by Kerstin Gier
I found myself sympathizing even more with Amy, who was finding it harder and harder every day to hide how heartbroken she was about Aiden. Gretchen and Ella had nicknamed her Lovesicky Mickey. I definitely didn’t want things to go the same way for me.
The elevator announced its arrival with an asthmatic wheeze. I never felt entirely safe in the elevators, but during my stint as a chambermaid, when I’d had to transport bulky cleaning carts and laundry bags from floor to floor, they’d always worked fine. True, they rattled and juddered in a less than reassuring way, but they did reward you with a melodic ping when you reached your chosen floor.
In the basement, one of the kitchen temps got into the elevator with me. She was quite pretty and not much older than I was, although she looked tired and a little sad. As the grille closed, she took off her white cap and undid the top button on her white smock. I’d never seen her before, but now, as she leaned back against the wall of the elevator and sighed, for some reason I felt an immediate connection to her.
Especially when she said quietly: “Love makes fools of us all, doesn’t it?”
“Definitely!” I agreed. “Thinking about one person all the time must block up the important bits of your brain.”
“You spend years being extra careful, trying not to give your heart to someone, and then one day you realize you’ve lost it, just like that.”
“Exactly!” I nodded vigorously. “And then that Someone doesn’t want it. Even though it’s lying right at his feet.”
The elevator jerked into life.
“Basically you have three options.” The stranger tucked a lock of brown hair behind her ear, and I admired her pretty teardrop earrings. “Well, four, if you count the option of leaving your poor bleeding heart lying there in the dirt and crying your eyes out until it stops beating.”
“No, that would be stupid.”
“The second option would be to pick your heart up and put it back in your chest. And then sew it all up so that you could never lose it again.” She looked at me expectantly. I shook my head. That sounded kind of bitter and miserable.
“The third option would be to pick it up, dust it off, and place it lovingly in the man’s arms,” said the girl.
“Too risky. He might just drop it again. Or chuck it against the wall.” I could see it all very clearly in my mind. The thriller writer would certainly have enjoyed the images that were running through my head right now. “Or he might lock it up somewhere along with loads of other hearts that girls had given him.”
The elevator made its cheery pinging sound. We’d arrived at the second floor.
As the grille opened, the girl smiled at me in a melancholy way. “Yes, it is a risk. But sometimes it’s a risk worth taking.”
“And what’s the fourth option?” I asked as I stepped out of the elevator. The girl didn’t follow me—she must be going up to a higher floor.
“Simple. You leave your heart where it is and pick his up instead.” She had to speak very loudly to be heard over the rattle of the closing grille. “That’s what you’ve been forgetting this whole time, Sophie.”
I’d got so carried away by the metaphor that I actually looked at the floor expecting to see a heart lying there. When I looked up again, the elevator had gone. Now I couldn’t ask the girl her name. And how did she know mine, anyway? Not to mention the fact that she seemed to know about my broken heart.
“There you are,” said a voice from behind me. It was Ben, leaning against the door to the staff quarters. Having just visualized him doing such horrible things to my heart, it was easy for me to glare at him. Even though he’d clearly been standing here waiting for me. And he looked pretty cute with his trusting blue eyes, his hands stuffed into his pockets and his hair all ruffled after a long, stressful day.
“What do you want?” I asked testily.
“Just to see how you are,” he replied. “You left so suddenly yesterday.”
Yes. Because I spat food all over your jacket. (Splat. The noise had followed me all the way into my dreams last night.) And because you called me a conspiracy theorist.
“I had to go and make myself a tinfoil hat,” I said. “I needed it for my conspiracy theorists’ meeting with Old Stucky and the thriller writer.”
He grinned. “Are you free now? We could go and get something to eat. I need to tell you what I’ve found out about Mr. Huber in Room 117.”
