“That’s... interesting? I mean, the housing concept.”
“It’s cool when you want a free meal in the common house. It’s not cool when you want to crank up music and chill, because one of the crotchety community elders will come over and tell you toturn it down, sonny boy!” he said in a cartoonish old-man voice. “And then you’ll be shamed in the monthly residents’ meeting. But whatever. It’s fine. I save money. I just have to listen to my mom trying to get me to go to fake school.”
“What’s fake school?”
“I’m not built for college. It’s a boring story.” He gave me a dismissive shrug and sighed. “Anyway, I just wish Alki Beach wasn’t so far from work.”
“I can see it from my house.”
“You can?”
“On clear days,” I amended. “I canjustmake out the lighthouse on Alki Point.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
He laughed. “I love how prim and proper you sound when you swear. It’s adorable. So, if I stand by the lighthouse and wave, you could see me?”
“It’s like five miles across the water, or whatever, so no. But I can see Mount Rainier on clear days.”
“So cool. I’ve only been to Bainbridge Island once. My family wanted to see the Japanese memorial wall.”
I intended to tell him that I’d been to the opening ceremony for the wall but was interrupted when our server reappeared. She’d brought a carafe of coffee, a cup of hot tea, a plate of hash browns, and a shamefully large slice of pie. I kept my head down while she distributed everything and poured coffee for Daniel. When Shonda left, I extricated the limp bag of tea leaves from my cup and concentrated on inverting the ketchup over my hash browns, watching its snail-slow descent down the bottle’s neck.
“You have to smack it with the heel of your hand,” Daniel said.
I glanced at him over the ketchup bottle. “I’ll do it my way, thank you.”
He snorted, smiling, and after a moment drawled, “S-o-o-o. Did you talk to Mr. Kenneth in the security room?”
My heart sped. “I did.”
“And you saw the footage from the elevator.”
“Yep.”
“And? What do you think?”
I tilted the ketchup bottle and gave it one shake. “I’ll tell you when you tellmehow you know this man is actually Raymond Darke.”
“It’s eating you up, isn’t it? I can tell.”
“You can’t tell.”
“I can. Good magicians need to be able to pick up on nonverbal clues to be able to guess how their mark will react, and I don’t mind saying that I’m pretty fucking good at it. You try to be all cool and collected, but I can read you like a book, Birdie Lindberg. Whenever we talk about mysteries, you get really alert and your eyes do this funny, squinty thing.”
“That’s my Nancy Drew face,” I said, feeling a little sheepish. “That’s what Aunt Mona calls it.”
He grinned and pointed at me over the table. “Aha! So I was right.”
“Maybe.”
“Tell me I’m right. I need to hear it from your lips,” he said, and it almost sounded flirty.
Or maybe I was just remembering how it was between us the day we met.
“First tell me how you know it’s Raymond Darke,” I insisted.
