Errands & Espionage

by Sam Tschida

Genres: Amateur Sleuth; Mystery

Synopsis

Meet Gabby Greene: Housewife. Glorified taxi driver and maid. Burner of meatloaf.

Recently divorced Gabby Greene spends most of her days listening to self-help books while wrangling her loving yet erratic kids. During a decade of marriage, Gabby shoved aside her own career and ambitions to make room for mountains of laundry, running errands, and investigating the case of the missing socks. Her number one suspect: their Bichon Frise, Mr. Bubbles.

All that changes when a secret government agency comes knocking on Gabby's door, asking her to go undercover. At first, she thinks some reality show is pranking her, but apparently, she bears a striking resemblance to an agent recently murdered, and… well, desperate missions call for desperate measures. Soon Gabby is juggling motherhood and a crash course in Spying 101, led by a handsome James Bond-type who has secrets of his own.

As Gabby embarks on a dangerous mission involving money laundering, a Russian oligarch, and an unfortunate incident with a prosthetic nose, she begins to realize that she is far from the invisible housewife she once believed herself to be, and that maybe, just maybe, she might be capable of saving the day.

Release date: August 6, 2024

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 352

Sample

Thursday, 7:13 a.m., 113 Avocado Avenue

A Nerf bullet sailed across the kitchen and nailed Gabby Greene square in the back of the head.

She twirled around and aimed her spatula at her eight-year-old devil child. “Lucas Daniel Taylor, there are no guns at the breakfast table!”

How did that even need to be a rule?

“She started it!” Lucas pointed at Kyle, a fourteen-year-old replica of her mother, except with purple streaks in her brown hair and a sparkle in her eye that hadn’t yet dimmed.

“Just put the gun down and eat your pancakes. Okay?” How hard could that be? The shirt he’d just put on was already sticky with syrup.

A glance at the microwave clock—fifteen minutes until the bus arrived. Gabby ladled out another batch of the pancakes. There was something so comforting about a pancake—perfectly round and tan as a buckskin pony. Wanting kids as an adult was a lot like wanting a pony as a child—you couldn’t know how much work they’d be until you got them home.

As she watched for bubbles in the pancake, Lucas yelled, “I can’t find my socks.” It wasn’t his fault. Finding and wearing socks wasn’t part of his skill set yet.

“I got it.” But did she? Were there even matching socks in the house? It was amazing how quickly you could go from “Do matching socks matter?” to a full-blown existential crisis. As long as she could delay it until after the bus picked up the kids.

She turned up her audiobook, almost loud enough to drown out the kids’ arguing. Sloane Ellis was revolutionizing divorce and single parenting, at least according to everyone on daytime TV. Supposedly, she made divorce just as fun as Marie Kondo made organizing sock drawers.

Gabby handed Lucas two mismatched socks, one knee-high and rainbow striped, the other a white tube sock—the best she could come up with. Where all the socks went was currently the biggest mystery in her life. Her number one suspect: Mr. Bubbles, her bichon.

Kyle looked up from her phone and noticed Lucas slipping on the rainbow sock. “That’s my sock!” She reached for him. Lucas feinted to the left and stuck out his tongue.

“It’s mine now. Mom gave it to me!” Lucas pulled the trigger, and a second Nerf bullet hit Kyle.

One hand on her hip and the other with a spatula, Gabby let them have it. She leveled her gaze at Lucas. “Lucas! No shooting your sister. No shooting at all! Give. Me. The. Gun.” Then, in her sternest mom voice, she barked, “And, Kylie, get ready for school and forget about your sock.”

“Don’t call me Kylie!”

“Oh, sorry, sweetie,” she apologized to the kid engaged in hand-to-hand combat over breakfast. Her daughter had gone from Kylie to Kyle last year. Gabby didn’t ask questions. If she wanted to drop an “i,” that was fine. “Kylie is so cutesy,” she had said. “What were you thinking, Mom?”

