Page 21 of The Claiming of the Shrew
“Have you ever done a room search before?” Fawkes asked.
“Sure. I lose my keys all the time.”
He rolled his eyes. “I mean looking for contraband. We should each take a quadrant, so we’re not repeating effort, and check hiding places. If she’s a professional, we aren’t going to find anything laying around loose.” He said this as Leah lifted a pair of underwear on top of the dresser. She hastily dropped them. “Although in this case, who knows. But the thing that makes the most sense is to do a quick sweep for easy hiding places.”
“What kind of places are we talking about?”
Fawkes ticked off on his fingers. “Anything that has drawers—inside, under, and behind the drawer itself. Behind pictures on the wall. Under the mattress. Inside air vents. Shake and check any containers you find. Er ...” He swept a look around at the dozens or possibly hundreds of salves, lotions, shampoos, and perfumes. “Let’s say the bigger ones or anything that isn’t obviously full of a liquid. Basically, if you’ve seen a spot used as a hiding place on a TV show, someone would probably think of hiding actual contraband there.” He drew a line in the air with his finger down the middle of the room. “You take that side, I’ll take this one. Start at one end. Don’t spend much time on any one location; we could search in here for hours. For now we’re just doing a survey.”
Leah checked the undersides of the dresser drawers, while Fawkes began a swift, professional-looking sweep through his side of the room, bending to look at the bottom of the chair and desk, lifting the edge of the mattress. He opened the nightstand drawer and winced. “Found her sex toys.”
“Please do not give me details. I have to work with the woman.” Leah leaned around to look at the back of the dresser, then checked the radiators. She felt that she was a quick study, but Fawkes was still faster, as he’d done this many times before. He did a sweep of the bathroom and came out shaking his head.
Leah sighed and left the mess as they had found it. “Guess we move on.”
They found nothing in Maggie’s room (almost meticulously tidy, with a stack of scripts on the bedside table) or Gloria’s (an absolute shambles). By the fourth room, Leah was starting to feel weary and heartsick. Part of it was just hypoglycemia from shifting so often into her shrew’s hyper metabolism, and she nibbled a chocolate bar from her purse. But she also was starting to feel intensely guilty about invading her castmates’—her friends’—privacy. The cloak-and-dagger adventure had been fun at first, but now she jumped every time a door slammed in the hall, and felt achey with regret. She’d found some porn magazines and a hidden bottle of booze, both of which she left in place, but she wished she didn’t even know that much about her associates’ private lives.
Some of it must have shown on her face, because Fawkes said, “They’ll be coming back soon, so what if we just ditch this and go have some fun?”
“Fun?”
“You know, the thing that makes life worth living? We’re at a beautiful mountain lodge, and the sun’s still up. Let’s enjoy ourselves and get back to work later.”
FAWKES
The amountof effort that it took Fawkes to get Leah to end a search that was clearly making her unhappy, and come outside in the sunshine, suggested that (contrary to all other evidence) she had never had fun in her entire life. However, once they’d crept away from their latest failed search and went out the back door, sunlight bathed her face and Fawkes could see her warming up and becoming her usual bubbly self.
“What exactly did you have in mind?” she asked him. “If we’re not looking for clues, I really should get back to rehearsals.”
“Do you want to?”
Leah hesitated. From the vicinity of the woods near the lodge, voices were raised in song for part of a verse before someone hit a flat note and it all fell apart. Maggie could be heard exclaiming in dismay.
“Er—no.”
“In that case, what do you say we take a walk and see some of this allegedly beautiful scenery?”
There were a number of paths going off from the lodge. Fawkes picked one at random, thinking it looked smooth and easy for Leah to navigate.
“So the play has songs?” he asked. “Peter Pan’s a musical, right? I don’t know much about it. The only version I’ve seen was the Disney cartoon. And I know it’s a book.”
“Well, that’s complicated.” Leah navigated the path with her usual unconscious deftness, and Fawkes got the impression that she was actually slowing down somewhat forhim. “There are a lot of different versions of it. It was a play before it was a book, and there are also different versions of the play, including some that are musicals and some that are not. Maggie rewrote the script for the number of actors that we have, and also for their relative singing abilities, which is, uh—not great in most cases. It’s a mix of the original play by J.M. Barrie, and the well-known musical version, but cut way down so we can do it with fewer people than we really ought to have, most of whom can’t carry a note in a bucket.”
“But there are some musical numbers?”
“Yeah, a couple. We do have some people who can sing a little, unfortunately not including Gloria.” Leah shook her head. “Okay, I think that’s all the brain cells I want to devote to the play right now. I thought we came out here to forget about all of that.”
It was a lovely day. Sunlight dappled the path ahead of them. Under the trees, the forest floor was dotted with white and blue wildflowers. Leah’s narrow hips flexed very appealingly with every step she took.
“Leah,” Fawkes blurted out. “You are my mate.”
Leah paused and looked over her shoulder at him. She rolled her eyes, although there was a slight blush on her cheeks. “Iknowthat. I have an inner animal too, you noodle.”
Fawkes could feel himself flushing. He wasn’t a blusher by nature. He had probably spent more time blushing around her than in the previous thirty years of his life.
“If you know that, then why didn’t you say anything?”
“I tried! You immediately told me ‘No’ and then ran off like you’d just remembered you left the stove on. What’s a girl supposed to think?”
