Chapter 5: The Siren's Call

Chapter 5: The Siren's Call

A month had passed. August hung heavy and humid over the city, the kind of heat that made asphalt soft and tempers short. For Miranda Croft, it was the summer of her complete undoing. For Alex Vance, it was the summer she became a general.

Her small apartment had transformed into a war room. A cheap whiteboard, commandeered from a campus dumpster, was covered in a spiderweb of names, dates, and legal statutes. Stacks of printed documents—labor codes, health regulations, corporate filings for every Sunny Smiles franchise in the state—formed precarious towers on her floor. Her encrypted group chat now included not just her original team, but a dozen other counselors from three different locations, a silent, digital army awaiting orders.

The financial bleeding at Sunny Smiles had become a hemorrhage. The initial chaos Alex had sown had festered into a full-blown crisis of confidence. The parent Facebook group was a raging inferno of one-star reviews and demands for refunds. Leo’s parents, armed with the knowledge of Miranda's negligence, were threatening a lawsuit. With her veteran staff gone and only a handful of hastily-hired, inexperienced teenagers to replace them, camper enrollment had plummeted. Miranda was drowning, and she knew exactly who was holding her head under the water.

Alex was reviewing a wage claim from the Northwood location when her phone buzzed. A blocked number. Her stomach tightened. It could be anyone, but she had a feeling. After four weeks of silence, the beast was finally stirring. She let it ring three times, took a deep, centering breath, and answered, setting her phone to record the call.

“Hello?” she said, pitching her voice to sound uncertain, weary.

“Alex? Alex, honey, is that you?”

The voice was a grotesque parody of warmth, a syrupy, honeyed tone that Alex had never heard from Miranda Croft. It was the sound of a predator trying to mimic the call of its prey. The siren’s call.

“...Miranda?” Alex feigned surprise, allowing a tremor of anxiety into her voice.

“Oh, thank goodness I reached you,” Miranda cooed, a strained, artificial relief in her voice. “Listen, I know we’ve had our… disagreements. This whole summer has just been a terrible, terrible misunderstanding. I’ve had a lot of time to think, and honestly, I just want to make things right.”

Alex remained silent, letting the cloying sincerity hang in the air. In her mind, she was cross-referencing Miranda’s words with chapters on witness tampering and coercion.

“I know you’re under a lot of stress, dear,” Miranda continued, her voice dripping with faux empathy. “Your doctor’s note said so. And I feel just awful about that. Truly. And poor Fatima… I was just so distraught about the little boy, Leo, that I completely overreacted. It wasn’t her fault. I see that now.”

Liar, Alex thought, her grip tightening on the pen in her hand. You’re only sorry you got caught.

“So, here’s what I’m proposing,” Miranda said, getting to the heart of it. “I want to pay you, and Chloe, Ben, and Sarah, for the entire rest of the summer. Everything you would have earned. And for Fatima, I’ll give her full severance and a bonus. A little something for the, you know… pain and suffering. Let’s call it a thousand dollars each. A clean break. Everyone gets paid, and we can all move on with our lives.”

The offer was designed to be the perfect bait for a group of broke college students. It was more money than they could ever hope to win in a protracted labor dispute, and it was immediate. It was an appeal to their exhaustion and their empty bank accounts. It was generous to the point of being suspicious.

“I… I don’t know, Miranda,” Alex stammered, playing the part of the overwhelmed student. “That’s… a lot of money. What about Fatima’s complaint with the Department of Labor?”

“Oh, that silly thing!” Miranda laughed, a brittle, tinny sound. “That’s part of the deal, of course. We just sign a little paperwork, a standard release form saying everything’s settled, and the complaint gets withdrawn. Simple. And I’ll even write every single one of you a glowing letter of recommendation. I’ll say you were the best counselors I ever had.”

There it was. The trap. The NDA and the release of all claims. She wanted them to sign away their rights, nullify Fatima’s legal leverage, and bury the whole affair for a few thousand dollars. And she needed something else, too. Alex knew what it was before she even said it.

“There’s just one little thing I’d need from you, Alex,” Miranda said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “That silly camp Google Drive. I seem to have been locked out of it. Some kind of technical glitch. I just need you to restore my access so I can process the payroll. It is company property, after all.”

The "company property" that contained years of her documented negligence. The incident reports she’d hidden, the safety violations she’d ignored. She wasn’t trying to process payroll; she was trying to destroy evidence.

This was the moment Alex had been preparing for. It was time to feign weakness, to make the predator believe it had cornered her.

“The Google Drive…” Alex said, letting her voice fill with manufactured panic. “Oh god, I don’t know… I don’t want to get in any more trouble.”

“You won’t be in trouble, honey,” Miranda crooned, sensing victory. “You’ll be helping. Helping everyone get paid. Just give me back my files, sign the paper, and this all goes away. Everyone walks away happy.”

“And Fatima gets paid too? The back pay and the bonus?” Alex asked, making it sound like she was trying to rationalize her surrender.

“Of course! My word is my bond,” Miranda said smoothly.

Alex took a slow breath, letting the silence stretch for a full ten seconds. She made a small, broken sound, something between a sigh and a sob. “Okay,” she whispered, infusing the single word with all the defeat and exhaustion she could muster. “Okay, Miranda. I… I just want this to be over.”

A wave of palpable relief came through the phone. Miranda’s voice became brisk, business-like, the false sweetness already evaporating. “Excellent. I knew you were a sensible girl. I’ll have my lawyer draft the agreement and—”

“Wait,” Alex interrupted, her voice still small, but with a new edge of fear. “I… I can’t just take your word for it. My dad, he… he said I should never agree to anything without seeing it in writing first.” She was inventing a legally savvy father on the spot, a perfect excuse for a cornered person to make a logical demand. “Could you… could you just email me the offer? All of it? The amounts for everyone, the back pay, the bonus for Fatima, the letter of recommendation… everything you just said. So I can show my dad. Please?”

The request was so perfectly naive, so utterly guileless, that Miranda couldn’t possibly see the steel trap hidden beneath it. To her, it was the last, pathetic squeak of her victim. An email would make it seem more official, more likely to convince the others. Her arrogance wouldn't let her see the danger.

“Of course, dear. That’s perfectly reasonable,” Miranda said, her condescension returning. “I’ll type it up and send it over right now. You’ll have it in five minutes.”

“Thank you,” Alex breathed, as if a great weight had been lifted. “Thank you, Miranda.”

She hung up the phone.

The mask of the frightened student vanished from her face, replaced by a cold, predatory smile. She looked at her whiteboard, at the sprawling map of Miranda's vulnerabilities. The phone call wasn’t a peace treaty. It was a confession. A verbal agreement was worthless in court, but a written offer to pay for “pain and suffering” in exchange for withdrawing a formal labor complaint and returning “company property” that was actually evidence?

That was Exhibit A. It was an admission of wrongdoing, a blatant attempt to obstruct a government investigation, and a clear-cut sign of guilt. Miranda, in her desperate attempt to trick Alex into a fatal misstep, had just handed her the gun, the bullets, and a signed confession.

Five minutes later, as promised, her laptop pinged with the arrival of a new email.

The subject line read: Our Agreement.

Alex opened it. And began to draft her reply—not to Miranda, but to the investigator handling Fatima Al-Jamil’s case at the Department of Labor.