“What in the hell is going on?” Ash demanded.
“Sorry, Ash.” Titus’s whole demeanor had changed. “It’s sort of awful, but we were feeding Caroline some stuff we’re hoping she will take to Hilary Allenwood. Then it will get back to Caprico or not and we’ll know a little more about their operation.”
Ash sank into his seat and glared at Lowell. “You bastard.”
But Lowell glared back. “Hey. You did sleep with my witness. Don’t mess with me on this, Forbes. You’re pushing it already. And you’re right. I did leave the poor girl out there on a limb by herself. But I promise that it wasn’t for no reason.”
Ash wasn’t sure that made him feel any better.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Mindy was used to walking on eggshells around the mirror maze thanks to Kevin’s wild mood swings where she was concerned. But what she felt this morning was absolutely over and above anything she had felt before. She was absolutely sick with it. This worry inside. And paranoia. Lots of that.
“Hey, Mindy?”
She gave a yelp from being startled that she nearly knocked over a box of maze complex maps that she had been stacking neatly beneath the front counter. Falling back from her knees to her butt, she glared up at Delia. A sharp retort was on her lips, but at the last second Mindy managed to reel it back in. This was not Delia’s fault and Mindy needed allies right now and not enemies.
Delia’s eyes widened. Then her expression grew rather careful. “Are you all right? I heard from Aaron, who had it from Layla, who is dating Justin, who was working with Grace last night, that there was some really weird thing going on in here last night with the cops. Is that true?”
Mindy didn’t figure there was any point in trying to hide it. Grace would have told just about everyone anyway. And maybe it would be better for Mindy’s side of the story to get out before something awful happened and story filled with lies wound up in the paper.
“What happened to you yesterday morning anyway?” Delia went on, her brow wrinkled with confusion. “You just didn’t show up. And then Felix came in and said you had called and asked to switch shifts. And by the way,” Delia continued, not giving Mindy a chance to respond anyway. “I hate working the counter with Felix. He is a stocker in the gift shop for a reason. The guy is slow!”
Mindy tried to smile. She should have had a huge smile on her face. God knew she’d had a wonderful night. An incredible, magical, wonderful night filled with—well it had just been the best night of her life. And this morning she’d woken up with Ash’s arms around her. Nothing could compare. Nothing. And he’d taken her to breakfast just like he’d promised and then he had driven her to work. She was wearing the same clothes she’d worn yesterday, but it was still possible that this was the best morning she could remember in her life.
“Hey! Are you going to say anything?” Delia propped her hands on her hips and frowned down at Mindy.
Mindy snorted. She tried to make her response lighthearted and teasing. She and Delia used to have fun together up here at the front counter on the day shift. “Are you going to stop telling me what I should say?”
Delia laughed. “Fair point.”
“My brother overdosed night before last,” Mindy told Delia. It occurred to her that Delia was probably the closest thing Mindy had to a friend. She didn’t want to lose that even though lately Mindy hadn’t been sharing things with Delia. “Darren had been having some trouble at Dino Golf. He was buying and selling prescription drugs and he took too much the other night. They put him in the hospital, but he died last night.”
Delia’s mouth dropped open and she sucked in a breath so quickly that it sounded like she was squeaking. “Mindy, I’m so sorry!”
Suddenly, Delia was flinging her arms around Mindy. It was kind of awkward because Mindy was still on the floor, but Delia didn’t seem to care. She was hugging and squeezing Mindy and rubbing her back and apologizing for being flippant. It was—well it was unexpected and warm and fuzzy and really sweet. Mindy hadn’t felt this supported in ages and she was beginning to wonder if it was because Kevin had made her paranoid to really get close to anyone.
“I appreciate your concern, Delia,” Mindy finally said. She heard the front doors of the big entry hall open as a group of tourists came streaming inside. It was nearly eleven. Time for the midday rush to begin as vacationing families sought air-conditioned attractions to beat the heat of the day. “You have no idea. It really means a lot to me.”
