When Saturday morning comes, I wake up bright and early, put on my cutest exercise outfit, and head to the gym before I can convince myself otherwise. I’m in the lull between the early morning gym rats and the later-morning class attendees, so my favorite treadmill is free and the weight room is sparsely populated. It’s ideal.
I get in a full hour of burn, and then I head back to my apartment, purpose accenting every step. Shower. Breakfast. Then search.
I shower with military precision, faster than usual, and then move around the kitchen in a pair of clean yoga pants and my favorite tank, only to discover that I’m in desperate need of a trip to the grocery store. I share an assistant with a few other people for times like this, but I don’t want to take the time to put together a list. Deli it is.
The breakfast sandwiches I order at the counter are gone by the time I get into the elevator at my building.
I’m only slightly disappointed that Ace is nowhere to be seen in the lobby. It’s a waste, though—he said he’d be busy this weekend, and I have no idea if that means he’ll be in the penthouse at all. For all I know, he’s been gone for hours.
But where would he go?
The next thought: Is there someone else?
I scoff out loud as I unlock the front door to my apartment. I might be ridiculously and prematurely in love with Ace Kingsley, but we’re not together. The moment he admits having similar feelings, everything might be different…but in the meantime, there are more pressing things to worry about, like the rumors that he might be a murderer. And here I am fretting over the possibility that he might be cheating on me with another woman.
I lock the door behind me with a firm twist and march over to my desk.
Settling in front of my computer, I take a deep breath. The photograph in the local newspaper is all I have to go on right now, so I’ll start there.
The first thing I do is log on to an online marketplace for people with translation skills. Within ten minutes, I’ve hired a man—I guess it could be a woman…the screen name offers no indication one way or the other—to translate the entire paper into English. I don’t want to take a chance on Google Translate and have the entire thing be unreadable. He—she?—promises to have it back to me within two hours.
In the meantime, I do an extensive search of the keywords I can claw out of the non-translated paper. All that comes up are more copies of the picture and the paper on a few obscure mirroring websites, mostly the kind that claim to “index the web” and don’t do anything else.
The notification that the job has been completed pops up forty-five minutes early, and I abandon the fruitless search and double-click to open the file. The translator has written the English copy in a Word document with labelled sections that correspond to red boxes he’s highlighted on each section in the newspaper.
The damn thing turns out to be a kind of travel newsletter that tourists can pick up for free at a kiosk for a travel company, which means it’s hardly newsworthy, and the picture could be from any point during his travels.
Shit.
I’m at a loss until I find one last line of text at the bottom of the document corresponding to a narrow box just below the picture caption. It reads: “The couple travelled to Rome from Bari.”
I read through all of the text again, but the sentence seems to be tacked on near the end of an article about Famous Sights in Rome. Maybe it was meant to be part of the caption, and some slipshod designer—probably whoever runs the kiosk, or the travel company—didn’t proofread it.
They might know something.
They might also speak Italian.
But a travel agent should know English….
I check the clock on my computer. It’s just after eleven a.m., so it’ll be…what…four o’clock in Italy?
The newsletter, in fine print at the bottom, lists an address and an international phone number, which, conveniently, I can call from my cell phone.
The voice that picks up on the other end of the line is crisp, British-sounding. “Good afternoon. You’ve reached International Adventurers. Are you calling to inquire about booking future travel, or about a previously booked adventure?”
“Oh, I’m—I’m so glad you speak English,” I blurt out with a nervous laugh. Where the hell has all my professional demeanor gone?
“Of course, miss. My name is Phillip. Is there anything I can help you with?”
I clear my throat. “I’m actually calling to ask about a newsletter I found online that I think your company created.”
“Ah, yes. We put them out monthly for about six months, then stopped and archived them for our website. Did you find an egregious error?”
“Well, in the—” I flip the newsletter to the front page, “—March issue of this year, you ran a photograph of a man named Ace King—Ace K. I wondered if you had any more information about him.”