“Well, at least you have somewhere to go. I have two cats and no home.” She glanced up at me with tear-rimmed eyes, an unexpected display of emotion from the mostly stoic girl. “Dylan and I broke up today. I’m only staying here until the old lady realizes I can’t pay and kicks me out.”
My heart went out to her, especially since I was in the exact opposite predicament. I was literally here celebrating my honeymoon.“Do you need some money, Blaire?” I offered gently.
She snorted.“I need a job. I met Dylan at work, so naturally I quit. I can’t stand the thought of having to see him every single day. It would be too awkward.”
“Well, I’m sure something will turn up.” My well-intended optimism was not well-received.
“Okay, Boomer,” she practically barked. “I’ll just walk into an office and immediately land my dream job without so much as an interview, then I’ll get a mortgage on a three-bedroom house by batting my eyelashes and promising not to default. All I’ll need after that is a white picket fence, and I can live happily ever after. I’ll pass on the whole Prince Charming facade, thanks.”
Okay, that was pretty harsh.
“I am nowhere near old enough to be a Boomer.” I tried to keep the upset from my voice, seeing as the girl was having a rough time already. “But I have a good feeling about your future, even if you don’t.”
With that, I left.
Charlene was so caught up in the reunion with her mother, she didn’t even see me go. Oh, well. It was for the best, right? Even if Blaire had nothing else, she would at least have the love of two very special felines.
I trudged slowly toward the staircase, trying to come to terms with how I was feeling in that moment. For the last day and a half, Charles and I had been focused almost solely on finding the missing mother cat, and now that we had… I was really going to miss that kitten.
Maybe I was more prepared to be a mother than I originally thought. Or maybe I just really liked cats.
Who knew?
Certainly not me.
I paused to look out at the garden from the window beside the secondary staircase and was startled to spy movement outside. I squinted in an attempt to clarify the picture, but it was all so dark.
Past midnight was no time to work in the garden. Could whatever was happening out there somehow be related to all the trouble Charles and I had been facing since our arrival? Was that the guilty party right outside the window already working to sabotage us yet again?
I honestly didn’t know, but I certainly had to go out there to take a closer look.
18
This time I did wake Charles. It took several good shakes, but finally his eyes blinked open.
“What time is it?” he groaned, covering his eyes to block out the light.
“Late,” I confessed with an apologetic wince. “I’m sorry. It’s just I found Charlene’s mother, and now there’s something going on in the garden. I’d feel safer if you were with me.”
He struggled to sit up in bed.“You found Charlene’s mother?” This was followed by a sharp gasp of pain.
“Oh, sweetie.” I reached over to rub his shoulders.
He leaned into my touch.“I guess that fall hurt me more than I initially realized. Let me just pop a couple Tylenol and—”
“It’s okay. You should rest.” And I should have known better than to wake him. Of course he was putting on a strong face after that horrid accident. He didn’t want to worry me, and now I’d only made things worse by disturbing him while his body was trying to heal.
He shrugged off my concern and practically leapt out of bed, as if to prove a point.“And miss the action? No way.”
I waited as he swallowed a couple capsules dry.
He clapped his hands together to signal his readiness to proceed.“Let’s go see what’s happening. And after that, you’ll tell me about finding Charlene’s mother?”
“Definitely. I can even take you to meet her in the morning, but I don’t know how much longer that person will be outside.”
Charles locked the door behind us, then shot me a worried glance.“A person is out there? Doing what?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I want to find out.”
“Fair enough,” was the last thing either of us said before quietly moving through the house and very quietly letting ourselves outside.
We held hands as we moved toward the dark figure to get a better look. The sound of a shovel breaking the soil rang out through the night.
“What was that? Do you think someone’s burying a body?” I whispered, fear surging through my body.
“I think…” Charles said, leaning down to whisper in my ear. “That my wife needs to stop watching so many true crime documentaries.”
“Who’s there?” a man called into the chilly night air. Apparently we hadn’t been quiet enough. I blamed our extreme sleepiness for us being careless enough to get discovered in our covert spy operation almost immediately.
Charles let go of my hand and moved in front of me to shield me from the stranger.“We were just coming out for some fresh air,” he announced, creeping closer with me behind him.
“Who are you, and what are you doing here?” I shouted, my voice quaking.
The man clicked on a flashlight and shone it beneath his face, creating a ghoulish affect.“It’s me, Bill.”
“Gardening at night a habit of yours?” Charles’s voice was light and airy, conversational. He was an expert at questioning witnesses and suspects alike.
“Usually, no, but there was no time during the day, what with the fiasco on the stairs and all the room switching. Tomorrow will be another busy day, so I figured I’d just knock this out now, before the old lady realized I’d fallen behind on my chores.” He took a step back, releasing a familiar foul smell into the air.
“Is that skunk cabbage?” I asked, immediately moving to pinch my nose.
Billy swept his flashlight toward the freshly planted cabbage. About half the gorgeous yellow roses had been uprooted to make way for their highly undesirable replacement, and this made me quite sad. The bees loved those roses and were likely planning on constructing their new hive nearby. Now the same plant that had driven them from their apiary would ruin this new location, too.
“Why would you tear up flowers and plant skunk cabbage in their place?” Charles asked, sounding genuinely curious. I knew him well enough, though, to see that he was just two steps away from levying a serious accusation the porter’s way.
“It’s all these darned bees,” Billy complained, lifting a hand to wipe sweat from his brow. “They’re scaring the guests. Madame Blue suspects they’re to blame for our lack of return bookings. She needed the money, so she wants them out of here. Obviously we can’t kill them, so I’m trying to drive them away using more natural means.”
“But you’re ruining the garden in the process,” I argued, protective of the place where we’d spent so much time over the last couple of days, the place my parents still remembered so fondly from decades past.
Billy swung his flashlight toward the uprooted roses.“These guys? Nah. I’ll move them to pots for the time being, then return them to this soil once the bees have left. No harm, no foul.”
Except this was incredibly harmful to the bees. They would be forced to leave their ancestral land, just because Madame Blue didn’t realize her unfriendly staff and deteriorating house were the real reasons so many guests never returned.
Charles and I, for one, couldn’t wait to get out of there.
19
The next morning, Charles and I were up early despite our strange nighttime excursion. He was excited to visit Charlene and her mother so we could all say goodbye before we packed up and headed to a nice, safe,boring hotel chain in town. I would take boring all day long if it kept my husband from facing any more misplaced misfortunes.
The only problem was that we had no idea what time Blaire might wake up, and I didn’t want to be the one to roust the cranky young adult from her sleep. So Charles and I busied ourselves by grabbing showers in the communal bathroom and packing up our luggage. When that was done, we scarfed down some protein bars that Charles had picked up on his latest supply run.