Page 45 of You'll Love it Here

“We’re not!” Jane half whispers. “We’re trying to find the panty thief.”

And shit. Letting Carmen in on our investigation like this isnotideal, but I digress. Jane is so keyed up, and Carmen isn’t making any moves to leave.

“And you think that’s Norm?” Carmen continues, like this is the maddest thing he’s ever heard.

“Only one way to find out!” Jane pockets her phone and stands.I follow her lead; my legs are wobbly and cramped from hiding like a sardine behind the table.

We make our way to the laundry room, a curious Carmen stalking behind us. Jane throws open her dryer and begins to unload while I collect my phone.

Apparently, Apple charged me $10.99 for unknown reasons again. It might be cloud storage that I’m not sure I even need, but frankly I can’t go down that rabbit hole right now.

A new message from Olivia also came in. A link to an article about Lana in a “Top 40 Under 40” profile of business owners in Calgary. She captioned it with:You one day.

I heart it, although my stomach flips uneasily. Why couldn’t I have kept my big mouth shut about Lana? If it doesn’t work out, I’ll be so humiliated.

“My pandies are missing!” Jane croaks.

“Your what?” I pocket my phone and turn to the sight of Jane having laid out all her undies side-by-side on the shitty fold-up table in the center of the room.

Jane’s voice drops. “My panties with the panda bears on them. They’ve disappeared.”

“No way,” Carmen mutters behind us.

She holds out her phone toward us for confirmation. On the notes app, she listed all the underwear she was including in this load. And third from the top reads:

Pandies

Jane looks deep in the dryer. “There’s no way. We didn’t see him touch the dryer.”

I search behind all the machines fruitlessly. “The camera was kind of obscured, you think he could do it that discreetly?”

“He saw us in the rec room,” Jane says, staring distantly ather undergarments as she considers this. “Maybe he was being sneaky.”

“Maybe, but that would be really tricky?” I retort. “There weren’t many chances, and we could see the dryer the whole time.”

Carmen is leaning against the wall, watching both of us in utter befuddlement. “There’s no way. The guy’s a weirdo, not a magician.”

I’m not so sure. I mean, he could be both.

“Yeah, and I kind of never suspected Norm,” Jane huffs as she spins the dryer hull. “I mean, I once got his mail by accident and when I dropped it off, he complimented the book I’d just picked up from the library. He seemed way too nervous to even talk to me, and that’s not a man who steals panties.”

“Right,” I say. That really doesn’t prove anything good to me. “And we’re sure he was loading his laundry the whole time the dryer was blocked?”

“Pretty sure.” Jane extracts herself from inside the dryer.

“We for sure saw those panties go in here?” I prompt.

“Yes, I remember them for sure,” she says. “Or was that when we loaded the washer?”

“No, I think I saw them too,” I say. “Yes, I remember them cause they had pandas.”

“Well, either Norm has sticky fingers, or my pandies evaporated into thin air!” Jane screeches, so serious that Carmen and I both whip our heads toward her.

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” Carmen attempts, holding his palms up. “You’re getting worked up, and it might be nothing.”

“It’s notnothing!” I’m surprised to see her eyes are starting to look a little glassy. She blinks heavily, then looks down at her undies spread across the table. “You know what, forget it. I just want to go to sleep.”

“I’m sorry,” I say a bit breathlessly as she begins throwing her undergarments back into the bin.