Chapter 19
CHAPTER NINETEEN
EMMA
“This is really cramping my style,” Nicole says with a sigh over the phone line. “I arranged for a petting zoo to be set up in the beer garden out back. An ill-tempered petting zoo. I mean, yes, it was startlingly easy to convince that dumb kid to let me do it. All it required was a fifty-dollar bill and a six pack, and he works at a brewery, for Christ’s sake. But it feels like a whole lot of work for nothing, and now the owners are super pissed at me because a skunk escaped into the tasting room. I mean, you think they’d be grateful that something interesting actually happened. How entertaining is it to sit around and watch other people get sloshed? But Seamus and Ellie didn’t even see the petting so. They didn’t make it to the end of the private tour. The good news is that she had me take dozens of photos and videos when they first got here, and I was able to clone her phone. We’ve got her files. If she’s got something good on there, it's ours.”
“That’s great,” I say, not really able to feel enthusiastic about it right now. “But Seamus is in the emergency room again?” I ask, my heart beating fast. I’m brought back to that moment earlier this week—Seamus, laid out flat on the maroon carpet in my father’s study. The study that still has a hole in its wall from our timely rescue of Shadow.
I don’t like that he’s gotten hurt again.
I definitely don’t like that it’s on my account.
“Yup. Ellie, too, though. She’s been livestreaming everything. She keeps saying ‘hashtag I leaped for love.’ Seamus looks pissed. So do the people from the brewery.”
“They went to the emergency room with him?” I ask, before catching on. “Oh, liability issues. They think he’s going to sue. You know, he’d probably win.”
“Sell your services on your own time, you sexy swindler. But the good news is that you probably have plenty of time to search Ellie’s room. And now we know there might actually be something good in there.”
Seamus had sent us a text saying so. He hadn’t included anything about his potentially cracked rib, but I guess I had Nicole for that.
A sense of misgiving throbs through me.
“I don’t like this. I should go check on him.”
“Oh, he’s fine. He’s in the exact place he should be. What are you going to do about an injury? Tie a bow around it? But it’s going to take a long time. There are like, fifty people in the waiting room. I’m sure his sister and brother would be there, but he didn’t want me to tell anyone, even though, let’s be honest, there’s no way Rosie wasn’t watching that livestream. It was a doozy. I’m hoping Jeffrey tuned in, too.”
Damien had driven all the way to Charlotte to track him, but Jeffrey’s car wasn’t at his house or his office, so he’d struck out.
“I don’t like this,” I admit.
I’m in Ellie’s hotel room right now, wearing all black and feeling like a bit of a pervert. Because I just opened one of Ellie’s three bags and found only lingerie. Oh, and a bagel, thrown in there for reasons that make sense to anyone who’s seen her house.
I sandwich the phone between my ear and my shoulder as I start on the second bag. “This feels wrong,” I continue.
That is accurate. What I’m doing feels intrusive and bad.
It also feels…
Well, I like the adrenaline pumping through my veins, reminding me that it’s better to act than to sit still. At least I’m doing something, trying to take back my life.
I rummage through some clothes, finding nothing unexpected.
“Please,” Nicole scoffed. “The concepts of right and wrong are meaningless. They’re a construct created by people who want to control us.”
“I’m pretty sure we can all agree it’s wrong, and certainly illegal, to break into someone else’s room and—”
“Did you break in? Because I’m pretty sure I gave you a key. That’s on me. So is the phone thing. And Ellie’s the one who’s all up in your hot piece’s business.”
“He’s not my hot piece,” I murmur, thinking about Seamus in the shower, his hand flexing on the glass as he used his other hand to work himself. The thought is enough to make my whole body ache.
“And you only have yourself to blame for that. I practically gift-wrapped that man for you. You think I didn’t notice the way you two were making eyes at each other at your brother’s wedding? I—”
I stop listening, because there’s a rustling outside of the door. I have only half a second to react—my blood boiling in my veins. The bathroom’s too far. The bed…
It’s lifted up off the floor but with a skirt encircling it.
There are probably primordial life forms down there—almost certainly someone’s unwanted bodily fluids. But it’s my only option, and I don’t overthink it. I practically vault myself under it, my heart thudding in my ears, my nose twitching from the dust. The movement’s so quick I nearly graze my face on the wooden bottom of the bed. I didn’t drop my phone, thankfully, but I end the call. Everything in me is attuned to the sound of the knob turning, the door opening.
But who is it?
Ellie is in the emergency room.
Seamus is with her.
Nicole is…
Actually, I don’t know, and I definitely wouldn’t put it past her to set up some Machiavellian test of my reflexes, but the heavy footsteps suggest a man. Damien would have given us a head’s up, right?
Seconds later, I hear the thump of a suitcase being opened. Probably the one I was searching before I slid under the bed. Maybe it’s hypocritical for me to feel umbrage over someone else breaking into Ellie’s room and going through her stuff, but a feeling of righteous indignation bubbles up inside of me.
Or maybe that’s because I can sense what I don’t yet have enough evidence to conclude—
The intruder is Jeffrey. The feeling I have hardens into certainty when I hear him sneer, “Always a fucking mess,” under his breath as he combs through her things.
He’s going through her things.
This confirms she might have something that could implicate him.
And he’s about to find it and take it.
He’s about to win, again, because he doesn’t play fair and only cares about upholding the rule of law if it doesn’t apply to him.
Rage floods my body. No. Not again. I can’t let this happen.
But I’m a rat caught in a cage. What am I supposed to do to stop him?
Heart thumping fast, I turn my phone over and find a waiting text message from Nicole.
I’m the one who hangs up on other people. Not the other way around. Is it weird that I respect you for it?
Jeffrey’s in the room, Nicole. He’s going through Ellie’s stuff.
