Serious Moonlight, page 15
“But—”
“Stop. Worrying.”
Maybe I was being silly. I considered the possibility that I was projecting my own stress and worries onto her, blowing things out of proportion. Maybe I was just being selfish, wanting her to shine all her glorious, sparkly light onto me and me alone—and not on Leon Snodgrass.
I sighed. “Fine.”
“That’s better. Now, on to more pressing things . . . Our Daniel is meeting you at what time?”
“He’s not ours.”
“Maybe not yet, but we can dream, yes?”
No problems there. Over the last twenty-four hours, all I could think about was how his heartbeat felt under my hand. Last night at work, I thought about it so much that it distracted me from doing my job correctly. I incorrectly programmed not one but two room keys. I had Joseph fetch the wrong car from the garage for a guest. I made errors when I ran the auditing program and had to get Melinda to override it so I could run it again. Chuck witnessed that fumble and christened me with a new nickname: Dopey. As in stupid Snow White and her stupid dwarfs.
“Hey,” Aunt Mona said, frowning, “this isn’t part of your mystery case, is it? Whatever it is you’re doing with Daniel tonight?”
“I don’t think so? But that reminds me . . . We found a clue. Hold on.” I rummaged around in my purse and pulled out the spreadsheet we found in the hotel. “Raymond Darke left it in a hotel room. We’re not sure what it is. I’ve tried matching the Cyrillic characters to an alphabet online, but it’s impossible. The font on the printout makes the script look different, and some of the letters are connected, and I can’t for the life of me make it out.”
“Is this Russian?”
“Ukrainian.”
Her brows lifted. “Really? I know someone who speaks Ukrainian. David Sharkovsky—he’s that Seattle gallery owner.”
“The guy who bought your first painting?” Which in turn led to my Nutella overdosing. I’d heard about him but had never seen him. “He’s the guy who sold your Young Napoleon Bonaparte painting, right?” It was quite the conversation piece, and her biggest single sale of an original painting.
“That’s him. He’s sort of an asshole, but I’ll bet he could translate this for you. If you want, I could try to arrange a meeting. Maybe you, me, and our Daniel could have lunch?”
“Are you serious?”
“I’ll give him a call and let you know tomorrow. As payment, you can promise to have a good time tonight.”
“I can’t promise that. I don’t even know what we’re doing.”
“Birdie,” she said, throwing her arms around my shoulders to hug me, “one day you’ll realize that the not knowing is the best part of life.”
Maybe for someone brave like her. Me? I wasn’t so sure.
After parting ways with Aunt Mona, I walked home with Grandpa Hugo and spent the rest of the afternoon fluctuating between anxiety and excitement. Sure, Daniel said this was a date that wasn’t a date. I shouldn’t place too much importance on one night. Or maybe at all. It felt like we’d done everything backward. If you were baking a cake and rushed to the end of the recipe, stuck it in the oven, and then several minutes later realized you forgot the eggs, wasn’t it too late to add them?
Maybe we weren’t a cake with missing eggs, but I honestly didn’t know what we were or what I wanted us to be. I tried in vain to work it out on the ferry ride into the city that night, but my mind completely emptied when I stepped outside the terminal. Because that’s where I found Daniel, sitting on the hood of his Subaru.
When he turned his head and spotted me, a giddy sense of elation zipped through my chest. He dropped to his feet with feline grace and smiled at me as if I were the sun. I smiled back from across the street, waiting for cars to pass before I crossed, heart hammering erratically. And then my feet were moving, and I was breathing, and it was all okay. I could do this.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi.”
“I worried you’d change your mind,” he said.
“But here I am.”
“I should have trusted in my own mantra. Fate finds a way.”
“Let’s not bring fate into this, Jeff Goldblum,” I teased.
He held up his hands in prayer and bowed. “That man should be canonized as a saint.”
“I’m starting to think you’ve got a bigger crush on him than Angela Lansbury.”
“Please keep my secrets, Birdie.”
“We’ll see,” I said, moving out of the street so that I didn’t get hit by a car before the date even started, which would absolutely be my luck.
