The girls in the office were already seated at their computers and talking away, jabbering nonstop about nothing that mattered. They all had pictures in frames on their desks. The frames were cheap and thin. With one exception, the pictures all seemed to be of animals. The one exception was on the desk of the only woman in the office with children. She had a girl and a boy, and they were posed together in front of a backdrop that looked like sky. The rest of the photographs were all of dogs and cats. The girls talked about the dogs and cats as if they were children.
Meera had her own little office. It was nothing much, but it distinguished her from the girls out there, in what was called the bullpen. She sat down and put her purse on her desk. Her ankles ached from negotiating the sidewalks. The city was still full of ice. She put her head in her hands and tried to steady herself. Any American in the company would have stayed home on a day she felt like this. That was why Meera was here. If they’d wanted an American, they would have hired one.
Rita Antonelli came in without knocking. They were supposed to knock. Meera wanted to scream.
“Miss Agerwal?” Rita said. “Are you sure you’re all right? You look like you’re feeling worse than you were last night.”
Meera put her hands down. “I am feeling all right,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Well, I don’t mean to bother you, but your mother called,” Rita said. “We’ve been a little worried, because it was really long distance. She said it wasn’t anything important, but—”
“I will call her back,” Meera said. Except she wouldn’t. She wasn’t about to call Mumbai from the office phone. She wasn’t about to call Mumbai from her cell phone while she was in the office, either.
“Well,” Rita said, hesitating. “She did say she would call back. And she said she had some good news. I took the call. She sounded happy.”
For God’s sake, Meera thought. “We need to file the rent receipt reports today for the places downtown,” Meera said. “I need you to start putting them together and sending them to me, and I’m going to go over them so they can be corrected before they’re officially filed. I don’t want a repeat of last month. There were so many typos, Mr. Alder could barely read them. And we’re going to have to make an eviction list.”
“I always think it’s sad,” Rita said. “Evicting people at Christmas.”
“It’s not at Christmas, it’s after Christmas. And everybody will get the usual thirty days.”
“Still.”
“Mr. Alder is a lot more lenient than I would be,” Meera said. “Some of these people, it’s incredible. It’s as if they thought apartments sprang up out of the ground like grass. It costs money to build an apartment building. It costs money to run it. Where do these people think the money comes from?”
“Yes,” Rita said, looking uncomfortable. “Yes, well—”
The phone on Meera’s desk rang. Rita looked infinitely relieved.
“I’d better let you take that,” she said, and fled the office.
Meera picked up. “Hello,” she said.
If her head hadn’t been pounding so badly, she would have realized that her mother couldn’t have called with good news. The times were all off. God only knew how late it was in Mumbai, or how early. Meera could never keep it straight. But her mother never called her at the office, either.
“Meera?” Her mother’s voice was floaty and high.
“Mai,” Meera said.
“I tried to call you at home, but you weren’t there. And then I tried to call you at your work, but you weren’t there, either. I didn’t know what to do?”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing is wrong!” Meera’s mother sounded triumphant. “I thought there must be, but here you are. So nothing is wrong!”
“Okay.” The ibuprofen was doing her no good at all. There was a sledgehammer going off inside her head. “Maimai, listen. I have a flu. I am feeling very ill.”
“You should drink—”
“I did, already, before I left the apartment. And before I went to bed last night. But I’m still very ill, and I don’t understand—”
“It was on the CBS. I listened on the Internet.”
Meera tried to sort this out. “You were listening to CBS on the Internet,” she said. This made a sort of sense. Her mother had bookmarked a local CBS news site. She checked it on and off to find out what was going on in Philadelphia and what the weather was and that kind of thing.
“It was that woman in the garbage bag,” her mother said. “They didn’t say who she was. They didn’t show a picture. Somebody put a woman in a garbage bag and threw her away on the street. It could have been you.”
Compared to Mumbai, there was not really a lot of crime in Philadelphia. Meera’s mother acted as if the crime in Mumbai didn’t count.
“Maimai,” Meera said. “It wasn’t me. And things happen. Things happen everywhere. And I am at work.”
“Yes, yes. I will go away now that I know nothing is wrong. I only had to know that you were safe.”
“I am safe.”
“Yes, yes. And you are ill. You should leave work and spend the day in bed.”
“I’ve got too much work to do.”
“Yes, yes.”
And then the phone went dead. Just like that.
Meera began to boot up her computer. A woman in a garbage bag. There must be something on the news. Hadn’t there been a picture of this woman? That would not necessarily have stopped Maimai. She would think the picture was distorted, or just plain wrong.
There was movement in the doorway, just outside her vision. Meera looked up. Rita was standing there, but she didn’t come in this time. She didn’t knock, either. This was fortunate for Meera’s head.
“Miss Agerwal?” Rita said.
“I am sorry,” Meera said. “I think I feel less well than I thought I did.”
“You don’t look well,” Rita said. “But there’s something out here we thought you’d better see.”
“What is it?”
“We don’t know.”
Fine. Wonderful. Exactly what she needed. Meera made herself stand up.
When she got into the bullpen, what she saw was all the girls standing around—nothing. They were just standing in a little circle and staring at the floor.
Meera went up to them and looked at the floor herself. There was something on the carpet, a jagged-edged splotch about three inches across, brownish red and thick looking.
“It’s sticky,” one of the girls said, pointing a toe at it. “It’s sort of like paste.”
“Karen almost fell in it,” one of the other girls said.
Meera made herself get down in a crouch to look at it. Her headache had suddenly receded. Her fever and chills had reduced itself to chills alone. It wasn’t just that it was three inches across. It was thick, thick enough so that it had not been completely absorbed by the carpet. It was deep.
Meera made herself stand up. “It looks like hot chocolate. Have any of you been drinking hot chocolate?”
“No, we haven’t,” Rita said. “And that wasn’t here when we left last night, either. Somebody would have noticed.”