Chapter 6
Chapter Six
How Much Hunt is in You?
GHOST
I don’t know what made me decide to agree to let Emily help with the treasure hunt. The hunt itself had been all but abandoned since we’d discovered the last “clue.” And I’d been ready to resign myself to the idea that we’d figured out what it was he’d wanted. Even if a lawsuit didn’t feel much like the guy I’d known.
But Emily, who didn’t even know my uncle, had a good point. He wasn’t the kind of guy who cried over spilled milk. He didn’t stew over his losses or worry when things didn’t go his way.
I had a lot to learn from him, I knew...but Uncle Marvin had never killed anyone, either. I wasn’t sure that was the kind of thing you just chinned up and moved past.
I faced the woman next to me, thoughts flying through my head as I considered how to fulfill her request, how to get her involved in what might really be a completed mystery.
“I guess you’ll kind of need to understand how it all started,” I said, trying to focus on the topic at hand and not on the way Emily’s dark eyes glinted with intelligence or the way the point of her chin turned her whole face into a heart.
“That makes sense,” she said, sipping her beer.
The lights of the bar gleamed in strands of gold in her long chestnut hair, and her fingernails matched, glittering as she gripped her glass. She was the most interesting thing I’d seen in a really long time, and sorting through my responses to her was like wandering a familiar but overgrown trail through the forest.
“Do you still have the map or anything?”
“We have a lot of ‘or anything,’” I said, laughing as I thought through the last few years of clues. “But yeah, we still have the map.”
Her eyes widened with interest.
“Can I see it?”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes widened even more. A silent question: when?
“I’m trying to figure out what makes the most sense. Everything is in my room, for the most part, but I know it might be a little?—”
“Let’s go.” Emily pushed her stool back and stood, picking up the backpack from the floor that must’ve held her conference materials.
“Ah, sure. Okay.” I hadn’t been planning for company and was pretty certain the rooms I inhabited were probably not fit for guests, but Emily was so eager. I also worried that it could be awkward for her, being in my room alone with me. “I don’t want to put you in a weird position,” I said, facing her as we both stood. “Taking you to my room, I mean.”
She tilted her head to one side, a wavy strand of her dark hair just touching that pointed chin as she looked at me. “That’s sweet. I wasn’t even thinking about that...does it make me na?ve if I say I trust you?”
“We hardly know each other,” I pointed out, pushing my mind away from all the other reasons why I might take a woman to my room. Of course, in all the time I’d owned the resort, I never had. In fact, there’d only been a few times since I’d left the navy, none of them meaningful, and all three of them unsuccessful at making me forget the one thing I’d been hoping they’d erase from my mind.
“True, we don’t know each other well.” She smiled, and the concern inside me melted. “I’m really not worried. But I guess I should tell you I always have pepper spray on me, and I’ve taken a few self-defense classes.”
“Noted. Want to just let your roommate know where you’ll be?”
“Sure,” she said, pulling a phone from the front of her bag and firing off a quick text. In the meantime, I signaled Wiley, who was at the other end of the bar.
“Hey,” he said, grinning as he looked between us.
“Hey,” I returned. “Just wanted to give someone a little heads up. I’m taking Emily here up to my room to run her through the details of the hunt Uncle Marvin left us.”
Wiley’s eyebrows shot up, but his easy grin stayed in place.
Emily had pulled her pack over one shoulder and was listening now, ready to go.
“I wanted to let someone know where we were in case she tries anything.”
Wiley laughed, and Emily’s hand surprised me, delivering a swift whack to my chest as a little exclamation burst from her lips. “Really?”
“Just kidding,” I told Wiley. Then I turned to Emily. “Really, though. I just want to make sure you’re comfortable. I’m not the kind of guy who takes women he just met up to his room.”
“I think I already knew that,” she said. “But I told Christine that if she hasn’t heard from me by midnight to alert the front desk.”
“Good plan,” I said, swallowing down the nerves suddenly erupting inside me.
I motioned Emily ahead of me, and we left the wood-paneled coziness of the bar and strode out into the lobby, where groups of writers gathered in seating areas and near the entrance for the restaurant.
“Did you eat?” I asked Emily.
“Not yet.”
“I can get something sent up,” I suggested, guiding her toward the elevator.
“Sure we shouldn’t take the stairs?” she asked.
“This is the other elevator,” I pointed out. “This one’s pretty reliable. And I think we’ve got the other one working smoothly now.”
“If you say so.” She flashed me that wide smile that lit her eyes, and stepped into the small space as the doors slid open. That tiny act of trust did something to me, made me feel protective of this woman I’d met not even twenty-four hours earlier in a way I hadn’t felt toward anyone in a while. Except maybe Aubrey. But this wasn’t the same.
