Serious Moonlight(57)

18




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That “where and when” turned out to be three o’clock the next afternoon in front of the Moonlight Diner.

Aunt Mona—dressed as a 1960s Mad Men secretary, complete with tangerine wig, typewriter nail decals, and cat-eye glasses on a beaded chain—took her boxy Jeep on the ferry and drove us to pick up Daniel there. Standing at the curb on the side of the diner, he spotted us right away. Perhaps it was the life-size smiling skeleton painted on the hood, lying in a field of giant flowers, which covered everything but the car’s windows and tires.

Just a guess.

“Hey, sweet young thing! We’re looking to party,” she shouted from the driver’s seat after rolling down the window. “How much?”

“Oh God,” I mumbled, slumping lower in the passenger seat as I scanned the sidewalk to make sure no one else heard that.

But Daniel just grinned. “I’d do almost anything for a slice of pie.”

“It’s true,” I confirmed.

“Lucky for you, we’ve got a dozen apple pies in the back seat,” she said. “Get in.”

The sky was overcast, but it wasn’t drizzling as we headed north toward Lake Union. And that’s about how I felt things were with me and Daniel at the moment. He was cheery and friendly toward Aunt Mona, gushing about her car and asking a million questions about it as he sat in the middle of the back seat, leaning between our seats to talk. And he was cheery enough toward me. But there was something I couldn’t put my finger on that wasn’t quite right. Maybe it was the same thing he accused me of during Clue for Couples: an invisible barrier had been erected between us.

Or perhaps I was just being overly sensitive.

Mr. Sharkovsky, the man we were meeting, lived on an eastern arm of Lake Union called Portage Bay. It had a large enclave of floating homes—actual moored houses that didn’t move, not houseboats. The most famous of those houses was Tom Hanks’s home in Sleepless in Seattle, but that was on the western side of the lake. Here, Aunt Mona took her car down a series of hilly, mazelike streets through a residential neighborhood that dead-ended near the water. We turned into a drive that snaked between several upscale homes tightly packed around the waterfront, and near the end of the drive, we parked in one of three private spaces.

“That’s his, there,” she said, unbuckling her seat belt.

Sharkovsky’s floating house was slate gray—a three-story, boxy building that was modern with Eastern shōji-style windows that looked as if they were made of translucent paper. Very posh, very stylish. Very art dealer.

As we exited Mona’s car, she answered an annoying ringtone, and while she was telling someone on the other end of the call in a hushed voice that she couldn’t talk, Daniel nudged my shoulder with his.

“Hey,” he murmured. “I thought we were doing this alone. You know. Nick and Nora. Not Nick and Nora and Mona.”

I blinked at him, a little confused, as a chilly wind blew off the lake and scattered my hair in my eyes. Did he think this was another date, or something? “I said in my text we’d pick you up at the diner.”

“You didn’t say Mona.”

Didn’t I? I resisted the urge to check my phone and prove him wrong. I suppose now that I thought back to the texts, they may not have been clear. “I don’t drive,” I argued. “I thought—”

“It’s fine,” he whispered as Mona was ending her hushed phone call. “I don’t mind her company. She’s super cool. I just thought this was . . .” He shook his head and started again. “I just had something I wanted to tell you. You know, privately. I never got around to it yesterday.”

Yesterday? It took me a second to put two and two together that he was referring to last night, when he’d asked me to ride along in the hotel van—he’d said that he wanted a private conversation then, too. Then we started talking about Clue for Couples and his bland good-bye kiss, and . . . Had he wanted to discuss something else? How had I not realized this?

Before I could respond, Mona put away her phone and looked over at us, a strained smile on her face. Had she heard what we were saying? I suddenly felt caught in the middle and slightly confused about how I’d gotten here.

“Ready?” she said.

“Let’s do this,” Daniel said cheerfully, as if nothing in the world were wrong. And to me, he whispered, “It’s cool. We’ll talk later. No worries.”

Right. That was what you said when there were worries.

What did he want to talk to me about?

The entrance to Sharkovsky’s house sat on the nicest dock I’ve ever seen, behind a screen of potted bamboo trees. We stood next to a boat moored to the side of the house while Aunt Mona rang the doorbell. Then we were ushered inside by a middle-aged housekeeper, who led us through a living room with minimalist, cold furniture and walls covered in large paintings.

Daniel whistled at the artwork. “These must be worth a pretty penny, huh?”

“More than the house itself,” Aunt Mona replied in a low voice. “And it’s worth millions, much like Sharkovsky.”

I didn’t really care. I was too busy worrying about what Daniel wanted to talk about in private. But there was no chance to do that now, as the housekeeper was informing us that Sharkovsky was on the roof patio and beckoned for us to follow her. One after another, we climbed an open set of modern, narrow stairs, getting small peeks at the other floors as we passed. On the second landing, Mona halted her ascent and stared down a short hallway into what looked to be a bedroom.