No Memes of Escape

by Olivia Blacke

  If the death of her coworker was bothering her, I certainly couldn’t see any outward sign.

  “Marlie,” I said, as genuinely welcoming as I could manage, “what can I get for you? Water? Tea? Or would you like something stronger?”

  “Odessa, dear, I feel like we might have gotten off on the wrong foot.”

  Whatever could have given her that idea? That she’d tried to convince me to rent a murder apartment? Or maybe it was that Izzy had called her—and by extension, all apartment brokers—a vulture.

  “Nothing to worry about. We’ve got a delicious cold-cut sub on locally baked honey-wheat bread as the special of the day, or if you’d prefer, we have several meatless options as well. If you’re lucky, we might still have a serving or two remaining of the cook’s infamous five-cheese macaroni. If you’re looking for something sweet there are homemade lemon bars.”

  “Why don’t you have a seat?” she asked, instead of ordering.

  “I’d love to, but I’ve got several tables to attend to.” I swept my arm out, indicating the other tables in the café. Not exactly rush hour, but a plausible excuse to remain standing.

  “Suit yourself. I understand your friend has a chip on her shoulder about apartment brokers.”

  “That’s an understatement,” I agreed.

  “It can be hard, paying a little extra for a service that seems unnecessary. I just want to help you find an apartment you love that’s in your budget. But more than that, I can help you navigate the murky waters of real estate. I can tell you what neighborhoods are safe and which landlords are responsive to problems. More importantly, I act as your go-between even after you move in and am available to resolve disputes or address concerns in a way that property owners rarely are. And I’ll have you know that my interests are always with the renter.”

  “Are they?” I blurted out. “Are they really? It seems to me that apartment brokers make money whether or not the renters are happy. Since people can’t afford to move, you don’t get a lot of repeat customers from renters. Which means the real money is keeping the building owners happy, right?”

  “That’s how a lot of brokers see it,” Marlie admitted. “Goodness knows that Vickie was one of them. Vickie had a killer instinct. That’s why she was always going to outperform me. She focused on commission, not customer satisfaction.”

  “And that’s why she was number one in your office.”

  Marlie nodded amicably. “Exactly. Although I suppose I’m number one now. For the time being, anyway. Another Vickie will come along, eventually. Can I give you some free advice?”

  “Sure,” I said. What could it hurt?

  “No matter how good you are at what you do, there is always someone hungrier than you are nipping at your heels.”

  “Waiting tables isn’t quite as competitive as real estate,” I pointed out. Then again, Nan had only been working at Untapped a few days and already got the best shifts and extra responsibility. At the rate she was going, she’d be assistant manager within the month.

  “Don’t fool yourself. Everything’s a competition. Speaking of which, if you want to beat someone to an apartment, you need someone like me in your corner. How about I set up some viewing appointments for you tomorrow. How does eleven o’clock sound?”

  “I’m sorry we got our wires crossed, but I’m set.” To be strictly honest, as much as I wanted an apartment in Williamsburg, I didn’t have the up-front money for a broker. I had to trust that Izzy would come through for us. “Can I get you something from the kitchen?”

  “Coffee will be fine,” she said.

  “Comin’ right up.” I poured her a mug and set it down on the table in front of her. “Holler if you change your mind about ordering food.” I hurried away before she could try any of her hard-sale tactics again, and hid just inside of the kitchen, where I could keep an eye on the occupied tables without having to talk to Marlie.

  “Friend of yours?” Parker asked.

  “Some apartment broker that is trying to get me to open a vein for her.”

  “Vampires,” he said, knitting his brows together. “When I first moved to Brooklyn, I fell for the broker racket. Ended up closing on the apartment, then finding out I couldn’t move in for three whole months because it was suddenly ‘under construction.’ When I finally got the keys, the electricity and water only worked intermittently. The range was broken. The toilet didn’t flush, and don’t even get me started about the water pressure in the shower. There was only one tiny window in the entire place, and it was busted.”

  “That sounds horrible! What did you do?”

  “I lodged a complaint. A lot of complaints. I tried to get my money back, but the broker never returned my calls and was always out of the office when I went by. Landlord wasn’t much better. I even filed a grievance with the city but nothing ever came of it. I’d already sunk so much money into the place that I didn’t have a lot of options left.”

  “Where did you end up living?” I asked.

  “There. I fixed up the window best I could with duct tape and cardboard. Bought a new toilet from the hardware store and installed it myself. It’s annoying not having a working stove on the regular, but we bought a multiuse air-fryer-slash-toaster-slash-oven and use the range for storage. With a few creative curtains and a lot of respecting each other’s privacy, I converted a studio into a one bedroom that I split with my roomies.”

  “Wait a sec, you still live there?”

  “Why not?” Parker asked. “It’s on a great block, and the rent is reasonable, split three ways. I’ve already invested a fortune in broker’s fees. What else can I do? Get suckered into someplace even worse and have to start all over again?”

  “Izzy was right. Apartment brokers are the worst,” I said.

