Page 7

7

The Ghost on the Roof

Jake

Dolores doesn’t find the head. Deb-from-IT does, letting out a shriek when she wanders in to pilfer coffee creamer from the underutilized fridge in the annex break room. Dolores bolts from her desk, shoves Deb-from-IT out of the way, and stands there basking in the sickly refrigerator light while the head stares out glassy-eyed from one fridge shelf, surrounded by a pool of scarlet blood spilled from some split red ink refills I took from the supply cabinet. Secret Santa had a charming MO.

“What is wrong with you two?” Deb-from-IT cries.

I know that something shifts between Dolores and me after that, because that evening her heels clatter up behind me as I wait at the elevator. When the doors open, she steps in with me, but I don’t look at her. I stare straight up at the number above the door as it changes. I feel her eyes on me.

“Jake,” she says after a few floors.

“Dolores.”

“Thank you for the doll.”

“I was raised to share my toys.”

“Your upbringing is between you and Norma Bates. Plans tonight, Jake?”

“No, but I know what you’re doing.”

“What?”

“Stropping your straight razor and combing the dating apps for your next husband.”

“Close. I’m watching that indie crime documentary on the Paper Pusher tonight.”

I was vaguely aware there was a documentary now.

“Do you think he’s single?” she drawls.

“Let me know if it’s any good,” I say as I step out into the main floor foyer. “Hasta banana,” I say, and I walk away without turning back.

—

From the coffee creamer incident radiates a little ripple to disturb our peace in the annex. The next day Cynthia-from-HR appears, cat earrings and pathological humorlessness and all. As she stalks toward me I smoothly press three keys to hide my open windows: my list, of course, but also payroll, the email server, and everything else I’m not supposed to look at.

She peers at me over her cherry red reading glasses. “That’s Dolores dela Cruz in there?”

I nod helpfully, and she frowns at the sheaf of papers in her hand.

Cynthia is in her fifties, tall and hale, with short gray hair and sensible footwear, and a way of speaking with emotionless precision at all times. I’m certain the inside of Cynthia’s house is filled with stacks of cozy murder mysteries and framed puzzles she’s glued together. A litter of kittens in a wheelbarrow. A duckling poking its head out of a watering can. She collects her cat’s fur in a bag to eventually knit into a sweater.

“And you’re Jake Ripper?”

I dust off smile number three for her: cheerful and charmingly rueful— Yes, I’m afraid that’s me.

“Jacob Ripper ,” she repeats, staring at me with pale, ice-cube eyes. Something toggles in my brain. She’s…familiar. And I’m familiar to her, too.

She peers at me like I’m a disgusting little boy with dirt under my fingernails. Before I can place her, she tucks the papers under one arm concealed in a frumpy cardigan and opens Dolores’s door without knocking. “Dolores?”

On the other side of the office window, Dolores snaps her laptop shut with one hand and cranks down the volume on the desktop computer speaker with the other. I’ve never seen her flustered before.

“I’m Cynthia Cutts. HR has brought me in as a consultant. I wanted to meet with you in person.”

Dolores stares, unblinking, and slowly clasps her hands over her closed laptop in a protective gesture. I’ve listened to too many of her podcasts, because right now she looks to me like a murderess with blood spattered on her clothes, casually adjusting her long skirt to conceal the murder weapon at her feet.

“What about?”

“I’m just checking in.”

It’s one of those harmless-sounding phrases that is utterly ominous in an office setting. Cynthia glances dourly in my direction, then shuts the door. I, however, have the hearing of a nocturnal predator, and I move to stand directly outside to eavesdrop. Cynthia can’t see me, but Dolores looks up and shoots me a peeved expression through her window.

“I’m getting ahead of a potential harassment situation. I heard there was an incident here with a doll.”

Cynthia is a corporate veteran. As usual, I’ve had my ear to the ground. She’s rattled around between companies, a hospital or two, even the Catholic school board—going where she’s needed like a frumpy, pickle-faced Mary Poppins sniffing out workplace harassment, and right now the east wind is blowing her into our annex.

I’ve probably seen her at one of my past temp jobs. That must be it.

Dolores is silent for a split second. “Yes?”

“A dismembered doll?”

“Yes.”

“It’s a hostile gesture. Your colleague left a dismembered Barbie doll in your office.”

