Foul Play on Words

by Becky Clark

  While waiting for the elevator, I hummed the silly advertising jingle for Glu-Pocalypse, the epoxy everyone in the world had in their junk drawer and which had served to implicate me in the murder of my agent. I tried to get the tune out of my mind, but it was insidious, as all good advertising jingles are, and I simply couldn’t help myself. I jutted my hips side to side to punctuate the final “Glu-Poc-A-Lypse!”

  The elevator dinged on the final syllable. As I stepped inside, so did a man carrying a briefcase. It startled me and freaked me out a bit. He’d come out of nowhere! Had he seen me dancing to music in my head?

  “Going down?” My finger hovered above the panel of buttons.

  He glanced over. “Same.”

  With everything going on, I wasn’t sure if I was being paranoid or prudent, but I plastered myself against the far side of the elevator.

  At least he ignored me instead of turning into one of those creepers standing too close, or worse, telling me I’d be prettier if I smiled. Or worse yet, calling me “ma’am” again.

  I felt myself getting angry even though he’d done none of those things. I was so relieved when the elevator opened at the lobby. I guess I should have thanked him for chasing the Glu-Pocalypse song from my head.

  When I stepped out, my nose tingled with the scent of wet dog. It wasn’t overpowering but floated at the periphery of my senses. More alarming was the large crowd of writers milling about. How did I know they were writers? Because every single person in the lobby not attached to a dog was attached to a notebook, binder, or computer of some kind.

  Clementine passed by in today’s hipster costume of miniskirt over strategically torn red tights, Uggs, and oversized man’s tuxedo shirt cinched with a wide, stretchy, faux animal-print belt. I gave her a wave and a wide smile. She gave me a wave and a grimace. My campaign of earning a smile from her was failing miserably. She rounded up a wayward group of writers and hauled them away, presumably to put them to work.

  I found a table at the back of the restaurant, where I desperately wanted to sit with my back toward the lobby, hiding until after my pancakes and coffee kicked in. Unfortunately, my father had impressed upon me at a very tender age the police officer’s habit of sitting with their back to a wall so they could survey a room in its entirety. I did the same. Couldn’t change even if I wanted to.

  The man with the briefcase was being led to a table for four. After he sat, he opened up a newspaper and walled himself off. I thought about Billy the PI doing this same thing and wondered if my mom had sent another mercenary to watch over me. After everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, I wouldn’t be so cavalier about dismissing his help.

  While the server poured my coffee, I ordered pancakes with bacon and two scrambled eggs. The grammatically horrifying menus had disappeared and I crossed my fingers that the hotel had either hired a new chef or Jerry had stepped up his game.

  A woman kissed the man with the briefcase and sat down next to him. He set his newspaper aside and gave her his full attention. Clearly not surveilling me.

  I was on my own once again, so I considered the events of the last two days.

  It was absolutely clear to me now that Hanna’s “kidnapping” was nothing of the sort. Everything pointed to Viv’s activities rather than Hanna’s. I was sure Hanna was perfectly safe kayaking through the Columbia River gorge, or at some music festival in Bolivia, or happily trapped on Tom Sawyer’s Island at Disneyland. But I couldn’t figure out why Viv thought it was a good idea to manipulate me in whatever nefarious financial plot she was devising. Our friendship was strong, but probably not embezzlement-abetting strong.

  Was I her alibi? Scapegoat? Diversion?

  And what did she need so much money for, if it wasn’t for some bogus ransom? Could her debt to the IRS really be six figures?

  Maybe Hanna had gone back to rehab.

  My breakfast came and I immediately crunched an entire strip of bacon, practically weeping with joy at its perfection. Maybe today wouldn’t be terrible. After wiping delightfully greasy fingers on my napkin, I used the internet browser on my phone to search for the ReTurn a New Leaf website. No costs were listed for their rehab treatment plans. I guessed it was like wondering about that beautiful cashmere sweater in the boutique. If you had to ask, you couldn’t afford it.

