Page 104 of Without a Clue

The coffee maker gurgles in assent as Nash stands over the little golden coffee bar in the corner of the room.

Seems we’re going to have another long night. Both of us too frazzled, both of us feeling the weight of anxiety hanging over us.

He has taken off his hat entirely now. It rests hooked on the golden cart.

The coffee maker gives a merry little (and ultimately very expensive-sounding) ding.

He rubs his weary face and proceeds to pour.

“Dozens of millions,” I say.

“And all of it . . . ?”

“Some of it will go to charities. But yeah, the rest—”

“His property?”

“To Gordon.”

“His investments?”

I laugh. “It’s Hugh. What investments? We’re lucky he didn’t bury his money in gold under a sewer cap on Thirty-Third Street.”

“Or unlucky . . . depending on how you want to see it,” Nash murmurs.

He hands me a steaming cup of coffee.

Gold-rimmed teacups in a hotel room. That’s a first.

I grip the cup of coffee in my hands, knees pulled up beneath the covers to my chin.

“How many interviews do you have left?”

“Three.”

Nash sits on the end of the bed. “Okay, Pip. Break this down for me. All the way.”

And I do.

For the next two hours, I go moment by moment, detail by detail over every single conversation, look, and gesture I’ve experienced over the past three days. Eventually I take to referencing Hugh’s books, and I go from mentioning the way suspicious things parallel certain scenes to pulling up said scenes on my laptop and sharing them out loud. Soon enough I’m taking a page from This Side of Destiny and typing up a brain dump of instances, both noteworthy and not. Just getting everything down.

Nash eventually nods off.

While Nash sleeps, I break down the brain dump into categories in an Excel sheet, organizing things into lists and those lists into other lists and those lists into more lists.

Then, against Pogache’s wishes, I go back again through every single reader who joined the book cruise, searching through their email confirmations and hunting down each of the cruisers in more detail one by one.

By the hum of Nash’s deeply sleeping chest, I write it all out in meticulous fashion, color coding anything fishy with mild yellow, medium orange, or highly suspicious red, and when my hand aches and my eyes refuse to stay open and my head eventually sinks onto my chest, the alarm clock reads 5 a.m.

To say it was tough to wake up is an understatement.

Nash had to shake me like a level 4 earthquake to get me moving.

“I’m up, I’m up,” I murmur, my head sandwiched between two pillows.

Soft pillows too.

“Pip,” Nash whispers, shaking my shoulder again. “You can sleep in and I’ll message the group. Or you can get up. But I’m going to miss my session, and you seem to care about that—”