Landry knows what she looks like, having seen the photos posted on Elena’s blog. Dark hair, round, pleasant face, in her early thirties . . .
Which describes many of the women she’s encountered so far in the airport.
Stepping out of the stall, she makes eye contact with one.
“Elena?”
The woman looks at her.
“Are you Elena?”
She shakes her head, shrugs. “No habla ingles.”
Landry apologizes, conscious of the curious stares of other women in the line. She wonders what they’re thinking, then decides not to care, tired of fretting about . . .
Well, just about everything.
What would Meredith do? She’d move on without a backward glance.
Landry dries her hands and does just that.
It’s probably better that she hasn’t run into Elena here at the airport, she decides, having caught a glimpse of her reflection in the mirror. She’s definitely looking travel weary. The sooner she can get to the hotel and pull herself together, the better.
At the car rental counter, she finds another long line and busies herself calling Rob from her cell phone while she waits.
“So you made it.”
His familiar drawl makes her aware of just how far from home she really is.
“Yep—I made it.”
“You doing okay?”
She hesitates. “Sure.”
“Good. Listen, I was just talking to John, and he used to have a client up there. He said that if you get a chance, you should try the chili at Skyline.”
“Did you tell him this isn’t a pleasure trip? I mean, I’m walking into a funeral for a friend who was murdered . . .”
And they haven’t caught whoever did it.
“I know you are,” Rob says quickly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—”
“No, it’s okay. I know.”
He’s back there at home, where everything is nice and normal, instead of here in a strange place worrying that whoever killed Meredith might turn around and come after her.
Because of course there’s no reason to think that.
Is there?
She stares at the blond hair of the woman standing directly in front of her and idly speculates about whether it’s a wig. It looks like one. Fashion choice by a brunette who thinks blondes really do have more fun, Landry wonders, or is she just yet another woman who’s lost her hair to cancer treatment?
“Next!” calls the counter agent, and the woman steps forward.
“I’m going to have to hang up in a minute,” Landry tells Rob. “It’s almost my turn.”
“Okay, wait—do you have any idea where the new car insurance cards are? Because I need to put them into the glove compartments and I can’t find them anywhere.”
Of course he can’t.
She reminds him—again—that she thumb-tacked them to the bulletin board in the kitchen.
“I looked there.”
“Look again.”
“But I didn’t—”
“Next!” calls the rental counter agent, finished with the woman ahead of Landry.
“Trust me,” she tells Rob, “they’re on the bulletin board. I’ve got to go.”
She hurriedly hangs up, steps forward, and pulls out the folded papers containing printouts of her reservations.
“Thank you, Mrs. Wells. Are you a member of our frequent renter program?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Would you like to join?”
“No, thanks.” I’d like to get into a hotel room with a hot shower, that’s all I’d like right about now.
“Are you familiar with Cincinnati?”
Feeling more impatient by the second, she admits, “No, I’ve never been here before.”
“You’ll want a GPS system in the car, then. And I’ll get you some maps.” The agent briskly steps away from the counter.
“I can tell you how to get where you’re going,” says a familiar voice behind Landry.
She turns to see Bruce Mangione, Private Investigator and Personal Security.
They hadn’t done much more talking for the duration of the flight. He’d gotten busy on his laptop after takeoff, and she’d finally managed to lose herself in the celebrity biography she’d downloaded to her e-reader the other night. The other passengers seemed equally subdued, probably thanks to having risen in the wee hours to make an early flight, then spending several mind-numbing hours at the gate. No one—not even the flight attendants—seemed to be in a conversational mood anymore.
After they landed, Bruce Mangione lifted Landry’s bag down from the overhead bin, she thanked him, and that was that. She lost track of him amid the mass exodus that began when the door opened onto the jetway.
“Hi,” he says. “I’ve been standing behind you but you seemed busy and I didn’t want to interrupt.”
“Oh . . . thanks . . . I just—that was my husband.”
“I just called my wife, too. She gets nervous when I fly. Sounds like your husband is worried about you, too.”
“He . . . not really. I mean . . .” She wonders how much he heard. “He just likes to make sure I’m okay.”
“I don’t blame him. Crazy things can happen. Trust me—in my line of work, I’ve seen it all. So where do you have to go now that you’re here?”
“I think it’s a Residence Inn . . . or maybe a Fairfield Inn. One of those Marriott chains . . .” She starts to reach for the reservation paper she left on the counter.
“You’re going to the hotel before the funeral?”
Caught off guard by his mention of the funeral, she turns back to him in surprise—then remembers that she told him about it on the plane. Still, she wonders again how much he overheard of her conversation with Rob just now. She wasn’t exactly whispering.
Not that it matters . . .
Does it?
“The hotel is right down the road from the funeral home,” she tells him with a shrug, “so—”
“All right, Ms. Wells, here you go . . .” The counter attendant is back, handing over a couple of maps and a contract. “The shuttle driver will wait for you if you hurry, right through those doors, if you’ll just sign here, here, here, initial here and here . . .”
“Thank you.” She scans the contract, signs, signs, signs again, initials and initials, and turns quickly to Bruce. “I’ve got to run. It was nice—”
“Are you sure you don’t need directions?”
“I don’t think—”
“Next!”
“Go ahead,” Landry tells him, gesturing at the rental counter and grabbing the handle of her bag. “I’ll be fine, thanks. Nice meeting you.”
“You too,” he calls as he steps up to the counter.
It isn’t until Landry has stepped out of the shuttle at the rental lot that she realizes she left the paper containing her hotel reservation back on the counter. And she isn’t sure of the name of the hotel chain, let alone the address.
Dammit. She’ll have to go back.
Wait a minute. She received an e-mail confirmation when she made the reservations. She should be able to find that in her phone . . .
She turns toward the shuttle as the doors close, but at the last second the driver sees her and opens the door. Two minutes later she’s behind the wheel of a rental car, typing the hotel’s address into the GPS.
There. See that? I can take care of myself just fine, she silently tells herself. No reason to worry. Not at all.
A man raps gently on the driver’s side window, and Jaycee jumps.
She hadn’t even seen him approach the car. She’d been too busy watching BamaBelle drive off in her mid-sized rental, which had—as luck would have it—been parked in the spot adjacent to hers.
Then again, perhaps that’s not as big a coincidence as it seems. Bama had, after all, been standing directly behind her in the line back at the counter.
Jaycee was so caught up in her own problems that she wouldn’t have even noticed her there had she not overheard that distinct southern drawl talking on the cell phone. Even then, she wasn’t positive it was Bama—or rather, Landry, as she’d introduced herself a few days ago when Jaycee spoke to her from Los Angeles.
But when Landry mentioned Meredith’s name, Jaycee knew for certain.
Sure enough, she snuck a glance over her shoulder and recognized a slightly older, more worn-out-looking version of BamaBelle’s official blog site photo.