The Sex Whisperer: Book 1 in the Whisperer Trilogy (18 page)

Once the nail was in, she expected the tire to go flat immediately. Nothing happened, though. The tire held air just like it had before the hole. If she pulled the nail out, it wouldn’t look like an accident anymore. She needed to let the air out herself.

She peered around the car at the Starbucks entrance. No one was coming or going. Her hands shook as she untwisted the cap on the air valve. She used her thumbnail to let air out of the tire. The hissing was so loud she thought everyone inside of Starbucks would hear it.
C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,
she kept whispering under her breath.
Hurry.

When the tire was so low that the rim
almost touched the ground, Charlotte stopped letting out air and twisted the cap back onto the valve. She stood up and tried to walk casually back to her car, tucking her dirt-caked hands into her pockets as she went. No one took any notice of her.

The perfect crime,
Charlotte thought.
Now, all I have to do is wait.

∞

Thomas left Starbucks at 8:05 p.m.
Not bad,
Charlotte thought. He waited a full hour and five minutes before giving up on Olivia. Before he got to his car, Charlotte drove out of the parking lot and headed South on Brown Street. She wasn’t sure that was the direction Thomas would go, but she knew two things: Thomas’s apartment was that direction, and she didn’t want to be around when the private eye emerged from the coffee shop.

Charlotte pulled to a stop on Brown and flipped on her hazard lights. She watched her rearview mirror carefully, sighing with relief when Thomas’s red truck
pulled out a few minutes later.

She grinned as Thomas veered around her SUV, then she anxiously checked her rearview for signs of the Towncar. A few moments passed, and nothing happened.
The private eye must have found his flat!

Charlotte clicked off her hazard lights and started following Thomas. As she suspected, the sex whisperer drove straight back to
his apartment. It was a square two-story box of a building, the sort that dot the landscape throughout Kettering and Oakwood. Charlotte had been in one of those buildings before, and she knew all of them had the same floor plan: eight apartments that shared a common hallway and stairwell; one apartment for each corner of each floor. Charlotte parked in front of the building, checked her rearview, saw nothing and rolled down her window. She called out to Thomas as he walked toward his front door. He looked suspiciously at her SUV.

“Who are you?” he asked.

Charlotte recognized his voice immediately. She might not admit it to anyone, but she had listened to the whisper Olivia gave her several times.

“I’m a friend of Olivia’s,” she said.

“Ah,” Thomas said. “I was supposed to meet her tonight.”

Thomas was just a few feet away now, his hands tugging nervously at the hem of his t-shirt.

“I know,” Charlotte said. “She sent me as her emissary. I’ve got your package, though, and I think she explains everything in her letter.” She reached into the backseat and produced the package. Olivia’s handwritten letter was taped to the top of the box.

“Charlotte at your service,” she said.

“Charlotte?” Thomas said. “You look familiar. I don’t understand, though. Why couldn’t Olivia meet me in person?”

“Let’s just say it’s complicated,” Charlotte said.

Thomas shrugged his shoulders, clearly unhappy with the answer. Charlotte looked at her watch. “I better be off,” she said. “
You never know who’s watching.”

She winked conspiratorially at Thomas
, then drove away, leaving him alone under the streetlight, a large package in hand.
Damn, I’m a good spy,
Charlotte thought.

∞

Thomas shut and bolted the door to his apartment. He even slid the chain lock into place.
Things are getting weird,
he thought. He carried the package to his coffee table, sat it down and tore into the letter.

Dear Thomas,

Please excuse the theatrics tonight. I really wanted to meet you at Starbucks, but when I found out I had to cancel, there wasn’t a good way to communicate that to you. Believe me, though, when I say I’ve been thinking a lot about how nice it would be to sit down for coffee with you. I really mean that. There’s so much I want to say! But Charlotte’s waiting on me, trying to sneak peeks over my shoulder.

Let me tell you this: my husband and I are getting a divorce. He found out about our communication (yes, your sex whispers, too!), and he’s trying to use that as leverage in the divorce proceedings. He wants me to willingly agree to a divorce where he keeps all the assets. In exchange, he says he won’t make your sex whispers public record. I won’t let that happen. You’ve got to trust me on that.

