16
If there was, in fact, a huge storm bearing down on the Vineyard, there was no way to know it from the weather the following morning. When I woke up, the sky was a clear, brilliant blue, the heat dry and an occasional breeze rustling the leaves on the trees that ringed the house. Meredith was waiting in the second-floor hallway when I got downstairs, a towel slung over her arm. “Jasper’s been in there for forty-five minutes,” she informed me with a grimace, nodding at the closed bathroom door. “I swear he’s waxing his chest in there just to fuck with me.”
“Nah,” I said with a smile, “he pays to have that done professionally.” I nodded up the narrow staircase. “You can use mine,” I offered, then immediately frowned, trying to remember if I’d left my dirty boxers on the floor next to the shower. “Just be sure to hold down the handle on the toilet if you need to…” I cleared my throat. “Anyway. Um, how’s Greg doing?”
Meredith shook her head. “Mostly the same,” she admitted. “They had him on some medicine to keep him in the coma while they waited for the swelling in his brain to go down, but now theyweaned him off it and were thinking he’d wake up on his own, but…” She trailed off. “It’s just a waiting game, is all.”
That…did not sound good. “I’m really sorry, Meredith.”
“Yeah,” she said, rubbing at her temple, “it isn’t great.”
I hesitated for a moment, both of us standing there in awkward silence. “Meredith,” I said—thinking suddenly of my mom back at home and how she’d made a million different kinds of soups when our neighbor Mrs. Le was in the hospital for a knee replacement, all of them stacked neatly in our crowded freezer in flattened-out Ziploc bags. “Is there, like…anything you need?”
Meredith seemed surprised by the question. “You know something, Linden?” she told me quietly, raking a hand through her knotty red hair. “You’re actually the only person who’s asked me that.”
I thought she might have been about to say something else, but the bathroom door swung open just then—Jasper emerging wrapped in a towel, surrounded by a cloud of steam. “Shit, sorry,” he said, smiling faux-cheerily at Meredith as he sauntered down the hallway toward his bedroom. “Were you waiting?” She lifted her middle finger at his receding back before disappearing inside.
Holiday showed up after breakfast, bearing fancy iced teas and a laundry list of reasons she didn’t think we should give up on the investigation just yet; in fact, what she really wanted to do was double down. “If we learned anything useful last night, it’sthat Topher Leal is more than capable of hurting somebody,” she pointed out. We’d gone into Birdie’s lush green vegetable garden for privacy, nobody around to hear us but the peppers and eggplants. “I think it’s probably worth it to at least try and see if he’s got an alibi for the night of the party.”
“Are you kidding me?” I almost choked on my iced tea. “I don’t want to get anywhere near that guy ever again. And I don’t wantyouto get anywhere near him either.”
“That’s very chivalrous of you,” Holiday said with a smile, “but you can relax. I’m not suggesting we knock on his door in a couple of rakish fedoras and start asking questions.”
“Then what are you going to do, exactly?” I asked. We seemed to have tacitly agreed not to talk about whatever weirdness might or might not have occurred in the car last night—actually, Holiday seemed so exquisitely normal and unflustered that I found myself wondering if maybe I’d imagined the whole thing. “Call up some ferrety IT friend of yours that you’ve conveniently forgotten to mention until now and hack into the motel’s security mainframe?”
Holiday shot me a look. “No, smartass,” she said patiently. “I’m going to go over there, offer the manager a hundred bucks, and see if they’ve got camera footage they’ll let me look at.”
“I—oh,” I said, feeling myself blush at the utter obviousness of it. I ran my thumb over the lid of my cup, which was still mostly full; the iced tea was the herbal kind, and tasted more like dirt than anything I might actually want to consume. “I mean, sure. That’s an option too.”
“I thought so.” Holiday smiled, pleased with herself. Her own cup was empty except for the ice, the tip of the straw bright redfrom her lipstick; I looked at it for a moment, then looked away. “We shouldn’t take my car, though,” she continued thoughtfully. “Just in case Topher is looking out for it.”
