by Becky Clark
“Thank you, ma’am.”
Really? Another ma’am? I had to quit wearing sensible shoes. “Thank you. It smells delicious.” I wondered who’d made it.
I closed the door behind the waiter and saw the armoire door had eased open for the ten-thousandth time. I picked up the white napkin folded neatly on the tray and tried to loop it around the knobs in an effort to keep them both closed. The knobs were small, the napkin was thick, and I couldn’t make it happen. Plus, Ozzi and my dinner awaited. I draped the napkin over the open armoire door. If it was going to hang open, at least I could tie a surrender flag to it.
Grabbing the bowl of chowder with one hand and the plate with the diagonally cut sandwich in the other, I returned to the bathroom to finish my conversation with Ozzi.
“Okay, I’m back.” I took a big bite of the sandwich. A sharp crunch, then a delightful combination of hot, gooey cheddar and pepper jack oozed into my mouth. I swallowed, then took a spoonful of chowder. I must have made yummy noises because Ozzi asked, “Are you eating or do you just miss me a lot?”
“I do miss you, but lordy, this chowder is delish!”
“I bet Portland has good chowder. Are you seeing any of the city?”
“Not much. I took a walk a little while ago but mostly I haven’t left the hotel since I got here.” After eliciting a solemn promise—heart-crossing, mother’s life and such—not to breathe a word of what I was about to tell him, I filled Ozzi in on what was going on with Hanna’s kidnapping, the suspicious behavior of everyone, and the new threat hanging over the heads of conference attendees if the kidnappers’ demands weren’t met by noon Saturday. “And now, all I want to do is figure out a way to cancel this conference without everything backfiring on me—and on everyone else—in a grand and spectacular manner.”
“What are your options?”
“I could call in a bomb threat,” I suggested.
“I think they call that domestic terrorism.”
“Wreck the power supply at the hotel? I know where the basement is. That’s probably where everything is.”
“Illegal.”
“I could give everyone food poisoning at lunch tomorrow.”
“Illegal and derivative.” Ozzi made that unconscious noise he makes when he’s thinking. “Maybe you could make a surprise announcement at lunch tomorrow that the conference is cancelled and everyone needs to clear out immediately.”
“Then I’d be on the hook for all of Viv’s costs. I’m sure I’d be the first one named in her lawsuit.” I finished the last couple of bites of my dinner. “I don’t see how I can cancel the conference.”
We talked a bit more about how I might be able to convince Viv to cancel or involve the police, but it seemed fairly hopeless. I told Ozzi I needed to call my brother too, and we said our goodbyes. Again, I wished I could do it in person.
When Lance answered my call, I filled him in and told him about the ransom, the ticking clock, and Viv’s weirdness about the money. “Will the police get involved if there’s embezzlement?” I asked.
“Any evidence ?”
“I don’t have any.”
“Then still no.”
“Will the police get involved if … someone … calls in an anonymous bomb threat, or shuts down the hotel power, or if everyone at the conference gets food poisoning?”
Lance was quiet for a moment. “Yes, but not in the way you want. Don’t do any of that, okay?”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
“Lance, seriously. Does this sound like a kidnapping?”
“Seriously? No. Why would this girl be kidnapped? Sounds like she disappears regularly. And that ransom amount? Sounds bogus to me. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the amount of a tax lien against Viv.”
Lance had verbalized everything I’d been thinking.
After we hung up, I left my phone charging in the bathroom but moved out to the living room. The pile of T-shirts and iron-on logos sat there in a heap, accusing me of neglect. Reluctantly, I knew I wasn’t going to solve any mysteries that night and might as well do the ironing Clementine demanded of me.
“There have to be more outlets in this stupid room,” I muttered, dropping to my knees. I crawled the perimeter of the living area, indeed seeing the hint of an unreachable outlet behind the armoire. I followed another cord snaking out and traced it to the lamp on the desk. The lamp near the loveseat had a light fixture attached to a wall switch. I crawled into the bedroom. If there wasn’t one in there I’d have to iron in the bathroom. I crawled the perimeter there too, and on the last available wall, the one on the far side of the bed, I finally found an open outlet I could reach. Kind of.
