Clutches and Curses

by Dorothy Howell

  “I’m supposed to have a room but the desk clerk says nothing is available. She’s checking with the manager now,” I said.

  “Bradley,” Maya grumbled. “He’s the manager. The guy’s a complete jerk. Come on.”

  I grabbed another muffin out of the bin—just so Maya wouldn’t think I didn’t like them, of course—and followed.

  The lobby was deserted. Amber stood at the registration desk clicking away at the computer keyboard when we walked up. Her wax smile morphed into something friendlier at the sight of Maya.

  “Haley really needs a room,” Maya said.

  Amber threw me a quick glance. “I know. But there’s nothing available.”

  Maya leaned in a little. “You and I both know there’s a room available.”

  Amber squirmed. “I tried to contact Bradley, but I couldn’t reach him. And you know I don’t dare—”

  “Look, Amber,” Maya said. “You’re in charge here. Just give her a room.”

  Amber cringed. “You know how he is.”

  Even I knew how Bradley was, and I hadn’t even met him.

  “Amber, you’re running the desk—so run it,” Maya insisted.

  She fidgeted for a moment, then finally squared her shoulders and said, “Well, okay.”

  All I could think was thank God Maya and I had bonded over my handbag. Otherwise, I’d be out on the street.

  “I need to see some I.D.,” Amber said, “and a credit card, in case of damage.”

  I handed them over. Back at the keyboard again, Amber ran a plastic room key card through the reader.

  “Room three-thirty-four. There are only four rooms in that wing. You’ll be the only one there,” she said.

  I started to get a weird feeling.

  “Something happened up there and we’re not supposed to book those rooms,” Amber said.

  My weird feeling got weirder.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “I’m making an exception for you,” Amber said, holding up the key card. “Do you want the room, or not?”

  “Yeah, of course I want the room,” I said, and managed a weak little laugh. “I mean, it’s not like somebody got murdered up there or anything. Right?”

  “Enjoy your stay.” Amber slapped the key card, my driver’s license, and my credit card into my hand and walked away.

  Oh, crap.

  CHAPTER 5

  Iwheeled my suitcase out of the elevator on the third floor and headed left toward room 334, my new home away from home. The carpet and wallpaper screamed ’70s, just like the lobby.

  Honestly, I didn’t get it. This whole section of Henderson hadn’t been developed back in the day, so just why the decorator had wanted to incite motel guests to throw on some bell-bottoms and dance the bump to Brick House, I didn’t know. My best guess was that the Culver Inn management had gotten the furnishings from some other bankrupt motel chain at a discount—a whopping discount, obviously.

  At the end of the long hallway, I turned left again. Just as Amber had said, only four rooms were in this wing of the motel. I found mine on the left at the end of the hall.

  From the look of things, this area hadn’t gotten any attention from the housekeeping crew in a while. The place was dusty. Something smelled weird.

  Jeez, I hoped that wasn’t the scent of toxic mold growing under the carpet.

  I stopped outside my door and glanced around. One room next to mine, two across the hall. An exit sign above the door at the end of the corridor flickered in the dim light. It was deadly silent up here.

  Maybe a week at the spa with my mom wouldn’t have been so bad.

  I pushed that thought away, hurried inside my room, threw the dead bolt, slid the security chain, and switched on all the lights.

  The room boasted amenities not found in the upscale hotels in Vegas: end tables with lamps bolted to them, pictures screwed into the walls, the TV remote tethered to the bed frame. The bathroom was small, the closet smaller. Orange shag carpet, a silver and brown bedspread, and avocado green drapes completed the bad-acid-trip look the decorator seemed to be going for.

  Actually, a week at the spa with Mom might have been okay.

  I pulled back the drapes, sending a flurry of dust motes into the air, and looked outside. This particular room wasn’t raking in an upcharge for its incredible view.

