twelve, after all. She knows Aunt Gigi told him about her quitting, because he left her a disappointed voicemail she has yet to return.
“You waitressed before, right, Taylor? At your dad’s restaurant?”
“Yeah.” Taylor holds the door open just enough to talk. She prays Anna won’t notice the dirty dishes piled up behind in the sink or sniff the late-night Chinese food takeout remnants on the counter she hasn’t yet bothered to put in the trash. “I grew up waitressing there.”
Slowly Taylor remembers she put her waitressing history on her rental application to fluff it up. She’d had only that one other job before coming to Boston, working as a nurse at the Outer Banks orthopedic center.
“Well, this place is kind of like a private restaurant,” Anna continues. “It’s real wealthy.”
“Oh?”
“There’s a lot of private eating and social clubs here. The ’Quin. The University Club. The Somerset Club. But this place, the Knox, is…different.”
“Different?”
“I think they’ll like that you’re an outsider,” Anna says.
“And you’re discreet, which is what they want.
You’ve been here for six months or so, and I know three things about you: One, you’re a nurse and a waitress—well, former waitress.
Former nurse, too, I guess. Two, you’re from North Carolina; three, you like antiques, and you also like Chinese food from Peking House. ”
Shit.
“I was planning to clean up—” Taylor starts sheepishly, but Anna interrupts with her loud and raucous laugh.
“Personally,” she gasps, “I like Hei La Moon. And that might have been more than three things. So, you interested?”
Taylor is. She’s actually toyed with the idea of getting a waitressing job, but it was going to be her last resort.
Sam mentioned that one of his clients manages the restaurant Peregrine, so he could likely get her an interview.
Her dad would be less than thrilled; he always wanted more for her than to be in the restaurant industry.
But if she waitresses at the place Anna is recommending, maybe her dad won’t mind quite as much.
Her father and Anna had hit it off on the call, and this is not just an ordinary restaurant, it seems, but some sort of private social club.
And the fact of the matter is, Taylor can waitress in her sleep.
She could do it for a few months while she figures out next steps.
And if she ends up having a good night, with customers ordering a lot of fancy wine and booze, she could set aside some money to send to her dad again.
The two times she did, pulling from her hospital pay, her dad claimed he didn’t need it, but both times he cashed the checks.
His restaurant is struggling, but she doesn’t know the full extent—he won’t tell her.
Once Anna gives Taylor the number and goes on her way, she sits down at her laptop to google the Knox, preparing for a flood of high-society information and photos of glitzy galas and prominent, well-known members.
But, to her surprise, she finds nearly nothing.
No website. Not even an address. Certainly, no members listed.
Only a few sporadic mentions of the Knox, mostly on Reddit threads: one on secret societies, another on nineteenth-century grave plundering (huh?), and a final mention in a “I could tell you but then I’d have to…
” discussion. In the latter, someone by the username of tdgarden33__ shared a single photo, shot at an odd, skewed angle—as if taken covertly—and revealing the upper portion of a room with shiny, deep navy-blue walls encased in crown molding and lit with an elaborate crystal chandelier.
Not such a Hard Knox life, reads the accompanying text.
Taylor’s interest is piqued.
Switching to Google’s News tab does not reveal much more, just some mentions in a couple of Boston magazines.
Finally, she moves her cursor over to the Image search tab, expecting the same dearth of information.
Almost mindlessly, she scrolls until suddenly, halfway down the page, something makes her catch her breath.
An image: a black top hat with a flower. It’s the same symbol from the stationery.