Free Masked by Norah McClintock Page B

old man? You think I’d be here if I was?”
    â€œHe probably just needs me to find something. I’ll be right back.”
    Corey scowls. He’s been in a sour mood ever since he walked through the door, even though he wasn’t in a sour mood last night. This isn’t going at all the way I imagined it.
    â€œI’ll be as quick as I can.”
    I slip out the door that leads from the kitchen into the hall and run down the stairs. When I slip into the store, I lock the door behind me. I don’t want to take the chance that Corey will decide to come down. I hope I’m right about my dad. I hope he just needs to ask me something and that he hadn’t heard Corey’s voice. I also hope that Leon hasn’t shown up.

Chapter Three
Daniel
    When the old man calls her name, which I hear as a rumble from behind the door, I think that Rosie is probably his wife. A lot of these places make it because the husband and wife both work there. The kids, too, as soon as they’re old enough. The money stays in the family that way.
    But just as I’m about to open the door and go back into the store, I hear her voice loud and clear: “What’s up, Dad? I was just about to take a shower, so…”
    You don’t mistake a voice like that— kind of husky, low for a girl, but not old-lady low. Smoky low. Sexy low. There are a lot of guys at school who are crazy about that voice.
    Rosie’s voice. Rosie Mirelli.
    She’s in my history class.
    The old man called her, and she called him Dad. What do you know? The princess is no princess after all, not if her dad owns this place.
    Part of me thinks she’ll never recognize me. She never looks at me at school. She treats me like a ghost, like someone who inhabits a whole different world from hers. A world of shadows and darkness, not a Rosie world filled with bright colors.
    Then again, she’s just the kind of girl who, if she were to see me trespassing in her world, would say, “What do you think you’re doing here?” Not that that would be a big deal ordinarily. I bet I’m not the first kid from school to come in here. It would mean nothing—except for one thing. Except for Leon.
    Leon lives next door to me. His mom and my mom talk all the time. Mostly they talk about their kids, about Leon and his brothers, about me and my sister. And because of all that talk, Leon knows about my job. I’m a mystery shopper. That’s someone who is hired to go into a store or a restaurant like an ordinary customer but who checks on the service and whatever else he’s hired to check on. All kinds of people are mystery shoppers—old people, young people, kids like me. Ordinary people. People you’d never suspect. My uncle got me the job. He knows a guy who runs a mystery-shopper business. But that’s not why I’m in the store today. Today my mission is different.
    I’m here because I was hired by a friend of my uncle’s who’s a real-estate developer. A Donald Trump wannabe. He has quietly bought up a lot of property in the area, and to complete his deal, he needs to buy this store. But the owner—Rosie’s dad—won’t sell. So my uncle’s friend hired me to take a look at Mr. Mirelli’s finances. That way, he says, he can come up with the right price and maybe the right pressure to motivate him to sell. I don’t understand the whole thing. All I know is that I’m being well paid—if I succeed.
    Leon asked me about my job one time. And he teases me about it at school sometimes, calling me Mystery Man. He’s said it a couple of times when he was with Rosie. And I bet he explained to Rosie what he meant. So I bet she’ll say something to her dad if I suddenly appear through a door that leads to a bathroom that her father doesn’t usually let customers use. And then he’ll know there’s some other reason for me to be there, because