Jeff took a slug of the water bottle he’d already opened. “What have you been up to?”
“Doing some amateur sleuthing in the creepy time warp that is Goldsgone.” She shared the details of her conversations with Liza and Shane, as well as the mother-son Oakhurst duo. “I think the personal trainer shows the most potential as a killer. And I just heard myself. That sounds like a comment on the bottom of a report card from a school for murderers.”
Jeff pointed at her with his water bottle. “Potential TV pilot. Bank it.”
“I keep telling everyone I’m out of the business,” Dee said, exasperated. Jeff gave her a “Who are you kidding?” look and she buckled. “Argh! You’re right. Banking it. In case I ever do go back. Anyhoo, there’s something off about him, although it could be the steroids, because you know he’s on them. It may take both of us to figure out what went down between him and Michael and how badly it ended. I booked us a semiprivate training session with him, so blow the dust off your exercise togs.”
“ ‘Dust’ is right. I joined a gym near me to meet girls and bought a bunch of insanely overpriced exercise gear. I got there, put it on in the locker room, saw how dumb I looked, and never went back.” Jeff took a sad sip of water.
“We’ll deal with your lack of confidence at a later date. Right now, with Aguilar being MIA and O’Bryant being an O’A-hole, it feels like it’s up to us to figure out who really offed Michael. ‘Offed.’ Now I sound like a mobster.”
“I do like ‘O’A-hole.’ That’s a keeper. It’s too bad we can’t go to the memorial. All the suspects in one place.”
Dee gave a vigorous nod. “That’s exactly what I thought.”
“Great minds.” Jeff tapped his head and winked. “You know the killer won’t miss it. It’d be too obvious. He’ll want to blend in with everyone.” He thought for a moment. “Or she. Liza . . . the restauranteur. Any ‘scorned lover’ vibe there?”
“Maybe. I feel like I would have picked up anger and hurt if that was the case. But I only picked up anger. Whether there was enough of it to motivate murder, I don’t know.” She hopped off her stool and went around the counter again, bending down to pull two bags of potato chips out of the cabinet below. “God, investigating is exhausting. I don’t know how anyone does it as a career. I thought nothing would be harder than writing the ‘Couple of Coco-nuts’ episode of Duh! where the teen band gets stranded on a desert island and has to sing loud enough for a passing cruise ship to hear them and send a rescue party. I was wrong.”
She offered a potato chip bag to Jeff, who declined it. “Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t have much of an appetite these days.”
“I get it,” Dee said, sympathizing with her beleaguered bestie. She returned to her stool, stopping first to glance at his computer screen. “I’m afraid to ask, but . . . any new bookings?”
Jeff shook his head. “I’ve been playing with a few social-media campaigns. What do you think of ‘Enjoy a platinum stay at the Golden’?”
“It’s . . . something.”
Jeff winced. “Yikes. Not helping my self-confidence.” “I’m sorry. I want to make things better, not worse for you. For us.” She glanced at the bag of chips in her hand. Her appetite was gone too. She put the bag on the counter. “Let’s do something productive, but not murder-y.”
She walked over to the stack of prints from motel rooms, motioning for Jeff to join her. They each took a print and then a rag, which they spritzed with glass cleaner. As the moteliers cleaned the frames, they pitched and tossed a variety of market campaigns, some serious, a few purely silly. Dee was happy to see the task had the desired effect of relaxing them both.
She held up her print frame up to the sunlight pouring in through the large room’s windows. The glass was so sparkly-clean that her own image smiled back at her. She added it to the growing pile of prints ready to be rehung in the motel rooms. “I love this painting.”
“You reminded me,” she said, “I still have to do a search to see where the original is.”
“Definitely. It’s like a hidden treasure.”
Jeff stopped cleaning. He stared at Dee. Then his face broadened with a wide smile. “That’s it. Our campaign. ‘The Golden Motel—a hidden treasure nestled in the Sierra foothills.’ ”
Dee gave an enthusiastic nod. “I like it.”
“I can create a graphic where I use this painting as the background and insert a photo of the motel.” Jeff swiped the air with his hand, indicating Dee should visualize the scene. “I’ll include a finished version of the pool and pop in a few extra pine trees to make the Golden look more hidden.”
“I don’t like it, I love it!” Dee responded with glee. Inspired, Jeff rose to his feet, pacing as he spouted ideas. “I’ll design it to look like a vintage postcard from when the Golden was built. We can print real postcards we give our guests and make a small mailbox where they drop them for us to mail. Publicity for the price of a postcard stamp.”
Dee rose and paced alongside Jeff. “We can put the image on different souvenir items to sell.”
“Yes! Mugs, mouse pads, key chains. Notepads we put in all the rooms that guests can also buy, along with pens that say, ‘The Golden Motel: A Hidden Treasure in the Sierras.’ ”
“Whoo-hoo!” Dee threw her arms around Jeff in a jubilant hug. “We finally have something to celebrate!”
Jeff hugged her back, then pulled away. “Does Elmira sell champagne? She must. If you can buy it at a gas station in California, you have to be able to buy it at a general store. I’m gonna go buy us a bottle, then get to work on the graphic.”
“I’ll come with you. I can’t wait until we tell Elmira about this. Ooh, I just had another idea!” Dee bounced up and down, her go-to move whenever she was super excited. “Forget my historic trail idea for Foundgold. We can do a ‘hidden treasures’ map instead, where we lay out all the same stuff, only in a different, more fun way. When you think about it, Foundgold itself is a hidden treasure. We totally lean into that.”
“Awesome.” Jeff fist-pumped. “We rock.”
“Yes, we do,” Dee said.
She grabbed a jacket sporting the logo of a long-forgotten sitcom she’d worked on, and flung it over her shoulder, then sauntered to the front door with a jokey swagger. She flung upon the door. To her and Jeff’s shock, Deputy Sheriff Aguilar stood there with his fist suspended in the air as if about to knock.
Aguilar lowered his hand. When he spoke, his tone was somber. “I’m here for Jeff.”
CHAPTER 16
Jeff turned white as a sheet. “Is this what it feels like before you pass out?” he croaked, keeping one hand on the doorframe to steady himself.
“I’m not here to arrest you,” the sheriff quickly corrected. “I’m here to apologize for not making it to your interview with O’Bryant. A tourist in Goldsgone thought his car was stolen. Turned out he had a few too many hard sarsaparillas last night and forgot where he parked it.”
Dee released a slightly hysterical giggle of relief. “I guess hard sarsaparilla packs a punch. I’ll remember that next time I get a hankerin’ for it. OMG, why do I keep talking like I was born in 1850?”
“Local hazard. Happens to all of us. You should hear us at our weekly poker game. It’s like a scene from an old Western.” Aguilar took off his hat and fiddled with the brim. “Um . . . you mind if I come in?”
“Of course not,” Dee said, speaking for her and Jeff, since he was still recovering from the one-eighty of fearing he was jail-bound to at least a temporary reprieve. “Come on in, Sheriff.” She ushered Aguilar into the room and showed him to the couch. He flicked the sides of his duster coat so they spread out on either side of him and sat down. “Water?” Dee asked. “Un-hard sarsaparilla? We don’t actually have any. I thought I’d ease the tension with a small—extremely small, more like minuscule—joke.”
This got a smile from the law enforcement official. “I’m good. And instead of ‘Sheriff,’ let’s go with Raul.”
“Okay . . . Raul.” Dee exchanged a look with Jeff. Being on a first-name basis with their law enforcement visitor boded well.
