Death in Paradise (4 page)

She lowered her voice. "Was it awful?"

"Yes." She waited for me to say more and was disappointed.

"So, I'll see you in a few minutes. You're going to have to give the breakfast speech. You know that, don't you?"

"I'm already working on it."

"You don't sound great, Thea. Are you all right?"

"It was a shock, Shannon." She understood that I didn't want to discuss it.

Miserable, I dumped my robe back on top of my suitcase and sat down at the desk. Hydrotherapy would have to wait. It was the first full day of the conference. We'd had an afternoon of seminars, our cocktail party for VIP guests, and an opening dinner with the author of the current hot book about how we were losing our girls as keynote speaker. Off to a brilliant start, notwithstanding that for cocktails they'd booked us into a room for seventy-five when we were closer to two hundred and I'd had to yell and scream at the convention office staff, and then at dinner they had failed to set up enough tables so that twenty-five people were left standing, even though we'd furnished an accurate count. We were professional women. We were recovering nice girls. We dotted our i's and crossed our t's and did our homework twice. Our signatures were still legible and we were just beginning to learn how to make ourselves heard.

Despite these glitches, and despite the frustration among the organizers, the attendees all seemed to be in high spirits. There was a wonderful sense of shared mission, coupled with a sense of having done something almost illicit by getting away to a conference in such a nice place. Everyone I'd talked with was having good time. Everyone, that is, except our leader, Martina. Her attitude had had a decidedly negative effect on her fellow board members.

Martina was—had been—a complicated person. Had been? No. I wasn't ready to think of her in the past tense yet, despite the evidence of my own eyes. In a world where people were judged by whether they viewed the glass as half-full or half-empty, Martina was in a class by herself. She was prone to think her glass had been stolen, or poisoned, or was full of the wrong liquid. Martina was an equal-opportunity crab. She snapped at underlings and peers equally, had more meetings than a busy Hollywood agent, obsessively micromanaged nearly everything she touched, delegating grudgingly only at the last minute, and nothing was ever her fault. The rest of us had been conspiring to oust her, not a simple task since the association had been her idea, and beating our heads against the wall in frustration. If Rory broke down sometime in the next hour and confessed to killing her, I wouldn't be surprised. The only part that wouldn't make sense was the lingerie. What had Rory done with the gentleman caller?

It was all too unreal. I opened the doors and stepped outside, out of the air-conditioned chill and into the soft caress of warm, tropical air. Below me, palm leaves rustled in the breeze. I heard the distant sounds of splashing and children's voices from the pool. Out on the water, a little knot of jet skis was already circling, the engines roaring like water-borne motorcycles. I longed to go out and play, to put something pleasant and normal between me and what I'd just seen, but the clock was running. Tucking the little slip of paper with Shannon's room number into my pocket, I picked up my briefcase and went out, taking one last look over my shoulder at the beautiful world I was missing.

Shannon was a big, vibrant redhead with an infectious laugh and heavy southern accent. She took one look at my face, steered me into a chair, and shoved a cup of tea into my hand. "It must have been just terrible. I can see from your face, honey. You look like you just saw your grandma's ghost." I sipped tea and tried to avoid their staring faces. I waited for conversation to pick up again, but it didn't. They all wanted for my story.

"I'm sorry," I said finally. "I know you want to know what happened but I can't..."

"Well, of course you can, honey," Shannon drawled. "Just take yourself a little old deep breath and plunge right in."

"I don't mean I can't bring myself to talk about it, I mean a policeman about the size of that ship out there"—I pointed to a large vessel passing outside the window—"told me in no uncertain terms to keep my mouth shut. And he wasn't particularly polite about it, either."

"Well, now, how would he ever know?" Shannon began, but Jolene Hershey, who was my candidate for Martina's successor and the levelest head in the room, interrupted.

"Shannon, don't you ever watch TV?" Shannon nodded, looking puzzled. "So you've seen what happens when a body is discovered, right? They question everybody. And since they're going to question everybody, they don't want us to know the details, because they're checking to see if maybe we know too much, isn't that right, Thea?"

I shrugged. "Sounds right to me... I didn't ask him why. I just got the hell out of there as soon as I could."

