Me: Me too. Wish I was still there.
Daniel: Wish u were still here too.(,)
I looked at the pink flyer Aunt Mona gave me. I didn’t want to come between Daniel and his mother. What a disaster. A disaster upon disaster, considering all the events leading up to this morning’s confrontation with Cherry.
Before I met Daniel, my life was a cozy mystery book in a small town with one quiet murder to solve. Now dead bodies were piling up everywhere, a serial killer was on the loose, and I was a brooding detective with a sleep disorder who’d fumbled all the evidence.
A good detective restored order.
So why was I leaving behind a trail of chaos wherever I went?
“There is no terror in the bang, only in the anticipation of it.”
—Alfred Hitchcock,Halliwell’s Filmgoer’s Companion(1984)
25
After a nap and a leftover cinnamon roll heated up in the microwave, things started looking... not exactly rosy, but less dreary. I still didn’t know what to do about Cherry, but Daniel and I texted on and off throughout the afternoon about other things, including what Leon Snodgrass had said to me, which Daniel thought was no big deal.
And maybe it wasn’t. I definitely regretted some of the stuff I’d said to Leon in the heat of the moment. I decided to let it go. I had too many other things to worry about, and I desperately wanted to see Daniel. I was hoping maybe he could meet me at the diner before work, but he was busy finishing some woodworking project for one his neighbors.
Once I got to work, he’d already been dragged into a security meeting with all the other employees who reported directly to Mr. Kenneth. It had something to do with SARG, the animal rights group. They’d staged another protest earlier today, outside the hotel, and this time the local news covered it.
“They dropped a huge banner from the second-floor windows,” Daniel whispered at the side of the registration desk later during a rare interlude, checking to see that no guests or employees were in hearing range. A couple of businessmen lounged on one of the sofas in the middle of the lobby, but they were caught up in their own conversation.
“A banner?” I repeated.
“Apparently, during the protest out front, two of their members checked in under false names in adjoining rooms and hung a banner out the window that said ‘Octavia Is a Prisoner,’?” Daniel explained. “No one in the hotel noticed for an entire hour. Management says SARG is becoming a PR disaster, and we have to watch out for their members. Gotta admit, though—I’m sort of admiring what they’re doing. They have pluck.”
I felt the same way. Just before ten p.m., I’d checked out an entire women’s soccer team, who were taking a red-eye flight back to Chicago, and their manager was fussy about every line item on the bill. They’d also rented five goldfish, and one of the players admitted that she’d knocked over the goldfish bowl and by the time she’d found the fish on the floor under the bed, it was dead, so she’d flushed it.
So, yeah. Maybe the animal rights group had some valid beefs with us.
“By the way,” I said, a little hesitant. “I wanted to ask... How’s your mom?”
“We’re not speaking at the moment.” He glanced at the guilt on my face that I couldn’t hide and added, “Don’t worry. We shun each other when we’re fighting. I always let her make the first move, since she’s supposed to be the adult. Anyway, it’s a ton easier to do when we’re staying in two different houses, so all hail Green Gables.”
He was trying to sound nonchalant. I could recognize it now in the little double swish of his eyelashes. The mannered shrug of his shoulder.
“I’m sorry you’re not speaking,” I said. I felt awful about it.
His lips parted as though he was going to respond, but nothing came out. His eyes roamed over my face for a long moment—so long my heart started racing madly and my chest got warm.
“Want to see a trick?” he asked, digging a deck of cards from the inside of his hotel zip-up jacket. Impossibly quick fingers shuffled the cards and fanned them out for my perusal. “Pick one.”
“Is this a marked deck?”
“You’re not supposed to ask that,” he said, mouth twisting upward. “Spoils the illusion. Just pick one.”
My fingers hovered over the worn blue corners of the cards. I slid one out.
“Don’t show it to me,” he said, flicking the remaining cards back together and palming them. “Just look at it and memorize it.”
I held my hands together, shielding the card from his eyes, and peeked.
“Got it?” he asked.
It was the two of hearts, and over the middle of the card were block letters, written by hand in Sharpie. It said:LOOK UP.