“It was a Ken doll.”

“Are you interested in putting anything on record?”

A longer pause.

“No, thank you.”

“I’ve already made some notes in your file.”

Dolores’s voice changes subtly. “That wasn’t necessary.”

“Which caused me to notice, it’s been well over a year since you’ve had a performance review.”

“It’s all right.”

“It isn’t. I’m not familiar with your department. What is your chain of command?”

“I really am busy right now,” Dolores says, walking the fine line between pleasant and crisp. “Perhaps we can schedule something—”

It’s exactly as I suspected. Dolores has reasons to be terrified of drawing the attention of HR.

“I apologize,” Cynthia says, not sounding apologetic, “but I will be leaving for a conference soon, and it will take as long to arrange a meeting as it will to sort this out now. I’ve taken a special interest in you, Dolores.”

And for some inscrutable reason, the apex predator’s dark eyes dart toward me, the little rodent, for help. Before I know it, my arm is raised and I’m knocking two sharp raps on Dolores’s door. I open the door without waiting.

Smile number five: roguishly apologetic and definitely not lying.

“I’m afraid Dolores is needed upstairs for a top-floor meeting,” I say. “Now.”

Dolores stares at me for a beat, then locks her laptop in a drawer and pushes past me without a backward glance.

“They can’t tie their shoelaces on their own,” she huffs as she passes.

“They really can’t. Sorry, Cynthia,” I say.

She narrows her eyes at me. I wonder what she caught me doing at that previous temp job.

In the elevator Dolores swivels to face me.

“Why did you do that?” she asks.

“Because I was bored.”

She nods knowingly. “Boredom’s a chronic problem for sociopaths. Where are we going?”

I hadn’t thought that far.

Dolores cocks her head and prowls, catlike, to the buttons. She runs her fingertips deliberately from top to bottom, circles the B, then looks over her shoulder at me. She presses 50, the top floor.

“I have a top-floor meeting,” she explains.

That fairground feeling, except we’re moving upward. “Me too. On the roof.”

When the doors heave open onto the top floor, she trails after me to the stairwell that takes us the rest of the way.

It’s chilly when we step out. The skyscrapers press close all around, and to our left is the dull, metallic glint of the harbor. I’ve been wanting to bring her here, wondering how to lure her up, and here we are. She deposits her phone on a rickety outdoor table that the janitorial staff keep up here for their smoke breaks.

It’s such a part of my routine, I light a cigarette without even thinking.

“You smoke ?”

Fuck no, but a lit cigarette is an essential prop if I want to spend time up here.

“Aren’t you worried about dying from cancer?” she prods.

“I’m not going to die of cancer.”

I hold out the pack, and she hesitates for only a second. I light her cigarette, and she puffs prettily at it, but she doesn’t really draw. She holds it like a fifties movie star, hand cocked carelessly, her sharp fingernails scraping the air, the blue veins in her wrist a surprising glimpse of vulnerability.

“Dying of something else, then? I don’t think you worry much about your future.”

My heart beats a little faster. She thinks about me. “What do you mean?”

“Apart from the fact that you’re working a go-nowhere temp job? That you didn’t finish your degree?”

She’s put at least a few minutes of effort into rifling through my LinkedIn profile. I haven’t searched her online. It’s the main rule of my list that I have to harvest my data at the office, to prevent the muddling of the personal and the professional. I do have standards. But here she is, admitting she’s googled me.

I’m not enough to hold her interest, because she changes the subject.

“Look at this insect colony,” she sighs, panning the city view. She leans up against the concrete wall just a foot in front of me, hips pressing flat against it, and tilts her head to one side in her vampire lover pose. I watch her like that. She’s dressed as she’s always dressed—covered from neck to wrist to knee in black, her outfit today a stretchy black pencil skirt and a soft black sweater that blots up the sunlight. The wind tugs at a few fine strands of hair escaped from the glossy knot on her nape. I could reach out and twirl my finger in those strands. She leans over the wall and looks down, down.

A cold current kicks up, and I stub out my cigarette and tug the black leather gloves from my pocket. I always have them on hand so I’m never caught short in moments like these. She turns just in time to see me pull them on.

“Oh, goody,” she says, looking up at me with watchful eyes. “You going to strangle me now?”

