Chapter 20

“Molly? Molly?”

It’s Mr. Preston, sitting beside me on a barstool, two hands supporting my back, keeping me upright.

Angela looks on, her face full of concern. She clicks her laptop closed.

“I’m all right,” I say.

“No you’re not,” Angela says. “You fainted, Molly. If Mr. Preston didn’t catch you just now, you would have fallen off your barstool and landed smack on the floor.”

I feel light-headed and foggy. Pinpricks of light twinkle in my peripheral vision.

“There, there,” says Mr. Preston. “Deep breaths, Molly.”

I breathe as instructed.

“She’s back in the land of the living,” Mr. Preston tells Angela, releasing his supporting arms. “No need to panic.”

“Look what a mess I’ve caused,” I say. “I brought filth into this hotel. I hired a rat, a rat named Lily.”

Mr. Preston swirls on his stool to face me. “Now you listen to me, young lady. Do not make the same mistake twice.”

“What mistake?” I ask.

“Assuming,” he replies. “You know exactly where that will lead. There’s only one way around it.”

“Which is?” I ask.

“Letting Lily speak for herself,” Mr. Preston replies.

“But she can barely utter a full sentence,” Angela says.

“She speaks,” I say. “With me. When she’s comfortable. It takes time.”

It is decided then that we must at least try to get Lily to talk to us, to hear her defense in her own words. We enact a plan immediately.

“Are you well enough to bring her here?” Mr. Preston asks.

“Yes,” I reply. I stand for a moment beside my barstool, testing my steadiness. “I’m feeling better now,” I announce, and it’s mostly true. The world has stopped spinning, at least.

“Off you go, Molly,” Angela replies. “And keep breathing.”

I nod at them both, then hurry out of the Social, heading downstairs, where I find Lily in the housekeeping change rooms putting on her uniform and getting ready for her day. Her entire face falls when instead of “Good morning,” I say, “I have a matter of grave importance to discuss with you,” and then order her to follow me upstairs to the Social.

When we arrive, Mr. Preston and Angela are exactly where I left them. Lily stops in her tracks the moment she lays eyes on them.

“What’s going on?” she asks, her voice hardly above a whisper.

“That’s precisely what we need to find out,” I say.

Mr. Preston stands as Lily and I approach. “Please, have a seat, Lily,” he says, offering her his stool. She sits stiffly, avoiding eye contact.

“Lily,” I say. “You may be in some trouble, but we aren’t sure yet. We want to give you a chance to explain yourself. Let me make one thing clear: we are not assuming that you are a thief or a scoundrel or a murderer. That would be foolhardy and preemptive.”

“What Molly’s trying to say,” Mr. Preston adds, “is that we’re offering you the benefit of the doubt.”

Angela places her laptop on the bar and opens it in front of Lily. “We wanted to show you this,” she says as she points to the KultureVulture homepage on the screen. Next, Angela walks Lily through every posting from the Grim Reaper and ends with the autographed copy of Mr. Grimthorpe’s book, inscribed to Dearest Lily.

Lily barely moves through the entire demonstration. It’s as though she’s turned to stone. Even when prompted to speak, Lily says nothing. Nothing at all.

“Surely you can see how this is concerning, how all fingers point to you stealing from the hotel, to you being this Grim Reaper,” Mr. Preston says.

Lily nods.

“Don’t you have anything to say for yourself? An explanation, perhaps?” I ask.

Lily looks me right in the eye. “The maid is always to blame,” she says.

“So you’re admitting it,” Angela replies. “You stole those goods and posted them for sale on this crappy website.”

“No,” Lily answers. Her voice is so quiet we have to huddle close to hear her. “I didn’t say that. I didn’t mean me.”

“If you’re not to blame, then who is?” Mr. Preston asks.

“Loose lips sink ships,” she says, her eyes two glassy pools.

“Lily,” I say, “you’ve been repeating that for days, but I don’t know what you mean by it.”

“One day, you’re the boss, Molly, the next day you’re not,” she replies. “I do her job and my own. She forces me to do her bidding, says I’m a goner if I don’t, but I don’t want to protect her anymore. She made me pull the alarm so she could take that box in the lobby. She steals tips from all the rooms. And if I don’t keep quiet, I’ll lose my job again and never get another. ‘Keep your mouth shut. Loose lips sink ships.’ That’s what she says.”

Mr. Preston’s mouth falls open. Angela slaps a hand over her own slack jaw.

“Who says all of this, Lily?” Mr. Preston demands. “We need to hear her name.”

