by Harper Lin
“Um, okay. Thank you.” Sandra took the tray from the girl and went back inside. I glanced over my shoulder to see if she was coming my way, but she was going straight down the hall, past the elevators. I figured the hotel must encourage employees to take the stairs when possible to leave the elevators for guests. Or maybe there was a service elevator down there.
I stopped outside my door and glanced back down the long hallway at the girl. She walked quickly, her loose blond curls bouncing on her back. I got a vague sense of déjà vu. But like all annoying cases of déjà vu, I couldn’t place it.
I held my key to the magnetic lock and opened the door. “Matt. I’m back.”
“Hey, Franny!”
I came around the corner and saw him still sprawled out on the couch, watching a couple of middle-aged men argue about who was the best—or maybe worst—at some position in some sport I didn’t care enough to figure out.
“They delivered some coffee for you a little bit ago. It should still be warm.”
I looked at the tray sitting on the table. It was identical to the one that had just been dropped off at Mike and Sandra’s room. “Did you order that?”
Matt shook his head. “Nope. Girl just brought it by. Said it was from the hotel because of the murder.”
I nodded slowly. Something about that felt wrong. Jacques had sent up that big box of macarons, and that hadn’t felt strange to me. And they’d offered us a free day in the spa, so it wasn’t the fact that they were trying to make up for our visit being marred by a murder. And the cost of a couple cups of coffee paled in comparison to either the macarons or the spa day, so it wasn’t that either.
“You want me to warm up your coffee in the microwave?”
My nose wrinkled automatically. Microwaved coffee never tasted right to me.
Matt laughed. “Well, you were kind of just staring.”
“I know,” I said slowly, still looking at the tray. Something wasn’t right, but what was it? “Did you drink any?”
“No, I wanted to let you pick first. She said one’s a macchiato and one’s a latte, and I know you like both, so I didn’t want to pick the wrong one.”
I nodded and turned to go to the bathroom.
“Are you going to drink this? Which one do you want?”
“Just pick whichever.” I was too distracted to pick which drink I wanted, especially without looking at them and smelling them.
It did seem strange that they were bringing up the trays individually instead of using a cart. But maybe they were afraid that the last ones to be delivered would be cold before they ever got to their destinations. I stepped into the bathroom and saw that a fresh stack of towels had joined the others.
My heart stopped.
The girl at Mike and Sandra’s door had been wearing head-to-toe light blue—a spa maid’s uniform. And spa maids weren’t room service.
“Don’t drink that!” I screamed, running back over to Matt.
He’d just opened one of the cups and was holding it to his mouth.
“Don’t drink that!” I repeated.
“Okay?” He put it down slowly. “Can I have the other one?”
“No!” I knocked them both over, just to make sure he didn’t have a choice but to listen to me, then spun on my heel and ran out of the room and down the hall. I stopped at Mike’s door and pounded on it. “Mike! Open the door! Sandra! Mike! Open the door!”
“What’s going on?” Matt had stuck his head out of our door and was looking at me like I’d lost my mind, but I didn’t care. I kept banging on the door and yelling for Mike and Sandra.
What was taking them so long to open it? I began to wonder if I could convince Whitney to let me in and if it would be too late by then. “Mike!”
The door jerked open. “Fran! What the hell?” He somehow managed to look even more annoyed than I’d ever seen him—and he had been pretty annoyed with me a time or two. He was also missing his shirt, but I didn’t have time to wonder right then if his irritation was due to me interrupting a romantic reunion.
“Don’t drink the coffee. Whatever you do, don’t drink it!” I ran down the hall before he had a chance to do anything but look at me like he was worried about my sanity.
“What the hell?” I heard him say again behind me.
“I don’t know, man.” Matt must have wandered down to see why I was freaking out. “At least she didn’t slap it out of your hand.”
The girl I’d seen at Mike and Sandra’s door was gone now, but I hoped I could catch her in the stairs. I had to catch her. But, if I didn’t, at least I might be able to describe her to someone and figure out who she was—and if she was really supposed to be delivering coffee to guests. Those long, shiny blond curls she had would be enough to identify her. People notice gorgeous hair like that.
It was a very long hallway, but I got to the end and jerked open the heavy fire door. And stopped and stared.
There, on the landing just inside the door, was a pale-blue spa maid uniform. And next to it, a long, wavy blond wig.
Chapter Twenty-Two
I wrung my hands together. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stop myself, even when Matt grabbed one of my hands and tried to hold it still. I just rubbed his hand with the one he’d grabbed and grated my fingernails up and down my leg with the other. I’d be lucky if I didn’t have bruises in the morning.
Sandra, sitting on the couch across from me, looked like a statue. The polar opposite of my anxious fidgeting, she sat perfectly still, but every muscle in her body held a tension that looked like she might jump up and fly screaming out of the hotel at any moment.
“There’s Mike.”
I looked up and followed Matt’s eyes across the lounge to Mike walking in from the lobby. He was, fortunately, wearing a shirt now. Two, actually. A white T-shirt with a blue flannel over it. His hands were shoved in his pockets in a way that I was sure was meant to convey an attitude of casual relaxation, but as he walked toward us, his unbuttoned flannel shirt shifted slightly, and I caught sight of the butt of a gun on his hip.
