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Dizzy Izzy @IsabelleWilliamsburg ∙ July 15

TFW you return to the scene of the crime #innocentuntilprovenguilty

Marlie leaned against the wall and fanned herself.

“You all right?” I asked. It wasn’t difficult to feign concern. I was plenty concerned. Just not for her. If I was being completely honest, I was more worried my friends and I might be in the same room as a murderer. I glanced up at the white camera mounted in the corner. Unlike in the library room, I was in plain view. Castillo was watching, and that gave me courage.

She sighed. “No. Hot flashes. They’re the worst.”

Oh. I hadn’t considered that there might be another plausible explanation for her excessive sweat. Then again, even if it was just a hot flash, it didn’t let her off the hook. She could be using that as an excuse.

“Can I get you something? Some water, maybe?”

“Thanks, but it’ll pass.” She pulled out one of the kitchen stools and sat down. “You’re so sweet. Vickie used to make fun of me anytime I had a hot flash. Said I was old and out of touch. Said I might as well get out of the business before I needed a hip replacement or something. As if! I’m only in my fifties. Hardly ancient.”

“Not at all,” I agreed. I was struck again by how unkind Vickie had been to the people around her. “I saw the sign outside. Vickie was listing this building?”

Marlie nodded and dabbed sweat away from her upper lip. “It’s a big deal, actually. If Vickie had managed to sell this place, it would have set her for the year.”

“Who gets the listing now?” I asked.

“Who knows? Me, probably. I’ve been number two at the firm ever since Vickie came in, and I’ve inherited a lot of her listings now that she’s gone.”

“So you stand to make a lot of money when the building sells,” I said.

“When the building sells?” she asked with a wry laugh. “Honey, this place has been on the market as long as I can remember. The owner’s asking way too much. It’s a hot neighborhood, but this block is zoned commercial only. Any developer with a lick of sense would do better off investing in a residential-zoned building in Bed-Stuy, or something cheaper in Queens.”

“It was your idea to host Vickie’s party here, wasn’t it?” I asked, the answer dawning on me. “You wanted to rub it in. That she might be broker of the month, but even she couldn’t sell this building.”

She made an odd noise in the back of her throat, like she was suppressing a laugh. “You’re a very astute young woman, aren’t you? I think I like you. You know what? I’m gonna waive my commission if you want to reconsider that place on Bedford.”

“You mean the murder apartment? No way,” I said, shaking my head vehemently.

“You’re missing out on the deal of a lifetime.” She fished one of her business cards out of her purse and pressed it into my hand. “Give me a call tomorrow and I’ll take you around to look at a couple of other places. Fee-free.”

“Golly, I’d love to, but even without your fee, I can’t afford anything in this neighborhood. Not on a waitress’s salary. Not without five or six roommates.”

“Probably not. But keep the card and call me if you change your mind.”

“Sure,” I said, tucking the card away into my bag. This time, I held on to my own messenger bag, thank you very much. I didn’t want to set it down and risk it becoming part of a murder scene. Again.

Not like I thought there was going to be another murder. I had hoped that being here would shake something loose. So far, all I had was a swing and a miss. Marlie didn’t have any reason to kill Vickie. It was a little mean-spirited to arrange for Vickie’s party to be in a building that she’d failed to sell, but it was a far cry from murder.

Marlie was organized. She had to be to make a living in real estate. She was fastidiously neat, or her decades-old, unfashionable wardrobe would be riddled with signs of wear. She wasn’t the type of person who would want blood on her hands, literally or figuratively. If Marlie was going to commit murder, she would pick a less messy method.

Marlie didn’t kill Vickie. I would stake my boots on it.

That left only Amanda and Gennifer.

I wanted to interrogate them both, but Gennifer was busy vigilantly searching for clues to solve the escape room puzzle, whereas Amanda was checking her makeup in the reflection of the shiny range hood that hung over the oven. “Any luck?” I asked her.

“They’ve got this well in hand,” Amanda said, flipping a hand toward where Gennifer, Izzy, and Raleigh huddled over the cookbook.

“Don’t you want to contribute?”

“I am contributing,” she insisted. “I got the numbers in the last room, didn’t I?”

All right, technically she had, but that was only because she remembered me finding them under the pool table the first time around. Which I couldn’t have done without the flashlight she’d picked up in the first room. In a way, we had solved that clue together. I begrudgingly gave her half credit. “You know, the game would go a lot quicker if we all cooperated with each other.”

“What’s with you and this silly game anyway?” she asked. For the first time, she put her phone away and concentrated her attention on me. “You tagged along the first time for what, a free escape room with a bunch of strangers? But what are you getting out of it now? You didn’t even know Vickie, so don’t give me that nonsense Izzy was spouting about doing this to honor her memory. I know you’re not supposed to talk bad about the dead, but Vickie was a jerk. Frankly, if you’d known her half as good as I did, you’d be happy she was dead.”

“And are you? Happy?”

“Do I look happy to you?”

