A Spirited Gift

I could hear Gramps saying this was motive. But I held that back—we didn’t know yet where Sandi was or if anything had really happened to her.

“So Sandi was up here and you came downstairs.” I tried to get back to finding our missing mayor.

“She said she wanted to clean up first, you know?” He shrugged. “I thought she came down after me and I just didn’t see her. There were a lot of people down there. She said something about looking for the ring she lost. She might still be looking for it.”

“All right.” I tried to decide what to do next. “I think we should go back downstairs for a minute. Matthew, you’re going to stay down there with a few of my friends. Don’t get any cute ideas about trying to leave.”

“I can’t anyway,” he snarled. “She lost my car key.”

“That must be the one you turned in, Dae,” Marissa added in an excited voice.

Thanks for the help, I thought, but said, “We’ll deal with that later.”

“Never mind all that,” Nancy said, grabbing Matthew’s arm in what appeared to be a painful grip. “I’ll take the little boy toy downstairs and let some of the guys keep an eye on him. He’s not going anywhere until we find Mayor Foxx. You guys start searching the rooms up here. That must be the plan, right?”

I almost said, Yes, ma’am, but I didn’t want to undermine her authority. Besides, Nancy could be pretty tough when she chose to be. “That works. Thanks.”

“Look, I didn’t do anything wrong.” Matthew defended himself. “She wanted me. She just wanted me too much. She threatened not to give me a good job reference if I tried to leave. I was angry. We settled it later. You can ask her when we find her. Then I’m going to sue the whole town of Duck for false accusations.”

“No one is accusing you of anything—yet.” I dismissed him and turned to Marissa. “I guess we’ll have to go room by room. There doesn’t seem to be enough damage from the storm that she could be hurt somewhere up here. But she might’ve had a little too much to drink.”

“Maybe we should call the police, Dae,” Marissa said, her gaze fixed on Matthew. “They’ll know what to do.”

“I don’t want to call them away from this emergency to find Sandi,” I replied. “There are only thirty rooms in the inn. We can look through them, and if we don’t see her, then we’ll call someone. Okay?”

“The mayor can take over for the chief if necessary, you know. It’s in the town charter,” Nancy said. “I’ll take him downstairs and come back up to help.”

After Nancy went downstairs with Matthew, Marissa and I began to work our way down the third-floor hall. She opened every door while I came behind her and checked under every bed, in every bathroom, closet, and any other place an adult woman could fall asleep.

There was no sign of Sandi. I began feeling some tension in my neck and shoulders that had nothing to do with looking under beds. What if something really bad had happened to her? I hoped I was doing the right thing not calling the police.

We moved to the second floor and did the same thing. Sandi wasn’t in any of those rooms either. But we did find a few more wayward gulls who’d taken refuge from the storm. They’d flown in through the broken windows and weren’t in any hurry to leave. We used towels and bedclothes to try and scare them back outside. They squawked at us—finally giving up and vanishing into the night.

I stood by the window (at least where the window used to be) and watched the last one fly away. The moon was bright in the clear black sky. I hoped all of this would be over by morning. Cleaning up after a storm I could deal with—trying to make what could be life-and-death decisions about another human being was another story.

“Kevin’s gonna have a mess to clean up,” Marissa observed, waiting for me at the end of the second-story hall. “There’s a hole in the ceiling.”

I looked up where she pointed and saw the spot, about the size of a hatbox, right above our heads. “How did we miss that when we were upstairs?”

“I don’t know,” Nancy said as she joined us. “Maybe we missed Mayor Foxx too. We’re not professional rescue workers.”

“What now?” Marissa asked.

“I guess we search the rooms on the ground floor.” I was really beginning to worry. I didn’t want to call the chief in from storm detail—no telling what all had happened out there that needed his attention. And truthfully, the police wouldn’t even look for Sandi yet if she was reported missing.

On the other hand, what Matthew had said and the way he was acting were very suspicious. He might not have done anything, but his attitude made me feel less than charitable toward him. What if I waited and something worse happened?

Chapter 6

The problem was solved for me when Duck Police Officer Scott Randall greeted us at the bottom of the stairs. He’d been injured the week before, and his broken arm was keeping him from being much help on the roads picking up trash from the storm. He’d been assigned to checking on Duck citizens.

I’d never been so glad to see someone I was barely acquainted with!