Macchiatos, Macarons, and Malice

by Harper Lin

  I took a long hot bath while Matt—obviously—watched the Celtics play against some other team I didn’t recognize. Not that I recognized many basketball teams. Or really any other than the home team. I couldn’t help but think that that would have been an awkward time for Bertina to come in. I was glad she somehow sensed that she should come earlier.

  As I eventually went to sleep that night, I thought about Gina’s murder and how sad it was. At least I had made some progress in figuring out who I needed to talk to. No doubt, Mike would be pleased the next time I talked to him.

  I was wrong. He was not pleased.

  Chapter Ten

  I was sound asleep when the ringing of my cell phone woke me up. I wanted to ignore it, but despite my minimal level of consciousness, I realized that the room was still dark. The only reason for someone to be calling me when it was still dark was if it was Sammy telling me there was something wrong at the café.

  I barely looked at the phone as I hit the button to answer the call and held it to my ear. “Hello?” I croaked.

  “It’s me,” a voice said, barely above a whisper. It didn’t sound like Sammy, but she wasn’t much of a whisperer. She was far too enthusiastic for that. “Where are you?”

  “What?” I still wasn’t awake enough to make any sense of what was going on. Why was someone calling me in the middle of the night, asking me where I was?

  “I’m in bed.”

  “With the case! And why aren’t you awake? It’s nine o’clock in the morning!”

  Something in my brain recognized the voice, but it wasn’t Sammy’s. It was a man’s. I felt the bed next to me. Matt was still there, and by the way he swatted at my hand as it patted his face, I didn’t think he was calling me from over there. Was it someone with the hotel maybe? But why would they call my cell?

  “Mike?”

  “Of course it’s Mike! Who did you think it was?” Despite his hushed voice, I could hear his annoyance.

  “Why are you calling me in the middle of the night, asking about the case?”

  “It’s nine a.m.!”

  I rolled over to peer out one of the windows. The tiniest crack of light showed through. Of course. Matt had closed the blackout shades so we could sleep in after our late night. Neither of us had expected Mike to call first thing.

  Matt shifted in the bed, and I realized that my conversation was waking him up.

  “Hold on,” I whispered to Mike. I slipped out of bed and wrapped myself in the fluffy white robe the hotel provided. I crept across the room, only tripping once over the coffee table. I managed to stifle my yelp and made it out to the balcony. “Okay, I can talk now.”

  He sighed, and I got the feeling that I was annoying him. I didn’t care. He was the one who woke me up.

  “So where are you?” he asked.

  “On the balcony now.”

  “With the case.”

  “Oh, right.” I pulled my robe a little bit tighter. “It’s going well! I talked to the barista in the lobby lounge last night and found out that Gina was closest with the spa girls. I’m going to try to talk to them today.” I deliberately called Carrick a barista. Even if I thought it was a word, there was no way I was going to call him a baristo. It was stupid.

  “Okay, what else?”

  I tried to think of what else I had learned. “The bartender seemed upset about her death.”

  “Okay.” He paused. “What else?”

  “Um, the barista is kind of a jerk?”

  “About the case, Fran!”

  “That’s about it.”

  There was a long pause before Mike said, “That’s it?”

  “Yeah, so far. Like I said, I’m going to try to talk to the spa girls today and see if they have any ideas on who could have killed Gina.”

  “That’s all you’ve found out?” The surprise in his voice was obvious even though he was still speaking very quietly. I guessed that it was because he was trying to keep Sandra from hearing, either because she was still asleep or because he didn’t want her to know that he had asked me to get involved.

  “It hasn’t even been a day, Mike.”

  “Our spa appointment is in less than six hours, Fran.” He had a point.

  “Okay, I’ll try to go talk to them.”

  “Now?”

  “If I can find them.”

  Nothing from Mike’s end. I had a feeling he wasn’t used to getting pushback from the people working on his investigations. Unfortunately for him, he wasn’t my boss. But I did want to help him.

