Page 14 of The Claiming of the Shrew (Fated Mountain Lodge #4)

LEAH

The screams brought every guest out of their rooms, converging on the source of the shrieking: Gloria’s room.

As Leah pushed forward with the rest, she caught a glimpse of Fawkes in the crowd.

He definitely had not come out of his room; he was out of breath and hastily buttoning his shirt.

He’d been shifted somewhere around the hotel.

Leah frowned at him, but before she could say anything, she got a look at Gloria.

And stared.

Gloria was a beautiful blonde with a luxurious head of salon-perfect waves. At least she used to be.

Now her hair was a brilliant, frizzy, Ronald McDonald orange.

So was her face, in blotches of varying intensity.

Maggie arrived on the scene, wrapping a bathrobe around herself; her hair was up in a towel and it looked as if she had come directly from a shower. “Oh, honey, what happened?”

Gloria shrieked again, burst into tears, and clung to Maggie. “I can’t go onstage like this! I look like a clown!”

She did, but Leah was too distracted to point this out. She edged through the assembled Menagerie and other puzzled guests, trying to get close to Fawkes.

“Are you sick?” someone else was asking Gloria.

“No!” Gloria moaned into Maggie’s shoulder. “Someone tampered with my cosmetics. Someone did this to me on purpose !”

“I’m sure we can fix it,” Maggie offered.

“Only by shaving my head!”

Leah got Fawkes’s attention by bumping into him. “I need to talk to you,” she whispered.

He turned a look on her that was filled with hope. “You changed your mind about me having?—”

“I haven’t decided yet.” She looked him up and down, taking in his sneaking-around clothes. “Where have you been?”

Fawkes touched a finger to his lips.

“Leah!” Maggie said loudly over the hubbub of the crowd. “There you are!”

Leah looked around in surprise. The director had put off Gloria onto another of the crew and was making her way through the crowd toward her, and she was scowling.

Fawkes, to Leah’s surprised pleasure, moved to interpose himself protectively between them. Leah shoved him out of the way. “She’s the director of the play,” she whispered. “She’s not going to hurt me.”

She was mostly convinced of that. But she didn’t know what to think about the way Maggie was bearing down on her, glaring thunderously. She’s found out I’ve been sneaking into people’s rooms , Leah thought. It was the only?—

“What were you thinking?” Maggie snapped. “How dare you do this to the star of our show!”

Leah stared at her in wide-eyed disbelief as her train of thought went off the rails, bounced on its side a few times, and let out a sad hissing sound. “What?” she said.

“What?” said several other people in the hallway.

“Now wait a minute!” came Joy’s indignant voice from the back of the crowd. Evidently she had been drawn by the screaming as well.

Maggie gripped Leah’s arm. Fawkes made a low noise like a growl.

“You’re Gloria’s understudy,” Maggie said. “All of us know that you want that role. No one else on the crew has any reason to want to see our star harmed—except for you.”

“What—I—she’s not even harmed!” Leah protested. “She’s just orange!” In retrospect, as the words emerged from her mouth, this probably wasn’t the stunning rebuttal of her innocence that she’d had in mind.

“And none of this started until you showed up,” Maggie went on.

“What?” Leah protested again. She couldn’t seem to come up with a valid defense. She was too shocked.

Fawkes seemed torn between glaring at Maggie and giving Leah curious looks. He mouthed something at Leah, which she was pretty sure was “Did you?”

“No!” Leah snapped at him.

Maggie grasped Leah by the arm. Fawkes bristled.

“We need to talk in private,” Maggie said.

“It’s fine,” Leah said to Fawkes, who looked like he was one move from turning into a raccoon and flinging himself at Maggie to claw her eyes out.

“I mean, it’s going to be fine—” Maggie was towing her along; she was separated from Fawkes in the crowded hallway.

She considered turning into a shrew and running, or rather dragging herself, away, but there was too much of a chance of being stepped on.

“Meet me later!” she said desperately in Fawkes’s direction. “In your—no—in Joy’s room!”

“Arrange your trysts later,” Maggie said sharply. She stopped just inside the door of her room, and Leah tried to look innocent and definitely not like she had been in this room just a few hours earlier.

“Now,” Maggie said. “Explain yourself.”

Leah scowled at her. “I have nothing to explain, because I didn’t do it. I was with Halstadt all evening.”

“Yes, but where were you before that? You’ve been out most of the day.”

“I was with Fawkes. He’s my alibi.” But she actually hadn’t been with him all day, had she? There was a rather significant chunk of time when she was by herself, while Gloria was down at dinner.

A perfect time to break into her room and mess with things.

Damn it.

