Hard to Find: A Tillgiven Romantic Mystery

by Traci Tyne Hilton

  The sky above us was dark with clouds, and night, but the shops had lights under their awnings, and the crowds in the narrow street were easy to watch. About a yard ahead of us, I spotted a group of tall, skinny boys about my age wearing backpacking gear and cargo shorts. One of the backpacks had a Canadian flag patch on it. “Let’s follow them.”

  The one with the Canadian flag spotted me right away, which was good and gratifying at the same time. Nice to know two days of straight travel hadn’t damaged my mojo.

  “Hey.” His tone was friendly, but he noticed I was with someone, and seemed less interested than half a second earlier.

  I smiled and tried to guess how many of the travelers were Canadian and how many were Kiwis. I wanted to say half and half. “We just got into town.” I shook my wet hair. “Bad timing, right?”

  The Canadian flag guy laughed. “I’d say.”

  “So, where are you all staying? I don’t know where to find a hostel.”

  “Oh, sure, we can help you.” The guy who spoke was definitely from New Zealand, which meant the crowd had met up as strangers. They were just the kind of guys I’d expect Si to fall in with.

  “Have you all eaten yet?” There were no words for how tired and hungry the professor sounded. I felt for him, and was glad he mentioned food.

  “We were just headed that way.” The group moved forward en masse. The street was too narrow for cars, and possibly too narrow for a group of backpacking kids, but they were relatively polite as they scooted around tanned tourists eating at the little tables on the streets. “There’s a pizza place around the corner.”

  I looked at the professor, one eyebrow lifted.

  He shrugged. “I’d eat anything right now.”

  I feared French pizza, after the weird, soggy mess that was Swedish pizza, but we were pretty far south, and there was a small chance someone around here knew how to prebake a crust and cook some of the water out of the sauce.

  The pizza place was packed with people exactly like the ones we had found on the street, and families, probably from England, feeding tired, sunburned kids. October wasn’t the tourist season, but apparently no one had told them that.

  TVs hung from three of the four walls, all of them playing soccer—futbol—and everyone had a beer. Everyone. I double-checked. Surely the little kids just had apple juice.

  It was like a French-Italian-American-English pub. It was about as much like my idea of Nice as the hotel I had parked at was.

  The gaggle of boys ordered a lot of food and told me not to bother, though they let Professor order his own Coke. We sat down at a long wooden table in the middle of the room that was just as sticky as it looked like it would be.

  The first of the many pizzas ordered made it to the table as Si walked in.

  Apparently Nice was a small town after all.

  One of the guys I had pegged as a New Zealander, though he might have been from Australia, if I was being honest, waved him over.

  They fist bumped, and Si pulled out a chair next to me, spun it around, and sat on it backward. “I’m dying. Give me food.”

  On the off chance Si wasn’t exaggerating, I handed him a slice—thin, golden crust with cheese that smelled too…strong…to have been mozzarella. It was topped with mushrooms, artichokes, and small chunks of meat I was not going to ask about. Si finished it in two bites and helped himself to another.

  “What are you doing here?” I leaned in so I wouldn’t have to shout.

  Si grinned. “Making the best of a bad situation.” He grabbed one of the beers and took a long swallow.

  “Hey there!” One of the Kiwis glowered at Si. “Get your own drink, man!”

  “Si.” The professor looked disappointed, and irritated. Plus, he still looked hungry.

  I passed him a slice of pizza that was mostly meat.

  Si passed the drink over to the guy who had bought it. “It’s France.” He shrugged.

  “You’re seventeen. And even in France the drinking age is eighteen.” The professor ignored his pizza. “We need to get out of here.”

  I pushed the plate closer to him. “Eat first.”

  He exhaled, nodded, and picked up the food.

  “Si, where are you staying?”

  “I hooked up at the hostel with these guys.”

  “But you’ve still got to buy your own drinks, fool!” The Canadian tossed a paper napkin across the table.