“You wore purple,” he said, nodding toward my dress and the cluster of orchid blossoms on a single stem, pinned above my ear. I’d stolen it from a large potted orchid my grandmother never in a million years would let me touch. Cutting it was a small rebellion. Daniel opened the diagonal zipper on his thin leather jacket to expose a short-sleeve shirt—typical Northwest flannel, except it was dark purple and black. “See?” he said. “We match perfectly.”
“And that’s not weird because . . . ?”
He grinned. “All in good time, my dear Birdie. Ready? Parking’s going to be rough, so we better shake a leg.”
“Where are we going?”
“You’ll see,” he said, running around to open the passenger door for me.
A couple of minutes later, we were heading away from the waterfront as the sky darkened. I was telling him about Aunt Mona’s Ukrainian gallery owner and how she was trying to get us a lunch meeting with him to see if he could translate our mysterious spreadsheet—to which his response was, “Seriously? That’s brilliant!” Right about that time, what started as a ho-hum drizzle on my window quickly changed over to real, actual rain.
Daniel flicked on his windshield wipers and suddenly it was pouring. Like, cats and dogs and herds of buffalos. It almost never storms here. Misting and gray skies for days on end, until you feel as if you’ll never see the sun again? Absolutely. Storms, however, not so much. And because it’s so rare, when it actually does happen, it’s either thrilling or apocalyptic. Right now, it was both. When lightning flashed, Daniel joked, “Ominous start to a first date!”
“You told me it wasn’t a real date,” I said in a loud voice to be heard over the onslaught of rain on the windows. I couldn’t see the road through the metronomic swish of the windshield wipers, which was mildly worrisome.
“I changed my mind!” he yelled back, hunched over the steering wheel and squinting. “Now help me watch for the interstate overpass so I don’t miss the turn.”
When an accident blocked the road, Daniel navigated down several side streets, and I was completely turned around. Then the rain slacked off. And after a block or two, when it was down to a tamer, less explosive rainfall, I asked him where we were. First Hill. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever been in this part of the city. Nothing looked familiar, just a lot of hospitals and apartment high-rises. And tucked away behind some trees at the corner of a brisk intersection that housed a pizza place and a drugstore sat a stately Victorian mansion.
We drove around the block once, until a car serendipitously pulled out of one of a handful of private spaces behind the mansion. Spotting it, Daniel quickly parked there before someone else could nab it. “How lucky are we? I was starting to worry that we would have to walk blocks in the rain,” he said, shutting off the engine. But when I asked him for the hundredth time where in God’s name we were going, he just told me to trust him and make a run for it with him.
“Now, Birdie!”
We jumped out of the car and jogged through the rain, pulling our jackets over our heads and splashing through puddles on the crooked sidewalk. I screeched when a spray of splash-back from a car’s tire hit the hem of my dress and sprayed my shoes. Daniel hurried me through an iron gate and up a private sidewalk shrouded by trees, and then we were dashing beneath a covered entry, shaking off water like drowned rats.
A fancy sign by the front doors read:
BY INVITATION ONLY.
TONIGHT’S PRIVATE EVENT BEGINS AT 7:30 P.M. SHARP,
AT WHICH TIME THE DOORS WILL BE LOCKED.
GOOD LUCK. YOU’LL NEED IT.
Clearly this wasn’t a normal home with people living inside, but a restored historical house rented out for private functions. Was this some sort of stage magic performance? A party?
Daniel ushered me into a foyer with a high ceiling. A chandelier winked above us as we crossed the marble floor, passing doorways to other rooms. We headed to a tiny reception desk that sat in the crook of a grand staircase, where a tall, big-chested man with umber skin and a rich voice greeted us.
“Welcome to the Boddy mansion. I’m Mr. Wadsworth,” he said, nodding politely. His dark gray tuxedo looked like something out of Downton Abbey. He gestured with white gloves. “Are you here for the dinner?”
“I have a reservation,” Daniel said. “Aoki.”