I was torn. On the one hand, that splat! was still fresh in my mind—I wasn’t sure I could sit across a table from him without feeling self-conscious, let alone eat anything. On the other hand, I really did want to know what he’d found out about Mr. Huber. The decision was taken out of my hands by the four hyenas from Lausanne, who emerged from the elevator at that moment in their uniforms looking—like the kitchen temp—rather exhausted. I thought they’d just walk on by without acknowledging me (they were still punishing me with the silent treatment, which I was very much enjoying), but unfortunately only Hortensia, Camilla, and Ava passed me by, with stupid suggestive grins on their faces.
Whatsername, however, stopped in front of us and smiled sweetly at Ben. “Hey, Benny. Please tell me it worked.”
No, please tell her to jog on. Benny.
But Ben smiled, too. He reached into his pocket, took out a cell phone, and handed it to Whatsername. “Here you go. Good as new.”
Whatsername squealed loudly, then clapped a hand to her mouth and said in a whisper: “You’re my hero, Benny! Thank you, thank you, thank you!” And as it gradually dawned on me that he hadn’t been waiting here for me but for Whatsername, she went up on tiptoe and kissed him effusively somewhere between his mouth, his nose, and his cheek—though I was pretty sure she’d been aiming for his mouth. “You’re the best!”
The worst thing wasn’t that she’d kissed him. The worst thing was that Ben had blushed. And not just a little bit, but very noticeably. Like a fricking tomato.
“Ariane,” he said. He sounded embarrassed, probably because I was still standing there gawking at them.
But not for long. I felt behind me for the door handle and slipped into the corridor. The last thing I heard was Whatsername’s gleeful laughter. Not until I was almost in my room did I realize that perhaps I should go back, scrape my heart off the floor, and put it outside in the snow, where it would freeze solid overnight. That would be option five.
Really, though, all this talk about lost hearts was crap. Again I double-locked the door behind me and threw myself down on the bed just as I had yesterday, without switching the light on. I hadn’t lost my stupid heart, and it wasn’t lying around on the ground somewhere—no, it was beating wildly in my chest and it hurt terribly.
Right on cue, my phone screen lit up. My mum had sent me a message with a photo of my dad and my brother on a walk. They were standing in a field under the wintry gray sky, smiling into the camera. What shook me wasn’t the familiar faces but how green the field was. For the first time since I’d been here, I felt something like homesickness. I was homesick for the lowlands and for my old life.
Something scratched at the door. It was the Forbidden Cat, and when I let her in she jumped straight up onto the bed where she curled into a ball and started purring. I was sure she’d come to comfort me.
21
“Amy was crying all night,” said Gracie.
“Not all night,” Amy shot back. “For half an hour at most. And you shouldn’t go around telling everyone about it, you blabbermouth.”
“I’m only telling Sophie,” pouted Gracie, aggrieved. “She understands.”
Yes, and I’d guessed anyway because Amy was wearing sunglasses. I should have done the same, really—not only to hide my eyes, which were swollen from crying, but also because it was very, very sunny today.
That morning, as if by magic, the blanket of clouds had lifted and the sunshine had come pouring through. It fell in dazzling, glittering pools on the snow. After all the gray days we’d just had, this bright sunlight was almost overwhelming.
Even Amy and I couldn’t help but be cheered up by it, broken hearts or no broken hearts.
It was the day before the ball, the second-to-last day of the year, and since early that morning the hotel and the grounds had been a hive of activity. A constant stream of delivery vans pulled up loaded with flower arrangements, pallets full of food, and a giant ice sculpture for tomorrow’s formal dinner. Old Stucky and Jaromir tried to tackle the neglected snowdrifts that had built up around the hotel; the banks of snow on either side of the cleared paths were now over six feet tall. It was like walking through a snow labyrinth.
