"Three hands, Nora. Three different hands, four months apart, on paper from the same notebook. A grudge writes once. Fear writes in installments, when it can't stand itself anymore." She turned one of the letters over, though there was nothing on the back. "And nobody — listen to me — nobody who is lying about being afraid begs you not to send help. *Please do not send the inspectors again.* A liar wants a scene. These women want the opposite of a scene. They want it to stop, quietly, and they have figured out the only way it stops is if somebody comes and sees it with their own eyes — and they are terrified even of that."
Silence on the line. Nora was not a woman who lost arguments, but she was a woman who recognized the sound of one being lost, and Charlotte could hear her deciding to hear the rest.
"So," Nora said at last. "What are we doing?"
"We," Charlotte said, "are not doing anything. I am taking a two-week leave."
"A leave."
"Starting Monday. Nobody knows where — a spa, a silent retreat, let them guess. You will run the company, which you mostly do anyway. And I — " She stopped, because saying it aloud made it real, and she wanted to hear how it sounded in the air of the office. "I am going to Savannah. There's a staffing agency that supplies half the hotels in the historic district, including the Wexford. I am going to sign with them under my middle name. Carmen Reyes — it's common enough to be invisible. Gray worked into my hair, plain glasses, no jewelry, no watch worth stealing. And I am going to clean rooms at my own hotel for two weeks, and I am going to find out who eats standing up in my house, and why."
The silence this time was of a different quality. Charlotte pictured Nora standing up now, in her kitchen in Decatur, phone to her ear, staring at nothing.
"That is," Nora said carefully, "the single most insane sentence you have ever said to me. And I was there for the motor lodge."
"You were twenty-four for the motor lodge."
"I aged. Charlotte. You are the chief executive of this company. You are — forgive me — you are a known face in this industry. Your picture was in the Journal in June."
"In June I had different hair and a photographer with a ring light the size of a dinner plate. Hotel guests do not look at housekeepers, Nora. You know they don't. Managers barely do. A woman with a cart is furniture that moves. I intend to be furniture that moves for fourteen days, and I intend to watch Doug Merritt be Doug Merritt when nobody he fears is in the building."
"And when you find it?" Nora said. "If you find it. What then — you tear off the glasses in the lobby? This isn't a movie. The moment you use your authority, every lawyer we have will ask how the evidence was obtained, and every — "
"The rule," Charlotte said, "is that I don't. That's the rule I need you to hold me to. I don't use my name, I don't use my authority, I don't fix anything while I'm inside it. I watch, I listen, I remember — I have a memory like a filing cabinet, it's the one vanity I'll keep — and when the two weeks are over, Carmen goes home, and Charlotte Reyes returns to Savannah on official business, with official questions, and everything I do after that will be done in daylight, by the book, forever. The only exception — " she hesitated.
"The only exception," Nora prompted.
"If someone is in danger. Real danger. Then I break cover and I don't care about the lawyers."
Nora exhaled, long and slow. "You know what you're asking me to do. You're asking me to help the CEO of a fourteen-hotel company disappear into a maid's uniform in a building run by a man we're investigating, and keep it from the board, the staff, your — " She stopped. "Isabela?"
"Isabela gets told I'm on a retreat and unreachable, same as everyone. She's a lawyer, she'd try to stop me, and she'd be right to try, and that's exactly why." Charlotte rubbed at her eyes. "Don't make me defend that part tonight. I'll tell her myself when it's over. She'll forgive me somewhere around Thanksgiving."
"She'll forgive you at Christmas."
"Then Christmas."
Another silence — but this one had turned a corner, and Charlotte could hear it turning: the sound of Nora Delacroix stopping fighting an idea and starting, despite herself, to build it. It was the most useful sound in Charlotte's professional life.
"The agency," Nora said, and now her voice had the brisk, terrible competence that had made her, at thirty-eight, the second-most-feared person in the company. "Not the big one on Bay Street — Merritt's golf buddy runs their Savannah desk, I remember it from the diligence file. There's a smaller one, Coastal Staffing, out by the mall. They supply the Wexford's weekend overflow. If Carmen Reyes walks in there with a Social Security card and a pulse, they'll place her inside a week. I'll make sure your paperwork is boring. References from a motel in Jacksonville that closed in 2019 — uncheckable and sad. Forty hours a week, cash-poor, no car. That's the profile that gets hired and ignored."