  “The absolute worst,” Parker agreed. He ducked his head so he had a clear view through the order window, and one side of his lip curled up mischievously. “How about you send over a little something? On the house.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t particularly like Marlie, but I didn’t want to be party to Parker doing something untoward to her food. “She’s not worth it.”

  “Speak for yourself,” he grumbled, then went back to stirring something in a large bowl.

  Marlie finished up her coffee and left a few dollars on the table to cover the cost of the drink with a few cents left over for a tip. Coming from a woman who survived on commission, I thought that was rude. If I could afford to eat, I could afford to tip. Generously.

  She also left her business card, which I promptly tossed in the recycle bin. For the past few days, I’d been obsessed over the murder of Vickie Marsh, but the more I learned about her, the harder it was to empathize with her. She bullied her “friends.” She reveled in stealing other people’s boyfriends right out from under them. And to top it all off, she was a ruthless apartment broker.

  Not that she deserved to die. No one did. But if I absolutely had to choose between, say, a sweet nun who fostered rescue kittens and an apartment broker, I know who I’d save first. And it wouldn’t have been Vickie.

  I still had no idea who had killed her, but now that it was obvious that Castillo wasn’t planning on charging Izzy with a crime anytime soon, I wasn’t sure if it mattered to me personally. I hadn’t known Vickie for more than an hour. I didn’t like the idea of a killer getting away with literal murder, but was it really any of my business? Castillo was a competent cop, and he was on the case.

  For now.

  What would happen if his boss found out that Castillo was currently living with the prime suspect? Would he get removed from the investigation? If so, would the detective that replaced him be so reasonable? I doubted it.

  Which meant I needed to figure out who the real killer was, and I was running out of time.

  21

  Untapped Books & Café @untappedwilliamsburg ∙ July 15


  Looking for a good mystery? Romance? Comedy? Thriller? Have we got some great suggestions for you! Swing by the bookstore to check out the latest arrivals in traditional and indie novels. #bookstore #newarrivals #Williamsburg

  The good thing about working in food service—or any service job, really—was that except when it’s slammed, there’s plenty of time to think.

  The bad thing about working in food service was pretty much the exact same thing.

  I mean, there were drawbacks, don’t get me wrong. It’s hard work for little pay, but I did enjoy meeting new people and serving them stellar food along with an amazing selection of beers. Speaking of which, Orange Is the New Beer turned out to be a delicious addition to our menu, and I hoped that Todd would keep ordering it. It was light and hoppy like most IPAs, but without a bitter aftertaste.

  I wondered how many beers Izzy sampled while she was living in the stockroom, and how many meals she made out of the contents of the walk-in fridge. If she had stayed much longer, Todd would have eventually noticed. He might not take strict notice of how many heads of lettuce were in the walk-in at any given moment, but he knew exactly how many bottles of beer we had at any given time. He was kind of a genius when it came to inventory, at least for the valuable stock.

  But I wasn’t worried about Izzy drinking a beer or two from the cooler, especially knowing that she likely put money in the till the next morning to cover it. I was relieved she was staying with Castillo for the time being. I was mostly anxious about what would happen to her in the long run. On the plus side, if she was tried and (wrongly) convicted of Vickie’s murder, she’d have guaranteed food and lodging at the hands of the Bureau of Prisons. The irony that the prison system was likely better than the apartment brokerage racket in New York City did not escape me.

  Izzy wasn’t going to jail. Not if I had any say about it. She was innocent. I was fully convinced of that. Which narrowed the possible suspects considerably to the people locked in the escape room.

  Except, the escape room wasn’t precisely locked.

  I thought back to what the Game Master had said when he closed the first door behind us. I hadn’t been paying close attention, with everything else going on, but I distinctly remembered hearing him say that due to fire regulations or something, the door wouldn’t be locked behind us, but if we opened it and walked out, the game was over.

  Anyone could have come into the room after us, and we might not have ever noticed.

  I wondered if Castillo knew that. If he had never been in an escape room—and I didn’t have any reason to believe he had—he might believe that we were physically locked in the room. I thought back to him interrogating me to try to remember if the subject had ever come up, but I’d still been shook over Vickie’s death and a lot of things had happened in the last few days. I couldn’t be expected to recall every single detail.

  Even if we weren’t exactly locked in together, we might as well have been. It wasn’t like anyone could have walked in off the street and joined the room without the Game Master noticing them. Sure, there were other games going, but they were all busy in their own rooms. I’d only seen one proctor—Brandon in the ill-fitting tuxedo. I had to assume his attention was split between multiple games. I guess if someone was really motivated, they could book one of the other rooms at the same time as we were in the Clueless room, wait until everyone was distracted, and sneak in to kill Vickie.

  Who knew we were there, in that particular escape room, at that exact time?

  Potentially, anyone on the Facebook invite.

  Nadia and her fiancée, Becks, certainly knew. They’d paid their share with every intention of joining the outing, so they would have had precise details. I needed to get my hands on the Facebook invite to see how much information Vickie had shared, and how many people she had shared it with. Castillo would never show me, but Izzy had been invited and she certainly would.