On one side of the forecourt was an enormous mound of snow that Carolyn and I had turned into a slide for the children. They romped about on it all day long, while Amy and I sat off to one side baking little snow cakes with the children who needed a bit of quiet time. We sold the cakes to imaginary customers in our imaginary snow bakery. It was the children’s idea of heaven. I couldn’t help thinking of what Viktor Yegorov had said: Nothing bad could ever happen at Castle in the Clouds. Today I was inclined to agree with him. I’d never have admitted it to Ben, but perhaps I had been too quick to believe in the grand hotel kidnapper. On such a glorious day, with not a cloud in the sky, I found it hard to feel paranoid.
The same could not be said of Grouchy Gordon, however.
“Did you hear about that little snitch of a bellhop?” Pierre had asked me at breakfast. “He only went and told Montfort about the Forbidden Cat.”
Everyone was talking about it. Nico, it turned out, had presented the hotelier with photos of the Forbidden Cat and even collected cat hairs as proof. And as if we weren’t stressed out enough already, Gordon Montfort had gone around and searched the basement and all the bedrooms in the staff quarters for the Forbidden Cat (or any sign of cat food, or a litter box), accompanied by Nico and Fräulein Müller. Again. I hoped the cat had found a good hiding place. She’d spent all night on my bed, and it wasn’t until this morning that she’d slipped out of the window and padded away across the roof. I’d made my bed nice and neatly, but the thought of Ben’s dad and Fräulein Müller rifling through the suitcase underneath it and seeing all the balled-up support tights on the shelf I used as a wardrobe was not a pleasant one. I was willing to bet Fräulein Müller kept her tights in neat little piles, with all the edges lined up.
But Gordon Montfort couldn’t find even the slightest trace of a cat, which made him quite irate. He yelled at Nico for only having taken photos of the cat instead of catching it; now they’d had to waste precious time searching for it. Instead of the promotion Nico had been hoping for (preferably to a job that didn’t require him to wear his little bellhop’s hat anymore), he suddenly found himself with no friends. Even his buddy Jonas wasn’t speaking to him.
Gordon Montfort’s bad mood worsened as the day went on. Nobody was safe from it, not even the children playing outdoors. That afternoon, their happy shouts got on Montfort’s nerves so much that he asked Carolyn to take them around to the back of the hotel to play.
Carolyn replied calmly that she couldn’t bring herself to spoil the children’s fun, but if Mr. Montfort could persuade them to abandon their beloved snow slide then of course she would be happy to take them to play elsewhere. This was very clever of her: Gordon Montfort would never dare upset the children of his VIP guests if he had to do it in person.
So he had no choice but to grit his teeth and put up with the noise—though not without shooting Carolyn plenty of vengeful looks. I guessed he must be standing out here waiting for someone to arrive, otherwise he could have just gone inside for some peace and quiet. Burkhardt Sr. came to chat with him for a while, holding some rolled-up papers—probably blueprints for the golf course. He was making lots of sweeping gestures, at any rate, and drawing imaginary lines in the air with his finger.
My heart sank. What with everything else that was going on, I’d pushed the sale of the hotel to the back of my mind. Today more than ever, I couldn’t imagine how anyone could bring themselves to deliberately destroy such a magical place.
“Over there, where that fir tree is, we’re putting in a four-story apartment block,” said Don, suddenly materializing beside me. He pointed his little plastic sled at the half-moon fir tree.
“Good Lord,” I murmured.
“We’re only keeping the outside of the hotel,” Don went on. I eyed him closely, but for once I couldn’t detect any hint of mockery or schadenfreude in his face. “The front bit, anyway. My dad says people don’t like this wedding-cake-style architecture anymore.”
“Are you even supposed to be talking about this?” I asked, surprised. “I thought it was meant to be a secret?”
“And I thought you and Ben Montfort were so loved up that you already knew the secret?” Don countered, without batting an eyelid.
“Ben and I are not…,” I began, but Don rolled his eyes and said, “I really couldn’t care less what you are or are not, Sophie Spark.” He shoved Gracie against a snowdrift as he walked away, then went whizzing down the slide with a scornful laugh.
