Chapter 7
Chapter Seven
Sybil stared at the Crane Hotel through windshield wipers that were working overtime, even though she was parked. The heavy rain would pass soon, and then she’d be out of excuses not to go inside.
All she had to do was drop off the estimate at the front desk and leave before Peter, Eloise, or Graham saw her. Peter because he’d want to talk to her, and Eloise or Graham because they would waylay her and give Peter an opportunity to talk to her.
Talking to Peter was dangerous because she started to forget all the reasons she shouldn’t talk to him.
The rain let up as abruptly as it had started, and she took a steeling breath. She could do this. In, out, and on with life. The money was too good to pass up, especially since she’d jacked up her usual prices. Or what her usual prices would have been if she did catering.
Sybil walked quickly through the parking lot, her boots splashing through the puddles that had formed. As she stepped onto the curb, the door opened and her heart stopped, but when the two people who exited weren’t Peter, she breathed again.
The Crane Hotel looked stunning all year-round, but she loved it best at Halloween. Fake cobwebs, fake bats “flying” out of the fireplace, and Clarence the skeleton dressed as a bellhop, hat and all. She gave a small salute to Clarence as she passed him.
The front desk had acquired a large crystal ball this year, and she could imagine Kiki pretending to use it in the middle of the night when guests asked her questions.
The front desk was also unoccupied. Panic spiked her heart rate. Kind of hard to drop and run if there was no one to drop to.
Sybil tapped the bell. Kevin popped up from behind the desk like an overcaffeinated Jack-in-the-box, and she jumped.
“Kevin!” she yelped, leaning against the front desk for support while she got her breath back. “Don’t do that.”
Kevin held up a ballpoint pen. “I lost my pen.”
Sybil pressed a hand to her chest and glowered at him. She’d babysat him a few times when she was a teenager and he was in elementary school, and he’d always been such a weird kid. Now he was a semi-awkward adult who’d dropped out of college because he didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life and his parents had said if he was going to live in their house he had to get a job. So Kevin had gotten three part-time jobs: the hotel, the ice cream shop, and the movie theater.
“Don’t jump up like that,” she reprimanded him. The paper had gotten crushed in her hands when he’d startled her, and Sybil tried to smooth it out on the counter. “I need this paper delivered to a guest. Or left for them. I just need it to get to someone, okay?”
“Who’s it for?” Kevin asked as he located a pad of sticky notes and poised his pen over the bright paper.
The words stuck to the roof of her mouth. Kevin wasn’t a gossip on purpose, but he loved small talk and worked all over town. Since everyone’s favorite topic was the movie, Sybil Morgan leaving Hollywood heartthrob Peter Green a piece of paper at his hotel was bound to come up.
“I’m so glad to see you up and about.”
A hand on Sybil’s shoulder gave her her second mini heart attack in under five minutes. She whirled and came face to face with Charlotte, who looked as surprised to see her as she felt to be touched.
“I’m sorry, I thought you were…Has anyone ever told you that you look a remarkable amount like Madelyn Penn from behind?”
“No, no one has ever told me I’ve got the ass of a movie star,” Sybil said before she could stop herself.
Charlotte didn’t seem to have heard her or was choosing to ignore the comment. She was too busy scrutinizing Sybil.
“Have you ever wanted to be in the movies?”
“Nope.” She didn’t need to think about that for a second.
Charlotte stared at her. It was probably incomprehensible to her that someone wouldn’t want to do what she’d devoted her life to.
“Let me put this another way,” she said once she’d regrouped her facial expressions. “Would you like to get paid two hundred dollars a day to stand around?”
“I own a business. I make more than two hundred dollars a day doing that.” Sybil neglected to add that was before expenses because it definitely dampened her argument.
“I know. You own that coffee shop in town. The one my husband is obsessed with.” Charlotte looked at the estimate that was lying on top of the front desk. “Who ordered a coffee cart?”
