Page 29 of Don't Cross the Blue Line
I finish the hot chocolate. Set a ten on the counter. Helen pushes it back. I push it forward. We do this three times, and Helen levels me with a mother’s look. “Save it for when you come back, Everly. Don’t wait another seventeen years.”
I give in, tuck it back into my pocket. “I won’t.”
“Maybe bring your dad some Tuesday morning. Like old times.”
The sentence hits somewhere unprotected, drawing out a side of me I buried a long time ago.
“Maybe,” I say.
Now it’s time to make something out of this day.
Slipping my worn notebook from my bag, I tuck a pen behind my ear and head toward Blue Line Books.
I’ve always loved this old bookstore, with its long, narrow aisles stuffed to the brim with books. A rolling ladder on a brass track lines the outer walls, and I have to resist the urge, once again, to pull out my Provincial Belle impersonation, swooping across the store with a basket of books, singing.
In the romance section between Penny Larke and Kennedy Ryan—two copies of Breakaway by Sutton Blake. The cover features a model way too attractive and with way too many teeth to be a real hockey player, holding a hockey stick in a way that suggests that he not only has no idea what he’s doing but might also just be a collection of abs hot-glued together and stuffed into a jersey. Handsome, strong, and…the complete opposite of every hockey player I know. There’s also a copy of book two in the hockey series, Slap Shot.
Three shelves over in thrillers, I find Thriller on Ice by E.J. Hartley.
Two identities. Two shelves. Same store. Same woman. It worked until last Saturday, and now my life is a sitcom, written by someone with a grudge.
I face out both Sutton Blake copies—guerrilla retail self-promotion is not beneath me—and slip out before anyone asks any awkward questions.
And now the real work begins.
The mall unfurls as I explore, and my thriller brain starts cataloging. Sutton Sweets has a blind spot, no cameras, service-hall access. The back door of the hockey shop, the Penalty Box, exits to a parallel corridor. Glow & Grain is an aggressively cozy candle shop—tiny, two people would be sharing oxygen. I photograph the layout and refuse—refuse—to think about another teensy tiny space I was trapped in lately…with a handsome, strong, terrible man. Hearthstone Home & Living displays couches you could vanish into, beds with actual pillows. If I needed to survive overnight in this mall, that’s where I’d start. Iron & Oak Hardware stocks duct tape, rope, flashlights, paint cans. Ever wonder what can be done with sixty feet of rope and a bag of marbles? No? That’s fair…but the answer is: more than you’d think.
The service corridors are the real prize.
I manage to slip in near the food court when nobody’s looking.
Loading docks with manual roll-up doors. Electrical panels clearly labeled. The security office (unmanned, just like Helen said) with monitors showing feeds throughout the mall, several screens dark. I count six blind spots. Six places a person could move through this building like a ghost. I mark them down.
This mall’s security is a thriller writer’s dream and a liability insurer’s nightmare.
On my way back, I pass the Staff Only door near the old rink offices—cracked open earlier, shut and locked now. I note it.
Was open during the event. Why?
I have what I need for the thriller. But I don’t have what I need for the other book.
Ice Cold Heart is on life support. Margot’s notes echo in my head.
Where’s the man underneath? Where’s the thing that makes him ache? Find that, and you have your book.
I don’t know, okay? I don’t know that man!
Except maybe I do, right? Or could…if I didn’t let the guy I also know, the jerk, get in the way. And honestly, if I let myself remember the way he looked at me, I could admit to a smidgen of a nervous flutter when his gaze snagged on my unruly red hair. Except, the way he said it…probably it wasn’t meant to be hurtful.
Right? I mean, you were there. What do you think?
Aw, now I’m hearing him. I’m just trying to be friendly?—
Maybe I should stop thinking of him as a cruel fourteen-year-old and start thinking of him as B.B.
Naw, that doesn’t help either.
But I don’t have any better ideas.
