Five

THE DREAM GAVIN HAD THAT NIGHT was unrelenting. He was drowning. He opened his eyes under water as a mouthful of air bubbles escaped. The river water tasted bitter, and he coughed, expelling more bubbles.

This isn’t real! he screamed in his mind as he thrust toward the surface. This is a dream! Despite the effort, he sank again as if he were being sucked downward. The flickering light through the top of the murky water grew faint as an unseen force pulled him deeper.

I’ve gotta wake up!

Panic took control of his limbs. As he flailed about, sinking ever downward, his arm snagged something like a vine or rope. He managed to grab onto the slick, rubbery line, twisting the vine around his arm, and stopped himself with a jolt. His heart pounded, and his lungs felt as if they were on the brink of exploding from the lack of oxygen. Gavin saw spots.

Though the undertow no longer pulled at him, the weight of his waterlogged clothing added to the strain of pulling himself up the rope.

After a few agonizing moments, Gavin burst through the water’s surface. He gasped uncontrollably as rain pelted him.

When he came to his senses, he saw that the rope, which turned out to be a green extension cord, was tethered to the support beam of a nearby bridge. He pulled himself along the cord toward the steel structure.

The distance between the low bridge and river was a mere three to four feet. If he could grab on to the steel undergirding, it’d be a refuge until the storm passed. Gavin heaved toward the structure with all of his might. A few strenuous moments later, he made it under the bridge. His lungs burned with exhaustion as he tried and failed to grab the support beam.

The extension cord wound tightly around the column, and something that looked like dark seaweed floated atop the water next to it. He carefully rotated himself to the side of the cold concrete pillar. He reached for the stringy object that bobbed about. Fear seized him as he realized that it was a mound of jet-black human hair. Trying to free his hand from entanglement, he pulled back, lifting a young Asian woman’s head from the water in the process. He gasped in shock and let the head hit the water with a splash.

The extension cord encircled the young woman’s body below the surface, crisscrossing her form. She was strapped to the column with her arms against her sides.

Gavin was petrified with dread. The anxiety of being in close proximity to a dead body was almost more than he could bear. Maybe he could free her and let her float away. Holding tightly to the extension cord with one hand, he grasped her hair with the other. The dead woman’s eyes were closed, and large, plastic earrings dangled from her ears an inch or so above the surface. The design was of two turquoise dolphins swimming opposite each other in a circle. He lowered her head and cried.

Gavin tried to move away, only to discover that he had become entangled in the hair again. He splashed frantically to get loose, but he couldn’t break free. Out of panic, he let go of the extension cord. Now his only lifeline was the dead girl’s perm.

He tried to grab the cord around her neck but instead snagged one of the dolphin earrings. The hoop ripped through the flesh of her lobe. An instant later, he was floating backward away from her under the bridge.

Hard rain struck his face even more fiercely than before as he emerged from under the bridge. A figure looked down from the edge. She wore a yellow dress.

Jo, is that you?

Gavin shook the raindrops from his eyes for a better look. “You’re not my Jo,” he mumbled in confusion.

The scent of lavender filled his nostrils. The woman held something above her head the size of a small suitcase, something shiny. He couldn’t make out the unclear shape.

Then, with a voice that boomed like thunder, she said, “I’m coming through, and you’re going to help me.” She threw the object, hitting Gavin squarely on the head, and then everything went dark.

Gavin awoke to the sound of his own screaming.

Even after the initial shock of coming out of a sound sleep lifted, he continued to breathe heavily. The details of the dream faded like fog subjected to the heat of a new day.

He took a moment to acclimate to his surroundings. The bedclothes were a damp, tangled mess, and he was drenched in sweat. On the far side of the room, an elongated shard of morning sunlight escaped through the suite’s drapes onto the floor.

Gavin’s mouth tasted like a burned tire. He grunted, “Coffee,” and shambled in his plaid boxers across the plush carpet to the small percolator. Moments later, the single-cup maker was dutifully brewing a small foil packet labeled House Blend as he headed to the bathroom.