A blush burned Sybil’s cheeks. If anyone else had asked, it wouldn’t have mattered. But this was Peter’s mom. What if she was like her son and could look at a person and know .
“Um, Peter did.”
Charlotte asked Kevin for a pen and then wrote a few things on Sybil’s paper.
“You can charge him at least ten percent more. I adjusted some of the figures for you.” She slid the paper back toward Sybil. “You could do both things and double your income while we’re here.”
Yes, it did appear that the ability to find someone’s buttons and push them was genetic. Money was the bottom line, and the bookstore loomed large in her mind. She shouldn’t turn her nose up at an extra couple thousand dollars.
But that couple extra thousand dollars came at the expense of being near Peter for his entire visit. Could she put a price tag on that kind of prolonged heartache?
“I don’t know…”
“Think about it,” Charlotte encouraged her and wrote down her phone number on a blank corner of the paper and tore it off. “Call me at this number. Or at the hotel. Or you can tell Arthur.”
“You are really gung-ho about this,” Sybil said, tucking the scrap of paper into her back pocket. “Is it really that important?”
“I am on a very tight, non-extendable schedule. I’d rather be over-prepared than fucked up the ass without lube.”
Sybil’s eyes almost popped out of her head, and she had to clench her teeth to keep her jaw from falling open. That phrase coming out of Peter’s mother’s mouth hadn’t been on her bingo card.
“I will, uh, let you know,” she said. Sybil handed the crumbled, torn estimate to Charlotte. “Can you give this to Peter? I don’t want it to get lost.”
There was an offended grunt from Kevin’s general direction.
“I will do my best,” Charlotte said. “The sooner you can get back to me, the better.”
“Are you sure you want to put dirt in front of these headstones? Someone might think you actually buried bodies here.” Connor wiped the sweat off his forehead with the back of his wrist but still managed to leave a streak of dirt behind.
“Less talking, more shoveling. We’ve got an hour before it gets dark.”
Sybil grasped the lip of her rain gutter tightly in one hand while she stretched her body and her other arm as far as she could reach to attach the leg of the giant spider decoration to the hook she’d installed years ago for this purpose. The spider was a pain in the ass to put up, but it looked cool—like it was climbing up her house—and her neighbor across the street, Edith Nelson, hated it, which made it even better.
Decorating her house for Halloween was a task she should have put off until Sunday when she had an entire day to devote to it, but after the last twenty-four hours, she was restless and itching to do something productive. Maybe if she kept moving, she wouldn’t dwell on Peter or his mother’s offer.
So she’d called Connor, her best friend since high school, and told him to come over once he was done coaching high school cross-country practice to help her. They’d hung lights and fake cobwebs and a witch riding a broomstick from a branch of the big tree next to her house. Together they’d lugged the solar-powered witch’s cauldron down from the attic and, like every year since she’d bought it, complained loudly that they were idiots for storing it up there. But she’d never get rid of it because it glowed green and bubbled fog all night.
“Why did we have to do this right now ?” Connor asked, imitating her urgency on the phone.
“Because it’s not supposed to rain until tomorrow afternoon. Did you want to do this in the rain?”
“We live on the coast. We do everything in the rain.” He shoveled some dirt into an even mound in front of one of the plastic headstones she’d jammed into her lawn. “Does this have something to do with the movie?”
Sybil’s foot slipped, and she grabbed the top of the ladder to catch herself. She blamed her racing heart on the near fall and not Connor’s question.
“What does me decorating have to do with the movie?” she asked in her best I-don’t-give-a-shit voice.
“I didn’t know if they were filming on your street.”
“Not that I know of.” She climbed down the ladder before she fell off. “Are they filming on your street?”
“They’re using my house.”
Her foot missed a step but luckily hit solid ground.
“Your house? Why?”