  The Culver Inn was U-shaped, and my room was on one side of the U. Below was a swimming pool, now drained; leaves and mud lay in the bottom. A dozen ratty umbrella tables surrounded by broken chairs completed the patio-from-hell effect.

  A couple of large boulders, a half-dozen tall palm trees, and a wrought-iron fence enclosed the grounds and separated it from the motel’s service area. There was a small building that I guessed held the pool and maintenance equipment, and some Dumpsters.

  Beyond that, the desert stretched for a few miles to a housing tract just visible on the horizon. In between lay piles of rock and construction debris. Seemed the construction companies didn’t bother to haul away their leftover crap, just dumped it in an open spot in the desert.

  Spa week with Mom flashed in my mind.

  I looked down at the swimming pool again.

  I thought about Mom and the beauty queens.

  Yeah, I’d rather be here.

  I took a quick shower, pulled on my pajamas, and yanked back the bedspread. Nothing crawled out. I crawled in.

  A really annoying buzzing sound woke me. I rolled over and realized the alarm clock was going off—at two in the afternoon. Not unusual for Vegas. The alarm had probably been set the last time the room was used, back during the Bush administration, I guessed.

  Immediately, a hunger pang hit me. I threw on jeans and a T-shirt, stuffed my laptop into an awesome Betsey Johnson tote, and left the room.

  Despite the fact that my room was crappier than crap, I was grateful for it. I intended to thank Amber for putting herself out there so I could use it, but when I got to the lobby, she wasn’t on duty. Another woman in the hideous Culver Inn uniform stood behind the registration desk. I got my car from the parking lot and hit the road.

  Driving was the ideal time to check phone messages, I’d found. Of course, it could be against the law to use your cell phone while driving in Nevada; I didn’t know. I was sure some law-abiding citizen would scream at me from the next lane, or offer a helpful hand gesture, if it was.

  I expected my voicemail box to be loaded with calls from Ty. It wasn’t. The only message was from Marcie, asking me to call her right away. I pulled to a stop at a red light on St. Rose Parkway and punched in Marcie’s number. She picked up immediately.

  “Are you sitting down?” she asked.

  No how-are-you, no what’s-up, no oh-my-God-you’re-not-going-to-believe-what-happened. This must be big.

  “I just picked up your mail, like you asked,” Marcie said. “And you got . . . something.”

  My spirits lifted. Wow, this must be great. Marcie wouldn’t have called otherwise. I’d probably gotten a refund or rebate on something. Maybe some rich relative had died—which would be tragic, of course—and left me a wad of money. I could use it. My checking account was on life support at the moment.

  “It’s from the IRS,” Marcie said.

  My breath caught. A wave of fear washed over me. Sort of like when you show up at a department store wanting to buy the latest handbag but don’t see any in the display cases.

  “Would that be the International Refund Service?” I asked.

  Yeah, okay, I didn’t know if there was such a thing, but there could have been. I mean, I’d been in Europe a few weeks ago, shopping diligently, doing all I could to maintain the international balance of trade. I’d maxed out a significant number of credit cards converting U.S. dollars to pounds and euros and God knows what else. And who knew how that conversion stuff worked, anyway. Maybe they’d realized they’d made a mistake. Maybe they were sending me a massive refund.

  Or maybe I’d really been cursed.

&nb
sp; “It’s from the Internal Revenue Service,” Marcie told me.

  Crap.

  “Want me to open it for you?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Come on, Haley, you have to face this.”

  Marcie was right—she’s almost always right about things.

  I hate it when other people are right.

  “You did file your taxes, didn’t you?” Marcie asked.

  I did a quick calculation. I’d filed my taxes electronically on April 14, a full thirty minutes before the deadline—beating my own personal best—and had already received my six hundred dollar refund. That was about six weeks ago. Would the IRS contact me now, after they’d sent me the refund?

  The traffic light changed and I drove forward with the line of cars.

  “I’m opening it,” Marcie said. A few seconds passed, then she said, “Did you get a refund this year?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Well, they want it back,” Marcie told me. “Plus penalties and interest. Plus another two grand. Call it three thousand.”

