“If I say no, will you huff and puff and blow my house down?”
“No, but I’ll wait here for hours until you feel sorry for me and let me in.”
I opened the door and held out an arm, gesturing for him to enter.
“Jesus, Birdie. This neighborhood is...” He finished by whistling. “Are these, like, million-dollar homes, or what?”
I pointed toward the house next door. “Thatis a million-dollar home. What we have is a fixer-upper. We barely have modern plumbing.”
He took off his shoes and set them by the door while looking around the living room. “I like it. Very homey. I saw the greenhouse outside and the koi pond.”
“No koi for a couple of years, so I suppose it’s just a pond now.”
“Guess you don’t need it since you’ve got the entire Sound in your backyard,” he said, looking through the kitchen at the view through the back windows. “Holy shit. Mount Rainier looks huge out here. One day it’s going to erupt, and we’ll all be dead.”
“Not from lava. The earthquakes will kill us first.”
“I was hoping to be preserved like Pompeii. What’s the point of living near a volcano just to be killed by an earthquake?”
He padded into the kitchen, and I followed. It was so strange to have him here in my house. I couldn’t stop looking at him while he surveyed our beach.
After a while, he noticed. “It’s okay that I’m here, right?”
“Of course. I’m happy you’re here.”
“Your grandfather—”
“Is still in Yakima,” I said.
“I mean, he wouldn’t want to bite my head off that I was here?”
“He wants to meet you. And he’s pretty easygoing. Also, he’s not here, so it doesn’t matter, does it?”
Daniel chuckled. “Guess not.”
“So?”
“So...,” he repeated. “We’re both off today. Did you have any plans?”
“Zero plans. You?”
“Also zero.”
I nodded, and he got quiet. So I said, “We could work on our case? I mean, the spreadsheet is a dead end right now, but maybe there’s something else we haven’t thought about.”
“You have any ideas since we talked about it in the diner? I can’t figure out how we pick up the thread if Darke isn’t coming into the hotel anymore. Only thing I can think to do is try to go to Kerry Park again and trail him.”
I didn’t like that idea. He already nearly caught us once, and obviously there were cops patrolling that street. Then something hit me. “Maybe there’s another way to get a different angle on this. Do you still have that video you took of Darke entering the hotel room?”
“Yeah, on my phone,” he said, patting the pocket of his jeans.
“Excellent. We’ll need to—well, it’s probably easier to do on my laptop.” I headed into the living room and remembered it wasn’t there. “My laptop’s upstairs,” I said, suddenly self-conscious that it was in my bedroom. I started to suggest he wait in the living room, but he was oblivious.
“Lead the way,” he said.
Feeling as if I had an entire hive of wasps buzzing around in my belly, I took the stairs two at a time. Daniel’s heavier footfalls thumped behind me as we breezed across the landing into my room.
“Oh, wow,” Daniel said, making me jump. His head turned as he looked around. “This isCasa de Birdie, huh? Did Mona paint all those? She showed me all the paintings in the theater. I see Sherlock. Who’s that with the mustache?”