The doors shut behind us, closing us in the intimate space, and my mind wheeled back to the night before, when I’d been on the brink of kissing Emily. That same tension was still there, like a rubber band between us, pulling us closer, threatening to snap. Her body was across the space from mine, her dark eyes shining.
I cleared my throat as the doors open, and ushered her into the hall and toward the staff wing. “How much do you know about the hunt so far? We haven’t really talked about it with anyone outside the staff and those involved in the clues. I know there’ve been some vague mentions in some of the articles written about the hotel.” A few of the writers that had attended the soft opening had mentioned it, but none had dug for details.
“I only know what you’ve told me and the little bit that’s been written about it.”
We came to my door, and I pulled out the key, wishing I wasn’t so painfully aware of the warm nearness of Emily’s body, the fact that we were about to be totally alone together. I shoved away the nerves, opening the room, and hoping I’d managed to tidy up that morning.
“But you want to go into detail,” I suggested.
“I want to help you solve it,” she said as the door swung open, revealing the front room of my suite. There was a long table scattered with books and papers—much of them related to Uncle Marvin’s goose chase—and a few things I’d dropped there because I was too lazy to put them away. The little counter to one side held a collection of mugs around the sink and coffee maker, and there were a couple shirts draped over one of the armchairs near the window. Otherwise, it wasn’t in too bad of shape.
Emily looked around appreciatively, regarding the peeling wallpaper and beat up crown molding as if it was something to be impressed by.
“We haven’t finished renovating this wing, obviously,” I told her.
“It’s cool seeing what it must’ve looked like back in the day, though.”
I gestured to a chair at the long table and rushed over to scoop up the clothing and shoes near the armchair. “Be right back.”
When the front room was tidy enough that I didn’t feel like a slob, I returned to the table and began sorting through the stack of items there. Emily had been gazing out the big windows facing the back of the resort, and she moved to join me at the table.
“So this,” I said, bringing out the taped-together parchment that had started this whole effort in the first place, “is the map.”
Emily smoothed it out in front of her, her eyes sharp as she scanned the hand-drawn document.
“This part looks older,” she said, her fingers tracing the lines of the original trail that had led us to Lola’s Gate, the first clue in our hunt. “And this part here?” she pointed to the part of the map we’d recreated, her arm brushing mine as she reached to trace the paper. Heat worked through me as Emily’s vanilla and orange blossom scent wafted around me and I had to step back to form a cohesive sentence.
“We had part of the map, and then discovered that the same map was in a movie. The map in the movie was in one piece,” I explained, taking the chair at her side. “And so we froze the screen and drew this part.”
“And all these symbols?” Her delicate fingers swept across the symbols on the map.
I pulled out the cipher key we’d used to figure out what they meant, and the printed photos I’d taken of the pictures down in the bar.
“That took us a while to get,” I told her, fascinated as I watched her eyes take in all the evidence we’d collected. She sorted through the prints of the pictures, her hands careful and quick. There was something so attractive about her focus, her clear determination. “A guest actually knocked a picture off the wall in the bar, shattering the glass. And that was how we found the symbol on the back.”
“So you looked at the other pictures,” Emily guessed.
“Right. And then Mateo’s daughter Lily—I know you have no idea who I’m talking about, but Mateo married one of my navy friends, Annalee?—”
“She was at the front desk when I checked in!” Emily looked up, her lips in a wide smile, revealing dimples to either side of her mouth that were completely charming.
“Yeah, probably,” I said. “Well, Mateo has a daughter—I think she was about seven when we got to this part—and she figured out that the symbols were basically a cipher. And she found words on the front of the photos that had symbols.”
Emily nodded as we both looked at the key that told us which symbol represented which word. But then she looked up at me again, her eyes narrowing. “But the words don’t make much sense.”
“They didn’t for a while, but we had a poem.”
“Oh, well, a poem. Of course,” Emily laughed. When the dimples popped this time, they were like magnets, drawing me closer to the easy happiness Emily displayed without a thought. I longed to trace my finger along one of those dimples.
“Sorry, I should’ve started with that.” I showed her another photo, this one of the poem that had been scrawled on the wall in another of the staff rooms.
“That would be so creepy if it said something spooky,” she said, the warm laugh coming again.
“I never thought about that,” I admitted, realizing she was right. “I just always thought about it being my uncle who’d written it...”
“You were close to him.” Her eyes found mine and filled with understanding.
“Yeah,” I said, marveling at the simple connection I felt with this near stranger. “We were. He was good to us.”
