I recognized Kristin’s blind faith in Jacques’ innocence. I’d felt that way myself when people I knew were suspected of crimes. But just because I recognized it didn’t mean I was willing to write off my suspicions. Believing Jacques to be innocent didn’t necessarily make it so.
Sue Ellen and Amanda had stopped talking, and Sue Ellen joined Kristin. She pulled Nick’s I-FAD sweatshirt off and tossed it on the bed. “I think maybe we’ve worn out our welcome.”
“No, ladies, listen.” I put my hand out and grabbed Kristin’s wrist. “Please understand. The day after I arrived in Las Vegas, I found a woman’s body. I think she was murdered. And a couple of days after that, her friend was found unconscious. I don’t know who’s behind it or why, and that’s making me a little crazy.” Kristin looked at my hand on her wrist and I let go. “I’m in an unfamiliar town where I have two friends: Nick and Amanda.” I glanced at Amanda. “I’m known for jumping to conclusions. Let’s keep what I said between us girls and call it a night.”
Kristin and Sue Ellen looked at each other. “I don’t know,” Kristin said. “Jacques will probably make tonight worth our while if we tell him what she said.”
These ladies were no dummies. “Hold up. You said Jacques bills your services to the room, right?”
“Yeah. So?”
“Tell him it was a misunderstanding and we worked everything out. Tell him you stayed here. Tell him whatever it is you tell him after you do whatever it is you do.”
The ladies looked at each other again. Sue Ellen shrugged. “What the heck. Beats giving back rubs.”
I sent the ladies on their way and locked the door behind them. I’d explain the charges to Nick and Marc when the time came. Despite my explanation of actions to the women, I kept Jacques on my suspect list. He had opportunity and a possible motive. Marc would be the best person to tell me about his standing relationship with Jacques.
I texted Nick, told him to disregard my voicemail, and immediately followed it up with another saying to not disregard it completely, but that I lacked evidence to support my suspicions. I considered calling the police, but what would I tell them? The only thing I’d confirmed for sure was that Jacques used a fake accent. Anybody who’d ever seen a Pink Panther movie would have recognized that.
I set the various plates on the room service cart and pushed the cart into the hallway. We’d kicked all three bottles of champagne, but I hadn’t even finished a glass. I checked the minibar, pulled out two splits, and handed one to Amanda.
“We might as well keep the party going.”
Amanda took the bottle and rested it on her thigh. “You just called me your friend. Are we?”
I considered the question. “We’re not not friends. I guess it was always just easier to not like you than to like you, because if I liked you I’d have to accept your place in Nick’s life.”
She peeled the foil from her bottle and popped the cork. “Trust me, accepting you hasn’t been a walk in the park either.”
I’d never considered that, and the thought made me smile. I opened my bottle, we filled our glasses, and clinked.
Hey, what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, right?
***
We each finished a glass and poured another. I took a much-needed bathroom break and came back to find Amanda standing by the window, staring out at the view of the strip.
“Is everything okay?” I asked her.
She didn’t answer right way. When she finally did speak, it wasn’t what I expected. “What did Nick tell you about Pamela’s death?”
“Pamela? Your college roommate?” I thought about the conversation Nick and I had while he was hung over after his Vegas bender with Marc. It had been along the lines of just-the-facts, but I’d gotten the gist of it. “He said he and Pamela broke up, and she almost immediately started dating Marc. When he tired of her, she begged Nick to take her back, and he didn’t. She killed herself and a part of him feels guilty.”
“Did he say why he feels guilty?” Amanda asked.
“Nick’s a smart guy. I don’t think he regrets not reconciling with Pamela after she left him, but I do think he thinks he should have seen she was troubled and maybe gotten her help.”
Amanda returned to her chair. She crossed and recrossed her legs several times, as if the subject made her uncomfortable and she couldn’t relax. The incident had happened a long time ago, but clearly it was as fresh in Amanda’s mind as it was in Nick’s.
“Why did Lydia’s death remind you of Pamela? You told Nick you thought I could help. What did you mean?”
“Lydia’s death looked like a suicide, but the paper said the medical examiner hadn’t released the cause of death. That’s what happened with Pamela at first. Even though it looked like suicide with her mental state and overdose, there were questions and an ensuing investigation.”
“But it was ruled a suicide in the end?”
“Yes,” Amanda said.
“How do you know all this? I know you were her roommate, but you never seemed all that interested in criminal investigation and you don’t talk about her like you two were close,” I said.
Amanda sighed. “Pamela and I were roommates matched by the computer. We didn’t have much in common, but when you’re put in a close living situation like that, you become friends. I can’t explain it, but that’s how it was. I knew things about her that nobody else knew because we shared a room. You can only hide so much when you share a twenty-foot space with another person.”
“What does any of this have to do with Lydia? Right now, the only connection I see is that both women were connected to Marc. But you’re talking about something that happened a long time ago.”
Amanda didn’t seem to find it as odd as I did. “We all attended I-FAD.”