I dragged the ironing board from the closet into the center of the bedroom and after several tries, got it set up. It seemed wobbly but it would have to do. I carried it to the side of the bed where the outlet was and tried to slide it into the gap between the bed and the wall. I finally succeeded in wrangling it into place by standing with it on the bed, then lowering it down as if I were a construction crane and it was a load-bearing I-beam in a skyscraper.
To plug in the iron, I had to twist myself into a master yoga position that involved a complicated process of breathing some space into my hips and softening my inner groin. But I finally did it.
As my reward, I dialed up the True Crime channel on the TV in the bedroom and settled in for some Forensic Files while I knelt on the bed to iron on those stupid patches. The instructions on the patches advised me to use something called a press cloth. I almost certainly didn’t have one, and opted instead for a washcloth from the bathroom.
When the iron was hot, really hot, probably too hot, I placed it on the dry washcloth, which was placed on the iron-on patch, which was placed on the T-shirt, perhaps even in the correct position. It made an alarming sizzly noise but I held it on for thirty seconds, per the instructions. When I pulled off the washcloth, it smoked. The patch had a perfect nubby imprint of the washcloth. It was crooked on the T-shirt and one corner was bent up. Most of it adhered to the shirt, but it wasn’t pretty.
“I told her I’m not good at this,” I muttered.
I ironed long into the night, kept company by all manner of true crime stories but barely making a dent in my piles of T-shirts, mainly because I had to give myself a mental pep talk before tackling each one. I finally turned off the iron around midnight, my legs tingling with pins and needles, and collapsed into bed. My last T-shirt looked no better than my first.
I thought I’d be able to sleep, since every part of me was exhausted up to and including my spleen, but I was wrong. The body was willing but the brain wouldn’t relax.
There’s something about the middle of the night that makes everything—and I mean, everything—seem worse than it could ever possibly be.
Glaciers melting. Fires raging. Snipers. Politics.
That freckle? At two in the morning, obviously skin cancer that had metastasized.
That noise? A marauding army coming to drag me off to Camp 1391.
That bill from Mastercard? Debt so deep a backhoe couldn’t dig me out.
Misplaced car keys? Clearly dementia.
That gray hair sticking straight out of my chin like a tiny flag? Impending geezerhood, incontinence, and sensible shoes for the rest of my life.
And now, in addition to all that, I had a kidnapping that might or might not be a kidnapping to solve, with someone who really didn’t want my help in solving it.
I grabbed my phone from the nightstand and groaned when I saw the time. I held it, gently rolling it from my right hand to my left and back again.
I should call the police and demand they investigate. But what if it wasn’t really a kidnapping? What if there wasn’t really any ransom? I’d look dumb, they’d look dumb, Viv would look dumb. Or worse, we’d look like criminals. I set the phone back on the nightstand.
But what if it was a kidnapping? I picked up the phone again. Was this just overblown, melodramatic middle-
of-the-night angst? Would insisting on an investigation get Hanna killed? The cops would require some kind of evidence, which I didn’t have and Viv would deny. I set the phone down.
That freckle was not skin cancer, there was no army near Portland, and I had plenty of time left to take a heroic stand against sensible shoes.
Things would look better in the daylight. Because they couldn’t look worse.
Twelve
I woke Friday morning with a serious crick in my neck from jolting awake in the wee hours when the ironing board collapsed. The clamor had launched me from my bed like a scud missile. The buckled ironing board could lie there forever for all I cared, slowly becoming buried under eons of dust and neglect. Or the maid could deal with it. Either way, it was dead to me.
Another drizzly, overcast day matched my mood, but I harbored high hopes that pancakes would lighten it and somehow strengthen my resolve not to return to bed. Hiding under the covers remained just on my horizon, but I willed myself to greet the day.
