During one of our post-work pie breakfasts at the Moonlight, I told him about Aunt Mona’s baby. I checked with her first, and she said it was okay to tell him, as long as he kept it secret until she was ready to broadcast it. He was happy for her, but also freaked out about how she got pregnant.
“Whoa,” he said. “I guess life reallydoesfind a way, huh?”
“I thought that was fate.”
“So did I,” he murmured. “Dear God, so did I....”
I wondered if I should get on the pill. Just as a double safeguard. I could handle aunt duty, but that was my limit right now. Maybe my mom was made of stronger stuff than I was. “You don’t want to know what happens when someone gives birth,” I told him, thinking of everything I’d recently learned from all those books Aunt Mona and I read. At this point, I was wondering how any woman ever in the history of time had survived childbirth. Better Mona than me.
By the time Friday rolled around, I’d gotten more used to the idea of Aunt Mona having a baby. My sleep had been more erratic than usual that week, so I was extra spacey, constantly nodding off for several seconds at a time. I never had to lay my head down, or anything. I just kept zoning out, constantly missing several words of any given conversation, which made me frustrated and unusually cranky. And that crankiness is what I blamed when Daniel and I got in a small tiff about going to the opera.
He was getting cold feet about trailing Darke there. He even suggested we should just drop the entire investigation: “We can find something new to investigate. There’s always something weird going on at the hotel. What about the animal rights group? Joseph says he’s almost positive he’s seen SARG members sneaking around the parking garage. Maybe they’re planning another banner drop or some other kind of publicity stunt.”
I didn’t care about the animal rights group. That wasn’t half as interesting as Darke, and besides, we were already committed. “Detectives don’t just give up,” I told him. “We can’t move from case to case without solving anything.”
“I suppose you’re right,” he said. “But if I had to choose between regular Nick and Nora and Nick and Nora Go Wild—”
“You know the real Nick and Nora had both, right?”
“Birdie, my Birdie. I love it that you think they were real,” he said, mouth twisting up. “Fine. We’ll go to the opera.”
Sometimes when people say things, it’s easy to see that their mind is on other things. And that’s what I saw in Daniel. It bothered me a little, but so did a lot of things, including that stupid red-and-yellow framed print I saw in Darke’s house. Where had I seen it before? My mind wanted to connect to something I’d seen when I was younger—at the diner? In our old apartment? That wasn’t quite right. At first I thought maybe it was a logo, but blindly searching for it online only made my eyes swim with beaches and palm trees. Then I thought maybe it was the words below the sunset that had my detective whiskers a-twitching. If I’d only had a few seconds to view the print from another angle, maybe I could have read those words.
I wished I could forget about that stupid framed print, but I couldn’t. And on the night of the opera, on the ferry ride over to the city, I fell asleep in my seat and dreamed that I’d gone back to Darke’s house alone—only to look inside his glass windows and see them turn into the glass of a Houdini water torture cell, and inside, Daniel was drowning. I broke the glass, and as the water streamed out, I caught a glimpse of Darke’s sunset poster again—and tried to focus on the black, swirly mark that was blocking the sun. I saw something in that black mark! But when a foghorn blew in the soupy night air hanging over the Sound, I woke up and couldn’t remember what Dream Me had seen.
Maybe I was just obsessing over something trivial. I tried to put it out of my mind, which was easy to do when I stepped out of the Seattle ferry terminal and saw Daniel waiting for me. He was right about that suit of his. It flattered him. He was polished and pressed, and the suit fit him like a glove. His tied-back hair gleamed under the streetlights.
He was dazzling.
“Jesus, Birdie,” he said with tender eyes. “You look beautiful. Like a dream. Oh shit. Is this a dream? Let me count; hold on.”
“I’ll join you,” I said, smiling, cheeks warm. And we both counted our fingers—one, two, three, four, five.
“All there,” he reported as he touched my flower. “It’s not a lily.”
“It’s a gardenia from our greenhouse. A hybrid called Mystery.”
“For real?”
I nodded. It was the only bloom on the bush, and the white matched my dress, which felt a little like what Daniel would call fate. “It’s my lucky flower,” I told him. “To go with your lucky suit. We should play the lottery tonight. Our chances of winning are astronomical.”
“I think I already won,” he said, kissing my forehead.
I could have stood there with him forever. But we nearly got bowled over by a rude hipster on a bicycle, so we decided to get our lucky selves far away from the terminal. We piled into his car, and he turned on David Bowie. And then we headed out of downtown.
The Seattle Center was home to the World’s Fair in the 1960s. Now it was a sprawling complex that was half grassy pavilion, half tourist attraction—museums, live concerts, and, of course, the Space Needle. The Seattle Opera’s official home, McCaw Hall, was also here, and it looked beautiful at night, its modern glass exterior lit up in purples and blues. And when Daniel and I parked in a garage across the street and strolled over a connecting skybridge that overlooked throngs of people, I was just so happy to be doing something special, I forgot all about everything else.
So much so, in fact, that when we walked under scrims of glass and peered into the entrance—with its enormous modern sculptured chandeliers hanging above operagoers dressed to the nines—I was completely caught up in the fantasy that this was a date. A beautiful, happy date. Prince and princess, out doing glamorous things. It wasn’t until Daniel pointed to a VIP sign that it hit me like a ton of bricks we weren’t on a date at all: We were committing a crime.
Okay, maybe not robbing a bank. I wasn’t even sure if it was considered illegal or just in poor taste to take someone else’s free tickets. But we certainly didn’t belong there, and we were lying like cheap rugs to get inside.
The VIP entrance was segregated in its own little portion of an interior promenade; this was where the big-money patrons entered, the ones who donated large sums of cash to the opera and Pacific Northwest Ballet. They had their own ticket window, coat check, and ushers.
We did not belong here.
You’re undercover, I told myself.Stay calm.
Daniel blew out a long breath and headed straight to the woman running Will Call, confidently informing her that we were part of Bill Waddle’s party, and were we the first to arrive? While they talked, I stood frozen, half zoned out, telling myself that sometimes even the best detectives must bend a couple of small rules to ferret out clues, and this might be the last clue we got on Raymond Darke. So, we weren’t going to waste it, and it was fine. It was all fine. And WHAT WAS I THINKING, COMING OUT HERE? We were going to end up in jail, and who would bail me out? Mona? Cherry?
