Chapter Twenty-Four
Twenty-Four
Before we got back to the car, I pretended to have to pee and raced back into the office. I needed to know who had been in that unit. I’d thought this trip might expose me; instead it could be what I needed to expose my stalker.
“Everything all right?” the man asked when I flung open the door and stomped in.
“Can you tell me who else has been in those units recently? Maybe in the last couple of years?”
“Those units? No one. I don’t think anyone has been here since they first moved in. You all are the best customers I have.”
“I know someone has been in there. Please, I don’t care what happened.” I reached into my pocket and pulled out my wallet, uncrumpling whatever bills I had. “Here’s forty-seven bucks; it’s all I have.”
“I don’t take bribes, miss.”
“Please, just tell me and I’ll go back to the office and talk up your Chinese satellite bullshit, convince everyone to give up on digital.”
“It’s not bullshit.”
“Yes, I know. Sorry.”
“But you’ll tell ’em?”
“Yes.”
He glared at me, wondering if I could be trusted.
“Okay, hypothetically…” He paused to acknowledge he was in no way admitting to this. “Hypothetically, we may have had a small break-in about a year ago. But nothing was taken. The office door was jimmied open, that’s all. But I got new locks, double dead bolt,” he was quick to point out.
“Do you have any surveillance cameras?”
“Well, we’ve got some fake ones. They say they’re just as good of a deterrent.”
“Clearly,” I scoffed.
“Well, that’s all I got for you.”
“Thanks,” I sneered, walking out.
“Don’t forget the deal,” he yelled after me. “One EMP from a basic rocket can wipe out the whole grid.”
One rocket wiping out the whole grid actually sounded quite wonderful. Maybe all the doors at Edgar Valley would open, creating mass hysteria, then my father would escape, help me track down whoever was doing this to me, and choke the crap out of them.
- - - - -
I slumped down into the passenger seat as Dominic finished something on his phone.
“Good news,” he said. “I got us a hotel room a couple hours from here. Kevin let me use some of his points. Two beds, don’t worry.”
I turned to him, unsure how I felt about that.
The exhaustion was taking its toll on me and I wasn’t looking forward to another five hours in the car, but it still seemed presumptuous of him.
We had kind of discussed it on the ride there.
I guess I didn’t need to be bothered by it.
There were too many other things to be bothered about.
I nodded and grabbed my phone to fire off an email telling my boss that I was still throwing up, must not be food poisoning, must be a bug.
I wouldn’t be in to work the next day either.
- - - - -
Attached to the Holiday Inn was a heavily decorated Chili’s knockoff restaurant called Tastes of the Pacific, which we found ourselves at soon after checking in.
The hostess showed us to a pleather booth near the bathroom and we were greeted by our waitress, Heather, who appeared to be over us before we even spoke.
“What can I get you to drink?”
I scanned the drink menu, which was obscene and required a lot of reading to determine what all the themed drinks were actually comprised of.
“I’ll take a Blue Bahama Breeze, please,” I said.
“Candy rim?”
“What kind of candy?”
She looked at me like I had said something truly insane. “I don’t know, honey, it’s just sugar.”
“Okay,” I said. “Sure, sounds good. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t, like, a Tootsie Roll or something.”
“And you?” She turned to Dominic.
“Same thing,” he said, possibly afraid to engage her further.
She strolled over to the bar and I went back to the menu, lifting the massive industrial plastic textbook in front of my face and shielding myself from Dominic.
“Hey,” Dominic said, and I lowered my menu to see his blue eyes peeking over his own.
“Yeah.”
“Can I ask you a serious question?”
I placed my menu back on the table, unsure where this was going, unsure if I should be nervous. “What?”
“Did you really think they might be putting Tootsie Rolls on the drinks?” He laughed out loud at my expense. “Like a bunch of Tootsie Rolls squished around the rim?” He mimicked affixing the chewy turd candies around a glass.
“I don’t know,” I said, laughing too.
“I would bet my life savings that no restaurant has ever done that. Ever.”
“Well,” I said, “the Bahamas also aren’t in the Pacific, and yet, here we are.” I held my menu up off the table as Heather came back with our two Bahama Breezes, neon blue with sugar crystals lining the rim.
Dominic laughed again. Heather did not.
