by Audrey Keown
“So who was around the night of the leak?” George put on his blinker and turned onto Third Street.
“Right. That’s a good question … Let’s see, it happened just before Clyde and Renee and the Trumans—Autumn and Tom—checked in. Furnell Rogers and his son Parker got here earlier that afternoon, and so did the two older women—Velvet and Deena. I think Mr. Wollstone was already here too, and a family with kids … I can’t remember their names.”
“That’s already a long list,” he said.
“And then you can’t rule out the people who aren’t staying at the hotel, like Clyde’s ex-wife or Selena. Either of them could have snuck in to create the leak.” There was a hidden passage leading from the drawing room to the men’s room. It had been secret at one time but was known to pretty much everyone now as one of the eccentricities of the place.
“Sneaked,” he said.
I rolled my eyes emphatically.
“That’s a lot of possibilities.” He sighed.
“Do you think I can even get to the bottom of this?” I said. “They’re all going home tomorrow. I won’t be able to find out much more after that.”
“You’ll do it,” he said. The way he said it, I believed him.
When we reached the hotel, George parked in the staff lot, and as we cut through the line of trees edging the eastern garden, I realized that I no longer thought of my mother every time I came this way—the numbing force of repetition, perhaps, or maybe a result of the work I’d been doing in therapy. Was it ironic that in realizing that I wasn’t thinking about her, I was thinking about her?
We passed Mr. Zhang, on his knees, dividing the feathery hay-scented ferns that edged the tree line.
“Hang on a minute,” I said to George.
“That’s all right. I need to check something in the kitchen. I’ll meet you in the storage room.”
“Perfect. You can bring me back some kind of snack.” I knelt down by the gardener on the gravel path. “Hi, Mr. Zhang.”
The old man grunted, and his ears moved as if they too were disturbed by my interfering.
“I hate to interrupt,” I continued. “But I wondered if you, as the person around here who spends the most time in the garden—”
He glanced up.
“—if you’ve seen graves with the names Hortensius and Mary Morrow?”
“Graves?” He stabbed his trowel into a clod of roots and soil.
“Yes, you know, the memorials? The inscriptions on the statues?”
“Mm, no. I don’t pay any attention to the names. The life of the dead is set in the memory of the living,” he said ardently.
“Cicero?”
“Yes.”
Ha. I was finally catching on. I was sure Mr. Zhang was pleased, but he only grunted as I said good-bye.
The phantom of Mr. Fig had lingered in every room of the hotel ever since his arrest but haunted the servant hall especially as I made my way to the elevator.
At the jail, he’d said that the Morrow family used to host special dinners for college students, something about fellowships or scholarships, and that there were a lot of photos of that kind of thing in the storage room.
He’d also told me where to find a key to the elevator’s key box and therefore to the storeroom, not knowing I’d already had to break into the elevator box once.
Now that I thought about it, I didn’t feel guilty about keeping that one detail from him when he’d kept so much from me. His many charming mysteries, which I had always interpreted as stemming from his care for my family and the estate, looked like plain old secrets at the moment.
And yet, I wondered if that was just my disillusionment talking.
I wiped my face with my hand. I needed to refocus. I was the only one who had all the pieces.
The elevator opened, and I stepped in. I found the nickel I’d used to wedge the key cabinet shut, pinched the edge of it, and worked it out of the crack. The little door squealed open.
I felt heavier all at once. My feet pressed into the floor.
Someone had called the elevator.
Quickly, I closed the cabinet and slid the nickel back into place. It fell out again and landed on the floor. The cabinet door sprang open.
The elevator stopped, and the doors slid back. Clarista stood before me in the entry hall, flashing a look of surprise that quickly fell again. Her smooth brow lowered to darken her eyes, and her fists went to her hips.
I held my breath. “Clarista. Everything okay?”
“No, everything is not ‘okay.’ ” She stepped back and gestured clearly that I should join her.
All I wanted to do was get downstairs, but the way her lips had gone strangely thin and the fact that she had just followed a subject with a predicate without hesitation terrified me.
I stepped out into the hall and glanced around for some clue as to what I’d done wrong.
“Did you—and I know you did, so don’t say you didn’t—remove Renee Gallagher’s possessions from this hotel?” She clasped her hands and steepled her pointer fingers at me to stress each phrase.
Apparently, indignation was all the fuel she needed to propel her sentences directly to their ends.
“Yes,” I said. “I thought I was only returning Clyde’s things to him.”
“How dare you assume that was your job? You didn’t know if police cleared those items to be removed. You didn’t know if they were his. And you apparently didn’t know how to ask permission.”
“I’m so sorry. You’re absolutely right. I’ll fix it.”
“That’s right, you will. Since you know so much about where he’s staying and how to get a hold of him, you can get the things back. Today.”
“Absolutely, I will.” Ugh. That meant yet another drive up the mountain, but if I could find an incriminating photo of Clyde before then, I could make the trip do double duty. “Thank you for giving me a chance to make things right.”