Delia stood up and pulled Mindy up with her. “If you need anything, please let me know. All right? You want to be like a turtle and go back in your shell. I’ve known you for years now and that’s what you do, but you can’t do that this time.”
“I won’t.” Mindy could not help but chuckle. This whole thing still seemed so surreal. Like it was happening to someone else. Like it wasn’t Darren’s body that had been taken to the hospital just yesterday morning. “Thank you, Delia. For always being cool.”
Delia was giving Mindy a strange look, but the two of them had to help the rush of people that had suddenly appeared out of seemingly nowhere. That was the tourism industry. People never seemed to realize the reason the attractions seemed so crowded was because they went when everyone else was going too. It was just one of those things and it kept Delia and Mindy busy for several hours until a brief slow down near one o’clock.
“Ugh! I’m so hungry. Can you watch the front while I go grab a snack out of my bag? I should have eaten a bigger breakfast. It’s not like I didn’t know I was scheduled for lunch at two.”
Mindy nodded. “Sure. Go ahead. My lunch is at three, but I don’t think I’m going to take it today. To make up for last night.”
Delia looked as though she wanted to say something else. Her brow furrowed and she absently shoved at her hair. But after a moment or two, she slipped off toward the employee break room without saying what was on her mind.
Mindy could only guess. At this point it was beginning to feel like everyone around her had been told some strange variety of what had been going on in her life. Almost like her story was one of those choose-your-own-adventure books and you just had to pick a different person to get a different ending. Help Mindy survive by choosing the best route out of the mirror maze. She could certainly say her life felt like that lately.
Mindy sold tickets on autopilot. There were days when she was pretty sure she could have done it in her sleep. The speech she gave to people about being safe in the maze and how the map worked was so memorized that she sometimes had to force herself to slow down so guests could keep up.
“Ma’am, can I get some help?” A woman waved to Mindy from behind the round ticketing counter area.
Mindy turned around on her stool. Where was Delia anyway? She should have been back by now if she had just been getting a snack. Maybe she decided to take a bathroom break too. “Of course, ma’am. How can I help you?”
“My little guy here,” she said as she bounced a toddler on her hip, “lost his binky up in the maze. We had it going in and now he doesn’t have it.”
Mindy blinked. This was not her only time dealing with what was about to be a ridiculous request. “Would you like to go back in and look?”
“Well.” The woman looked doubtful. “We got pretty lost in there. I don’t know that I could. Do you think you could have some of your workers go up there and look for it?”
Mindy almost laughed. At the last second, she caught herself and cleared her throat instead. “I’m really sorry, but that’s not possible until the cleaning crew goes in tonight. I could leave them a note if you’d like. Then we’ll call you in the morning if they find it.”
“But we’re here on vacation.” The mother bounced the toddler a few more times. She had another child clutching at her leg. “He won’t be able to sleep without his binky.”
“And you don’t have a spare?” Mindy could not imagine this to be possible. If your kid needed that to sleep, you kept one on hand at every moment
because they were kids and they left their stuff all over town.
“No. I don’t. That was our spare.” The woman was starting to look irritated. “Can you just go and look? Honestly! Is it that hard?”
“At the moment, I’m by myself up here,” Mindy pointed out. “And I can’t leave the ticket counter and go through the maze. If you said you got lost, it’s going to take me at least half an hour to go through all of the usual dead ends to look for your pacifier.”
Of course, Delia had to come wandering back to the front counter right at that moment. “What’s going on?”
“My son left his binky up in the maze and she won’t even go look for it!” The accusatory tone in the woman’s voice was ridiculous. It wasn’t like Mindy was the one who had been foolish enough not to tie the kid’s pacifier to his shirt or something. Surely, they had that sort of apparatus for kids. That way you didn’t lose something so important to the child’s apparent survival.
Delia looked at Mindy. Now she was trying not to laugh. “Would you like me to go up? Or I’ll watch the front for you.”