  “I’ll find them,” I said. I wasn’t sure how, but I would figure it out.

  He begrudgingly accepted it with a promise from me that I would check back in with him in two hours. He wanted it to just be one hour, but I reminded him that I still needed to get dressed. I didn’t think he cared, but he agreed to two hours anyway.

  We said goodbye, and I slipped back inside. Matt was still sound asleep. I grabbed some clothes from my bag and got dressed quickly in the bathroom. I scribbled down a note for Matt and left it on the bedside table, then slipped out of the room.

  I half expected Mike to be waiting outside his room to make sure I left like I said I would. He wasn’t there, but I realized that he could have been watching through his peephole without me knowing. I smiled and waved as I walked by the door, just in case.

  Downstairs, I looked longingly at one of the restaurants when I passed it. It was the one with the amazing-looking brunch menu, and I’d been hoping to have a nice breakfast there, maybe even with a mimosa or two. But Mike was counting on me, so I told myself I’d just stop in at the bakery and grab a croissant.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised that the patisserie counter was unattended, but I was. I briefly considered helping myself and leaving a five on the counter but decided that probably wasn’t a good idea. I’d just have to be hungry.

  Garrett, the manager, was at the front desk as I walked by. I waved and said good morning, but he ignored me. So much for the good customer service he was supposedly so concerned about. I was sure Whitney would have at least said hello.

  I stepped outside and looked around for where the loading dock was. I had no idea if the spa girls would be there, but it was my best bet. Either that or go down to the spa itself, which was probably still roped off with police tape. It seemed like a long shot that the girls would be at the hotel at all today, but I had to try.

  I didn’t see any signs of where the loading dock was, so I just took a wild guess and turned right. Even if it would have been shorter to go the other way, I’d get to it eventually. Unless Carrick was lying about its existence altogether, but I didn’t think he was. A hotel this size had to have somewhere to get its deliveries.

  Right actually turned out to be the right way to go. I found the loading dock about halfway down the side of the building, and just beyond that, slightly blocked off by a small grove of trees, a small group of girls sat around chatting. They were scattered among a bench and a couple of chairs, with another girl sitting on the ground. With a couple of them dressed all in white, I had a good feeling that they were the spa girls—or at least some of them. Hopefully ones who knew something about Gina.

  I started toward them, not sure of how I was going to strike up a conversation with them. “Hey, don’t mind me. I’m just a stranger coming up to talk to you about your dead friend” didn’t seem like it was going to be my best bet. And they all looked to be at least ten, maybe fifteen, years younger than me—college students or recent graduates. Not the people I had the most in common with now that I was in my midthirties and, admittedly, not as cool as I used to be, if I could even really say that I was ever cool. It was doubtful.

  I considered it a stroke of luck then that, as I got closer, I realized I recognized all of them. Whitney from the front desk, dressed in all black, sat on a boulder wedged into the slight swell of ground that, combined with the grove of trees, made me understand why they used this as their break spot—it was out of the way and re
ally hard to find if you didn’t know where to look.

  In a chair slightly apart from the other girls sat Sophie, her sleek black bob tossed back and a cigarette dangling from her fingers. That couldn’t possibly be good for her sense of taste, an important trait for a baker. Maybe she didn’t care though. Working the counter of a bakery didn’t necessarily mean she had any interest in actually baking. She didn’t seem to have any interest in doing her job either, but that was neither here nor there. I realized this must have been where she spent all her time instead of being at the counter of the bakery when I wanted a croissant.

  On the bench sat the two girls in white—the spa girls I wanted to talk to. And despite the fact that I’d only spent twenty minutes in the spa and they probably had dozens of workers, I recognized these two. The one with her curly hair in a ponytail was Noelle, our tour guide in the spa. And next to her, examining her long shiny chestnut hair for split ends, was Amber, the spa technician who had stumbled screaming out of the treatment room when she found Gina’s body.

  I still hadn’t come up with a clever way to join their group, so I decided I was just going to have to walk up and act like I belonged—the classic method of someone who wasn’t necessarily doing what she was supposed to do.

