Macchiatos, Macarons, and Malice

by Harper Lin

  I held my hand out.

  He shook his head. “No, you don’t want it.”

  “Yes, I do. Let me try.”

  He made a couple more efforts to warn me off but finally gave in. I took a bite and had to admit he wasn’t wrong. Still, I swallowed it down. I put the last bite on the table next to the box full of hopefully tastier macarons and shook my head. “Somebody must like it.”

  “I warned you,” he muttered.

  “Yeah, I know.” I picked up a pistachio macaron to hopefully get the flavor of soap out of my mouth. Thankfully, it was much tastier. “So, what do you think? Is one of them lying, or did Carrick just not know Gina well enough yet?”

  “They pay me to get information, not make decisions.”

  I shook my head. I might have to get Matt to tell Mike directly what he’d learned. Mike would probably have some insightful cop question that would make it obvious who was telling the truth. “Did you find out anything else? Other than what sports they played in high school, I mean.”

  Matt chuckled. “We talked about the hotel manager. Garner?”

  “Garrett.”

  “Yeah. He seems like a jerk, just from what the two of them said.”

  “About the issue with someone using the rooms?”

  He nodded, stretched, and put his feet up on the coffee table next to the box of macarons. I slid them away. Foot seemed like an even worse flavor than lavender-sage.

  “He’s my prime suspect.”

  “Oh yeah? Tommy agrees with you?”

  “They said he asked her out a while back, and she said no. I guess he’s not the kind of guy who responds well to that.”

  “Sounds like an understatement.”

  I decided that if Matt was getting comfortable, I should too and leaned back into the couch. Instead of putting my feet on the coffee table though, I put them on Matt’s lap and wiggled my toes.

  He dutifully dug his thumbs in and started massaging them. “Aren’t I supposed to be paying someone a lot of money to do this for you this weekend?”

  “The spa’s still closed. That’s why we’re trying to get this murder solved, so I can have a professional do this instead.” I turned my foot so he could have a better angle.

  “Anyway, Tommy said this Garrett guy has gotten aggressive before. Not toward people, but he’s been known to slam things and kick things. Threw a chair across a room once.”

  “Wow.” I subtly moved my feet so he could massage the other one. “It’s a long way from that to murder though.” He may have been my prime suspect, but Mike would continue not caring about that until I brought him some evidence. I may not have been a detective, but I was pretty sure chair throwing wouldn’t cut it.

  “That’s what Carrick said.”

  So they disagreed again. Interesting. “What did Tommy say about that?”

  “More or less the same thing. Carrick hasn’t been there long enough to know what Garrett’s really like.”

  I groaned, partly because what little evidence I’d managed to find all seemed to contradict itself and partly because Matt had hit a really good spot on my foot.

  “Anyway, then Tommy had to go in the back to take care of something, and Carrick and I got to talking about baseball again, so that’s all I found out.”

  Before I could say anything else, the room phone rang. Matt and I exchanged a look. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard a hotel room phone ring. I was closest, so I hopped up to get it.

  “Hello?”

  “Hi. Is this Fran?” a cheery voice chirped on the other end.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “Great! Hi, Fran, this is Whitney. I was just calling to let you know that the police have released the spa, and housekeeping has been in to get it all spick and span, and it’s back open. As compensation for the inconvenience, we’re giving you a free day pass to enjoy the pool and other amenities. You’re welcome to head on down to use it today, or you can save it for a later day in your stay. Do you have any questions?”

  Other than how many times she’d rattled that spiel off and how many more times she still had to, I didn’t and told her.

  “Great!” She paused for a second, and I thought that was it, but it wasn’t. “Did you make it upstairs earlier?” Her voice was lower. Not quite a whisper but almost like she didn’t want anyone to overhear.

  “Yes, I did—why do you ask?”

  “Just wanted to make sure you made it up there and saw everything okay.”

  And then it hit me that she wasn’t talking about the rooms. “Yes, I did. It was very interesting. Thank you for pointing me in that direction.”

  “Oh, you’re welcome. A lot of guests seem to think they’re really cool, and you seem like the type to like old stuff, so I thought I’d suggest it.”

  Or maybe she really was talking about the rooms after all. I was so focused on looking for clues I was making them up out of nowhere. “I did like them. Thanks.”

  “Okay, cool. Just go down to the spa whenever you want to use your pass. Talk to you later.”

  “Who was that?” Matt asked as I put the phone back down on the receiver.

  “Front desk. The spa’s back open, and we get a free day pass to use the pool and stuff.”

  “Cool. That didn’t work out so bad, did it?” He cringed when he saw the look I was giving him. “Well, I mean, not for Gina or anything.”

  I nodded and pulled out my phone to make a call. This was actually unbelievably great news. Yes, Gina’s killer was on the loose, but Mike had put me on the case so that the spa would be opened as soon as possible so that he and Sandra could get their massage so that they could get their marriage back on track.

  “Who’re you calling?” Matt asked, leaning over my shoulder, clearly feeling a little bad for his comment.

  “Mike,” I mouthed just as he answered.

  “Hello?” His voice on the other end sounded gruff and strained.