While waiting for the elevator, I hummed the silly advertising jingle for Glu-Pocalypse, the epoxy everyone in the world had in their junk drawer and which had served to implicate me in the murder of my agent. I tried to get the tune out of my mind, but it was insidious, as all good advertising jingles are, and I simply couldn’t help myself. I jutted my hips side to side to punctuate the final “Glu-Poc-A-Lypse!”
The elevator dinged on the final syllable. As I stepped inside, so did a man carrying a briefcase. It startled me and freaked me out a bit.
He’d come out of nowhere! Had he seen me dancing to music in my head?
“Going down?” My finger hovered above the panel of buttons.
He glanced over. “Same.”
With everything going on, I wasn’t sure if I was being paranoid or prudent, but I plastered myself against the far side of the elevator.
At least he ignored me instead of turning into one of those creepers standing too close, or worse, telling me I’d be prettier if I smiled. Or worse yet, calling me Ma’am again.
I felt myself getting angry even though he’d done none of those things. I was so relieved when the elevator opened at the lobby. I guess I should have thanked him for chasing the Glu-Pocalypse song from my head.
When I stepped out, my nose tingled with the scent of wet dog. It wasn’t overpowering but floated at the periphery of my senses. More alarming was the large crowd of writers milling about. How did I know they were writers? Because every single person in the lobby not attached to a dog was attached to a notebook, binder, or computer of some kind.
Clementine passed by in today’s hipster costume of miniskirt over strategically torn red tights, Uggs, and oversized man’s tuxedo shirt cinched with a wide, stretchy, faux animal-print belt. I gave her a wave and a wide smile. She gave me a wave and a grimace. My campaign of earning a smile from her was failing miserably. She rounded up a wayward group of writers and hauled them away, presumably to put them to work.
I found a table at the back of the restaurant, where I desperately wanted to sit with my back toward the lobby, hiding until after my pancakes and coffee kicked in. Unfortunately, my father had impressed upon me at a very tender age the police officer’s habit of sitting with their back to a wall so they could survey a room in its entirety. I did the same. Couldn’t change even if I wanted to.
The man with the briefcase was being led to a table for four. After he sat, he opened up a newspaper and walled himself off. I thought about Billy the PI doing this same thing and wondered if my mom had sent another mercenary to watch over me. After everything that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, I wouldn’t be so cavalier about dismissing his help.
While the server poured my coffee, I ordered pancakes with bacon and two scrambled eggs. The grammatically horrifying menus had disappeared and I crossed my fingers that the hotel had either hired a new chef or Jerry had stepped up his game.
A woman kissed the man with the briefcase and sat down next to him. He set his newspaper aside and gave her his full attention. Clearly not surveilling me.
I was on my own once again, so I considered the events of the last two days.
It was absolutely clear to me now that Hanna’s “kidnapping” was nothing of the sort. Everything pointed to Viv’s activities rather than Hanna’s. I was sure Hanna was perfectly safe kayaking through the Columbia River gorge, or at some music festival in Bolivia, or happily trapped on Tom Sawyer’s Island at Disneyland. But I couldn’t figure out why Viv thought it was a good idea to manipulate me in whatever nefarious financial plot she was devising. Our friendship was strong, but probably not embezzlement-abetting strong.
Was I her alibi? Scapegoat? Diversion?
And what did she need so much money for, if it wasn’t for some bogus ransom? Could her debt to the IRS really be six figures?
Maybe Hanna had gone back to rehab.
My breakfast came and I immediately crunched an entire strip of bacon, practically weeping with joy at its perfection. Maybe today wouldn’t be terrible. After wiping delightfully greasy fingers on my napkin, I used the internet browser on my phone to search for the ReTurn a New Leaf website. No costs were listed for their rehab treatment plans. I guessed it was like wondering about that beautiful cashmere sweater in the boutique. If you had to ask, you couldn’t afford it.
