“Gone?”
“Why me?” Marie wailed, the waterworks going strong. “Don’t my friends love me? Don’t I deserve to have the perfect wedding with all my best girls around me?”
Evelyn hugged Marie tighter but rolled her eyes. Clearly, she didn’t think it was as big of a deal as Marie did. “Marie, maybe she had a work emergency and had to go home. I’m sure it’s not about you.”
“Or she couldn’t handle what she saw in the alleyway that night,” I chipped in. “We talked about it yesterday. She’s been struggling.”
Marie drew away from Evelyn to fix her puffy eyes on me. “You talked to Angelica?”
“Briefly, yes.”
“What did you say?”
I shrugged. “Nothing much. She asked how I deal with the bodies I see. I said I don’t always process it well.”
Marie’s face contorted. “So this is your fault!”
I froze in place. “Wait, what?”
“You told her she could go home!”
“How on earth did you get that out of what I just told you?” I threw my hands up in defeat. “You know what? This is a waste of time. I don’t know if the wedding is making everyone stressed out, but I don’t have to sit around and let you two treat me like this. I’m tired of being your punching bag for when things go wrong.”
In my pajama pants and oversized sweatshirt, I stormed from the room, but the situation wasn’t much better in the hallway. The rest of the bridesmaids lingered outside to eavesdrop on Marie. When I emerged, they scattered like roaches.
“Hold up!” I ordered, and the girls slowly turned to face me. “Who was the last person to see or talk to Angelica last night?”
Casey, a girl who’d flown in from New Mexico, raised her hand. “I think I was? I saw her go into her room after dinner.”
“I saw her later,” another girl, Kelani, chimed in. “I passed her in the hallway around midnight. She was getting ice from the vending machine.”
“Did you notice if she went back to her room?”
Kelani lifted her shoulders. “I didn’t see. I went to bed after that.”
“Did anyone talk to her at dinner?” I asked the entire group. “Did she mention anything about leaving the hotel?”
“She didn’t say.”
“I don’t think so.”
Suspicion began to eat at the back of my mind.
“Does anyone have a spare key to Angelica’s room?” I asked. “I’d like to check it out.”
“Marie does,” Casey said. “She has spare keys to everyone’s room in case we lose ours.”
“Of course,” I muttered.
Leaving the bridesmaids to fend for themselves, I ducked back into the loft, where Evelyn and Marie had moved to the balcony to further discuss Angelica’s disappearance. The wind whipped at Marie’s hair, but she didn’t seem to care about the cold. Maybe she’d needed some fresh air to calm her down.
She’d left her keycard on the counter by the door. I swiped it, snuck down the hallway, and scanned into Marie’s enormous suite. The extra hotel keys for the bridesmaids’ rooms were piled in a crystal jar near the mini fridge, each one labeled with a room number and a name. I found Angelica’s, Room 1420, and silently celebrated.
The bridesmaids had retreated to their own rooms as I found my way to Angelica’s. I slipped inside and took a cursory glance around.
The bed was made. The pillow mints were uneaten. The mini bar was fully stocked, even though the Greys and the Delacourts were paying for all the hotel fees. If I were Angelica, I would have taken full advantage of the free perks.
Angelica’s things were gone. She had left nothing in the bathroom, not even trash or a half-used bar of hand soap. There were no hairs on the pillows or dirty towels on the floor, waiting for the maids to come pick them up. It was as if no one had ever stayed in this room at all.
I searched everything. I stripped the bed, checked the closets, swept the bathroom cabinets, and pulled open every drawer. I wasn’t sure what I was looking for, but instinct told me that Angelica hadn’t left the Saint Angel on her own. The last time someone disappeared like this—in the middle of the night with all of their stuff—she had turned up dead a few days later.
But nothing turned up. No sign of a struggle. No drops of blood. No scuff marks on the carpet that might indicate Angelica had been dragged from the room. The place was clean. Too clean.
I picked up the phone by the bed and dialed the front desk.
“This is Janine. How may I help you?”
“Hi, Janine. It’s Jacqueline Frye,” I said. “I was just wondering when the maids usually clean the fourteenth floor? I want to take a nap today without interruption.”
“They usually get up to the fourteenth floor around two pm,” Janine said.
“Do they ever start cleaning early in the morning?”
“Only if guests are checking out of their rooms early.”
I blew air through my nose. “Do you know if anyone cleaned 1420 this morning?”
Her keyboard clacked. “No one’s been up there yet.”
I gazed at the stack of unused towels in the bathroom, along with the untouched soap and shampoo bottles. If the maids hadn’t been here, who made the bed and replaced the pillow mints?
“Anything else, Miss Frye?”
“Yes, one more question. Did you happen to notice one of our bridesmaids leaving the hotel last night?”
“I’m afraid I don’t work the night shift,” Janine answered. “Jordan takes over the front desk after a certain time.”
“But you were here when we got back from the bachelorette party at two in the morning.”
She coughed thinly. “Yes, sometimes I cover for Jordan if I need extra hours. If that’s all Miss Frye, I have guests waiting for my attention.”
After she hung up, I took one last look around Angelica’s room before stepping out. On the way back to my own room, I passed the vending area, triggering a memory from last