“No.” Mindy chuffed out a little sigh. “If you go, I’ll have to send a search party for you and the binky.”
This was true and Delia knew it. She was horrible in the maze. She got turned around and lost all the time. “You’re right,” Delia agreed. Then she giggled. “Sorry about that. I’m just not very good with a sense of direction.”
Mindy shrugged. “I’ll be back in a few. If I’m not, send someone else in after me, or just send some tourists through and they can help me out.”
“Got it!” Delia waved gaily as Mindy strode off toward the maze’s exit.
Mindy decided to go in backwards. That might help a little. She waved to the guys working the exit. They barely paid her any mind. She could hear them behind her talking about baseball. Stats or scores or standings or something. Most of the young people who worked the entrance and exit to the maze were students. High schoolers or college kids who needed a job that paid minimum wage and required almost no brainpower.
Once inside the mirror maze, Mindy immediately set to work trying to find the little kid’s binky. It wasn’t until she was up in the tower that she realized someone was following her. The sensation was odd. She could hear breathing in the passage behind her. But when she turned, the mirrors threw everything off and she couldn’t make out a shape down the corridor. It didn’t help that all of the passages up here were round. The angles on the mirrors wreaked absolute havoc with your sense of direction.
Mindy tried to quiet her breathing and pressed her back against the wall. She was more curious about this person on her tail than the stupid binky. There was no way she was going to find that thing. It was literally like looking for a needle in a haystack.
Turning, Mindy waited with bated breath and frozen limbs. Was there another employee behind her looking for something else? It wasn’t like people didn’t misplace their stuff up here every other second in spite of multiple warnings about just that situation.
But no. It didn’t feel like a tourist. First of all, they rarely came alone. Tourists came in pairs or groups. Some of them quite large. She could hear the faint echoes of other groups in other parts of the maze. Maybe that was what she was hearing. Except there should be nobody between her and the exit. The maze didn’t work quite like that. There was only one way up and one way down from the tower.
Then a slight breeze nearly made Mindy fall over with shock. The air movement wasn’t from the ventilation system. It was something else. The air felt strangely warm. Hot almost. Even stranger, it was tinged with the scent of the outdoors.
The binky forgotten, Mindy charged from the backside of the tower to the front. There was a chamber there. It wasn’t huge, but compared to the tight closeness of the rest of the maze tunnels, it felt enormous when you stumbled in. There was a spectacular view of the Branson strip thanks to a huge floor to ceiling viewing window. It was one of the things people always talked about when they were here. And right now, it was cracked open.
Mindy stared at the edges of the big window. She could not even begin to conceptualize how this had happened. The window was not an open and closed thing. You didn’t just crack it a bit to get some fresh air. This was a safety feature that had actually been built in because of fire requirements. Meaning it could be opened from the inside or the outside using tools in case someone got trapped during a fire. But right now, there was a crack of daylight visible all around the right side and the top and the bottom as though someone had taken out all of the hardware and just left the mirror balanced there in the meantime.
This was more important than a binky. This was catastrophic! There were other people in this place. They could come up here and fall to their deaths on the parking lot nearly three stories below if something wasn’t done about this at once. They had to shut down the maze and evacuate!
Mindy spun around to run and find maintenance when she suddenly found herself face to face with Kevin Eads. He did not have a very nice expression on his face. In fact, he looked rather murderous.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Ash really had no business bothering Mindy in the middle of her shift at the mirror maze. However, this was the best part about being able to just stop by and visit your—well not girlfriend because they weren’t there yet—except they totally were. Ash shook his head over the contradictory emotions swirling around in his mind. The important thing was that he wanted to see her and to make sure she was doing all right. He wanted to let her know he gave a shit about that because nobody else ever really had. At least not in Ash’s mind.
There was a young woman manning the front counter when Ash came in. Actually, there were a couple of young women. But considering one of them had a toddler on her hip and another kid grabbing her waist, she probably wasn’t an employee. She looked bored, and annoyed.
