CHAPTER SIX 
There Goes the Bride
THERE WAS NO TIME TO lose. Once Xavier reluctantly agreed that, yes, I could start a search for Veronica and we could keep the cameras off until I got a better idea of what had happened to her, I hustled back into the elevator and headed down. This time, I went straight to the casino floor.
“Where are we going? Are we even allowed to be here?” asked Bess, who had followed me along with George. “Aren’t we underage?”
I could barely hear her with all the binging and bonging and clanking change sounds, not to mention the music that was pumping in at what had to be an unhealthy volume. Bright lights shone all over the casino floor, making it look like daylight at any hour. “I’m pretty sure you’re right,” I admitted. “But just… wait.”
I hadn’t spent a lot of time in casinos. But I had watched enough casino heist movies to know that casinos had massive security centers… security centers that they are notoriously secretive about, because people tend to stop having fun and spending money when they realize their every move is being tracked. I needed to get inside somehow. But I had a feeling that a teenage girl just showing up at the hotel’s front desk and asking for an invitation wouldn’t be taken very seriously.
I walked over to a slot machine, looked around, and perched on the seat in front of it. Looking at the screen, I could barely make sense of it. The machine was branded with a network TV game show host, whose voice enticed me to “spin the wheel!” But the game was video-based, meaning there was nothing really spinning. Tiny icons formed five rows and three columns. Lines framed the screen, showing all the different sets of images you could use to win—if you paid enough money.
“Nancy!” George hissed. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but for heaven’s sake, slots have the worst odds of any game in here! It’s simple math! Not to mention, they’re all—”
“Excuse me, miss?” A stocky, friendly looking man, dressed in black pants and a black satin jacket, had sidled up to me while George was giving her rant. “Can I see some ID, please?”
I turned to him. “Are you security?”
He nodded and tapped his name tag, which was made to look like a police badge. It read PARKER. I wasn’t sure whether that was his first or last name. “If you can’t produce an ID, I’m afraid you’ll need to come with me.”
“To the security office?” I asked eagerly.
He looked nonplussed. “No,” he said. “But I suspect you’re underage, and I need you to leave the gaming floor.”
I reached into my tiny purse and pulled out my driver’s license. “I am underage. And I sat at this slot machine. Now don’t you need to take me to the security office?”
Parker had gone from nonplussed to confused. “Miss, are you well? It’s not against the law to sit at a slot machine. But as you are underage, I will escort you off the gaming floor.”
“I’m underage too,” George blurted, producing her own driver’s license.
“Me too,” Bess added, “but I don’t have ID because I didn’t get the dress with pockets.”
Parker’s polished demeanor was cracking. He furrowed his brows, looking from Bess, to George, to me.
“The thing is,” I said, “we all probably should go to the security office, because we’re having an emergency.”
It makes sense for casinos to be serious about security. After all, they don’t just need to protect their employees and patrons from crime being committed inside the casino; they also need to make sure that no one is cheating the casino. And because that’s a multimillion-dollar proposition, there is basically no spot in a casino or related property that isn’t watched over by one or more security cameras.
I explained what had happened at the wedding to Parker as he very reluctantly led us out a nondescript doorway hidden behind a bank of poker machines, down a brightly lit hallway, and to a heavy reinforced steel door that was, almost definitely, locked.
“That sounds terrible,” Parker said, “and I understand why you’re concerned, but I’m telling you, no civilian gets inside the Soar security office.”
“But Parker, weren’t you listening?” I asked. “She left her purse and wallet behind! Doesn’t that sound suspicious to you? If one of your security cameras got footage of where Veronica went, it could help us understand whether she disappeared on her own—or was taken by somebody.”
Parker made a low sound in his throat—annoyance he was trying to tamp down, I suspected—and shook his head. “A runaway bride,” he said, “is not a crime. I suggest you go to the police and engage their help. If they decide a crime has been committed on Soar property, they can demand our footage, and we will hand it over.”
I sighed.
“The groom is already alerting the police,” Bess said. “In fact, he was on the phone on the roof-deck when we left him. But surely you know that when a person goes missing, the first twenty-four hours are when they’re most likely to be found alive? Time is of the essence here, sir!”
Parker frowned at Bess, then at me. “No one gets behind that door unless you work here,” he insisted.
George had pulled out her phone and was fussing with it. Without another word, she suddenly pushed the screen toward Parker. I heard Xavier’s anguished cry from when I’d stepped onto the roof-deck a few minutes earlier.
As Xavier began ranting into the camera, Parker turned to me. “What is this?”
