Chapter 11
Luz found it on Tuesday afternoon, in the lighting booth, in a binder nobody had opened since the first Friday of December.
The booth was a narrow room high on the third floor, behind a door marked STAFF ONLY, with a long glass window that looked down over the whole atrium.
The big spotlight lived in there, on a heavy black stand.
So did a mess of cables, a broken office chair, and three years of empty coffee cups.
After Carols Under the Dome, the TV crew had left it worse.
Luz had gone up with a trash bag and a bad attitude.
She came down twenty minutes later with no trash bag and a face like a closed door.
“I need you in the stockroom,” she said. “Now. Please.”
Caroline followed her in. Luz shut the door and locked it. Then she held out a single sheet of paper in a clear plastic sleeve.
“Don’t take it out of the plastic,” Luz said. “Stephanie says fingerprints. I already called her.”
“You called Stephanie before you showed me?”
“Just read it.”
It was a cue sheet. Caroline knew it at once, because she had made it.
It was the running order for the lighting, with every cue down the left side in her own typing.
6:55 — House to half. 6:58 — Countdown. 7:00 — Clock strikes.
Lights out. Spot up. Spot search 45 sec, land on couple under mistletoe.
Hold for kiss. Organ on release. There was a copy of this sheet in the booth every year for the spotlight operator.
Beside the seven o’clock cue, someone had written in blue pen.
The handwriting was neat and slanted and very clear.
It leaned hard to the right, like a person walking fast into the wind.
Caroline had seen that handwriting on sticky notes on Connor’s desk.
She had seen it on a Snow Ball planning memo two years ago.
She had seen it on a birthday card to Connor that said To the best boss in Philadelphia.
Hold spot on C.B. — do not move until I signal.
Under that, underlined twice: Gold star. 7:00 exactly.
Caroline read it three times.
Then she sat down on a box of glass ornaments, the same box she had sat on the night of the lighting, because her legs had stopped working again.
“C.B.,” she said.
“Connor Bradshaw,” Luz said.
“Or Caroline Bradshaw.”
“It says hold. You weren’t under the mistletoe, Caroline.
He was.” Luz crossed her arms. “She walked him to the gold star. You saw her do it. You told me you saw her point. And the light went right to it. Forty-five seconds of searching, like every year, and then right to it, like it knew.” She took a breath. “Because it did know.”
Caroline looked at the clear plastic sleeve in her hands.
She thought about the night of the lighting.
About Brittany’s hand on Connor’s elbow at the Walnut Street doors.
About Brittany pointing, not at the mezzanine stairs, but at the middle of the floor.
Best view in the house. About the spotlight wandering across the crowd, teasing, the way it always did, and then sliding down and stopping, dead, on the gold star.
She had thought it was bad luck. She had thought it was the worst luck in the world.
“Who ran the spot this year?” she said.
“Rory Flanagan. The freelance kid. He’s done it three years.”
“Where is he?”
“He’s in the booth right now,” Luz said. “Doing the rig for Thursday’s concert. I didn’t say anything to him. I wanted to talk to you first.”
Caroline stood up.
* * *
Rory Flanagan was twenty-four years old, with a red beard and a Phillies hat on backward and a pair of work gloves stuck in his back pocket. He was on his knees on the booth floor, coiling cable. When Caroline came in with Luz behind her, he looked up and smiled.
Then he saw the plastic sleeve in her hand. And his smile went away so fast it was like watching a light switch off.
He stood up slowly.
“Mrs. B,” he said.
Caroline held up the sheet. She didn’t say anything. She just held it up so he could read the blue writing.
Rory’s face went red. Then it went white. Then he sat down in the broken office chair, which tipped sideways, and he caught himself on the desk.
“I didn’t know,” he said. “I swear to God, Mrs. B. I didn’t know.”
“Tell me,” Caroline said.
“She came up here.” Rory pulled off his Phillies hat and held it in both hands.
“The afternoon of the lighting. Like three o’clock.
She said she was from Mr. Bradshaw’s office.
She had a badge. She said it was a surprise.
For his team. She said everybody in his office had a bet about whether the spot would land on him, and she wanted to win it.
She said it would be funny. She said you’d think it was funny.
” He looked sick. “She wrote that on the sheet. And she gave me an envelope.”
“What was in the envelope?”
Rory shut his eyes. “Five hundred bucks.”
Luz said a word under her breath that made Rory flinch.
