Chapter 8
Avoiding Zara at the Royal Leilani should have been easy because she rarely left the concierge desk, while the gardeners were supposed to stay outside. But somehow Lincoln kept seeing her everywhere…or at least, spotting her from afar and then continuing to think about her as he watered and weeded.
Then there was the time she was helping a couple retrieve their wedding ring, which the wife had dropped into the koi pond that wound its way through the restaurant. Since he was nearby, pruning a night-blooming jasmine, she called him over.
“This is Jim, one of our dedicated gardeners. Jim, any ideas about that wedding ring down there? I can’t quite reach it, and the broom handle’s too big to grab it.”
He could barely see the flash of a diamond past the flexing orange bodies of the koi. “Give me a moment.” He jogged to the garden shed and came back with a long-handled avocado picker. It had a bag that the fruit would drop into, and it seemed worth trying it on a ring.
After some maneuvering and splashing, he triumphantly retrieved the ring and presented it to the overjoyed couple.
“That ring cost me forty K,” the man whispered to Lincoln. “Here, take this for your trouble.”
He tucked a dollar bill into Lincoln’s pocket.
One dollar. For a diamond ring. What was wrong with the man?
“Honey, he was just doing his job,” said his wife. “No need to go overboard. Oh hahaha, I just made a pun! Overboard, did you catch it?”
Something about the couple seemed off to him. He eyed them more closely, noticing that her Chanel bag was a knockoff and his watch was a replica of the famous Grandmaster Chime.
After the two had headed to the bar for a celebratory pina colada, he spoke to Zara in a low voice. “Double check their form of payment. And keep them away from your top-tier customers.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Didn’t you see his watch? It says Patel Philippe.”
“So?”
“So it’s a fake.” When she continued to look at him blankly, he added, “Patel, not Patek? Not only is it a fake, it’s an insultingly obvious one.”
Her eyes widened. Pretty eyes, he thought, like sunlight shining through honey. “How do you know that?”
Hell. Didn’t everyone? “I, uh, saw it on the Internet.” That seemed like an all-purpose explanation.
Better than telling her that he owned two of them himself, so he happened to know they cost sixty thousand dollars and you had to go through an application to purchase them.
Not just anyone was entrusted with a Patek Philippe.
That couple certainly hadn’t been.
A few days after that incident, he was running the leaf blower near the kitchen storeroom when Zara appeared before him, waving her arms to get his attention.
He turned the machine off, removed his ear protection, then waited while she caught her breath.
A few tendrils of her hair had escaped that tight knot and curled along her hairline.
“I…want to tell you…that you were right about that couple. They tried to skip out on their bill.”
He nodded, unsurprised. “Did they manage it?”
“No, which is great because I could have gotten fired. Even if it wasn’t my fault, nothing pisses off management more than a scammer. Can you believe they were using someone else’s identity?”
He almost flinched, but controlled his reaction just in time. He too was using a false identity, although not in order to rip anyone off. Did that distinction matter? “Ballsy,” he said.
“You think conning people is ballsy? Then you’d love my—” She snapped her mouth shut, then changed direction.
“They were good, I’ll admit. I should have caught onto them myself, but I didn’t, so I wanted to thank you personally.
The manager thinks they were here to rob other guests.
In fact, I’m not even sure that ring you found was actually theirs. ”
“The ring was definitely real,” he told her. “Four-carat diamond, emerald cut.”
She folded her arms across her chest and narrowed her eyes at him. “I suppose you saw that on the Internet too?”
Damn it. Why did he keep blurting out unhelpful things?
He shrugged, which was better than telling her that he’d bought his first wife a similar ring.
His second wife had gotten an even more expensive one.
Ironic, since they’d broken up six weeks after their impulsive, doomed wedding.
The length of his marriages seemed to be in inverse proportion to the cost of the rings.
Next time—not that there’d be one—he’d go for something from a bubble gum machine.
“Well, I just wanted to say thanks.” Her phone buzzed.
She looked at the screen and rolled her eyes.
“It’s nuts how rich people can’t wait two extra seconds for their restaurant reservations.
Can you find an explanation for that on the Internet?
Oh, one little thing, if you don’t mind.
” She lowered her voice. “Eddie is hanging out in hale eighteen, would you mind keeping an eye on him in between leaf blowing?”