“It’s a livestream,” I replied without missing a beat. “It’s already gone out to Redd Zone’s two hundred fifty thousand followers. And it’s pretty intense, so it’s likely to go viral.” I paused, and George stopped the video.
“Unless I’m mistaken,” I went on, “that video sure makes it look like a bride was kidnapped or worse in this very casino. Once that gets out, I suspect people are going to think twice about getting married here. Or staying in the hotel. Or spending their money in the casino. It could be devastating for the Soar, which is such a shame! It’s such a high-end place, which someone clearly spent a lot of money to build and maintain. If only some smart, enterprising, underage girl could prove once and for all that nothing nefarious happened to this woman at the Soar…”
Parker scowled, then ran his hand over his face. He pulled a card from a lanyard around his neck and pressed it to a reader on the reinforced door, which opened with a snick.
“Let’s make this quick,” he said. “The boss is not going to be happy.”
He opened the door and stepped inside. We followed him. Almost immediately, I gasped. I’d been expecting a bunch of people watching security cameras, but nothing could have prepared me for how vast the dimly lit space was, and how many people there were, watching a seemingly endless number of cameras. As soon as the door opened to reveal us, it was like time stopped. Everyone turned from the screens they were monitoring to stare at three teenage guests in semiformal attire—guests who definitely didn’t belong.
“Who in the name of all that’s holy is that?” an irritated female voice demanded from the darkness.
Parker cleared his throat. “This here is Nancy Drew,” he said, “and I can explain.”
After much deliberation and explaining, the three of us were put in a private room and given a laptop loaded with the afternoon’s footage from the roof-deck; the elevators; the floor where the observation deck, restrooms, and bar/café were; and Veronica’s floor.
“There she is,” Bess said right away as, onscreen, Veronica entered the elevator from the roof-deck in her wedding dress, still holding the crystal headpiece.
We all watched, transfixed, as she pressed a button and got off on the floor below.
“The observation deck floor!” I cried. “So she did go down to use the restroom there.”
There were no security cameras in the restrooms, obviously (gross). But when we switched to the footage from the floor with the bar/café, we saw Veronica enter the restroom… and then nothing.
Ten minutes went by. Fifteen. “I don’t get it, guys,” I complained. “I looked in there! She was not in the restroom when I got there. And the mother and daughter who were in there hadn’t seen her.”
“But we don’t see her come out,” Bess said, biting her lip.
“Or do we?” George asked. “We do see a few people go in and out after Veronica goes in. Are we sure one of them isn’t…?”
I hit rewind. We went back to when Veronica disappeared into the restroom. An older woman wearing a velour lounge suit exited the restroom, futzing with her curls. Then two young women in braids and matching family reunion T-shirts, laughing hysterically as they headed to the bar/café. And then…
“There!” Bess cried. The timestamp on the video put it just three minutes after Veronica had entered. “Check her out.”
It was another older woman, or so I’d thought, dressed in a baggy sweatshirt over a turtleneck, thick leggings, and a baseball cap that said WHAT HAPPENS IN VEGAS…
“But her hair!” I cried. “It looks short and gray.”
“No, look at that walk,” George said, pointing. “I know my cousin. Bess is right: that’s Veronica.”
We were all silent for a moment as we digested that fact—and what it meant.
“She stashed clothes in the restroom,” I said, struggling to believe it.
“She stashed a wig in the restroom,” George added.
Bess shook her head. “She planned this,” she said. “I don’t know why, but Veronica planned to leave Xavier at the altar—and disappear.”
I thought back again to when we’d seen Veronica the night before on the observation deck. The red eyes, the sadness in her gaze—was it related to this, knowing she planned to leave? Then I thought of how Veronica had beamed when the door to the roof-deck opened and she first saw Xavier. She loved him. At least, in the moment, I had been sure of it. And that certainly matched how she’d acted every time I’d seen the couple together before that point, since they’d gotten engaged.
Why, then? Why had she become a runaway bride?
We went back to the elevator footage and found Veronica—in her old-woman disguise—getting back in and riding the elevator to the third floor, the floor that housed the casino’s buffet and pricey steakhouse. We could see the door open, and Veronica talking to someone outside the elevator. After a moment, she exited. We waited for a few minutes, but she never got back into the elevator.
“We need more footage,” Bess said with a sigh.
When we went back out into the security office to request footage from the third floor, we learned that security guards had searched all public areas of the casino but had found no sign of Veronica. I told them about the disguise, but they said they had seen no trace of the disguised Veronica either. Deanna had allowed them into her suite and they saw the same things we had—her purse, including her phone, left on the bed. No indication that she had been back after we left to go to the wedding.