She should have gotten ponies.

The smell of burnt pancake hit her nose. Why had she made pancakes on a school morning?

Another glance at the clock: three minutes left.

If they missed the bus again… For a fraction of a second, she shut her eyes and imagined getting on the bus herself. It could take her away for once, just a quick trip, maybe to Las Vegas. She could see the Thunder from Down Under and let it all go for a weekend. Linda from down the street went away all the time. Gabby couldn’t decide whether to judge her and act superior or be jealous. She chose judgment because she didn’t have time or means to go to Vegas. But deep down she knew it wasn’t just the caffeine burning a hole through the lining of her stomach. It was jealousy.

“Kyle, Lucas, grab your bags. It’s time to go!”

Just as the clock ran out, they made it out the door, Gabby following behind, her arms full of confiscated items: a Nerf gun, an umbrella that Lucas liked to use as a sword, and a bag of Laffy Taffy that would wreck Kyle’s braces.

No please or thank you. Her kids had no respect. None. It was her own damn fault. She hadn’t demanded it, hadn’t felt she deserved it, the same reason she’d accepted shit from Phil for all those years. And he had been the one to leave. Him. After she had done everything except make the money. On the night he’d told her, she’d been washing her face and trying out some new cream that promised to erase the bags under her eyes. Phil had stood behind her. “Gabs, I’m leaving.”

“Where?” She’d glanced at her phone. It had been ten o’clock. She’d asked, “Are we out of ice cream?” because that’s all that she could imagine. Turns out they were out of a lot more than Cherry Garcia, which she would never eat again, thank you very much.

“No. I’m leaving leaving.”

She had stopped rubbing the cream into her face and stared at his reflection in the mirror. He had been talking to the back of her head. Coward.

“Don’t worry, you can have the house. I’ll get an apartment closer to the office.”

It’s not like she had enjoyed Phil recently, but she hadn’t worried about that. Their marriage had been about the kids, at least for her. She thought it had been for him too.

He said there wasn’t anyone else, he had just “outgrown her,” but she knew better. Men never left a wife unless they’d already lined up the next one. That man couldn’t even feed himself.

A marriage that crumbled without her noticing, kids that didn’t know how to wash a dish to save their lives. What was she supposed to do about it now? Kyle was half-grown. Lucas had a Y chromosome that didn’t bode well. If she knew how to load the Nerf gun, she would let a bullet fly—Lucas didn’t need to know she broke the rules—but guns weren’t her department. What was her department?

Kyle texted: S and I need a ride to horseback riding after school.

She had kids and then rented them ponies. What was her life?

Thursday, 8:10 a.m., 113 Avocado Avenue

Alone at last, Gabby walked into the house to the waiting disaster. Spilled syrup, stray Nerf bullets, piles of paper from backpacks, and a never-ending mountain of dishes. Why did she bother? Housework was the background noise that no one cared about or even saw. A good wife and mother was basically a servant, completing all the tasks without drawing any attention. Gabby was so good at it that she’d achieved the highest degree of skill: invisibility. She was invisible when she was married to Phil, and she still hadn’t materialized.

Those thoughts weren’t helpful, though. They sure wouldn’t get the dishes done.

It had been four months since Phil moved out. She should probably get a job, but it had been fourteen years since she’d worked outside the house, not since Kyle was born. And she had been a travel agent. Her skills: buying plane tickets and booking hotels. She might as well have worked at Blockbuster. People booked their own travel these days.

She hit PLAY on her audiobook. Sloane Ellis would help her help herself.

The agency had been nice, a little place in a high-end strip mall in Pasadena next to a Verizon where she used to flirt with a hot phone guy. He’d given her a secret discount on her phone bill once. Those had been the days—grabbing a coffee or lunch with co-workers and planning tours of Irish castles. That’s how she’d met Phil. He’d planned a vacation for two to Mexico. At the end, he’d asked her to go with him. In retrospect, that was creepy. At the time, she’d really wanted a beach vacation, and Phil had had all of his hair. It had felt like something that would happen in a movie.

