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“Uhm, well…have you seen or heard from Kassidy?”
“Who?” he responds.
Trying to reign in my annoyance, since I am already on thin ice after the bus brawl yesterday, I speak through clenched teeth.
“Kassidy Heartwell, my tutor…”
Coach Pollard’s brows furrow. It seems he didn’t remember her presence either. His face focuses on the other members of the coaching staff, all of whom shake their heads back and forth.
“Did you check her room? The last I saw her, we had her escorted into the stands.”
“Did anyone go back and get her when the game was over?” I ask, suspecting the answer is no but needing confirmation.
“Have you checked her room?” Coach says in response as the other coaches start making phone calls and sending text messages.
“I don’t know what room she is supposed to be in,” I say, managing to refrain from grabbing the front of his shirt and shaking him.
Pollard flips through some papers on his clipboard, looking for what I can only assume are the room assignments from the hotel. He rips off a piece of paper, scribbling a room number before handing it to me. Taking off like a bat out of hell, with Zanko hot on my heels, I forget the elevator, deciding to take the stairs to the ninth floor. The team occupied most of the floor.
Breaching the doorway and rushing down the hall, the door closes with a loud bang. The cleaning staff is already here, starting at the far end. Hopefully, if we need to, one of the ladies can be sweet-talked into opening the door for us since we don’t have a key.
Double-checking the room number, I pound on the door with my fist several times.
“Kassidy!”
Pound,pound,pound
“Kassidy! Open the door!”
Repeating the process several times and getting nothing but silence in return, Zanko steps away from me. Leaning my forehead against the closed door, I mentally will the thing to open, hoping with every fiber of my being that she is just in the shower and can’t hear me. Snippets of Zanko’s conversation reach my ears, but I refuse to move for fear of spooking the poor woman.
“I’m sorry, sir. It is against hotel policy to open the door of another guest.”
“I understand. We are just worried that something might have happened to her. No one remembers seeing her sinceyesterday afternoon,” he pauses as the woman’s mouth gapes open. Zanko catches on and uses her concern against her. “This is just not like her, and we fear that she is missing, possibly abducted.”
The woman gasps as he lays it on thick, but it does the trick. She warily approaches me, and I step aside so that she can unlock the door. As soon as there is the slightest crack, my body pushes the woman out of the way as I rush into the room.
Only making it a handful of steps, it is obvious that Kassidy was never here. The bed is still perfectly made, her bags sitting on the floor just inside the door.
“Fuck!” I yell into the empty room, causing the cleaning woman to jump.
“Dude, chill,” Zanko says, consoling the shocked woman.
Grabbing Kassidy’s bags, I spin around, giving the woman an apology for my outburst. She did us a favor and shouldn’t be the focus of my irritation.
Zanko and I take the stairs again to the lobby. The team is now congregated there as several coaches pace, phones plastered to their ears. Once I reach Coach Pollard, I give him the news.
“Her room was empty. She never slept there,” I update him, which causes him to curse under his breath.
“Got it!” One of the managers calls out before returning to his conversation. “Thank you,” he says to the person on the phone before ending the call and pocketing his phone. He focuses on Coach Pollard as he speaks, but his voice carries through the large room.
“A security guard reported a young woman, matching Kassidy Heartwell’s description, lingering in the stands two hours after we left,” he pauses like that tells us where she is.
“Well?” I question, unable to take the suspense.
“He escorted her through a gate,” he finishes.
“Then where did she go?” Coach Pollard asks, giving me a look that tells me to keep my mouth shut.
