The Receptionist

  PRAISE FOR KATE MYLES

  “Kate Myles takes no prisoners and leaves no skin on the bone. The Receptionist is a riveting and disturbing evisceration of twenty-first-century Hollywood greed and ambition. Überagents, self-improvement gurus, desperately ambitious actors—none of these denizens of sun-drenched Los Angeles are safe from Kate Myles’s scalpel-sharp pen.”

  —Christopher Rice, New York Times and Amazon Charts bestselling author of the Burning Girl series

  “A dark, gripping tale that won’t fail to captivate.”

  —New York Times bestselling author Robert Bryndza

  “The Receptionist is the best kind of guilty pleasure. Unlikeable characters? Check. Twisty plot? Check. This book has a pervasive sense of dread throughout, which made me turn the pages even faster. I couldn’t wait to see how it ended.”

  —Samantha Downing, USA Today bestselling author of My Lovely Wife and He Started It

  “The Receptionist is compulsively readable and deliciously disturbing, perfect for readers who enjoyed Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects. Myles has written a genuinely unnerving thriller that I couldn’t put down.”

  —Jess Lourey, Amazon Charts bestselling author of Unspeakable Things and Bloodline

  “The Receptionist starts as a scathingly funny, deftly observed comedy of Hollywood manners—then twists, changes gears, and gathers the tense, heart-palpitating momentum of a runaway train.”

  —Jon Evans, Arthur Ellis Award–winning author of Dark Places and Invisible Armies

  “Kate Myles’s The Receptionist is a terrific thriller and a mesmerizing character study; I read it faster and with more pleasure than any crime novel I’ve picked up in months.”

  —Scott Phillips, bestselling author of The Ice Harvest

  “The Receptionist is a freight train, hurtling toward a sheer drop. Kate Myles’s razor-edged debut offers a bitter satire of LA society (or lack of same), told with the pure, pulse-pounding abandon of a 911 call. Myles’s villains are delightfully awful, and her dialogue shines bright and cuts deep, but what makes her a tale spinner on par with the greats, like Patricia Highsmith and Tana French, is her recognition that the most thrilling moment of that fatal train ride comes not from the pounding of the engines or the fiery conflagration of landing but from the moment of weightlessness as you fall.”

  —Nick Seeley, author of Cambodia Noir

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2021 by Kate Myles

  All rights reserved.

  Epigraph, “Wherever you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense,” is reprinted from Our Town by Thornton Wilder. Copyright © 1938 by The Wilder Family LLC. Reprinted by arrangement with The Wilder Family LLC and The Barbara Hogenson Agency, Inc. All rights reserved. To learn more about Thornton Wilder, go to www.ThorntonWilder.com.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781542027458

  ISBN-10: 1542027454

  Front cover design by James Iacobelli

  Back cover design by Ray Lundgren

  In memory of my parents, Monica and Pat, who stocked our home with love and literature.

  And for Peter, my heart.

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE EMILY AND CHLOE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  PART TWO EMILY

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  PART THREE CHLOE AND DOUG

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  PART FOUR EMILY, DOUG, AND CHLOE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

  EPILOGUE GRACE

  GRACE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Wherever you come near the human race, there’s layers and layers of nonsense.

  —Thornton Wilder

  PROLOGUE

  Nothing was left of the crime scene. The home had been sold, torn down, and was replaced by a stone-walled mansion with a new address designed to foil the last of the curiosity seekers. It was the original house number that drove so much of the morbid tourism. One didn’t even need to have listened to the 911 call to recite it from memory.

  “ONE NINE FOUR SEVEN TWO!”

  The address became a meme. A joke. A public service announcement reminding people to remain calm in emergencies.

  Eventually, the terror in the caller’s voice persuaded a judge to redact the audio of all but the 911 operator—a ruling meant to balance the interests of the public and the wishes of the victim’s family.

  But no judge had the power to rid the internet of the photograph.

  The picture was gruesome, released not in the public interest but for the financial gain of an anonymous functionary in the police department: black and white, degraded, printed out and scanned back in, with crease marks showing how the paper had been folded, secreted out of the station in a pocket or backpack.

  The family tried to make it go away. They sued. They shut down websites. But the image always reappeared, floating to the surface of some grimly titled URL, until it was finally discovered by an eleven-year-old girl.

  Unschooled in the visual vocabulary of true crime, the child initially mistook the pool of darkness on the floor for a throw rug and the smudges up the door for dirt. It took days of fixating, studying photo captions, and rereading descriptions of the crime before she understood.