Sloane Ellis cut through her feelings like a knife. “Divorce is a new beginning. A rebirth.”

Was it? What was she going to be reborn as? She had an English degree (almost), two kids, and experience buying airline tickets. Her targeted ads were for online therapy, an endless list of vitamins to alleviate PMS, and vibrators. Who knew her better, Sloane Ellis or the algorithm? Of course, it wasn’t up to the algorithm to see her potential. She rinsed a plate and slid it into the dishwasher.

“Stop with the negative self-talk. You might have a prehistoric résumé, stretch marks, and a house you can’t afford, but you can change it all.”

Could she? She scraped a plate of sticky burnt pancake into the trash.

“You are ready for an adventure.”

She ran the garbage disposal. The sound of grinding metal assaulted her ears, and she fished a spoon out of the drain.

“Not just a weekend away, you are ready for the adventure of a lifetime: self-discovery. A rewarding career, romance, parenting, and above all, self-determination. A life of your own.”

Gabby caught a glimpse of her reflection in the window above the kitchen sink and tried to imagine herself as someone else. Her frizzy hair tamed into a sleek style, her skin lasered extensively. What would a freshly lasered Gabby do?

“The first task on your adventure is—”

The sound of the doorbell cut off Sloane’s comforting yet commanding voice. The dog sprang to action, a low rumble in his throat starting as he ran toward the suspected intruder. Gabby tried to block him with her body while she cracked the door. Mr. Bubbles, a persistent devil, ran between her legs like he was a one-hundred-and-fifty-pound rottweiler instead of a ten-pound fluff ball wearing a bow tie.

“Mr. Jonathon Bubbles!” Jonathon was for Lucas’s preschool teacher, whom Lucas idolized because he did balloon tricks and also had a penis. Gabby once had had a short-term relationship with a guy who made balloons, so she couldn’t blame Lucas. She grabbed the dog’s collar while he pawed at the air. “Sorry.”

The mailman asked her to sign for a package and hurried away with a muttered curse. Another legal document from Phil. Damn divorce papers, like they were even in English. She tossed it into the corner without opening it. Then she held Mr. Bubbles high in the air and stared into his unrepentant face. “Mr. Bubbles, you are such an asshole!”

She stopped herself. She was taking out her feelings for Phil on poor Bubbles.

He panted, exhausted from his effort defending his home, and wagged his tail.

Her heart melted, and she smiled at the little asshole. Why did she have such bad taste in men, even dogs?

She grabbed a broom and hit PLAY on the audiobook. “The first task on your next adventure is to assess yourself coldly and objectively. Your physical self, your emotional self, and your potential. Let’s start with physical.”

That was easy, she was twenty-five pounds overweight in a pair of black yoga pants. She took a swig of coffee.

Sloane started in, “Sorry, but you can’t have yoga pants. They are lying to you.”

Gabby choked on her coffee. Had Sloane bugged her house?

“I’m serious. Stop laughing. Your first task is to stand in front of a full-length mirror completely naked. See yourself for who you are and stop lying. Pause the audio, find your workbook, and press play when you’ve stripped down physically and emotionally.”

Shelly across the street had recommended this book to her. Had Shelly stood naked in front of a mirror and cataloged her faults?

It seemed dumb, but if she was really going to try to change her life, she needed to actually try. So far Sloane was the only one with any ideas.

Gabby expelled a breath, grabbed the workbook, and walked upstairs. In her bedroom, she pulled off her sweatshirt and yoga pants. She was still wearing a nursing bra. Lucas was eight. That joke about “easy access” had stopped being funny five years ago. Had Phil ever laughed?

The workbook was a basic drawing of a woman, like the one pathologists used for autopsies, at least TV pathologists. Sloane wanted her to autopsy her old self, catalog her self-esteem’s cause of death. It wasn’t a single, crushing blow, it was a combination of so many little things.