“An eye on him?” He’d never kept an eye on a child in his life. What did that even mean? What if the kid swallowed a rock, or threw up, or needed to know the meaning of life? “I’m on the clock, I have to work.”
“Of course you do, those leaves most definitely need to be swept out of view, our guests shouldn’t be subjected to the sight of a single brown dead thing.
” She rolled her eyes. “Don’t mind me, I’m having a day.
Leaf blowing comes first, obviously. But if you could just poke your head in while you’re passing by and ask Eddie if he needs anything…
he doesn’t have a way to reach me. And he was kind of moping around when I picked him up from school. He doesn’t do well with hot weather.”
“What about—” He couldn’t think of another objection, so he didn’t finish the sentence.
“The guests staying there, you mean? Late arrival, so there shouldn’t be a problem.
It’s a family flying in from Switzerland.
Mia’s at a play rehearsal and my usual babysitter ditched us.
I haven’t had a chance to interview—” Her phone buzzed again.
”Anyway, would you mind?” she continued, rapid-fire.
“Thanks so much, you’re a champ, I owe you, what do you want in return?
A latte? A new car? Philippe Patel watch?
Okay, gotta go.” She flew across the close-cropped grass—Zoysia grass, he now knew—then spun around and blew him a grateful kiss from midway across the lawn.
It was a light and teasing gesture, completely devoid of significance, but it had a strange effect on him. That leaf blower barely seemed to weigh anything when he got back to his task. He even found himself whistling.
He never whistled, as it was a habit Violet Kerr despised. “Well-brought-up gentlemen do not whistle,” he’d been instructed. “You can leave that to the lower classes.”
Well, here he was, to all intents and purposes what she would call lower class, and right now, he felt like whistling. It helped the time pass and distracted him from his sore lower back. You don’t know what you’re missing, Mama.
In order to properly earn that air kiss, he made his way in the direction of hale eighteen. There was no reason he couldn’t work around that one first. All of the hales had to be cleared of dead leaves in the next hour or so, when the next batch of guests would start arriving.
It was midday, the sun at its peak, beating down on the top of his head. Even through the straw hat, his scalp was heating up. The hales were air conditioned, so hopefully Eddie wasn’t too miserable.
He set down the leaf blower and tapped on the hale door. “Eddie? It’s Jim, the gardener from the other day. Your sister asked me to check in on you before I start the leaf blowing here. Are you in there?”
No answer from inside the hale. He looked around to make sure no one was watching.
It was strictly against the rules for a gardener to step inside a hale, and the last time he’d done it, he’d gotten caught.
If it hadn’t been Zara, who was also breaking the rules, he would have gotten fired.
He couldn’t count on getting lucky again.
He turned the knob, expecting the door to be locked, but it opened easily.
It must have been left unlocked for cleaning.
In fact, he saw as soon as he walked in, the housekeeping staff hadn’t been in here yet.
The couch pillows were strewn about the living room, glasses still crowded the coffee table, and a pile of damp towels sat on the floor.
“Eddie?” he called softly. When he got no answer, his stomach tightened. He pulled out his phone and called the front desk.
“Royal Leilani Resort, one moment, please.” The receptionist put him on hold.
Goddamn it. He didn’t want to wait until the receptionist tracked down Zara. He ended the call and went to search the rest of the hale.
It was empty.
A terrible sense of dread crept into his gut.
Had Eddie run away? Or had someone taken him?
Zara obviously felt that the unoccupied hales were safe for her little brother, but evildoers were everywhere, even at elite luxury resorts.
Maybe even especially there. When people had lots of money, they could get to the point where they felt immune from consequences. That could make them dangerous.
He opened the sliding glass doors and ran into the backyard.
This particular hale didn’t have a pool.
Instead it featured a barbecue grill and a round outdoor table under a striped umbrella.
It was known as the Jacaranda hale thanks to the tall tree that shaded the yard and littered it with ethereal lavender flower petals.
Eddie wasn’t sitting at the table, nor was he napping on the grass.
Just as Lincoln was about to give up the search, he heard a soft, ‘help,’ from somewhere above his head.
“Eddie?” he called. “Where are you?”
“Up here. In the tree. I’m stuck.”