  “What?”

  I shot across two lanes of traffic. Horns blew. Tires screeched—and I don’t think they were mine.

  Then, like a desert oasis, I spotted a Starbucks.

  “I’ll call you back,” I told Marcie, and snapped my phone closed.

  I cut off an SUV and whipped into the parking lot, grabbed my laptop, and rushed inside Starbucks.

  Chocolate had a calming effect on people, didn’t it? I think I read that somewhere. I intended to put that little bit of info to the test—right now.

  The guy behind the counter prepared my grandé mocha frappuccino with whipped cream and extra chocolate syrup—no way would anything smaller get me through a crisis of this magnitude—and I found a seat at a table in the corner.

  Oh my God. How could I owe the IRS three thousand dollars? And, better yet, how could I possibly pay the IRS three thousand dollars?

  I sucked down half of my mocha frappuccino, then forced myself to slow down. While chocolate and caffeine had definitely helped solve a number of problems in the past, I couldn’t afford brain freeze at a time like this.

  I opened my laptop and logged onto my bank account. I needed facts. Then I could proceed calmly and quickly to a solution.

  I checked the balance of my checking account and nearly launched myself out of my chair. Only a couple hundred bucks. I checked my savings account. Jeez, did that “minus” symbol mean I’d overdrawn it? How had that happened?

  Maybe I should take an accounting class next semester.

  Anyway, no time to worry about that now. I checked the balances on my credit cards and found I had some—not a lot—of available credit on all of them.

  I dug a pen and paper from my tote and made a quick list of upcoming expenses and things I needed to buy. I had to get the tire that had blown last night repaired. The fender that had been scraped in the Holt’s parking lot had to be fixed, too. There was that traffic ticket I’d gotten. It would be expensive, plus I might have to go to traffic school. I needed to eat while I was here, so I’d have to have money for that, too.

  I looked at the calculations I’d made. Yikes! No way did I have enough money to cover everything.

  A horrible vision flashed in my head. I was in Vegas, for God’s sake. What about seeing a show, or hitting a great buffet? What about shopping?

  An even more horrible thought bloomed in my brain: what if I found that Delicious handbag but didn’t have enough money to buy it?

  Oh my God. This was a crisis of staggering magnitude. Where was my best friend when I needed her?

  I drained my frappuccino. I desperately needed another one. But should I spend the money for it?

  Immediately, I disregarded the notion. I had a massive problem to solve involving not only basic survival and high finance, but the acquisition of the season’s hottest handbag. This was no time to worry about a couple of bucks.

  I got another frappuccino and sat down again. By the time I was half finished with it, I felt calmer. Not because I’d come to any brilliant conclusions or flashed on a fantastic solution of what to do. I just decided to forget the whole thing for a while and move on to something else.

  Like the murder I was suspected of.

  Really, what else could I do?

  I Googled my way to my high school’s Web site. I didn’t even know they had one, but there it was. Good ol’ Monroe High, private school to the rich and affluent—and those who could convincingly fake it.

  Seeing the photo of the school with its ivy-covered walls, swaying palms, and manicured lawns reminded me of how glad I was to be done with all of that. I’d almost rather face the Iraqi secret police than go back to high school.

  My older brother and younger sister and I had all attended Monroe. It was near our house, so most of the students were from our neighborhood.

  I didn’t know exactly how our family ended up living in the upscale area. Mom’s grandmother left the house to her, along with a trust fund. Nobody seemed to know—or was willing to tell—what my great-grandmother had done to get all that money in the first place.

  Scholarship kids from other areas of L.A. attended Monroe, too, lest our school might have been considered stuck up and snooty, which, of course, it was. With tuition and fees topping fifteen grand per academic year, what else could you expect?

  Attending Monroe High was a lot like surviving in the business world. Networking, who you knew, and who you could meet were important. At private schools, though, most of this was used for evil.