Gabby was game. She was gonna change her life even if she had to count every bright white stretch mark.

“Don’t lie to yourself. Know your advantages and disadvantages. No blame or guilt. Only then can you make a plan.”

She was fully naked and wondering if she should draw a double chin on her sketch—everyone had a double chin from certain angles—when the doorbell rang again.

The mailman must have forgotten a package, hopefully something other than legal documents.

She threw on her robe and hustled.

It wasn’t the mailman. From the landing, she could see two women dressed in black. They looked serious. Not Mormons. Mormon missionaries were always eighteen-year-old boys in button-down shirts and skinny ties their moms had probably bought. Too polished for lawn care people.

Tupperware? Someone on the neighborhood LISTSERV had been hyping Tupperware sales like it was 1977, and Gabby had gone down a rabbit hole. Tupperware came in a lot of colors these days and was part of a strategy for saving the planet by reducing single-use plastic. “Be part of a movement that creates change every day,” the website proclaimed. She had clicked on the link that read, “Embrace your inner entrepreneur,” but then the kids got off the bus, and she hadn’t finished filling out the online form.

If she was going to buy Tupperware, she was going to sell it to herself. Thank you very much for the pep talk, Sloane Ellis! These ladies would have to find some other housewife to sell silicone muffin tins to.

She opened the door resolved to say no politely but firmly so that they wouldn’t ask twice. This time, Mr. Bubbles cowered behind her. Just like Phil, he had a problem with strong women.

“I’m so sorry, but I don’t need any Tupper—” she started to tell the women whose outfits were giving TV cop vibes. They were clearly newbies to door-to-door sales. If they wanted to sell stackable storage containers for yesterday’s spaghetti, they should try to look more approachable.

The short-haired woman waved a badge in Gabby’s face. “Ma’am, we’re with the CIA. Can we come in?”

Thursday, 10:20 a.m., Greene household

What was the CIA doing at her house? Her mind reeled with visions of drug cartels, secret codes, and Claire Danes pursuing the truth at any cost in outfits remarkably similar to the women on her doorstep. She had zero clue, less than zero, what the CIA was doing at her house. Had she called Ted Cruz too many times? Everyone she knew did that. He had been her whipping boy throughout the whole divorce.

“Is this about Ted Cruz?”

The short-haired agent flashed a look of confusion.

Duh. Ted Cruz would be a Secret Service issue. Any woman with a buzz cut didn’t have time for Ted Cruz’s bullshit. She had Clint Eastwood energy.

It was something else… All those cheap products she’d been ordering from suspicious websites for almost nothing. Gabby stood back to let the CIA agents enter. “I know I shouldn’t have ordered that face mask.” It was too good to be true—$3.99, made of gold, and shipped from Russia. It was probably made out of plutonium or cocaine. “I have to stop clicking on my Facebook ads.”

Standing in her entryway next to a pile of kid shoes and backpacks, the agent with Clint Eastwood’s stare said, “My name is Agent Alice Strong, and this is Agent Valentina Monroe.”

Agent Monroe didn’t just look like Sofía Vergara, she had a name to match. Gabby loved Modern Family.

Gabby swallowed a lump in her throat and looked directly at Agent Strong. “What is this about?”

Agent Strong glanced around the entryway that led into a comfy living room. “Where can we talk, ma’am?”

Gabby walked toward the kitchen. “If you don’t mind a mess.” She was starting to shake.

Agent Strong stared pointedly at the coffeepot, and Gabby responded, “I’ll get us some coffee.”

She was about to be interrogated by the CIA in her kitchen wearing nothing but a robe with “MOM” emblazoned across the right breast. They hadn’t even asked a single question yet, and she was sweating like she was forty-five minutes into a spin class. A coffee wouldn’t help, but she shoved the pot under the basket of grounds and flicked the red button to ON.