The man checked a tablet and smiled. “Ah, the Plums. Of course. You’re assigned to my group. Let me just get your name tags and envelope.”
Boddy. Plums. Why did this all sound wildly familiar? While the man bent behind the desk, Daniel retrieved a dark purple clip-on bow tie from his pocket and fastened it to his collar. “Is it straight?”
I nodded dumbly, and when Mr. Wadsworth stood up, he said approvingly of Daniel’s bow tie, “That’s more like it. Now, what names should I write on your name tags? Professor and Mrs.? Professor and Mr.? Both professors?”
“Professor Nick Plum and Professor Nora Plum,” Daniel said.
I stared at him.
“Is this . . . ?”
Daniel bit his lower lip and squinted at me before saying, “Live-action Clue game.”
“We’re . . . ?”
“About to solve a murder mystery,” Daniel said. “And eat dinner. Hopefully before the murder, because I’m famished.”
“What are you afraid of, a fate worse than death?”
—Professor Plum, Clue (1985)
16
* * *
“Clue for Couples,” the butler elaborated, handing me a stick-on name tag, on which he’d written Professor Nora Plum in neat script. And after giving Daniel his name tag and asking if he’d been to one of these events before—Daniel had not—Mr. Wadsworth informed both of us, “Tonight’s killer has already been chosen randomly. It will be up to you to figure out whodunit,” he said dramatically. “This is your character envelope. It’s crucial that you don’t open it until instructed during dinner, and absolutely do not show the contents to other players. Now, please feel free to join the other guests to your left in the ballroom.”
“The ballroom,” I repeated, thinking of the board game. “Is there a billiards room, too?”
“Absolutely. Mr. Boddy’s mansion is here in its entirety, and you’ll be free to explore later. For now, please confine yourselves to the ballroom. Dinner will be served in . . . let’s see . . . fifteen minutes. I look forward to being your guide tonight, Plums. Enjoy!”
Daniel and I shuffled across the foyer toward an open door. He nudged my shoulder with his and spoke close to my ear. “Is this okay? Did I totally blow it? You’re not saying anything, and—”
“I’m so excited,” I whispered.
“You are?”
I nodded.
“Whew! I was worried there for a second. Like, maybe you hate surprises. Maybe you hate Clue or you’ve never played it.”
“I love Clue! I used to play with Mom and Aunt Mona all the time.”
“Well, this is kind of like a dinner murder-mystery thing? U-Dub’s drama department does them to raise money. Lots of people from my high school used to go to these all the time. It’s like Rocky Horror, you know? People cosplay and get into it.”
God. Aunt Mona will die with excitement when I tell her. “That’s why the purple,” I said. “Professor Plum’s color in the game.”
He grinned. “Yeah.”
“I like your bow tie.”
“It smells gross. I couldn’t find a purple one, so my mom dyed one of my grandfather’s. Does it make me look smart and studious?”
“A-plus. Superhot,” I confirmed.
His eyes flicked down my dress. “Not so bad yourself, Plum. I’m damn lucky to be married to you.”
“Now we’re married? This wasn’t supposed to even be a date.”
“Let this be a lesson. This is what happens when you believe a magician,” he said. “You think it’s not a date, and the next thing you know, abracadabra! You’re married to a professor suspected of murder.”
I snapped my fingers. “Misdirection.”
“Gets you every time,” he answered with a grin.
We walked into a small ballroom to find several other couples mingling. Most were adults, but there was another teen couple. A middle-aged man wearing a khaki uniform and a pith helmet was the first to greet us.
“The Plums have arrived,” he said, toasting us with a glass of champagne.
“Colonel Mustard, I presume,” Daniel said.
“Freshly returned from Africa, old boy. Big game, that’s what I like to hunt. The bigger the better,” he said, utterly committed to his character. He held up a hand to someone across the room. “You must excuse me. Miss Scarlet is trying to seduce my wife. Be seeing you.”