Returning to the main area of the suite, he promised himself to never again get as drunk as he’d been the previous night. He didn’t even remember how he’d made it back to his room. Cup in hand, Gavin took long, measured sips of the steamy liquid. Not even a river of coffee could wash this headache away. He remembered how Josephine would have a fresh pot of his favorite blend waiting for him each morning. She joked that the aroma warded off the evil fairies that caused writer’s block.

If only that were true. Gavin hadn’t written anything new in over a year and a half, not since the divorce. The book tour he was on was for a manuscript that he had completed while he was still with Jo. Except for an essay written for TIME Magazine comparing vampirism to a distorted version of the Eucharist, he hadn’t done anything of note for over nineteen months, fairies or not.

He opened another single-serving packet and set another cup to brew. Across the room, something caught his attention. At first, he thought that one of the white curtains was off the rod and on the floor, but that wasn’t it.

Across the suite, a long, beige sheet of paper curled out of the typewriter and onto the floor like a thousand-year-old ribbon. It reminded Gavin of the classic images of St. Nicholas holding a spiraling parchment with the names of every child in the world. He moved cautiously toward it, hoping that he hadn’t damaged the device during his bender from the night before.

To his astonishment, the winding scroll was covered in typewriter text. Expecting clumps of nonsensical type on the paper, he was shocked to find coherent sentences. Of course, each paragraph contained random occurrences of words with wrong characters, but that was the fault of the machine’s peculiar keypad.

It smelled like the pages of an old book. He held the midsection of the roll of paper to his nose and took in the aroma. Closing his eyes for a few seconds, he imagined himself in a cramped cottage bookstore, holding a first-edition Faulkner or some other classic work. The scent eased a fraction of the pounding that was his head.

With exuberance, he traced the scroll back around to where it started on the floor, back at the beginning. The story began with the abduction of an erotic dancer of Asian descent on her way to work at a men’s club. Written from the perspective of the killer, the opening chapters showed his blasé attitude in selecting a victim as if he were choosing a ripe tomato from a fruit vendor’s cart.

Gavin’s eyes raced across the sheet with unmitigated delight. He remembered the classic Hemmingway quote: “Write drunk; edit sober.” Maybe the old codger had been onto something after all.

He continued as the text masterfully described the character forcing the girl under the boardwalk and tying her to a support beam with an extension cord. As the killer applied another layer of duct tape to the victim’s mouth, he told her that when the tide came in that night, she wouldn’t drown through her mouth, but her nose. He kissed her on the forehead while tearing one of the dolphin-shaped hoop earrings through her left lobe. The killer examined it like a trinket that washed up on the shore of some lonesome beach.

The last thing the perp said to the crying girl was the single word, “Souvenir.”

Then the story unfolded with the typical aftermath of the detective genre—an early morning fisherman spotted the body, there were descriptions of the goings-on at a crime scene, and a crotchety old detective worked the manhunt with a newbie partner. Even though these segments were not nearly as intense as the crime, they were still first-rate. The best part of it was the absence of the Damien Marksman character.

As he prepared to remove the paper from the typewriter, something on the page caught his eye, or rather something not on the page. The pangrams he’d typed the afternoon before while on the phone with Beverly and Billy were gone, except for one—the one that had left out the letter K. He shuddered when he looked at it.

Q: JUST WHAT UNEXPECTED HORRORS BEFALL A VERY CRAZY MR.GAVIN CURTIS?

But those words hadn’t been the last ones he’d typed before heading off to the bar. Those had been “Reichenbach Falls.” Was he losing his mind? Everything he’d typed before and after that sentence was gone, yet the blank space was still there on the page where those words had been. He ran his finger across the coarse paper stock and was slightly relieved to feel indentations in the blank areas on the paper. But why did all of the other phrases fade or disappear and the text about him remain? Even more alarming was the possibility of the story of the murdered Asian dancer dissolving into nothingness. Using the camera feature of his cell phone, he took snapshots of the writing, thirteen pics in all.

Gavin delicately tore the paper roll from the top of the machine and grabbed his pen for markups. He re-read the story as the long scroll trailed behind him on his way to the edge of the bed. The writing was sublime. It was perfect, superb in the classic Gavin Curtis style. It was chock full of what a leading horror critic from long ago had classified as “Curtis’s poetic flourishes of gore.”