I wasn’t certain. Maybe? It was hard to tell under all that makeup and in the poses she held so carefully even when there wasn’t a camera pointed at her. “Is it true that Vickie was spending a lot of time with your boyfriend?”

“Where did you hear that?” she asked.

“I don’t remember,” I lied. “So, it is true?”

“It most certainly is not,” she insisted. “You’re talking about Gary, right? I broke up with him last week because he was such a lousy Instagram boyfriend. I couldn’t give two figs who he’s seeing now.”

“What’s an Instagram boyfriend?”

She gave me an exasperated look. “Selfies are great and all, but sometimes I need a free hand to catch the perfect picture. That’s where an Instagram boyfriend comes in. I was trying to get this perfect pic and Gary was supposed to climb up a fire escape so he could get the angle right, but he dropped my phone, if you can believe that!”

“You broke up with a guy because he dropped your phone?”

“Do you have any idea what the latest iPhone costs?” she asked, flipping her hair over her shoulder.

“Your phone seemed right as rain,” I said, recalling navigating through it to recover the deleted photos. “It’s not even cracked.”

“The screen shattered,” she said. “I had to trade it in for a refurb with half the memory. And I swear it’s got gremlins or something.”

“Gremlins?” I asked.

“It’s always messing up. Logging me out of apps. I never get email notifications anymore. GPS insists I’m somewhere in Jersey. Plus, it keeps rearranging my icons.”

“But it still tags your pictures correctly, right?”

“Hardly,” she said, blowing out a sigh. “They’re always out of order, and the metadata is all sorts of messed up. The numbering’s off and the time stamp’s always wrong.” I was hardly a techie, but I knew that the metadata was the hidden information associated with a picture, like when it was taken and if location was turned on, where it was taken. “I swear, I’ve got thousands of followers on Insta. Would it kill Apple to give me a free iPhone? Imagine all that good publicity.”

“Yeah, all right,” I agreed. I hadn’t checked lately, but Apple had a couple million more followers than Amanda. I doubted her influence would make a dent in their social media presence.

Far be it from me to direct Amanda’s brand strategy. What did I know? I had only a handful of followers on my personal accounts. Sure, I managed the Untapped Books & Café’s accounts, but it wasn’t like people followed them to read my boring updates. They just wanted to know what was going on at Untapped and stay ahead of upcoming events and menu changes.

But Amanda had also inadvertently let herself off the hook. Vickie hadn’t stolen her boyfriend. Plus, Amanda hadn’t deleted photos to hide evidence. The gaps in the pictures I’d recovered were explained away by the operating system bugs in her phone.

“If you weren’t mad at Vickie for stealing your boyfriend, again, then why were you arguing on your way to the escape room?”

“Aren’t you the nosy one?” Amanda asked. “We weren’t really arguing. Vickie was mad that I’d tagged her in an unflattering picture, so I took it down. Happy?”

That explained why there were no pictures of Vickie on Amanda’s feed from that day. All things considered, Amanda didn’t seem to have a strong motive to kill Vickie, which left only one suspect.

“Bingo!” Gennifer called from across the room. “Try setting the thermostat to seven hundred and fifty degrees.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Parker said as he headed toward the thermostat.

“Nope.” She held the cookbook upside down and shook it so the pages flapped against one another. “There’s got to be a hundred recipes in here, and not a single one of them lists a temperature setting.”

“So where did you get seven hundred and fifty degrees from?” I asked as Parker fiddled with the dials. I scanned around like I’d done every five minutes or so since the game had started to make sure I knew exactly where everyone was at all times. I wasn’t going to make the same mistake again and lose track of anyone.

“Look at the stove.” Gennifer pointed and, sure enough, the stove was set to seven-fifty. Which I like to think I would have noticed if I hadn’t been so busy interrogating Marlie and Amanda.

“That’s it,” Parker said, staring at the thermostat. “Nothing’s happening.”

“Try pushing ‘run program,’ ” Gennifer suggested.

He did. There was a popping noise as a tile in the ceiling above us swung open. A key on a long string dropped out of the hole. The key swung like a pendulum. “Well, what do you know?”

Raleigh reached up and snatched the key. I was glad he’d come along, because if it had just been me alone in that room, I would have had to climb up on a barstool to reach it. “Heads up.” He tossed the key to Izzy. She inserted it into the lock, opened the door, and a siren went off.

Everybody jumped backward as the Game Master stepped into the open doorway with a flourish. “Congratulations,” he said with the enthusiasm of someone who had just stepped in gum. “You have managed to escape. Now, if you’ll all follow me, we’ll take a group photo. Check our Facebook page tomorrow to download or share your picture.”

“Not for nothing, but the last time I did an escape room, we had to solve something like a dozen puzzles. This one had, what, four? Five? Hardly worth it, if you ask me,” Gennifer said as we filed down the hall.

I blinked at her. “We barely solved this one, and it took us two tries.”

“Yeah, but not everyone was contributing. Call me if you want to try a more challenging one with me later. We’ll have a blast. There are a few on Staten Island that are real bears, but they’re fun,” Gennifer offered. I wasn’t sure I wanted to take her up on that. This room had been plenty difficult enough for me.

