by Jan O'Hara
Shep grimaced and offered his hand to Oliver in a complicated bro-shake. “Why didn’t you say something? I wouldn’t have given you such a hard time.”
“People get weird when they find out he’s famous,” Page said knowledgeably. As Oliver snorted she cast a glance at him from under her lashes. “Or so I’m told.”
“I guess they do,” Teague said, smiling, as two young girls sidled up to Oliver.
They had been trying on polarized sunglasses nearby, and had clearly overheard the conversation.
“Somehow I don’t think these ladies are looking for me,” Teague said.
“Mr. Pike,” the blond one said with a flash of perfect, straight teeth. “Oliver, that is. I—that is we—watch you on Morning’s Light.”
“Your performances are masterful,” said the brunette. “You play Carson with such intensity.” She scrabbled in a purse that looked like it was made of purple shag rug and pulled out a phone with a matching case. “Pose for a selfie?”
With a half-admiring, half-bemused grin, Teague slipped away to attend to a couple looking at sports watches.
Shep excused himself to go back to the Wobbly Dog—but not before administering a few bone-jarring backslaps, to show bygones were bygones.
“A soap opera? Do tell.” Page propped one elbow on the counter and set her chin in her palm. She batted her eyelashes while Oliver posed between the two women. “I don’t watch TV but I’ll take an educated guess: the script calls for many, many scenes while you’re dressed in your tighty whities.”
“Oh, yes,” said the blond on a laugh. “Though they’re not always white. In fact, they’re not always there—though there’s no full-frontal,” she hastened to advise Page. There was more tittering and a flurry of texting.
Page poked her tongue in her cheek.
Oliver shrugged and tried to ignore his burning cheeks. “Guy’s gotta do something to eat up his day.”
“Mmmm.” Page looked like she was going to say something meaningful but Teague finished with the couple and rejoined them.
With more giggling and sideways glances, Oliver’s admirers slipped out the door.
“Did you come here looking for something in particular?” Teague said. “The bats and balls are retired until the summer, but I can fetch them, if you like.” He jerked a thumb towards the stockroom. “Mi sports store es su sports store, or something like that.”
Relieved to change the subject, Oliver explained what they were after.
Teague hauled out a map of the town and environs, took a black Sharpie and began to circle possibilities. “There’s always the skating rink. How many people are we talking here?”
Oliver looked to Page. She had a better bead on this than him.
“Fifteen. Twenty, tops,” she said.
“I don’t have enough skates to cover you,” Teague said, “but they have rentals.”
“Our youngest client is sixty. If they fall,” Oliver said dryly, “I’d prefer it to be on something soft.”
“They?” Page nudged him with her shoulder. “Bet you don’t know how to skate.”
Oliver shrugged. “Not much call in the desert.”
“You have a stack of legal waivers?” she said to Teague, who raised one eyebrow.
“Standard procedure for guided trips. Why?”
“Because she’s a smart-ass,” Oliver said as Page smirked. Again he felt it, the warm zing of happiness.
Since Oliver’s injury, the people who knew about his past tended to react in one of two ways.
There were the overprotective ones, who pushed it to the point of being patronizing or smothering. People like his mom. Are you allowed to fly, Oliver? What if the cabbie has an accident? Don’t bend over, Oliver! It raises the pressure in your brain.
Or they were dismissive, like his father. Only way to know if your retina will detach again is to try. If you go blind, you go blind.
Outside of Shawn, no one had treated him like himself. Until Page, no one had dared to tease him or trash-talk him.
He missed being trash-talked.
“Okay, you’re after low impact.” Teague said. “What about a hike? There are nice trails above the golf course. It’ll challenge them but it’s not too remote, and it winds around the creek.”
“We need a step up from that,” Page said. “Something with pizzazz. Something people won’t do on their own.”
Oliver had to agree.
In the end, Teague slipped on a jacket and walked with them across Main Street, where he gestured across the valley to the mountains, and pointed out options. They settled on a plan, but the timeline became a sticking point.