Gavin placed the pen on the bed beside him. He didn’t need it. Other than the mistype errors caused by the quirky machine, there was nothing to change. It was a flawless piece. He marveled at the notion that he’d written a first draft that required no revision—and written it stone-drunk, no less. Usually, Billy Cavanaugh only looked at his stories after the third or even sometimes fourth draft, but here was something that Gavin could proudly send to press without any editing.

Giddy with excitement, he made a fist pump in the air. “I’m back! Oh, God, this is gonna be so huge. I’m so back.” It felt like he was twenty-five again, despite the awful hangover pounding at his head. The aches brought on from the night before would pass, but this thing was his emancipation from the rut he’d been trapped in. The disappearance of the pangrams didn’t matter.

He shot a glance at the alarm clock display. It read 10:38 a.m. in dark red characters. Gavin fumbled for pillows to prop himself up for his third self-indulgent reading and clicked the television remote. The Dodgers and the Reds had been tied 1-1 at the end of the fourth inning last night when he was in the bar. At least that was what he last remembered of the game. Cycling through the channels to get the final score, he came across an overly chipper morning show. He decided he could endure them for the sake of the scores. The hosts cackled away for a few minutes about the latest celebrity mishaps and gossip.

Finally, they broke to the scheduled local news segment. There was an aerial shot of half a dozen police cars and emergency response vehicles parked along a fishing pier. The crawl at the bottom of the screen relayed the grim message: “Local resident, Misa Kawaguchi, abducted near Pier 719, bound to support column until drowned. Police Chief Taylor: ‘The most inhuman thing that I’ve ever witnessed.’”

Gavin rose slowly from the bed and stood, remote in hand, feeling his mind turn inside out. His blood ran cold while a distraught-looking man in uniform, who Gavin guessed was the police chief, concluded his final comments about the murder. A high-school yearbook photo of a smiling young girl replaced the image of the man. It must’ve been the most recent photo the media could get by airtime, the graduation date being from four years before. The text under the picture read, “Victim—Misa Kawaguchi.” Gavin gasped, noting the girl’s Asian features.

The floor beneath him felt as if it had fallen away. He slumped to the floor with his back against the bed, crumpling part of the paper roll in the process. What’s going on here?

He chewed his lip as the report continued. The newscaster bore a solemn expression as he encouraged viewers with any information regarding the case to call the station’s tip line. Gavin sprang into action, nervously jotting the number down in the margin of his story.

As the program shifted to a brief recap of weather and sports, Gavin stared at the widescreen in frozen silence. The Dodgers had beaten Cincinnati 4-1, but he barely registered it. Internally, there was a firestorm swirling in his mind as he struggled to force the pieces of the murder together.

How could this be? Was this for real?

The channel returned to the annoying clamor of the morning show, prodding Gavin from his trancelike state. He turned the television volume low.

Think, Gav! Think about it. What’s happening here? Concentrate. Just work through it like a puzzle.

As crazy as it seemed, there had to be a logical explanation.

He paced even before being aware of doing so. When he passed in front of the full-length mirror, he caught sight of his hair spiraling in all directions.

“Where did the story come from?” he asked, patting his hair down. A few wild strands defiantly stood back up. One thing he knew was that he couldn’t take this horrible thing that happened to the girl and market it as fiction—not without altering some of the details, at least.

He looked down at the phone number scribbled on the parchment. Of course he didn’t have a Crime Solvers tip. How could he? But maybe he could get some information about the case.

Gavin grabbed his cell phone from the nightstand only to discover that the battery was dead. It’d been a stroke of luck that there’d been enough of a charge to snap pics of the story. He set it to charge and picked up the hotel phone.

Then he lowered the phone to its cradle as if placing a sleeping rattlesnake back in its terrarium.

How could he be so stupid? He wrote detective and spy novels! It’d be child’s play to send a trace back to where he was.

He stared at the cord, taut between his twitching fingers. Until he had all the facts, and most importantly, until he was able to prove his own innocence, he couldn’t tell the cops what he knew. He couldn’t tell anyone.

But what if the police already knew about him? The notion made him feel like he’d been kicked in the chest. It was undeniable that someone out there knew what was happening.

What if the police concluded that he was involved? What then? How could he prove he wasn’t? What if someone accused him?

