“I like detective stories—and detectives. Brainy is the new sexy.”
—Irene Adler, Sherlock (2012)
Daniel was right: the pie was good. Like, life-changing, I-just-found-religion good. How in the world had I avoided it all this time? No wonder my mom had eaten it as if it were nutrition personified.
In fact, I was still thinking about it when I took an early ferry into the city the next day. I was also thinking about Daniel’s leg touching mine under the table. I couldn’t figure out why it felt more taboo than what we did in the back seat. Maybe I was just on a mystery high. Or a pie high.
Maybe both.
After daydreaming my way through a short bus ride from the downtown ferry terminal, I ended up in front of Elliott Bay Book Company in Capitol Hill. I’d been here before, and it was an excellent bookstore—two expansive stories with lots of light spilling over crisscrossed beams, wood floors, and row after row of cedar shelves. Any other day, I’d spend hours browsing. But I was headed to the café in the back of the store, where I was supposed to be meeting Daniel. I’d given him my phone number last night under the heady influence of Rainier cherries and brown-sugar crumble, and we’d been texting to coordinate our plans. When I looked around, I worried that I’d misunderstood.
Then I spotted him at the counter.
Like me, he was wearing the hotel’s required “uniform” of black pants and white shirt—it was two hours before we both had to clock in—but instead of the green Cascadia zip-up he wore when driving the hotel van, he had on a slim leather jacket with a diagonal zipper that clung to lines of lean muscle on his arms and chest. Inside my head, I had a brief, hallucinatory flash of that chest without a shirt on and quickly banished it.
As if he could sense me, he turned around and his eyes immediately found mine.
“Hello, Nora.”
I glanced behind me.
“You’re supposed to call me Nick,” he explained. “Or I could be Nora, if you want. I’m not picky.”
I stared at him.
“I watched online clips from The Thin Man last night,” he said brightly.
“Oh,” I said, unexpectedly pleased. “You did?”
“I felt it was my duty to get in the right frame of mind for sleuthing. I have no idea what the movie’s about, but Myrna Loy was insanely hot, and they’re both total boozers. I liked it when she found out her husband had already had five martinis and she wanted to catch up with him.”
“ ‘Bartender, bring me five more martinis,’ ” I said, loosely quoting Nora in the film.
“ ‘And line them up right here!’ ” he finished.
I laughed. “It was the 1930s. Drinking was a sport.”
“Well, this isn’t a martini, but it will have to do,” he said, extending an arm to hand me a steaming paper cup. “Black tea. Since you are apparently a coffee hater, which is a little blasphemous in this town. But if you truly prefer it, I will defend your right to drink this brown tap water.”
“Perfect,” I said, smiling. “Thanks.”
He nodded toward my head. “Different flower.”
“Tiger lily. We have all kinds of lilies growing in our yard. My grandmother was a big gardener,” I explained. “She said it was holy work.”
“Is that why you were homeschooled and couldn’t swear? She was religious?”
“No. I mean, yes, she was religious, but I think it had to do more with the fact that she drove her teenage daughter away, and they didn’t speak for years, and then she died. I think she was just trying to keep me on a short leash out of overprotective fear, if that makes sense.”
Daniel stared at me for so long with a dazed expression, I feared I’d said something wrong. But how could that be? Maybe it was just that he hadn’t heard me. It was a little loud in the café (music, cappuccino steaming, cups clinking), and I wondered if this was one of those environments that made it hard for him to pick out sounds. So I pointed toward the front door, and we walked outside together.
What little sun we had was low in the sky, and Capitol Hill was windy, which made walking and talking hard. But we didn’t have far to go. We turned on Pike and crossed Broadway, made famous by Sir Mix-a-Lot and his posse, when he wasn’t proclaiming his love for big butts. This enclave of the neighborhood was a collection of restaurants and yoga studios, lots of rainbow flags.
“I sort of pictured you living here,” I said. “When we first met.”
He tugged his ear and shifted to the other side of me. “This is my good ear,” he said, and then asked me to repeat myself. When I did, he said, “You thought I lived here? Why?”
“Seems like hipster central. Or maybe Ballard.”
