Prostrate, Hope peered out of the back of the catering truck. By the time it rounded the second corner of the lodge and descended down a small ramp, she anticipated its coming to a full stop and slid out, feet first. As her shoes made contact, she fell onto the pavement, tucked into a ball, and rolled an ugly back somersault. She quickly came to her feet and stuffed herself into a cave of steel formed between two massive Dumpsters. The catering truck continued another thirty or forty feet, its brakes squealing as it stopped.
Odds were that Penny was somewhere inside this building.
She heard a male voice first: “Stupid shit…” Then the rolling open of the truck’s back door, the driver angry at the gate guard for leaving it unlatched.
A smallish man not with the catering crew walked within inches of her and started shouting at people. Hope leaned back, put her hand into something disgusting and had to bite her tongue to keep from groaning out loud.
The one barking orders explained that the caterers would be let inside. The back door would be opened for them. If caught anywhere in the building other than the basement or the first-floor dining room, they were told they’d spend the rest of the night in the truck, under guard, and could say good-bye to any tip.
“And I’m a big tipper,” he said, his voice fading into the building.
She wondered if she could pull off being part of the catering crew. She picked out the voices of two women and a man, all three having arrived in the truck, she assumed. The back door now open, they went about unloading the truck. Hope sat up into a crouch, brushed herself off, and poised herself.
Prepared to head to the back of the truck, pick up a crate and act like she knew what she was doing, she willed her feet to move, but they remained frozen to the pavement. Terrified, she collapsed and hunkered back down.
She couldn’t do it.
It was then, sitting there between the two Dumpsters, with only a wedge of visible landscape and sky in front of her, looking out across an empty golf green where sprinklers made rain with random precision, that she spotted a flicker of movement high in a tree at a great distance. She saw a low stone pillar that supported the wrought-iron fence. This tree was on the far side of that fence.
There! Another similar movement, about twenty yards to the left of the other, also high in a tree.
She stared and stared. No more movement.
And then she understood.
Hands trembling, she removed the BlackBerry, shielded it carefully before lighting up its screen, and began typing.