Gavin rushed to the window, half expecting to see squad car lights. There were no patrol cars, only the parking lot and the blocked-off bridge in the distance. “Stupid, stupid, stupid!” he chided himself. Of course there were no police. This thinking was merely the result of an overactive imagination, right?

Be cool, Gav. Be cool. Gotta get control of this before it goes off the tracks.

Frustrated, he repeatedly slammed his palm against the wall next to the curtain. “This is ridiculous. I haven’t done anything wrong.”

He glanced down at his stinging hand. “It’s impossible! I couldn’t have done what’s on the page.”

He turned from the window to face the antique typewriter on the desk. Gavin swallowed hard and approached the device.

But could he have done the things on the page, things that he’d written about?

The news reported that the murder scene was only a couple of miles from the resort. Gavin massaged his temples. This was the mother of all hangovers. Could he have been drunk enough to have been there and not remember it?

Even if he had walked two miles stone-drunk—murder? Why would he kill anyone? It was impossible. He just needed time to sort it all out. Equal measures of confusion and panic flooded in like a tsunami, making it difficult to breathe. He began to hyperventilate. He thought of the suffocating frog from his childhood. If he didn’t settle down, he was going to pass out, or worse, have a heart attack.

He stopped at the edge of the desk, transfixed on the machine as if he were waiting for it to move. Had it moved? He was certain that it’d been in the center of the desk when he tore the story from it. Now it was slightly over to the left.

He reached ever so slowly to touch it. Before his fingers made contact with the keys, a knock from the door startled him. Gavin jumped back from the desk as if a cannon had been fired in the room.

Cops!

Without thinking, Gavin rushed to unlatch the sliding door to the balcony opposite the entry. The glass was a quarter of the way open before logic kicked in and he recognized the obvious flaw in going that way. There was no escape, and he couldn’t very well hide from the police out there.

More knocking at the door rang out across the vast suite, this time more forceful.

He faced the paper roll with the story opening—evidence! The chapters might as well be his confession. He scrambled to wad up the scroll and shove it between the mattress and box spring. A few seconds later, the dreadful click of a key card disengaging the door lock made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. They were coming in.

The metal swing-bar latch prevented the door from opening all the way.

The unexpected voice of a woman announced, “Housekeeping?” with an inflection that sounded more like a question.

Was it a trick? Were the police behind her, waiting to pounce on him?

“Uh, just a minute,” Gavin managed to blurt out. “Uh, I’ll be right there.”

He bounded for the door and shoved it closed. Looking through the peephole didn’t reveal as much as he’d hoped. There was the fisheye distortion of a tired, thirty-something-year-old woman waiting to come in. She tapped on the door. “You want me to come back?”

She leaned forward until an almond-colored eye filled the peephole. “I’ve got other rooms. I can come back in a half hour.”

“No,” Gavin answered abruptly through the door. He had to be cool. If the cops were out there beyond his view, he needed to appear normal, and the normal thing would be to let her in to clean. And why not? He hadn’t done anything wrong. “Gimme a sec to get my robe on.”

“All right.” She pulled away from the peephole and adjusted the cleaning bottles on the cart behind her.

He grabbed a plush robe from the bathroom along with a couple of oversized towels. After draping the towels over the typewriter on the desk, he checked the bed to ensure that none of the scroll peeked out from under the mattress.

He tried to calm his breathing. Be cool, Gav. Be cool.

With trembling fingers, he unlatched the door. “Sorry for the wait.”

The woman pushed the cleaning cart past him without a word.

Gavin peered down the hallway for any trace of an ambush. It was empty for the moment.

Already in the bathroom, the housekeeper began her duties. When she saw Gavin watching her in the mirror, she turned to face him. “Are you feeling okay? You seem a little out of breath. I could radio someone if you need a nurse.”

“No, I… when you knocked… well, I was… running in place.” He knew this was a weak explanation, but now he had to go with it. “For exercise. You know, jogging in place? Yeah, here in the room.”

“You know that we have a gym on the third floor, right? And you can schedule a time with a trainer.”

“Yeah, but I like self-led exercises.” The lie’s credibility was crumbling faster than he could spin it. “I don’t like using equipment that people have sweated on.” Gavin felt like an idiot, but he had to keep it going. “It’s working pretty good for me, in fact—five pounds in two weeks.”