  “I’ve got the next round.” Si did a “bro” nod, tilting his chin up. He was playing tough guy, showing off for the backpackers, who were clearly older than him.

  The Canadian laughed.

  “Have you been asking about Drew? Have they heard anything from her?” I wanted to call Si out on his lie. He was clearly not here to find my sister.

  “Nah. She must have blown right past Nice. Or gone somewhere else.” He reached for another pint, but I scooted it out of his way.

  “You know that you can’t stay here, right? Your grandma is going to be at the school in two days.”

  He smiled. “Maybe she’s bringing money.”

  “Si!” I pressed my fingertips to my forehead. “You can’t be serious. Do you know the kind of trouble the professor will be in if he doesn’t get you back to the school?”

  “Who?”

  I was steaming. Who, my foot. Obviously I meant the professor. Who did he think I meant? “Isaac, you little twit!”

  “He’s not a professor. Why do you call him that? Do you have a thing for authority figures?”

  I picked up a piece of pizza. Me? Have a thing for authority figures? Please. I don’t even know any authority figures. “Isaac, then. Whatever.”

  “He’s right, you know,” Isaac said. “I was on track to be a professor in Montreal, but I didn’t stay at that job. You don’t just get to be a professor because you teach. I’m technically an instructor at Tillgiven.”

  “Did you say Tillgiven?” A blue-eyed guy with a lot of freckles who was sitting across from me spoke up. “I went there two years ago!”

  “Hey.” I smiled. “We’re students there right now.”

  “So is this like travel weekend or something?” He pulled his eyebrows together, mildly confused.

  “It was.”

  A guy in a red denim jacket jabbed his elbow into the freckled guy’s side and pointed down the table. I turned toward the action. The two backpackers on the end were having a joint-rolling contest. The winner threw his hands up and kicked his chair out behind him with a shout and a laugh.

  The boy Si had stolen the drink from grimaced. “Americans.” He got up, and the bald guy who had gone to Tillgiven did too. They left without saying goodbye.

  “We should get out of here too.”

  Si stared at the joint-rolling race. “I’ll catch up with you all later.”

  Isaac grabbed Si by the strap of his backpack. “We’ll all go together.”

  Si wriggled out of the tight fisted grip but left the restaurant with the professor—well, Isaac, I guess I should call him. I dropped a few of my remaining euros on the table for the pizza the three of us had eaten. I had no idea if it was enough, but it was the right thing to do.

  “Drinking? Pot? What are you thinking, Si?” The professor was steaming.

  Si clamped his mouth shut.

  “Why don’t you take us to the hostel so we can get your stuff? We’ll just hit the road now, right…Isaac?” The butterflies. Every time I said his name. “We can pull over and sleep on our way.”

  Both of the boys maintained their stubborn silence as Si led us through Old Town. The streets were narrow, more like a sidewalk, but where they went uphill they were made up of short, wide steps, about two inches high and a few feet long. Someone buzzed past us on a scooter that hopped up the steps in a way that had to jostle the rider’s brain. Si’s hostel was just outside of Old Town.

  Drew and I had stayed at hostels in the States before. One such was a one-bed outfit in the locker room at a junior college.

  Th
is was not that kind of hostel. This would have passed for a castle back home in Oregon, but instead was a cheap night’s sleep in one of the most fabulous towns in all of Europe.

  The hostel was made up of a few stucco buildings, a couple of stories tall, that would have been called Californian Mission, or maybe even just Mexican, if we were back home, but it wasn’t, of course. It was French, and fabulous, and instead of having a museum or a winery, it had a two-story nightclub and a cafeteria with a cereal bar and a bulletin board full of adventure activities for youths with time on their hands. I couldn’t peel my eyes off the ceilings, as though it was a church and the glass art chandeliers were by the Masters.

  “Wait here.” Si pushed out a bar stool for me. I sat and soaked in the atmosphere. Honestly, I thought the Tillgiven school was cool. The buildings were traditional Swedish, and each about 150 years old. But…what can I say? This place was huge and beautiful and buzzing with activity. Part of me expected to see Grace Kelly swoop in with her white-blonde hair and huge sunglasses and a mink stole. It was just so…rich.

