by Harper Lin
It was interesting, but I wasn’t sure it was useful. “Did you see anyone else around who wasn’t supposed to be there?”
She looked at me out of the corner of her eye without turning her head. “You some kind of Nancy Drew or something?”
I didn’t know kids read Nancy Drew anymore. I had read maybe one or two of them growing up and gave up because they seemed hopelessly old fashioned. But I had Amber’s attention, and I wasn’t going to risk losing it because I got distracted by Nancy Drew, so I shrugged. “Just curious is all.”
“Sure you are,” she scoffed but didn’t seem like she cared. She grabbed another section of hair and ran her finger across the ends, fanning them out.
“So did you see anyone?”
She flicked her eyes at me again then sighed and went back to examining her hair. “I wish I had,” she muttered. “I keep thinking about it, trying to figure out if I missed anything. I mean, somebody went in there, right? Why didn’t I see them?” She shrugged and brought her hair closer to her face.
Before I could say anything else, a familiar face walked out of the spa. “Sandra!”
She looked at me and smiled, or at least made an effort to. It had to be just about the saddest smile I’d ever seen.
“Fran. Mike said you and Matt were here.”
I held my hand out to catch her arm. “Wait here a second. I want to talk to you.”
She looked hesitant but stayed next to me while I turned back to Amber.
“Is there any way Garrett could have gotten into the treatment room without you seeing him?”
Amber didn’t react at all.
“Amber.”
She looked up at me disinterestedly. “Huh?”
I repeated my question, slower this time.
Her shoulder twitched in a shrug. “I mean, maybe without me seeing him, but somebody would have seen him there. We all know him. And he’s not, like, the kind of guy you don’t notice or something.”
I hadn’t been at the hotel long, but I could see her point. Garrett wasn’t exactly shy about making his presence known, but even if he didn’t announce himself, everyone knew him. People wouldn’t forget that they’d seen him like they might with someone less recognizable, especially not since Noelle had apparently banned him from the spa.
“I better go before Noelle catches me out here. I’m supposed to be in the back getting ready for my first client.” She flicked her hair back over her shoulder.
I could have tried to get her to stay and talk to me a little longer, but I didn’t know what Noelle would think if she caught Amber hanging out in the hallway with me, so I just smiled and thanked her for talking to me.
She turned and looked me in the eye. It was the first time she had, since she was always playing with her hair. “Thanks for caring about Gina,” she said then walked toward the spa entrance.
I turned to watch her go. Something about the way the door slammed behind her sounded ominous to me, but I shrugged it off.
I shoved it to the back of my mind and turned to Sandra. “So how are you doing?” I asked with a smile.
Her eyes flicked around, doing nothing to hide her anxiety. “I’ve been better.” She smiled weakly.
I didn’t know how much to play dumb and how much to let on that Mike had told me. I didn’t want to say anything that could mess up his chances even more. I decided that the less I let on, the better. “Did you hear the spa reopened?”
She nodded slowly.
“Mike tells me you guys had a couples massage scheduled.”
Another slow nod.
“So you still get to do it. That’s great!” I hoped that if nothing else, my unabashed enthusiasm would sway her in favor of it.
It didn’t work.
“I—I don’t know if we’re going to.”
“Why not?” I asked, as if I didn’t know.
She shrugged and looked around anywhere but at my face, far from the normal self-confident Sandra I’d known since we were kids. “I just don’t feel comfortable, knowing that someone got killed down here yesterday and whoever did it is still on the loose.”
“You know Mike would never let anyone hurt you.”
She finally met my gaze with a look that said what she wouldn’t—or couldn’t.
“That’s not it, is it?”
She looked away again as she shook her head.
Somehow I felt like it would have been easier to change her mind if she’d been afraid for her life instead of her heart.
