Death of a Batty Genius (Stormy Day Mystery #3) (9 page)

Jessica stood at my side and whispered in my ear, “We are getting dinner tonight, right? Otherwise, Jeffrey might have to battle me for that pan-seared tuna.”

“We won’t die,” I whispered back. “I’ve got some Junior Mints in my purse.”

She elbowed me teasingly. “I haven’t seen a single staff member, outside of the construction crew. In a place this size, there should be prep cooks in the kitchen all day. Dinner time’s coming, and I don’t see anybody trying to help Marie except for Jeffrey, and you and I both know that cat won’t even peel a potato.”

“He’s not great with tools that require thumbs.”

I looked around for signs of resort staff who might have been shy and staying out of sight, but found none. Jessica was right to be concerned. Three-and-a-half hours up the side of a mountain was well outside the delivery range for Golden Wok.

Marie delicately plated the tuna for Jeffrey and set it before him. He dove right in, which made her smile.

Jessica cleared her throat and pushed up the three-quarter sleeves of her shirt. “Marie, did your staff call in sick? Let me help with something. I work in catering, and I take direction well.”

Marie gasped. “No, no. You’re Butch’s guest. I couldn’t possibly let you help.”

“Honestly, getting to work in a brand-new kitchen like this would be a privilege. And maybe I could put it on my resume.”

Marie looked down at her red clogs. “I could use some help,” she said weakly.

Jessica had already located an apron and pulled it on. She started washing her hands, right at home.

The Fairchild cousins had wandered off, so I gathered up Jeffrey plus his food, and excused myself to take him back to the room.

When I got to the room’s door, the construction foreman was dropping off a plastic litter pan. “Now, that’s just regular sand in there,” he said. “It won’t clump like the commercial litter, so I brought you an extra bag.”

“Thanks! You’ve made us feel right at home.” I pulled out some cash and handed him a tip.

The foreman seemed confused, but accepted the money and walked off.

Once we were inside the room, I explained to Jeffrey, “I didn’t mean to insult the man. It’s just force of habit from all my business travels to tip the bellhop.”

Jeffrey jumped into the litter pan and started rearranging the sand so it was more to his liking.

“All the comforts of home,” I mused to myself as I took a second look around the room.

A glass door led to the snow-blanketed patio. Beyond the perimeter were stone planters that would hold flowers in the summer, and beyond that was nothing but trees, a steep drop-off, and then the valley. Inside the room, the decoration matched the rustic setting, with walls the color of granite, and furnishings in every shade of bark, from the dark brown of pine branches to the silver-white of paper birch.

I relocated Jeffrey and his sand castles to the washroom, then plugged in my laptop while commenting, “Let’s hope they paid the Wi-Fi bill before the start-up money ran out.”

A minute later, I sighed. There was internet, but I needed a password.

“Just as well,” I said, closing the laptop and reaching for my investigation manuals.

I’d just settled on the bed with a book when someone knocked on the door. I opened it, and found nothing but an empty hallway. I looked left and right. Nobody was there. I rubbed the goosebumps on my forearms. The patterned carpet running up and down the hall reminded me of that horror movie,
The Shining
. I closed the door quickly, before scary ghost twins could appear.

Someone knocked again, and that time I answered the interior door, the one connected to Christopher’s room.

He had a map in one hand and a camping lantern in the other.

“Let’s go check out the lava tubes,” he said.

“You mean the caves? I don’t know. Dinner’s soon, and I was going to have a relaxing bath.”

“You don’t take relaxing baths.”

“And you don’t go spelunking. Where’d you get that map?”

“It’s top secret, actually. Highly confidential. You’ve already seen too much.” He folded the map and hid it behind his back.

I reached for it, curious, but he only yanked it farther from my grasp.

“Let me see that map. Is it for hidden cave networks?”

“What do you think?”

Chapter 10
 

The first rule
of being in a secret cave exploration society is you don’t talk about being in a secret cave exploration society.

And you certainly don’t share the maps with the general public.

I hadn’t done much cave exploration, much less been in a secret society, but I’d always been fascinated by the idea. There were rumors of secret Oregon caverns and their entrances, but this information wasn’t readily available, and for good reason. It took only a few disrespectful partygoers to ruin pristine underground sites with beer cans and graffiti.

But I wasn’t planning to put any secret maps on the internet. I just wanted to see the yellowed paper Christopher had, because it was the closest thing to a treasure map that I expected to see in my lifetime.

“Please? Just a peek?”

Christopher kept backing away from me, laughing and tucking the folded map into his jeans pocket. “Come with me and you can do more than peek at my map.”

Grumbling, I grabbed my boots and coat.

Christopher held the lantern low, at his hip, lighting the cavern without blinding us. Holding a candle or lantern ahead of your face looks great in movies, but blinds you in real life.

At the first fork, he led us to the left, to the smaller of two chimneys leading up. He hopped over some loose boulders and climbed up with ease.

