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Much to my consternation, she’s standing beside me when I glance over my shoulder.
“Excuse me, but aren’t you that missing prince?”
“Missing…prince?” I say, affecting a French accent and adjusting my mustache.
“The prince of that little European country. The gorgeous one who’s supposed to announce his bride by the end of the month.”
Shit.
She turns to her partner. “Roger, we stopped there for a minute on our twentieth anniversary, didn’t we? That place where they have that quaint yearly festival to celebrate a birthday.”
Roger says he doesn’t remember the place, but the woman looks at me expectantly.
I clear my throat and push my sunglasses up the bridge of my nose. “You know a lot about this country I’ve never heard of.”
She straightens and looks up at me over the top of her sunglasses. “I didn’t say the name of the country.”
“I wish I were him, mademoiselle. His life sounds fascinating.”
She eyes me like my mother when she catches me in a lie. Then, to my relief, she shuffles back to her table where the hotel waitress has delivered a fruit plate.
So, the alert has gone out, and I’ve been declared missing, have I?
Wonderful.
It’s only a matter of time before someone hires a private investigator and finds out where my credit card has been used or the last ping of my phone was.
I will indeed be followed and pestered if the palace staff finds me. Let’s hope the lack of cell signal and the failure of Google Maps up here can buy me some time.
It’s time to lay low and be smart.
Checking the time as I walk through the lobby, I see I have mere minutes to catch the tollbooth woman with the whiskey-colored eyes before she ends her shift.
I’m a fool for letting her out of my sight for a minute.
* * *
When I pull up to the booth where I saw the fascinating woman this morning, I do not see her. In fact, the entire lane is closed to traffic.
This is an outrage; it’s a full thirty seconds before the end of her shift. What kind of highway authority runs this operation?
I park my car, exit, and knock on the booth, but nobody is there.
“Sir, what are you doing?”
I look around and realize the question comes via a loudspeaker from the next booth.
“Where is the young lady who works in this booth?” I shout over the noise of idling engines.
“Hold on, right there,” she says.
I will not hold on. I walk straight up to the next booth amid the blaring horns of other motorists.
The dark-skinned woman holds up her hand. “Sir, you cannot walk up to a tollbooth. You have to be in a vehicle.”
“Shall I reverse and switch to your lane if I wish to seek more information about the young lady who was working in the booth over there?”
The woman glares at me, picks up a handset, and punches some blinking lights. “Pete, we got a pedestrian tweaker at Station Three.”