A bearded, burly college-aged boy in a campy French maid’s outfit circled the room with a tray of hors d’oeuvres, and after informing us that his name was Apollo, he then introduced several of us to each other, all in character. Many guests were repeat attendees, so when we met others who were first-timers, I was thankful to find we weren’t the only ones who weren’t in full-on cosplay. A few characters had been added—Dr. Orchid, Miss Peach, Prince Azure—to make a total of nine couples. We’d barely had time to meet everyone, when a young man in a black suit entered the room carrying two giant shopping bags.
“Good evening, everyone,” he said, stopping the conversations. “I’m Mr. Boddy, owner of this elegant and very fine mansion. I invited you all here tonight.” After a burst of applause and cheers, Mr. Boddy proceeded to tell us that we all had something in common, and could we figure out what that was? Colonel Mustard’s wife, who was a little tipsy, shouted, “Blackmail!”
This clearly irritated the actor playing Mr. Boddy, who broke character for a few seconds. He then proceeded to give a dramatic speech about how we were all ruthless people with dark secrets—and look! He had some gifts befitting our dank, despicable souls. He withdrew stacks of boxes from the shopping bags, and after he exited the room to more applause, proclaiming, “I’ll see all of you villains at dinner!” each couple chose a box. Daniel shook ours before opening it. It was our murder weapon; we got the candlestick.
While everyone was still buzzing about the prop weapons, the butler returned to herd us across the foyer into a dining room. Under another glittering chandelier, a long table was set with china and silver and fresh flowers. “Everyone, find your place cards,” Mr. Wadsworth instructed. “And before you’re seated, please place your weapons on the tables lining the walls.”
We followed instructions and found our places at the table, which happened to be across from the only other teen couple—the Peacocks. They smiled at us, but I caught them staring at Daniel and whispering, and that made me uncomfortable.
After a salad was served, Mr. Wadsworth encouraged each couple to open their envelopes without showing the contents to others. Ours contained: a “detective notebook” to check off clues; brief motives for our characters (Mr. Boddy was blackmailing us because we’d smuggled artifacts from South America, and we’d lose our university teaching jobs if anyone found out); and a single white card that read innocent.
“I’m almost disappointed,” Daniel whispered. “That Mr. Boddy is sort of a dick, and I was hoping to off him tonight.”
“Why did we smuggle artifacts? Wouldn’t we be more concerned about going to jail than losing our jobs? This motive is incomplete.”
“We probably needed the money from selling black-market artifacts to raise money for our sick child’s surgery.”
“We have a kid?”
“We have ten. Little Timmy may never walk again.”
“He’s not the only one,” I mumbled. “Ten kids? Good grief.”
“You couldn’t stay away from me. I tried to resist, but the smell of chalk dust and blackboards excited you, so we were constantly having sex in the classroom where we taught.”
“Well, that was enough to get us fired, right there.”
“It wasn’t in front of the students,” Daniel said, feigning disgust. “God, Nora. Get your mind out of the gutter.”
Dinner was a jumble of dishes and animated conversations. An anticipatory revelry crackled in the air. Everyone seemed happy—some more than others, depending on how hard they’d hit the cash bar. The only thing casting a pall over the otherwise cheerful table was the teen couple, who were continuing to make me nervous with all their staring. Finally, when dessert was served, the boy spoke up.
“Hey,” he said to Daniel, signaling him with his hand. Both had to lean in to hear over the laughter and chatting surrounding us. “Did you go to Garfield?”
“Yeah,” Daniel said, shifting a vase of flowers to see the boy better. “I graduated last year.”
“I thought so. We’re seniors,” he said, referring to his partner. “We thought you looked . . . familiar.”
The girl blinked rapidly and said, “You’re not that kid who—”
“Shh,” the boy scolded, bumping her. And then it sounded like he said, “Don’t ask that here.”
“Never mind,” she mumbled to Daniel.
A tension grew in the silence that hung over the table. Maybe they were talking about his failed stunt with the Houdini water torture cell? Surely that wasn’t what was causing all this weirdness. Then I remembered what Daniel said during Truth or Lie: I did a stupid thing.
