“What did she say?” Connor asked.

  “That if the execs from Atomic won’t take her call she’ll send someone to their front door to bug them in person.”

  He snorted. “That sounds like Parker. And what are we supposed to do?”

  I sighed. “Sit and wait until someone gets back to us. And plan what we’re going to do to Barry when we catch up to him.”

  “Liv, I tried. There’s nothing I can do.”

  “That’s not what I wanted to hear, Parker.”

  “It’s not what I wanted to tell you, either, but I don’t work for Atomic and they don’t want me butting in.”

  I closed my eyes and rubbed at them, trying to wish her words into something else. This couldn’t be happening. This could not be happening. Parker was the one who could fix anything. She had a stronger will than anyone I’d ever met and an inability to take the word ‘no’ as a final answer.

  “What did they say?”

  “They say I work for you but not them and they’re blocking me from doing anything. I’m not allowed to send you money because they’ll report me to Drive In. You know I’m not really supposed to be working with you in the first place. I could lose my job. We could both be sued.”

  Oh my God, I hadn’t even thought of that, but she was right. Officially, she worked for Drive In. She managed my career through some loophole she’d found but she was on a tight rein there, and we both knew she was walking a dangerous line. If Atomic decided to make trouble and she lost her job because of this, I’d have to kill myself.

  “Okay you’re out, then. Have you been able to get in touch with Taylor?”

  Because I hadn’t. I’d called her at least fifty-seven times and she hadn’t picked up. It was so unlike her that I’d started to worry that something had happened to her, too.

  Was she also stuck in a parking lot without a ride? And without her phone?

  “I did actually, and she’s giving Atomic an earful right now. She says she’ll call you as soon as she has good news.”

  Terrific. That meant she wouldn’t call if she didn’t have good news. And right now, I needed to hear my friend’s voice.

  “Thanks, Park. If you figure out a way to get us some money, let me know.”

  I hung up feeling entirely hopeless. This was a stupid, stupid situation. What kind of record company actually blocked my best friend from sending me money when I was stuck on the road without a van? This was unreal.

  A second later, my phone buzzed again. Taylor was calling.

  “Please tell me you have good news,” I said.

  “I don’t. I offered to get you a hotel room or a ride. Anything. I begged them to take care of you. But their official answer is that they hadn’t paid for the van in the first place and they’ve already put the tour’s entire budget into play. They’re not willing to do anything else. And they won’t let me do anything, either. I’m sorry, Liv.”

  She sounded horrified, and rightly so.

  “They’re actually going to leave us up here on our own?” I asked, shocked, horrified, and getting increasingly angry.

  Seriously, this couldn’t be happening.

  “That’s what I’m getting so far,” Taylor replied. “I’ve got a call in to my lawyer though, and we’ll see if they get any more reasonable once he gets a hold of them. But that’s not going to happen until tomorrow. So for tonight...”

  I looked up and met Connor’s eyes.

  For tonight, we were on our own, in a town far away from ours and where we didn’t know anyone. In the middle of the night.

  Connor reached out and squeezed my shoulder. “You sit tight. I’ll figure something out.”

  A moment later he was gone and I was actually on my own. Waiting for other people to figure something out.

  CHAPTER 13

  Olivia

  An hour later I was still sitting in the same place, only now I was cold. I checked my phone and saw that it was 10 at night. The people in the booth behind me had left and turned out all the lights, checking first to make sure I was going to be okay.

  I’d said I was fine. What else was I supposed to say? ‘No, I’m not okay, please take me home with you’? I wasn’t a lost kitten.

  I was a sometime musician sitting in a parking lot in Great Falls, Montana by herself because her roadie had deserted her and her record label couldn’t even be bothered to get her a hotel room for the night. And the guy who was supposed to be sitting with me, because we’d agreed we were in this together, had up and left without any explanation other than a muttered idea that he was going to figure something out.

  When a van that looked like it was right out of Scooby Doo pulled up in front of me, I wondered what else could possibly go wrong. Who the hell was this, and why were they pulling into this parking lot in the middle of the night? What could they possibly want with this place?

  Were they here to kidnap me? Because that would go right along with all the other things that had happened so far.

  Then Connor jumped out of the van and jogged around to me, grinning like a maniac.

  I glanced from him to the van, confused, and then looked back at him. “What did you do, travel back to the 70s?”

  “I got us a vehicle,” he said, full of pride and self-congratulations.

  I looked back to the van. “You got us a vehicle?”

  He followed my eyes, though I didn’t think he was seeing the same thing I was, because he was far too happy about it. “Well yeah. We can’t just spend the night on the street, and we need a way to get to the next venue. I figure a van kills both birds with one stone.”

  For a long moment, I didn’t even have any words to throw at him. This was all too ridiculous. The van might have been red once but was now more orange, and had wooden siding that should have been illegal. It was possibly the ugliest thing I’d ever seen.

  “When you said you were going to figure something out, Connor, I was hoping it would include a hotel room. Maybe some food.”

  He put out a hand and helped me to my feet. “Even if we get a hotel, Olivia, we’re going to need transportation. And this was the best I could do on short notice.”