“This doesn’t begin to make things right.” Her copper eyes seemed lit from behind. “You’ve put the hotel in jeopardy. Someone from her family could still sue us. You better hope and pray that doesn’t happen.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And the only reason I haven’t fired you already is because we’re shorthanded with Mr. Fig gone.”
“Yes, ma’am.” She stood waiting for me to leave with a look on her face that said I’d better get myself moving. I didn’t dare pass her to get to the elevator.
I turned toward the desk to find Doyle beaming as if he’d just been gifted a year’s supply of cotton candy. “Well, well, well.”
I blew past him to see if George was still in the kitchen.
He was up to his elbows at the sink, scrubbing a cutting board like his life depended on it. With a liberal dose of bleach, judging by the stinging of my nose.
I cleared my throat. “Ready to go?”
“Sorry. Yes, please.” He rinsed his hands and dried them. “Take me away from this.”
As we passed the stove on our way out of the kitchen, a little experiment occurred to me. “Hang on.”
I turned the knob to light the nearest gas burner.
“What are you doing?” George looked like he was wondering if I was going to burn myself on purpose this time.
“Just a little test.” I pulled one of the loose strands of hair that I’d gathered from the Achilles settee out of my pocket.
If it was real hair, it would catch fire and burn quickly to the end, but if it was a cheap wig filament, it would melt.
I leaned over and held the strand up to the flame. The end caught fire for half a second, and the rest of the strand softened and fell into a liquid squiggle on George’s white stove top.
“Um …” George said.
I straightened up and looked at him. “I think Clyde is telling the truth.”
When we got to the elevator, it responded immediately to the call button. I hoped that meant no one had been inside while the key cabinet was open.
“Clarista’s ready to fire me,” I said as we stepped inside.
“I heard. Sorry.”
“Is it me, or does she make a lot more sense when she’s angry?”
He laughed sardonically. “This is the first time you’ve seen her that way, isn’t it?”
“It’s jarring.”
“I know. You’ll get used to it.” He handed me a small paper bag full of chocolate-covered bacon.
“Wow, thanks.” I stuck a piece in my mouth and kept talking anyway. “I hope I won’t have the chance. Coherent Clarista is terrifying.”
He laughed. “Reminds me of Bea, you know?”
“Oh yeah?” I took a breath.
“The way she’s usually so casual, but then when she talks about anything scientific, her language gets so technical and specific.”
I reached in for another bite of the sweet, salty bacon. “This is amazing. Did you just have it lying around?”
“Just something I’m experimenting with. Clarista’s thinking of beefing up the weekend cocktail hour.”
“Beefing it up or baconing it up?” I asked, and got a smirk in response.
When we reached the storage room, I used the hard-won key to let us into the dim, utilitarian space again.
“So you’re hoping that if you go to Clyde with definitive proof he’s been here before, he’ll fess up to whatever secret he’s hiding?”
“Pretty much.” I wiped any trace of chocolate from my fingers, located the box that Mr. Fig had told me about, and pulled several heavy, leather-bound albums from its depths.
There were three labeled Staff, one for the years 1911 to 1940, the second for 1941 to 1970, and the last simply reading 1971–.
A world of loss was represented by that small dash.
There was no ending year, because my family had never finished filling the album. They had lost the house and never taken another staff photo after 1987.
I pressed my fingers to the corners of my eyes, trying to stop the hurt from coming out.
“Yeah.” George put a firm hand on mine.
“It’s like … it’s a lot easier to think about two or three generations back, but when it comes to my mom’s own story …”
“You realize it hurts too much?” he asked.
I nodded, then swallowed, gathered myself, and found an album of events including the early eighties.
We flipped through, marveling at the puffy sleeves and the puffy hair. It was hard not to get deeply distracted.
Several of the photos were accompanied by newspaper clippings describing the events.
“Here’s 1983. We’re getting there,” George said.
“We have to scan more carefully now. We don’t know exactly what Clyde looked like then.” But in a few more flips, we’d found him. He wasn’t hard to pick out, being one of those men whose boyish face was only covered by a thin veil of laugh lines and extra pounds.
“Wow, that’s him, right?” George said.
“Definitely.”
A small group of people in staff uniforms and formal wear posed on the terrace, several clearly college aged. Someone had thought it was funny to have some of the maids sitting on the young men’s knees. (Le sigh.)
I punched George lightly in the arm. “Look at Mr. Fig!”
He reminded me of Robert Redford à la The Natural, handsome and still redheaded, maybe in his early thirties.
George leaned in. “He was young once.”
My grandparents bookended the group. I could see my mother in my grandfather’s high cheekbones, in the rigid bend of his nose, but nowhere else in the photo.
She would have been a teenager when this photo was taken. Maybe she was out at an event of her own.
I thought of taking time out to flip through the album and look for her, but these were events—garden parties, dinners, dedications. The family photos were in another book.
And I had to stay on track.
A copy of the dinner photo with Clyde in it was featured in the newspaper clipping on the next page. I lifted the plastic film and took the article, leaving the original photo in place. “Okay, let’s go.”
“Hey, by the way,” George said as we stepped into hall. “The cellar door doesn’t look bad to me.”
