“She must still be downstairs,” Andrea said.
In the cubicle outside Rita’s office, there was a commotion, and we turned as one. Before, I hadn’t noticed anyone sitting there. “Lindsay?” Andrea asked, her tone doubtful.
A figured hunched on her hands and knees on the floor jerked up, banging her head on her desk. “Shit!” she cried. Then she saw me. “Oh—sorry.” She jumped to her feet and darted out her hand for me to shake, then thought better of it since it was holding a paper towel that was dripping some sort of fluid all over the carpet.
And that wasn’t the only odd thing about her. She was wearing a nubbly tweed jacket over what appeared to be an old taffeta formal. I usually wasn’t too judgmental about outfits. I had been around theater people, so I was used to creative dressing. But this girl looked bizarre. Plus, I have this thing about taffeta. I don’t like it. (It’s a long story.)
“I’m having the worst morning.” Lindsay gestured to her desk, where an overturned Starbucks cup told the whole tale. “I spilled my latte all over this manuscript. Rita’s going to kill me!”
Andrea waved off all her worries. “It’s no big deal. Stuff like that happens.”
“But it’s a Rosemary Cain proposal—and she’s rejecting it!”
Andrea went still. “Oh.”
I knew the name Rosemary Cain, but not well enough to be able to name any of her books by title. But I got the gist of what was going on. Big author, stupid boo-boo. “It’s just a few pages,” I said. “Why don’t you retype them? The author probably won’t even notice.”
It seemed a pretty obvious suggestion, but Lindsay latched onto it as if it were a pronouncement coming straight down from heaven. “That’s right! I could retype them. She’ll never know! Rita won’t even have to know.”
She thanked me profusely, and I felt a little embarrassed. It hadn’t taken a genius to figure out what to do. Lindsay was probably a few seconds away from figuring it out herself.
Or maybe not. She obviously hadn’t figured out not to wear prom dresses to work.
“She’s a mess,” Andrea whispered to me as we walked away. “Something like that happens every day. I call it the crisis cubicle. She and Rita together are a train wreck.”
At the next office we passed, a woman about my age with dishwater blond hair was sitting at her desk with an untouched bagel next to her.
“Hi, Cassie,” Andrea said. “This is Rebecca. You know, the new inmate.”
Cassie’s blue eyes fixed on me. “Cool!” Her office was a duplicate of mine, with the exception of romance covers covering her cork board, and a single framed picture on the desk. It was a picture of a younger Cassie in a blue gown and mortarboard. Her hair was longer, but it was also frizzier; she had the Jan Brady effect going big time.
Cassie stared unblinkingly at me. “Mercedes made you sound like Wonder Girl. She couldn’t stop singing your praises.”
“Really?” I asked, surprised.
“She said you worked for Sylvie Arnaud.”
“Oh, right.” I nodded.
Andrea tugged on my arm. “Okay, well I guess we should—”
“You must have really wowed Mercedes at your interview,” Cassie broke in. “I thought they were just looking for another assistant editor, not an associate.”
“I had thought so, too, initially…”
Her lips tensed into a toothless smile. “I’m an assistant editor. This is my third year here. I was Rita’s editorial assistant one of those years.”
“That’s…” I really couldn’t figure out what I was expected to say. “…good.”
“You think so?” She shrugged. “I guess I just have high standards.”
Andrea laughed and told me, “We’ll probably all be working for Cassie next year.”
Cassie smiled, but I had a feeling she actually felt that we all really should have been working for her already.
The rest of the tour was a blur. We ventured out into other pods, but after twenty minutes of meeting people, my brain started to go numb. Andrea introduced me to coworkers I knew I wouldn’t remember if I bumped into them five minutes later.
But I did learn the important things—where the bathrooms were, and the mail and supply room. The mailroom was headed by a guy with a long blond ponytail named James. According to Andrea he had been a bike messenger until he had been hit by a bus. He still had the restless energy that I had noticed in bike messengers, that same way of catching your eye just long enough to let you know that he would be glad to run right over you.
The only other guy I detected in the office was the head of the art department, named Troy Raymond. His office was cavernous and wallpapered with huge prints of cover art—which was to say, men with no shirts. There were two couches in his office (“For meetings,” he explained. “I like to be comfy.”) and a huge desk, and to the side, a drafting table.
“Troy’s our link between the production folk downstairs and editorial,” Andrea explained.
“Downstairs?”
He laughed. “The mole people. Art, copyediting, production. The unglamorous folk.”
“Right, like we’re glamorous,” Andrea said.
Troy gave my outfit a pointed once-over. “I wonder. That’s an awfully nice Chanel there. Who’d you have to sleep with to afford that?”
I began to sputter about it being a hand-me-down, and Troy burst out laughing. “I was just zooming you.”
As Andrea and I left Troy’s office, she laughed. “Those ‘meetings’ he was talking about are his interviews with cover models. He’s the only one here who has any fun.”
I shook my head. “Not many men work at Candlelight, do they?”
“There are more in production, but editorial’s almost exclusively women right now. The president of the company is a man, of course. Art Salvatore.”
“I didn’t meet him.”
“And you probably won’t until the Christmas party. His office is over there”—she pointed to a long, dark corridor—“but he rarely walks among us.”
“Oh, I see. Head honcho.”
“More than that.” She lowered her voice. “It’s said that the Salvatore family used to be in the laundry business, if you know what I mean.”
My mouth popped open stupidly, and my voice came out in a squeak. “The mob is running Candlelight Books?” Being from Ohio, I was still fascinated when I bumped into anything vaguely Godfatherlike, even after two years of living in Brooklyn. I never expected organized crime in romance publishing, though.
“It’s all just a rumor,
