57 Joey
Joey
The back door of the inn clicks open, and Joey slips inside. Quietly, she makes her way up the stairs. She can see Kathy’s hair-sprayed coif from here, but she’s busy with a noisy game of Candy Crush. Room three is just at the top of the stairs on the right. Joey silently unlocks the door.
Inside, it smells faintly floral. The bed is made, and there are clothes draped over it.
The closet is open, and there are more clothes, mostly neutral in color but all delicate and pretty.
A slender woman with dark green eye makeup and nude lips pouts at her from an issue of Vogue on the nightstand.
Joey wonders, momentarily, what it would be like to be a glamorous public figure.
She sees nothing masculine in the room. Not a watch or a shirt or a pair of shoes.
She steps into the tiny bathroom, which to Kathy’s credit, has great light and is appointed in soft white porcelain with matte black fixtures.
Makeup is scattered on the counter. A case of brushes catches Joey’s eye, and she digs through it.
A hair straightener and an electric toothbrush sit next to a cosmetic shop’s worth of face creams. She’s not sure what she’s hoping to find.
Some clue that will point her in the right direction, perhaps.
Back in the bedroom, she opens the drawer beside the bed.
Empty except for a remote control and a laminated paper with the Wi-Fi details.
She closes it with her hip and looks around the room.
This was not worth stealing the master key and breaking Kathy Renner’s trust forever for.
There is nothing in here that can help her.
She is about to leave, about to make her way silently down the stairs and try her luck at the restaurant, when she spots Nicola’s suitcase peeking out from the closet.
It’s gorgeous white leather and looks as if it’s never touched a luggage carousel in its life.
She wheels it out of the closet and finds the zipper.
Splaying it open on the floor like she’s doing a dissection, she examines the interior.
Empty. But when she reaches a hand inside one of the pockets, she feels something square and flat, about the size of a book.
She pulls it into her lap and instantly recognizes it. It’s the painting of the old general store, with a carved wood frame around it—the one that, until recently, hung on the wall of Aspect Coffee since Barbara had it commissioned in the nineties.
Processing the bizarreness of this discovery, Joey digs around again in the pocket and feels something else. A kitschy wooden bear holding a sign that says Whisper Ridge Inn. Excitement and curiosity make her dig her hand into the same pocket a third time.
This time her fingers find something small, cold, and solid.
She already knows what it is before she pulls it out, and she feels a sudden burst of anger.
The ring. The gold one with the black onyx stone and single gold droplet.
She knows now, holding it in her hand, that this is not from a vintage shop in LA.
It was a birthday gift to Quinn from her grandmother.
She holds it under the lamp to examine it closely.
The light catches on an inscription on the inside of the band. Quinn Winter, 12/13/1993.
A sound makes Joey look up. Someone is at the door. She searches around for somewhere to hide. In the closet? Under the bed? But there’s no time. In another half-second, Nicola’s block heels appear, and the door thunks closed behind her.
“Oddio!” Nicola throws a hand to her chest when she sees Joey, who is crouched on the floor with a suitcase wide-open in front of her.
Nicola is dry and unruffled, despite the weather outside.
They stare at each other for a long moment, and Joey wonders if she is going to run away, call for help, or attack her.
She stands up slowly with her hands out.
“What the hell are you doing?” Nicola clutches her purse to her chest.
“Nothing, just…” Joey says, taking a careful step over the bag. Nicola backs up, as if Joey is about to lunge at her. “I was looking for you. The door was open. I thought—”
“The door was not open.”
“It was. I just wanted to come and bring you a coffee.”
Nicola looks around her, waving her hands in exaggeration. “Where is it?”
“I left it downstairs. But I was just about to go get you another one.”
Nicola eyes her. “I am calling the police,” she says finally, digging through her purse.
“No.” Joey grabs her wrist, and the look of shock and fear that Nicola gives her makes her let go quickly. “Please. I was just leaving.”