  Making connections was often about pretending to be friends with someone just because their family had access to something you wanted—a sky box at Dodger Stadium, an “in” with the casting director at Dreamworks. Social ranking among students was big, based on wearing the latest designer accessories—whether or not they complemented our uniforms. If a student didn’t come from a wealthy family, they faked it. “Smart” kids were befriended by “cool” kids just for help with grades.

  Not that I had ever done any of these things, of course.

  But since we were literally locked behind a gate during school hours, I learned to survive. And, of course, thrive.

  That’s how I roll.

  I scrolled through the Monroe High Web site, seeing pictures of the computer lab, art studio, theater, TV studio, gymnasium, and classrooms, and remembered Courtney Collins.

  I hadn’t really thought about Courtney since high school. She was one of those girls I was glad to never see again after graduation. Our only connection was some classes we’d had together.

  Plus, there was that whole thing with Robbie Freedman.

  Courtney had not been my best friend—not even my sort-of friend. Honestly, I’d never really liked her. She didn’t seem to know that, though, which was really irritating because she always talked to me and sat next to me in class.

  Everything about Courtney annoyed me. First of all, she was really nice. I mean really nice. Like, she didn’t have enough sense to see what was going on around her and know she should be upset, or mad, or something.

  Second of all, the teachers loved her—or maybe they just felt sorry for her. I don’t know. Courtney was in my art class and for an entire semester everything she drew, sketched, painted, and sculpted had the same stupid stained-glass pattern. At the school art fair that spring, Courtney’s painting got first place—but only because the teacher helped her with it—mine got second. At graduation, she got a couple of scholarships and some awards—not that I thought I deserved them, but still.

  Then, of course, there was that thing with Robbie Freedman.

  I clicked onto the “alumni” icon. A list of Monroe graduates’ names along with their accomplishments filled the screen. Jeez, when did the school start doing this?

  I scrolled through a few of the names I remembered from high school. Most people had already graduated college, some were in med school or law school. One guy had opened his own dot-com c
ompany and was already a millionaire. A girl—who’d definitely had some work done, judging from the photo she’d posted—was starring in a Broadway play. Everybody was doing big things.

  Everybody but me.

  Not a good feeling.

  Then it hit me. Oh my God, lots of graduates from Monroe had probably logged onto the site, wondering what I’d done with my life. I paged down and clicked my name. Nothing came up.

  Jeez, I couldn’t let people think I hadn’t accomplished anything. Of course, I couldn’t let them know what I’d actually done, either.

  I set up an alumni account with a password, and paused, my fingers on the keyboard trying to decide what to write. Absolute truthfulness in this sort of situation wasn’t required. I mean, half of the graduating class had probably stretched their accomplishments, right?

  Then it occurred to me that no matter how far I stretched the things I’d done, nobody from Monroe High School would be impressed. So I typed in that I did undercover work but couldn’t disclose anything more, as a matter of national security. Just enough info to be intriguing and make me sound important, without actually entering any facts that might prove embarrassing in the future if some Monroe alumni checked into them and decided to rat me out.

  Some things never change, even after high school.

  I clicked on Courtney’s page on the Web site and was surprised to see the only info she’d listed was her move to Henderson. I’m not sure what I expected to find. Certainly not that she had some big career going. Courtney never struck me as being that bright.

  I entered her name into a search engine and eventually found an article about women and small businesses that she’d been mentioned in for the local newspaper. Wow, Courtney had started a fashion accessory business? When did that happen? I kept searching and, half an hour later, I had her address.

  I packed up my laptop and left.

  CHAPTER 6

  My GPS took me to the Bay Breeze Apartments on Warm Springs Road, a sprawling complex in a nice area of Henderson. The buildings were sand-colored stucco with red tile roofs. Lots of pine and palm trees, green belts, plants, and flowers. I wound my way through the maze of driveways and speed bumps and pulled into a parking spot outside Courtney’s apartment.