Teague shook his head. “Tomorrow afternoon? That’s cutting it pretty close.”
“We’ve got the bus and driver, if that’s the concern,” Oliver said.
Teague scratched his chin. “I’ll have to get Shredder and Monroe to cover the store. It’ll cost you.”
“He’s good for it,” Page advised Teague, her eyes dancing. “If he needs cash, he’ll film a masterful sex scene.”
Before he’d lost the shine of being a pro athlete, before the vortex of prolonged recovery, Oliver had plenty of access to women. In his experience, when they brought up the “S” word in conversation, it was because they were thinking about sex. More than thinking. They were yearning, lusting.
He was lusting.
Was Page?
“I might have to do that,” Oliver drawled, holding her gaze when she would have looked away. And there, standing on a ledge of snow above a picturesque winter valley, in the presence of a mountain guide, Oliver’s patience was rewarded. Page lost her smart-ass smile. For a second, before her lids covered her eyes, he had the satisfaction of seeing her pupils dilate.
She covered by initiating a brisk, aggressive walk indoors while talking money with Teague.
Oliver fell behind, content to stroll with his hands in his pockets. He indulged in a slow, triumphant smile. He wasn’t alone in feeling the zing.
Look out, Page, he thought. I’m back and I’m coming after the zing.
Chapter 17
Because the loss of her backpack still smarted, each time Page was in public and among elderly males, she made a point of scanning their faces, looking for the luggage-hold thief. After breakfast on the fourth morning in Harmony, her diligence was rewarded.
She had just come from Oliver’s room, having retrieved the cell phone he’d forgotten on his dresser. She was tucking it into her bra for safekeeping, thinking about how well the oldsters’ profiles were coming together, and that they were close to being prepared for the border, if only they could find Mr. Lee and ensure he was sane, when something moved in her peripheral vision.
She turned her head and there, one corridor-length away, was the thief. He looked exactly as she remembered him, down to the knife-pleat crease in his trousers.
For a moment she couldn’t react. Then rage flooded her veins and shot to her vocal cords. “Hey!”
The shout was a mistake. He looked right at her—right at her—pivoted on the heel of his fancy dress shoe, and vanished into the stairwell.
Page took off at a run. That gray-haired rat-sucker had taken her money, her ID, and everything physical that connected her to her family. He’d been so sneaky about it, too, that he’d made Oliver doubt her truthfulness. Heck, at times the thief had Page questioning her own sanity.
She was going to take him down.
When she reached the stairwell door, she pushed it open with such force it careened into the opposite wall. A boom reverberated as she stumbled onto the landing.
A half-flight above, a young couple was descending the staircase with a small pig-tailed girl between them. The mother’s eyes widened. The little girl shrank back, clutching her parents’ hands, and the father shifted to insert himself between his family and Page.
“Did you see an old guy run past? Grandfatherly? Treacherous?” Page asked. Before they could unglue their jaws, the stairwell echoed w
ith the sound of rapidly ascending footsteps. “Never mind.” She raised her chin, shook her fist and called upward, “I’m coming for your sorry ass.”
Page squeezed past the family and raced on.
He was moving at an impressive pace, especially for a senior, but Page worked hard to narrow the gap. She chased him up to the fourth floor landing, then the fifth. On the sixth, she caught a glimpse of a vanishing pant leg as he exited the stairwell. But seconds later, when she strode into the corridor of the sixth floor, it was completely empty.
How was that possible?
“Calm down, Page,” she said aloud, panting. There were a limited number of suites on the upper floor. She could use Oliver’s phone to call for reinforcements. As long as she remained in the hallway, the thief couldn’t go anywhere.
Assuming he’s here to begin with, a little voice whispered. Nobody else recalls seeing him. Remember how he wasn’t on the security tape? Remember the family’s bafflement in the stairwell? Maybe Oliver was right and you fried a few circuits when you were hypothermic.