“Me, a hipster?” He laughed and then twisted his head at a comical angle. “Are you serious? Birdie, Birdie, Birdie. I take Saturday nights off from work twice a month to play in Magic tournaments.”
“Magicians have tournaments?”
“Magic the Gathering. You know, the card game?”
I thought back to when I’d researched Daniel online, and some event from a comic book shop had popped up—not that I was going to tell him I’d been stalking him online. “Like Dungeons and Dragons?” I asked.
“Same crowd of nerds, so close enough, and I was a dungeon master when I was a kid. Basically, if there’s a wizard in it, I’ve played it. I like my games dark and full of demons.” He glanced at me. “I bet your religious grandmother would have hated me anywhere near her granddaughter, huh?”
He had heard me earlier in the bookstore. “She was Lutheran, not a member of a crazy cult,” I said, grinning. “Sure, she thought that Bobby Pruitt down the street was trouble because he listened to heavy metal, but we weren’t Amish, or anything. We had Internet and TV.”
“So, though you couldn’t swear, electricity wasn’t satanic science for you either. That’s what you’re saying.”
“That’s what I’m saying. I just wasn’t aware of tournaments for games like that.”
“There’s a pro tour every year—the World Magic Cup. You travel to other cities and win big cash. Like, tens of thousands. And you get to go to cool cities, which I’d love to do.”
“Because you’re not a hipster with a man bun; you’re a nerd.”
He feigned insult. “I’ll have you know, this is a topknot, not a man bun. But, yeah, I’m such a nerd. Throw in magic tricks and the fact that I’m nineteen and still live with my mom. Now you’ve built yourself a raging nerd monster.” He thumped his chest with one fist and roared.
I laughed so hard, hot tea splashed on my hand.
“Are you laughing at my dorkishness?” he said, eyes merry.
“In a good way. You might be the biggest nerd I’ve ever met.”
“It’s good to be number one in something,” he said with a smile, holding out his coffee cup for me to clink. When I did, he lifted his chin toward a storefront. “I think that’s our destination.”
The record shop was part of a block-long building, its neighbors being a fish-and-chips shop and a gay nightclub. A leafy tree growing out of the sidewalk hid the store’s unassuming black-and-white sign—TENOR RECORDS. If it weren’t for the album covers plastering the glass door, we might have missed it.
“Put down your martini and let’s get to some sleuthing, Nora,” Daniel said, full of infectious cheer. A bell tinkled when he opened the door, and we stepped inside.
The narrow store was a claustrophobe’s nightmare. Clunky record racks stretched from the register to the Employees Only door in the back corner. Every inch of wall space was filled with albums pegged to display racks and vintage cardboard flats of old covers—operas and concerts from every decade, every language. And between the two outer walls, instruments hung from the ceiling by fishing wire: violins and bows, clarinets and flutes. It was like a scene from inside the Great Hall at Hogwarts.
“Whoa,” Daniel said, looking around as a string quartet played Mozart over the shop’s trembling stereo speakers. “We seem to be the only customers.”
And no employees. We were alone. “Maybe someone’s in the back? Let’s look around.”
Daniel and I strolled down an aisle, scanning the bins of records until I spotted the opera section, and he began flicking through the covers. Most of them appeared to be old and used. I caught snatches of words in vintage fonts: scenes and arias, Decca, Maria Callas, Pavarotti. Metropolitan Orchestra. Tosca, La Traviata, Antony and Cleopatra. It was like reading a book in a foreign language.
“Look at this thing,” Daniel murmured, hefting a giant boxed set of records emblazoned with raised silver letters. Der Ring Des Nibelungen. “This is one opera? Christ. Fifteen hours? That’s insane.”
“I’d probably fall asleep in the first hour.” I picked up a copy of arias from Verdi’s Aida. On the front was a photo of an enormous Egyptian temple set, the two opera singers inside it looking like ants. “Rome Opera House. I had no idea the sets were so elaborate.” I opened the gatefold to see more of the Egyptian temple inside.
“It’s like Broadway on crack,” Daniel said, standing closer to inspect the photograph with me. “You think this is what Raymond Darke listens to?”