We all picked through a box of silly hats. I selected an oversized tiara. Izzy grabbed a top hat and hung a sign around her neck that said “escaped prisoner.” Parker put on a long sleeping cap, like the kind that might be featured in a Dickens novel. Not to be outdone, Raleigh found a pair of glasses with an integrated Groucho Marx–esque mustache and put that on over his real glasses. Marlie tossed a pink feather boa over her shoulders, Amanda went straight for the flapper girl headband, and Gennifer nabbed a pair of Christmassy reindeer horns.

It took a minute of arranging and rearranging until we were settled, with Raleigh behind me and Parker next to me with our arms looped at the elbows. Izzy was on my other side, with everyone else crammed in around the edges. At the last minute, Parker held up an “I’m with stupid” arrow, pointing at his own head.

“Great,” Brandon intoned after snapping a few pictures. “That should be online by close of business tomorrow. Thank you for joining us, and we hope to see you at Verrazzano-Narrows Escape! again soon.”

As we put away our silly hats, I tried to corner Gennifer, but she brushed past me. “I’d love to stay and chat more, but I’m gonna bounce. I hate leaving Penny for long.”

“But . . .” I said, not even knowing how to finish that sentence. Izzy was a stellar judge of character. That should be good enough for me. Gennifer was uber competitive but also seemed super nice. I had no reason to mistrust her just because Vickie had bullied her when they were younger, but I had run out of suspects and I hadn’t even had the chance to question her again.

“Text me if you want to try one of those escape rooms in Staten Island I told you about, ’kay?” Then she was gone.

I made eye contact with Izzy, and she shrugged. I returned the gesture. “Well, that was a blast,” Raleigh said, coming up beside me. “Now how about we go grab a coffee somewhere? Or maybe a beer?”

“Or we can go try that Limoncello cake like you promised,” Parker said, on my other side.

“Gee, those both sound great, but I think I left something behind in there. I’ll see you guys later.” I hurried back to the front desk and caught Castillo’s attention.

I had to admit, it was a bit strange and flattering to have Parker and Raleigh vying for my attention, but in the end, it was just awkward. Raleigh was nice. And cute. And in a band. I wasn’t sure what he saw in me, except maybe a few conversations I hadn’t even taken part in. I had no idea what Izzy had told him about me, but I was at a definite disadvantage because I knew practically nothing about him at all.

I hadn’t even looked his band up on YouTube yet.

It wasn’t that Raleigh wasn’t attractive. He was. He was also tall, humble, and had a genuine sense of humor. Plus he was in a popular band but didn’t seem conceited.

Unfortunately, Raleigh wasn’t actually interested in me. He was interested in the woman he’d met online. He was interested in Izzy. Who wasn’t on the market, not that I was, either.

And then there was Parker.

Sweet, funny, talented Parker.

My dear friend Parker.

I’d known him for almost two months, and not once had either of us shown any kind of romantic interest in the other. Was he actually attracted to me, as more than just a friend? Or was he caught up in the idea of competing with another guy?

Not that it mattered. He had a girlfriend.

“See you tomorrow?” Parker asked, hesitating at the door.

“Of course,” I said, waving him on his way. I held up one finger to get Castillo’s attention. “I think you still have my ID.”

“Sure, come this way.”

“What did I tell you, man?” Brandon said. “Always check the copier when you’re done. If people have to come back to get their IDs or anything else they forgot, they give us nasty reviews on Yelp.”

“Ten-four,” Castillo replied without pausing. I followed him back to the copy room.

“So? Did you see anything suspicious?”

He shook his head. “Nothing out of the ordinary. You?”

“Nothing with a side of nothing. I didn’t get a chance to talk to Gennifer, but I’m pretty much convinced that none of those women hurt Vickie. Which is impossible. Someone killed her.”

“Which means we’re back to you or Izzy.”

“You know as well as I do . . .”

He interrupted me. “Yeah, yeah. You’re both innocent. But you’re also the only ones with fingerprints on the trophy.”

“Wait, the only fingerprints? How is that even possible? There had to be a dozen people that handled it before we won it.”

“There are several other partials from unidentified sources. We tested it against everyone in the escape room, and you and Izzy were the only matches. Ran the extras through the system, too, but nothing popped.”

I sighed.

“Odessa, don’t act so glum. I’ll solve this.”

“I know. I just feel like we’re running out of time. It’s fortunate that the room was released when it was, or Izzy never could have arranged this little reunion in the first place.”

Castillo laughed. “You know, for a smart person, you can be so thick sometimes. You really think the police just up and decided to release a crime scene right before Izzy called to book it? Or I just happened to show up and announce I was the new guy, reporting for training, ten minutes before your reservation?” He tapped me on the forehead. “This is why you need to leave the detecting to the professionals.”

Oh. Duh. I should have put that together sooner. It was encouraging that Castillo would go to so much trouble to not only allow us to set up the failed sting, but to actively help us. It gave me hope that he really did believe that Izzy was innocent and wasn’t going to let his department railroad him into arresting her.