Medical conditions:(1) Deaf in one ear due to Houdini escape trick accident. (2) Distractingly good-looking. (5) Excellent smile. (4) Good kisser. (5) Really good kisser.
Personality traits:Knows lots of card tricks and enjoys performing for people. Gregarious. Maybe not as gregarious toward me as I wish he’d be; sometimes withholds information.
Background:Lives in West Seattle, Alki Beach neighborhood. Mother (Cherry), whom he lives with, was magician’s assistant. Secret woodworking talent; his mother wants him to go to a trade school.
Unsolved mystery:Has a standing appointment for some unknown reason every week. Something happened in high school that is the subject of gossip, but he STILL won’t tell me what it is. Why? (Ongoing investigation.)
A few minutes later Daniel returned with tightly tied bags of takeout that not only Melinda but several others at the hotel had ordered. He handed me a small bag containing a box of egg rolls. “A gift from Annie,” he explained. And I looked out the window to see the woman standing in the doorway of the restaurant. I held up my hand in thanks and she waved in return.
“Does everyone in the city like you?” I mumbled.
“It’s not easy being this awesome,” Daniel said, giving me a smile that held a little shyness in it. And with a van full of Chinese takeout and an undefined agreement between us, we headed back to the hotel, both of us deep in thought. Right before we got there, I remembered a text I’d gotten earlier from Aunt Mona.
“So, hey,” I said. “Remember that Ukrainian art gallery owner I was telling you about? The one my aunt knows? He said he’d take a look at our spreadsheet tomorrow afternoon. Want to come along?”
Daniel’s brow furrowed. “Does he know we stole it from Darke’s hotel room? How much did she tell him?”
“Nothing,” I said, surprised that he was so concerned. “I warned her to keep it on the down-low. We can make something up about why we need it translated.”
His shoulders and brow relaxed in tandem. “Okay. Then, yeah. That sounds good. Excellent, actually. Just let me know where and when and I’ll be there.”
“Truth walks toward us on the paths of our questions.”
—Maurice Blanche,Maisie Dobbs(2003)
18
That “where and when” turned out to be three o’clock the next afternoon in front of the Moonlight Diner.
Aunt Mona—dressed as a 1960sMad Mensecretary, complete with tangerine wig, typewriter nail decals, and cat-eye glasses on a beaded chain—took her boxy Jeep on the ferry and drove us to pick up Daniel there. Standing at the curb on the side of the diner, he spotted us right away. Perhaps it was the life-size smiling skeleton painted on the hood, lying in a field of giant flowers, which covered everything but the car’s windows and tires.
Just a guess.
“Hey, sweet young thing! We’re looking to party,” she shouted from the driver’s seat after rolling down the window. “How much?”
“Oh God,” I mumbled, slumping lower in the passenger seat as I scanned the sidewalk to make sure no one else heard that.
But Daniel just grinned. “I’d do almost anything for a slice of pie.”
“It’s true,” I confirmed.
“Lucky for you, we’ve got a dozen apple pies in the back seat,” she said. “Get in.”
The sky was overcast, but it wasn’t drizzling as we headed north toward Lake Union. And that’s about how I felt things were with me and Daniel at the moment. He was cheery and friendly toward Aunt Mona, gushing about her car and asking a million questions about it as he sat in the middle of the back seat, leaning between our seats to talk. And he was cheery enough toward me. But there was something I couldn’t put my finger on that wasn’t quite right. Maybe it was the same thing he accused me of during Clue for Couples: an invisible barrier had been erected between us.
Or perhaps I was just being overly sensitive.
Mr. Sharkovsky, the man we were meeting, lived on an eastern arm of Lake Union called Portage Bay. It had a large enclave of floating homes—actual moored houses that didn’t move, not houseboats. The most famous of those houses was Tom Hanks’s home inSleepless in Seattle, but that was on the western side of the lake. Here, Aunt Mona took her car down a series of hilly, mazelike streets through a residential neighborhood that dead-ended near the water. We turned into a drive that snaked between several upscale homes tightly packed around the waterfront, and near the end of the drive, we parked in one of three private spaces.
“That’s his, there,” she said, unbuckling her seat belt.
Sharkovsky’s floating house was slate gray—a three-story, boxy building that was modern with Easternshoji-style windows that looked as if they were made of translucent paper. Very posh, very stylish. Very art dealer.
As we exited Mona’s car, she answered an annoying ringtone, and while she was telling someone on the other end of the call in a hushed voice that she couldn’t talk, Daniel nudged my shoulder with his.
“Hey,” he murmured. “I thought we were doing this alone. You know. Nick and Nora. Not Nick and Nora and Mona.”
I blinked at him, a little confused, as a chilly wind blew off the lake and scattered my hair in my eyes. Did he think this was another date, or something? “I said in my text we’d pick you up at the diner.”