  I loved growing up in the information age. Even when I was a kid, practically everyone had internet in their homes. Computers became relatively inexpensive and existed almost everywhere from the classroom to the living room. I got my first smartphone when I was in middle school, about the same time I opened a Myspace account. I literally could not recall a time that I wasn’t on the internet—surfing, searching, and sharing.

  It never seemed like a big deal before. It was second nature to check in on the current social media platform of the moment anytime I went somewhere even slightly interesting. It wasn’t until I moved to Williamsburg that I started to be more conscious of how much information I was actually sharing online, and even then, I didn’t know if I actually grew that much more careful. I still broadcast my location without giving it a second thought half the time.

  What if Vickie’s Facebook invitation had given her killer everything they had needed to find her and murder her?

  But that was silly, wasn’t it?

  Even if someone really, really wanted her dead—and for all of her flaws I couldn’t imagine anyone hating her enough to murder her—it was a little too complicated. Book an adjoining escape room, somehow manage to get Vickie alone, kill her, and slip out without anyone else in the group seeing them or getting caught on camera? That seemed a little far-fetched even for my admittedly overactive imagination.

  I wasn’t completely ready to rule out Nadia, Becks, and the other invitees as suspects, but even if any of them wanted to hurt Vickie, they weren’t in the room with us. Not like I could prove that Becks had a headache that day, or even that they were both together, but they had if not an iron-clad alibi, at least a plastic-clad one. As for the other invitees? Maybe they could sneak into the game in progress but there were easier ways to kill someone.

  That limited the field to the six of us in the escape room. Vickie didn’t bludgeon herself over the head. I trusted Izzy implicitly and I certainly hadn’t hurt anyone. That narrowed the list down to the three original suspects.

  Marlie was my first choice. But if I was being honest with myself, I was biased because she was an apartment broker. I forced myself to be objective. Marlie worked with Vickie in a competitive industry. What was it that Vickie was celebrating? She had won an award for being the best in the office for twelve months in a row. Marlie played it off as nonchalant that she was always second fiddle to Vickie, but she had to be jealous. She was at least fifteen years older than Vickie. How must it feel to know that someone practically half her age was crushing it?

  I paused in my musings to bring refills to the table with the subway map table topper surrounded by men who looked—and smelled—like they had spent the last hour or two in the gym. They’d spent ten minutes grilling me on the caloric content of every item on the menu, especially the beers, before deciding on plain grilled chicken and room-temperature water, which seemed like a waste of Parker’s culinary genius, if you asked me.

  As soon as there was a lull, my thoughts wandered back to the escape room murder. Unlike Marlie, Gennifer seemed nice. I’d caught a glimpse of a competitive streak at the escape room, but Izzy liked her. They went way back, but they hadn’t been in contact for years, and people changed over time. Gennifer was a mother, so her focus was probably more on raising a little one instead of competing with someone she’d gone to high school with half a decade ago. They weren’t even in the same industry, as far as I knew, so if there was any jealousy, it wasn’t professional. Gennifer seemed happily married and didn’t need Vickie’s Realtor services, so I was at a loss for a possibly motive.

  From all accounts, Vickie hadn’t been the nicest person. She’d bullied Gennifer when they were kids, but high school was long enough ago to cool even the hottest tempers. Gennifer didn’t seem to hold a grudge. Which, come to think of it, was weird. I put on a friendly face when Carin Butcher, my childhood bully, came into the Crawdad Shack back home, but I was never going to like her, much less hang out with her. I had to chalk it up to Gennifer being a
very forgiving person.

  That is, unless she was lying and still held a grudge, but she didn’t seem the type.

  Then there was Amanda. I’d love to talk to her again. She admitted that Vickie stole her boyfriend back in college, but conveniently forgot to mention it had happened again recently. Gennifer told us that Vickie was even bragging about stealing Amanda’s current boyfriend and that they were arguing about something on the way to the escape room. What were they arguing about, if not boyfriends?

  Plus, there was the matter of Amanda’s missing photos. Amanda seemed completely obsessed with Instagram and kept a ton of pictures on her phone that didn’t make the cut or she wouldn’t always be running out of space like she claimed. Why had she deleted a chunk of them around the time that we were in the escape room? What was she trying to hide?

  The table with faded birthday wrapping paper under the Plexiglas protector had finished their meals fifteen minutes ago and I’d brought their check already, but no one seemed in a hurry to leave. Which was just ducky with me. Most of the tables were empty anyway, and the longer they lingered, the greater the chances were that they would order something else that would add a few more dollars to their tip.

  My only other customer was an older gentleman who wore a bulky hand-knit sweater despite the heat wave outside. He’d sat himself at the counter and ordered coffee, black. I checked on occasion to see if he needed a refill yet, but as far as I could tell, he hadn’t even touched it. “Can I freshen that up for you?” I offered.

  “No thanks, doll,” he replied, winking at me.

  I knew I should have been offended, but as a waitress, I’d gotten used to more than my share of overly familiar customers. “Let me know if you change your mind,” I told the older gentleman.