from the journal
"Anna, slow down," Beckett said. "You said she was acting weird this morning. Weird how?" "Well, she told me she'd run into an old friend and was meeting her for breakfast. Eleanor never has breakfast in public. She and Miguel always get a suite and come out half an hour before game time looking rested and fit and beautiful, and that's the only time you see them. The second they finish playing, either of them, they slide their cards into the tray and up they go, zipping up to the 33rd floor or wherever, into the suite. I don't know, maybe they hop into waiting limos and race over to some fancy restaurant, nobody ever sees them. It's part of their mystique, part of why people are fascinated by them: they don't hang out in the bar, they're never in the restaurants, you won't see them walking by. The only way you know if Miguel and Eleanor are at the tournament is to show up in the playing area. So now Eleanor shows up alone, gets to the hotel with some old friend nobody's ever heard of, and a couple of days later is out for a bit of breakfast? I mean, I guess she must have old friends, but ... How good of a friend could this woman be? I've never even heard of her. Then, here's where it gets even weirder. She called me twenty minutes late. Eleanor always/> calls me at noon. Not eleven fifty-nine, not twelve-o-one. You can set your watch by it. I do, obviously. I mean, she's my game day wakeup call.. Anyway, she called me twenty minutes late and was all strange on the phone." "Strange how?" "Well, she gets all lovey-dovey on the phone with me, which is totally not Eleanor Scout Lee. The Eleanor I know calls while she's doing ten other things. Most I usually get is a brusque 'You up?' Once in a blue moon she'll ask me to get the entry, but that's pretty rare. This time it was, like ... I dunno. Like she wanted to keep me on the phone, chatting away. She said she wasn't having a good time with her friend. All that, late and everything, it was pretty strange." "Ok, so then what?" "Beckett, can we cut the crap and find my partner?" "We are already hard at work on that. What happened next?" "So as soon as I got off the phone with her, I was like, 25 minutes late." "Late?" "Sure. Eleanor likes me there at quarter-till. Without fail. It's one of the major things with her. Gotta be there at least fifteen minutes early. So usually, I have 45 minutes to get up, get dressed and get down there. I usually make it. This morning I only had about twenty minutes. No way I could get there on time. So I hopped in the shower, quick curled my hair, tossed a coat of clear polish on my toes and tore out of there still buttoning my blouse. Of course it was ten till one, so it took forever for the elevator to come, and then when it did finally come we had to stop on every. Single. Floor. I get down there and it's like two minutes till one and I start looking for her. She'd got the entry, so I knew where to go..." "Wait a second. How'd you know where to go?" "Huh? She told me."