  They didn’t notice me until I was just a few yards away, but when they did, their heads turned in unison toward me. It was almost kind of creepy the way all four of their heads swiveled as one. I tried to ignore it and kept moving toward them with what was probably a really cheesy smile plastered on my face.

  “Hi, guys!” I said cheerfully when I got close enough.

  “Hi,” most of them said back uneasily. Apparently, hotel guests didn’t often crash their break time. Sophie was the only one who didn’t greet me. She just looked at me disdainfully before taking a long drag of her cigarette and exhaling the smoke in my direction. She seemed like such a lovely person.

  I focused on Whitney. She was the closest to me, and I knew she’d recognized me and Matt the day before when we passed her in the hall. “I was just out for a walk, and I heard you guys talking and thought I’d come over and say hello.”

  The three that weren’t openly ignoring me said hello again. Sophie just arched one of her perfectly groomed eyebrows a little higher.

  I stood there smiling silently in hopes that one of them would start to feel awkward and say something that would give me an opening to start talking to them.

  Whitney was the one who broke. “Do you want to sit down?” She gestured at the open chair. Noelle gave Whitney a subtle but unmistakable “what are you doing?” look. Whitney shrugged.

  “Sure!” I grabbed the chair and pulled it over closer before one of them could find a way to cancel the invitation.

  Whitney, still the one most uncomfortable with the silence, smiled at me, a forced, put-upon smile that I read right through without caring. “So, you checked in yesterday, right?”

  “Sure did!” I beamed at all of them. They all smiled hesitantly back except for Sophie, who rolled her eyes and looked away.

  “I’m sorry about all the…” Whitney hesitated. “…events yesterday.”

  I had my opening. I nodded sadly. “I was down in the spa yesterday when—” I waved my hand so I didn’t have to say it. They knew what I meant. “Noelle was giving me and my boyfriend a tour.”

  Noelle looked up and smiled weakly.

  “Oh, so you were right there!” Whitney looked faintly surprised.

  Amber finally looked away from her split ends and over at me like she wasn’t sure if I was telling the truth. She must not have seen me. Of course, since what she had just seen was her friend’s dead body, I couldn’t exactly fault her for overlooking the spa guests who happened to be in the area at the time. She looked over at Noelle, who nodded again, confirming my story. Amber grabbed another section of hair to study.

  “Yeah, I was.” I was surprised how naturally and easily Gina’s death had come up. Of course, it was the talk of the hotel. Getting the girls to tell a total stranger about who could have wanted to kill their friend might be a completely different story. “It was so—unexpected. And upsetting! And I didn’t even know her. It must be so much harder for you guys.”

  The three civilized ones nodded. Sophie puffed away on her cigarette.

  I was hoping one of them would volunteer something else, but they didn’t, so I had to keep pushing and hope I didn’t go too far. “And the way she died—” I shuddered, partly for show and partly because being suffocated during a mud wrap seemed particularly horrifying. “Why would anyone do something like that?”

  It was mostly a rhetorical question, so I was surprised when Amber burst out for the first time. “Because he hates her, that’s why!”

  Noelle immediately turned to comfort her.

  Whitney looked at me as though any of them had something to apologize for. “She’s taking it really hard. Gina and Amber were best friends since elementary school,” she said, but I was focused on Amber and what she’d said.

  “Who? Who hates her?”

  “Garrett!” Her voice exploded out as an anguished scream.

  “The hotel manager?”

  Noelle seemed to be trying to hush Amber, but Whitney nodded at me. “He had it in for her for some reason.”

  “Because she wouldn’t go out with him!” Amber’s face was red, and fat tears rolled down her face. “He was in love with her, and he was mad that she wouldn’t go out with a jerk and a pig like him! She thought he was disgusting, and he killed her!” She collapsed, sobbing into Noelle’s shoulder.