  The professor was apparently dazed as well, because he sat with me at the little table to wait for Si, eyes staring vacantly at the cereal bar. I pulled out my phone and logged into the free Wi-Fi I had seen advertised. I had a lot of emails to check up on, both mine and Drew’s. The professor roused himself enough to get a cup of coffee, and then pulled out his phone too.

  Half an hour later, we realized we had been duped.

  Isaac Daniels 5

  I had never stayed anywhere as posh as the “hostel” Si had holed up in. Not only did it feel like the kind of place we’d see Paris Hilton casually stroll through, it was huge. As soon as Dani and I realized he had ditched us, we went hunting for him.

  The room he had abandoned us in was a foyer of sorts. We followed the hall down to a bar, throbbing with electronic dance music. It was only seven, so though the night was dark, the place was pretty empty. Apparently the crowds were still slumming it at that pizza parlor and other dives like that. Dani wandered back out into the hall by the door while I scanned the room one more time.

  The music pulsed through the dark room like the heartbeat of the club. It reminded me of the giant brain on the distant planet in A Wrinkle in Time. It felt like it would thrum through everyone who walked into the room and dictate all their actions. The thought was particularly repulsive as the signage of the hostel said the buildings had originally been a monastery, and this room had been the chapel. One wall hosted a modern stained glass window that mocked the former, holy purpose of the room. Once a place of quiet contemplation and worship, now a place to get drunk and hook up. It made my skin crawl. I left the empty bar and joined Dani in the hall.

  “I got the number of the surf rental place.” She pointed to a sign on the bulletin board. “So if we can’t find him tonight, we can catch him in the morning.”

  “We’ll find him tonight.” I headed toward the rooms. The sooner I had my little flock back at the Bible school, the better.

  The guest rooms were mostly in two wings of the old monastery. I started in the hall at the wing around the corner from the bar. My job was simple: Pop open a door, check for Si. Repeat. Door after door. One thing I learned quickly was that there was little to no ventilation and the rooms were rank—worse than the boys’ dorm back at the school.

  Dani crinkled her nose at the smell of the last room I opened, a moment of cute that almost made the stink worth it. The room-by-room approach was going to take too long, but it was the only way to, well, check every room.

  Behind me Dani was still talking. A few items caught my attention. She had read her sister’s emails. Had more clues. Ideas about the boy? girl? Marissa and such. But I didn’t care. At all. Let Drew elope to Scotland with a boy pretending to be a girl every weekend. She was legally a grown woman, whether or not she was…what had Dani said…too smart? to act like one.

  Please.

  How smart could she be?

  I had a PhD at twenty-three, and I made adult decisions with my life.

  Like this one.

  I paused. The irony was not lost on me.

  I was at the end of one side of the ground floor and had only been propositioned twice.

  “I’m worried, though,” Dani was saying. “I don’t like the sound of her last email to Marissa, who, by the way, she is now just calling ‘M,’ so the theory that Marissa is a boy is gaining cred, I think. But anyway, I think she’s lost, and that scares me. She has absolutely no sense of direction. Because, Isaac, she’s headed to Scotland, right? The border. How hard is it to get there? But she just said that her train pulled into Cardiff, and that’s not going north from Dover, so what is she doing?”

  North from Dover. Headed to Cardiff. I couldn’t picture it. “I don’t have an atlas memorized, sorry.”

  “I’m just saying that as soon as we’ve got Si, we’ve got to go get Drew, because she’s starting to scare me.”

  “Can’t do.” Not with El Jefe and his mom on their way and the whole “Si could drop dead any minute from his untreated type 1 diabetes” thing.

  Dani moved ahead of me and started checking rooms too. All the better. Get through it twice as fast.

  It still took an hour to finish both floors of that wing. And it was full night now. The noise from the bar was thunderous. “I think we should go back to the bar.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think he’d be holed up in a room with a party like that going on.” Dani led the way, went straight to the bar, and ordered food.