He sat down next to Sandra and took her hand. She didn’t move, not even her eyes, which were trained on a spot on the floor somewhere between us.
Mike looked from Matt to me to Sandra, his eyes lingering on his wife a little longer than on me or Matt. Then he took a deep, controlled breath and, in a voice so low I had to strain to hear it, filled us in on what the local police had just told him.
“They confirmed the presence of large doses of opioids in all four cups.”
If Sandra had looked before like she wanted to run screaming, I was pretty sure that now Mike’s hand holding hers was the only thing keeping her from doing it.
“The ones in your room were a little harder to test, of course, since they were splattered all over the floor, but they managed to get enough from what hadn’t spilled out to test them individually.” He gave me a look that seemed to be part admiration and part amusement at my near-hysterical reaction.
Matt squeezed my hand tighter.
“They need to run some more tests, but they’re pretty sure it was fentanyl.”
I searched his eyes, trying to figure out if he could really be saying what I thought he was saying.
“With the amount that was in them, one sip would have been enough to kill any of us.”
Sandra’s body jerked, and Matt leaned his head into his free hand and muttered an obscenity under his breath.
“Fran saved all of our lives.”
It was the kind of thing he normally would have looked pained to say. He never liked to admit that I’d helped him out with a case or been right about anything, especially when he felt like I was acting more on gut instinct than on logic and evidence, which to be fair, I usually was. But at this moment, there was none of that. He met my eyes with unabashed gratitude for acting on my instincts—even if they made me look crazy—and saving his life. And his wife’s.
Matt rubbed his forehead. “Why would anyone try to kill
Fran? And you?”
“Well, the obvious answer is that I’m a police officer, and Fran has been openly asking a lot of questions about the case. Whoever it was must have thought we were getting too close for comfort and decided to do something about it.” Mike stopped and took a deep breath. There was something else, but he seemed hesitant to say it. “But we don’t think I was the second target.”
I stared at Mike, confused. Yes, Matt had talked to Tommy and Carrick about the murder earlier that day, but was that really enough for someone to think he needed to die? Surely it was a prime topic of conversation among all of the guests. And something else—“Then why deliver poisoned coffee to your room?”
Mike looked at me with something I’d never seen behind his eyes. His jaw clenched. “To kill Sandra.”
For the first time since we’d sat down, Sandra moved. She looked up at Mike with wide eyes. “Me?”
His jaw tensed again, and his head bobbed in the slightest nod.
“But why kill Sandra?” I asked too loudly for the room and the conversation.
The few other people in the room looked up as Mike glared at me. I realized what that look in his eye was—it was fury. Fury that someone had tried to kill him, kill his friends. Kill his wife. And at the moment, it was fury at me for practically yelling something that I should have whispered. But as soon as it flared, he got it under control. I might have been stupid, but I wasn’t the enemy, and he knew that.
“You and Sandra were talking this afternoon? In the hallway outside the spa?”
I nodded.
“About the murder?”
This time, I shook my head. “No.”
Mike’s eyebrows rose. He didn’t believe me. He thought I was lying, blatantly, to his face, in front of someone who could easily contradict me and tell the truth.
But she didn’t. Because it was the truth.
“No,” I said again. “Maybe just for a second in passing, but only because we were talking about the spa opening back up and the massage you were scheduled for. And about y—” I stopped as Sandra suddenly looked over at me. She didn’t want me to say. Didn’t want me to tell Mike that she and I had been discussing their marriage. Fair enough. “We were talking about the massage.”
Mike’s face went from two eyebrows raised to just one, but he still didn’t believe me. Maybe a little more than before, but he knew I was still hiding something.
I kept my mouth shut, my chin raised in defiance. If Sandra didn’t want me to tell, I wouldn’t tell.
“You were overheard talking about it.”
I wanted to protest that whoever was claiming that was the real liar, but then realization dawned. “No, I was talking to Amber. Who works down in the spa. She was the one who found the body.”
Mike’s brows knit together, and I knew why. Sandra and Amber looked nothing alike. Sandra was a natural blonde, while Amber had dark hair. Sandra wore street clothes while I’d never seen Amber in anything but spa white. Sandra probably wasn’t quite old enough to be Amber’s mother, but if she wasn’t, she would have had to be a much older sister. They couldn’t be mistaken for each other.
“I was talking to Amber about it when Sandra came by. I stopped her so I could talk to her for a minute. Whoever thought we were talking about the murder must have seen the three of us together and heard something about the murder and thought Sandra was involved in the conversation too.”
Mike looked at Sandra, who nodded. “She’s telling the truth,” she said softly.
Mike gave a curt nod. The muscles in his jaw flexed as he clenched his teeth. I knew what he must have been thinking. Here he was, trying to rekindle things with his wife and get a murder investigation wrapped up before it was too late for them, and he practically got his wife killed in the process. Or at least that was what I assumed he was thinking. He may have just been trying not to be mad that he was wrong about what happened.