  “Hey! Did you get the call that the spa is back open? Your massage isn’t scheduled for another hour, right? So you can still make it.”

  “Yeah, they called me.” He sighed heavily. “Sandra says she won’t go.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  “What do you mean she won’t go?”

  Matt looked up at the sharp tone in my voice, but I wasn’t really paying attention to him. I was paying attention to Mike on the other end of the phone.

  “She won’t go,” Mike said, sounding drained. “The spa’s open, but the police haven’t made an arrest yet. She said she won’t be able to relax, knowing that the person giving her a massage could be a murderer.”

  I bit my tongue—literally—to keep from spitting out any one of the sharp retorts that was running through my mind at the moment. Her masseuse could be a murderer anyway. If she needed the person to be arrested, did she need them to be convicted too? That would require the massage to be put off for a while.

  Besides, Gina worked in the spa—it wasn’t like someone was bumping off strangers down there. Her murderer was probably someone with a grudge of some sort, not someone who just stumbled into the first open room and killed the person inside it. I hoped not anyway. That would be a game changer. But in any case, it was a couples massage—she wouldn’t be alone with anyone but Mike. Did she really think that her masseuse was going to kill her while someone else was in the room and Mike was two feet away?

  Despite all of those less-than-kind thoughts, I didn’t blame her for feeling uneasy. Someone had been murdered down there after all. I’d probably feel a little uneasy when we went for our own massages, too, but I’d had a knot in my back from leaning over baking sheets for weeks now, and I wasn’t going to let a little anxiety get in the way of someone digging in and working that thing out.

  The one thought that I couldn’t dismiss was that Sandra was a smart woman and generally far more levelheaded than I ever was, not at all the type to freak out over every slight risk or threat of danger. She was married to a cop, for heaven’s sak
e. She couldn’t be. But it was because of her typical poise and composure that I was a little bit suspicious of her reasoning. I couldn’t help but wonder if what she was really nervous about was the status of her relationship with Mike and whether she was ready to get back together with him or continue the separation. A couples massage would be a definite move in one of those directions.

  Or she may have just been feeling anxious about the murder.

  “So, what are you going to do?” I asked instead of saying any of that.

  “I don’t know.” Mike’s voice was low and rough. It was the closest to emotional I’d ever heard him. Well, except for maybe that time when he saved my life, but that time he didn’t sound like he was going to burst into tears. This time, as out of character as it was, it seemed possible.

  I felt terrible for him. I knew how desperately he wanted things to work out with Sandra. And it was that desperation that I heard in his voice now and that made me want to do something—anything—to help him. “Do you think it would help if I talked to her?”

  “I think it would help if you found the murderer. Have you gotten any evidence yet?”

  Despite my sympathy for him and his predicament, I bristled a little bit at his implication that this was my murder to solve. It hadn’t been my idea to investigate. I was supposed to be enjoying a romantic weekend with my loving boyfriend. I wasn’t a cop. And goodness knew Mike had told me enough times to stay out of police business. And now he was getting on my case about not solving it quickly enough? It grated. I wanted to say so, but I bit my tongue yet again. He was going through a lot, and if he was depending on me to solve the case, he was obviously at the end of his rope.

  I opened my mouth to tell him about the couple I’d overheard in the hallway near the historic rooms but then closed it again. There was no way I could tell him that without also telling him that someone had been using the unoccupied rooms for romantic rendezvous. Well, I could forget to mention it, but it wouldn’t do any good. He’d find out soon enough, and then I’d be right back where I started. No evidence and nothing to tell him. It wouldn’t even do any good telling him about what Matt had learned from Tommy and Carrick. Everything either of them said contradicted what the other one said.

  “No, nothing yet.”

  He heaved a sigh that oozed either deep disappointment or discouragement, maybe a combination of both.

  “Now that the spa’s back open, I think I’m going to go down there and try to see what I can find out,” I blurted out, wanting to give him at least a little bit of hope. Until that moment, I’d had no such plan, but apparently, I did now. Judging by Matt’s face, he was none too pleased about the sudden change in plans.

  “Okay, good.” Mike sounded instantly more cheerful but not much. It was Mike after all. “Let me know what you find out.” He barely said goodbye before hanging up.

  Matt’s eyebrows were raised when I looked at him.

  I sighed and told him about Sandra.

  “And what does that have to do with you?”

  “Mike was upset.”

  Still with his eyebrows up, still the skeptical look.

  “I don’t know. It just came out. I felt bad for him. I wanted to help.”

  Matt sighed and leaned back on the couch, rubbing his forehead. “I just wish we’d known ahead of time that you’d be into this. I could have gone golfing.”

  “Well, that wouldn’t have been very romantic.”

  His eyebrows—which had returned to their normal position only moments before—shot back up. “And you running around investigating a murder is?”

  “Good point.” I tried to think of how I could fix the situation. “You could come down to the spa with me.”

  It didn’t seem possible, but his thick, dark eyebrows went up even higher.

  “What? You’re the one who decided to take me on a mini spa vacation. I’m just trying to get us down to the spa together.”

  “I envisioned it more as lounging in a sauna than interrogating suspects,” he said drily.