"Come on," Shannon snapped, not managing her disappointment in a calm and mature way, "don't be coy with us. We know you've got a cop for a boyfriend. And we know all about what happened out there at the Bucksport School. I know Dorrie Chapin thinks you walk on water. Why, you're practically a detective yourself, after that."

Not bloody likely. Dorrie probably wished I'd sunk to the bottom and never come up. But that was an old, sad story. The death of a student is always a terrible thing and the Bucksport School would be years recovering. Dorrie was lucky she still had a job. I rubbed my forehead wearily. "Whatever you do, any of you, don't you dare tell the police about that."

"Why not?" Jolene asked.

"Because cops have a habit of asking me to get involved, and I don't want to be any more involved in this business than I already am. I can't tell you what I saw, but I can tell you that I wish I hadn't, and that right now, I am not a happy camper. I am"—I realized the truth of it even as I said it—"the natural liaison between the group and the police, now that Martina's..." I hesitated. "For better or for worse, I've had some experience dealing the police, and those guys upstairs... they..." I fumbled for words, wanting to warn them about what they would face, yet not wanting to sound like a wimp. "They seemed particularly unfriendly."

Jolene put a comforting hand over mine. Her hand was warm. I resisted the urge to grab it. "Scary?"

"Scary and mean. Hard. Unreasonable." I felt vaguely sick just thinking about it, but whether it was fear of those impassive men with their cold eyes or just shock from what I'd seen, I didn't know. I looked at my watch. "We've got one hour until the breakfast meeting. How are we going to handle it?"

"I favor the truth," Jolene said. "We say there's been a tragic accident and Martina is, uh, no longer with us... but that she had a mission, in trying to bring the girls' schools together to share our strategies, to try and achieve our common goals, and we would dishonor her memory if we abandoned the conference now."

"Well, now," Shannon said. "That sounds very impressive to me."

Rob Greene, the only man on the board, and a guy I admired for his ability to stay comfortable and a team player in a room full of women, was frowning. "Rob doesn't agree," Jolene said. "Do you, Rob?"

He shrugged. "I don't disagree with the stuff about Martina's mission. That's absolutely right. I just think we're going to get off on a bad footing if we don't tell the truth. That she's been murdered. They're going to know it soon enough, anyway. These are educated, informed people. They read. They think. They listen. They're not on a beach vacation, shut off from the real world. I mean..." His laugh was a bit cynical. "Has any of us even set foot on the beach?"

"I've logged my three miles. Jogging," Shannon said. "I believe I was on the beach. Too dark to tell, really, but it felt like sand under my feet. And I think those things I kept dodging were boats."

There was laughter at that. Then others chimed in and a swirl of conversation rose around me. I was in it and yet I wasn't a part of it. I was tuned out, hunkered down inside my own head, trying to get my balance back. I was yanked abruptly into the conversation when someone said, "You saw them, didn't you, Thea?"

"I'm sorry. I missed what you were saying. Saw what?"

"Rory and Martina, screaming at each other like a couple of fishwives," Zannah Wu said. "Last night outside the bar."

I nodded. "Martina had had too much to drink. Rory was trying to get her to go to bed."

"Right," Zannah said. "And that's when you told Rory to go and then told Martina to stop acting like a spoiled princess who expected everyone else to pick up the pieces, and she slapped you and ran away."

That wasn't exactly what had happened, but it was close enough. And I didn't think anyone had seen us, which was why I'd dragged Martina down what seemed like a dim, deserted corridor to have our little tete-a-tete, which had nearly ended up in fisticuffs. Looking across the room at Zannah's placid face, I wondered what else she'd seen. Had she seen me comforting Rory? Heard Rory's bitter outburst? Had she seen Martina go back into the bar and later leave with Lewis Broder, the assistant head of the Fowler School, a slight, supercilious man with a voluptuous mustache and shifty eyes, his arm around Martina's waist, her head against his shoulder?