Okay, so who else was free during that time?

“And where were you this evening?” Leah demanded.

Maggie’s angry defensiveness surged. “On set! Don’t try to cast blame on me. Why in the world would I want to wreck my own production?”

“Why would anyone?” Leah shot back. “Why would I? Why are you blaming me?”

She wondered briefly if Gloria could have dyed her own hair to cast blame on someone she didn’t like—Leah, say—but discarded that thought immediately.

Gloria’s brain simply was not that twisty.

Also, Gloria would never in a million years have come up with a plan that involved messing with the two things she loved most in the world: her hair, and her starring role.

But whoever had done it knew that would be the way to hurt her most, Leah thought. Hmmm.

Meanwhile, as Leah’s thoughts pinged along at shrew-speed, Maggie was talking again. “I can’t prove you did it, though you’re certainly the prime suspect, but as of now, you’re out of the production. I don’t want you walking around in the set area without someone else from the crew with you.”

“ What ?” Leah stared at her in astonished hurt. “I’ve been with the company for years. These people are my friends.”

“If you’re innocent, you’ll be cleared. For now, if I see you unescorted in the crew area, you’ll be asked to leave.”

Leah found, to her horror, that she was choking back tears. The unfairness of the accusation galled her. She wanted to scream, cry, throw a fit.

“I don’t want to be in this stupid crew anyway!” she flared, and with that not exactly sparkling example of witty repartee, she stormed out of Maggie’s room.

The hallway had emptied. She could hear voices from Gloria’s room, where presumably the star was being consoled by the rest of the cast. Fawkes was also gone—yet another thing to be angry at stupid Maggie for. The only person still around was Joy, who came toward her quickly.

“Are you okay? Leah?”

“No!” Leah snapped. She stopped and leaned against the wall to press a hand against her eyes. On top of fighting with Fawkes earlier, this was just too much.

“Oh, honey.” Joy put an arm around her, and Leah relaxed into her. Joy might be annoyingly overbearing sometimes, but she did give good, comforting hugs.

“I hate everything,” Leah said into her shoulder. “They think I did it. Maggie kicked me off the crew.”

“What?” Joy pulled back, suffused with righteous fury. “That woman is getting a piece of my mind right now!”

“No—no, wait—” Leah tried to pull her back. As satisfying as it would be to watch Maggie get a fully charged death ray of protective-big-sister Joy, it probably wouldn’t help her case. “Calm down! Think of the bean, Joy. The bean.”

“Sometimes Mama needs to murder someone,” Joy growled, but she let Leah coax her back down the hallway.

The door of Joy’s room was already a crack open. Leah pushed it the rest of the way open, then stopped at the sight of the pillowcase, which she had left under the bed, lying on top of it.

“Oh,” Leah said.

“Yeah,” Joy said. “About that.”

“Shut the door, quick!”

Joy pushed the door shut. “So I am going to assume you have an explanation for this.”

“Did you look in it?”

“Of course I looked in it. Are those the things you’ve been helping Hester look for?”

Leah sighed and sat beside the pillowcase. She twitched it open just to check that they were talking about the same thing and it hadn’t been replaced with, say, a pillowcase full of pillow. The sparkles of diamonds and gold gleamed from within.

“I found this in Fawkes’s room earlier.” It came out as a half whisper.

“Oh, sis.” Joy sat beside her and put a hand on her back. “Did you tell Hester?”

“No. Not yet. I want to know—I just have to be sure before I do.”

“I understand.” Joy’s voice was serious, completely devoid of the usual big-sister teasing. “I can’t even imagine what I’d do if it was Bar. What did he say?”

“He says it’s not his and he’s never seen any of it before.

Which of course is what he would say whether or not he actually did it.

” Leah ran a hand over the lumpy surface.

“If it is him, then he’s been lying to me the whole time.

But if it’s not, someone set him up. I just don’t know how to decide. ”

“You’re going to figure it out,” Joy told her. “You’re Detective Shrew, remember?”

“Yeah, well, Detective Shrew may have lost her investigative partner.” Leah looked at her hopefully. “Do you want a job?”

Joy raised her hands. “I want to help , but I’m busy too, you know. I’m not prepared to go sneaking around at all hours. You need to get Fawkes’s side of the story.”

“I did already. Sort of. And I was going to talk to him tonight, but he disappeared. I don’t know where he is now.”

Her shrew approved of finding Fawkes. Her shrew approved of it very much. The MINEMINEMINEMINEMIIIIIIIIIIIINE was deafening, almost drowning out Joy.

“Have you thought about, you know. Calling him,” Joy was saying. “On a phone.”