  “I know. But Mike—”

  “Mike better appreciate all the work you’re doing on this,” he grumbled.

  “He does.” I sighed. At least I thought he did. It was hard to tell with him sometimes.

  Matt gave me a serious look. “Do you really think it’s safe for you to go poking around down there? Somebody was murdered yesterday, you know.”

  “It’ll be fine.” I stood up and straightened my shirt, unsuccessfully trying to smooth out the wrinkles that had resulted from my hurried packing.

  Matt looked doubtful. “Just be careful, okay?”

  I smiled and bent down, resting my hands on his shoulders. “I promise I will.” I went to brush a kiss across his lips, but he grabbed me and pulled me down onto the couch with him, making the kiss much more intense than I’d planned. I kissed him back for a few seconds before gently pushing him away. “I really need to get down there. Mike is counting on me.”

  I thought for a second that he was going to kiss me again. Instead Matt shook his head but had a smile on his face. “Blame Mike all you want. I know you do it because you’re nosey.”

  I wanted to argue, but I couldn’t. Well, not much. “I’m naturally curious.”

  He grinned and flicked the TV on. “Call it what you want. You can’t stand a mystery. You hate not knowing what’s going on.”

  He was right, of course, but I couldn’t admit that, so I ignored it. I almost leaned over to kiss him again but knew it would just delay my mission even further. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I will.” I cast one last look over my shoulder at him as I headed for the door.

  His only reply was a grunt. He was already glued to the basketball highlights on whichever sports network he had managed to land on first. More likely than not, he’d be asleep before I made it to the elevator, which was fine by me. It would give me more time to figure out who to talk to down in the spa, get ahold of them, and convince them to tell me something that would blow the case wide open.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The girl at the desk refused to let me in without an appointment or a spa pass. I could have gone ahead and used the day pass the hotel had offered me—the girl even asked about that—but I was pretty sure Matt would have appreciated that even less than he appreciated me running around investigating Gina’s murder. That would have been a step too far.

  So after unsuccessfully trying to get the receptionist to talk to me about Gina, I was reduced to wandering down the hall outside the spa, hoping to run into either a good idea or someone who would talk to me.

  I wasn’t optimistic. An employee would be my best bet, and they probably had back hallways to use when they came and went. They probably weren’t just wandering the main hotel halls. And even if they were, I doubted they’d talk to me after Garrett had come down so hard on them and threatened their jobs. But I wasn’t quite ready to give up, so I walked slowly back and forth, hoping that, by some stroke of luck, I’d run into someone who didn’t know or care about Garrett’s threat.

  And then I did.

  Amber was sauntering down the hallway in my direction when I spotted her. Her long chestnut hair cascaded over her shoulders. I wondered if she gave treatments with her hair like that. I tried to think of what it had looked like when I first saw her the day before, but all I could remember was the horror on her face as she stumbled, screaming, out of the room where she’d found Gina’s body. I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember how she’d worn her hair. Not that it mattered. I just had a serious case of hair envy, comparing her glossy curtain of hair with my unruly mop. That’s not to say that I didn’t appreciate my own thick waves, just that her hair was truly stunning. Maybe it was something in the hotel’s water—almost everyone had gorgeous hair, no matter what the texture. Amber’s hair was long, shiny, and straight. Whitney’s kinky curls had a gorgeous sheen, and Sophie’s sleek bob was utterly flawless. Even the blonde I’
d seen upstairs had bouncy waves that looked like they were out of a magazine. Maybe I needed to soak my hair in the sink for a while. Or book an appointment with one of the stylists in the salon. That would probably be easier.

  “Amber?”

  She stopped and looked at me, clearly not able to place me at first, but recognition dawned on her face after just a few seconds. “You were outside earlier.”

  I nodded and held out my hand to shake hers. “I’m Fran.”

  “Amber,” she murmured even though I obviously knew since I’d just called her that.

  I hesitated. I wanted to talk to her about Gina, of course, but I wasn’t sure if she would. Maybe if I could ease into it, but I didn’t know what else to bring up to get her talking. I was going to have to think fast. “I’m sorry about your friend.” Not the most original, and I was pretty sure I’d already said it to her, but it was the best I could do on very short notice.

  “Thanks.” She leaned against the wall and started examining her hair for split ends.

  “She worked down here with you?”

  She nodded and grabbed another section of hair.

  “You two were close?”

  Another nod. This wasn’t very productive. But she wasn’t telling me to shove off either.

  I took a step closer to her so I could lower my voice to where it wouldn’t be overheard. “You said you think Garrett did it?”

  She flicked her eyes up at me for just a second, and I thought she was going to tell me to get lost, but she just went back to examining her hair. “I dunno. He was a jerk, and he hated her. It would make sense.”

  She didn’t sound nearly as confident about his involvement as she had that morning. It was the opposite of what I needed—doubt instead of evidence. But maybe she just needed a little prodding. “Did you see him down here?”

  She shook her head. “Noelle banned him a while ago. He kept coming down, being loud, and bothering the clients.”

  “She has that kind of authority?”

  She shrugged without looking up. “He stopped coming.”