As a child, one of my favorite books was a Dr. Seuss called
Bartholomew and the Ooblick.
In the story, the king is bored with the weather and wishes for something new, so he gets ooblick, a thick, sticky green stuff that falls from the sky instead of rain and gums up the kingdom. Right now, it seemed like we were experiencing an onslaught of ooblick. The fallout from Martina's death was going to gum up everything. I already felt like I was about knee-deep in the stuff. Meanwhile, we had to get back to the other business at hand. And I, who pride myself on being calm and competent, was feeling awfully shaky, my thoughts scurrying around like frightened mice.

"All right. Jolene, you can deliver the bad news, eulogize a bit, and declare that the show must go on. To create a transition, maybe Shannon or Zannah should introduce me and explain that I'll be the speaker. Which means"—I heaved myself to my feet, feeling ancient and heavy—"that I'd better go upstairs and use my remaining twenty-five minutes getting ready to deliver something coherent in the way of a speech." Jolene looked so relieved I realized she must have been afraid she was going to have to give the speech. "What's after breakfast?" Suddenly I couldn't remember. If my brain didn't come alive soon, I was in for an embarrassing time.

"Bus tours with lunch stops, followed, in the late afternoon, by a choice of workshop topics on 'The Value of Single-Sex Education in the Middle-School Years,' "Jolene reminded me. "Are you sure you're up to this? The breakfast speech, I mean? I could muddle through something, you don't..." She bit her lip. "You don't look like you're feeling very well."

"Rotten," I agreed. "But I worked with Martina on the speech. I know the subject pretty well." Worked with was a euphemism.
Typically,
she had let it go to the last minute and then called on me to write it when she found she couldn't produce anything of quality on such short notice. "The show must go on."

It almost didn't. I found Rory leaning against the wall outside my room. When she spotted me, she ran at me and consumed me in the grip of a lost child recovering her missing mother. I practically had to pry her off before I could get the door open. She followed me inside and collapsed into a chair. "It's horrible. Wasn't it horrible? Wasn't it the worst thing you've ever seen in your life?"

It wasn't, but I didn't need to tell her that. Even if I was interested in telling horror stories, which I was not, this was neither the time nor the place. I had less than half an hour to compose Rory and myself before I had to give a speech. And she was more in need of composing. She huddled on the edge of the chair, bent low with her arms wrapped around her knees. Her eye makeup had smudged under her eyes and run down her face in little rivulets. She looked like an actor made up to play a chimney sweep.

"They're going to think I did it," she whispered. "Because of last night. I should just go jump off your balcony and be done with it. I can't take it, Thea. Those cops! You saw them. Big as houses and mean. They wanted me to talk, but I got so upset I told them to come back later."

"You haven't talked with them yet?"

She shook her head. "I've been hiding, since then, because, you know, they scare me." She clenched fistfuls of her dress in her hands. "I didn't do it, Thea."

"Why would they think you did it, Rory? You're her assistant. The two of you were very close. You admired Martina. Everyone knows that."

"And everyone in the hotel knows we had a fight last night, too. You know you can't keep a secret in this group. I don't think I can take it." She jumped up and started pacing in the small area between the foot of the bed and the windows. "I don't think I can take this... being questioned, everyone looking at me, prying into my private life, prying into hers. Of course it will be me they ask... who else knew her like I did? They'll make me sit there and keep asking me questions until I say things I didn't want to say and poor Martina won't have any privacy left at all and it will be horrible. I can't take it. You know. I just can't take it." She was working herself into a state of hysteria, with churning arms and bobbing head and her speech coming faster and faster.

I picked up the phone to call for help. "What are you doing? Put that phone down!" she wailed. "I'm not ready to talk to them yet. Please. Thea. Give me some space. I've got to think about what to do...."

"Front desk," said a voice in my ear.

Before I could speak, Rory grabbed the phone out of my hand and slammed it down. "You're not going to turn me in," she said. "I'm not going to let them get me!"

"Then calm down," I said. "Sit back down in that chair and take some deep breaths. I'll get you some water."

Obediently she sat in the chair. I went into the bathroom. As I came out with the water, she dashed to the door, opened it, and rushed out onto the lanai. I shoved the water glass onto the nearest surface and went after her. She climbed onto a chair and tried to get up onto the railing but I was there by then, with my arms wrapped around her waist, holding her back. She kicked and flailed and punched, and all I could do was hold on. If I freed a hand to do more, she might get away from me.