He may need to hear it, but I do not. Her name hangs like a pestilent odor in the air.

Funny, it’s just as Gran always said: sometimes everything falls into place, making something absent feel as though it’s been there all along.

“Cheryl,” Lily says with finality. “She’s your rat.”

---

—It feels like déjà vu. We’ve finished speaking with Lily, and now I’m rushing through the lobby and down the stairs to the housekeeping quarters to find a maid but a different one this time. I’m late for my shift, which concerns me deeply, but not as much as Lily’s recent revelation does.

I find her by her locker, fully dressed and about to fasten a Head Maid pin on her left side, right above her heart. How dare she. It’s all I can do not to rip it from her hand and stab her with it.

Anger solves nothing.Good things come to those who wait.

“Cheryl,” I say, forcing an ersatz smile to my lips. “How lovely to see you this morning, and only fifteen minutes late, too. I’ve come to tell you there’s free orange juice and muffins upstairs at the bar.”

Her floppy feet shuffle my way until she’s standing right in front of me.

“Angela said you love freebies,” I add.

She puts a hand on her hip. “Did she?” she says.

“Yes,” I reply. It actually happened like this: when I asked Mr. Preston and Angela how on earth I was supposed to convince slovenly, ornery, petty-thieving, good-for-nothing Cheryl to join us upstairs at the Social, Angela contrived the trap. “Just tell her there’s food. She’ll take the bait.”

Now, Cheryl eyes me, then shrugs. “Muffins sound good. Anything to get out of work.”

And just like that, I’m walking up the stairs and through the lobby making small talk about the weather with my archnemesis and chief rival. I smile and smile and smile as I lead her through the glorious front lobby to the bar at the Social, where Mr. Preston is midway through a chocolate chip muffin that he’s lifted from the heaping plate Angela has placed on the bar. Lily sits stock-still on her stool.

“Oh, hello, Cheryl,” Mr. Preston says as he offers her his seat. “We’re thrilled you’re joining us. Do me the honor?”

Cheryl plops herself down. “Thanks,” she says as she helps herself to a muffin and snaps her fingers at Lily for a glass of orange juice, which Lily pours and hands to her without a word.

“Uff, nice to take a load off,” Cheryl says.

“Working hard this morning, though you’ve just arrived for your shift?” I say, which is when Angela shoves the plate of muffins at me and kindly suggests I stuff one in my mouth.

“Hey, if Snow wanders in and sees us all shirking, this was your idea, not mine,” Cheryl says.

“Of course!” Angela replies. “We wouldn’t want you taking the blame for something we did. What kind of people do you take us for?”

Cheryl rips into a muffin and starts chewing a hunk of it. Her beady eyes search our faces, but she doesn’t find what she’s looking for. “All right, this is too weird,” she says. “What do you all want? What’s really going on here?”

Mr. Preston clears his throat. “Since you mentioned it,” he says, “we have something we wanted to raise with you.”

Angela doesn’t waste a moment. She whips out her laptop, open to KultureVulture.com. “Such a nice day,” Angela says. “And yet a Grim one, too, isn’t it, Cheryl?”

Cheryl takes in the screen. “This has nothing to do with me. Nothing.”

“They know the truth, Cheryl,” Lily whispers. “I just told them.”

Cheryl swivels to face Lily. “You little snitchy bitch. The pawnshop just gave me thirty thousand dollars for that rare first edition. I would have given you a cut, Lily. How could you be so stupid?”

“I told you before,” Lily says, her voice a quiet knife. “I don’t want your dirty money. I just want my job.”

Cheryl’s beady eyes shift from Lily to Angela to Mr. Preston, then finally land on me. “Wait,” she says. “We can make a deal here, can’t we? Split the proceeds of my sales four ways as long as you all keep quiet? We’ll be a hell of a lot richer if you can just hold your tongues.”

If I were to hold any tongue right now, it would be Cheryl’s—for the express purpose of ripping it from her mouth.

“I think I’ve heard enough,” Mr. Preston says. “Do we agree?”

Angela nods and so do I.

“I’ve definitely heard enough,” says Lily, her voice no longer a whisper. The clarion sound fills me with overweening pride.

“Molly, would you mind fetching Mr. Snow?” Mr. Preston says.

“Would I mind?” I reply. “On the contrary, it would be my pleasure.”

I curtsy to Cheryl, bowing more deeply than I’ve ever bowed to anyone in my life, because it’s the last courtesy she’ll receive from any of us for a very long time.