It was obvious the woman saw through the lie, as demonstrated by her new interest in cleaning the toilet rather than speaking with Gavin.

He studied her. He wanted to ask if she knew anything. Were there any police in the lobby? Was anything out of the ordinary happening?

Looking over her shoulder at him, she asked, “Do you need to use the commode? Because I can make the bed if—”

“Huh? Oh, no, it’s fine. I just wanted to ask you something.”

She turned back to the toilet and scrubbed at it more vigorously. “What?”

“I wanted to ask if you’d heard anything.”

“About what?”

“The murder.”

She stood up and flushed the toilet. “What murder?”

Was she bluffing? Was it a trick to get him to let his guard down before the cops burst in?

“There was a murder—a drowning—a couple of miles from here. A young woman.”

The woman peeled the rubber gloves from her hands and tossed them into her plastic bucket. “Nope. I ‘ve been making my rounds.” She offered a polite “Excuse me” as she passed by him into the main area of the suite. Pointing at the mound of towels on the desk, she asked, “Do you need me to replace those?”

Gavin quickly skirted by her and placed a hand atop the concealed device. “No, they’re fine. They’re not wet or anything. I wouldn’t put wet towels on wood.” As absurd as it was, he felt like his mother had found a stack of Playboys in his dorm room.

“There’s not an animal in a cage or something under there, right? One time, a fella tried to keep an injured bird that he—”

Gavin cut her off. “No bird, no animal, nothing like that.”

She turned slowly. Without a doubt, she knew he was lying about the exercise. Why should she believe anything else he told her? Even so, he was compelled to keep the machine hidden from her, even though he didn’t know why. She was just a maid.

She resumed her work—adjusting the couch cushions, straightening the room—and only paused when emptying the soiled sports coat from the trashcan.

Gavin sat in the desk chair next to the covered typewriter. Maybe she really was only here to clean the room. He studied her reflection in the mirror when it came time to change the bed sheets. Would she discover the story hidden between the mattress and box springs? What would he say? He readied himself to spin around in the chair and run to snatch it from her.

As it turned out, he’d tucked it far enough in that she didn’t find it.

The maid twisted a large beach towel into the form of an origami swan and arranged it on the middle of the bed. Monica Garcia had loved those silly towel animals. Steamy afternoons in hotel rooms were commonplace during their two-month fling. Often after lovemaking, she’d gently attempt to deconstruct the terrycloth creation to learn how it was formed, but she was never able to master the art.

What an awful mistake she had been. Their relationship had been as doomed as a towel swan in a tornado, unable to sustain itself under the weight and strain of real life. All that was left of them was the wadded-up, cautionary reminder of something that should have been avoided from the start.

Gavin decided to officially apologize to Josephine at Billy’s party. He’d approach her in private, maybe by the pool or on Beverly’s patio, and tell her he was sorry for everything he’d put her through. He’d never actually said it before.

The high, shrill sound of the vacuum assaulted Gavin’s brain like a million needles. He made his retreat to the balcony, closing the glass door behind him.

Plopping down into one of the cast-iron chairs, he saw a boy doing bike tricks in the parking lot below. Where was the resort security to stop this hooligan? The kid’s parents were probably on the golf course or at the spa or something.

Gavin leaned his head back. As he rubbed his eyes to relieve the tension in his head, the unwelcome image of drowned Misa Kawaguchi’s yearbook photo crept in.

The biggest question that remained was why. Why would anyone do this? Why would anyone do this to him? Someone had gone to a lot of trouble to orchestrate this. He knew that he had some crazy fans—some real nut jobs, in fact—but this took it to a whole new level. If it were a fan or fans, then why not reenact a Damien Marksman storyline? How would they even have known that he was working on a new story for the first time in months?

No, it was something darker. He was sure of it.

He was being set up.

The idea made his blood boil. Since he obviously wasn’t the killer, someone else must have been. And that someone had set him up, or at least they were trying to implicate him.

It was simply dumb luck that he’d seen the news broadcast about the drowning. The killer—or killers—wouldn’t know that. This gave him an advantage. He’d have to play it smart, though. No more mistakes like almost calling the cops. He blamed that error on his raging headache. He’d need to act more methodically from this point. His career and his life depended on it.