“He loves you. You know that? He really wants this to work out,” I said softly. I felt awkward and inappropriate, like I was simultaneously betraying a confidence and giving someone unwanted advice, which was probably actually a pretty good description of the situation. But I didn’t know what else to do, with her standing there in front of me, looking nervous, like she was about to make the biggest decision of her life. And I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t try.
“I know,” she whispered. “The whole thing just seems like a bad sign. We come here to try again, and this happens? What if it’s the universe telling me to move on? What if I ignore it and everything is worse than before? I just don’t know what to do.” She looked completely forlorn.
I didn’t know what to say. On the one hand, I could just tell her to go for it—get back together with Mike. It would be great. They would live happily ever after. But what if I was wrong? Even though I wanted things to work out between them, I couldn’t just blindly tell her that it was the right thing to do. After all, I didn’t really know.
I reached out and rubbed her arm. “Follow your heart.”
“But what if it’s wrong?” She looked me in the eye, but I couldn’t tell if she was afraid she was wrong for wanting to go back to him or leave for good.
I tried to look more confident than I felt. “It’s never wrong to follow your heart.”
For a second, I thought she thought it sounded as ridiculous as I was afraid it did. But after staring at me for what felt like a very long time but must have only been a few seconds, she reached out and pulled me into a big hug.
“Thank you, Fran,” she said when she finally let me go. She actually looked happy.
“So you’re going to get your massage?” If Sandra was going to go get the massage, I could stop worrying about solving Gina’s murder. Not that I wanted her killer to go free, but it wouldn’t be my problem anymore.
She hesitated, looking a little uneasy. “I don’t know yet. I still need to think about it some more.” She stopped and smiled. “But I feel better about it.”
“Good,” I said and smiled back at her.
“I better get back. Mike’s going to be wondering where I disappeared to.”
I considered it a good sign that she was concerned about Mike worrying about her. It was at least better than her avoiding him. She hadn’t committed to the massage, but I felt like I’d at least put in a good effort that Mike would have to appreciate even if I hadn’t figured out Gina’s murder yet.
Chapter Twenty
After Sandra went back up to her room, I stood in the hallway outside the spa for a few minutes, trying to decide my next move. I could try to talk to more of the girls who worked in the spa, but it didn’t seem like most of the hotel guests had the same qualms about lounging at a murder scene that Sandra did. There was steady foot traffic into the spa as people came down to use their free spa day. Either that or they were just ghoulish sorts who wanted to check out the scene of the crime. Whatever their reasons for being down there, I didn’t think I was going to have much opportunity to talk to any of the girls.
I sighed. Mike wouldn’t be happy about it, but I was pretty sure there was nothing else I could do down there, not right now anyway. Maybe I could come back later, closer to closing time, and try my luck again. I decided to head back to the room and see what Matt was up to.
I walked slowly, letting my mind wander as I went. It was beyond frustrating that virtually no one had any information about what
had happened to Gina, and on the rare occasion someone actually told me something useful—like that Garrett had it out for Gina—someone else contradicted it immediately, like how Carrick said that Garrett may have had a temper, but he wasn’t a murderer. Sure, I knew a few more things about the soap opera–style drama of the Alford Inn, but I wasn’t sure any of that shed light on Gina’s murder. I was honestly at the point where I was beginning to think that either everyone knew who killed her and was keeping their mouths firmly closed or that her murderer was invisible.
I stopped dead in the middle of the hall and turned slowly back around to look at the housekeeping cart I’d just passed. It was the first one I’d seen since I’d been there. Or was it? Was the housekeeping staff extra covert here, or had I just not paid attention?
Who really noticed the housekeeping staff? Sure, I noticed their work—turning down our bed and making it back up again, cleaning the bathroom—but they’d seemed to operate invisibly, coming in and out of our room completely unobserved by us. And I suspected I wasn’t the only one like that. Housekeeping was practically meant to be invisible. And with the spa rooms having to be turned over between clients, surely there was housekeeping staff in there all the time. It was the perfect opportunity to commit murder—or the perfect cover.
