“Fate is by far the greatest mystery of all.”
—Lady Julia Grey, Silent in the Grave (2006)
What do people wear for dates that aren’t dates? I didn’t have a clue. That made me anxious. And several hours before I had to leave to catch a ferry the next night to meet Daniel, a slow-rising panic was filling my body. I hoped Aunt Mona knew what she was doing.
Critiquing my reflection in a floor mirror, I stood at the back of a boutique shop—Junk and Disorderly Vintage Clothes, just down the street from Mona’s theater, which separated their racks of vintage clothing by era, 1920s to 1990s. Aunt Mona squatted on the floor in front of me, checking the length of my hem, while Grandpa Hugo sat on a bench outside, chatting with a couple he knew from across the island, whom he’d stopped when he spotted them passing by.
“Perfect,” Mona said.
I twisted to peer at the paper tag pinned to the back of the bodice. “Better be. It’s insanely expensive.”
“Can you really put a price on something that looks this good?” she said, standing up to admire it from a fan of fake eyelashes that were made from tiny bird feathers. Today’s wig was a silver bob. “Besides, it’s my treat. You know I can always find money for new clothes.”
She’d bought most of mine since I was old enough to walk. I smoothed my hand down the fabric of a casual 1950s dress. It had a narrow belt and a pleated skirt that looked “supremely Nancy Drew,” according to Aunt Mona. It was also the only thing in the store right now in my size that was purple—mauve, close enough—for whatever reason Daniel had in mind.
“If we had a week or two, I could make you something fabulous,” she said.
Likely it would be covered in sequins and have insane accessories.
“I love this,” I said. “Honestly.”
“Oh, good!” she said, clapping the tips of her fingers. “I needed a little joy today.”
I looked at her face more closely. “Why? You haven’t seen Leon Snodgrass again, have you? I thought you were going out on his stupid yacht tomorrow.”
“Still am. Just to talk.”
“About what?”
Her eyes darted away. “Nothing. To catch up, that’s all.”
“Why don’t I believe you?” Maybe it was the little worry line that creased her forehead. Maybe it was because I had no faith in Leon Snodgrass. For all I knew, he was planning to seduce her and whisk her away to Texas, or wherever he was living now. Aunt Mona leaving the island one day had always been a secret worry of mine, and now that I was working in the city and soon facing decisions about being an adult, I double worried about her leaving. I just always thought she’d be moving back to Seattle—not to the other side of the country.
I wasn’t sure I could handle that.
“Is there something you aren’t telling me?” I asked.
“Ugh,” she complained, letting her head loll back as she squeezed her feather-deckled eyes shut. “You’re worse than my own mother, Birdie.”
“You don’t speak to your mother.”
“No, mi corazón—she doesn’t speak to me. There’s a difference.”
“I feel like you’re keeping secrets,” I said. “That violates our sacred pact to always be honest with each other.” I raised three fingers. “It’s the second part of the Daring Dame pledge.”
“On my honor.” She held up three fingers, then took my hand, petted it, and sighed. “Sometimes when you say things a certain way, you look and sound just like your mom, and it makes me extraordinarily happy. Remember when I sold my first painting, and we were going to go out to that fancy seafood restaurant and celebrate, but you’d sneaked that entire jar of Nutella? It was all over your face.”
“You called me a brownnose for weeks. Ms. Patty, too.”
“Your mom was so calm when she was trying to get the truth out of you—‘Birdie, I get the sinking feeling you’ve already spoiled your dinner,’ ” Mona said, doing a pretty good imitation of my mother.
I chuckled, remembering standing in the kitchen of our tiny apartment, knowing I was in trouble. “I truly had no idea how you guys knew. I’d buried that jar in the trash pretty well. And, you know, to this day, I can’t even hear the word ‘hazelnut’ without getting a little queasy.”
Mona’s laugh was deep and throaty as she tugged at the bodice of my dress, looking me over. “Honestly, me either. I had no idea a girl that small could vomit so much. You were a live-action parenting course. I should get some kind of medal for all the stuff I learned from living with the two of you.”
“Hey,” I said, squinting. “Don’t think you can distract me with memory-lane stories. What’s going on with you? I’m genuinely starting to worry, and when I worry, things get blown up to epic proportions. In my head, you’ve got three days to live, and you’re leaving on a plane to Jakarta tonight with Leon without even so much as a good-bye.”
She snorted a little laugh. “If I had three days to live, I definitely wouldn’t spend it on a plane with Leon. Stop worrying. It’s nothing like that what-so-evah,” she said dramatically. “Look, it’s not a three-days-to-live situation, but I don’t need gossipy island busybodies listening in on my personal stories here.” She waved her hand toward a couple of elderly shoppers who were most definitely listening to us, scattering when they realized they’d been caught. Then Mona said in a lower voice to me, “I promise we’ll do girl talk soon, okay?”
“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.”