“Oooh, good idea.”
“What,” I asked them curiously, “are you girls talking about?”
Both faces popped up, startled.
“Oh, nothing, Ms. Wright,” Jasmine said, grinning. “We’re just trying to get our videos of Mr. Newcombe disappearing to trend number one.”
“I’ve never gone viral before,” Cassidy confessed. “It’s exciting! Although I don’t really have anything to promote.”
“You do,” Jasmine scoffed. “Your OnlyFans.”
“Shhhh!” Cassidy, scandalized, glanced around. “My mom might hear you!”
I glanced around as well. “Where’s Lauren?”
“Oh, she went back to the hotel. She said she felt inspired to work on her novel. Too bad, because she’s missing out on everything.” Then Cassidy looked guilty. “I hope you don’t mind, Ms. Wright, but because of what happened here tonight, you and Will Price aren’t trending in the top ten anymore. You’re, like, not even top twenty.”
I threw a quick look in Will’s direction and saw with relief that he was still on his call and didn’t appear to have overheard. He was, however, massaging his brow like a man who felt a massive headache coming on.
“Uh, thanks,” I said to the girls. “That’s okay. We’ll talk some more later, okay?”
“Okay,” they said. “Bye—”
But I was already hurrying over to Will, and reached him just as he was slipping his phone into his suit pocket.
“Hey,” I said gently, laying a hand on his arm. “Are you all right?”
He lowered his fingers from his face and blinked down at me in surprise, as if he couldn’t imagine why I’d be standing beside him, let alone expressing concern for him. “Of course,” he said, reaching up to pat my hand. “I’m fine. How are you?”
On the word you, his fingers gripped mine, sending a wave of warmth through me.
“I’m fine,” I said. To my regret, he’d released my hand as quickly as he’d grasped it. “It’s you I’m worried about. I’m really sorry about … well, all of this. I know it’s not how you were hoping the night would go.”
He gave me a kind but all too brief smile. “Thanks, but I’d hardly call any of this your fault. In any case, I just got off the phone with Henry. He’s bringing the bus around. You should be able to leave for the hotel and forget this nightmare in a few minutes.”
“Great.”
Except that I didn’t want to go back to the hotel. I wanted to stay there with him. I wanted to slip my fingers back into his, kiss those worry lines away from his forehead, and tell him everything was going to be okay.
Except what was I thinking? I didn’t know if everything was going to be okay. I couldn’t do any of those things. Had I lost my mind?
“Um,” I said instead. “That sheriff’s deputy I was just talking to said they have to call off the search. It’s too dark out, and they need the helicopter to take someone who’s had a heart attack up to the hospital in Miami.”
“I know.” He was staring moodily off into the darkness again. “They told me the same thing. They only have the one helicopter. One of the disadvantages of living in paradise, I suppose. For day-to-day life it’s idyllic, but for emergencies it’s not very convenient.”
I looked down at my pedicured toes. “Right. I got the feeling from their line of questioning that they don’t seem to think there really is an emergency here. They seem to think that Garrett—”
“I know.” Will’s tone was flat. “If Garrett does rematerialize, unharmed, the festival is in a heap of trouble. Apparently, there’s a fifty-thousand-dollar fine for filing a false missing persons report.”
“Fifty thousand dollars?” I looked up sharply, appalled. “That’s a large—and very specific—amount.”
“That’s the amount it costs to launch a search and rescue like the one we saw here tonight.” He gestured toward the coast guard vessels that were beginning to pull out of the harbor.
“Well, Garrett can afford to pay it back,” I said. “Have you ever looked up his net worth?”
“No.” Some of the tension had left Will’s face. He even smiled a little. “Is that a thing people do?”
I wanted to say that his sister did it—or at least her friends did—but instead I said only, “Oh, well, I guess some people do. And believe me, Garrett can afford it.”
Will’s smile vanished. “Yes, but even if he did disappear on purpose, I don’t think I—”
“Bus is here.” Frannie swept by us, waving her phone. “Just got a text. Let’s get a move on, Jo. Already missed the first half of the game, don’t want to miss the second.”
“The way I’d write it, see,” Saul was saying, loudly, as he strolled past, following his wife, “is I’d have the guy—that’d be Garrett—stash some scuba gear beneath the dock so that after he goes in, all he has to do is swim over and grab it.”
“Saul, that’s been used so many times before,” Kellyjean declared. “I’ve seen that in about a thousand episodes of Magnum P.I. alone.”
“Wait, now,” Jerome said. “Let the man finish.”
“Right. You didn’t let me finish. This scuba gear has been cursed by Satan—”
Scuba.
Scuba.
Of course.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
That’s it,” I whipped around to say to Will. “Garrett scuba dives. He told me.”
Will stared. “I beg your pardon?”
“Friday night on the author bus, when we were talking about going out on your boat, Garrett was bragging about how he’s certified to scuba in open water. He offered to teach me, but I said I wasn’t interested.” My mind was racing. “Can you rent scuba equipment around here?”
“Absolutely,” Will said. “It’s Florida. You could rent a tiger if you wanted to. But you don’t think—”
“I do.” I turned and stabbed my index finger into Will’s chest to emphasize my words. “I know where Garrett is.”
“Jo, are you coming or not?” Frannie’s voice shouted shrilly from the darkness of the parking lot where the author bus was waiting. “I’m going to miss the third quarter if you don’t hurry up!”
I flattened my hand against Will’s chest. I liked the warmth I could feel radiating from beneath the light material of his shirt, and the steady ba-dum, ba-dum of his heart. I didn’t care what kind of videos Jasmine, behind us, might be recording. “Do you have a car here?” I asked him.
“Of course,” he said. “But why?”
“Because it will be faster.” I took his hand—the hand I’d been longing all night to hold. It felt solid and right in mine, like it had been made to fit in my fingers. “Come on, let’s go.”
“But where are we going?” Will looked more amused than upset—especially when I began tugging him toward the parking lot, ducking past the author bus where Frannie was frantically yelling at Kellyjean to hurry up, since she’d had to run back into the restaurant to get her wrap. Kellyjean had never, in all the time I’d known her, remembered to bring all her belongings when we’d left a place.