  I blessed her name.

  The French version of chili fries was good, even if Dani didn’t make an attempt to pay for them. I hadn’t stopped to think about how she had paid for her trip so far. I’d have to remember to fill up the Saab when we hit the road again.

  We ate every last bite while scanning the club for Si. The place was dark, and loud, and the same sweaty youth who made the guest rooms here so…authentic…were grinding and laughing and drinking all around us.

  We needed to search the massive sea of dancers for our man, but it didn’t look promising. I took Dani by the hand and led her into the crowd. A dirty blonde in a tube top elbowed me in the face as I walked past. Her apology was slurred, and her face was flushed. I put myself between the dirty blonde and Dani, since the dancer hadn’t stopped flailing just because she hit me. I kept one arm around Dani’s waist in an attempt to guide her through the mess of people and out of harm’s way.

  I didn’t see Si.

  “We’d better book a room,” Dani said. “I think I have enough left to grab a spot in an all-girls dorm.” She chewed her bottom lip.

  I didn’t like the idea of Dani staying with the drunk girl in the tube top and her friends. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Find Si in the morning?”

  I led her to the other wing of guest dorms, and even though she sighed heavily, we checked every room there.

  “He’s not here. Or he is here and he’s hopping from room to room, actively hiding from us.”

  “Probably.” I dragged my hand through my hair. “You’re confident we can find him at the surf shop in the morning?”

  “Completely. This is a surf town, and he is here to surf. He’s seventeen, right? Couldn’t be anything more logical.”

  I agreed with a simple nod. “Let’s go, then.”

  Nice was quiet on a fall evening. The party was all at the hostel. Old Town was shuttered, and the people who called Nice home were in their homes. A few places, tourist shops mostly, showed signs of activity still, but all in all, the stars above, the shooshing of the waves on the rocks, and the scent of sea air at night calmed me down. I kept Dani’s hand in mine because I wanted to. And because it was my job to keep her safe and in sight.

  I took her inside the hotel we had parked at. “Chambre simple, s’il vous plaît.”

  The desk clerk cocked an eyebrow at me. “You meant to say double, non?” His accent was heavy, but in that way that makes French people sound
sophisticated.

  “No, single.”

  “But sir, we only do single rooms for…single people.” He smiled at Dani.

  “Yes. It’s for her. One single room, please.”

  He shrugged, took my credit card, and gave Dani a room card key.

  I walked her to the room. She kept talking the whole time. I had given up trying to follow her thoughts halfway to the elevator.

  She opened the door and looked up at me, all green eyes and hope.

  I leaned my head forward to kiss her good night. Then I stopped. I don’t kiss Dani. I’m her teacher. I’m just…tired. “Night,” I said, swallowing every other thing I was thinking.

  She blushed and looked away. “See you in the morning.”

  She may have asked what I was planning, while she talked nonstop on the way to her room, but I don’t recall telling her that I was going to sleep in the Saab. Which I was.

  The next morning I wasn’t sorry I had slept in the car in the hotel parking lot. In fact, I woke up feeling…I don’t know. Good. Like I had done something with myself. Sure, all I had actually done was walk away from a perfectly good job because a pretty girl had gotten on a train, and then manage to lose a kid who I couldn’t afford to lose, but it seemed to add up to something bigger than that.

  I got out of the car and stretched. It was still early, and the sun wasn’t high yet. The blue grays of the fading night were still on the horizon, and there was a crisp fall chill in the air. Nice was far enough south that the chill would pass by afternoon, but right now it was good.

  I went into the lobby and poured myself a cup of bitter coffee from the pot they had on a cart in the hall. Then I called Dani’s cell. Remembering Dani-in-the-morning, I wasn’t offended when she didn’t answer.

  I settled in an overstuffed chair in the waiting room and grabbed a copy of La Figaro. Good language practice, newspapers. Plenty of unfathomable vocabulary.