I winced. “You should see the other side.”
I’d told him in the car how I had managed to get the door off its hinges and back on again. There were definitely scratches and gouges along the trim from where I’d attacked it with the mallet in my escape.
“Eh, I can probably do a little work on it before Fig gets back.” George had picked up some woodworking skills from his dad.
I knew I could trust him to fix it. “That would be amazing. Thanks.”
Thinking of my escape and the hurry I’d been in triggered an idea. Until now, I’d been assuming the killer would have thrown out whatever clothing had ripped on that nail in order to destroy any incriminating evidence, but what if in their hurry to flee the scene, they’d been as distracted as I was? What if they hadn’t noticed their clothing being ripped at all? What if a torn shirt was hiding in one of the guests’ suitcases here in the hotel?
On our way back upstairs, I realized that, with the gravestone groupies checking out tomorrow, tonight would be my last chance to search their rooms. It wasn’t my shift or my responsibility to do turndown though, so I’d have to get creative.
“Hey,” I said. “Before we go, I need to take advantage of everyone being away at dinner.”
A few minutes later, I waited for my cue behind the green baize door to the entry hall, cracking it open a smidge so that I could hear.
“Hey, Doyle,” George said at the desk. “I’ve, uh, got some leftover muffins that I need to get rid of.”
I grinned. He sounded like an illegal pastry dealer.
“Muffins? What kind?” I could picture Doyle’s suspicious eyes.
“Blueberry.”
“Really? Just blueberry? Nothing weird in there?”
“Nothing weird,” George said convincingly.
“Pepper? Some kind of herb? Coconut flour?”
I smiled to myself. Doyle’s suspicions weren’t entirely off base.
“None of the above.” George said as the swinging door to the kitchen creaked and Doyle’s footsteps retreated.
I didn’t waste any time darting to the desk to help myself to the master set of room keys. Doyle would look for them for turndown service soon, but I needed them more.
I made my way first to Leonard Chaves’s room and left the door unlocked for George to follow. Each of the guest rooms was themed around a different color palette, which as far as I could tell was left over from the way it had been decorated by my family.
The Homer Room was all in green, the shade the old poet had used to describe honey. Ancient Greeks perceived color absurdly. They didn’t even have a word for pure blue, and they had been surrounded by it.
A pair of Leonard’s worn-looking brown loafers stood sentinel on the Persian rug at the end of the bed. I looked for his suitcase under the inlaid table by the window where guests would often stash one but didn’t find it until I checked the bathroom.
George popped in just as I got to the unmentionables.
“Perfect timing,” I said. “There’s a pair of plaid boxers here that you can look over for tears.”
He groaned. “C’mon, now. Surely you can tell on sight whether they match what you found.”
“Sorry, too close to tell.” I smirked.
Upon further inspection, the boxers were in excellent condition, and given that they were Leonard’s only plaid item, we moved on.
As soon as we stepped out of the room, I heard someone swear. I looked around for a foul-mouthed foe.
It was Doyle on the other side of the gallery that rimmed the second-floor suites, bending over to pick up a key he’d dropped in front of the Romulus Room. Without benefit of the key ring I’d borrowed, he was wrangling all the loose ones.
I chuckled inwardly as I pu
lled George out of Doyle’s line of sight toward the Alexander Room, where Tom and Autumn Truman were staying.
The couple was becoming more suspicious to me all the time, but they seemed at odds, keeping things from each other. If they had something to do with Renee’s death, I found it unlikely that they were in it together.
“You do his, and I’ll do hers,” I said to George when we’d locked the door of the suite behind us.
We began our careful rifling of their clothing. Autumn had unpacked hers into the Chippendale tallboy dresser. She wore mostly timeless linens, pale silks, that sort of thing. I didn’t find any plaid, and I hadn’t expected to.
“Um,” George said, bending over Tom’s bag. “It’s not what we’re looking for, but it’s suspicious.”
He held up a few Ziploc bags of pills.
I came over to take a look. The pills didn’t match the ones I had found in Selena’s desk, but they were in the same kind of sandwich bags. “Oh, very suspicious.”
These were blue and said DAN 5620. I’d run a Google search on that when I wasn’t in a hurry.
“And the hoard of packaged food in here is just about immoral,” George said, kneeling by the suitcase again and holding up handfuls of snack-sized Doritos, Little Debbies, and beef jerky.
I laughed.
He twisted his mouth and put everything back. “I’m starting to feel really weird about this.”
“I know.” I helped him zip the suitcase.
“It’s unethical.” He sank back on his knees.
“I know. Honestly, I’m surprised I was able to rope you into it in the first place.” I frowned. “But it’s a means to an end.”
We checked that the couple’s bags were back in place and, without having found even a square of plaid, made our way out of the room.
I wasn’t surprised that George took issue with my methods of investigation, but I didn’t have the same options the police did for getting warrants and doing this properly. He wasn’t wrong, but I was desperate. “You don’t have to keep helping me, though, if you don’t feel good about it,” I said, standing on the threshold.