And there’s something about her voice as she says this, and the poison-apple redness of her lips, and the way she looked at me for help just a few minutes ago. My body feels like a guitar string that was strummed. I vibrate. I resonate with whatever energy she puts out.

There’s a feeling she’s been stirring up in me these past weeks that I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s the desire to be in another person’s company. A desire to hold eye contact with another human being, a desire to touch another human being—

She holds my eyes and leans sinuously against the wall, her arms folded across her chest, and then she shivers from the November cold—and without really understanding how it happens, I’m suddenly standing just inches away from her. She smells like coffee and cigarettes and herself.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” she whispers, her breath steaming in the cold air between us.

I drift a little closer. “The gloves aren’t for strangling,” I say.

Her lips quirk in a sharp little smile, like she knew this all along. “They’re for pushing.”

She wraps her hand once, then twice in my tie, and pulls me in. I grip her by her waist and pick her up—I’ve never done anything like this before, so I’m almost surprised when it works—and I place her on top of the wall, the only thing keeping hapless humans from wandering off the edge of this building. Her bare knees press against me, and I wrap my hand behind one calf and hold her like that. Her face is now above mine, and she stares down at me breathlessly, lips parted, close enough to bite. I can see fine lines around the corners of her lips and the edges of her eyes—smile lines, though I never see her truly, properly smile. She turns and drops her cigarette over the edge, and we watch it fall toward the street below until it vanishes from sight, a little white pixel blinking out.

She turns back to me, eyes dark and fearless, and she wraps her little hands around my neck to hold on for dear life—or to choke me.

“Are you going to push me off now?” Her voice is a whisper, a little puff of air against my lips.

“Not today.” I slide my hands around to her back to demonstrate.

Her breath is warm when she pulls me in by my neck, and our lips brush. Her lips are warm, too—all of her is warm , and it’s something I think I forgot about other human beings. They’re warm to the touch. I lean into her. A wet slide, and the tickle of her breath, and the softness of her skin. The kiss is like slipping into a steaming bath, and I’m thawing. My body flares to life at her touch.

I step closer still, until we’re as close as two people can get without breaking any public indecency laws. There’s a certain logic to the way we fit together that makes me wonder why I never imagined doing this before. Her leg shifts against my hip, and my hand finds the smooth skin there. I wish I wasn’t wearing gloves. She doesn’t protest when my fingertips touch the hem of her skirt—

And then she bites my lip—gentle at first, and then slowly increasing the pressure until it stings, until I can feel my pulse in every part of my body—

“What the hell are you doing?” a voice bellows. “We’re in the Cascadia Subduction Zone! What if there’s an earthquake?”

It’s the elderly caretaker whose smoke breaks sometimes overlap mine. Dolores slips to the ground and tugs her skirt down, swearing under her breath. Her lipstick has left a pink smudge on her lips, and I wipe my own mouth with my gloved hand.

“Idiots!” he hollers at us. He lights a cigarette and stomps to the far side of the roof, where he glares at us from under bushy eyebrows.

I cough, and Dolores coughs, and she can’t seem to look at my face. She stares at the city view instead, and I stare at her profile, wondering if that kiss was as surprising to her as it was to me.

And then another feeling creeps in after the surprise: apprehension. It’s a terrible risk to let anyone in.

She clears her throat one more time.

“You’re not as bad at that as I thought you’d be,” she says, casually shanking me with her words, her voice back to normal—bored. “But you should quit smoking. If you want to kill yourself, I can help you think of some more creative ways to do it. In fact, I’ll do it for you.”

And to her it’s just a little insult, but it’s something completely different to me. She turns to walk past me, but I sidestep in front of her.

“Would you?”

Surprise, for a split second, before her habitual sarcasm rallies. “What sort of loose floozy do you take me for? If you want to see my straight razor, you’re going to have to put a ring on it first.”

She’s already turning away, back toward the rickety table with her phone. I’m desperate to stop her. All I want is for her to keep looking at me like she actually sees me.

I blurt out the first thing I can think of. “How was the Paper Pusher documentary last night?”

She stops in her tracks at the abrupt subject change. “It was delightful,” she says over her shoulder. “An ethical serial killer who goes after corporate perverts with a long HR trail. Doing God’s work. And local , too. So important to appreciate homegrown talent.”

“I ended up watching Ghost Hunters ,” I tell her. I did no such thing.