  PART ONE

  EMILY AND CHLOE

  CHAPTER ONE

  EMILY

  Oh my God, this girl is fucking my husband.

  That was my first thought when Chloe showed
up outside my office. She was too striking, lingering there in the doorway in her pencil skirt and tank top, with a face that somehow managed to appear both cherubic and angular. She raised her fingers to the doorjamb, hesitating, waiting for me to invite her in. Her bare shoulder caught the light of the hallway fluorescents, giving her the faintest shimmer of a halo. She smiled.

  “Thank you so much for meeting with me,” she said.

  I ignored her and turned to my laptop. I’d already told Doug I didn’t want to see any more of his “hungry creative” types. His company was bursting with these day jobbers who’d stayed too long in entry-level positions, hoping to expand some hustle in content creation. “My wife’s an agent,” he liked to brag before signing me up for another favor meeting, another waste of my time.

  Chloe took an exaggerated breath and stepped toward my desk with her hand extended. I gripped the rounded arm of my chair and tried to control my breathing in the face of this nerve, this absolute gall.

  Was he actually sending me his side pieces?

  “Mr. Markham said you’re a great agent,” she said.

  “Please,” I said slowly. “Call him Doug.”

  She blinked and wiped her palm on her hip, easing herself into the seat across from me.

  I wasn’t jealous of her beauty. That wasn’t it at all. I’d grown accustomed to the gorgeous. They were everywhere in my work, filtering through the waiting rooms of the entertainment industry, their cheekbones and long layers bowed toward scripts and iPhones. They whispered to themselves and emoted silently and were often objects of ridicule until they became wives or became successful.

  But outside my world, even a few miles down the 10 freeway at Doug’s office, the simple, supple fact of Chloe would have been a confrontation. She’d have stood out as a goddess amid the scattering of hip nerds and tech bros and fierce young women in communications. I couldn’t picture a scenario where he wasn’t sleeping with her.

  She made a show of looking around my office, opening her arms to the space. “I love this building,” she said. “Is that a real Calder in the lobby?”

  “What do you think?”

  “Okay,” she said, nodding to herself. She was silent another moment before starting off in a shaky voice. “I guess I’ll tell you about me? I’ve been in LA two years. I’m the receptionist at Beyond the Brand, Doug’s company. But that’s just my day job. My real work is with this group, Common Parlance. We’re performers. Well, we don’t call ourselves performers, really. We do pop-ups. But not like a restaurant pop-up. It’s immersive. We wear carnival masks.”

  There was something odd in her manner. Her hands were trembling, along with her voice, and her eyes kept fluttering to her lap. The people I normally dealt with were so slick; I almost didn’t recognize the behavior of a nervous person. I pushed my chair from my desk and sat back, taking a better look at Chloe’s outfit. Her tank was thin cotton, like something that came in bulk packaging. Her skirt was pilling at the waist. She needed a pedicure.

  She trailed off as I looked her over and chewed the inside of her thumb.

  “So you do happenings,” I offered.

  “I guess you could call them that.”

  “What would you call them?”

  “We’re trying to figure it out. I like ‘guerrilla theater,’ but nobody else does. Whatever happened to plain old ‘performance art,’ right?”

  Her smile was goofy, friendly.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Twenty-four.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I am! I don’t like lying about that stuff. I think . . . never mind.”

  “What were you going to say?”

  “It’s stupid.”

  “Go on.”

  “Oh gosh, it’s just that I’m trying to approach everything in life like I approach my art. I want to make sure everything I do is real, you know?”

  I focused on her eyes. They were round and clear, with a lack of guile that would have been charming in someone a few years younger. Maybe she wasn’t having sex with Doug.

  “Like, if you’re mostly telling the truth,” she said, “and that’s what we do as artists, right? Tell the truth?”

  “I’m not an artist.”

  “But you work with them.”

  “Actually, I work with experts: psychiatrists, former FBI agents, people you might see on a talk show.”

  “Oh,” she said and looked confused. She edged to the front of her chair. “Well, I have this belief that if there’s something fake in there, people will see it. Even subconsciously, they’ll know something is wrong.”

  No, I decided. She was too sincere. She’d never have been able to pull off this meeting if they were having an affair.

  I felt a ball of warmth inside me then, solid and radiating and about the size of a lemon. That was how big the pregnancy books said the baby was now. I was four months along. I hadn’t told Doug. I brought my hand to my belly. It was barely perceptible, the tightening, the roundness under my palm. I wasn’t going to be able to keep it secret much longer.

