Serious Moonlight(32)

“You’re not an art dealer.”

She shrugged. “But I have an eye for it and knowledge of the market. I don’t know . . . It’s probably a waste of time, but at least Grandma Snodgrass will be chaperoning us, so I won’t do anything regrettable. Speaking of regret, how’s our beautiful boy Daniel?”

“He’s not our boy. Or my boy. He’s his own boy.” I gave her a hard stare. “You told Grandpa Hugo about meeting him in Pike Place?”

“It may have come up. Promise, cross my heart, that I won’t tattle again.”

Unlikely. Ever since my grandmother died, Aunt Mona and Grandpa practically had become bosom buddies, which was weird, because things had always been tense between Mona and my grandparents. As she ate her pastry, I told her about the conversation I had with Grandpa and Cass in the greenhouse, filling her in on the Raymond Darke intrigue . . . and the breakthrough Daniel and I had in the record shop.

“This is all sort of fascinating. And essentially you’re telling me that you’re playing Nancy Drew with Daniel. I can picture it all now—Oh, Daniel. Help me solve the riddle of the hidden staircase!”

I licked chocolate off my finger. “Don’t make it sound lurid. We’re just investigating a man who comes in the hotel. And we may possibly be going to Kerry Park after work.”

“O-o-oh, super romantic.”

“It’s a stakeout.”

“Super-duper romantic, especially if your name is Birdie Lindberg.”

“At five in the morning.”

She made a face. “Now you’ve killed it for me. I’ll never understand your sleep issues. I know you hate doctors because of what happened to your mom, but you need to see somebody and get this sleep stuff worked out.”

“There’s nothing to work out. Sometimes I have trouble sleeping, and sometimes I have trouble staying awake.”

“Hugo said the same thing and look what happened to him and his men.”

When Grandpa fell asleep piloting a boat, it wasn’t just him it affected. Two other people were injured. This is why I’ll never drive a car. I’m terrified of falling asleep at the wheel and hurting other people.

“Has anything been getting worse lately?” she asked. “You haven’t had anything weird happen at work, have you?”

I knew what she meant: what Grandpa called “going boneless,” better known as cataplexy. It’s this thing that happens to some narcoleptics. Basically, you lose control of all your muscles and sometimes collapse. People think you’ve fainted, but you’re conscious. It’s just that you can’t move. And it’s triggered by the stupidest things. A burst of laughter. Excitement. Anger. Any intense emotion, really. It’s completely unpredictable, and it had happened to me three times. Twice since Christmas.

“I’m fine,” I told her. “Don’t worry. I haven’t fallen asleep on the job.” I mean, technically I fell asleep in the laundry room after my shift. “And I haven’t gone boneless for several months. Since . . .”

“Eleanor’s funeral.”

“Right,” I said. “Since then.” Unbelievably embarrassing. I didn’t cry that day—not once—through the entire service. And then boom. Paralyzed, right in front of her grave. A hundred people thought I’d fainted. Good times.

“Does Daniel know?” she asked.

“No one at work knows. Why would I tell them? I told you, it’s all going fine.”

She sighed heavily. “All right, I’m backing off. But I think you should tell Daniel. And I definitely think you should talk to him about what happened in the back seat of his car.”

“That’s a big N-O. Besides, he doesn’t want to talk about it anymore, either. We agreed to leave the past in the past. We’re investigating this Raymond Darke thing strictly as coworkers.”

“Oh, really? Where’s that flower girl ad he wrote you? Pull it up. I want to read it again.”

I protested, but she insisted. It was bookmarked on my phone, not that I kept looking at it or anything. But while Zsa Zsa Gabor rubbed her snowy-white kitty face against my leg, I got out my phone and pulled up the Missed Connections site.

Huh. Daniel’s ad was no longer there.

He’d taken it down.

? ? ?

Before our excursion to Kerry Park, I had to wait on Daniel after our shift ended, because he wasn’t back from taking a customer to the airport. I’d been fighting off the intense need to take a nap since leaving Aunt Mona’s place, so the combination of these things was a little disastrous. One minute I was sitting on a sofa in the hotel lobby, stifling a yawn while cracking open my dog-eared emergency purse book, and the next thing I knew, I woke to find Daniel’s face floating over mine.

I yelped.

“WAKE UP.” His arms were on either side of my head, braced on the back of the sofa.

“Wasn’t asleep.” My tongue was thick around the words, slurring syllables. “Just drifted off.”

“That’s the same thing.”

“Says you.”

“You always fall asleep in public?”

I hesitated, thinking of my earlier conversation with Aunt Mona, and decided to test the waters. “Sometimes on the ferry,” I admitted. One of the ferry employees had woken me up on several occasions, which was embarrassing, because I worried he thought I might be a drunkard or a heroin addict. “And I’ve never stayed awake during an entire movie in a theater.”