  Okay, that was a fair point, and it was 10 at night. I guessed most car rental places were probably closed. We definitely needed transportation, regardless.

  But still.

  Scooby Doo van.

  Connor pulled me toward the monstrosity, already trying to talk me into liking it. “It’s more comfortable than you might think, and there’s plenty of room in there. I figure we probably have enough money for some food and a hotel tonight, but when we’re out on the road we’re going to want to have access to a place we can sleep. And we might not have a real tour bus, but we do have...”

  “The Scooby Doo van,” I finished, starting to come around to the idea.

  Yeah, it was hideous. Truly horrendous. I felt like my eyes might start bleeding soon. But there was plenty of room in there, and if the record label wasn’t going to give us a hand...

  “It’s not the worst idea I’ve ever heard,” I admitted, running a finger lightly over the bright used-to-maybe-be-red paint job.

  “Gee, thanks,” Connor said with a snort.

  I sent him a sidelong glance. “I’m not going to give you a full endorsement until I’ve seen the inside.”

  He laughed and slid the side door open. “Your chariot, my lady.”

  The inside was even uglier than the outside. The back didn’t even have seats. Just one open space for whatever it was for. And the floor was covered with orange shag carpeting. I glanced to the driver’s side to see one of those woolly steering wheel covers, and the dashboard looked like it was also covered in faux wood.

  The whole thing smelled like someone had shampooed it using cherry KoolAid.

  “I don’t even have the words,” I told him honestly.

  “I don’t think there are words, to be completely frank,” he replied. “But it’s the best I could find and it’s better than nothing.”

  “And if we run out of money, we can go solve mysteries on the side,” I said. “So what are we doing tonight, now that we have this groovy van?”

  Connor chuckled. “There’s a Walmart down the way that’s still open. I figure we get some clothes and maybe sleeping bags. Food. And then tomorrow, we head for the next show.”

  “Do you even know the schedule?” I asked. I hadn’t bothered to find it out because I’d thought we could leave that up to Barry.

  More fool, I.

  Connor waved his phone at me. “I had Danny email it to me, so I do. The next town is even smaller than this one. Like, Arberry-sized. So we’d better stock up on everything we need here, while we can.”

  I nodded. “So Walmart it is. And then we’re bunking down in the Mystery Mobile.”

  “Pretty sure it was called Mystery Van,” he noted.

  “Mystery Mobile sounds better.”

  He laughed and ushered me into the passenger seat—which was, surprisingly, made out of leather rather than vinyl—and then hustled over to the driver’s seat. “Walmart, here we come. Hope you’re ready for Connor and Olivia’s Mystery Tour.”

  I laughed at that. We’d started without a real name for the tour. Too small, I’d guessed, for Atomic to bother naming it.

  And now, it seemed, we had our name. Mystery, indeed.

  In every way possible.

  I had to admit, I had doubts about the next step in our plan. According to Connor the next town—Cascade—consisted of a main street and some spokes, with one bar and one theater, where we were going to be playing. He’d thought we couldn’t count on them having any big box stores and from what he told me, he was right.

  The place did sound like Arberry.

  But that left us shopping at Walmart in Great Falls in the middle of the night, and with nowhere to go afterward. So when we walked through the sliding doors and into the fluorescent lighting of the store, with no plans to leave any time soon, I was feeling distinctly...

  Well, like we were going to be loitering there for as long as we could manage.

  Which wasn’t far from the truth.

  “So we’re going to get some clothes, get some sleeping bags, and some food, and then...”

  “Hang out?” I asked, giving him a sidelong glance. “Just walk the aisles browsing?”

  He shrugged, looking more than a little bit bashful. “Until we get tired enough to go find someplace to park and get some sleep.”

  I wanted to laugh at how ridiculous that sounded. I also sort of wanted to cry. “This is definitely not how I expected my first real tour to go.”

  He nudged my shoulder with his elbow. “Hey, it’s the Mystery Tour. You never know what you’re going to find out there on the road.”

  “Finding a hotel with clean sheets and fluffy pillows would be nice. Also a credit card with unlimited credit.”

  He just chuckled, grabbed a basket, and gestured for me to follow him.

  We went through the sporting goods section first, grabbing the best sleeping bags we could find—his blue and mine red—and then made our way to the home goods for pillows and extra blankets.

  “Food next?” he asked.

  “Obviously not. Food last. If we’re getting cold stuff or warm stuff, we won’t want it melting before we get it to... Oh, we should get an ice chest,” I added, starting to actually think ahead. If we were lucky enough to get already-cooked food and wanted to keep it, and if we wanted to keep drinks or anything else cold, we needed a way to do it.

  One could not survive on bags of chips alone. And now that my brain was coming around to the idea that we were going to be on the road, I was beginning to see how this was going to have to go. Starting with Connor not being in charge of the food. He probably lived on licorice and beef jerky at home.

  I would not be living on things like that.

