Chapter 22: Eighteen Names

Nobody helped Cressida up.

She stayed on her knees on the parquet with her hands flat on the floor and her hair coming down.

I took the carbon-fiber key fob out of my tote.

It had ridden in that bag for two weeks, beside a steel key and a lip balm.

"Posey," I said.

She stood up at my side.

"You owe her four months of rent," I said. "You owe nobody anything now."

I put the fob in her palm.

Posey looked down at it.

"Lena, I can't take a car."

"You don't have to drive it." I closed her fingers over it. "Sell it. Pay the girls."

"Which girls?"

"The eighteen," I said.

Posey lifted her head.

Slowly, she turned to the room.

"I checked every name," she said. "I read her old group thread back three years. It's all in there."

The woman in yellow stood.

"I'm on it," she said. "I was the sixth."

The girl in the corner got up.

"Eleven," she said.

A girl by the window said, in a small voice, "Fourteen."

One after another, the women who had laughed at me got up from their chairs.

Not all of them.

Seven of them stood, and they stood in a line, and nobody had asked them to.

"Ten percent," said the woman in yellow. "I'll never get it back."

"You will," said Posey. "If the car sells for four million, that's about two hundred thousand each, with room left over."

"That's not what we paid."

"It's what she owes you," Posey said. "Plus interest."

I had never heard her speak that clearly.

Cressida lifted her head.

"You little thief," she said to Posey, in a cracked voice. "I picked you out of a bar. I gave you a dress."

"You gave me a blue dress," Posey said. "And a man's hand on my back."

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