Evan drew the resort beside her in quick, clean lines. Ballroom. Terrace. Service corridor. Boardwalk. Pier. Marina. A map of two weeks of their lives, rendered in ballpoint on a square of paper meant for cake crumbs.
“The gala is our best chance,” Margot said. “Two hundred guests, every vendor, every staffer, all in one room. If the accomplice is going to act, they’ll act while the crowd is loud, the lights are low, and everyone’s watching the dance floor.”
“Blind spots.” Evan marked small X’s. “Service corridor. The path between the service building and the marina. The back third of the parking lot. And the pier.” He looked up. “Jolene covers the corridor. Ray covers the marina. Tessa covers the terrace angle from inside. I’m on the pier.”
“And me?” Margot asked.
“You run the gala.” He held her gaze. “The room has to look normal. If the accomplice senses anything off, they wait us out, and we lose them. You’re the best person in this building at making everything look fine when it isn’t.”
“That’s either a compliment or an insult.”
“It’s the truth.”
Ray nodded. “I’ll set up on Dock One with my tackle. Nobody questions a fisherman after dark. We’re part of the furniture.”
“Same as housekeepers.” Jolene was untying her apron. “Service corridor and the back entrance. Twenty-two years I’ve watched that hallway. I can tell you who’s walking it by the sound of their shoes.”
Tessa unzipped a bag that had been designed to pass as a clutch purse and laid out two phones, a portable camera rig, and a battery pack, setting each one down on the counter like a soldier laying out a kit. “You want me to be the security camera that actually works.”
“Exactly.”
“I was born for this.” She wasn’t joking. The bubbly ring-light voice was gone. In its place sat a woman with two million followers and the instincts of a photojournalist.
Margot looked around the circle of faces, lit hard and honest under the kitchen fluorescents. “If you see something, don’t confront. Call. Text. Whatever’s fastest. Harker is fifteen minutes out. He answers on the first ring now.”
She let that land. “If anything escalates, we call and we back off. We’re not heroes. We’re witnesses.”
Nods around the counter. Ray topped off his thermos from the staff pot. Jolene tucked a master key into her sleeve like a magician. Tessa holstered her phones.
They dispersed one at a time, thirty seconds apart. Evan had suggested it, so nobody watching the kitchen door would see a team leave it.
He was the last one out. He paused with his hand on the swinging door. “Margot.”
“Yeah?”
“Whatever happens tonight, you built something. This team. This gala. This whole impossible week.” His gaze held hers across the kitchen. “That’s not nothing.”
“It’s not nothing,” she agreed.
What she meant was, you’re not nothing. You’re the reason any of it held. The words stacked up behind her teeth, and she kept them there, because there would be time after. She had decided, somewhere between the tree lighting and the napkin, that there was going to be an after.
He left. The door swung twice and settled.
She stood alone in the kitchen for one full breath and looked down at the napkin in her hand.
Two sets of handwriting on one small square. His block letters, her tight cursive, side by side. The way they’d been for two weeks: in the dock shed, on the pier, at the workbench, in a ballroom, plugging in a Christmas tree.
She checked her watch. Seven o’clock. The gala opened at eight. Upstairs, two hundred guests were dressing. Lou’s cake rested under its towel like a champion before a fight. The ballroom stood lit and ready and full of everything she and Evan had built that afternoon.
And somewhere in this resort, a person without a name yet was planning to tear it all down.
She picked up her trusty pen. Tucked the napkin into her back pocket. Straightened her shoulders.
Five people. One evening. One plan drawn on a napkin in a kitchen that smelled like buttercream.
Showtime.
Chapter forty-two