Until we get it all sorted out, my lawyer asked me to cut off communication with you — no email, no whispers, no phone calls. He seems to think my husband hired a private eye to follow you and gather more evidence. Because of that, I’ve asked Charlotte to deliver your package and this letter. I trust it finds you safely, and I apologize for dragging you into a mess that you don’t need to be a part of. When this is all over, I’ll find you. I promise :)

xoxo,

Hawaii Girl

PS Please dispose of this letter. Burning perhaps? Or flushing it down your toilet? Ha. I bet you’ve never had a relationship like this, have you? It’s kind of exciting.

Thomas stood up and ran a hand through his hair. Indeed, he’d never had a relationship like this before. He walked to the window and pulled the blinds down slowly. He didn’t see anyone suspicious on the street. No pedestrians, no cars he didn’t recognize. He reread the letter twice, then grabbed a lighter and burnt it over the sink in the bathroom. The fan in the bathroom sucked the smoke away. He used toilet paper to wipe up the ashes, throwing the remains into the toilet so he could flush them away. He thought about Olivia’s handwritten words rushing through water pipes under the streets of Oakwood. Then, he went to the living room and approached the package. He needed to see what was inside.

∞

Olivia met Olivia at last. The other Olivia dressed sharply, almost scandalously, in a short black skirt. The skirt was so short, Olivia thought she’d be able to see the woman’s panties if she craned her neck a bit. The other Olivia was bony, too, her large eyes accentuated by wireframe glasses that looked 60 years old.

“I have to say that I’m more excited about this show than any I’ve put on since I joined the CAC,” the director said.

Olivia grinned. “Please tell me you’ve worked here 30 years.”

The director smiled. “A year and a half,” she said. “This is my third show. But still, we’ve done Warhol since I got here. That’s saying something, isn’t it?”

Olivia nodded, smiling.
Does she really like my photos that much?

The
director’s office was covered in beautifully grotesque paintings. There were red-eyed unicorns, sneering elves and dogs with hooves for feet.

“My latest obsession,” the director said. “They’re by a Japanese artist who hasn’t sold a single painting in her home country. Americans can’t seem to get enough of them, though.”

“They’re incredible,” Olivia said.

The director didn’t hear her
. She was pulling a long cardboard tube out from behind a filing cabinet. She tucked it under her arm and asked Olivia to follow her. They walked through the main gallery, heels echoing loudly off the walls. They got to an area cordoned off with a thick white curtain. The director pulled a flap aside and motioned for Olivia to go inside.

Both women grabbed hardhats off a nearby stand and strapped them on. “So this is it,” the director said. “We embellished your idea a bit. We wanted to go with a hotel theme.”

Indeed, Olivia could see they were constructing a building inside a building. The director unfurled blueprints from her cardboard tube.

“This will be the front of the hotel,” sh
e said, pointing at the drawing. “We’re standing in it. Guests will file through the front door there and wait in line to approach the front desk. We’ll have someone staffing the desk. There will be a bellhop, potted plants, luggage racks, industrial carpet, the whole nine yards.

“Each guest will deal with the front desk one at a time,” the director said, resting her elbows on the
unfinished wood. “They’ll sign their name in the guest book, get a key, and then they’ll they get escorted here.”

The director led Olivia down a short hallway and opened a door. Inside, there was a ladder, and
she motioned for Olivia to climb it.

“I’d go first but I wore a skirt today,” the director said.

I hadn’t noticed,
Olivia thought, as she climbed the ladder. The metal was cold on her hands, and she could taste sawdust in the air. She kept wondering how much money the museum was sinking into the exhibit.
Why do they think my work’s worth all this effort?
She asked exactly that when the two women stood on a platform above the ladder.

“People forget w
e have bills to pay,” the director said. “Unless you’re showing Ansel Adams, photo exhibits don’t get people into the museum. If you give them an experience, though, they can’t stop talking about it. People have so few experiences anymore. That makes it easy to give them a fake one. And they’ll pay you for it, too! We’re projecting we’ll get at least 200,000 visitors to your exhibit at $18 a head. That’s more than $3.5 million. And, of course, you’ll get a dollar from each of those tickets.”

Olivia felt herself gaping, but she couldn’t help it.
$200,000! And that’s before any print sales!

The director didn’t skip a beat. She spun around on the platform, arms extended. “Each of these doors will be labeled with deceptions,” she said. “Instead of a lever, we thought a key might work better with the theme. The same key will fit every door, and the guest can choose the door they’d like to open.”

The director chose a door at random and walked down a narrow hallway.