- - - - -
The drinks were good. Sugar for days. I had too many and I was going to feel like garbage the next day.
Three hours in a car with a splitting headache for sure.
Dominic led me back to our room. He hadn’t had as many Blue Bahama Breezes as me, but he did have quite a few Jack and Cokes.
The buzz from the first Breeze had given him the courage to ask Heather for what he actually wanted.
I flopped down onto one of the beds and he did the same on the other.
We both stared at the ceiling and I started drunk thinking—amplified anxiety.
My stalker was really getting the better of me.
I was no closer to figuring out who he or she was.
I had no clue what was going to happen next.
I had kissed two of my suspects. For now, it was just par for the course.
The only round I could technically count as a win was getting Reanne killed instead of Porter, but once I saw Reanne’s body, I ended up bummed, left second-guessing everything I ever felt toward her.
Kind of hard to really consider that a win and not another victory for my adversary.
Sure, Porter was still alive, but he was way more involved than I wanted.
And missing. Maybe I was someone who could be messed with after all.
“You okay?” Dominic asked, rolling over to face me.
“I’m worried about Porter,” I admitted. I had been tight-lipped on the drive out there, not wanting to say too much given Porter’s situation.
“Why?”
I turned my head toward him, ready to shake the tree. “He went to visit Abel Haggerty.”
“What?” Dominic swung up into a sitting position with more grace than I would have expected given the drinks.
“He visited Abel in prison and I think he got into his head.”
“No way,” he protested. “Abel doesn’t let anyone else visit.”
“Well, he did. Porter said Abel wanted to know about Elyse since you never talk about her.”
“Yeah,” he scoffed. “I don’t think it’s right to tell the guy who murdered her entire family about her. She’s my friend. What if he did something to her because of something I said?”
“What’s he going to do? He’s in prison.”
“I don’t know, get some young impressionable guy to come visit, brainwash him, and get him to do his bidding.”
“Like you?” I spat back.
“You think I’m doing his bidding?”
“Isn’t that why you’re really looking for Marin Haggerty? You’re trying to find her for him?”
“I’m trying to find her because she’s killing people!”
“And Abel told you about Oswald Shields,” I pointed out. “He could have just said he didn’t know the name. He told you Oswald and James hid her. Don’t you think he did that so you would look into it?”
Dominic shook his head. “No, he told me she was a dead end. He told me to leave her out of my book or he would stop talking to me.”
“And did that make you stop? Or did that make you more curious? Did that make you look even harder?”
Dominic squeezed his eyes shut and rubbed at his temples. I was making sense and he didn’t want me to. He was too drunk to reason out another comeback and so was I. Not that I needed one. I was right.
My head started pounding, my brain sloshing around. I sat up, hoping for equilibrium, and scooted back against the headboard. I turned to Dominic, whose face was pleading for me to acknowledge that I didn’t think he was being controlled, consciously or unconsciously, by Abel.
“Has anyone ever…approached you after visiting him?” I asked.
“What, like you did?”
“Yeah, but not me. Like, did anyone ever leave a note on your car while you were inside?”
“Someone left a note for Porter? What’s going on?”
“It’s nothing.”
“Dammit, Gwen, why do I feel like you’re more involved in this than I am? What do you know that you aren’t telling me?” He flung his arms down on the bed, alcohol giving him his own sense of gravitas.
“Nothing,” I said. “It just seems like everyone is so obsessed with this. It was twenty years ago.”
“Yeah, and it’s now. There are victims—James Calhoun, Oswald Shields.”
And Reanne, I thought.
“It’s not safe for Porter to be getting involved,” he asserted.
“You sound jealous.”
“I’m not jealous; I’m trying to figure out what the hell is going on.”
“Don’t act like you’re so noble,” I said. “You could have called the cops and told them what you know. You’re only thinking about yourself and your great American novel.”
“I’ll call the cops right now. Is that what you want?”
“Sure,” I said, calling his bluff.
He threw his head back, then rolled it around and returned to me. “And what if there’s some hit out on Elyse?”
“Don’t worry about Elyse,” I said for no real reason other than I wanted him to stop talking about her. In reality, if she wasn’t involved, I should be very worried about something happening to her. The idea that she could take care of herself was birthed from my own fantasy of who she was.
“What, are you her keeper now?” he asked.
“Shut up,” I said. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”