Chapter 3
Arthur Pendelton’s face drained of color, his professional smile instantly vanishing into a mask of corporate anxiety. He glanced from Clara’s furious expression to Julian’s guarded posture, and finally down at Maeve, who was now crying silently, tears tracking clean lines down her dust-smudged cheeks.
“Miss Jenkins,” Arthur said, using Maeve’s last name with a sudden, formal distance. “Is this true? Did you take Mrs. Vance’s necklace?”
“No, Mr. Pendelton, I swear on my mother’s grave,” Maeve choked out, her hands gripping the straps of her handbag so tightly her knuckles turned white. “I left this bag on the cart in the service pantry while I was working in four-hundred-two. Anyone could have walked past it. Anyone could have dropped the necklace inside.”
Clara scoffed loudly, turning her back for a fraction of a second before whipping back around. “Oh, brilliant. So a passing phantom decided to frame the innocent maid by stuffing a fifty-thousand-dollar heirloom into her personal belongings? Do you take us for complete fools?”
“Mrs. Vance, please, let us handle this with discretion,” Arthur pleaded, stepping between the angry guest and the distressed employee. He turned to Julian. “Mr. Vance, you mentioned security footage? May I inspect the terminal?”
Julian nodded and stepped aside, tapping the interface once more to replay the loop. The grainy black-and-white images flickered across the screen: a figure in a blue maid’s uniform stepping up to the open service cart, lifting the flap of the brown leather bag, dropping the sparkling necklace inside, and casually walking away. The face of the person in the video was obscured by the wide brim of the standard hotel cap, but the uniform was unmistakably identical to Maeve’s.
Arthur adjusted his glasses again, his expression grim. “The uniform matches. The location matches. Miss Jenkins, even if you claim you were in room four-hundred-two, the electronic key log for that floor will tell us precisely whose card accessed the pantry and the Vances’ suite.”
“Check it! Please, check it right now!” Maeve urged, stepping forward.
Arthur pulled a slim administrative tablet from his breast pocket, his fingers flying across the glass screen as he accessed the hotel’s central database. The hallway grew dead silent once more, save for the hum of the air conditioning vents overhead. The digital clock in the corner of Arthur’s tablet ticked upward as he scrolled through the encrypted access logs for the third-floor east wing.
“Well?” Clara demanded, tapping her heel against the floor. “What do the logs say, Arthur?”
Arthur stopped scrolling. His eyebrows drew together in a puzzled frown. He tapped the screen twice, refreshing the data feed. “That’s... peculiar,” he murmured, half to himself.
“What is peculiar?” Julian asked, leaning in closer to look at the screen.
“According to the electronic register,” Arthur said slowly, looking up from the tablet with a bewildered gaze, “Maeve’s key card was used to enter room four-hundred-two at one-fifteen. But at one-twenty-eight, while she was supposedly inside that room, her primary key card was also registered as swiping open the door to Mr. and Mrs. Vance’s private suite down the hall.”
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Clara stared at the manager, her lips parting slightly in genuine confusion. “That’s impossible. A key card cannot be in two places at once.”
“Unless,” Julian said, his voice dropping an octave as the gears in his mind began to turn, “someone cloned her card, or she has an accomplice.”