They stared back.

“Cream and sugar?” she asked.

“No thank you.”

The women looked out of place at the table. Agent Strong peered down her nose at Kyle’s biology homework. Agent Monroe sat in front of a large plastic place mat featuring a cheerful map of the United States complete with cartoon Mount Rushmore in the center and a smiling alligator over Florida. “You’re probably used to more detailed maps,” Gabby quipped.

“Please take a seat, ma’am.” They were telling her to sit down in her own kitchen. It hit her, maybe they were here because someone else was in trouble.

“Is it Phil?” Was he some kind of white-collar criminal and she’d never known it? Last time she’d seen him, she’d barely recognized him in skinny jeans, a tight shirt with a flipped-up collar, and a fake tan with a radioactive glow. The divorce was wearing him.

“Relax, ma’am, and take a seat.”

Gabby moved a lunch box off the chair. In the chaos, Kyle had forgotten the leftover ramen she had begged to take. School lunch was fine for Kyle. Lucas not so much. Between all of his allergies and his gluten intolerance, she needed to take a Xanax to let anyone else feed him. The woman who looked like an honest-to-God Bond girl started pushing papers in front of her. “Please sign here.”

Gabby tried to stop shaking, but her signature came out like her grandmother’s, overly careful but still squiggly. “I got syrup on the paper. Does it matter?” The pages were definitely going to stick together.

Bond Girl blew out a breath, clearly exasperated. “Initial here and add your date of birth, please.”

Gabby didn’t have enough time or focus to read any of the documents. She caught glimpses of words: Nondisclosure, National Security, Secrets, Severe Penalties, Punishment, Jail Time.

She looked at their belts for handcuffs and guns. Who was going to take Kyle to horseback riding tonight if they arrested her?

Alice Strong looked like her name, all hard angles with a severe face, the kind of woman who didn’t ever need help opening jars, the kind of woman who probably didn’t even need to open jars because she only ate takeout at her desk.

Gabby looked between them. “I’m sure whatever I did was an accident. I’m very prone to accidents.” They stared back, and she kept going. “Give me a simple task, and I’m bound to turn it into a national security problem.”

As she laughed nervously at her own joke, the women exchanged a look, and Gabby said, “See. I can’t stop putting my foot in my mouth.” All they needed to do was feed her a few details, and she’d confess to anything.

Gabby started straightening up, making piles of paper that should be recycled, just for something to do with her hands.

Loud and slow, Agent Strong explained, “You’re not in any trouble.”

“Yet,” Valentina said sharply.

Agent Strong cautioned the other agent with a look. In a dead-serious tone of voice, she said, “We’re here to offer you a job.” She didn’t appear to be kidding.

Gabby dropped the paper she’d been straightening down on the table. When she saw it was the schematic of all of her flaws, including the distance between her boobs and her navel (4.5 inches), she snatched it back.

“What?” She couldn’t have heard them right.

“The CIA needs your help.”

Hadn’t they noticed her double chin? “You’re kidding.”

Alice Strong looked at Gabby, the same way Gabby looked at the kids when she was at the end of her rope. “Kidding? This is no laughing matter. We need you.”

Gabby had seen movies where the CIA approached genius college students who knew tae kwon do and had brains like supercomputers. Gabby had just burned pancakes. She was eight credits shy of having an English degree she would never get.

The CIA had interrupted her while she was inspecting a mole on her inner thigh and trying to remember the signs of cancer: irregular edges, color variations, growth. Maybe the CIA needed a mom who could solve problems with a ramped-up anxiety level and mastery of WebMD.

“I do need a job,” she said. “I got divorced recently, and you know how that goes.” She looked up to see two blank faces. Alice and Valentina looked like they had no idea what she was talking about. “I was thinking of something at a department store over the holidays, but I guess, if the CIA wants me.”

Agent Monroe looked like she was trying hard not to roll her eyes.