Many clicks and bites of breakfast later, I gleaned that rehab costs in places like ReTurn a New Leaf—in-patient spa settings on an Oregon beach—could be anywhere from $20,000 to $80,000 per month. Hanna had been in-patient at least twice, and three-month treatments weren’t unheard of. I did the math with the help of my calculator app, then felt foolish, since I could certainly have multiplied eighty thousand times three in my head. At the high end, $240,000 for each of her two prior visits would be $480k, a tidy sum. If Hanna was there again, and not in Bolivia or Disneyland, Viv could be looking at $720,000 in total, in addition to her tax problem.
If I could whistle, this would have been the time to let out a low one. Viv could be a million bucks in debt. It made my money problems seem pretty insignificant.
I stabbed the last bite of scrambled egg and almost choked when someone appeared beside me without my noticing. So much for seeing a room in its entirety.
Lily squealed in my ear, “There you are!”
“Um, yeah.” I coughed to clear the wayward egg from my throat. “Here I am.”
Lily stepped to the side and gesticulated wildly at someone across the restaurant. “Here she is!”
I watched a middle-aged man walk toward me. He’d surely stepped right off the pages of Guru International Magazine. Flowing, floor-length, flowered kaftan in a brown-on-beige batik. Matching harem pants, pegged at the ankle. Huarache sandals. Unkempt stubble. Wavy, shoulder-length salt-and-pepper hair parted in the middle. The stone tablets were the only thing missing.
As he walked toward us, Lily could barely contain her excitement and bounced on the balls of her feet while gripping the back of a chair, probably to keep from floating away on the wings of her palpable joy.
When the man reached us, he placed his hands in prayer position and gave a slight bow, directed at Lily, and then gave a second one in my direction. “It’s an honor to meet you, Charlemagne Russo. I recognized you from your book covers.”
That seemed like a lie, since Lily had directed him over here. I filed it away as a character trait I could use in my writing and took the high road. “Call me Charlee. And you are?”
“Garth. Just Garth.”
Ah. Viv’s ex. The author all the volunteers went moony over. “Nice to meet you, too.”
He sat down without being invited and motioned for Lily to do the same. The waitress refilled my coffee while Lily politely turned over a cup and moved it to the edge of the table to make filling it easier. The waitress tipped the pot toward Garth’s cup, but he placed his hand over it. Lily placed her hand over her cup, too, and returned it to its original position.
“Is this cof
fee fair-trade from sustainable plantations?” Garth asked.
The waitress rolled her eyes. “Yeah, sure.”
“And is it brewed with … tap water?”
“No, sir. It’s brewed with artisanal free-range water collected in a hand-crafted well built with individually hewn stones and hand-dipped, using only the finest eco-friendly biodegradable bamboo cups by children rescued from African orphanages.” She glared at him, forcing him to move his hand from the top of his mug with only the power of her world-weary mind.
I made a mental note to overtip her.
Lily didn’t wait to be glared at. She picked up her cup and held it out, accepting coffee with a downward cast of her eyes.
“So,” I said after the waitress left. “You’re one of the local speakers at the conference?”
“Local?” Garth projected his voice, leaned in aggressively, and went full arrogance. “I, dear Charlemagne, am a citizen of the world. I spend some time here in Portland to recharge my batteries and coffers, but the rest of the time I’m in some far-flung country.” He sipped his coffee, then set his cup down with a disdainful sneer. “Plus, there are people in Oregon I miss when I’m not here.”
“Ah, Viv.”
“I come here despite Viv’s presence.”
A look of embarrassment passed over Lily’s face, but whether it was for Viv or Garth, or maybe me, I wasn’t sure.
“I’m sorry. I assumed that because you spoke at Viv’s conference—”
“Viveka and I have a … complicated relationship.”
This was getting interesting. “But a good one?”
“A complicated one.”
“She told me she pays for you to come speak at this conference every year? Even though you’ve been divorced for so long?”
“Like I said, complicated.” He took another sip and made another face, but it seemed like it was more directed at me than the coffee made from icky ol’ tap water.