Page 18 of Arctic Panda's Secret Mate
It’s not broken!
“Who used all the hot water this morning?” Saina asked, when they gathered for an informal midday meal in the dining room. Chef had laid out ingredients for sandwiches with fat pickles and a creamy noodle salad. “My shower barely got warm.”
“Not I,” Breck assured her. “I figured I’d gotten up too late and everyone else had used it up.”
Tristan made himself a cheese sandwich with a handful of sprouts, a stack of sliced peppers, and a generous smear of horseradish. Breck made dirty jokes about thick meat and Darla giggled at him. “My shower was early and it never got very hot,” she said to Saina.
“Hmm,” Saina said. “It was fine yesterday.”
Tristan was about to take a bite of his overstuffed sandwich when he realized that everyone was looking at him.
Of course they were. He was the fix-it guy.
He was too far into his bite to abort it, so he chewedself-consciously and swallowed. “I could have a look at the water heater,” he said. “I found the utility room while I was looking for the wifi.”
“There’s still no wifi, either,” Bastian pointed out. His sandwich was mostly ham.
“It’s like we have a ghost,” Lydia said. Her sandwich was a veritable tower of vegetables with a few lacy layers of cheese and thin-sliced beef. She took several pickles.
“A ghost?” Gizelle stood in the doorway out to the great room, having arrived like a specter herself.
“Nothing to fear, I’m sure,” Chef said hastily. “Even if it does seem to have a penchant for rearranging the kitchen.”
“Tell me it’s not putting the knives out of order!” Breck said with mock horror.
“No, no. Just the cheese and the dishtowels.”
“Maybe it took the information binder that’s gone missing,” Darla suggested. “And I’d swear there were more chips in that bag last night.”
“The eggrolls were gone,” Wrench growled, looking accusingly around.
Lydia put a hand on his arm. “I didn’tneedthem,” she said peacefully.
“You wanted ‘em,” Wrench said, as if that was reason enough to pound someone for taking them.
Tristan was very glad he was not the eggroll thief. He finished his sandwich while the others mentioned other things that might be missing.
“A hairbrush,” Magnolia offered, “but I’m notpositiveI brought it.”
Tristan was pretty sure that there had been bites taken out of his vegetarian leftovers, but he wasn’t sure enough to volunteer it.
“I was reading a magazine in the great room that Ican’t find now,” Saina said thoughtfully. “Did one of you borrow a safari edition of the National Geographic?”
Everyone assured her that they had not.
“Can you bears smell anyone trespassing?” Bastian asked. “Tex can smell a drop of rattlesnake poison from across an open-air restaurant, could you tell if someone had broken in?”
“I’m afraid my sense of smell is not quite as refined as his,” Chef said. “There have been a lot of people here, especially a few who probably worked here, and the kitchen is full of conflicting smells. It has been very well sterilized.”
“I cannot tell,” Magnolia said carelessly. “Chef is constantly asking me if his spices are correct when he’s cooking, but I only know they are all perfect when he serves it.”
Tristan shrugged when Bastian’s gaze fell to him. “Pandas don’t have a great sense of smell.”
“Besides, who would break in for a few harmless pranks and to rearrange dish towels?” Lydia asked. “Our ghost doesn’t seem to have a vendetta!”
Tristan found a moment in the conversation to slip out. He left his plate on a counter in the kitchen and went down the hall to the utility room.
The water heater was a standard model, and Tristan stared at the settings with a furrowed brow. It was set to 115, which was unusually low (Travis was adamant about keeping them above 120 to prevent the growth of bacteria in the tanks), and didn’t at all match the blazing hot showers they’d all enjoyed the first several days.