Agent Strong said, “This is serious, Ms. Greene.”

“But really, I don’t understand. Why on earth do you need my help?” She fingered the corner of Kyle’s biology homework. Kyle had gotten a B minus.

Valentina slid a photograph across the table toward Gabby. “This was Agent Darcy Dagger. We need a replacement for her.”

Gabby didn’t have a sister, but that’s what she would have looked like. They had the same wide-spaced hazel eyes and heart-shaped face. If Gabby had red hair and a better haircut, they could be twins. Although this woman had what Gabby’s grandma would call “a schnoz.”

Gabby could barely focus as Alice went on about facial recognition software. “Facial recognition measures the shape of the face, the distance between features, the similarity of the features themselves, as well as a person’s expressions,” Alice explained. “We did a thorough search of social media profiles to come up with a facial match to Agent Darcy Dagger. Except for the nose, you and Agent Dagger are nearly identical.” Agent Strong scanned Gabby’s face. “You both have that weird little divot in your chin.”

This was surreal.

“The nose isn’t as significant of a difference as it appears. It’s one of the easiest features to disguise. A simple prosthetic will do the trick. A different face shape or smile is much more difficult to hide.”

“You want me to replace Agent Dagger?” Gabby’s world was spinning. She glanced at the clock. Normally she’d be heading to the grocery store or throwing something in the Instant Pot so she could focus on the kids in the evening. Instead the CIA was asking her to replace an agent who did who knows what. In her photo Agent Darcy Dagger looked straight into the camera with a confidence Gabby had never known. Her look said, “I’m ready to save the world, one mission at a time.”

Gabby could make a beer can chicken.

“You’re kidding, right? This is a joke.” If they were still married, she would have suspected Phil. If Alice and Valentina were men, she would expect them to pull off Velcro pants and start singing “Happy Birthday.” Or maybe Ashton Kutcher had started filming Punk’d again. Anything was more likely than the CIA recruiting her.

“What did Agent Dagger even do? Was it hard?”

Agent Strong took a sip of coffee from Gabby’s “World’s Greatest Mom” mug. “Darcy was working undercover to take down a Russian shell company masking itself as an American investment business.”

Shell company—Gabby wasn’t sure if she could use that term in a sentence.

“The company is laundering blood money.”

“When you say ‘blood money,’ you mean someone died?”

“Yes.”

Gabby blinked. The more they talked, the less sense they made.

Agent Strong continued. “They are laundering blood money through the business and sending it back to Russia.”

Gabby tried to put it all together, but it sounded like the two-sentence description of a movie Phil would love. She usually fell asleep or scrolled through social media until she ended up watching a girl slightly older than Kyle give a detailed makeup tutorial. Then she would ping-pong between being upset at the expectations Kyle would have to face and wondering if she should order new mascara.

If she was going to consider working for the CIA—how had that thought even crossed her mind?—she needed to make sure someone was around to help with the kids. Lucas couldn’t make his own after-school snacks yet, and Kyle needed a ride to horseback riding. Bonding with an animal was supposed to help with her self-esteem. Gabby picked up her phone to dial her mom. “Let me just check and see if my mom can come to town and watch the kids after school.”

Valentina reached across the table and grabbed her phone. “Ms. Greene, you don’t understand. You cannot call anyone.”

“What if I can’t find someone to watch the kids?”

Valentina looked her dead in the eye. “Ms. Greene, this is a matter of national security. You absolutely cannot tell anyone anything.”

“But—” These women obviously didn’t understand how difficult it was to find childcare.

Agent Strong leaned forward with her elbows on the table, getting uncomfortably close to Gabby. “If you breathe a word of this, you will be charged with multiple counts of unauthorized disclosure of secrets related to the national defense. I will not hesitate to bring you in.”

“Oh.” She dropped her hands to the breakfast table.

“Can I have an extra day to think?” She didn’t want Kyle and Lucas to grow up without a mom because she joined the CI. . .