“Excuse me.” I poked my head into the utility room the housekeeping cart was standing outside of.
A middle-aged woman dressed in pale blue stepped around a corner, her arms laden with fluffy white robes. “Can I help you?”
“Um, yeah.” I suddenly realized I would need to have some reason I had stopped to talk to her. I decided to go with my old reliable. “I was wondering if it would be possible to get some more towels?”
“Of course! What’s your room number?”
I wanted to kick myself as I told her. If I kept this up, I’d have a room overflowing with towels.
“I’ll get that taken care of for you.” She picked up a tablet from the cart and started tapping on it. “I’m actually spa housekeeping, but I can get the request submitted to the guest room staff.”
“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were a separate department.”
“Yup. Blue is spa. Light gray is guest rooms.” She plucked at her scrubs-like uniform top, flashing me a wide toothy smile that was traced in a bright red a touch too orange for her pale skin. “Happens all the time.”
At least now I knew she worked in the spa. “Can I ask you a question?”
I expected to see the curtain fall behind her eyes—the one that said she didn’t want to talk about the murder. But instead, a little light went on. This was a woman who liked to gossip. But still, just in case I was reading her wrong, I wanted to ease into it.
“The treatment rooms in the spa—they get cleaned between each client, right?”
The disappointment on her face was obvious. She was apparently a woman who really liked to gossip. “Oh, of course. It wouldn’t be sanitary otherwise. The health department would shut us right down.”
I paused and leaned in, glancing up and down the hall for effect. “Were you working yesterday?”
The light came back on. She nodded rapidly. “Mm-hmm.”
I took a conspiratorial step closer to her. “Did you see anything?”
“Ugh, no. I wish I had.”
“Oh, that’s too bad.” I stepped back and sighed. “Do you think the police are going to catch whoever did it?”
She nodded confidently. “Definitely. I mean, they always do on the TV shows, don’t they? And those are always in big cities like New York or LA. Or nationwide! This is just little podunk western Mass!”
I didn’t have the heart to point out that those shows were scripted. And that it wouldn’t make very good TV if the good guys lost.
“Actually—” She leaned toward me. “There’s a rumor that the hotel manager did it!”
Chalk up another point in the Garrett column. “Did anyone see him down there?”
She shook her head, looking disappointed. “And I’ve asked everybody! Well, almost everybody. There was a new girl working yesterday, and I haven’t run into her again yet. Didn’t catch her name either.” She glanced down at her cart, looking glum before brightening up suddenly. “But you know what? If I don’t, I’ll just go ask Garrett who she was. I’ll tell him that she misplaced something and I need to talk to her about it. Then he’ll have to tell me who she is and where to find her. And he won’t even know he’s incriminating himself!” She put her hand on her hip and looked at me with a self-satisfied smile.
I wished she lived in Cape Bay. She had a shamelessness to her that would have come in handy in some of the murder cases I’d gotten involved in. Not that I was planning to ever do that again. But then again, I hadn’t exactly planned on doing it in the past either.
“Are there any other rumors? Any good gossip?” I brushed my fingers against one of the robes she’d laid on top of the cart. It looked like normal terrycloth, but it was one of the softest things I’d ever touched. I wondered if I could get Matt down to the spa this afternoon. Assuming I didn’t get a good lead from the housekeeper, of course.
She sighed. “Not really. Everyone was really surprised. Gina was a good kid. It’s terrible what happened. Really terrible. With all the crazy folks who work in this hotel, I never would have guessed Gina would be the one to get knocked off.”
I nodded sympathetically but thought it was a strange thing to say. “Are there some people you would have expected to be murdered?”
She hesitated, seeming to realize that she may have said something she shouldn’t have. “Well,” she said after a few seconds, “it’s not that I thought anyone would kill them, but I know there wouldn’t be too many sad faces if that nasty Sophie up in the bakery never came back. Have you met her? She’s a real piece of work.”
