Page 23 of Fire Peak

“I could also just book a suite every summer and complain to the manager when there’s no mint under my pillow.”

April snapped her fingers. “That reminds me. One of the cleaners found this near one of the suites. You’re so good at all that electronic shit, thought you might have an idea what it was all about.”

She dropped a small piece of electronics into Charlie’s cupped hand. At a glance, Charlie knew exactly what it was, and it gave her a chill down her spine. “It’s a listening device.”

“Really?” April drew back as if it was a snake. “Is it listening to us right now?”

“I don’t know. Where did she find it?”

“In the corridor outside the Fireweed Suite. It could have been there a while. She found it during the deep cleaning we do every two weeks.”

Charlie opened up the reservations program. Six different parties had stayed in the Fireweed Suite over the past two weeks. They were all long-time guests with no history of causing trouble.

“I can call all these guests and ask if they left any electronics behind. I can play dumb and pretend I don’t know what it is.”

April shook her head. “I don’t want to bother the guests. No one has called about it.”

Charlie looked at her more closely. She got the sense that wasn’t April’s real reason. Did she know more about this than she was letting on?

“Can you find a serial number or something and trace it to whoever purchased it?” April asked.

“That would be a ninja move for sure. But I can guarantee it’s not traceable. The most we could find out would be who manufactured it, and there are only a few options for that anyway.”

“Well, we certainly can’t have it listening to our guests.” April dropped it onto the polished wood floor and ground it under the heel of her boot. Then she tossed it in the trash. So much for learning more about it.

“You’re a woman of action,” Charlie told her.

“When it comes to my lodge, I’m a tiger.” April bared her teeth in a snarl, then smiled cheerfully and hurried off to another of the endless lodge chores.

For the rest of the day, Charlie kept thinking about that bug. Was that device meant for her?

And…was it the only one? Were there more that hadn’t been discovered yet?

It screamed of something Nick Perini would have used. She was certain he had put a tracker on her Buick. And then there were those cameras he’d set up. The man knew his way around spyware.

The lodge only had sixteen suites. As the office manager, she made it her business to know exactly who was checking in, how many were in their party, and their names and addresses. She looked up their photos before they arrived, and then she visually confirmed everyone’s identity because she also worked as the dinner hostess. From six to eight every evening, the lodge served dinner on the expansive covered deck overlooking the mountains. Her job was to show everyone to their tables.

In the early days, she’d braced herself every time the guests gathered in the foyer, waiting for the deck to be opened up for seating. She was fully prepared to duck out if she spotted Nick, and ask a server to replace her.

On the chance that it might not be Nick, but some other investigator hired to replace him, she relied on her comprehensive pre-check-in check-ups.

No one suspicious had ever shown up. So she’d started to relax and enjoy herself here. Crap.

Was Nick back in the neighborhood?

11

That night, Molly and Lila drove up for their semi-regular friends gathering—one of the best parts of this unusual summer. The four best friends had all been misfits in their own way. Molly because her family was so dirt poor. Ani because of her leg brace. Lila because of her witchy-ness, which she had trouble hiding. Charlie got teased for her height, and that was bad enough. Once her father went to prison, the teasing turned to mockery.

But now…he was getting out. She could still hardly believe it.

Over drinks on the deck, they toasted the incredible news about her father. Lila sipped her usual lemon drop through a straw, and Molly nursed a glass of red wine she kept refilling from a bottle that sat on their table. Even though it was past eleven, there was still plenty of light in the sky, and since they were halfway up Fire Peak, that light held a special fiery radiance, with tones of persimmon and crimson and mulberry in the misty clouds that drifted past.

The view was so stunning that Charlie never got tired of looking at it, and it pissed her off that she had to yank herself back to reality and talk about potential sketchiness.

“Have either of you noticed anything unusual over the past two weeks?” she asked her friends.

“Everything around here is unusual,” Molly pointed out. “Where would I even start? I just got a new client who wants to sue the guy next door because he walks around naked in the morning.”

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