downstairs

At least once a month, my mother would pull birds of paradise from the downstairs bush, arrange them like so, place them in a vase and position the flowers as a centerpiece in the living room atop our mahogany coffee table.

“We swapped details and saw each other later that night. It was all normal,” Paiz said, adding that Payne fetched him from downstairs at the Park Hyatt Palermo after he got lost.

A few hours later, at 4 a.m., her mother went downstairs to use the bathroom.

"Quite a few times they themselves had to go downstairs to the shelter in the hotel they stayed at," he says.

As she went downstairs she could see her mother with her hand on the front door as if trying to close it and a "gun tip" poking through the open door.