by Susan Shreve
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE: BABY RUBY?
CHAPTER TWO: THE SAVE-THE-MARRIAGE BABY
CHAPTER THREE: PANIC ATTACK
CHAPTER FOUR: AN UNFORTUNATE DISCOVERY
CHAPTER FIVE: THE GAME OF SLEUTH
CHAPTER SIX: POLICE REPORT?
CHAPTER SEVEN: AN UNUSUAL CLUE
CHAPTER EIGHT: A SENSE OF SMELL
CHAPTER NINE: DIVIDE AND CONQUER
CHAPTER TEN: ROOM 618
CHAPTER ELEVEN: TOO MUCH TIME TO THINK
CHAPTER TWELVE: TOO LATE?
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: A TURN OF EVENTS
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: FOUR A.M. IN ROOM 618
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: BY THE LIGHT OF DAY
CHAPTER SIXTEEN: SLEUTH LLC
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN: A WEDDING AFTER ALL
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
It was the last weekend in May, and in room 618 of the Brambles Hotel in Los Angeles, Jess O’Fines was trying to zip up her new shimmery violet sundress without catching the soft flesh around her belly in the zipper.
“Too tight, babes?” her sister Teddy said.
“Are you saying I’m fat?” Jess asked, holding her breath.
“I’m just wondering if the dress is too too small,” Teddy said from the plush rose carpet, where she was lying with her eyes closed, her feet on the bed, waiting for the electric-blue nail polish she’d painted on her toes to dry.
“You do think I’m fat, don’t you, Teddy,” Jess said matter-of-factly.
“I think you’re yummy and sweet.”
“Whatever that means.”
“Warm blueberry muffins, delicious carrot cake. You’re the best.”
“Oh brother …”
And just then their real brother, Danny, flew into the room with Baby Ruby under his arm like a football.
“Jess,” he said, out of breath, half-dressed, no shirt, his belt unbuckled.
Jess, in that frantic way he had of announcing an emergency, as if he had just exploded all over the hall of the Brambles Hotel.
Jess didn’t even lift her head from the job of zipping — her dress was a little too tight in the waist, very tight around the rib cage, but she’d been able to fit into it when she tried it on at Lateda Dresses in downtown Larchmont, next door to the wedding dress store where her sister Whee was shopping.
“I have a problem, Jessie,” Danny said.
“Me too,” Jess said. “I’m trying to get dressed for the party tonight.”
All year, Jess had been waiting for this weekend in Los Angeles, for staying at a hotel with room service, something she had never done before. There would be parties before the wedding and after the wedding and dancing and a swimming pool and the Pacific Ocean hammering the beach just outside the hotel balcony.
A normal family occasion like the ones she’d read about in books ever since she could remember, or seen on television and in other families in the neighborhood, or mostly dreamed about before she went to sleep at night.
“Bad news, babes!” Danny’s plump panda-bear face was white with shaving cream. “I’ve got to have your help.”
“It’s my twelfth birthday,” Jess replied without looking up. “I can’t help you.”
“Yesterday was your twelfth birthday, Jess, and I told you I have an amazing present in my suitcase for you that you’ll love.”
He took a sniff of Baby Ruby’s diaper and made a face.
“This is an emergency,” he said.
Jess had zipped the dress all the way up but she could barely breathe.
“A heart-stopping emergency.”
Danny O’Fines often had heart-stopping emergencies. Squash for the baby’s lunch burning on the stove, a fire in the washing machine, his keys dropped in the trash can and lost, Baby Ruby twice slipping off the bed while Danny was shaving or searching in the closet for the right shirt for the day. He was a stay-at-home dad with nothing to do but take care of Baby Ruby and go on the Internet to look for jobs while his bad-tempered wife, Beatrice, called Beet, was in medical school.