“So you said it was Amber you talked to?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll let the local guys know. They may need to pull her aside for her own safety. Or for questioning.”
A chill went down my spine at the thought of Amber possibly being a suspect. She’d seemed genuinely devastated by her friend’s death and genuinely interested in finding out who killed her—unless that was all an act. That possibility terrified me.
We sat in silence as Mike got up and went to talk to the police in the lobby. When he got back, he sat down and rubbed his hand across the back of his neck. “They don’t think she’s involved but said they’ll pull her in just in case.”
Just in case she was a murderer or a potential victim, he didn’t say.
We sat for another minute before Matt spoke up. “So, what do we do now?”
Mike inhaled slowly. “The local guys say we’re free to leave, especially since there was an attempt on all of our lives. It would probably be a good idea.”
I had to admit it was tempting to flee the hotel and forget all about this nightmare of a vacation. But if someone was trying to kill me, it had to be because I was onto something. And I wasn’t going to back down. My wits had saved us all. Maybe they could lead me to whoever did it too. “I’m not leaving.”
All three of their heads swiveled toward me.
“I’m sorry?” Mike asked.
“Are you joking, Franny?” Matt looked incredulous.
I shook my head. “I’m not leaving. I’m seeing this through.”
Mike shook his head, but he knew better than to argue. Once I’d made up my mind, I wasn’t changing it.
Matt knew that too. “Well, then, I guess I’m staying too.”
Mike’s jaw clenched again. “I can’t leave the two of you alone here.” He looked at Sandra, who looked like she thought we’d all lost our minds. “You can go. No one will blame you,” he said softly.
She hesitated before shaking her head. “No, I’ll stay.”
“Baby, I—” He put his hand on her cheek and ducked his head down. Whatever he said to her was too quiet for me to hear.
She looked unsure, but I thought she was about to agree when the lights flickered, followed almost immediately by a crash of thunder that shook the whole hotel.
The sky had gotten cloudy earlier, but I hadn’t expected rain until sheets of it suddenly started pouring down, accompanied by a massive gust of wind.
Tommy and Carrick, who had been behind their respective bars, both rushed out and over to the wall of windows, closing them as fast as they could but still getting drenched in the process.
Sandra shook her head. “No. I’m not driving in that. Not in the dark and not somewhere I’m not familiar with.”
Mike nodded. I could tell he didn’t want her driving in a storm like that either. It might have been risky staying in the hotel when a murderer had his sights set on us, but driving down twisting mountain roads while being buffeted by gale-force winds and torrential rain had the potential to be even more dangerous.
For a moment, we sat there, letting it sink in that we were staying—because we wanted to or because four strong walls seemed safer than a metal box on wet, curvy roads—in a place where someone had tried to kill us—all four of us—just hours before. And we were clearly targets, but we didn’t know whose target we were. It wasn’t exactly how I expected the weekend to go.
“Is anybody else hungry? You guys want to get something to eat? We could go by one of the restaurants—” Matt, perpetually thinking of his stomach, started to ask before Mike cut him off.
“We’re not eating or drinking anything prepared inside this hotel.”
I almost asked why, but then I realized—we had successfully evaded one attempt to kill us by poisoning our food, but we might not be so lucky a second time. I hadn’t been the slightest bit hungry before, more concerned about who had tried to murder us, but at the prospect of not eating until at least the next day, my stomach suddenly started to rumble.
“We could go out,” Matt suggested.
Sa
ndra glanced over her shoulder at the storm and shuddered.
I didn’t want to go out in it either. “We have some macarons in our room,” I offered. The sugary treats weren’t particularly substantial nutrition, but it might subdue the hunger pangs until we could make it out.
“From the bakery?” Mike asked.
I nodded.
“Were you there when they were packed?”
I thought about it. I was pretty sure we’d gone through the small box that I’d picked, but we still had the other—that had been sent up to our room. “No, but we’ve already had some and—”
“No. We can’t risk it. The suspect could have poisoned just one. It’s actually the smarter way to do it.”
“They were from Jacques.” Mike’s tone had left no room for objection, but I held onto some fragile hope that he would change his mind if I just explained the circumstances.
He did not appreciate my comment. “How do you know that?”
“The card—”
“Could have been written and signed by anyone. He could have written it and had someone else pack them. He could have packed them and passed them off to someone else to deliver. If anyone had even a moment where they were alone with them—or not even alone, just where they could tamper with them without being noticed—they could have added the drugs. We’re not eating them.”
This time, I didn’t argue.
I was beginning to resign myself to the possibility of going hungry for the night when Matt’s stomach decided to intervene again.
“What if just one of us went out? We could pick something up from a place in town and bring it back to eat here.”
To my surprise, Mike didn’t immediately shoot him down. Instead he looked thoughtful for a moment before slowly nodding. “That could work. But no one goes out alone. It’s too risky. We have to stay in pairs.”
“I’ll go with him.” It only made sense. Matt was my boyfriend, and Mike clearly didn’t want to leave Sandra.