She turns and narrows her eyes at me. She can’t make me out. “So you’re into that paranormal shit.”

“Well, I wasn’t. Until I started seeing a ghost.”

She snorts contemptuously. She turns away from me again, and I add, “Here. At work.”

Dolores stops and slowly revolves on the spot to face me once more. “Really.”

Her voice is bored again, but I know she’s not bored. If she were bored, she’d leave.

“At first I didn’t understand what I was seeing. I thought she was just like everyone else. But after a while, I noticed it’s almost like no one else sees her. Just me.”

She peers at me.

“She shows up at work every day like a normal, living, breathing worker bee. She sticks to the annex, which is perfect because it’s been a ghost town since the layoffs.”

Her expression has changed.

“She goes through the motions of a normal workday. Ghosts are like that—they’ll carry on with whatever routines they had before.”

“Is this a story about a ghost, or her stalker?”

“Just a ghost.”

Dolores flinches against a gust of wind whipping across the rooftop. She glances at the caretaker across the way.

“This is a very boring story,” she says, and I know she’s hooked.

“Well, I think there’s a clever twist.”

“And what would that be?”

“The twist is, ghosts don’t know they’re ghosts. But she knows exactly what she’s doing.”

Dolores’s eyes are fixed on me, unblinking. She actually sees me, the dull temp who vanishes into his surroundings. I want her to know I see her, too. Both of us in stark relief on the top of this skyscraper, the city at our feet.

“And what is she doing?”

What is she doing, she asks.

This company is like a great, purring, half-slumbering creature. Unseeing, unfeeling, intent on one thing only: feeding itself, expanding, growing. Increasing profits every year. More. More. Chomping down on its employees, sucking the juices out of them, chewing them to a pulp and spitting them out.

I applaud anyone who gets the better of it, and what Dolores is doing is getting the better of it. Every day she strolls into work, stands in an elevator full of Spencer & Sterns minions, glides past supervisors and HR henchmen, and locks herself in a cushy stolen corner office to dick around all day in peace. All so that every two weeks she can collect her paycheck without having done a lick of work, courtesy of the disastrous, chaotic layoffs, like a cool, collected sociopath. She knows I know. I can see it. And she’s not the least bit concerned. She stares me down.

She’s clever. She’s fearless. She’s irresistible.

But in answer to her question, I say, “She’s haunting the living. Lingering over unfinished business.” I think of the laptop she was so careful to conceal from Cynthia. “Keeping her secrets in plain sight on her desk.”

Dolores’s eyes are strangely glassy. “I’m not so great at elaborate metaphors. You’re a creep.”

“ You’re the creep.” She’s the one who made a sexual innuendo about strangling when we first met. She’s the one who threw my peace offering in the trash and snooped through my things and fucked with my computer.

She cuts across me. “I found your list, you know.”

This is interesting. She’s most certainly seen the desktop image by now. I changed it after her idle question about the Paper Pusher’s dating status.

“Maybe Cynthia will want to know you spend your days adding your coworkers’ names to a spreadsheet labeled ‘Terminate.’?”

“Maybe she’ll want to know you’re gray-rocking from paycheck to paycheck hoping nobody notices you weren’t reassigned to a new supervisor after your entire department was laid off.”

Whiplash. Dolores stiffens, and I have to wonder what our conversation about ghosts meant to her if my words surprised her.

“Or maybe we call a truce,” I say.

She watches me with suspicion. We’re a pair of poker players holding our cards tight to our chests. I toss mine down first.

“Because I like you a lot more than I like Cynthia,” I add, “even if you are a creep.”

She holds out for two seconds, and then her sharp edges soften. The quills go down. She takes one half step toward me, and my phone buzzes.

“You going to get that?” she says impatiently on the second buzz.

I fish it out of my pocket and pick up.

“Jacob?” a familiar voice says on the other end of the line. Normally I wouldn’t have answered. Normally, I would have glanced at the screen properly first instead of trying to hold Dolores’s eyes.

I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Yes?”

Dolores turns on her heel and is gone in a flash. It’s just me, the amateur geologist caretaker, and my uncle.

It’s the usual. The birthday dinner tonight. He guilt-trips me by invoking my aunt, and I agree, and we both hang up, and that’s that.

I look out at the harbor one last time and debate tossing myself over the edge.