Was she doomed to having hallucinations about elderly thieves on random occasions?
She exhaled and prowled the length of the corridor. After the exhilaration of action, she hated the icy creep of self-doubt. Should she call for help?
She was passing Mrs. Arbuckle’s door when she noticed an oddity. While all the other locks glowed a steady green, Mrs. A’s blinked a cerulean blue, rather like the color of Oliver’s eyes.
After a quick glance to ensure she was unobserved, Page tried the handle. The door opened without need of a keycard.
Not more than ten minutes ago, Page had run into Madeline in the lobby, where Gill had been hailing a cab for Mrs. A’s planned day on the town. If the sports-coated man existed, he was probably in there right now, riffling through Mrs. Arbuckle’s possessions.
Page took a breath. She was going to check the room, verify his existence and mendacity before calling in the cavalry. But she wouldn’t be stupid about it.
She pulled Oliver’s phone from her bra and wiped it on her leggings to remove the sweat that had accumulated during her brief run. Oliver hadn’t locked his phone—an inexcusable mistake for a man so fixated on privacy, but one which worked to her benefit in this instance.
She thumbed in the numbers for the Thurston’s front desk, save one, pushed the door open cautiously, and slid in. She held the phone aloft, her finger hovering over the last digit.
In the quiet of the room, the sound of the engaging lock seemed ridiculously loud.
The room had a deserted feeling to it, but she hesitated at the light switch. Why draw attention to herself?
She took a step forward and peered around the room.
Another step.
The drapes had been left half-closed and in the pale light of an early winter morning, the room was cast in pink-tinted half-shadow. It was enough to see the maids had already come and gone. More importantly, unless the thief was hiding in the bathtub, she was alone. Either Page had let herself be led astray, or she was genuinely losing her mind.
Then a figure detached itself from a puddle of shadow near the bathroom door. It flew in her direction.
Page took an involuntary step backward. Her right heel caught on the carpet and she stumbled. Her back struck the door with sufficient force to send the phone tumbling from her grasp. She abandoned it and seized the doorknob with both hands, wrestling fruitlessly with it as the object neared and halted at her feet.
“Son of a monkey wrench.” Page put a trembling hand to her chest as her heart threatened to beat itself outward. “I forgot about you, Betty Jo.”
The little dog cocked her head to the side and let out a woof.
“Are you alone in here?” Page bent to pick up the phone, which thankfully didn’t look any the worse for wear.
The Shih Tzu gave one sharp bark and turned, trotting to the bathroom door where she sat, inexplicably, on the proximal side of the transom. She tilted her muzzle upward, seemingly fixated on a point in the bathroom about six feet off the floor. Her stubby tail beat a tattoo on the carpet.
“Have you trapped a spider in there?” To shake off her nerves, Page slid sideways to turn on a bedside lamp and in its cheery light, moved swiftly to check out the suite. Closet, bathroom, space under the bed, space behind the armchair? All empty, as she’d thought. Nothing amiss in the bathroom, either, though Betty Jo didn’t budge as Page stepped over her.
“Okay, pooch, I’m off,” Page announced. Better escape before she was caught on the premises without a good explanation. Page would worry about her sanity later.
She speed-walked across the suite and seized the door handle, only, despite a lengthy tussle, the electric lock wouldn’t release. It beamed a stubborn red light back at her.
“Son of a buzz saw.”
After a brief hesitation, she tapped the last digit of the Thurston front desk into the cell. Her best option was to track down Oliver. Hopefully he’d know how to extract her from the room without drawing the staff’s attention, though he was bound to have questions of his own.
She was busy imagining and discarding options for cover stories, so it took a moment to realize the phone wasn’t ringing. She checked the signal strength, which was fine, and reentered the number. Same result. For the heck of it, she tried calling the number of her last job, Strange Inklings. Nothing. Not even a dial tone now.
Think, Page, think.
When she tried to open a text bubble, the lock screen finally appeared. No way was she cracking a six-digit PIN.