  Many clicks and bites of breakfast later, I gleaned that rehab costs in places like ReTurn a New Leaf—in-patient spa settings on an Oregon beach—could be anywhere from $20,000 to $80,000 per month. Hanna had been in-patient at least twice, and three-month treatments weren’t unheard of. I did the math with the help of my calculator app, then felt foolish, since I could certainly have multiplied eighty thousand times three in my head. At the high end, $240,000 for each of her two prior visits would be $480k, a tidy sum. If Hanna was there again, and not in Bolivia or Disneyland, Viv could be looking at $720,000 in total, in addition to her tax problem.

  If I could whistle, this would have been the time to let out a low one. Viv could be a million bucks in debt. It made my money problems seem pretty insignificant.

  I stabbed the last bite of scrambled egg and almost choked when someone appeared beside me without my noticing. So much for seeing a room in its entirety.

  Lily squealed in my ear, “There you are!”

  “Um, yeah.” I coughed to clear the wayward egg from my throat. “Here I am.”

  Lily stepped to the side and gesticulated wildly at someone across the restaurant. “Here she is!”

  I watched a middle-aged man walk toward me. He’d surely stepped right off the pages of Guru International Magazine. Flowing, floor-length, flowered kaftan in a brown-on-beige batik. Matching harem pants, pegged at the ankle. Huarache sandals. Unkempt stubble. Wavy, shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair parted in the middle. The stone tablets were the only thing missing.

  As he walked toward us, Lily could barely contain her excitement and bounced on the balls of her feet while gripping the back of a chair, probably to keep from floating away on the wings of her palpable joy.

  When the man reached us, he placed his hands in prayer position and gave a slight bow, directed at Lily, and then gave a second one in my direction. “It’s an honor to meet you, Charlemagne Russo. I recognized you from your book covers.”

  That seemed like a lie, since Lily had directed him over here. I filed it away as a character trait I could use in my writing and took the high road. “Call me Charlee. And you are?”

  “Garth. Just Garth.”

  Ah. Viv’s ex. The author all the volunteers went moony over. “Nice to meet you, too.”

  He sat down without being invited and motioned for Lily to do the same. The waitress refilled my coffee while Lily politely turned over a cup and moved it to the edge of the table to make filling it easier. The waitress tipped the pot toward Garth’s cup, but he placed his hand over it. Lily placed her hand over her cup, too, and returned it to its original position.

  “Is this coffee fair-trade from sustainable plantations?” Garth asked.

  The waitress rolled her eyes. “Yeah, sure.”

  “And is it brewed with … tap water?”

  “No, sir. It’s brewed with artisanal free-range water collected in a hand-crafted well built with individually hewn stones and hand-dipped, using only the finest eco-friendly biodegradable bamboo cups by children rescued from African orphanages.” She glared at him, forcing him to move his hand from the top of his mug with only the power of her world-weary mind.

  I made a mental note to overtip her.

  Lily didn’t wait to be glared at. She picked up her cup and held it out, accepting coffee with a downward cast of her eyes.

  “So,” I said after the waitress left. “You’re one of the local speakers at the conference?”

  “Local?” Garth projected his voice, leaned in aggressively, and went full arrogance. “I, dear
Charlemagne, am a citizen of the world. I spend some time here in Portland to recharge my batteries and coffers, but the rest of the time I’m in some far-flung country.” He sipped his coffee, then set his cup down with a disdainful sneer. “Plus, there are people in Oregon I miss when I’m not here.”

  “Ah, Viv.”

  “I come here despite Viv’s presence.”

  A look of embarrassment passed over Lily’s face, but whether it was for Viv or Garth, or maybe me, I wasn’t sure.

  “I’m sorry. I assumed that because you spoke at Viv’s conference—”

  “Viveka and I have a … complicated relationship.”

  This was getting interesting. “But a good one?”

  “A complicated one.”

  “She told me she pays for you to come speak at this conference every year? Even though you’ve been divorced for so long?”