And then it dawned on me, that it wasn’t a coincidence. That Nick joining me in Las Vegas wasn’t simply a spontaneous getaway, that Amanda entering the lingerie market wasn’t a random choice. That Marc wasn’t just in Las Vegas to get married. I felt my eyes move back and forth as pieces of conversations that I’d heard from the moment I stepped foot into the hotel dropped into corresponding places like a game of Tetris.
“Nick told me Marc is your financial backer. Your company was ruined. You knew Marc from college, and you reached out to him for funding. Lydia said something about that—about how opportunistic designers came out of the woodwork to get at his money. I thought she was talking about Nick because he was with Marc at the time, but she was talking about you. Am I right?”
“You’re not wrong,” she said.
“And instead of investing in your company, he gave you a job.”
“No, he bought my company and let me stay on as an advisor. He thought it was wise for me to go into a niche category that I had no connection to while we rebuilt my brand, and he pulled strings to get me into the Intimate Mode show.”
It was solid advice, and Amanda was smart to have turned to someone who knew what he was talking about. “You talked to Marc about Nick’s financial trouble too, didn’t you?”
She nodded. “After Marc bought my company, I told him about Nick’s situation. He wanted to talk to Nick about possible opportunities. I didn’t think Nick would even consider it, but I told Nick I wanted him to meet my new investor. I didn’t tell him who it was until after he found out Marc was in Vegas.”
“We ran into Marc when we checked in. Nick seemed surprised by Marc being here.”
“He would have been. I planned to have Marc and Nick meet at Flush. Yesterday when you left in my sample robe and I said I had an appointment—that was Marc. I didn’t think it was a good idea for him to find out what you did or that I was involved.”
“When Nick agreed to come to Vegas with me, he wanted to get away from his recent problems, but seeing Marc reminded him of old problems.” I started to understand why Nick had acted so strange that very first day and why he said Marc Rico was the last person he wanted to ow
e. Nick had narrowly missed owing some very bad people. It would be hard enough for him to accept help rebuilding, but help coming from Marc would have reminded him too much of the past.
“Nick came to Vegas to spend time with you. When you asked him, he thought maybe you had something else in mind.” She sang the first four notes—da dum de dum—of the wedding march. “Meeting with investors wasn’t his priority.”
“But right after we checked into the hotel he went off with Marc.”
“Nick was mad. At Marc, at me, at all of us. He might have thought you were in on it too.”
“He thought I had something to do with Marc meeting us in the lobby?”
She shrugged. “You like to solve problems. If Marc invested in Nick’s company, that would be a problem solved. But Nick wanted time with you. He didn’t want any interruptions. I kept prodding him to meet with my investor and when he realized that investor was Marc, he felt trapped. When he found out Marc was getting married, Nick felt like a fool for thinking it was all about him.”
30
At least I now knew Nick hadn’t lied to me. When I’d first told him about the lingerie show in Las Vegas, he asked if I wanted company. He joked about having a flexible schedule, and he said there would be possible leads for him at the accessory shows. All true. It wasn’t like Nick knew everything about my life, so I had no reason to know every detail about his.
“Tell me how you reconnected with Marc,” I said.
“You know I had business trouble.” It was statement, not question.
Yes, I knew. It was over a year ago. An arsonist had targeted Amanda’s runway show. I’d volunteered to help her before Nick and my relationship hit some speed bumps. I would have come out of the situation feeling far superior to Amanda in terms of business acumen and high road taking, but she’d seen me in my underwear and that was kind of an equalizer.
But all things considered, an entire convention center of industry professionals had seen me in my underwear now, so that shaved the edge off Amanda’s high ground.
“I took a year off,” she said. “I applied for a teaching position at I-FAD and sent out resumes to everybody I knew on LinkedIn. Honestly, I thought I was done with the fashion business. Even if I had something creative left to say, my name was a joke. Why would anybody pay attention to me?”
“Did you go to Marc or did he come to you?”
“I saw his name in the alumni magazine. I-FAD is known for being a design school, but Marc is one of our more successful graduates from the business side. The current faculty wants to use his success to recruit more candidates for that major, so there was a profile on him. There I was, sitting in my living room in my underwear asking the universe for a sign. The mail arrived and inside was the magazine with that profile.”
I showed great restraint by not saying a word. I’d been known to look for signs on occasion, so anything I said would have had a pot/kettle/black feeling.
“You called Marc and set up a meeting,” I said.
Amanda’s face softened, and I realized she’d been expecting the very comment I’d kept in reserve. It was an oddly bonding moment.
“I reached out to congratulate him on the article. He’d heard about my business trouble. The next day, he called and said he may have an opportunity for me and did I want to meet to talk?”
“That fast?”
“I asked the universe for a sign. It’s not like I was in a position to ignore him. Even if I didn’t want the job, I probably would have asked him for a loan so I could get caught up on my bills and not have credit problems on top of everything else.”
I hadn’t spent much time thinking about Amanda’s life after her troubles. I’ll admit, I’m the center of my own universe. The problems I have take center stage and the problems I get mixed up in tend to override everything else going on around me. And helping Amanda had led to my own set of problems.
