Murder With Ganache: A Key West Food Critic Mystery (19 page)

“I’ve got a wicked headache,” he said, looking and sounding surly. “And they won’t even give me an aspirin. I can’t wait to get out of here. Allison says it could be another four days.”

So “Mom” was “Allison” today, meaning he didn’t want to feel close to anyone, even her. Maybe he didn’t want anyone to see how bad/scared/worried he felt.

“Are you hungry?” I asked, glancing at the hospital tray on his bedside table—the Saltine crackers, the red Jell-O, the pasty gray noodles floating in pale chicken broth.

“Not really,” he said. “Not for this crap.”

Now I wished I’d brought some cookies or that last piece of strawberry cream pie. I, of all people, knew how good food opened doors. Then I remembered the peach cake Mom had given me this morning. I rustled in my backpack and pulled out a foil packet.

“My mother baked this—Ina Garten’s peach cake. It’s to die for.” I handed him a white plastic fork and he attacked the cake as though he hadn’t eaten in days. Which he hadn’t.

“What’s on TV?” I asked, watching him lick the last crumbs from the foil, trying to get the conversational juices lubricated.

He rolled his eyes, embarrassed. “
iCarly
.”

A Nickelodeon sitcom about a girl raised by her older brother who has her own Web TV show. Not what I’d expect from a teenage boy.

“There is nothing worth watching in the afternoon. Nothing,” he said. “And if you’re here to try to make me talk about what happened, I don’t remember. Period.” He planted his arms across his chest, scowling, and then clicked the volume up on the television.

I sat in the chair next to the bed, facing the TV. “It’s been a dreadful week.”

His eyes filled with tears and he dashed them away. I studied the TV screen, giving him a little space to gather his dignity.

“Where’s your mom?” I asked a few minutes later when I couldn’t take any more silence between us—or more silly television.

“They’re talking with that detective—the one with the stick up his butt.”

I snickered, even though the police trouble looming wasn’t the least bit funny. “That has to be Detective Bransford. What’s with the cop outside the door?”

“I guess they think I might make a run for it.” He plucked at his hospital gown. “I wouldn’t get far in this.”

I sighed, puzzled about how to reach him. Was he really this out of it, or were the consequences of the last few days not registering? “I ran into Mariah’s parents over at Project Lighthouse.” I figured he’d know the name, whether or not he’d actually been to the center.

He turned to stare at me. “I hate that guy,” he said.

“Tell me about it,” I said softly.

A resigned look passed over his face. “They already gave me the third degree. I don’t remember much. They said Mariah died?”

The sadness in his face nearly broke my heart.

“I’m so sorry.”

“That cop seems to think I did it.”

“That’s one theory, for sure,” I said. “Mr. Mathers seems to be trying to build a case that she ran away to escape from you.”

Rory looked down at his hands, fingering the edge of the hospital sheet. “That’s so not true.”

“I know there’s something you don’t want to say, but if you don’t speak up, you could end up arrested for her murder.” We watched a commercial about stain-busting detergent. “What do you think she was running from?”

“Everyone thought she had such a perfect life. Her family has tons of money—and a big honking mansion in Princeton. And her father is so smart and important that no one questions his side of the story. He’s some big shot at Princeton, professor or something. But he’s a major phony. And he didn’t understand her at all.”

“What didn’t he understand?”

He rolled his shoulders back, gave a big sigh. “She knew her parents never could really love her because she isn’t theirs.”

“How so?”

“She’s adopted.”

Which totally caught me off guard. I’d thought Mariah’s mom resembled her almost perfectly, allowing for the twenty-five-year difference in their ages and a huge difference in taste. But on the other hand, I’d been primed to expect that. “Lots of kids are adopted,” I said in a neutral voice. “But most of them don’t run away.”

“You don’t know how hard they were on her. It was all about appearances. She finally couldn’t take it and started skipping school and hanging out with the townies. That’s where I met her.” A tear shimmered on his lower lashes. He blotted it dry with the sheet.

“So you met her in town. And?”

“And she needed money to get away.”

Might as well ask it straight out. “Was she using drugs? Or selling them?”

“She needed money to get away,” he repeated in a stony voice.

I took a deep breath, in and then out. “So you came down here to help her. That’s why you asked to go off by yourself the night of the shower?”

He crossed his arms over his chest and frowned. “Allison would never have let me go if she knew I was meeting Mariah.”

I nodded and bit my lip, trying not to show how annoyed I felt. And mentally kicking myself for not picking this up the other night. If I’d been paying more attention, maybe I could have saved us all a lot of agony. And saved Mariah’s life. “I know there’s a lot you don’t remember yet. Do you have any ideas about who killed her?”

He scowled and shook his head. Digging in. “The last thing I remember was on Duval Street with our friends.”