The sound of the boy’s voice gave him a sharp rush of relief.
He peered higher into the branches, noting their smooth gray bark, and there was Eddie, stretched on his stomach halfway down a branch, hanging on for dear life.
He could see the boy’s curly brown hair and one skinned knee, but not much more than that.
“Did you climb up there?” Stupid question. It wasn’t as if a bird had dropped him there.
“Yes,” said Eddie in a meek voice. “Don’t tell Zara.”
“Let’s get you down first.” He analyzed the situation.
As a kid, he used to love climbing trees.
The Kerr estate had several ancient magnolia trees that were like safe havens for him.
He used to imagine them as his friends, even held silent conversations with them.
He’d ask them why people sometimes gave him weird looks, why conversations would stop in his presence, and what was it about him that made him different.
The trees never had an answer, but their solid presence was a comfort to a lonely boy.
Sadly, their nanny had thrown a fit when she’d found him in the live oak tree tangled in Spanish moss. She’d gone to his mother, who’d laid down the law. No more climbing trees.
But even today, whenever he went back to his mother’s house, he took the time to put his hand on the bark of those old magnolias.
He hadn’t climbed a tree in over twenty years, but maybe it was like riding a bike. The only problem was that the branch Eddie was clinging to might break under the weight of two people. Better to get a ladder.
“Can you hang on for a few minutes while I go grab a ladder?” he asked the boy.
Gazing past silvery leaves and purple flowers, he had the disorienting sense of time being distorted.
It was him up in that tree, that young, lonely boy from years ago, and yet this was also him on the ground looking up.
“I don’t know.” Eddie whimpered, his body shaking. “I’m pretty tired.”
“How long have you been up there?”
“I don’t know.”
Right. Kids didn’t have the same grasp of time as adults. They didn’t generally have Patek Philippe watches, after all.
“Okay. Don’t worry about that. Can you back down towards the trunk? I can climb up and help you from there.”
“I tried that. That’s how I got stuck. Every time I try to move it hurts really bad.”
A stub of a dead branch was probably digging into him. It was possible that if Eddie pushed through that obstacle, he could reach the trunk. But what if he got even more injured in the process?
He judged the distance from the ground to the branch, and figured it was about fifteen feet. If he positioned himself under the branch and encouraged Eddie to let go, he could break his fall.
Or they could both break their necks. Not an ideal plan, but maybe the best under the circumstances.
He stepped toward the tree so he was standing directly under the boy. “Eddie, have you ever seen a picture of a sloth?”
“What?” The kid was sounding more and more breathless. He might run out of energy any moment.
“Sloths like to hang upside down from the branch. What happens when you try to roll over? Does that hurt too?”
“I don’t know. I’m afraid. I don’t want to fall.”
“That’s okay if you fall. I’m going to catch you. I’m right under you, can you tell? If you scoot over to your side, whichever way doesn’t hurt, you can let go of the branch. Go ahead, give it a try.”
It took a bit more coaxing, but finally Eddie tried rolling to his right side. “Ow! That hurts.”
“Try it the other direction.” That hurt too, and Eddie started to whimper.
“Hey hey,” Lincoln called to him. “We’ll figure something else out, okay? You hear me? I’m not going anywhere until you’re down from that tree.”
He hoped his shift supervisor, Raoul, hadn’t noticed the silence of his leaf blower. If he didn’t get all the hales done before check-in time, he could get fired. Raoul had been itching to get rid of him anyway, since he had a friend he wanted to bring onto the staff in Lincoln’s place.
He shaded his eyes to see what Eddie was doing now. His position had shifted on the branch. Instead of rolling sideways, he was inching forward, toward the end of the branch.
“Stop,” Lincoln said urgently. “Don’t go any further because—”
Too late. With a terrifying crack, the branch broke halfway down its length.
Eddie pitched toward the ground in a flurry of splintered wood and leafy confusion.
It all came directly toward Lincoln’s head.
He flinched away to avoid getting a face full of leaves, but kept his eyes open a slit so he could track Eddie’s fall.
Where was he? A moment of panic when he thought he’d lost him.
Then…there he was, heading straight for the ground just a step away.
Lincoln dove forward to catch the boy in his arms, then felt something hit his head. Then…nothing.