“Okay, option number three,” she said aloud, hoping to calm her nerves with the sound of her own voice.
She sat on Mrs. Arbuckle’s bed and reached for the bedside phone, hesitating before she dialed. The existence of call display made this maneuver trickier. If the hotel staff was on the ball, and they always were when it came to Mrs. Arbuckle, they were bound to be curious when they noticed where the call originated.
This would so much easier if she could come up with a plausible excuse for being in the suite, uninvited.
While she weighed options, Betty Jo gave up on whatever had fascinated her in the bathroom. She padded over to Page, flopped onto her back, and lolled her head, inviting Page to indulge in a belly rub.
“Sorry, but I’m more of a cat person,” Page said, and pressed the front desk button before she could reconsider. While she waited for the phone to connect, she slid to the carpet. “I’m also a liar,” she whispered.
The dog closed her eyes in contentment as Page scratched, and Page smiled and listened as the phone rang. And rang. And rang.
On the tenth ring she pulled the phone from her ear and stared at it. What was going on? An unmanned Thurston phone during business hours? For Mrs. A? Was the staff dealing with some kind of emergency?
She hastened to the window and, being careful to remain concealed, looked out at what promised to be a gorgeous winter day.
She shook her head. “I have no idea what’s going on, Betty Jo.”
The phone was plugged in, wasn’t it? Otherwise she couldn’t have heard the dial tone and the ring tone. She dragged the bedside table out to be sure, and yes, everything was connected as it was supposed to be. Just in case, she unplugged and replugged the phone, tried again. Twelve rings this time, still no answer.
With a growing sense of fatalism, she tried all the other preprogrammed buttons on the phone—room service, laundry service, even a number labeled Ben’s cell, which was almost certainly the manager’s private number.
Her last call was to 911. Nothing.
Meanwhile, the electric door lock held, the bedside lamp glowed, and the alarm clock’s numbers rotated. When the bathroom’s hair dryer roared as she turned it on, to test the limits of the suite’s malfunction, a crop of goosebumps erupted on her neck and propagated elsewhere.
She wasn’t superstitious but this didn’t make sense. It was almost like an otherworldly force had conspired to keep her, confined
and incommunicado, on the top floor of the Thurston. To what purpose, she couldn’t imagine.
* * *
✽
An hour later, Page knew her goose was cooked, her onion boiled, her cheese curdled. She had knocked on the common wall between Mrs. A’s suite and that of her neighbor, and pounded on the door, to no effect. All she could do now was await the moment of pending discovery and heightened mistrust.
She collapsed in an armchair and pulled a soft throw blanket over her lap, not bothering to retrieve Oliver’s phone when it slipped behind the seat cushion.
The dog had grown bored, too, and jumped onto the bed, where she dozed with light snores, one ear twitching periodically.
“If I have to be trapped here, at least you’re with me,” Page murmured. She rolled her head restlessly. “Whatever it is we’re waiting for, let’s get on with it.”
The dog’s eyes opened. She sprang to her feet as if electrocuted. She gave three sharp barks and stared at Page intently.
From the depths of the chair, Oliver’s phone began to ring.
Page scrambled to her feet. Between the adrenaline in her system and the chair’s design, it took a while to locate the phone. Even then, the number on the call display made her hesitate before accepting.
It was the 602 area code. The number Oliver liked to torture himself with but always declined.
“Don’t meddle, Page,” he’d said to her not more than two days ago, and his face had been fierce in the declaration.
On the other hand, he’d probably prefer she extricate herself without going to jail.
She accepted the call and slid the phone to her ear. “Hello?”
There was a long pause, then a deep male voice replied in the honeyed vowels of a Southern accent. “Now right here is a testimonial for why you can’t never give up. In the last year I must’ve called eight hundred times, hopin’ Oliver would answer. And on the occasion of the eight hundred and first, not only do I get a pickup, but I am rewarded with a pleasant surprise. And who might you be?”