I simply didn’t believe him, but pressing him for more wasn’t going to work either.

“This may sound dumb,” I said, “but I’ve discovered that family has less to do with biology than it does with who cares enough to make the effort.”

Rory shook his head again. “You don’t understand—she had to get away from them. And to do that, she needed money.”

The angry look on his face told me I’d get nowhere if I insisted that Mariah’s parents really loved her, at least in their own limited way. “Some of the kids reported that you and Mariah had been fighting,” I said. “Do you remember that?”

He pressed his lips together and plucked at his hospital ID bracelet. “I remember being on Duval Street with all the kids. Like I said. A guy was bothering her. That’s all.”

“Who was the guy?”

He shrugged and slumped down into his pillows looking pale and tired. I’d pushed him too hard. “If you remember something more about what happened, call me, okay?”

I stood up. “Sometimes the people you’re not related to can feel exactly like family. In a good way. Your mom, for example.” I smiled. “She feels like another mother to me. Although two mothers can be a lot. Especially two mothers on a small island.”

I laughed and managed to eke a grin from him too. “Here’s the thing: There are big differences between my mother and Allison, but I know they both love me. Same as your dad and my dad love you.”

Rory frowned again. “If my father cared about
me,
he’d drop this stupid idea about military school. He wouldn’t be sending me away.” He scowled even harder. “And it was your father who told my mother I couldn’t stay with her.”

I hesitated. Was there a way to explain the truth to him without telling Allison’s secrets? Probably not. Probably the best thing I could do was point him back to her.

“Talk to your mother about that,” I said. “She would want to know how you feel. I’m sure of that.” I wanted to hug him. Instead I squeezed his shoulder. “I’m so glad you’re feeling better.”

I thought about Mariah’s father on the way out to my scooter. How he’d accepted a business call in the middle of the conversation about his daughter’s death. How he’d assured the person on the phone that they would be working on the spreadsheet details by that evening. How could he possibly concentrate on numbers at a time like this? Maybe there was a good reason that Mariah felt disconnected from her parents. But probably now we’d never know.

Bottom line: I believed that Rory did whatever he did because he felt as though he had to save her from her parents. But what were the chances that anyone else would believe him?

I thank you for calling them off, young ser. I promise you, they would have found me indigestible.

—George R. R. Martin,
A Game of Thrones

Back outside the hospital, the last of the morning haze had burned off, revealing a perfect sunny spring day. I noticed that I’d missed two calls from Ray during the time I’d been eavesdropping in Project Lighthouse and then talking with Rory. I dialed him back.

“I’m afraid to ask how everything’s going,” he said as soon as he answered.

“Up and down,” I said. “Rory’s conscious and he’s been moved out of ICU, so that’s the good news. Allison thinks he’s about to be arrested for murder, though he can’t remember what happened. Or possibly he does remember, but he’s not willing to say. That’s the bad.”

“Crap,” he said. “I’m awfully sorry.”

“How about on your end?”

“Not good,” he said, sounding utterly miserable. “Now that the opening is over, I’ve got nothing to do. I’m having a terrible time explaining to my folks why they flew across the country for nothing.”

I was losing my patience for all this. “For god’s sake, Ray, what in the world did you say to Connie’s father? Why did you run him off?”

Silence.

“Have you talked to Connie by any chance?” he finally asked. “Or seen her?”

“Not today,” I said. “We’ve been a little busy.” I didn’t mean to sound snippy but I suppose it came out that way. Poor Ray, he was having almost as bad a week as my family was. “Do you want me to call her?”

“Would you? I’d be so grateful. Is there anything I could do for you in return?”

An idea took shape in my head. “Could you borrow your friend’s boat again? If we took another spin around the island, maybe we’d run into someone who knew something or saw something the other night. I feel certain of this: Rory Michaels may have stolen a Jet Ski or even arranged to score some drugs, but he would not kill a girl. I’ve known the kid practically all his life—he doesn’t have a mean bone in his body. Crabby and full of teenage angst, yes. But mean? No.”

“I can do that,” Ray said. “It sounds like a good idea. When we were out yesterday, we were focused on looking for your brother, not witnesses or clues. I’ll call you with a time.”

“One more thing,” I said. “Any chance you and your parents would be interested in joining me for an early dinner at Two Cents tonight? We could show them through Mallory Square after.”

“Absolutely,” he said, sounding enormously relieved. I could imagine that these couple of days that were supposed to be filled with the happy bustle of his wedding preparations felt awkward and empty.

I zipped back to houseboat row to see if my mother and Sam wanted to accompany me on the boat. Sam was pacing back and forth on the dock, talking on his phone. Each time he passed her, Schnootie the schnauzer barked and lunged to the end of her leash, nearly strangling herself. My mother and Miss Gloria were reading on the deck, enjoying the perfect weather day. I explained the latest plan—the boat ride and then an early dinner.

