Once Burned, Twice Spy by Diane Henders

Author:Diane Henders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: thriller, comedy, small town, romantic, fun, amateur sleuth, technological, women sleuths, female protagonist, racy
Publisher: Diane Henders

Chapter 27

With my mind shuttered and every muscle rigid with the need to flee, I marched stiffly down the hotel corridor to the vending machine.

Retrieved the claim check.

Rode the elevator down to the main floor.

Claimed my gear from the concierge, making appropriate mouth-noises and stretching my wooden face into a smile-like grimace.

When I slid into the back seat of a cab from the taxi queue, the driver asked, “Where to?”

“Airport.” The word fell from my lips without thought, my mind frozen numb.

Sometime later, the cabbie’s voice roused me. “Are you cold? I can turn up the heat.”

I came back to myself, realizing I was huddled with my arms wrapped around myself while I shivered in long hard waves.

“Y-Yes. Heat. P-Please.” My voice came out in a rusty croak.

He frowned. “You wanta stop for a coffee or something? There’s a Timmie’s drivethrough on the way.”

“H-Hot chocolate. Th-Thanks.” I fumbled a five-dollar bill out of my wallet with trembling hands and poked it over the seat at him. “K-Keep the change.”

Nora’s voice came back to me. “…a high-performance machine… collapse when you run out of calories…”

I blocked it out with a shudder and sat carefully thinking about nothing until the cabbie handed a cardboard cup back to me.

The jolt of hot sweetness kicked my brain into gear again. By some miracle, the hairs Nora had given me were still clutched in my white-knuckled hand. I tucked them carefully into my wallet, hoping they would still be viable by the time I got them to a lab.

But Nora had to know I wouldn’t be able to have them tested right away, so she was probably lying about the whole thing.

She couldn’t be my mother. My mother had died thirty years ago, and the identity of the corpse had been confirmed by dental records. This was some kind of mindfuck, designed to keep me off-balance for some reason.

Ian and Nora had to be conspiring against me, although I couldn’t figure out why.

But how could she have known all those things about me?

I gulped more hot chocolate, my eyes watering as it seared my tongue. How could anyone have researched me that effectively? Or had I somehow given the answers away?

It wouldn’t have been difficult to dredge up my old crush on Darrell Raven. Practically everybody in our small school had known about it, much to my teenaged humiliation. And anybody from the school could have told her the story of Darrell knocking his teeth out with my pogo stick. Hell, Nichele and I still laughed about it sometimes…

Another shivering fit seized me. What if ‘Nora’ had talked to Nichele? A few hours of so-called reminiscing could have dredged up all kinds of obscure facts that nobody else would know.

What if Nichele was in danger right now? What if she was being stalked by whoever was trying to frame me, to be held as leverage against me later?

But that didn’t make sense. If Nichele had talked to someone who was pretending to be from our old home town, she would have mentioned it to me.

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