“Twenty-five years,” I told Campbell. “Not twenty. Whoever the Lady of the Lake is, she died five years before Ana disappeared.”
“Is this the part where you tell me I told you so?” Campbell asked.
“No,” I said. I’d wondered—and suspected—too.
“Good,” Campbell replied. “In other news, I vote we get Sadie-Grace after we visit the valet stand, because the good Lord knows the girl’s sweeter than she is discreet. Now, do you want to distract the valet, or should I?”
Campbell could go from zero to full-on Southern belle in half a heartbeat. Luckily for us, she could also go from Southern belle to seductress and back again in a heartbeat and a half. The poor valet was going to get whiplash.
But at least she had his attention.
I ducked behind the valet stand, telling myself that I was doing this for Campbell—because I owed her one, and she needed the White Gloves.
She needed something. I knew what that was like.
The valet stand had a cabinet built into the back. It was, not surprisingly, locked. I grabbed a pin from my hair and went to work.
“But what do you do,” I could hear Campbell saying, “when a car is too big to fit in a spot? Or too… powerful to handle?”
I rolled my eyes and continued jimmying the pin in the lock. The mechanism clicked, then gave, and a second later, I had the cabinet open. Inside, there was a Peg-Board, with easily a hundred numbered pegs. Valet keys hung on a good three-quarters of them. I scanned the rungs, trying to figure out what Victoria had meant when she’d said that we should check out the valet stand.
“Personally, I’m a bit of daredevil. You won’t tell, will you? I just like to go fast, is all.”
There. Three rows down, there was a key on a familiar-looking chain. A snake wrapped around a rose. I plucked it from the board and then saw two others. I grabbed them, too—seconds before I heard someone coming out the front door of the Arcadia hotel.
Keeping low to the ground, I shuffled toward the entrance and then popped up beside the group as they exited. When Campbell saw me, she cut the valet loose, and two minutes later, we’d made it far enough away from the building to examine our loot.
The three key chains were identical. The keys that hung on them were different, but all three had one thing in common.
Size.
“Golf cart keys,” Campbell said. “One for you. One for me. One for Sadie-Grace.”
Right after Victoria had pointed us to the valet stand, I’d been more focused on the bombshell she’d dropped about the Lady of the Lake than her parting shot. Don’t tell Lily.
“If Lily’s out, I’m out,” I told Campbell. I’d never cared about impressing the White Gloves in the first place, and I didn’t think there was any more information to get out of Victoria.
“What if Lily weren’t out?” Campbell asked me.
I wasn’t sure what she was getting at. “Victoria just said . . .”
Campbell smiled. “I happen to have an in with one of the other White Gloves,” she said. “One who isn’t overly fond of Victoria Gutierrez.”