  “Like I said, complicated.” He took another sip and made another face, but it seemed like it was more directed at me than the coffee made from icky ol’ tap water.

  “Where have you been traveling?” Lily asked him.

  “Let’s see.” Garth stroked his beard exactly like I knew he would. “Kathmandu, Kyoto, Caracas.” He held up one finger. “And Cartagena.” He rolled his R from here to Colombia and stretched out the second half of the word exactly like I knew he would.

  “On a comedy tour of the world?” I asked.

  “Um…”

  “Everyone knows that words with K sounds are the funniest.”

  “Phuket.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Phuket.”

  “You don’t need to be so—”

  “On the Bay of Bengal. Bewitching place.”

  “Ah.”

  He toyed with his cup, clearly miffed that we had no follow-up questions, or much interest in his travels.

  But I didn’t want him to clam up despite how annoying this conversation was. Maybe he was an important key to unlocking the things I didn’t understand about Viv. Plus, I really wanted to know whether he was aware that Hanna was his daughter. I knew I couldn’t ask, though, so I tried a different approach, something all writers love to talk about. “So, Garth, what do you write?”

  Lily giggled, and Garth smiled at her like they shared a secret.

  “You mean books?”

  I nodded, sipping my perfectly acceptable coffee.

  “I haven’t written any books. It’s all in here.” He tapped the side of his head with his index finger.

  “Not even travel guides?” I rolled my R in solidarity.

  “Travel guides are for flabby American tourists who simply want to say they’ve traveled but aren’t willing to step away from their comfortable bourgeoise lives.”

  “Oh.” Jerk. “So you don’t write, but you speak every year at a writers’ conference?”

  He shrugged while smiling at Lily benevolently. “What can I say? I resonate with the masses.”

  I tried to wrap my brain around that.

  Clementine appeared at Garth’s side and collected him for a sound check for the opening night banquet. I turned and watched them walk out of the restaurant and through the growing number of writers milling about in the lobby. Garth worked the crowd like he was Jesus—greeting everyone, patting heads, bestowing benedictions, embracing, awarding air kisses. Everyone, men and women alike, visibly swooned.

  I turned back to Lily, who had a look of pure rapture on her face. I snapped my fingers in her face until her trance was broken. “What’s his speech tonight … the Sermon on the Mount?”

  “It’s called ‘The World Is Your Frog, Lick It.’” Lily’s glassy eyes sought out Garth. She was a junky in need of a fix.

  “Why does he speak at a writers’ conference if he’s not even a writer?”

  “I don’t know.” She shook her head as if to prevent his aura from taking complete control of her. “But he’s so deep I wouldn’t be able to understand half of what he wrote anyway.”

  Something was deep, anyway. Like what I’d stepped in the other day.

  Lily stood to leave. “I need to … I just want …”

  “Yes, go.” I shooed her away and she scurried off. Follow him. Hang on his every word. Let him baptize you with his Zen-like arrogance.

  I waved for the check, still wondering about Garth. He was Hanna’s father but didn’t know it. Or did he? He was traveling all the time. Did the weird ransom amount have something to do with a foreign currency exchange rate?

  I began googling the countries and exchange rates he’d mentioned.

  Kathmandu, Nepal. One dollar equaled 107.89 Nepalese rupees, so $339,000 would be 36,575,998.2 rupees.

  Kyoto, Japan. One dollar equaled 114.13 yen, so $339,000 would be 38,690,578.5 yen.

  Caracas, Venezuela. One dollar equaled 9,946.86 Venezuelan bolivars, so $339,000 would be 3,371,986,557 bolivars.

  Cartagena, Colombia. One dollar equaled 3,003.76 Colombian pesos, so $339,000 would be 1,018,274,640 pesos.

  Absolutely no useful information except that now I knew how to work my currency converter app. What I’d hoped to find was that $339,000 was exactly one million of one of the other currencies.

