A Napkin and A Plan
Chapter forty-one
Margot was in the kitchen when Harker’s call came at six thirty. She answered and put it on speaker. Evan was leaning against the counter across from her. There was no way he didn’t want to hear this.
“The ornaments,” Margot said.
“That’s my bet. I’m sending a team.” A pause. “Here’s the problem, Ms. Pine. The marina office logged activity at that slip this afternoon. Caleb’s been in my holding cell since two o’clock.”
The kitchen went very quiet. The walk-in compressor hummed. Somewhere down the corridor, a tray of glasses rang faintly against a cart.
“Someone else moved the ornaments there,” Harker said. “There’s an accomplice.”
The word sat in the kitchen like a third person at the table.
She gripped the counter edge. An accomplice. Someone was still at the resort. Someone she’d been smiling at, scheduling around, trusting with vendor logistics, had been working with Caleb the whole time.
The old David feeling started up her throat, the one that whispered you trusted the wrong person again. She pushed it back down. This wasn’t David. This was a puzzle, and puzzles had solutions. And she was standing in a kitchen with a man who solved things for a living.
Evan had straightened off the counter. His expression had gone sharp the moment Harker said accomplice, all the ballroom warmth packed away in a single second. “Who is it?”
“If I had that, I wouldn’t be calling you.” Through the phone, papers shuffled. “Look. Two weeks ago, I’d have told you both to stay home and lock your doors. I’m not going to waste my breath. So, I’ll say this instead. Watch your backs tonight.”
It was the closest thing to respect Harker had ever handed them.
She ended the call and looked across the counter at Evan.
“The gala. If there’s an accomplice, they’re still here, and they don’t know we know.
The gala is the last event before everyone packs up and scatters.
If they’re going to move, they move tonight. ”
“You want to use the gala.”
“I want to use it as a stage. Which is what I’ve been doing all week anyway.” She pulled a cocktail napkin off a stack and clicked her pen. “Except this time, we write the ending.”
He studied her across the counter. “How many exits does this building have?”
“Seven. I counted on my first day.”
The corner of his mouth moved. “Of course you did.”
Her team showed up at six forty-five. Five people around a stainless-steel counter in a kitchen that smelled like buttercream and dish steam.
Margot. Evan. Jolene. Ray. Tessa.
A dock worker, a housekeeper, a ship’s captain, an influencer, and an event planner who’d been suspended and reactivated inside the same week. If a better team existed anywhere on the Outer Banks, Margot hadn’t met it.
“Caleb is in custody,” she said. “The ornaments are in a boat slip in Manteo. Harker’s sending a team for them. But someone moved them to that slip this afternoon, while Caleb was already in a cell. Someone who’s still at this resort.”
“Who?” Tessa sat on the counter with both phones holstered on her hip like sidearms.
“We don’t know. That’s the problem, but that’s also the plan.” Margot spread the napkin flat on the steel.
Evan drew the resort beside her in quick, clean lines. Ballroom. Terrace. Service corridor. Boardwalk. Pier. Marina. A map of two weeks of their lives, rendered in ballpoint on a square of paper meant for cake crumbs.
“The gala is our best chance,” Margot said. “Two hundred guests, every vendor, every staffer, all in one room. If the accomplice is going to act, they’ll act while the crowd is loud, the lights are low, and everyone’s watching the dance floor.”
“Blind spots.” Evan marked small X’s. “Service corridor. The path between the service building and the marina. The back third of the parking lot. And the pier.” He looked up. “Jolene covers the corridor. Ray covers the marina. Tessa covers the terrace angle from inside. I’m on the pier.”
“And me?” Margot asked.
“You run the gala.” He held her gaze. “The room has to look normal. If the accomplice senses anything off, they wait us out, and we lose them. You’re the best person in this building at making everything look fine when it isn’t.”
“That’s either a compliment or an insult.”
“It’s the truth.”
Ray nodded. “I’ll set up on Dock One with my tackle. Nobody questions a fisherman after dark. We’re part of the furniture.”
“Same as housekeepers.” Jolene was untying her apron. “Service corridor and the back entrance. Twenty-two years I’ve watched that hallway. I can tell you who’s walking it by the sound of their shoes.”
Tessa unzipped a bag that had been designed to pass as a clutch purse and laid out two phones, a portable camera rig, and a battery pack, setting each one down on the counter like a soldier laying out a kit. “You want me to be the security camera that actually works.”
“Exactly.”
“I was born for this.” She wasn’t joking. The bubbly ring-light voice was gone. In its place sat a woman with two million followers and the instincts of a photojournalist.
Margot looked around the circle of faces, lit hard and honest under the kitchen fluorescents. “If you see something, don’t confront. Call. Text. Whatever’s fastest. Harker is fifteen minutes out. He answers on the first ring now.”
She let that land. “If anything escalates, we call and we back off. We’re not heroes. We’re witnesses.”
Nods around the counter. Ray topped off his thermos from the staff pot. Jolene tucked a master key into her sleeve like a magician. Tessa holstered her phones.
They dispersed one at a time, thirty seconds apart. Evan had suggested it, so nobody watching the kitchen door would see a team leave it.
He was the last one out. He paused with his hand on the swinging door. “Margot.”
“Yeah?”
“Whatever happens tonight, you built something. This team. This gala. This whole impossible week.” His gaze held hers across the kitchen. “That’s not nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” she agreed.
What she meant was, you’re not nothing. You’re the reason any of it held. The words stacked up behind her teeth, and she kept them there, because there would be time after. She had decided, somewhere between the tree lighting and the napkin, that there was going to be an after.
He left. The door swung twice and settled.
She stood alone in the kitchen for one full breath and looked down at the napkin in her hand.
Two sets of handwriting on one small square. His block letters, her tight cursive, side by side. The way they’d been for two weeks: in the dock shed, on the pier, at the workbench, in a ballroom, plugging in a Christmas tree.
She checked her watch. Seven o’clock. The gala opened at eight. Upstairs, two hundred guests were dressing. Lou’s cake rested under its towel like a champion before a fight. The ballroom stood lit and ready and full of everything she and Evan had built that afternoon.
And somewhere in this resort, a person without a name yet was planning to tear it all down.
She picked up her trusty pen. Tucked the napkin into her back pocket. Straightened her shoulders.
Five people. One evening. One plan drawn on a napkin in a kitchen that smelled like buttercream.
Showtime.