“I thought the goldfish program was a big success,” I said. In training, I’d been told that families loved it. Kids could choose which goldfish they wanted upon check-in, and one of the porters would carry it up to their room.
“It is,” Melinda insisted. “No one’s killing fish. Sometimes they get diseases or an overeager child scoops one out of the bowl or dumps orange juice in the water . . . So, of course, we must dispose of them occasionally. But it’s not as if we kill them for pleasure. Goldfish don’t live long anyway.”
I knew for a fact that wasn’t true, but no way was I saying so.
“And Octavia has a custom-built, half-a-million-dollar tank,” Melinda said. “She’s adored by locals and tourists, and she’s perfectly happy living with her starfish friends. Every fall we release that year’s Octavia into the Sound and catch another one.”
“Wait, what?”
“They only live a year or so. We ‘retire’ them and catch a young one. But if guests press you about this, just say that this Octavia is the former Octavia’s baby. And if anyone has a problem with the way we run things, they can talk to me. Got it?”
“Absolutely,” I said, though I wasn’t liking any of this information. But it was obviously a sore topic for her, so I was thankful to leave the fish issues behind for now and head out the front door with her when she was ready to introduce me to the final three Bats.
The first was someone I’d already met earlier: Joseph. Turned out, he not only watched the door, but he was also the bellhop and the backup valet, if any guests needed their luggage carried or their car retrieved from the underground parking, until the Bat shift ended and the morning crew’s Roosters took our places.
At Joseph’s side was a blond, college-aged bruiser named Chuck, who was loud, obnoxious, and a guard working under the security manager, Mr. Kenneth. “What up, femme?”
“Please refrain from using that term,” Melinda scolded. “It doesn’t mean what you think it does.”
“It’s French for female,” Chuck argued around the gum he was smacking. “It’s a term of endearment. And why does she get to use a nickname on her tag?”
I glanced down at my name tag. “It’s my real name.”
“Your mom named you Birdie? Is she some kind of hippie?”
“She’s dead.”
“Oh shit!” Chuck says. “My bad.”
“Please refrain from using bad language on the property,” Melinda said wearily.
He wasn’t paying attention. “So, Birdie. Betcha didn’t know that Joseph here was descended from Chief Seattle,” Chuck informed me.
Joseph sighed heavily, pushing dark hair out of his eyes. “My family’s Puyallup, from Tacoma. Completely different tribe.”
“Who cares? Guests eat that shit up,” Chuck said, grinning. “Right, boss?”
Now Melinda ignored him. “And over there is our driver,” she told me.
The scent of her chocolate-scented lotion filled my nostrils when she waved her arm and shouted to get the attention of a boy about my age. He was lean and animated, standing on the other side of the hotel van, cheerfully chatting with a taxi driver and completely oblivious to Melinda.
“He’s half-deaf,” Chuck offered. “Must be nice. You can tune out whoever you want.”
“His hearing is impaired,” Melinda corrected in a low voice. “You need to be patient with him sometimes.”
Joseph whistled sharply with his teeth. The van driver waved good-bye to the taxi and hurried toward us, slender legs striding, head down, hands shoved deep in the pockets of the same sort of zipped-up green windbreaker that some of the staff wore. He had dark, short hair . . . Wait, no. Long hair. Really long hair, wound up into a samurai-style, hipster topknot at the crown of his head.
Huh.
My heart started hammering furiously.
When people say they have a “gut feeling” about something, it’s because our brains are constantly being fed information by our bodies. Our noses smell smoke, and then our brain tells us to get the heck out of the house. And at that moment, my body was telling me to stop, drop, and roll. It just took my slowpoke brain a few extra moments to realize why.
“This is the night-shift van driver,” Melinda informed me as he approached. “Daniel Aoki, meet Birdie. She’s the new night clerk.”
When the driver lifted his head, his eyes widened, and he murmured, “Oh, fuuuuuuuu . . .”
Every muscle in my body turned to stone.
I knew that face. And lots more of him too.
This was the boy I’d met in the diner.
“Men. Can’t live without them. You can’t hit them with an ax.”
—Phryne Fisher, Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries (2015)
3
* * *
Son of a beekeeper!
I tried to process what was happening, but all I could do was stare and wonder if all of this was a bad dream. Just to be sure, I stealthily counted my fingers—a trick I learned from my grandpa. Looking at your hands is a good way to test wakefulness, because if you’re dreaming, they sometimes morph into extra-long space-alien hands or the number of digits will be wrong. At the moment everything was as it should be. Five fingers. Nothing extraterrestrial.
I was awake, and all of this was really happening.
Okay. Deep breath. Maybe I was confused. This could be someone else who looked like him. A twin? I looked harder. Wide silver ring on middle finger. Tiny V-shaped scar on cheek. And on his head, one stray lock of hair hung loose around his face: it spilled over his shoulder and stopped in the middle of his chest, a million times longer than mine.
It was him, all right.
And the way his face lit up with joy when he recognized me made it all so much worse. Oh, that smile—so effortless and sincere. So big and wide, it lifted the keen angles of his cheeks and made his brown eyes squint. That was the thing that had attracted me in the diner, his easygoing, open manner. I’d never met anyone so comfortable with both himself and other people, so honestly cheerful.
This couldn’t be happening. He was standing in front of me, and he had a full name: Daniel Aoki. I didn’t want to know that. He was supposed to be my private, forgettable mistake, not my coworker!
“We call him Jesus,” Chuck said. “If you saw him with his hair down, you’d understand. He does magic tricks for the guests that are probably just as good as turning water into wine.” Chuck turned to Daniel and asked, “Hey, what’s the Japanese word for Jesus?”
“No idea,” Daniel said. “Don’t speak it.”
“But your mom does, right?” Chuck said.
“Isn’t your mom from Spokane?” Joseph asked Daniel.
“Born and raised,” Daniel said, unaffected by Chuck’s boorish observations. Maybe he’d become numb to them. Maybe, like me, he was too busy trying to compute the chances of us ending up being coworkers, and how was this even possible? I wished he’d quit looking at me like that.
“You two know each other, or something?” Chuck asked after an awkward silence.
“No,” I said at the same time Daniel replied, “Yes.”