Now the security head, the woman who’d demanded to know who we were when Parker brought us into the office, came with us into the little room where we sat down to view the third-floor footage. Her name tag read FLORA.
“I have to hand it to you kids,” she said, reaching for the mouse that sped up or slowed down footage. “You’ve figured out more in a couple of hours than I’ve seen detectives put together in days.”
“Whoa,” George breathed when the third-floor footage came up onscreen. “This isn’t going to be easy.”
The hallway that the elevators exited onto on the third floor was mobbed. “The third floor is where the buffet is,” Flora explained. “It’s kind of a big deal in Vegas. And this was right around the early bird specials.”
We watched the same five minutes over and over, but while we could sort of see someone who looked like Veronica in disguise exit the elevator, the crowd seemed to absorb her completely. When the crowd had moved on, she was gone. There was no telling what had happened to her.
Flora demanded footage of all the stairways and exits from the third floor, and it took at least an hour to carefully watch it all, but there was no sign of Veronica leaving the building.
Bess coughed. “So she’s still—here?” she asked incredulously. “In the casino, in disguise or something?”
Flora huffed. “If you were a runaway bride, and you took time to put together this disguise and plan your exit this carefully… would you stay in the same casino as all your guests and your former fiancé?”
George shook her head. “Definitely not. But there’s no footage of her leaving….”
“Well.” Flora shook her head. “Here’s the thing, girls. And I can tell you this because you’re underage, and if I catch you out on the gaming floor, I’ll have you arrested. Our security system is pretty tight, but there are holes—every system has holes. Cameras get damaged and need repair, and there are spots in the stairwells the cameras don’t catch. Ways to sneak out in a crowd and not be detected. If your friend knew what she was doing, she could most certainly have gotten out.”
I looked at my friends. George looked thoughtful, and Bess’s eyes were wide.
“And she could be anywhere by now,” I filled in. “Anywhere at all.”
The security team searched the restaurant floor but found no further sign of Veronica.
“What about the police?” Bess asked as we left, blinking helplessly as we stepped from the dark security office into the bright white hallway. “Xavier was going to call them.”
“And he did,” Flora replied. “We’ve been cooperating with them. They’re questioning Xavier. Dude doesn’t seem to know much, but when a bride runs like this, you have to wonder what she’s running from. I’m sorry, girls—I think we’ve done all we can for today.”
I swallowed hard as we left Flora and the security office behind. I couldn’t help thinking of Priya’s face when she’d told Veronica in the suite earlier that she didn’t have to marry Xavier. She didn’t trust him, and neither did Veronica’s parents. Arlo had said he couldn’t count on Xavier. Veronica had left him at the hospital the night before.
But they loved each other. I had been so sure when they saw each other on the roof-deck.
Maybe, in this case, love just wasn’t enough to go through with the wedding?
My friends and I quickly moved past the gaming floor and took the elevator to the buffet. It was eight thirty at night, later than it felt like it should be, but the security office and the gaming floor had no windows, and I had always heard that casinos pumped in lots of fresh oxygen to make gamblers feel more awake. I felt disoriented and fairly sick to my stomach, but George insisted that we should sit down and eat something, or we’d regret it later. So we picked up plates at the end of the buffet bar and began loading up. I could see why Flora had said it was kind of a big deal in Vegas—all you could eat for just $12.99! And there were high-end items on the buffet, like shrimp and prime rib. I almost wished I was hungrier.
I lingered at the salad bar, trying to pick things that looked fresh and easy on the stomach. When I got back to the table, George and Bess were staring at George’s phone in a way that made me think a Significant Development had occurred. “What’s up?” I asked.
George turned the phone to face me. “Xavier is out of questioning,” she said. “He texted us to see what we learned. Should we cooperate with him?”
Bess cleared her throat. “It does seem like Veronica left on purpose, with the disguise and everything. It makes me wonder if we can trust him.”
I nodded. “I get that,” I said, “but he’s going to find out what we know eventually anyway, if the security here is cooperating with the police. We might as well learn what he knows. Want to invite him down here to debrief?”
George nodded and began typing on her phone. I took a few half-hearted bites of my meal, and the food was making me feel a little better. A few minutes later, Xavier arrived. He was wearing sweatpants and a Redd Zone hoodie, and he looked, if this was possible in the scant hours since we’d seen him on the roof-deck, like he’d been awake for seventy-two hours straight. His eyes were red and a little swollen, implying tears. But he looked relieved to see us as he sat down at our table.
