Chapter 2 - The Rabbit With One Eye
“Let go of me,” Vivienne hissed.
Adrian didn’t squeeze. He just held her hand where the whole ballroom could see it.
“Why are you trying to take her rabbit?” he asked.
“Because she’s upset. Because this stranger has filled her head with nonsense.”
“My name is Mara,” I said. “And I found your daughter locked inside the linen elevator.”
That wasn’t exactly how it had started. I’d heard a faint knocking behind the wall near the service kitchen. At first I thought it was a pipe. Then a voice had asked whether Christmas was over yet. I opened the old freight elevator using the maintenance key left in my cart. Sophie was sitting on the floor beside a plate of untouched crackers. The emergency stop had been engaged from outside.
Adrian stared at me. “How long?”
“I don’t know.”
Sophie lifted six fingers, then closed them. “Till I was good.”
Vivienne’s public smile finally cracked. “You know how she invents stories. Her doctors—”
“Which doctors?” Adrian interrupted.
“Our family specialists.”
“Give me a name.”
She opened her mouth, but no sound came.
The hotel manager, Mr. Kessler, hurried over. “Mr. Vale, perhaps we can handle this privately.”
“No,” Adrian said. “We’ve handled too much privately.”
A photographer lowered his camera. The string quartet stopped pretending not to listen.
Adrian turned the toy over. An uneven seam crossed the rabbit’s back, sewn with blue thread. Sophie touched it with one shaking finger.
“Mommy fixed him before the accident,” she said.
Adrian’s face changed. Sophie’s mother, Laurel Vale, had died in a car crash three years earlier. At least that was what every article I’d read claimed.
I reached into my apron pocket and handed him my tiny sewing scissors. He stared at them, then carefully cut three stitches.
From the stuffing slipped a flat brass key and a folded scrap of paper.
Vivienne took a step backward.
Adrian unfolded the note. The handwriting was tight, slanted, hurried.
IF THEY SAY I DIED, ASK WHO SIGNED THE REPORT.
Underneath was a number: 417.
Sophie whispered, “That’s where Mommy went.”
A security guard spoke into his radio. “We have a situation at the north ballroom.”
May you like
From inside his earpiece, tinny but clear, came a woman’s voice.
“Get the child out. The father cannot see Room 417.”