Oh, fuck. Where are you?
I’m hiding under the bed. We need to stop him, but he can’t find me here.
Got it covered.
My heart feels like it’s going to beat right out of my chest as I listen to him continue his search. He finishes with the first suitcase and moves on to the next…
What if Nicole’s intervention comes too late? I need to do something, but I’ll be in big trouble if I’m caught in this room, hiding under the bed like a psychopath pervert. Beyond big. My career will be even more decisively over, and I might face arrest…
I hold my breath, thinking of what Seamus has said to me more than once—that I’m not the kind of woman who takes things lying down. Sure, right now I’m literally lying down, but that doesn’t mean I can’t send a message.
My mind works furiously, and I recall something I spotted on the bureau—a rabbit shaped Bluetooth speaker. I lift my phone in shaking hands and start searching. There . The network’s called CarrotCake. Heart beating hard, I click into the Bluetooth network and then pull up the song on my phone.
Five seconds later, Taylor Swift’s “I Can See You” blares out of the rabbit-shaped Bluetooth speaker.
“Fuck,” Jeffrey says, dropping something.
A manic smile spreads across my face. For one thing, he hates Taylor Swift. For another, he must be scared. Maybe this makes me a bad person, but I revel in the thought, even though it means he knows someone is watching him.
“Is someone in here?” he calls out.
I say nothing. I don’t move a muscle. But the smile slides off my face, because there’s something menacing about his tone.
I listen as he opens the bathroom door, pulls back the shower curtain. A part of me would love nothing better than to sneak up behind him and give him the jump scare of his life—but no jump scare is worth a possible conviction.
Still. He already suspects someone’s in here. There’s no rewinding that, not that I would. So I decide it’s best to opt for a power play—to make him feel like he’s being watched by someone who’s not afraid of him. So I pick a new song—“Vigilante Shit.” My finger is shaking from the nerves prickling all over my body, but I can’t stand down. I won’t.
Jeffrey swears to himself and opens the closet. Then I hear his shoes approaching the bed. There’s a pause, and then they shift direction, leading him over to the dresser. He drops the speaker onto the ground and crunches it under his expensive black loafer. Again and again, the violence making my heart pound harder. The music sputters and then dies.
Jeffrey crouches to pick it up. He throws it away.
Maybe he assumes there was some sort of camera attached to it, and it was Ellie who was messing with him, but he’ll complete his search anyway. I know he will. The man is nothing if not thorough. I suck in a deep, dusty breath, my mind whirring, and decide that I’d rather face him standing up than playing peekaboo through the bed curtains.
He wanted to paint me as a crazy stalker? Might as well act like one.
I’m about to shove myself out—hopefully at least getting the benefit of surprise—when the door to the room whooshes open.
“Sir,” a man says in a stern tone.
“Yes?” Jeffrey replies, calm now. Collected. No one would guess he’d just stomped a speaker into dozens of little pieces. Then again, no one lies like Jeffrey. He used to tell me we could both convince a teetotaler to buy a bottle of hooch—and I had mistakenly taken pride in that. Because to me convincing someone is not the same as lying to them. Convincing took work. It meant being more prepared, more eloquent. It meant wanting it more.
But I’ve realized there’s no lie he won’t tell if he thinks it will help him.
“Uh, you’re going to have to come with me, sir,” the man says.
“Excuse me?” Jeffrey sputters, sounding convincingly pissed.
“There have been allegations of a…sensitive nature about a silver-haired man meeting your description breaking into rooms along this floor and…ahem…exposing himself. Someone saw you enter this room, sir, and here you are.”
I bite my lip hard to keep from laughing. God bless Nicole.
“That is outrageous ,” Jeffrey says, his voice outraged. “I need to talk to your manager, at once.”
“That’s exactly where we’re going,” the newcomer says. “Unless you want to involve the police.”
“No,” Jeffrey says with the confidence of a man who truly believes he can talk his way out of anything. “No, there’s no need for that. We’ll get this all cleared up in no time.”
Then I hear the scuff of shoes, the shutting of a door, and they’re gone.
I text Nicole: Good save.
Nicole: I know, right? It’ll take them a while to sort everything out, and it’s sure to be super embarrassing for him. I’m hiding on the first floor to take some photos of him being taken into the security office. ;)
Nicole: Why don’t you finish the search?
Nicole: Let’s nail the flasher pervert.
So I quickly look through the rest of Ellie’s bags. What I find: Clothes. Accessories. Rabbit food. A small baggie that probably does not contain flour.
What I do not find: Anything of interest besides the broken bits of the rabbit Bluetooth speaker. If the information was on that, it is sadly gone.
There aren’t any notes, any paper, any electronics…
We have access to her phone, of course, and that might be exactly what we need. It feels too easy, but sometimes things that feel too easy aren’t.
I leave the room the way I found it, listening at the door and looking out the peephole before I step into the hall and hurry away.
When I get to my car in the garage, I call Nicole to give her the news.
“He thought he was going to find something,” she says. “That means Seamus is right, and Ellie has leverage. You know what this means.”
“That we need to get it from her?”
“We need her to think we’re her friends—and to know that Jeffrey isn’t her friend.”
“I…uh…I don’t know how she’d react to seeing me. She thinks I’m crazy.”
“Did you give her reason to?”
“Maybe,” I admit. “Remember the cactus?”
She cackles. “I’ll never forget it. Well, I’ve been watching her livestream from the waiting room, and they just called her about the pervert in her hotel room. She looked like she was about to shit herself from excitement.”
A harsh laugh escapes me.
“So she’s leaving, obviously. She’ll be taking an uber and livestreaming the whole thing. Why don’t you go pick Seamus up? We can meet up later. Damien’s on his way back from Charlotte.”
Look at that, she told me to go exactly where I really, really want to go.