I’d been hospitalized (talk about signs). When I recovered, I vowed to take control of my life. I accepted a job at a local start-up e-zine, which had been acquired by Tradava Department Stores, thus giving me the very financial stability I’d sought when I first moved back to Ribbon. I pushed Amanda out of my mind to keep my eyes on my own paper, and enough had happened since then that I’d never stopped to think about the damage done to her life. Did that make me a bad person? I didn’t think so. But it did make me reconsider any snap judgments over the decisions she’d made.
Amanda was the sort of woman to whom it appeared things came easily. She had naturally sleek and straight hair while I had curls that I fought to tame. She had the figure of a model pre-body positive movement, while I had sandwich rolls around my waist. She had her name on the inside label of the clothes in the fashion magazines I read. The closest I’d come to having my name on a designer label was when my mom wrote “S. KIDD” on the elastic inside my Carter’s cotton briefs.
I’d almost lost everything when I first moved to Ribbon. And Nick had lost everything when his showroom manager had been murdered. But watching Amanda lose everything had taught me a valuable lesson. We are all in control of our own lives, and it’s our responsibility to look out for ourselves. It was after Amanda’s trouble that I got my life on track. In a way, I had Amanda to thank.
“Fast forward. Marc bought and renamed your company and kept you on as an advisor. You’re here to represent the collection. You told Marc about Nick and now he’s here too.”
“I just thought Nick should hear Marc out. Nick has options that I didn’t. He double majored in design and business, and he worked for a bunch of companies before he went out on his own. He could make five phone calls and have a job by the end of the month.”
“But he didn’t. For all I know, while I’m here working the Intimate Mode show—” I ignored Amanda’s raised eyebrow at the word “working”—“Marc is trying to set up Nick as the creative director of one of his companies.”
I glanced at the clock. It was long past visiting hours at the hospital. I didn’t doubt they’d bend the rules for someone of Marc’s financial background—heck, I didn’t even doubt he’d make a generous donation to them on the spot to gain favor. I’d do the same thing if I had his money and Nick was the one in the hospital. No judgment.
But the longer the two of them were gone, the more concerned I became that they were bonding like Amanda and I were. Would Marc offer Nick a job? Would Nick take it? If so, how would that affect Nick’s and my future?
As the night wore on and the champagne bottles emptied, it seemed inevitable that Amanda and my night would turn into a slumber party. Amanda curled up on the sofa and I draped a blanket over her.
“Go to sleep. I’ll set the alarm so you can get to your hotel in the morning before the Intimate Mode show.”
“Okay,” she said, her voice sounding halfway to dreamland. As I reached the door, she spoke. “Samantha.”
“Yes?”
“I never said thank you.”
I smiled, though in the dark she probably couldn’t see. “You didn’t have to.” I picked up a keycard and left.
I had questions. Too many questions to sleep. I wanted to talk them out but there wasn’t anybody around who could help me. I wandered into the casino, hoping to find a distraction. I weaved through the slot machines, barely registering the colors and sounds. Before I knew it, I was out of the casino and headed toward the chapel. I had no idea why.
Yes, I did.
I was troubled, and there was something about the quiet, peaceful zone behind those doors that offered calm. And also, I wanted to find out more about that guestbook.
Tonight, Irene was wearing a light blue straw pillbox hat with netting by her forehead. Her floral dress and short jacket held tones of blue, purple, and green, and her lips were an iridescent shade of coral. She smiled, revealing a transfer of lipstick onto her two front teeth. Involuntarily, I ran my tongue over my front teeth to make sure I didn’t reflect her makeup fail.
“Well, hello there!” she greeted me. “You were here a few nights ago. Has your fella gotten over his nerves yet?”
“Pretty much,” I said.
“I shouldn’t tell you this, but he came back after the two of you left and said you’re the one who’s nervous about getting married. Isn’t that sweet? He wanted to give you some alone time to talk to Chaplain Rick so you felt comfortable before making any decisions. If you ask me, too many people rush into marriage before they’re ready. It’s nice to see you two taking this seriously.”
I knew Nick had come back to the chapel to return the guestbook, but I hadn’t known he’d used our circumstances as his cover. It touched me that Nick had confided in Irene and that he’d shared his concerns that I wasn’t ready to commit.
“Is that why you’re here? To seek counsel?” she asked.
“Actually, I wanted to sneak a peek at the guestbook.” I didn’t know if my request was normal or not, so I added, “It’s comforting to see all those people who are so sure about their decision.”
“Sure, honey. I was just working on it.”
“Working on it how? I would think people sign in and that’s it.”
“Yes, except the other night I spilled my coffee on it and two of the pages stuck together. I tore them out, but it’s a shame not to have a record of those weddings in here. I told Chaplain Rick I’d copy them all in myself.” She opened the book and pulled out two soiled pages. “I’m sure nobody cares about this but me, but it just seems like the right thing to do.”
“May I?” I asked, reaching for the pages.
She handed them to me and I scanned the entries. The pages were wrinkled in the way of wet paper that’s dried. And three-quarters of the way down on the second page was an almost illegible entry: Marc Rico and Chryssinda Sykes.
Panty Raid Page 14