I hesitated. I knew Jasper wouldn’t care if I dipped into the August House motor pool, but couldn’t exactly tell him why I suddenly needed a set of wheels.Hey, dude, you mind if I borrow the middle car for a little bit of attempted murder recon? Totally chill.And if I lied and told him I was going out for food or shopping or even just to dick around, there was always the chance he’d want to tag along.
I went to Mrs. Kendrick instead. She was sitting on the patio in a lounge chair, reading a fat pastel hardback with a sticker on the cover bearing the logo of a celebrity book club. I’d been trying to give her a wide berth since the other night in the dining room, but this morning she seemed totally lucid as she nodded in the direction of the house. “Keys are on the hook in the mudroom,” she told me, not even bothering to ask what I needed a car for. “Just be sure to get back before the rain starts—okay, Linden? The radio says it’s going to be ghastly later.”
The hurricane, I remembered suddenly. Birdie had been watching ominous weather coverage on the TV in the kitchen this morning during breakfast, though right now the sky was still mostly clear. “Of course,” I promised. “I’ll be back in plenty of time.”
Holiday and I cruised by the motel parking lot a few times to make doubly sure there was no sign of the red Honda, then pulled up to the curb right in front of the office. “Should one of us stay outside?” I asked as I put the car in park. “To like, be a lookout?”
“He’s not going to come into the office,” Holiday said reasonably. “But if for some reason he does, I’d rather we were together.” Then, as if perhaps she was worried I somehow wasn’t picking up her underlying point: “Like. In front of a witness.”
I tried not to gulp. “Right,” I said, trying to keep my voice neutral. “Totally.”
We found the manager watching YouTube videos on his phone and drinking a Diet Dr Pepper; he was probably in his late twenties, with a spray of painful-looking acne across his jawline and the general air of a person who definitely thought he was destined for greater things than standing behind the desk in a low-end motel all day. “I really shouldn’t,” he said when Holiday explained what we needed and offered him the cash.
“Probably not,” she agreed with a smile that said they were in on this together. She leaned on the counter, tilted her head to the side, and slid the money in his direction. “But who’s going to know?”
In the end he let us look at the tape, the three of us crowded into a small, windowless office off the lobby. The desk was littered with the remains of what I assumed had been his lunch, confetti of shredded lettuce and a half-eaten bag of Funyuns. It smelled like someone had unleashed a cloud of Axe body spray behind the counter at a Subway.
“We’d be looking for late last Friday night or early Saturday morning,” Holiday instructed as the clerk scanned through the grainy footage. Judging by the condition of the property, I’d been half expecting an actual VCR hooked up in some dusty utility closet—or for the clerk to inform us there wasn’t actually anyfootage at all—but instead the three of us were hunched around a computer in the corner, albeit one that looked nearly as old as Holiday and me.
“Sure thing,” the clerk said distractedly, swearing under his breath as he struggled with the ancient rollerball mouse. Then he frowned. “Sorry—why did you say you were interested, exactly?”
I froze—somehow I had not anticipated this, the most obvious of questions—but Holiday was prepared. “We didn’t,” she said sweetly, “but my boyfriend is staying here, and I’m pretty sure he’s cheating on me.” She rolled her eyes with the forbearance of a long-suffering woman wronged. “He was supposed to meet me at a party the other night, and never showed. He said he fell asleep in his room and his phone was on silent, but a friend of mine says she saw him at some dive bar in Vineyard Haven doing body shots with his ex.”
The clerk let out a low whistle. “My last girlfriend cheated on me,” he said mournfully. “It feels like you can’t trust anyone these days. In fact, I saw on this Subreddit that the government—”
“Seriously,” Holiday interrupted, then dug her nails into my arm, nodding at the screen: Sure enough, there was Topher getting out of his car and heading into his hotel room. The time stamp on the screen read a little after 1:30, when Jasper and I had still been cleaning up the yard back at August House. Holiday and I watched in silence as he got himself a soda and some chips from the vending machine, then dug a key out of the back pocket of his jeans and climbed the exterior stairs to the second floor of the building, letting himself into a room at the far end before shutting the door neatly behind him.