“This is the deal,” Danny began, taking a diaper out of the back pocket of his dress trousers. “I had everything organized with the hotel — the babysitter was coming at six thirty to our hotel room, 642. I called from home weeks ago and they said, ‘DONE, Mr. O’Fines. A babysitter will be knocking on your door at six thirty,’ they said. Her name is something like Melinda or Belinda or Melissa. And there I am waiting for this truant, and nobody, not even housekeeping, appears. So I check the front desk of the hotel and they tell me ‘BAD NEWS, Mr. O’Fines.’ So, the babysitter we got for Baby Ruby blew us off.”
“Get another one,” Jess said.
“There isn’t another one. I asked at the front desk.”
“In the whole city of Los Angeles?”
Jess sat down on the end of the king-sized bed she was sharing with her sisters for the weekend.
This was the kind of thing that happened to Jess O’Fines, the youngest of the O’Fines kids, the baby in the family by three years, the only child left at home with their mother, Delilah, after the divorce was final and Teddy was sent to live at the home for juvenile delinquent girls to recover from kleptomania.
Tonight Jess was supposed to be wearing her violet dress and strappy high-heeled sandals to the rehearsal dinner in the hotel’s Bay Room overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Every single other person in her family would be there. Her brother and sisters and aunts and uncles, her cousins, her mother and father, and her mother’s best friend and her father’s tennis partner. She was supposed to be sitting at the head table between Whee, who would be marrying Victor Treat the next day in the garden of the Brambles Hotel, and her father, Aldie O’Fines, formerly Daddy.
Jess was Aldie’s date for the weekend.
Danny plopped Baby Ruby down on the bed beside Jess.
“You can bring the baby to the rehearsal dinner,” Jess said.
“I can’t!” he said, changing Baby Ruby’s poopy diaper right there on the white sheets. “I have to make a speech.”
“What about Beet?” Jess asked.
“Beet?” He rolled his eyes. “You know Beet better than that. She’s not an option to babysit in the hotel room.”
“Beet is the man in the family,” her father had said when the computer company for which Danny worked downsized, and Danny lost his job and became the “at home” parent. “Danny is the mother,” her father had said.
“I’m not an option for babysitting either,” Jess said, running her hand through her slightly curly hair, tears of frustration welling in her eyes.
Already she could feel her plans for the evening unraveling around her and there was nothing she could do about it. She was the fail-safe child, the last child at home with hand-me-down clothes and leftover dinners when her mother went on a date, and tonight Jess was stuck with someone’s leftover job.
“JESS!”
Delilah opened the door to room 618 and slipped in, dragging a Pack and Play for Baby Ruby and dressed in a tiny fuchsia strapless thing so tight she could barely walk.
“The major speech, Jess. Danny is giving the major speech of the evening to his sister Louisa,” her mother said, catching sight of herself in the mirror over the dresser.
“Is this dress too tight?”
Delilah turned around, checking the mirror over her shoulder so she could see her behind.
“It is too tight, isn’t it, everyone?”
“Yes,” Teddy said. “But that shouldn’t stop you.”
“I would rather not babysit,” Jess said quietly, sitting on the edge of the bed.
“Of co
urse you would rather not babysit, darling….” Her mother hesitated, leaning into the mirror to examine her mascara. “But honestly, Jess, you know the dinner will be dull with speeches and blah, blah, blah, and you’ll be doing Danny and all of us who adore you such a favor.”
“I plan to be at the rehearsal dinner,” Jess said, but even as she spoke, she knew she had lost.
If only Jess were able to cry on demand in a pinch like her friends could do. Just once, she wished she could be the kind of girl who lost her temper or caused a scene or fell to the floor in tears. Or be like Teddy, who would say to her only mother, “You’ve got to be kidding. I am not going to miss the rehearsal dinner just because Danny asked me to babysit his child as if I were some kind of servant. He’s your son, so maybe you should be the one to babysit.”
Teddy could do that. But Jess simply wasn’t that kind of girl.
She didn’t complain. She didn’t say I can’t with a mouthful of tears the way other girls might do. And she didn’t ever say NO!
“What’s the matter with no,” Teddy had asked her once. “It’s a good word.”
“I can’t say no, especially to Mom,” Jess said. “Just in case.”
“Just in case what?” Teddy had asked.
“Just in case Mom puts me up for adoption.”
“Unlikely.”