Ash ignored her and focused on the one with the nametag that read DELIA. “Hello. My name is Ash Forbes. I wondered if someone could just let Mindy Hall know I swung by.”
“Mindy?” Delia swept Ash with one of those head to toe looks that made him feel like he needed to check his fly. “She’s just stepped out for a minute. Had to go up into the maze to see if she could find this poor kid’s binky.” Delia thumbed over her shoulder toward the mom and toddler crew.
“Binky?” Ash didn’t know anything about kids. He was picturing a blanket.
Delia grinned. “Pacifier.”
“Oh. Right.” Ash could not begin to imagine letting his kid put something back in their mouth after it had been rolling around on the floor of a place that saw this much traffic. “How long do you think she’ll be up there?”
“I don’t know. Shouldn’t be much longer though.” Delia glanced at her phone display and frowned. “She’s already been too long. I radioed the guys at the exit a few minutes ago and they said she went past a minute or two after she left here. That’s like twenty minutes and Mindy can do the whole maze in under thirty.”
Ash got the feeling he was supposed to be impressed by this. “Is that good? I’ll admit I’ve never been up there. Mazes aren’t really my thing.”
“I don’t know what the record is,” Delia began slowly, “because we don’t tend to keep track of visitors and guests. You know? We make sure they check in and out at the bottom so we know they’re alive and well and out. But we don’t time them because they’re usually exploring around on purpose. But of the employees, Mindy is the best at getting through. I think she has it memorized.”
Ash wasn’t surprised. Mindy was smart as a whip. “Then I think I’ll wait just a few minutes to say hello.”
“Who are you?” Delia seemed unable to help herself. It was evidently a slow day. There were a few people ambling by to purchase tickets, but Delia speedily helped them and sent them into the maze without seeming to lose focus on Ash. “I’ve never met you before. But I’ve seen you around.”
“Yes. Around.” Ash nodded. “I’m a private investig
ator.”
“Oh. Are you helping Mindy because of her brother?” Delia nodded sympathetically. “I thought something else had happened for sure! You can’t believe how Kevin Eads was talking to the cops the last few days.”
“The cops?” A warning bell went off in Ash’s head. “Do you know which ones?”
“Not the guy who came to see Mindy the other day.” Delia frowned. “What was his name… Right! Lowell. It wasn’t Lowell. It’s the guy I usually see Kevin talking to.”
“Usually?” The warning bells were getting louder and more insistent. “Kevin Eads usually talks to police?”
Delia gave a careless shrug. “I always thought it was weird because we don’t have a lot of crime here. But then I thought that was maybe why. You know? That Kevin was consulting with that Sergeant Caprico guy because he wanted to make sure we didn’t have thefts and stuff like some of the other attractions in town.”
“What changed your mind?” There had to be something. It was looking like Delia felt there was something suspicious going on. That was no doubt why she’d brought it up though she might not realize it.
Delia pursed her lips. “I was going to tell Mindy. But you know she’s been through a lot lately. But Kevin was saying some really awful stuff about her.” Delia glanced at the mother with her kids, but the lady had wandered toward the gift shop as though she needed to keep her children occupied. “Kevin told the sergeant they needed to run Mindy in on charges of prostitution. He said that would keep her quiet. I don’t know what they meant by that though. It seems stupid. Everyone knows Kevin and Mindy used to sleep together.”
“Does Mindy know that everyone knows?” Ash was pretty sure she did not.
Delia was shaking her head. “No. We like Mindy. She’s sweet and helpful and really smart. Kevin is our manager though. He’s an ass. He traps girls in the maze sometimes and tries to make them do sexual favors for him like this is some kind of role play palace. I’m not kidding,” Delia added as though she was sure Ash wouldn’t believe her. “The guy is twisted.”
Rock Wolf Investigations: Boxset Page 90