“Here, we’re going to simulate the effect that the guest is between the walls of a hotel,” she said. “We’ll have fake
spider webs, a single light bulb hanging on a cord. Then, just as you described, the guest can peer through holes in the wall and see the rooms on the other side. Your photos will be on the walls, of course. They’ll be the focal point, but in some of the rooms, we plan to have paid ‘hotel guests.’ They’ll be doing innocuous things: reading the paper, watching TV, sleeping. You know, the sort of things we all do in hotels.”

At the end of the hallway, the women came to another door.
“Here’s where things get interesting,” the director said. “We’ll have a TV playing back footage like you described. We’ll have the phone, and the buttons, too. People will be able to see themselves choosing a door of deception. Then, the phone will ring, and they’ll be told they can delete or donate the footage. That was a
brilliant
stroke, by the way. It pulls them into the exhibit; makes them a part of it. After that, we’ll lead them to the reception hall where guests can mingle, look at larger versions of your work and see which doors got picked the most.”

Olivia was speechless.
And yet she could feel the director’s eyes on her waiting for some sort of response.

“It’s perfect,” she said. “When do we open?”

“Six weeks from today. It’s an aggressive schedule, I know, and we still have some kinks to work out — like making sure people move through the exhibit quickly enough — but we’re confident we’ll be ready in six weeks. The show will open early for you, 6:30 p.m., I think. The media will be allowed in, too, and your friends and family.”

Olivia nodded. “I’ll be here,” she said.

“Come ready to answer some questions about your work,” the director said. “The reporters are going to have a field day with this. Here’s a little cheat sheet with some of the questions you’ll probably get asked.”

Olivia glanced over it.

“Wow, preparing for an interview never crossed my mind,” she said.

“Trust me,” the director said. “You’ll be glad you did for this show. And you have to tell them that every single aspect of this show, the placement of every nail, was your idea. They’ll think you’re the next Warhol.”

Olivia and Charlotte sat on the kitchen island in the dilapidated Cat Lady’s House. They swung their feet back and forth as Charlotte recounted her tale of espionage
, and Olivia talked about her upcoming exhibition. Night had fallen, and they were working their way through a bottle of Malbec.

“I’ve been thinking about that package you brought back for Thomas,” Charlotte said. “What if it was something illegal like drugs or a gun?”

“I don’t think so,” Olivia said. “Airport security would have found it.”

“Maybe it was money,” Charlotte said. “That’s it. You’re part of a money-laundering ring that stretches from the Midwest to the Pacific. The sun scarcely sets on your nefarious empire!”

“I think spying knocked something loose in your brain,” Olivia said.

The wine was warming her now, and Olivia was starting to feel really good when her phone rang. It was Mr. Albion’s number.

What the hell?

“I apologize sincerely for calling you at such an unprofessional hour,” Mr. Albion said on the other end, “but I have a question that
I would like to pose to you. Might I inquire as to whether or not you, or perhaps someone you know, went to the Brown Street Starbucks this evening?”

Olivia bit her lower lip. “No,” she said. “I’m sorry. I haven’t been there in ages. Did something happen?”

“Nothing to concern yourself with, no,” Mr. Albion said. “It’s just that your husband’s attorney claims an employee, or someone on his payroll, may have been the victim of a prank, and he thought myself, or you, or someone you know may have been involved. It’s silly really. No, I just wanted to put my conscious at ease. Nothing to worry about at all.”

Olivia shrieked when she hung up the phone. “Oh my god!” she said. “You really ruffled some feathers tonight! My attorney got contacted by Mike’s attorney to see if we were involved in a ‘prank’ at the Brown Street Starbucks tonight.”

The two women looked at one another and burst into laughter.

“I think we’re in over our heads,” Olivia said, after they’d composed themselves.

Charlotte sighed and scooted closer to her friend. She knew Olivia never broke the rules, and the idea of getting in trouble scared her.

“We haven’t done a damn thing,” Charlotte said. “I mean think about it. What’s the absolute worst-case scenario? I get a misdemeanor for popping someone’s tire?
I’d have to buy the PI a replacement and maybe do some community service. C’mon Livy, he was hired to spy on someone you know. You think he wants to tell the police he was spying on someone at Starbucks when a yoga instructor jammed a nail in his tire? Please. They’re amateurs!”

Olivia shook her head.