As far as her family was concerned, Jess was perfectly happy. Or else she had persuaded herself that she was happy. But she had bad thoughts. She couldn’t help it. Right now she was thinking she could bolt out the door of room 618. Bye, bye, Ruby O’Fines, she’d wave at Baby Ruby lying in her Pack and Play — after all, what could happen to a baby in a Pack and Play? Off Jess would go, down in the elevator, past the room where the rehearsal dinner was taking place just as Danny was giving his stupid speech, out the back door of the hotel, across the beach, and surely in this beautiful hotel, she would meet a boy, maybe a little older, and he’d ask her to swim in the moonlight and she’d take off her dress and jump in the inlet just off the Pacific Ocean, swimming next to him without a single thought of Baby Ruby.
Across the room, Teddy sat on the floor in her underwear, watching the television on mute.
“You’re toast, Jess,” she said.
Toast was Teddy’s new word for everything. Even Whee was toast for getting married.
“You’ll be spending the evening right here in room 618 while the rest of us are yukking it up at Whee’s rehearsal dinner.”
“You could watch the baby, Teddy,” Jess said. “You don’t even like parties.”
“They wouldn’t let me,” Teddy said, lighting a thin, ebony European cigarette. “I’m a juvenile delinquent.”
“No smoke allowed around the baby,” Danny called. “And while you’re at it, Teddy, don’t sit around in your underwear with a man in the room.”
“A man in the room?” Teddy asked. “I hadn’t noticed. Is there a man in this room, Jess? All I can see is Danny. And Mom, of course, doing her lipstick.”
Jess shrugged.
That’s the way her family had been since she was in second grade.
Divorced parents, unemployed brother with a grumpy wife and a baby, a juvenile-delinquent high-school-dropout sister sprung just for the weekend from reform school, where she was spending a few months for shoplifting again and again and again.
“Okay, babes?” Danny said, ruffling Jess’s hair, dropping Baby Ruby in her lap. He opened a diaper bag and took out bottles and rattles and wipes. “My favorite, good-as-gold little sister.”
“Your demented little sister,” Jess said, wriggling around so Ruby could fit into the cup of her lap. “Weak, wimpy little sister. I should run away.”
“Here are two bottles of milk,” Danny said. “Beet’s breast milk. She froze it.”
“Oh, swell!” Jess said. “Good to know.”
“Give Ruby one bottle at eight, one at midnight.” Danny ignored her comment.
“Midnight?”
Danny checked his hair in the mirror.
“How come you’re getting back so late?” Jess asked, a sinking feeling in her stomach.
“It’s a late party, Jess,” Teddy said, turning off the television. “I plan to have a panic attack at about ten o’clock and call 911.”
“Here are diapers,” Danny was saying, scrounging the bottom of the diaper bag. “Feed her, burp her, change her into jammies, put her in the Pack and Play, and pray she doesn’t scream bloody murder. But Jess.” Danny lifted her chin. “Look at me. Do not EVER take your eyes off the baby under any circumstances.”
She took a deep breath.
“The Brambles is a hotel,” Danny said, as if Jess were brain-dead, as if it had not already come to her attention that she was in a hotel. “And anything can happen to a baby in a hotel.”
“Thanks, Danny,” she said. “I kind of guessed we must be in a hotel.”
Danny gave a thumbs-up and, without another word, he and Delilah left.
“Think of it this way, Jess,” Teddy was saying. “At least you won’t be there when Mom’s dress splits right up the back and she has to wrap herself in the tablecloth.”
The door to the bathroom opened and Whee walked out, a towel wrapped around her chest, crying as she seemed to be doing ever since she and Victor had decided to get married.
“What’s happening now?” Whee asked.
“Just the usual O’Fines family fun and games,” Teddy said.
“Like what fun and games?”
“We’ve been playing Scrabble, singing old school songs, hugging and kissing and dancing,” Teddy said. “As for me, I’m having a blast, Whee, just like you seem to be doing.”
“Whee’s not having a blast,” Jess said. “She cries every day.”