“I figured he’d just give her a kiss on the cheek, or something,” Rory said.
“Like the grandmas do. I figured everybody would laugh. And then the light hit them, and I held it. Like she said. And he—and then it just kept going—” His voice cracked.
“I kept watching for her hand to come up. That was the signal. It never came up. She kept it down flat on his coat the whole time. So I held.”
Caroline felt it go through her all at once, hot and then very cold.
Her hand. Caroline had seen it. She had seen Brittany’s hand go flat on Connor’s coat and stay there. She had thought it was a touch. It had been a message to the booth.
Everybody’s waiting.
“I’ve felt sick about it for two weeks,” Rory said.
“I gave the money to my church. The whole five hundred. I didn’t want it.
” He wiped his face with his hat. “I should have come to you. I was scared. She texted me after. That night. She said thanks for the help and a smiley face. And then she said this stays between us or you’ll never work in this city again. ”
“You still have that text?” Luz said.
Rory took out his phone and held it out with a shaking hand.
Caroline read it. It was from a number with no name. thanks for the help ? perfect timing. And under it, two minutes later: this stays between us. You understand. Or you won’t work a single event in Philadelphia again.
And above it, from earlier that day, from the same number: Gold star at 7. Hold until I lift my hand. Don’t move it for anything.
* * *
Caroline did not call Connor.
She thought about it. She stood on the third floor, outside the lighting booth, with the phone in her hand, and she thought about it very hard.
He would be furious. He would do something. He would call his lawyers, and his board, and Barry. He would make phone calls and fix it, and he would do it fast and big and public, and in two days everyone in Philadelphia would know that Connor Bradshaw had exposed the woman who set him up.
It would be about him again.
And it would be him protecting her. Standing in front of her. Tearing things up on television.
She put the phone in her pocket.
“Stephanie’s on her way,” Luz said, beside her. “She says don’t do anything until she gets here.”
“I’m not going to do anything until she gets here,” Caroline said. “And then I’m going to do it myself.”
* * *
Stephanie arrived at five-thirty, in her court suit, carrying a legal pad.
She read the cue sheet through its plastic sleeve.
She read Rory’s texts. She made Rory tell the whole story again, twice, while she wrote it all down, and then she made him sign the bottom of the page.
Rory signed it like a man signing his own confession, which it was.
Then Stephanie sent him home and sat down on a box of tinsel in the stockroom and looked at Caroline.
“Okay,” Stephanie said. “Here’s the lawyer part. This is fraud. At minimum. It’s bribing an employee of a business to rig a public event. Maybe it’s more. She threatened him. That’s intimidation. And if she’s planning to sue Connor for anything, this blows her whole case into little tiny pieces.”
“I know.”
“Here’s the best-friend part.” Stephanie put down the legal pad.
“Caro. She did this on purpose. From the beginning. She walked him to that star and paid a kid to hold a light on him and lifted her hand at the booth. And then she stood in your office the next morning with two coffees and told you she was so, so sorry about the stupid moment.”
“I know.”
“And then she wrote a plan to take your job. And then she leaked it.”
“I know, Steph.”
“So what do you want to do?”
Caroline looked at the cue sheet on the stockroom shelf.
“There’s something you should see first,” Luz said from the door. She held up her phone. “It went up an hour ago.”
It was the website of Philadelphia magazine. There was a big photograph of Brittany Vail in a cream sweater, sitting on a velvet couch with the light coming soft through a window behind her. She looked sad and brave and very young.
The headline said: “I WAS A 29-YEAR-OLD WOMAN CAUGHT IN A POWERFUL MAN’S MOMENT.” Brittany Vail Speaks for the First Time.
Caroline read it.
In the interview, Brittany said that she had been “completely blindsided” under the spotlight.
She said her boss had kissed her in front of the whole city, and she had not known what to do, and she had been “frozen.” She said the holiday transition plan had been “entirely the board’s idea,” and she had only been “asked to help.” She said she had been “put on leave for something a man did to me.” She said she had “nothing but compassion” for Caroline Bradshaw.
At the bottom of the article, it said that Brittany had been hired as the new director of events and experience at Stroud’s, the old department store on Market Street, starting in January.
And it said that Brittany would be attending the Hadley’s Children’s Carol Concert on Thursday, as a guest of Stroud’s chief executive, Ned Stroud, “to show her support for the children’s hospital and for the Hadley’s staff, who she says she has always loved.”