“I’ve watched enough movies to know how these things work,” Charlotte said. “And, in fact, your fabulous friend has a great idea on how to speed up this whole divorce episode, too.”

“
What’s that?” Olivia asked cautiously.

“I think we should break into Mike’s house and look at his computer records,” Charlotte said.

“You’re kidding, right?”

“Absolutely not,” Charlotte said. “He did the same thing to you, and he’s using it as blackmail.”

“I don’t even need the money anymore,” Olivia said.

“Yeah, but this isn’t about the money,” Charlotte said. “It’s about justice. You didn’t do anything wrong, and Mike’s trying to blackmail you with shame. I’m serious, Livy. I’ve thought about this a lot. You know everything about that house — every nook and cranny. We could be in and out in five minutes. No one would be the wiser. And, if your attorney asks where you got the info, you could just say Mike never changed his passwords
, and you accessed his email from here.”

“
How are we going to hack his computer?” Olivia asked.

“
I’m guessing we won’t need to,” Charlotte said. “If he ever saved his email password in his browser, we can access it in 30 seconds!

“
Besides, the more I think about all this, the more convinced I am there’s some reason why Mike wants a divorce. Out of the blue, he starts being a complete and total asshole? It doesn’t make sense. There’s got to be another woman involved. The whole thing reeks of cheating.”

“You realize how crazy you sound?” Olivia asked. “This could get us in a lot of trouble. Breaking and entering is a felony.”

“It’s only a felony if we get caught,” Charlotte said. “And there’s no way we’d get caught. We just need to figure out when Mike’s going out of town, and sneak in one of the upstairs windows. He basically did it to you while you were in Hawaii! It’s only fair that you get the same sort of information on him. Besides, I’ve always been taught that you have to fight fire with fire.”

“I’m going to vomit if I hear that phrase again,” Olivia said. “Now, pass me that Malbec
, and let’s talk about something else.”

Charlotte handed her the Malbec, and Olivia took a drink straight from the bottle.

“I have to show you something,” Charlotte said. She reached into her purse and pulled out a computer printout.

Olivia scanned it. It was an advertisement for a business conference in Atlanta.

“Look who’s speaking in Atlanta tomorrow morning,” Charlotte said.

Olivia scanned the names at the bottom of the ad and saw Mike Hampton from P&G. “Oh my god,” she said. “You’re serious about this.”

“Of course, I am,” Charlotte said. “He must have already left for Atlanta. We can go tonight.”

“How long have you been planning this?” Olivia asked.

“Does it matter?”

Olivia shook her head.
“How would we even get up to one of the second story windows?”

“I’ve got a plan,” Charlotte said. “You just need to go in the living room
, and dig some black clothes out of those cardboard boxes.”

“I’m not going anywhere until we finish this Malbec,” Olivia said. “And then I’m going to bed.”

“Spies don’t actually
drink
their drinks,” Charlotte said.

“And I’m just a soon-to-be-divorced felon who’s thirsty,” Olivia said, pouring herself a very full glass. “I’m not breaking in anywhere.”

“One more glass, and then we’ll go,” Charlotte said.

“One more glass, and we’ll think about it,” Olivia said.

Charlotte smiled deviously.

“My best friend is insane,” Olivia said.

“There’s a fine line between insanity and brilliance,” Charlotte said.

∞

An hour later, Olivia was more than a little drunk. She sat stock still in the passenger seat of her best friend’s SUV. Both women wore black clothes from head to toe. The radio was off, and neither woman spoke. There was no moon tonight, and there weren’t any other cars on the road. Olivia wondered if she and Charlotte were the only two people awake in Dayton at 3 a.m.

Thankfully, Olivia’s old house had a back entrance for the gardeners. No one would see them approach
.

Charlotte turned off the headlights and hunched over the steering wheel as she pulled onto the
gravel. The darkness was nearly complete.

“This is spooky,” Olivia whispered.

Charlotte reached over and squeezed her friend’s hand. “We can do this,” she said. “No one knows this place like you. You could probably get in with your eyes closed.”

As Charlotte wound slowly around a bend in the road, the greenhouse came into view, and Olivia felt her stomach drop. She hadn’t realized how much she missed her house until now, and that kindled anger in her stomach.
Charlotte’s right; Mike doesn’t deserve to keep everything.
He shouldn’t be allowed to intimidate and bully me.

Charlotte parked beside the pool, the SUV shielded from the house and neighbors by an elbow-shaped bank of evergreen trees.