The idea that Peter and Connor were going to be in close quarters for more than a handful of hours turned her stomach into an angry sea of cold dread. They’d met before, but their interactions had been limited to casual, large-group small talk. Or as much small talk as Peter was capable of. It was inevitable that she would come up as a topic of conversation and Connor was too smart to not fill in the blanks about her two trips to London. Sure, she’d threatened Peter within an inch of his life at Graham and Eloise’s wedding to never, under any circumstances, talk to anyone in Crane Cove about their relationship, but she’d also witnessed firsthand his ability to talk first and think later.
“Because it’s a construction zone. Over the summer I was cutting some lumber in the front yard when a location scout drove up and asked if I’d be interested in having my house in a movie.” Connor rolled his shoulders. Sybil didn’t know if he was shrugging or stiff. “They offered me a lot of money to leave my house as it was and then rent it for two weeks during the shoot. School was about to start so I was going to have to slow down work anyway, and now I can afford to hire out some of the projects I didn’t want to do anyway.”
“You didn’t want to do any of those projects,” she reminded him. “You’re just poor.”
Connor had purchased a large Victorian home on Lilac Lane, the same street that Graham and Eloise lived on. The income disparity between Connor, a high school English teacher, and the Thatchers, who owned a hotel and had money from when Graham had owned a tech company, was comical. Connor had lived with his parents for years, saving every spare penny for a down payment, and even though he said it was his dream house, she didn’t understand why he’d bought it. It was too big for a single man and needed a ton of work. The place was a money pit.
“And for once my poverty has worked out in my favor.” He finished the last of the fake graves. “If I hadn’t needed to go so slow, they wouldn’t have wanted the house and it would’ve taken longer.”
She cocked her head to the side. “It would’ve taken longer if you had more money? Is that English teacher math?”
He rolled his eyes and put the shovel into the wheelbarrow. “It’s the end of my day. I used all my brain power on teenagers.”
“How much did they offer you?”
“Thirty thousand dollars.”
If she’d still been on the ladder, she would have fallen off.
“Thirty grand? Are they nuts?”
Connor grinned. “Probably, but I wasn’t going to point that out. I got that number in writing quickly.”
“Fuck.” The size of the number had dazed her. She shook her head. “I thought Charlotte was offering me a lot of money.”
“Did the movie people want to use your house too?” he asked.
“No, my body,” she answered.
“They want to use your what ?”
Sybil mentally slapped herself. “No, not like however you’re thinking,” she reassured him. “The director asked if I want to be a double because I guess I look like Madelyn Penn if you squint hard enough.”
Connor narrowed his eyes. “Huh. Yeah, I guess you’re the dollar-store version.”
Sybil picked up a plastic pumpkin off the porch railing and threw it at him. It bounced harmlessly off his shoulder and he laughed.
“How much did they offer you?”
“Two hundred dollars a day. Which sounded great until you opened your big mouth.”
“It’s not bad,” he said, taking hold of the wheelbarrow handles and lifting. “What would you have to do?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, I didn’t ask. I don’t see how I can take the gig. Stardust takes up all my time.”
“Did you know,” Connor began, pushing the wheelbarrow toward the backyard where her shed was hidden, “that you have these people called employees and you pay them money to work at your business? I’ve heard a rumor that you don’t even have to be at your business for it to operate.”
“Stardust is open and I’m here now,” she reminded him, crossing the lawn to pick up the pumpkin she’d thrown at him.
“Yeah, but as soon as we’re done, you’re going to go back there and work. You close early on Mondays for Wine and Whining.” He stopped to open her gate and then called over his shoulder, “Psychologists call that having control issues.”
“I don’t have control issues,” Sybil mumbled, moving some dirt with her foot.
“So you bury the bodies on your front lawn? Bold.”
Her head snapped up so fast she got dizzy. Peter stood next to her mailbox, dressed for a run and artfully disheveled. She knew she didn’t look that good when she was sweaty. Her entire face turned cherry-tomato red when she got hot, but Peter had perfectly pink flushed cheeks and glistening sweat on his forehead. His plain, nondescript green sweatshirt wasn’t even damp under the armpits.
“One of those isn’t for me, is it?” he asked, taking a few steps up her front walk.
