If Kate was off our list, as Caroline had insisted, she was the only one we’d been able to eliminate so far. Who had hired Countertop Man to track down Caroline? Who had come after me in the parking lot? Who had sent the threatening note with the charm? It was close to midnight and my brain was getting fuzzy, probably from all the poisons coursing through my system from the crap food, which did, as Caroline predicted, go down far too easily.
We still hadn’t heard from Lucy and Grant, and I was getting worried-then I realized it wasn’t likely Lucy would call my cell. She knew how bad I was about remembering to turn it on. She probably would have called on the landline. I checked the cell anyway. There was only one voice mail message. From Roxy Rhodes. Did I know how to reach Grant Sturgis? Kevin Brookfield was close to making an offer on the nursery and she wanted me to see if Grant was still interested. Especially since Kevin and I were friends, too.
“What’s the matter?” Caroline said, looking adorable in her son’s oversized, albeit smelly, hockey shirt. “You look puzzled.”
I was. Why would Roxy think I knew more about Kevin Brookfield than she’d told me? I’d only met him once, that time at the diner when I was planting false lamiums for Babe. We’d barely exchanged words.
Despite the hour, I called Lucy and she picked up on the first ring. After pretending to be Caroline, she and Grant had driven in circles for hours trying to elude the press and had decided to stop for the night. She hadn’t seen anyone at the dumpy motel where they’d pulled in and felt they were in the clear. Lucy sounded exhilarated over her adventure; I doubted Grant Sturgis was having as much fun.
“Can I talk to him?” I said.
“He’s in the shower and I’m waiting for a pizza. That’s the only thing they’ll deliver to this extremely humble establishment.”
There was a bizarre echo on the phone, the repeating sound of traffic and bells, like those on a vehicle that was backing up.
“What’s that noise?” I asked. “Where are you?”
“It’s a dive, but Sturgis got all weepy when he saw the name. Some fleabag called the Hacienda.”
Ten minutes later Lucy and Grant joined us in our room, two doors from their own. After their tearful reunion, I hated to break it to them that if there had been any reporters following them they’d soon be at the Hacienda, but Grant and Lucy were positive they had evaded any cars that might have been on their tail.
“Early on I saw a Civic and an SUV following us-couldn’t tell what make because he was behind the Honda.” Lucy was good with anything that had a label. “Both cars were light colored.”
“Out-of-state plates?”
“Yeah, but I couldn’t recognize which state. Remember when each state had one type of license plate and you could play name-that-state on long driving trips? Now there are three or four to choose from. I’m pretty sure the plate was dark blue and white.”
“Maybe we should leave,” I said.
“C’mon, we lost them. No one’s here. Can’t we at least wait until the pizza comes? It’s Frank Pepe. It’s supposed to be wonderful.” Lucy said. “I had to give my credit card, so I’ve already paid for it. And I haven’t eaten all day.”
We took a vote. If there was no activity outside the hotel in the time that it took the pizza to come, we’d stay. By morning Caroline would have to surface somewhere, and when she did it wouldn’t take long for whoever wanted to find her to find her, but we’d deal with that tomorrow.
Lucy, sans wig, and I went to the front desk when the pizza arrived and we went to her room to let Grant and Caroline have their first private visit in weeks.
And that’s what would have happened if ten minutes later the cops hadn’t burst into both of our rooms.
Props to the desk clerk who I had dismissed as a nerdy loser, so unobservant that he checked in two women as mother and son. When Lucy and Grant arrived, ordered a pizza under a different name than they registered under, and then switched partners with us, the clerk-who probably watched a lot of true crime stories on television-decided I was a madam who’d brought a teenage boy to a motel for an assignation with a man while I ate pizza with the guy’s wife. Lord knows what he thought we were doing. It was the stuff of supermarket tabloids.
Once the cops discovered Caroline was not a young boy but a middle-aged woman dressed as a boy, they reckoned it was simply kinky sex, none of their business, and they left the four of us alone. Hey, if consenting adults wanted to play the housewife and the UPS man or the contessa and the chauffeur, what was it to them? Needless to say, for Grant and Caroline, the moment had been ruined.