A Life Beyond Us novel · Chapter 17 of 24
Chapter 17: Receipts
The woman from the Lodge walked down the center aisle in no hurry at all.
Bridget followed two steps behind, mouthing sorry to me over her shoulder.
"Thirty-one years at that desk," the woman said, to nobody and everybody. "I've seen every kind of liar come through that door. I never had one throw my key at the wall."
A sound went through the ballroom, a rustle of women sitting forward.
Darcy had stopped moving.
"This is a stranger," she said. "She's been coached."
"I was coached," the woman said agreeably, "to wear a corsage."
Someone laughed.
She stepped up beside me at the lectern and I moved the microphone down to her height.
"Is that all right?" I asked her quietly.
"Honey, I've waited six years for somebody to ask me." She cleared her throat.
"The sixth of June, six years ago.
Room fourteen, two beds. She paid with her own card at nine-forty in the evening. Two men came in after her, one of them half carrying the other."
She looked straight at Darcy.
"You came down to my desk at ten past one in the morning by yourself and you threw the key at the wall. The key tag is still cracked. I wrote it in the book."
"Your book could say anything," Darcy said.
"It could," the woman said. "So I brought it up here."
I put my phone to the cable at the lectern, and the title slide behind her went black.
The photo of the ledger page came up forty feet wide.
Sixth of June.
Room fourteen.
In, nine-forty.
Out, one-ten.
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