I couldn’t say I was surprised. I didn’t even work there, and I wouldn’t be sorry if she just stopped showing up. As long as it wasn’t because she was dead, of course.
“And, oh, have you met that boy who works the coffee bar? Carrot? Wouldn’t be sad to see him go either.”
I assumed she meant Carrick, although calling him Carrot amused me. I might have to start thinking of him that way whenever he annoyed me.
“Garrett—that’s the hotel manager—if he took off, it wouldn’t be a loss to anyone. But now, you know who I would miss? Tommy—the bartender. Mm-mm, he’s a cutie, isn’t he? And so nice and friendly! That Carrot could learn a thing or two from him.”
I didn’t disagree with her there. Tommy was definitely one of the more pleasant employees I’d met at the hotel.
“Well, I better get back to work.” She pulled closed the door of the storage room. “The spa’s packed today, between that free day they offered and all the looky-loos. If you ask me, they should have kept it closed. It doesn’t seem right, being business as usual down there with Gina’s killer on the loose.”
I agreed and thanked her.
“They should have your extra towels up to your room later today. If you need them before that, just call down to the desk and let that Whitney girl know. She’ll fix you up.”
Oh right. The towels. I’d practically be able to start my own spa in the room with the number I’d have after I got even more delivered.
The spa housekeeper set off, trundling down the hall with her cart, and I turned to make my way back up to my room. Everything seemed to keep circling back to Garrett. I was starting to think that if it looked like a duck and it quacked like a duck, well, he must be a murderer. But I wasn’t sure. And I knew Mike—and the local police—wouldn’t go for “there’s no evidence except some rumors pointing to him, but there’s no evidence pointing to anyone else either!”
They wanted actual evidence, something they could take to a jury. Not wild guesses by the housekeeping staff. I was out of ideas, but maybe something would jump out at me on my way up.
Chapter Twenty-One
The elevator doors opened on my flo
or, but I didn’t get out. I was frozen in place. I had just had a stunning realization—the new spa housekeeper. It made so much sense.
There was a new housekeeper down in the spa yesterday. The maid I talked to saw her. And hadn’t seen her since. It was possible that she’d decided not to come back after there was a murder her first day on the job, but it was also possible she wasn’t employed there at all. I had to tell Mike. It wasn’t much, but I had to tell him. I could have kicked myself for not getting a description though. He’d want that.
I thought for a second about going back down to the spa, but what would I say? “I need to talk to one of your housekeepers? Uh, middle-aged? Likes to gossip? Bright-red lipstick that’s the wrong color for her skin tone?” It didn’t seem promising, but maybe Mike could figure out how to talk to her again.
The elevator doors had closed, and I had to wait for the elevator to get up to the top floor, where someone had called it, before I could ride back down to my floor.
I actually got off when the elevator reached my floor this time and headed for my room. I wondered if it would be too much to stop off at Mike’s room to tell him my housekeeper theory. He’d probably want to know, but I wasn’t sure if he’d appreciate my stopping by unannounced. Still, he had a peephole—he didn’t have to answer the door if he didn’t want to.
As it turned out, when I turned the corner to the hallway where both our rooms were, someone else was already knocking on Mike’s door. Unless I wanted to wait in line, it looked like talking to Mike was definitely out.
The person at the door was holding a tray—room service, I figured, although for some reason, I didn’t feel confident about that.
I was close enough to hear when Sandra opened the door. She looked and sounded confused. “We didn’t order anything.”
“Oh, it’s courtesy of the hotel. Because of everything that’s happened.”
The woman holding the tray sounded vaguely familiar, so I tried to get a look at her as I went by, but her long blond hair hung down on either side of her face, blocking my view. Still, something about her voice was so familiar and not in that vague “maybe she’s someone I went to college with” kind of way—no, I felt like if I did know her, I’d heard her voice recently. But for the life of me, I couldn’t figure out where.