  Sophie was still ignoring everything and everyone around her. I looked at Whitney. She nodded slowly. “He was on her case for a while, trying to get her to go out with him, but she kept turning him down,” she said quietly. “Garrett doesn’t take rejection well. Or disagreement. Or anyone daring to be female, really. He’s just a jerk.”

  “Do you think he could have killed her?” I kept my voice low too. I didn’t think Amber or Noelle could hear me over the sobbing, but I didn’t trust Sophie.

  Whitney shifted her position on the boulder. “I don’t like to think that about anyone, you know?”

  “I get it. But someone obviously killed her, and if it was Garrett—”

  She looked down at her silver-painted fingernails. “I don’t know anybody else who hated her that much. Gina was good people, you know? Not the kind of girl to make a lot of enemies. Not the kind of girl that anyone would want to kill.”

  “Anyone except Garrett?”

  She looked me in the eye for the first time. “He’s not a good guy.” Her voice came out strained and thick with emotion. There was more there than she was saying, and I didn’t think it was that he brought all the girls candy and roses on Valentine’s Day.

  I was still looking at Whitney, with her clenched jaw and rage-filled eyes, when cell phones started blinging around me. At first, I reached for mine, but then I realized it was the only one that hadn’t gone off.

  Whitney was the first to get her phone out and read the message. “Shoot,” or something like that, she muttered. “It’s from Garrett.”

  Noelle and Amber looked around frantically, and even Sophie turned her head. These girls were afraid of him.

  “Under no circumstances should any hotel staffer talk to any hotel guest about the events yesterday, refer to it, or acknowledge its happening. No fraternizing. Punishable by firing,” Whitney read. “Can you believe that? I had five people come up to me this morning wanting to talk about it. And that’s not even including you.” She looked at me. “At least you actually care. Everyone else just wants some hot gossip they can be the first to share. And what does Garrett expect me to do? Just look at them and say I don’t know what they’re talking about? Walk away? He’d fire me for that too. Geez.”

  “He didn’t even say her name,” Amber sobbed. “Or that she died! What is wrong with him? I hate him. I hate him! I should kill him. Kill him to get justice for Gina.”

>   Noelle grabbed her shoulders. “Stop it! Don’t say that. Someone will hear you!”

  Whitney scrambled up and went over to Amber’s other side, putting her arm around Amber’s back. “You can’t talk like that. I know you’re angry, but you can’t say stuff like that. He’ll fire you if he hears you.”

  I noticed that neither of them were trying to argue that Garrett didn’t kill Gina, just that Amber needed to be quieter about wanting revenge.

  “I don’t care if he fires me. I care that he killed Gina!”

  They both shushed her as Sophie looked on. A door slammed somewhere in the loading dock.

  “C’mon, let’s get you inside.” Whitney reached under Amber’s arms to encourage her to get up off the bench. Noelle helped from the other side. Their arms around Amber, they started guiding her toward the door back into the hotel that had been propped open. “We have to go,” Whitney said over her shoulder to me. “We can’t be seen talking to you.”

  Sophie stood up slowly and followed them. With one last disdainful look over her shoulder, she smudged her cigarette out on the hotel’s brick exterior and kicked away the doorstop. The door slammed behind her as she disappeared inside.

  I grabbed my phone out of my pocket and dialed Mike’s number.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Garrett? The hotel manager?” Mike repeated when I told him what I’d found out from the spa girls… and Whitney. Sophie hadn’t really contributed to the conversation.

  “Yes, that’s what they all said. Apparently, he hated her because she wouldn’t go out with him.” I had my hand cupped over my mouth and the phone and was speaking as quietly as I could. I was still outside near the little grove of trees, and I was keeping an eye on my surroundings as best as I could, but that didn’t stop me from being nervous about someone sneaking up on me and hearing what I was telling Mike. “The things that you look for are means, motive, and opportunity, right? So he obviously had a motive—Gina refusing to go out with him. Everyone had the means because they suffocated her with one of the mud strips. And of course he had the opportunity—he’s the boss. He can go wherever he wants whenever he wants, and no one thinks anything of it.”