“I’m not sure I’m supposed to talk about it.” Letty glanced meaningfully over her shoulder at Maya, who was stringing wooden spools on a length of red yarn.

“Does she believe your story?” Ava asked in a near whisper. “She’s not going to arrest you, right?”

“Yes, I think she believes me. And no, I don’t think an arrest is imminent,” Letty said.

Ava craned her neck, looking out toward the parking lot. “Where’d Joe go? I thought he had the day off?”

“He said he had some stuff to take care of,” Letty said. Anxious to divert Ava’s laser focus, she pointed at the screen of the computer. “According to the portal, you’ve got guests checking into unit twelve the Monday after Easter. But I thought you told me the Sheehans aren’t driving home until that next weekend.”

“What?” Ava peered over her shoulder at the screen. “This doggone new booking software has me so confused, I don’t know who’s coming and who’s going. Does that mean we’re double-booked?”

“You were supposed to input all that data into the new spreadsheet,” Letty said, trying to sound more patient than she felt.

“I was trying, but then Merwin interrupted me, complaining about the damned shuffleboard cues, and I guess I lost track of what I was doing,” Ava said. “What do we do now?”

Letty clicked over to the bookings for the rest of the motel. “Hmm. The Feldmans are checking out on Easter morning. Can you turn the unit that quickly? Will Anita come in to clean on Sunday, or Monday morning?”

“We’ll have to get it turned, even if I have to do it myself,” Ava said, sounding resigned. “I don’t want to disappoint new guests. Especially since they’re booked for ten days. And at the new rate.”

Letty nodded. “Okay, I’ll email the guest and tell them we’ve had a slight hiccup, but the unit they’ll be in is just as nice. Maybe we can give them a free breakfast coupon for Sharky’s, as a consolation prize.”

“You’re a natural at this, you know it?” Ava said, beaming at her assistant manager. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you’d been in hotel management your whole life.”

“Not my whole life,” Letty said modestly. “But I was doing residential property management, which is sort of the same thing, back in New York, before I came down here.”

“Since you’re here, I’m going to go run my errands. I should be back around three, if anyone comes looking for me,” Ava said.

Once her boss was gone, Letty threw herself into work, imputing all the existing motel reservations from Ava’s handwritten logbook into the new software. It was arduous, mind-numbing work, just the thing she needed to keep from thinking about Evan Wingfield.