Free How I Spent My Summer Vacation by Gillian Roberts Page A

Tommy.” Did I get it? His sexual advances were going to be legitimized and therefore no longer offensive or unwelcome. She held out her hand on which glimmered a knuckle-sized diamond ring. “Bought it on the boardwalk last night, the impetuous man!” she simpered. “This big softie had a big win, and spent it all on me!” She winked at me.
    “Told you my luck was changing,” Tommy said.
    It would serve her right if the headlight on her ring finger turned out to be as fake as Tommy’s organized crime stories or his imaginary rival, Sherwin. This betrothed couple should skip the blood test and have a premarital lie detector test instead.
    “Grandpa’s heart will be broken,” I murmured.
    “What a day,” Tommy said. “Good news and bad. You heard, didn’t you?”
    “About you? No, actually, not until you just said.”
    “No, no. I mean the other news. Jesse Reese. It’s all over the papers.”
    “Oh. Yes, I…I heard.”
    “Remember who told you first,” Tommy said. I must have shown my confusion.
    “In the lounge,” he said. “I told you he was in deep trouble with you-know-who. Only I was wrong on one point, I admit. I thought he had three days to live. I was two off the mark.”
    Yesterday. In the bar. That man Tommy had used as one of his stories? I remembered a man in a suit— the man in the suit? The one that Sasha had mentioned? It had to be the same person; he was the only man in a business suit I’d seen in the hotel. That must be why the photo in the paper had looked vaguely familiar. Jesse Reese had been in the bar last night. Jesse Reese had been the man who’d joked about what was normally “his” suite. I took a deep breath and exhaled loudly.
    I was disproportionately relieved, the doubts and nagging questions I’d had about Sasha now gone. Sasha had not known Jesse Reese, had no prior relationship—but she’d been honest enough to acknowledge a sense that she’d met him, had known him in some way.
    And then I was disproportionately upset. What had happened in the bar after I left? Had Sasha really gone out with Dunstan? I remembered Jesse Reese tilting toward her, my sense that low-level flirting was under way.
    Had Sasha perhaps switched from Dunstan to Jesse, in which case anything was possible? Had she gone back to the bar to make plans with Frankie—or with Jesse Reese? I hated thinking in these terms, but it would be foolish not to consider the possibility.
    The desk clerk rang a bell—as if I had luggage.
    “You and Granddad will come to the wedding,” Tommy said.
    “If he can bear the heartache of the loss,” I said. With Sasha in jail and Mackenzie in limbo, it was good to have an imaginary friend as company for the ride upstairs. Just me, Granddad Sherwin, the dead Jesse, and a hundred million questions.

Six
    MY NEW DIGS WERE NEITHER gilded nor sophisticated. They were grudgingly designed in serviceable style for those who worried about money and weren’t likely to be real gamblers. A no-frills room. No hair dryer or complimentary bathrobe. A small clock-radio, and no premium channels or in-house movies on the TV. In their place, a VCR—bolted down—and a notice that nearby video rental stores would be glad to deliver one’s tape of choice.
    I pulled the bedspread off one pillow, just to make a personal statement. Otherwise, I had nothing to unpack, nothing to mark the place mine, and no sense of what to do next.
    I had detoured to the scene of the crime en route to this room. The men hanging around the place were unaware of how crucial, how central, a woman’s makeup is to her mental health. They insisted on continuing to hoard every bit of it, including my hairbrush. Either they were doing make-overs on one another or they were as sluggish and inept as I suspected.
    Or maybe they’d cut an overnight deal for yet another instant crime-of-the-week movie and were already using the room as a set. I wondered who was playing Sasha. Cher had the right spirit, but