Free Take the Money: Romantic Suspense in Costa Rica by Lucia Sinn Page A

Julie agreed. “But I got in late and didn’t know what else to do.”  It was on the tip of her tongue to ask Nellie what had prompted her to buy a restaurant in a foreign city where she could barely speak the language.  But she decided that such nosiness wasn’t smart, especially since she was nurturing a few secrets, herself.
    She said, “Tell me how to find your place, and I’ll be back at five.”
    The room at the La Casa Verde was $25 a night and a quick survey told Julie it was her kind of place. There was a small bed with a worn chenille bedspread, tile floors, the usual barred windows with lace curtains fluttering in the breeze. A bathroom down the hall had to be shared but Julie wasn’t one to linger, so it would be fine.  She hoped the two chickens strutting in the courtyard below wouldn’t awaken her at dawn. 
    Julie arranged her meager belongings in her dresser drawer and tried to decide where to put her bankbook.  Should she tote it around everywhere she went, or was it safer hidden somewhere in the room?  She opted for pinning it to the inside pocket of her jeans.
    She looked out at the brilliant blue sky where a few small clouds drifted like puffs of cotton. A shaft of warm sunlight sliced across her room, but she felt an involuntary shiver. This was not like her other adventures. All the time she was bumming around Europe and the Middle East, she’d felt like a trapeze artist with a safety net in place to break her fall.  When the risks got too high and her wanderlust sated, she could always count on running back to boring old Lewiston.  Now she wondered if she could ever go home again.
    Why hadn’t she gone to the police, taken her chances?   She must have been half in shock.  But the chilling memory returned.  Once again she envisioned the menacing stance of the white-haired man at the top of the hill coldly surveying the scene where he had arranged for a man to die.  Kevin’s last warning echoed in her mind. They’ll get you too. She pressed her palms against the sides of her head, finding it difficult to breathe.
    She had never felt so alone.

 
    FIVE
    The Sycamore, Lewiston’s oldest office building, wasn’t too classy. Wiser businessmen had fled the crumbling brick and cement building with its high ceilings, thick walls and dingy hallways. “For Lease” signs were posted on several interior doors. The only remaining tenants were down-at-the-heel lawyers, a few aging doctors and the usual fly-by-niters.
    Bare wooden floorboards moaned beneath the weight of Maggie’s footsteps as she emerged from the vintage elevator and hurried down the hall to Mike Basinki’s office.  Black letters, peeling at the edges, were glued onto frosted window glass:
    MIKE BASINKI
    PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR
    Maggie jiggled the loose-fitting porcelain door knob, and the door flew open with a loud rattle. Mike Basinki jumped up from behind a vintage wooden desk. 
    He still had the bony angular face she remembered, but his black hair was grayer around the edges.  Deep creases fanned out from the corners of his tired brown eyes.  He wore a crisp white shirt and plain red tie under a gray tweed jacket that hung lopsided on his narrow frame.               
    Maggie said:  “ Pax Vobiscum .”
    Mike intoned the ancient response: “and with you too.”
    “I’m Maggie Kelley Lawson Carrithers,” she said.  “Do any of those names sound familiar?”
    “I remember you, Maggie.”  Mike's voice was grave, his eyes steady.
    “I wasn’t sure,” she said. “You were a year ahead of me at St. Margaret’s
    It had been part of some educational scheme that the nuns had configured.  One year, you would be with the class ahead, the next year with the class below. This overlapping had supposedly benefited both the slow and fast learners, although the latter had been rare at this Catholic school in a low income neighborhood.
    “Please sit down.”  Mike pointed a long finger to a wooden