Who knew he was at the resort? It only took a second to realize that anyone with any skill could narrow down where he was staying in Droverton. There simply weren’t a lot of five-star accommodations here. His mind flashed back to the hundred or so faces at the book signing yesterday.

The boy on the bike weaved through the parked cars of the lot below. Who lets their kid bring a bike to a hotel?

The whine of the vacuum faded. A few seconds later, the maid tapped on the sliding door. “Is there anything else, sir?”

“Yeah, there’s a kid down there on a bike, in the parking lot.”

“Sir?”

“He’s just riding around and around. It’s not safe.”

“Did he do something to your car?”

“No, but he’s—”

“You just don’t like him riding his bike out there, right?”

“Like I said, it’s not safe.”

She paused. “Okay, I’ll report it.”

“For his sake.”

“Yes, for his sake.”

“Of course.”

“Is there anything else, sir?”

“No, I’m good.”

Gavin returned inside. “Wait… who knows I’m in this room?”

She looked puzzled. “Sir?”

“Is there a way for people to find out the guests of the resort, the rooms that they’re in?”

“No, sir. That’s very confidential. Only the front desk would have that, and they don’t release that information, but you could leave a message for someone there if you’re needing to get in touch with—”

Gavin waved off the reply impatiently. “No, no, nothing like that. Me, does anyone know about me, that I’m in this room?”

He attempted to manage his bird’s nest of crazy hair and forced a smile like one of the pictures on the inside flap of his books. “Do you know who I am?”

The woman looked nervous. “Sir?”

“I said, do you know who I am?”

With a saccharine-sweet smile, she answered, “Sure, I do.” The sarcasm was as thick as a two-by-four. “You’re the guy who runs in place in his room for exercise and who definitely doesn’t have an animal hidden under a stack of towels.”

With that, she rolled her cart out of the room.

Gavin unwrapped and ate the mints from his pillow as he peeked into the hall. The end of the maid’s Rubbermaid cart disappeared into a room further down the corridor, the door closing behind it. There was still no sign of cops.

Guess I’m in the clear after all, at least for the moment.

Gavin examined the swing-bar door latch while opening and closing the door to determine whether it could be unhooked from the outside. He was baffled.

There were only two possibilities that came to mind: Either the killer came in while he was passed out or asleep, read the opening of the story, and then went out to re-enact the crime verbatim. Or else the killer committed the act and then snuck into his room to type it up.

Both theories had gaping holes in logic. For starters, as loud as it was to type on the machine, how could he have slept through such a racket, no matter how drunk he’d been? That and the fact that someone would’ve had to mimic his writing style at his best. The notion that someone could write Gavin Curtis better than Gavin Curtis was ridiculous. Nobody was as good as he was.

It had to be the alternative, that someone had come in after he had finished writing the opening and used the story as a script.

“Okay, then—motive,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “What would be the motive?” What was the endgame for someone framing him for murder? Was it blackmail? Cold, hard cash? Was someone trying to bag fat cat Gavin Curtis, this generation’s greatest author?

He removed the towels covering the typewriter. Clicking on the desk lamp and squinting, Gavin bent to examine the machine. Were there fingerprints that the police could use to implicate the real killer or killers? He’d have to come up with a better explanation before he involved the police. Even he found his current theories too hard to swallow.

Was someone out for revenge? Sure, he’d made plenty of enemies along the way, even a few “frenemies”—colleagues that would like to take his place on the bestseller lists. But would that have warranted this? Taking away his life and using his own writing as a weapon against him? He seethed with anger at the prospect and determined that whatever was happening here, whoever was doing this, he’d prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law.

One thing was certain: he must act quickly. The time to solve this and exonerate himself was ticking away. At any moment, the culprits could spring the trap. He had to hurry, and the first thing to do was to get away from this room.

Gavin dressed quickly in a pair of khaki slacks, a golf shirt, tennis shoes, sunglasses, and a blue LA Dodgers ball cap. Before leaving, he took the wadded-up story from under the mattress and stowed it securely in the room safe.

