She made herself climb the stairs. Suzie’s bedroom was wallpapered in a cheerful pattern of tropical leaves. The door to the walk-in closet was open, and clothes were scattered on the floor, as though Suzie had packed in a hurry.
Charlie staggered to the bed. She fell asleep on top of the coverlet, with early-morning sunlight flooding in through the picture window, still in her clothes.
She woke to the red and golds of sunset. Her head felt cottony and her mouth was dry. For a disoriented moment, she didn’t know where she was. Then everything came flooding back, and along with it, a stab of panic.
This is a job, she told herself. A job, even though she wasn’t sure she had a client. When working, you couldn’t afford to let yourself get freaked out.
Forcing herself up, she handled the practical things. She plugged her phone into her charger and sent her sister and mother a text, saying she was okay and giving them a brief outline of what happened to Adam. Then she got into the shower.
One of the things Charlie had always loved about breaking into houses was the pretending part. Here she was, trying on Suzie’s life, like the fresh tee and hoodie Charlie found in the closet. Suzie had body wash that smelled like vetiver and shampoo that smelled like hemp. In the medicine cabinet, an assortment of half-used bottles of painkillers greeted her. A book on her bedside table promised the eight secrets of being an effective communicator.
All the lights were so bright that there were barely any shadows.
As her jeans went around and around in the washer, Charlie made a pot of coffee. In Suzie’s fridge, she found a can of Diet Coke and a jar of peanut butter. Charlie stuck a spoon into the peanut butter and took a bite of it while she poured the contents of the soda can down the sink. Then she picked up some kitchen shears, took out Vince’s metal box, and got to work on the padlock.
First, she had to cut the can so that it became a large rectangle of aluminum. Then she cut out two shims, each with a long wedge. Since he’d used a spring-loaded double-lock padlock, she knew she was going to need to hit the two tabs on the inside to wedge them open.
Carefully, she pressed the first of the metal shims around the shackles, adjusted it a little with her fingers, and took it out again. Then, positioning the long wedge on the outside, she pushed it down into the gap between the shackle and the body of the lock. With enough slight back-and-forth twisting, she got it to slide in deeply enough that she was ready to rotate it. No audible noise came from it, but there was a feeling of resistance. When she couldn’t turn it any farther, she found pliers under the sink and used those to get it the rest of the way. Then she worked the other side. When both were done, and the shims turned, she gave a firm pull.
The lock opened.
She sucked in her breath and opened the box.
No Liber Noctem rested there. Only a slim piece of paper, the edge tattered from being ripped out of a notebook.
Charlie slammed her open palm against the marble counter. Fuck fuck fuckity fuck.
What was she going to do now?
She supposed the box was a decoy. A piece of misdirection. Vince had left it to slow down anyone looking for The Book of Blights. Which meant that wherever he was, the book was with him.
Unfolding the paper, she was surprised to find it addressed to her.
To the Charlatan,
If you found this, things have gone all the way wrong.
The key is abandon all hope.
V
Charlie poured coffee into a mug and took the letter over to the couch. Her heart was speeding. The sight of Vince’s handwriting, blocky letters written in a rush, brought back an intense longing to speak with him. To yell at him. To make him believe that so long as he wanted to be known, she wanted to know him.
The key is abandon all hope. Maybe she should. Maybe she was being a fool.
But her gaze strayed back to the words.
The key is abandon all hope. Not to abandon all hope, the way you’d write it if you were suggesting it literally. The words had the feel of a riddle, but she didn’t understand it.
Staring at the wall, she sipped her coffee.
She had no better idea of where to find him than before. Her mind traveled down predictable paths to the same dead ends. She’d already tried his cell phone. She’d gone to the address on his license and talked to Liam. She’d called his boss and found out he hadn’t shown up for work and was pretty much fired.
What had he wanted with grotty hotel rooms and cleaning blood off ceilings anyway, being the grandson of a billionaire? But maybe he’d gotten used to that, tidying up after his shadow’s messes.
Maybe he liked it, being in all those empty hotel rooms, the way she’d liked breaking into houses.
But then she had a very different thought.
There was a story that Vince told, about how his boss’s wife was furious because her husband brought her to a fancy hotel for the weekend, not revealing that he had the key because the room was the newly cleaned scene of a murder. Probably cleaner than any other room in the hotel, his boss had told everyone at work. Nothing for her to complain about. The wife hadn’t agreed, and made him spend a week on the couch.
If there was an unoccupied hotel room, Vince could have gone there. He wouldn’t have needed any identification. He wouldn’t have even needed to break in.
Charlie took out her phone and poked around a bit until she found the number of Craig, one of Vince’s coworkers. The young guy who’d taken a job cleaning up bodies so he could one day do super authentic special effects makeup for movies.
The last text she had from him was from four months ago: Vince’s cell died & he wants me to tell you he’ll be home in 1hr w veg lo mein.
It was such a normal message that she couldn’t stop looking at it.
Charlie thought about the horrible moment when she’d been sure it was Vince’s body on the couch, Vince’s blood on the walls. She had to find him before Red did.
She called the number. Craig picked up.
“This is Vince’s girlfriend,” Charlie said. “I know he’s in the doghouse at work, which is why I’m calling you.”
“Is he okay?” Craig asked, sounding like his usual friendly self. “Winnie and me were saying it wasn’t like him to just drop off the face of the earth.” She always found it a little funny how upbeat Craig and Winnie were, considering what they did.
Their boss, not so much.
“He got really sick,” Charlie said, thinking that covered a host of possibilities. “When he’s feeling better he’ll give you a call, but he wanted me to ask about a place he cleaned. It’s the room that wasn’t going to be able to have guests for a week or two? He thinks he left his watch there.”
“In Chicopee?” He sounded a little wary, but not yet suspicious.
“Yeah,” she agreed. “But he totally spaced on the room number and he doesn’t want to ask at the desk.”
“Gimme a sec.” The tension had gone from his voice. She hadn’t asked for the name of the hotel, after all, or an address. He believed that she knew the place. “Says here it was 14B.”
“Thanks,” she said. “Vince’ll give you a call when he’s feeling better.”
“Tell him to hang in there,” Craig said, and disconnected the call.
Charlie typed in “murder” and “Chicopee” into her phone’s search engine and sorted the results by most recent. It appeared that there’d been a stabbing at the East Star Motel, on Armory Drive, eight days before.
She gave herself a victory spoonful of peanut butter and went to get her jeans out of the dryer.
* * *
The East Star Motel hunched on the corner of two streets, a one-story building with exterior entrances to the rooms, not unlike where her mother lived. But if that place was intended for long stays, this was the opposite. It rented by the hour, its sign promising vacancies, Wi-Fi, color television, and discretion.
Charlie pulled into the lot. The Corolla made a strange sound as she did, a sputtering sort of cough. And then the engine died.
“No,” she told the car, in what she hoped was a stern manner. “This cannot happen. Not right now. Come on. Come on.”