“Your parents?” she asked, her tone careful.
“They worked a lot. They were distracted, I guess. But summers were always here.”
“I understand distracted parents,” she said. “Though mine were pretty close to perfect when I was little.” Emily dropped my gaze and looked down at the table as if admitting this had been a mistake somehow, and I immediately missed the warm connection of her eyes.
It had been a long time since I’d met anyone new, I realized. Certainly, I’d met dozens of contractors and staff as we’d pulled the resort from obscurity and rebuilt it, but I hadn’t befriended any of them. I’d kept my circle small, made up mostly of my sister and the old friends who’d arrived one by one to keep tabs on me. I was a project in myself, I knew, and my best friends—my family, really—they’d worried about me these past years. Hell, I’d worried about myself, that I’d never be able to really move forward.
But Emily?
She’d pushed past any defenses that kept others out without even noticing them. And now?
I could admit I was drawn to her. I was attracted to her easy smile and open nature. She was like the fresh air that trickled in as you pulled open windows on that first warm spring day, making you realize gradually how much you’d missed it through the frigid winter.
“So the words on the cipher matched those in the poem,” Emily said, comparing the two.
I shook myself out of the contemplation that had kept me quiet too long. “Yeah,” I said, dragging out the completed verse.
The copyright, Lola dispute, rights writer, Lola greed. Bear bear. Heart heart. The key, rights studio.
Emily held up the paper, squinting at it as she read. And then those eyes found mine again. “Um...”
“Yeah, that part’s still a little confusing.”
“Theories?”
“Well, there’s some other stuff we figured out,” I went on, leaning back in the chair as I thought about how far we’d come in our efforts to unravel my great-uncle’s intentions over the past couple years. “Remember the big bear in the bar?”
“The one with the Rufus sign at his feet?”
I sat up and gave her a level look. “There is only one bear in the bar.”
“Good point,” she laughed. “So yeah, Rufus.”
“Rufus.”
“How does he fit in?”
“His paw has an inscription and it’s not very flattering to an old friend of my uncle’s. It calls him a traitor and names him—Rudy Fusterburg.”
“The guy you mentioned before,” Emily said slowly, shaking her head.
“Right. So here’s what we figured out. I told you a little bit last night, but this is the detailed version.” I explained about Rudy and my uncle having been friends and writing partners in a company they called Mountaintop Studios in Hollywood back in the fifties and sixties. I told her about the actress Annie Lowe, who was once engaged to Rudy, and how history shows Annie mysteriously disappearing. We’d deduced that Annie was actually Lola, our aunt, and that she’d run away with Marvin to Kasper Ridge, breaking her engagement and giving up her career to marry my uncle.
“Wouldn’t that make your uncle the traitor? At least in Rudy’s eyes?”
“I’m sure Rudy would have agreed with you. But in retaliation, he removed all traces of my uncle from the work they did together.”
For the next couple hours, I walked Emily through the movie scripts we’d found, the photo album, and the costume jewelry. I told her about Will’s visit to Rudy’s family in west Los Angeles, and about the lawyer we’d consulted about a lawsuit. Emily agreed that the idea of suing a dead man’s family was distasteful at best, and it reassured me. That couldn’t have been what Uncle Marvin wanted.
By the time we’d been through it all, with Emily making notes in a laptop as I wound up, I was starving.
“I forgot I promised you food!” I’d gotten wrapped up. “I’m hungry—I bet you’re starving.”
“I was too interested to realize it, but I’m hungry now, yeah.” Emily looked up at me with her warm dark eyes over the screen of her computer.
“Should I order some food up? Or I can send it back to your room?” I really didn’t want her to leave yet.
She closed the computer and glanced around as if only just realizing she was in my room. “If you’re hungry too...” She gave a little shrug.
A glow of warmth lit within me at her clear reluctance to leave. “Great. I’ll grab the menu.”
A few minutes later, the order placed, and a couple fingers of Half Cat poured into two glasses, we moved to take the armchairs in front of the big window. It was strange having someone else here. I’d sat here many times alone, deep in thought, but the whole room felt different with Emily here. The whole world did, actually. Brighter, full of possibility.
“The whole story is incredible,” Emily said. “But I’m not sure you’ve really solved it. I feel like there must be something else, something missing. Can it really all be about money?”
“I mean...it is a treasure hunt.” There had to be something valuable at the end of all this, didn’t there?
“Yeah, but treasure is a loaded word.” She sipped her whiskey and then leaned forward. “You can treasure a memory. Or a person. Or a feeling, you know?”
I sighed. “You’re right. I just don’t know how much more hunt I have in me.”