Page 36 of The Claiming of the Shrew
A door down the hallway opened. Gloria stepped out. Her hair was up under a turban (still bright orange, from the visible wisps) and her face was plastered with a clay mask that covered up whatever was currently going on with her skin.
She stopped and stared at the scene before her, which consisted of Hester, wearing a fluffy pink bathrobe with a hotel robe slung over her arm, slowly following a raccoon that was stopping at every door to sniff under it and occasionally stand up and sniff the doorknob.
“Uh ....” Gloria began. “I was going down to the sauna.”
Hester sighed. “Oh, that’s on the website, isn’t it? I’m afraid the sauna isn’t open yet. My mom runs the website, and she’s a little more optimistic about our upgrades than we are.”
“Oh,” Gloria said. She looked at the raccoon again, then very slowly stepped backward into her room and closed the door.
A couple of doors past Gloria’s, Fawkes suddenly got lucky.
It wasn’t the smell of whoever had been in Leah’s room. But it was the person who had been in his room. And he smelled something else as well. Some kind of bird?
Fawkes growled, which he had rarely tried to do as a raccoon before. It turned out they could manage a perfectly threatening growl. From inside, he thought he heard a thump and then silence.
“What, this one?” Hester raised her hand to knock, then lowered it. Whispering, she leaned forward to ask, “Is Leah in there?”
Fawkes sniffed again, then shook his head. There was no trace of her smell, just that other, infuriating one.
“You’re sure we need to get in here?”
Fawkes growled again. If this person hadn’t been the one who directly kidnapped Leah, they almost certainly knew where she was.
Hester took a deep breath and knocked on the door. “Management! I’m so sorry to bother you so late, but we need to enter your room. It’s an emergency.”
Gloria’s door opened down the hall, and her turbaned, clay-masked head popped out. “Emergency?” she asked in alarm.
Hester waved a hand at her, whether to reassure her or wave her away. “Nothing you need to be concerned about, ma’am. Please stay in your room.”
Gloria’s door slammed.
Hester knocked on the door again, then shook her head and scowled down at Fawkes. “You better be right about this,” she muttered. She took out what looked like the same key she’d used to open Leah and Joy’s room. “Skeleton key,” she murmured, and Fawkes’s raccoon ears pricked up as he filed that away for potential usefulness.
With one more knock, Hester declared, “We’re coming in. We’ll only need to be here for a few minutes. We need to check your room.”
She unlocked the door. As soon as it started to open, Fawkes muscled his way in with his small but powerful raccoon body and scrabbled to the middle of the room.
He stopped, then, looking around in puzzlement. The room smelled powerfully of the person whose scent he had detected in his room, but as far as he could tell, they were alone. The window was open, and a cool night breeze blew in.
There were very faint, almost undetectable hints of Leah’s scent; he probably wouldn’t have been able to tell if he didn’t know her so well. But nothing strong, as a shrew or otherwise. He sniffed around a little, just to be sure.
Hester turned a light on. Fawkes shifted human, and Hester wordlessly thrust the robe at him. “Thanks,” he said, flinging it carelessly around himself. “Whose room?—”
He stopped. He knew exactly which room, because he and Leah had been in here before. This was Maggie’s room, clearly identifiable by the stack of scripts on the bedside table. The top one, fat with annotations, read DIRECTOR’S COPY.
“I’d have to check the register,” Hester said. “Why did you need in here again?”
“Because I recognize the smell. This person has been inside my room. She left—” He remembered almost too late that Hester hadn’t been told about the jewelry trove. “—an item that was definitely meant to incriminate me. And she blamed Leah for sabotaging Gloria’s makeup, with absolutely no evidence. Now I know why. She was trying to get Leah out of her way.”
His raccoon was frothing and snarling inside him.Let us at her!
“And who is ‘she’ exactly?” Hester asked.
“Maggie. The play’s director.” Fawkes went to the open window. He prodded one bare foot in a heap of clothing just under it. The clothes were still warm from body heat. “She was here recently. Whatever she turns into, it can fly or climb, and she left as soon as we knocked on the door. Sounds like a guilty conscience, doesn’t it?”
Hester joined him at the window and looked out into the night. “Do you have any idea where she’d go?”
For a despair-soaked instant, he didn’t. Then he remembered something Leah had said. Maggie had both a room in the hotelanda trailer.