Gracie was about to chase after him, but at that moment somebody else attracted her attention. “Look, there’s Tristan!” she cried. She hurried toward Tristan and the teenage Barnbrookes, who were tramping over from the car park dressed in full ski gear. Lots of the guests had made the trip to Evolène that morning to go skiing and were now returning to the hotel in dribs and drabs. Although Amy loved skiing, she hadn’t gone with them because of Aiden. And because of Ella and Gretchen, of course—who annoyingly looked as stunning in ski gear as they did in everything else.
“I can just imagine the photos on Gretchen’s Instagram page. #chairliftselfie, #perfectbobblehatface, #howigetboystocarrymyskis,” Amy growled, and fixed her eyes on the ground as Aiden, loaded down with three pairs of skis, trudged past us in the direction of the ski cellar. “I hope he knows I don’t care that he’s trampling all over my heart.”
This reminded me of my conversation with the sympathetic kitchen temp last night.
“Perhaps it’s all just a big misunderstanding,” I said. “Perhaps he hasn’t even realized you’ve given him your heart. Because you put it down behind him secretly without saying a word, instead of placing it lovingly in his arms.”
“I asked him to go to the ball with me,” Amy hissed.
“I know. But perhaps he thought you were only asking him because you felt sorry for him because he’s deaf. Perhaps he thinks that’s why you’re learning sign language.”
“Why would he think something so stupid? He knows me!”
I shrugged. “Everyone thinks stupid things sometimes.”
Now Viktor Yegorov came out onto the forecourt. He went to stand beside Gordon Montfort and looked at his watch. They must both be waiting for someone. The seven jackdaws, who’d been circling on the thermals above us for the past few hours, now swooped down onto the awning above the revolving door and started chattering noisily to one another.
Montfort looked up at them irritably. “I hate those ugly creatures,” I heard him snarl. “They’re like flying rats.”
One-Legged Hugo gave an affronted caaww, but the others just ignored him and carried on twittering merrily. If they’d paid more attention in my language lessons, they could have left the hotelier utterly gobsmacked by croaking “Quiet, you philistine!” at him. But it turned out they had something even better in store for him. As if at a secret signal they all rose into the air, and something fell from the flurry of black feathers—a thick white glob of something that landed slap-bang on the shoulder of Montfort’s jacket. A little bit went on his ear, too.
“Splat,” I said with satisfaction, but nobody could hear me above Montfort’s loud cursing. He had to make do with quickly wiping his jacket with a tissue, though, because at that moment a dark limousine pulled slowly up the drive and rolled onto the forecourt. Two men got out. Clearly these were the people Yegorov and Montfort had been waiting for. Upstairs, at the window of Room 310 Mr. Von
Dietrichstein was watching the whole thing through his camera lens. I hoped very much that he’d managed to get a photo of the bird poo incident.
“Interesting, eh?”
I hadn’t realized Tristan had popped up in between me and Amy, and I jumped. “Four men shaking hands?” I said. “Not particularly.”
“Not even if one of them has an armored suitcase chained to his wrist?” As always, Tristan sounded deeply amused.
“Oh.” Now I saw it, too.
“I bet that famous necklace is in there—the one the Russian lady was given as a wedding present,” said Amy. “She’s going to wear it to the ball tomorrow.”
I looked at her in surprise. Was there anyone in this place who didn’t know all about the so-called Smirnovs and their priceless jewelry?
Tristan nodded. “The legendary blue Nadezhda Diamond,” he said quietly. “It’s still an enormous thirty-five carats, even after being cut. It’s a cushion cut, surrounded by twelve flawless diamonds, set in eighteen karat white gold. It once belonged to Catherine the Great, but for decades after the October Revolution it was believed to be lost.”
The four men now strode across to the revolving door and disappeared into the lobby one after the other.
“It’s said to be cursed,” Tristan went on. “Legend has it that the diamond was stolen from a secret temple in Madurai in India in the seventeenth century. It used to be set into a golden statue of the goddess Kali, as the third eye on her forehead.”