Free The Stager: A Novel by Susan Coll Page B

smashed-up leaves, or maybe even tea, which is what I think it is at first, until the word “marijuana” pops into my head from the unit we did at school on “harmful narcotics,” which was right after the unit on “stranger danger.” It seems pretty unlikely to me that Nabila would do any harmful narcotics, since she’s always talking about being healthy and eating fruits and vegetables. She’s become friends with the guy who works across the street, at the farmstand in front of Unfurlings, and she’s even convinced my mom that it’s better to buy the vegetables there than in the grocery store because they don’t use pesticides. I open the baggie and smell the leaves, but I don’t know what marijuana is supposed to smell like, so this doesn’t help.
    Someone knocks on the back door. I hear the Stager open it, and she starts talking to a man. Then I hear another voice, and then another, and then Nabila comes downstairs to see what’s going on, and all of a sudden there are three men in the basement, carrying equipment. I don’t know who they are, but one of them has a video camera that says “HGTV” on the side, and he’s standing outside Nabila’s door, talking into a microphone.
    “And now we journey to the leafy suburb of Bethesda, Maryland, located just outside Washington, D.C. Forbes magazine has named Bethesda one of the most affluent and highly educated communities in the country. CNNMoney has listed it first on top-earning American towns, and, most intriguingly, Total Beauty has ranked it first —and, yes, I did say first , ladies and gentlemen—on its list of the country’s Top Ten Hottest Guy Cities … This is of course a nice segue into the home of a celebrity couple who wish to remain anonymous, which is why they have chosen to live in relative obscurity in a tony enclave of million-dollar-plus homes known as The Flanders…”
    The camera is pointed at me, and I cling to the baggie, terrified that I’ve just been caught on camera snooping and holding drugs.
    I stuff the bag of leaves in my pocket and squeeze past the HGTV people into the main part of the basement, where the door leads out to the pool. A blur of white races across the garden and squeezes under the fence. The next thing I know, I’m outside, where it’s raining, with a bag of smashed-up leaves in my pocket, chasing after a rabbit that might or might not be Dominique.

 
    LARS
    Bella is in the middle of another important dinner when she learns that Elsa is missing.
    We had originally planned to make this our big London date night, to dine at some five-star fusion restaurant in Soho she’d heard about from a colleague, but then she remembered that she had a work-related “thing.” This is not atypical Bella behavior. Sometimes when we have plans, her memory is jogged at the last minute by a chirp of the calendar function on her phone, other times by a flip through her pocket diary. Another method involves smacking herself on the side of the head as she recalls suddenly that she has another obligation. Last night it was dinner with Luxum’s CEO; the night before, drinks with the outside counsel in from Frankfurt. Tonight is the marquee event, an expensively catered welcome-to-London-I’m-the-face-of-Transparency-at-Luxum-International dinner with various dignitaries, celebrities, and big-time investors. How one forgets about this until an hour prior to the event is something that eludes me.
    And there she is, seated between the visiting prime minister of Kazakhstan—or maybe Kyrgyzstan (I am reasonably well traveled, but my experience is confined to places where I have either lived, played tennis, or vacationed)—and the boozed-up American ambassador, who seems to be hitting on her.
    Bella can see on her phone, which she pulls discreetly from her jacket pocket a couple of times as it vibrates, that she’s missed several calls from home. (This is where I begin to understand what I was beginning to understand back in