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“We haven’t finished renovating this wing, obviously,” I told her.
“It’s cool seeing what it must’ve looked like back in the day, though.”
I gestured to a chair at the long table and rushed over to scoop up the clothing and shoes near the armchair. “Be right back.”
When the front room was tidy enough that I didn’t feel like a slob, I returned to the table and began sorting through the stack of items there. Emily had been gazing out the big windows facing the back of the resort, and she moved to join me at the table.
“So this,” I said, bringing out the taped-together parchment that had started this whole effort in the first place, “is the map.”
Emily smoothed it out in front of her, her eyes sharp as she scanned the hand-drawn document.
“This part looks older,” she said, her fingers tracing the lines of the original trail that had led us to Lola’s Gate, the first clue in our hunt. “And this part here?” she pointed to the part of the map we’d recreated, her arm brushing mine as she reached to trace the paper. Heat worked through me as Emily’s vanilla and orange blossom scent wafted around me and I had to step back to form a cohesive sentence.
“We had part of the map, and then discovered that the same map was in a movie. The map in the movie was in one piece,” I explained, taking the chair at her side. “And so we froze the screen and drew this part.”
“And all these symbols?” Her delicate fingers swept across the symbols on the map.
I pulled out the cipher key we’d used to figure out what they meant, and the printed photos I’d taken of the pictures down in the bar.
“That took us a while to get,” I told her, fascinated as I watched her eyes take in all the evidence we’d collected. She sorted through the prints of the pictures, her hands careful and quick. There was something so attractive about her focus, her clear determination. “A guest actually knocked a picture off the wall in the bar, shattering the glass. And that was how we found the symbol on the back.”
“So you looked at the other pictures,” Emily guessed.
“Right. And then Mateo’s daughter Lily—I know you have no idea who I’m talking about, but Mateo married one of my navy friends, Annalee?—”
“She was at the front desk when I checked in!” Emily looked up, her lips in a wide smile, revealing dimples to either side of her mouth that were completely charming.
“Yeah, probably,” I said. “Well, Mateo has a daughter—I think she was about seven when we got to this part—and she figured out that the symbols were basically a cipher. And she found words on the front of the photos that had symbols.”
Emily nodded as we both looked at the key that told us which symbol represented which word. But then she looked up at me again, her eyes narrowing. “But the words don’t make much sense.”
“They didn’t for a while, but we had a poem.”
“Oh, well, a poem. Of course,” Emily laughed. When the dimples popped this time, they were like magnets, drawing me closer to the easy happiness Emily displayed without a thought. I longed to trace my finger along one of those dimples.
“Sorry, I should’ve started with that.” I showed her another photo, this one of the poem that had been scrawled on the wall in another of the staff rooms.
“That would be so creepy if it said something spooky,” she said, the warm laugh coming again.
“I never thought about that,” I admitted, realizing she was right. “I just always thought about it being my uncle who’d written it...”
“You were close to him.” Her eyes found mine and filled with understanding.
“Yeah,” I said, marveling at the simple connection I felt with this near stranger. “We were. He was good to us.”
“Your parents?” she asked, her tone careful.
“They worked a lot. They were distracted, I guess. But summers were always here.”
“I understand distracted parents,” she said. “Though mine were pretty close to perfect when I was little.” Emily droppedmy gaze and looked down at the table as if admitting this had been a mistake somehow, and I immediately missed the warm connection of her eyes.
It had been a long time since I’d met anyone new, I realized. Certainly, I’d met dozens of contractors and staff as we’d pulled the resort from obscurity and rebuilt it, but I hadn’t befriended any of them. I’d kept my circle small, made up mostly of my sister and the old friends who’d arrived one by one to keep tabs on me. I was a project in myself, I knew, and my best friends—my family, really—they’d worried about me these past years. Hell, I’d worried about myself, that I’d never be able to really move forward.
But Emily?
She’d pushed past any defenses that kept others out without even noticing them. And now?
I could admit I was drawn to her. I was attracted to her easy smile and open nature. She was like the fresh air that trickled in as you pulled open windows on that first warm spring day, making you realize gradually how much you’d missed it through the frigid winter.
