There was a fence around the most dangerous part of the garden, high and wrought-iron and very dramatic. Sloane was pretty sure you had to do a lot more than just touch one of the plants inside it to get poisoned, but she couldn’t fault the hotel for not wanting to take any chances.
And Sloane did, in fact, want to touch the plants. Even though she knew they were poisonous and she was more than smart enough to understand that it was a bad idea. She just wanted to see. To make sure. To see what would happen, though she knew it would probably be nothing. With most toxic plants, you had to ingest a pretty good amount before they’d do anything.
But deep down, the thing Sloane always wanted to say was: Prove it.
“Already plotting?” a familiar voice asked, and Sloane turned from where she’d been examining a shiny, red, heart-shaped leaf to see Max standing on the path, dimly backlit and dressed in his ghost-hunting getup.
The getup was not sexy: some kind of harness over his torso with a camera in the middle, a headlamp strapped to his forehead, a fanny pack, and a small duffel bag. Objectively, Max looked like a dork.
Subjectively, Sloane took her time looking.
“Why? Did you do something I should plot about?” she asked. “If I tried really hard and get my botany right, I think I could give you a pretty bad stomachache.”
“If I die of arsenic poisoning, I’ll tell them to look for you first,” he said, walking over and putting the duffel bag down. “Sorry I’m late, but I got all the pictures you wanted. And a few more.”
The first image that Sloane’s brain offered up when Max said pictures was not, alas, of ghostly writing on a wall. It was…adult.
“Arsenic is a metal. It doesn’t come from plants,” Sloane’s mouth said, while her brain went Dick pics??? “Sometimes it’s in plants, but only because they absorb it from ground water.”
Both of Max’s eyebrows went up, scrunching his forehead underneath the head lamp. “You know, I wasn’t worried until right now,” he said.
“You mean you got pictures of the writing on the walls!”
“Did you lick that?” Max was eyeing her with half concern, half suspicion. “What did you think I meant?”
“Nothing,” Sloane lied, instead of saying dick pics. “I’m not licking poisonous plants. And you’re thinking of, like, cyanide and strychnine. Those are in plants. Arsenic is in old green paint.”
“Oh, yeah,” Max said. “I think I knew that.”
“And it bioaccumulates, so it’s a bad poison to use for murder because it’s easy to test for,” Sloane went on, because she was still, a little bit, thinking about what Max’s dick pic would look like, and she didn’t hate it, and maybe a brief talk on How to Be Good at Murdering with Poisons would cover that up.
“Noted,” Max said. “No arsenic. There go my weekend plans. You ready for this?”
“Don’t tell me you were recording me just now, giving murder advice,” she said. “Was this whole trip a setup?”
“Nah. That’s all just between the two of us,” Max said, voice going lower. “Totally secret. You changed your outfit.”
As if she’d never heard of clothes before, Sloane looked down at herself. She’d put on jeans, a long-sleeved top, and a jacket before coming out, because it was cold.
“This works, right? I wasn’t supposed to dress up like it was nineteen ten?”
“It works,” Max said with a smile that hitched higher on one side than the other. “It’s great, unless you want the comments on this to be full of drooling perverts. Then you should’ve worn that robe thing you had on earlier.”
Sloane put her hands in her jacket pocket and tried to look unimpressed, even though she could feel the heat crawling up her neck. Max wasn’t looking at her face. She was fine with that. “You mean my swimsuit coverup?”
“Is that what it was?” Max tried, and failed, to sound innocent.
“Obviously. Only the drooling perverts would like it?”
He shrugged, which shifted the camera strapped to his chest. Sloane tried not to notice the way it made his T-shirt ride up. “Maybe some regular ones, too.”
“So the swim coverup is for perverts. Got it.”
“I didn’t say that,” Max told her, crouching to reach into the duffel bag on the ground. “I said the perverts will comment on the video. The rest of us know how to jerk off without telling everyone about it. Ready?”
Maybe he did mean dick pics, Sloane thought, then ran her hands through her hair and nodded. “What do you need me to do?”
“Want to bat your eyelashes and hang on to my every word?”