The elevator ride from the seventh floor was quiet, since Gavin was the sole occupant. The reflective panels showed how awful he looked.

He emerged from the elevator and made his way to the concierge station. A slender, uniformed black man, who looked to be in his thirties, finished giving directions at a dizzying pace to a resort guest, a large woman in a pastel muumuu. The concierge disappeared behind the counter and then popped back up a second later with a handful of trifold brochures. “Here you go, miss, and I just sent a copy of your spa itinerary to the printer in your suite. Just call down here if you need anything else.”

Gavin waited, then gave the woman a wide berth as she vacated the area. He moved forward, crossing some invisible boundary that activated the man behind the counter.

“Hello, sir. How may I help you this fine morning?”

Gavin leaned in, lifting his shades to read the man’s nametag. “Listen, Thad? Is that your real name, Thad?”

“Yes, sir, it is. Short for Thaddeus.” He replied as eagerly as a puppy’s wagging tail.

“Your parents must’ve hated you,” Gavin mumbled.

“Sir?”

“Look, in order for us to conduct business here, I’m going to need you to dial the Good Ship Lollypop routine down—I mean, like way, way down, okay?”

“Understood, sir. A little hair of the dog for you this morning?”

“Yeah, but first I need to understand something about your door locks around here.”

Thad looked bewildered with an almost comically pouty expression. “Did somebody lose their door key?”

“No, I didn’t, but can anyone get into a room once the swing-bar latch is closed?”

Thad thought for a second. “No, there’s not really a way around those. That’s why we use them, for the safety and protection of our guests.”

“But there has to be a way to jimmy it, like if a kid was too short to reach it and was locked in a room. What would you do then?”

Thad shook his head, crinkling his brow in the sincerest look of concern. “We’d send a maintenance worker to go through the sliding door on the balcony—very dangerous.” The concierge thought for a moment more and then added with a knowing smile, “But wait, if the child was too short to unlock it, then how could they latch it in the first place?”

“Okay, never mind,” Gavin said in frustration. “I need some help with something. I think someone is trying to… to prank me. Thad, I need your help. Do you have records, like cab call records, of me leaving the resort, or if I left the bar with anyone?”

Thad leaned in discreetly. “Is this about a female guest, Mr. Curtis?”

The question took him by surprise. “Why would you say that? Why did you ask if it was a woman? Did you see me with someone?” Gavin removed the sunglasses to get a better look at the man’s eyes. “And how do you know who I am?”

“Mr. Curtis, I assure you that the Droverton Resort guards your privacy with the utmost care and discretion.”

Gavin noticed that Thad looked away from him as he said this.

Something’s up.

“We go to great lengths to help you avoid troublesome encounters with paparazzi and tabloids during your stay.” Thad’s eyes met Gavin’s again as he showed a mouthful of perfect teeth. “And how do I know you? You’re my favorite author. I’d recognize you anywhere, despite the ball cap and shades.” The man was practically gushing.

Gavin raised a hand in surrender. “Okay, all right, but is there any record of anyone visiting my room or of me going out last night? Or the video cameras in the hallways—can you look at the recordings to see if anyone came into my room? It’s important.”

Thad playfully clicked away at his console keyboard. “Um… yes, uh-huh.”

“What is it?”

Thad raised an index finger, and the clicking resumed. Finally, the concierge stopped and confided, “I’ll have to get with security about video, but I can establish a timeline for everything else for now. You authorized your tab at HWBG at a quarter ‘till ten, then ordered room service from your suite a little after eleven. The tray was picked up on the twelve-thirty sweep.”

“What is a HWBG?”

“Sorry—Hungry Waters Bar & Grill.” Thad gestured to the bar entrance across the far side of the lobby. “So according to this, you were here all night, but like I said, I’ll get with the security crew to review the video.” A few final punctuated strikes of the keyboard signaled that the search was over.

“But what about after room service? I hate to admit it, but I was pretty zonkered. I need to know if I went anywhere after that.” Gavin spoke in shamed tones. “I can’t really explain why.”

“Oh, but I can vouch for you,” Thad said in the peppy voice that Gavin had warned him about using.

“You saw me after eleven?”

“Heard you.” Thad smiled with glee. After a pregnant pause, he motioned to one of the other workers. “Theresa, cover my station for a moment while I help this guest.”