“Could be.” She picked up the pumpkin from the damp grass. “What are you doing here?”
“I was out for a run and saw your street,” he said innocently as he moved toward her slowly, like she was a baby deer that would run away if he made a sudden move. “Any chance you give passing joggers water?”
“Only from the hose.”
There wasn’t enough menace or malice in her voice because he smiled at her, and her traitorous heart had the nerve to have palpitations.
He stopped a few feet from her, put his hands on his hips, and surveyed her house. “I’ve been on movie sets with lower production value. This is really impressive.”
She blushed so hard she worried there was steam rising from the top of her head.
“Peter, why are you here?” she asked again.
He looked at her and his face softened. “Because?—”
“Did you want to set up the hands before I go home? The ground is soft.” Connor half shouted as he came out of the backyard. He stopped when he saw Peter. “Oh, hey, man. How’s it going?”
Peter gave him a small wave. “Hey, Connor. It’s good. Just out for a run, saw the house, and had to stop and say how impressive it looks.”
“Can you settle something for us?” Connor asked. “Is there such a thing as too much fake cobweb?”
“No, but there is certainly such a thing as too little fake cobweb.”
Sybil smugly stuck her tongue out at Connor, then her face froze as she realized she’d said the exact same thing to him when he’d complained about how much fake cobweb she had.
“What are ‘the hands’?” Peter asked, holding up his own hands and wiggling his fingers.
“She got these skeleton hands last year, and we installed them along the walkway so it looks like they’re trying to grab your ankles,” Connor explained. “They looked pretty cool.”
Sybil’s forehead reflexively creased into a frown, but she corrected it quickly. Connor wasn’t the biggest fan of her Halloween decorations. He was more the “carved pumpkins are more than enough” type. Either he was lying to Peter for some reason that was only clear to him, or after sixteen years of friendship he’d finally come around to her way of thinking.
“Do you need any help?” Peter asked.
“No,” Sybil answered quickly before Connor could open his mouth. “We were wrapping up for the night. Connor has papers to grade, and I have to get back to the shop.”
Cinematic disappointment crawled across Peter’s face. “Well, if you ever want help, you know where to find me.”
“You’re at the hotel with the movie people, right?” Connor asked, and Peter nodded. “That reminds me. Sybil, can I sleep here while they’re using my house for the film?”
“I guess so?”
Connor was acting weird, and Peter’s face was blank with a cheerful smile painted on top. She hated that she knew what he looked like when he was pretending to be happy. She hated more that she wanted to run her hands over his face to wipe that expression away.
Peter looked up at the sky. “I should get back before it gets too dark.”
“Yeah, you should really wear reflective gear. Someone might hit you with their car,” Connor said.
Peter nodded and then went down the walkway a lot quicker than he’d come up it, and walked toward the stop sign at the end of the street with his hands in his pockets.
“Someone might hit you with their car?” Sybil repeated. “What the fuck?”
Connor shrugged, his eyes still trained on Peter’s retreating form. “It’s true. Someone might hit him with their car if they don’t know he’s there. Kids these days text and drive.”
“Yes, with all the glorious cell service we have in Crane Cove, texting and driving has become endemic,” she said sarcastically. “What’s your problem with Peter?”
“You mean Peter Alan Parker-Green?”
Her face burned. That lovely intimate knowledge slip up had happened at Graham and Eloise’s wedding when Connor was filling out the witness information for the marriage license. He’d tried to ask her about it after the fact, but she’d stonewalled him.
“I don’t have a problem with him,” Connor continued, “but you do, and I don’t like how he comes around even though it makes you uncomfortable.”
She crossed her arms. “I don’t have a problem telling someone if I want them to go away and stay away.”
He leveled her with the kind of skeptical look he reserved for his students, but when she didn’t back down or cave, he sighed and said, “Fine.”
They headed toward her house so Connor could wash his hands. Halfway up the front steps, she stopped. “Do you actually want to stay here while they’re filming in your house, or were you bluffing?”