I Am Royal: The Search for a Prince

Plotting

            

After Khalid left, Willow spent the next hour convincing Dan that if she did not have Nicki over, she would go insane. Dan was adamantly against it. Willow still hadn't said anything about the whole running away thing. Finally she bit the bullet and out-right apologized. And she meant it. She apologized for running away, for risking his job, for scaring him, for only thinking of herself. She made it heartfelt and genuine, because she really was sorry. He seemed shocked by it. But it worked. A few minutes later, he phoned Nicki- he wouldn't let Willow use the phones- and told her she could come.

"She says she's renovating right now, but will be here in about half an hour," Dan told Willow.

Willow asked the maid standing quietly in the corner of the parlor for papers, markers, and thumbtacks. She scurried away, retrieved the items, and Willow disappeared into her bedroom. By the time Nicki arrived, Willow had written out all the events that had occurred in the last twenty hours, color-coded them, and was starting to tack them up on her bedroom wall. Dan escorted Nicki in. He froze when he saw Willow pushing a thumbtack into the plaster.

"What... are you doing?" he said.

Willow looked at her work, and then at Dan.

"Hanging up clues?" she said.

"You just punched holes... in two hundred-year-old walls..."

Willow said, "Ummmm..."

She slowly put the hammer down. Dan sighed and waved his hand. "The damage is there already. I'll call for a repairman when you're done."

"What's all this?" Nicki asked, looking at the papers Willow had hung on the walls, and the strings connecting them.

Willow tapped the first paper. "Maritime Ball, 6:15-ish p.m. Dan escorts me out of the ballroom, with the news that Henry is missing."

"Ooh, this is a timeline," Nicki realized. "All right. Shouldn't you start it a bit earlier, then?"

"What do you mean?"

"When was the last time you saw Henry?"

Willow didn't think Nicki had ever in her life referred to Henry by his title. She was very anti-monarchy, which was strange, considering her best friend was a princess.

"I last saw him..." Willow thought. "I was talking to Khalid, and I glanced over at him. He was staring at Chelsea."

"Of course he was. That was it?"

"Yes."

"But, he made it into the ballroom?"

"As far as I know." Willow wrote down the dinner on a piece of paper and tacked it onto the wall in front of the first one. "Okay... then, they found his crown in the garden."

"Wait..." Nicki flopped onto Willow's plush bed and rolled over. She put her chin in her hands and said, "I'm going to need to know about your conversation with Khalid."

"That's not why we're here," Willow reminded her, tapping the timeline.

"Yes, it is!" Nicki protested. "If you want to be really thorough about this, you're going to need to think about everything that happened between the last time you saw your brother and the point that he disappeared."

Willow knew Nicki was digging for gossip. But, she was also willing to discuss it with her friend, since she was pretty confused about her own feelings, too.

"He was really cool," she admitted.

Nicki's eyes brightened. "Oh my god, really? You're serious? You're not kidding me, are you?"