Joey looks back down at the suitcase on the floor.
She remembers what she saw and decides to change tack.
She reaches down and snatches up what she found in the suitcase.
“What are you doing with this?” Nicola looks wrong-footed, and Joey uses it to her advantage.
“This painting was hanging in my coffee shop.”
Nicola frowns, but she lowers her hand from her purse. “Give me your phone,” she says.
“Excuse me?”
“Your phone. I do not want pictures or video recordings of this. Give it to me.”
Joey puts up two surrender hands and then reaches slowly into her back pocket.
“Here.” She offers up the phone. “Look, I don’t care what you stole.
” Joey chucks the painting and the carved bear onto the bed.
“I want to know where you got this.” Joey takes a chance by holding out the ring.
“Just tell me honestly. I won’t tell anyone about your little habit.
I don’t care. I just need to know where the ring came from. ”
There’s a silence during which the rain barrages the window.
Nicola could still call someone. She could simply shout, and Kathy would be up here in less than a minute.
Joey accusing her of being a thief would be so inconsequential; it’s not as if Nicola couldn’t just apologize and return everything and take Joey down for breaking and entering.
“I will put them back,” says Nicola. Joey’s not sure she believes her, but she honestly doesn’t care.
The way she’s looking at Joey tells her that this is far from the first time she’s stolen.
The objects—everything besides Quinn’s ring—may not have any monetary value, but drawing attention to them could do real damage to a glamorous public figure like Nicola Bianco. Joey waits.
“Almost as soon as I took it, I realized it was strange,” she says, clearly on the verge of distress.
She’s trying to hide it but she’s gripping the shoulder strap of her purse so hard her knuckles are turning white.
“The inscription,” she says at last. “It’s that girl’s name.
Quinn.” The way she says it sounds like queen.
“I recognized the name when Elena mentioned her the other day. I was so curious because I thought, There’s no way the girl in Elena’s story is the same girl whose name is on this ring.
It makes no sense. So I came to see you.
I thought, you are a café owner in a small town.
You will know. And you recognized the ring right away.
I did not even have to ask. I knew then that it belonged to her. I just did not understand how he—”
“He? Who’s he?”
“I wanted to find out what happened to her, so I pretended I needed to learn about her for research for a role, but that man, her father, he was so angry. He tried to push me. I had to run.”
“Who did you take it from in the first place?” Joey asks, but she thinks she knows already.
Nicola’s eyes are focused on hers. “He and I have been friends for almost twenty years. He has never said anything about this place or anyone he knew here. Not once. I don’t know how he got it.
” Her voice is growing cold with every word, a lake freezing over.
“Then I thought, Maybe he knew her some other way. Maybe he somehow knew the girl, and I tried to ask him without asking him, you know? And it suddenly became clear.”
“What became clear?”
Nicola smiles mirthlessly. “That he was lying.”
Joey suppresses a chill. “Where is he now?”
Nicola waves an insistent hand. “I don’t know. And I don’t care.”
“Listen to me, do you think…?” Joey speaks slowly. “Is he the kind of person who could…kill someone?”
For a second, the question hangs in the air between them. How could either of them know this?
Nicola is clearly horror-struck. “You have to go,” she says quickly.
“Wait, please. Where can I—”
“He will know it was me who told you.” She makes a show of striding toward the door.
“Nicola, wait.”
But she doesn’t wait. She gives Joey an unapologetic look and then opens the door violently. “Kathy?” she calls down the stairs.
Joey grits her teeth and glares at Nicola for a beat.
It feels like a betrayal of trust. They were on the same side.
She doesn’t waste a second, though she is bombarded with memories.
Suddenly things she wondered about for so long—like who Quinn spent all her time with that spring—appear in vivid color.
Joey lets the door close behind her and drops the master key right outside it. She sprints down the stairs, past Kathy, where she pushes open the back door and runs into pelting rain.