At that moment, a single clerk emerged from the back offices, a pale, gangly man who looked to be in his early twenties, possibly younger. One side of his short blond hair was shaved, and the other flopped over his eyes. Tattooed musical notes along both wrists peeked out from his shirtsleeves when he stretched to straighten the top of a rack of sheet music. Then he headed toward the front register, stopping only when he spotted us.
“You guys need something?” he asked, pushing hair out of his eyes.
Daniel closed the Aida album, tucking it under his arm as he approached the clerk. “Hey, man. What’s up?” he said, casual as can be. “We were trying to track down someone who may be a regular customer here and wondering if you might be able to help us.”
“Uh . . .” The clerk looked at Daniel, then me. Then Daniel again. “Maybe?”
“He’s a white dude in his early fifties. About this tall,” he said, holding up his hand. “Looks like he enjoys wine—has a reddish nose and a potbelly. Wears a blue baseball cap. Frowns all the time.”
The clerk shrugged. “That sounds like half our customers, honestly.”
I added, “He’s well off. Would likely drop a lot of cash on collectibles. Rare vinyl, that sort of thing.”
“Yeah, we’ve got a couple customers who do. They pretty much keep the store afloat.”
Daniel whipped out his phone, and after pulling up a few screens, turned it around to show the clerk a photo. It was pixelated and a little blurry, but I recognized it: our mystery man in the hotel elevator. Daniel had snapped a picture of Mr. Kenneth’s security footage at work.
The clerk’s eyes brightened. “Yeah, that’s Mr. Waddle. Bill Waddle.”
Waddle? Was that another alias? Daniel and I shared a look before I asked, “Can you tell us anything about him?”
“Uh, well. We order a lot of imports for him.”
“Like this?” Daniel said, holding up the Aida album.
The clerk nodded. “Yeah, he’s into Verdi. But that particular pressing isn’t rare enough for him. He likes hard-to-find things. He’s been trying to track down a rare recording of The Mikado for about a year, but only ten copies were pressed. It’s worth a grand, easy.”
“Does he come here often?” I asked.
“A couple of times a month, I guess,” the clerk answered. “Sometimes to browse. Sometimes to pick up special orders.”
“You wouldn’t happen to have an address on file?” Daniel asked bluntly.
I was instantly nervous. I wasn’t expecting Daniel to ask that. It wasn’t part of the plan we’d discussed in the diner last night. We were just supposed to be getting a sense of Raymond Darke. What he likes. Where he goes. Who he was. We knew where to find him—at least, in theory. If we wanted to see him, we could wait until he came into the hotel again on Tuesday.
The clerk made a funny sound. “That’s private information. Sorry. I don’t even know if we have it, but if we did and I gave it out, I’d get fired. Why do you need it?”
“Honestly?” Daniel said. “We’re just trying to help out a friend.”
We were?
Daniel continued. “He took something from our friend, and they want it back. It was probably a mistake. He might not even realize he has it. Anyway, this Waddle guy is a total dick, and I’d be happy if I never saw him again. I’m just trying to do someone a solid.”
What a vague, terrible story. This guy would never buy it.
Except, he did.
The clerk laughed, and his shoulders relaxed. He leaned one hip against the counter and crossed his arms. “I’m so glad you said that. He makes me run around like a chicken with my head off, pulling this or that album, only to leave them piled on the floor when he’s finished. Nothing makes him happy. According to him, we never have what he wants, and we open too late, and all of this is always my fault somehow. Meanwhile, his two yappy bulldogs get free rein of the store, and they slobber on everything. He’s just a nightmare.”
“Dude,” Daniel said chummily. “That’s just how I pictured him. And I’m in customer service, so I’m completely understand your pain. Miserable people are the worst. And this guy does not like his life. You can tell.”
“You’re right about that.”
“Is there anything you can do to help?” Daniel asked.
“I can’t give you his address,” the clerk said. “But I can tell you that he’s always bragging that he’s woken up before the sun for thirty years. If you want to talk to him, he walks his slobbering dogs every morning at sunrise. Kerry Park, in Queen Anne.”
My inner Nancy Drew did cartwheels while Daniel gave me a secret, triumphant look.
Maybe this whole partnering-up idea was a good idea after all.