Puffing as I hustled to keep up, I commented, “You’re as spry as a mountain goat.”

“Must be all the yoga.”

I laughed. Christopher didn’t do yoga, and made fun of people who did.

After twenty minutes of steady climbing, I asked, “How are your parents?”

“Getting older, with the exception of my mother’s face.”

“She finally got that second facelift she wanted?”

“And a new handbag! They made it with the leftover skin.”

His joke made me laugh so hard, I stumbled on some gravel and nearly wiped out. Christopher caught me easily and held me with his free arm.

“A new handbag,” I wheezed as I blinked away the tears of laughter. “Since when do you make jokes about your mother’s plastic surgery?”

He grinned. “Credit should go to my father. He’s been making that joke for months.”

“Now I’m really confused. Since when does
your father
make jokes about your mother’s plastic surgery?”

“People can change, you know.”

“Sure, but they never do,” I said.

His voice got soft. “People change if they have the motivation.”

He was still holding me, our faces only inches apart. Our lips got closer and closer. I fluttered my lashes, closed my eyes, waited, and just as I felt his breath on my mouth, I reached down and yanked the map from his hand.

“Hah!” I cried, stumbling backward while waving the map in triumph. “I’ve got your super-secret map!”

He gave me a serious look. “Stormy-Lou, don’t look at that. It’s not for your eyes.”

“Too late.” I backed up a safe distance, then used my phone to take a photo of the map for later.

“I can explain,” he said.

I studied the map for a moment, while my emotions rose up like storm clouds gathering.

“You liar,” I said in disbelief. “This isn’t some hand-drawn secret map. It’s mass-printed on this yellow paper to look antique. There’s a logo right here in the corner, from the Oregon Tourism Commission.”

“There is a secret passageway, though.”

I crumpled the map and tossed it at him. “You can shove your stupid map up your secret passageway.”

“I’m not lying. There really is another system connected to this one, and I’m going to take you there.”

I crossed my arms. “Why? What other surprises do you have in store? Are we going to stumble upon a bottle of champagne, candles, and a picnic blanket?”

He frowned. “Were you always this paranoid?”

I took a step back, bumping into the cavern wall. The narrow passageway was feeling smaller by the minute. The pressure made me feel like screaming, but I held back.

Through clenched teeth, I said, “I need to ask you a question. Why are we here?”

“To help my cousin.”

“I’m going to give you one more chance to tell me the truth. Why are we here?”

He took a deep breath, then answered plainly, “To help my cousin. That’s all.”

“Fine,” I spat. “Butch isn’t here in the caves, though, so if you want to help your dear cousin so much, we should go back to the lodge.”

“Go back already? But we’ve hardly seen any of the caves. Don’t you want the full experience?”

“If you want the full experience of being in a cave, I think you should go
all the way
.” I reached out and grabbed the lantern from his hand.

“You wouldn’t,” he said.

“Keep your ears on alert for monsters,” I called over my shoulder as I walked away with the light. “Forest Folk aren’t the only cryptids known to reside in these parts.”

When I got back to the room, I found Jessica there in a towel, her pale skin still steaming from the shower.

She took one look at me and said, “You were off somewhere with Christopher.” She squinted at my face. “You’ve got a weird look and your mouth is bare. You two were kissing! Your lip gloss has been all kissed away.”

“Nice try, Detective Kelly, but I haven’t been kissing anyone who isn’t a cat. And I don’t wear lip gloss anymore, because the gray fur that follows me wherever I go tends to stick to the lip gloss.”

“Darn. So much for my powers of deductive reasoning.”

“Actually, it wasn’t deductive reasoning, but
inductive
reasoning, which is more bottom-up. You
wanted
to believe I was off kissing Christopher, so you looked for evidence to support it.”

“You really don’t wear lip gloss anymore?”

“Nope. And thanks to His Regal Grayness, I don’t wear white pants anymore, either, but that’s not much of a hardship.”

“So, where were you just now?”

“Would you believe, spelunking?” I explained to her how Christopher had used the lure of a secret map to trick me into going to the caves with him, then how I’d called him out on his scheming, and finally how I’d left him alone in the darkness to be consumed by man-eating vampire bats.

Jessica said, “Give me a minute to put some clothes on and I’ll go with you to rescue him from the caves.”

“No need. He actually walked out behind me, hanging back just enough so he thought I couldn’t hear him. Come on, Jess, do you really think I’d leave Christopher out there to give an upset stomach to all those innocent vampire bats?”

“You do seem pretty mad at him.”

“I am. Or… I was. I don’t know. He really gets under my skin.”

Jessica got a jar of shell-pink nail polish from her bag and started shaking it. “Getting under your skin is not always a bad thing.” She sat at the room’s desk and spread out the complimentary stationery to protect the wood surface before painting her fingernails. “Stormy, if someone gets to you, that means, deep down, you care about them.”