Thad ushered Gavin behind the counter into a boxy staff break room adorned with federal wage posters and employee-of-the-month memorabilia. When the two were seated in wobbly metal folding chairs, he continued. “Okay, so… I’m a little nervous, because of our privacy policy and all.” Thad closed his eyes as he took in a breath. His eyes popped open like a jack-in-the-box with a smile to match. “Ms. Garner, your publicist, was worried about you when she couldn’t get you on your phone, so Mr. Edwards, the on-duty GM, went by your room. This would’ve been about eleven-thirty. Though you didn’t answer the door, he heard the sound of typing.”

Thad’s eyes were as wide as saucers. “When I came on at midnight, the staff was busy comping the rooms on your floor because of all the noise.” Thad stopped to pantomime typing. “Mr. Edwards made sure that all of the guests knew the noise was Gavin Curtis writing—hopefully another Damien Marksman novel being written… here… at the Droverton Resort, so exciting!”

Gavin’s eyes wandered the small area. It came as no surprise to him that nearly every employee-of-the-month Polaroid on the wall was of the man across from him.

Thad couldn’t be less aware that he was losing his audience. “Everyone on the floor got their stay for free as long as they promised to tell everyone they knew that you were here writing.”

The statement brought Gavin back. “So I’m part of a publicity stunt?”

“Well, it isn’t a stunt. We’re just excited to have you here. It’s like Fitzgerald writing Gatsby at the Seelbach Hotel in Kentucky. It’s an event! It is a novel, right? Please tell me it’s another novel.”

He ignored the question. “So your privacy policy isn’t worth squat.”

Thad stopped smiling. Gavin prodded the man’s chest with his index finger. “This Edwards guy, I oughta bust his ass. I want to talk to him.” Mumbling under his breath, but loud enough to hear, he added, “I should sue the whole lot of you.”

“But… he’s gone. I could get Mr. Templeton if—”

Gavin heaved a sigh. There was no point in fighting about it now. “Screw it. I guess I am Gavin Curtis, after all.”

Thad seemed relieved.

“So, Thad, you came up, too, as a part of the big author-stalking party?”

He eased into the answer as if testing the waters. “Well, yeah, Mr. Curtis. I took an early break. Like I said, you’re my favorite author.” He was back speaking at full speed. “There was a crowd of people in the hallway when I went up, mostly staff, but a few guests standing outside. You were really going at it. Do you always type on a typewriter? You see, I do a bit of writing myself, not anything like you, but—”

Gavin extended his hand again to reel the conversation back in. “You say there was a bunch of people around. Did anyone—anyone at all—come in while I was writing? Any staff or guest?”

“Uh, no, sir. I don’t think so. I mean, I’ll know from the security tapes, but I don’t think so. That would seem—”

“Did anyone hear me speaking? Were there other voices in the room? I need to know. It’s very important for me to know, Thad. What you say could determine what, if any, action I take against the resort.”

For the second time, he stopped smiling. “I promise I’ll check, Mr. Curtis, but is everything okay?”

“I can’t go into details right now, but something’s going on. I don’t want anyone in my room for any reason. Understood?” Gavin stood and shook Thad’s hand. “I’m counting on you.”

The concierge beamed and acknowledged his new assignment with a nod as they left the break room.

Returning to his post, Thad motioned to Theresa to remove herself from the counter. “Post a Code A-4 on room 719.”

“No one goes near my room until you find out who has been in there. And I’d like to get a printout of all the activities we discussed with timelines, the video notes, everything. When you get that compiled, just slide it under my door in a sealed envelope, okay?”

Gavin turned to head back to the bank of elevators.

“Okay, but Mr. Curtis, I can just—”

“What is it?” Gavin turned to face the man and didn’t attempt to mask his annoyance.

“If you’d prefer, I can just print it to your room. Print it to your printer.”

“The one on the desk in my room, you can send it there?”

“Of course. It’s all connected. I can send a printout directly to it using the network.”

Gavin stopped in his tracks. “Transmitted—that’s it. Thad, you’re wonderful.” He removed his shades and sprinted back to Thad at the counter, laughing. “I need a cab as fast as you can get one!”