“From happiness,” Teddy said. “Happiness just gets to some people and they cry all the time.”
“You guys … leave me alone,” Whee said, collapsing on the bed. “STOP!”
Jess worried about things. She worried that Whee wasn’t crying from happiness, that Danny and Beet would have a terrible fight as usual and Beet would leave with Baby Ruby and go back to Larchmont, that Teddy would live in reform school for the rest of her life, that after Delilah finally got the boyfriend she was looking for in her tight dresses, she, Jessica O’Fines, would end up like the bag ladies on the Avenue in Larchmont with all of her possessions loaded in a grocery cart, sleeping the nights in a trash bag next to the CVS.
She worried that maybe marriage in the O’Fines family would never work out for any of them.
“I hate this family,” Whee said, flinging her arm over her eyes.
“Ditto,” Teddy said. “But this family is the one you have, unless you plan to take on Victor Treat’s family of robots as your very own.”
“That’s exactly what I plan to do,” said Whee. “And I plan to live in a clean house with dinner on time and the laundry done, and I plan to have ordinary, well-behaved children and love my husband until death do us part. Which will certainly be a change from this family.”
“Whew!” Teddy said, getting up to dress. “That’s too many plans.”
“And what is Baby Ruby doing here?” Whee asked, exasperated.
“The babysitter bailed,” Jess said.
“Of course she bailed,” Whee said. “Danny probably made the arrangements for the wrong date.”
Jess picked up Baby Ruby and sat on a chair across from the bed.
“I’m glad you’re going to be married until death do you part,” Jess said. “I was beginning to wonder.”
“I’m emotional.” Whee sat on the bed, rubbing her eyes. “It’s emotional to get married. You’ll know about that when you do it.”
“I’m emotional without getting married,” Jess said, pressing her nose against Baby Ruby’s warm cheek.
“And I’ll never get married,” Teddy said. “It’s enough trouble to live with myself.”
There was a knock on the door and Aldie O’Fines, in a blazer and striped shirt
with a red-and-blue Superman tie, stuck his head in the room.
“Hurry up, guys. The party’s on.”
“I’m going to be late, Dad,” Whee said. “And tell Danny thanks a lot for making Jess take care of Baby Ruby.”
“Anything I can do to help you girls?” Aldie asked, ignoring Whee. “A glass of wine. A new car? You guys get dressed pronto, and Jess O’Fines, my date for the weekend? You’re a champ!”
He shut the door and headed to the elevators. They could hear him whistling all the way down the hall.
Whee stood in front of the mirror in her lacy black dress, holding her long blond hair up.
“What do you think? Should I wear it up or down?”
“It looks beautiful down, Whee,” Jess said.
“I could cut it off in a rat pixie like mine,” Teddy said, joining her sister at the mirror. “I’ve got scissors in my suitcase.”
She was taller than Whee and skinny, too skinny, her face white as chalk. But she had pale blond hair like Whee’s and “good bones,” as their mother had told them both, and might even be pretty if she made an effort.
“Soon you’ll lose your baby fat like Teddy,” Delilah had said to Jess, “and then your good bones will show up.”
“Baby fat?”
Sometimes, her mother drove her crazy.
What Jess saw when she looked in the full-length mirror was not baby fat. It was FAT — a squishy ball of flesh in the middle of her torso ruffling the waist of her violet dress; a round, freckled face; slightly curly hair tumbling down to her shoulders; and bright blue eyes. She liked her eyes.
Whee reached out her hand to Jess.
“Come look at the perfect O’Fines sisters before I leave the tribe and become Louisa Treat.”
“You won’t be Whee any longer?” Jess asked, standing next to her, holding Baby Ruby in her arms so all that showed of Jess was her face and arms and legs but not the little rolls of fat around her belly.
“I’ll always be Whee to you guys.” She shook her long hair, kissed Jess on the head, and grabbed Teddy by the hand, heading for the door.
“Good-bye, Jess. I am so sorry about our completely incompetent brother.” She checked the clock on the counter. “We’re late!”
“Late is good,” Teddy was saying as they hurried down the hall to the elevators.