  But Doug knew. Of course he did. The one time he didn’t clear his internet search history, I saw what he’d written. Wife hiding pregnancy.

  I could tell him now. We could start being honest with each other. Because Doug had sent Chloe to me as a sign, a peace offering, an example of someone he could have slept with but had chosen not to. I moved both hands to my desk and straightened, overcome with an unfamiliar sense of well-being.

  “Tell me, then—how can I help you?” I asked.

  “I was hoping you’d come see us perform.”

  I paused and raised my eyebrows. “Can I be honest?”

  “Please.”

  “You’ve been talking about your group for a while, but I still don’t understand what you do.”

  Chloe sat back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “We do site-specific performances, like street theater. It’s improvisational. We start out really subtle and play off what’s happening around us, like we interact with reality, if that makes any sense.”

  “Do you have any press?” I asked.

  “We do Snap and TikTok. Oh, and YouTube.”

  “What kind of hits do you get?”

  “I can tell you . . .” She pulled her phone out of her pocket and frowned at the screen. “What’s your Wi-Fi?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “I get it. You’re alternative. But this is RFG.” I waited for some recognition from her, some acknowledgment she was out of her depth. “We’re a major agency. We don’t pluck people out of obscurity.”

  The disappointment flushed across her face. She certainly hadn’t thought anything was going to happen here? I was hoping to make the rejection painless.

  I softened my voice. “I work with the elite. People we can market across different platforms: publishing, retail, that kind of thing. It’s hard to get there. I mean it’s impossible.”

  She narrowed her eyes, ready to take me up on a challenge I hadn’t given her.

  “Do you want advice?” I asked.

  “I’d love some.”

  “Your group needs a hook. Something simple that tells people who you are.”

  She pursed her lips and swished them to the side. “Would the masks count as a hook?”

  “Maybe. But think in terms of what’s out there already, like Blue Man Group. You’ve heard of them? They’re blue men. They’re easy to understand.”

  Chloe propped her arm on the back of her chair. It was a pose, exquisite and still. Doug had told me she’d been a backup dancer for Fefu Fornes, the latest child actor turned racy pop star. “Yes, but we go deeper than that,” Chloe said. She sounded like she was talking down to me. “We’re beyond entertainment, beyond language, beyond form, even. Like, there’s this undercurrent to every crowd and interaction. We tap into what’s really going on and bring it to the surface.”

  “Sounds exciting.” I flashed her a smile and stood to start the process of getting her out of
my office. “You have a great look. Have you done commercials?” I grabbed a business card from my desk. “Send me your headshot, and I’ll forward it to our commercial agents.” My hand was on her shoulder, and she was almost out the door when she stopped.

  “Wait,” she said. “I forgot to give you a flyer for our next show.”

  “Don’t worry—” I started, but she’d already unzipped her handbag, a cheap yellow-leathered overnight bag of a purse, full to the top with faded receipts and free-floating tampons. I saw a flash of hot pink that might have been underwear. She shoved it under the hairbrush and stapler, all tangled up in what looked like two different brands of computer cable.

  “I’m sorry. I know I put the flyers in here.” She leaned on the arm of my tufted leather sofa and lowered her head, plunging her arm into her purse and churning. “I’m sorry,” she said. I wanted to tell her to stop, to email it to me, but her movements picked up speed. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. She started trembling again.

  “Where is it?” she whispered with an intensity so out of place in my cool, professional world. It was something from the domestic sphere: intimate, desperate, with a hint of violence at the end of it. “I’m sorry,” she said again, shaking her head in a tiny, frantic figure eight.

  “Chloe.” I put my hand on her back. “It’s okay.”

  She stopped and slumped and reached in once more, grasping a handful of something inside. “I must have taken them out for some reason.” She tried to perk up with a smile, but it was too late. The entire meeting must have been an exercise in keeping it together.

  I remembered this kind of unraveling from the early days of my career, trying out unproven clients. The crazies always made for a good story. But Chloe was so young and pretty. I had an urge to help her.

  I thought of taking her purse from her hands and showing her how the yellow was cracking near the bottom seam. Look, I wanted to say. This is why your bag is so crappy. The leather was colored with a surface dye. It’s like the manufacturer slapped paint on skin.

  I wanted to take my Bottega Veneta from the back of my chair and let her run her fingers over the soft woven pattern. Leather needs to breathe, I wanted to tell her. See how you can still see the grain? That’s called aniline. It’s been dyed all the way through.