  I had one left, but my currency calculator needed to know the country and I was woefully ignorant about where exactly “fuk-et” was or how to spell it. I typed “Bay of Bengal” into the magic machine I held in my hand and enlarged the map until it told me that Phuket was part of Thailand. It also told me it was pronounced “poo-ket” and not “fuk-et,” like Garth had said.

  Had he actually traveled there? It didn’t seem so, given that he didn’t know how to pronounce it. Had he been to any of the places he’d mentioned? If not, where had he been? And why would he lie?

  Thirteen

  I called Viv. “We have to talk about Garth.”

  “Well, come to the workroom. I’m trying to track down a gluten-free bakery.”

  “You’re at the hotel? Again?” But she’d hung up.

  I scribbled my room number on the bill as Brad Pitt walked up.

  “Can I join you?” he asked.

  “I’m just finished. And now I have work to do. No rest for the weary.”

  “I thought it was no rest for the wicked.”

  “Same thing.” I hurried away but heard him call out for a rain check. “Maybe!” I flapped one hand over my shoulder.

  I dodged writers and agility dogs through the lobby, passing the bow-tied hotel manager, who was chastising a woman with a standard poodle on a leash. He didn’t know whether to speak to the dog or the woman, so he switched every other word. “I know it was our mix-up, but we simply can’t conduct our business with this cacophony of barking. I must put my foot down.”

  I didn’t hear any barking, but the noise from the writers could be described as a cacophony. I guessed it was easier to keep dogs quiet than writers.

  In the hallway near the Columbia Room, I passed the conference registration desk, where volunteers scurried like mad even while attendees waited in line to check in.

  “Just give us a little bit longer, folks,” one harried woman called out. “We need to finish getting these bags stuffed.” She waved her hand at half a dozen volunteers violently throwing pens, notepads, brochures, and bookmarks into the swag bags.

  I hurried down the hallway to the Clackamas Room, where more volunteers buzzed around, caroming off tables and each other like a bunch of drunken toddlers. I pulled a folding chair close to Viv and plopped into it. She was scrolling on a laptop through a listing of Portland-area bakeries.

  “You’re here?” I whispered. “Working on the conference? Not trying to find your daughter? Not cancelling the conference so none of these nice people get murdered? What is wrong with you?”

  Viv didn’t look up, didn’t seem surprised at my outburst. “My therapist sa
ys it’s my default coping mechanism. I’m sick with worry but not coping well.” She stopped and met my eyes with hers. “I think I’m disassociating a bit.”

  “Ya think?”

  “I need to do stuff I have control over, Charlee.”

  “Like cancelling the conference?”

  She returned to the laptop. “I told you I can’t do that. Please don’t bring it up again.”

  “Okay, then let’s talk about Garth.” I tried to control the anger in my voice. “He told me he’s been all over the world, but didn’t know how to pronounce Phuket.”

  “So?”

  “So he obviously has never been there.”

  “So?”

  “So why would he lie?”

  “I told you. Small-time hoodlum.”

  “That’s not what hoodlums do. They steal bikes or hit people over the head for their wallet or leave the liquor store without paying for their six-pack of Pabst. Now you tell me the truth. If Garth wasn’t in Thailand or Japan or Venezuela, where was he?”

  We had a stare-down, eyes narrowed.

  Finally Viv said, “How would I know? You should ask him.”

  An involuntary gurgle of frustration escaped from deep in my throat. Next thing I knew, all my questions poured out like a gush of water from a rusty pipe that snapped. “How come you didn’t get food poisoning, Viv? Why aren’t you more worried? Why are you HERE? What are you doing to find Hanna? What’s with you and Garth? What were you and Roz arguing about? Tell me about Hanna’s rehab. Do you need money for another stint at ReTurn a New Leaf ?”

  Viv glanced around the room to make sure no one was listening. “How do you know about that?”

  “Is she using again?”

  She glared at me. “Fine. I’ll tell you.” She swallowed hard, wet her lips, and spoke quietly. “I went out to the rehab place after I dropped you off from the airport, but Hanna isn’t there, or so they said. They’ve lied to me before, though, at Hanna’s request.”