“What happened?” Bess asked him. “You go first.”
Xavier sighed. “They questioned me for hours, bro. But in the end, they said they didn’t have a reason to suspect me.” He went on to say that he’d told the cops that his and Veronica’s relationship had never been better. After a while, the police explained to him that security footage showed Veronica changing into a disguise and leaving, and that the disguise implied that she left of her own free will. They thought she probably got cold feet.
“But I just know that’s not it,” Xavier said, pressing his fingers to his temples. “V is my soulmate. I would know if she wanted to leave me. Something happened. And I’m afraid someone did something to her.”
George looked sympathetic, but she still pressed. “But how do you explain the disguise, then? She had to have planted that earlier.”
Xavier winced and nodded. “I know. I know. Maybe someone threatened her if she went through with the wedding. Maybe she had something going on that she wanted to work out on her own before we got married. I don’t know! All I know is, V loved me too much to leave me like this. There’s something bigger going on—something we’re not seeing yet.”
I caught Bess’s eye, and I could tell that she, too, was struggling with Xavier’s explanation. The easiest answer was certainly that Veronica had chosen to leave. But at the same time, something about his manner made me believe Xavier. I knew not everyone trusted him, but it felt to me like he was telling the truth.
Still—that didn’t mean Xavier knew everything about his bride-to-be, or what she really felt about him.
“So the police aren’t doing anything?” I asked after a moment.
“Well, they’re filing a missing person report,” Xavier replied. “Her leaving behind her wallet and cell phone was enough evidence of that. They’ve put out a trace on her credit cards. But they say there’s not much else they can do, unless I find evidence of a crime. Until then, I don’t think this is high priority for them.”
There was a moment of sad silence, none of us knowing quite what to say. We filled Xavier in on what we’d learned in the security office, but he knew most of it already from the police. When we finished our meal, it seemed like there wasn’t much left to do but turn in for the night.
Xavier looked teary again. “I just know she wouldn’t leave me,” he whimpered. “She’d never make me feel like this on purpose. She’s the love of my life! Something happened to her, I know it.”
As Bess and George leaned in to comfort him, I had a sudden brain wave. “If there’s no crime, according to the police, does that mean they didn’t take evidence?” I asked. “Meaning you still have her phone?”
Xavier looked a little startled, but then nodded. “Yeah, I have it.”
“Do you know the passcode?” I asked. “Do you mind if I do a little poking around in it, looking for clues?”
I stared into Xavier’s eyes. See, this is a big test for possible criminals: a guilty person will not want to hand over evidence that might get them caught. But Xavier looked totally open, maybe even relieved. “That would be amazing, Nancy,” he said, seemingly earnestly. “I’ll give it to you, and the passcode is 10-23. That’s the day we met.”
He smiled a little sadly. We packed up our things and followed Xavier back to his room, where we waited in the hall while he got Veronica’s phone and handed it to me.
“Listen, tell me anything you find out, if it might mean she’s safe.” He hesitated. “Even—even if you think it’s something I might not want to know. Even if she doesn’t want to marry me, I just want to know she’s okay.”
I nodded. “I’ll definitely do that, Xavier. Now, try to get some sleep.”
We said our goodbyes. Exhausted, Bess, George, and I summoned the elevator to go down to our floor. But when the elevator doors opened, they revealed a familiar face.
“Priya!” Bess said. “How are you doing?”
As we crowded in, I noticed that Priya was still wearing her red satin bridesmaid dress, but her hair had fallen a bit and she looked worn out. She was leaning precariously against the railing on the back wall.
“I’m fiiiine,” Priya replied, shifting to lean against the corner. “And you? What’ve you all been doing since the… the wedding that wassssshn’t?” She laughed at her own joke, a little too hard.
I exchanged glances with Bess and George. It looked like Priya had spent a lot of the hours since Veronica disappeared at the bar. Her slurred speech and awkward balance told me she had been drinking.
“We’ve been trying to figure out what happened to Veronica,” I said. “You know, talking to security and stuff.”
Priya’s eyes widened. “Oh, why would you do that? There’sh no need.”
Bess frowned. “What do you mean there’s no need?”
“Issshhhn’t it obviousss?” Priya asked. “Veronica finally lissshened to me and got shmart. She ran away.”
“From what?” Bess asked. The elevator dinged to a stop: fourteenth floor. It wasn’t where we were staying, so it had to be Priya’s floor.
“From Xavier,” Priya said, lunging toward the open door. “She finally saw it. That guy was going to kill her.”