Miranda Bliss - Dying for Dinner

When she shifted and groaned, her head rolled forward. I let go a sigh of relief.

“You’re OK?”

Her eyes fluttered open. “Annie? What… what happened?”

I didn’t bother to tell her that at this point, that wasn’t the question. The only question that mattered was, what were we going to do now?

From where I was sitting, I could see the big-as-a-picture-window windshield at the front of the RV. Beyond it, there were few lights left on in the exposition center and, as far as I could see, no people around, either.

“It must be late,” I said and by this time I’d pulled myself together enough to keep my voice down. “The show must be over. There’s nobody out in the hall.”

Eve had to look over her shoulder to see what I could see. When she did, tears filled her eyes. “What’s going to happen?” she asked. “What does he want? Is he going to hurt us?”

I thought about Claude and wondered if his body was still back in the bedroom where we’d last seen it. “If he wanted to hurt us, he would have done it by now,” I told her. She looked relieved to hear it so I guess in the great scheme of things, I could justify the little white lie. “I think he wants to use us to get at Norman, to get his money back.”

A single tear slipped down Eve’s cheek. Only she could make crying look attractive. If I let myself go (and believe me, I was close enough to panic that it just might happen), my nose would get red, my eyes would puff, and my skin would get blotchy. Eve cried like the heroine in a romantic blockbuster. She sniffed decorously, too. “What are we going to do, Annie?”

I didn’t have the heart to tell her that I didn’t have a clue.

Maybe it was just as well. Before I could open my mouth, we heard the sounds of a key turning in the door. The next thing we knew, the man who must have been Matt O’Hara hoisted himself up into the RV.

“Well, lookee who’s awake.” He beamed a smile at us. It made my blood run cold. “Just in time, too. I was just about to make a call to your friend Norman.”

“We can’t help you.” My words scraped out of my parched mouth. “We don’t know where Norman is.”

He barely gave me a look. “Shut up. And don’t lie to me. It won’t do you any good. I know he was here doing a cooking demonstration today. I sat right there in the auditorium and watched it. Sorry you had to miss it, ladies. You would have loved the drama. Especially when a little kid in the audience popped a paper bag. I swear, Norman just about fainted, right there onstage. That’s how much of a scared little girl he is.”

I took offense at him making fun of Norman. I took more offense at him assuming that little girls are always scared. He might have noticed my scowl if he’d bothered to look.

Instead, O’Hara shifted his gaze to Eve, who wilted beneath it. “You said you knew about the bank robbery. What else do you two know?”

There didn’t seem to be any point in trying to fake our way through this so I simply told the truth. “We know that you and Howard Fish robbed a bank back in Nevada. He was holding the money for you, right? What, were you set to meet somewhere so you could split it? Is that when the cops caught up to you?”

“The cops caught up to that idiot, Howard.” O’Hara spat the words. “The rat bastard squealed on me, so eventually, yeah, they caught up to me, too.”

“But Howard was convicted, and you were cut loose. After that, he wouldn’t tell you where he stashed the money, would he?”

O’Hara slammed a fist against the nearest cardboard box. “Said he was doing the time, so he should take all the profits. I never could get him to tell me. Then Howard died, and I couldn’t find out anything about anything. Until a friend on the inside told me about some dope named Norman Applebaum. Said he’d been Howard’s cellmate for a while, that he’d been Howard’s friend.”

“And you put two and two together.” This made sense and I know it sounds crazy, but at a time like that, logic was exactly what I needed. My emotions were too brittle. They couldn’t be trusted. Logic was the only thing that was going to save us. “Why did it take you so long to find Norman?”

“Why do you care?” O’Hara reached into his pocket, and for a second I was afraid he’d pull out the chloroform-soaked hankie again. Lucky for us, he was looking for a piece of paper. He unfolded it, and, peering through the gathering gloom, I recognized the phone number of Très Bonne Cuisine.

“Been in prison,” he said. I guess that was the answer to my question. “Took me a while to find your friend Norman. He likes to change his name. But now that I have found him…” O’Hara waved the piece of paper in front of my eyes. “As soon as we get out of here and I can get a cell signal, you’re going to make a phone call for me.”

“You won’t get that far.”

I signaled Eve to keep quiet, but it was too late. She was upset and when Eve is upset…

There was nothing I could do but sit back and pray that she’d come to her senses.

“There are cops all over this place,” Eve said. “They’ll stop us before you can drive this thing out of here. They’ll find us.”

“They must be looking.” I said this to myself more than to anyone else. Again, I was sticking with rational thought, and this was as rational as thoughts came. Jim and Norman knew I’d been on my way to find Eve and go to Claude Brooking’s booth for a mandoline. When we didn’t return in time for the cooking demonstration, they must have been worried. They must have come looking for us.

“Of course they did.” O’Hara saw the wheels were turning inside my head. “Why do you think I had to make sure you two wouldn’t make a sound? They came looking, all right. But that Scottish guy, and that other one, the guy in the suit-he must be a cop, I can tell them a mile away-neither one of them knew that Brooking guy. I told them I was him and they bought right into it. Didn’t recognize me from any of my mug shots. Good thing I shaved my head since my last prison picture was taken, lost some weight, too. That cop, he never suspected a thing. I told them I sent you away with whatever it was you’d come for. And they headed off again, looking for you.” He glanced at his watch. “That was hours ago. Think they’re nice and worried by now?”

I pictured Jim and Tyler searching the building. I imagined how frantic Jim would be when he couldn’t find me.

I told myself not to go there or my panic would swallow me whole.

“So what’s your plan?”

I don’t think O’Hara expected me to be so objective about the whole thing. Which didn’t oblige him to answer. He kicked his way through the gadgets that littered the floor, climbed into the driver’s seat, and turned the key in the ignition.

“We’re going to head outside,” he said, carefully pulling the RV toward the garage-sized doors I saw across the now-empty exhibition floor. “And when we stop to check out, if one of you makes even so much as one little bit of a noise…” He took his knife out of his pocket and left it on the front seat next to him. “One of you makes a noise and I cut the other one. That’s a promise.”

We were quiet when he pulled out of the hall, and we were quiet while he drove along the D.C. streets looking for a place to pull over and make his phone call. He finally found it across Woodrow Wilson Plaza in the Federal Triangle Metro parking lot.

O’Hara turned off the RV, punched the numbers on his cell phone, and held it up to my ear. I wasn’t surprised when Jim answered the Très Bonne Cuisine phone.

“Jim?” My voice was tinged with tears and I knew that would get me nowhere. And it would worry Jim. I swallowed my emotions. “Jim, it’s Annie.”