Maybe this
will
be easy,
Olivia thought.

They
climbed out of the SUV and paused — both of them listening carefully to catch any unnatural sounds. There was nothing except the tap of a branch bouncing off the greenhouse glass in the breeze.

Charlotte opened the back of the SUV and pulled out a heavy case.
“Help me with this,” she said quietly.

“What is it?”

“It’s a fold-up ladder. I got it on Amazon Prime for $200. Free shipping.”

“It’s heavy as sin,” Olivia said.

They trudged up the hill, both of them carrying an opposite side of the heavy plastic case. By the time they got to the house, they were breathing heavily. They sat down to rest with their backs against the case.

“We can do this,” Charlotte said.

Long before Olivia wanted to move, her friend was standing, quietly unlatching the case and pulling out the ladder. Unfolding the ladder was a job in itself. Each latch clanged loudly into place, and when they finally had the ladder stretched out to its full length on the grass, they could see it was too tall for the job. Charlotte could have bought a ladder half as tall and half the weight.

“This is going to be the hard part,”
she said. “We have to stand the ladder up.”

It was lying flat in the grass with the base of the ladder closest to the house. They walked away from the house to the top of the ladder and picked it up so it was waist high. With a grunt, they hefted the top of the ladder over their heads and started walking toward the house, sliding their hands
down the ladder as they went. With each step, the top of the ladder rose higher and higher until it was standing perfectly vertical.

Olivia’s arms were exhausted from the work. She could feel her muscles trembling under her clothes. She could also see if they leaned the ladder against the house now, it would
rest directly on Mike’s office window.

“We’ve got to back up,” she whispered.

“I need to rest,” Charlotte said. “My arms feel like noodles. Let’s set it against the glass and back it up in a minute.”

Olivia nodded. As they tilted the ladder toward the house, though, they realized how top-heavy it was. The whole thing moved faster than they anticipated; much too fast. It was gaining speed, and they couldn’t do a thing to slow it down. Olivia held her breath as the ladder slammed into the glass with a magnificent crash. Both women closed their eyes and ducked.
Shards of glass rained down around them.

When Olivia opened her eyes, she saw her friend in the same position she was: crouched down, hands covering her face. They didn’t make a sound. And for a moment, they thought no one had heard the commotion.

Then, they saw a light flip on at the neighbor’s house. It was the Vincents, a nosy older couple that Olivia had spent years trying to ignore. They held their breath when they heard a patio door slide open. Olivia imagined the old man shuffling onto his deck in a pair of slippers.

“Hello,”
he called out in a wavering voice. “Anyone there?”

There was no answer. A minute passed, then two. Then, the patio door open
ed and closed again.

“Shit,” Charlotte said. “This wasn’t part of the plan.”

“I can’t believe I let you talk me into this,” Olivia said. She was so angry her hands shook.

“Calm down,” Charlotte hissed. “We can’t lose our cool now. We’ve still got to go inside and copy his passwords.”

“No way,” Olivia said. “We need to get the hell out of here. Nothing you can say or do will get me up that ladder.”

“I know,” Charlotte said. “I’ll do it. We’ll figure out what to do about the window later. You just carry the case back to the SUV.”

Olivia stood and ran back to the SUV with the case, her heart thumping hard in her chest. After she’d tucked the case away, she looked back at the house and realized she could hardly see the ladder from there. That meant old man Vincent couldn’t have seen anything from his vantage point. Still, he might have called the cops. Olivia doubted it, but she wouldn’t put it past the old codger.

By the time Olivia got back to the ladder, Charlotte was climbing down.

“You figured out the password?” Olivia asked.

“Yeah,” Charlotte said. “We’re going to leave the ladder.”

“What do you mean?” Olivia asked.

“We need to get the window replaced,” Charlotte said. “I’ll call someone in the morning and you can meet them here. They’ll think you live here.”

“Jesus,” Olivia said. “This is just getting better and better. This was such a great idea, Charlotte.”

“Hush,” her friend said. “We can talk about it later. Right now, we need get out of here.”

Without a word, Charlotte jogged off toward the SUV. She didn’t look back. Olivia stood there for a moment looking up at the gaping hole in her old house. Then, she set off running after Charlotte.

∞

Maybe we can pull this off.

Olivia
stood in the foyer of her old house looking anxiously out the window while she waited for the repairman.