  Seconds later we were back in the camping section finding the cheapest cooler we could get and making sure we had the biggest size. The van was lacking in a lot of things—God only knew if it had a heater or a/c that worked—but there was a lot of room in the back, so we’d have space for things like sleeping bags and coolers.

  “And bodies,” Connor said when I told him about all the space.

  I tipped my head at him. “Are you planning on transporting bodies? Because I might have a problem with that.”

  “Our bodies, Olivia,” he retorted.

  That didn’t make it much better.

  “So you’re thinking we’ll be dead and laying in back and someone else will be driving?”

  His hand shot out and he jammed his finger right into my ribs, then started tickling. “That’s not what I meant and you know it!”

  I screeched and scurried away from his fingers. “Don’t tickle! You said our bodies like we’d be dead! Tickling is not an appropriate response to me calling you on it!”

  He stuck his tongue out at me. “Tickling is an appropriate response to anything. Okay, we need clothes. Unless you have more stuffed in your backpack than I realized.”

  “Even if I did, it wouldn’t include clothes for you.”

  We strolled slowly toward the clothing section, making a list of the things we were definitely going to need and how often we thought we’d be able to stop and do laundry while we were on the road. By the time we got to the women’s section, we’d decided on three pairs of jeans each, several tops, and one pair of shoes. Maybe a dress for me. Maybe some cowboy boots if we could find them.

  And I was trying not to think about how much money we were spending. I’d had cash stuffed into my backpack and Connor had his debit card, but we were officially on a fixed income until someone could deposit money in Connor’s account, and that made me nervous. I’d grown up in a home where there was always enough money, and the thought of not having it made me feel untethered in a way I didn’t completely understand.

  Still. It wasn’t as if we could go out on the road without clothes.

  “Oh my God, you have to get this,” Connor said, breaking me out of my thoughts.

  I turned to see him holding up something that might have been a dress but might also have been a burlap sack. If burlap sacks came in bright pink.

  “Connor, pink is not my color,” I said politely. “Redheads should never wear pink.”

  He scoffed. “Olivia, you’d look beautiful in anything you wore.”

  I eyed the piece he was holding up. “Not that.”

  “Anything,” he said softly, looking at me with something in his eyes that I didn’t want to think about.

  I turned, avoiding that look, and laid eyes on the ugliest shirt I’d ever seen. No, it wasn’t a men’s shirt but I was sure it came in XL.

  And it was the perfect distraction from the way Connor had been looking at me.

  I walked over, grabbed the shirt, and turned, grinning. “Fair’s fair, Connor. I’ll try that on if you try this on.”

  His mouth dropped open to deny me, but I shook the shirt and nodded.

  “Yep. You put this on and model it for me with....” I looked over to the men’s section, eyes flitting across the selection, and ran over for a pair of honest-to-God checkered pants. “These!” I whirled and saw him turning a shade of red I’d never imagined possible, and laughed aloud. “Put these on and let me see them and I’ll try on the pink sack.”

  He narrowed his eyes and considered, then grabbed several other things off the rack. A bright yellow shirt that would definitely clash with my hair, a plaid skirt, and shorts that didn’t look like they would cover anything. I retaliated by grabbing more of the worst clothes I could find, and he retaliated again.

  By the time we headed for the dressing rooms, we were both holding armfuls of clothes we’d never buy but had agreed to put on just so the other would have to wear one of the things we’d chosen. And we were laughing like children, our whoops echoing through the mostly deserted store.

  What was more, I was having fun. There was no reason for that to be true. We were stuck in Great Falls with a van that looked like it may or may not have a time portal hidden in the back. We had no money and no one coming to rescue us. We didn’t know if we’d make it to our next stop, and even if we did, we didn’t have much in the way of equipment.

  Our label had hung us out to dry and I had a bad feeling they’d somehow arranged it that way. They’d also made it clear that we had to stay on tour if we wanted to win those contracts they were dangling in front of us. I didn’t know how we were going to do that. We had what passed for a plan, but it wasn’t good.

  This was a nightmare come to life.

  And if I had to experience it, at least Connor was here with me, making me laugh through the whole thing.

  CHAPTER 14

  Connor

  I woke up the next morning facing the wall of the van, and remembered that I’d faced this way on purpose. Olivia and I had stayed in Walmart until security started asking us whether there was anything else we needed and had then headed toward the exit with our sleeping bags, pillows, and clothes that we might actually wear. Olivia had washed her face in the bathroom next to the exit and we’d both brushed our teeth.

  Then we’d gotten to the van, parked it under one of the streetlights so we’d be able to see, and done our best to make the back area a decent bedroom.

  It had been nearly impossible. There was plenty of room for us to lay down but the presence of the wheel wells had meant the space was narrower than we’d expected. Olivia and I had been right next to each other, breathing the same air and running into each other if we rolled over. I didn’t know how she’d felt about it but I’d been hyper aware of how close she was, my mind playing through the memory of the one night we’d spend together again and again.

  I’d finally turned to face the side of the van out of sheer self-preservation.

  When I opened my eyes to see sunlight streaming through the windows, I breathed a sigh of relief. And then I remembered where we were and what we were doing, and I realized that there was a way to get this done.