“I’m in this time,” Miss Gloria said. “I’ll get my gear.” She popped up and disappeared into the houseboat.

“If you don’t mind,” Sam said, looking at my mother, “this would be a good chance for me to work on my case back at the hotel.”

“We’ll see you for dinner?” my mother asked, standing on her tiptoes to kiss his lips.

“Definitely.” He wrinkled his brow and frowned a little. “You ladies stay out of trouble. Don’t try to do anything yourselves. Call the police the second you see anything suspicious?”

“We promise,” said Miss Gloria, who’d returned to the deck with a wide-brimmed hat, sunscreen, an emergency ziplock bag of chocolate chip cookies, and a big smile on her face.

We piled into my mother’s rental car, dropped Sam off at the hotel, and raced out to the marina. Ray was waiting by the boat.

“Thanks for arranging this,” I said. “I thought your folks might have liked to join us.”

“Mom needed to do a little shopping on Duval Street,” Ray said. The dark half-moons under his eyes suggested he hadn’t slept much last night. “And honestly, we all needed a little time apart.”

“Hasn’t this been the hardest week?” Mom asked. She put her hand to her forehead, shading her eyes like the brim of a ball cap. “We don’t know quite what we’re looking for, do we?”

“Someone we didn’t notice yesterday, but who might have noticed Rory,” Ray said.

We followed the same route we had the day before, though the feeling of the trip was different. The sun was out and so were bright-colored sailboats and day-tripping motorboats and raucous Jet Skis. And the knowledge that Rory was alive and recovering from his injury made the outing feel less ominous.

Until we passed the mangroves where Mariah’s body had gotten hung up.

“Slow down.” I signaled to Ray. “This is where we found Mariah.”

“That’s a long way from where Rory was,” Ray said. “How are they figuring he could have gotten injured over by Wisteria Island and still managed to dump her body here? It’s too far for the tides to have brought her.”

“Someone’s not looking very hard at the facts,” said my mother. “Somebody’s jamming puzzle pieces willy-nilly into any old hole.”

“Speaking of the facts,” Miss Gloria piped up from her seat in front of the console, “what really happened between you and Connie’s father? It’s just plain silly that we’re all tippy-toeing around acting like nothing’s wrong. Or as if there’s no way to fix this.”

“I second that opinion,” said my mother, turning from the bow to stare Ray down.

“Third,” I added, watching Ray’s face turn from pink to red. “Ray, tell us. How bad can it be?”

“Bad,” he finally said, his gaze still pinned to the horizon.

We three waited.

“I didn’t ask her father to leave,” he finally said in a soft voice. “My parents sent a big check as a gift for the wedding or the honeymoon or a boat—however we wanted to spend it.” He gave a halfhearted smile. “I had the card from them sitting on my kitchen table, waiting to show to Connie. When I got up in the morning, the money was gone. Fifty hundred-dollar bills. Just gone.
Pfft.
” He snapped his fingers.

“Lordy! They sent all that cash in the mail?” Miss Gloria asked.

“No. I’m the one who’s an idiot. I had it cashed because I thought she’d enjoy seeing the money. And spending it too,” said Ray with a quick smile that faded away as fast as it had crossed his face. “The point is, the only other person who’d been in my apartment was Keith.”

“Connie’s father took the money?” Mom asked. “Are you sure about that, honey?”

“I tried to come up with another theory. Like maybe he’d gotten worried about that much cash sitting around and so he put it away somewhere.” He looked right at me. “I had to ask him.”

“Of course you did.” I nodded. “And?”

“First he denied knowing anything about it. He suggested maybe I’d hidden it someplace safe and then forgotten where I’d hidden it.”

Miss Gloria laughed. “In my case, that would be a good bet.”

“Then what happened?” I asked.

“As you can imagine, it was beyond tense. He never admitted to taking the cash, but he rambled about needing money to cover some short-term debts. And then how Connie would certainly want to loan money to him. And if I was going to be part of his family, I should understand that too.”

He scowled and sighed. “Finally I insisted he tell her what had happened. Let her decide how to handle it and whether she was satisfied with him usurping our honeymoon nest egg without anyone’s permission.” Ray’s jaw had clenched tighter and tighter as he finished the story. “I said, look, she’s going to be really disappointed in you if I tell her what happened.”

He fell silent.

“And he said?” I prodded.

“He said she wouldn’t be disappointed because he knew I wouldn’t tell. He said we both knew that family was more important than anything in the world to Connie. And he knew I wouldn’t be the one to take her father away from her.”

Ray glanced at me, his face ashen and eyes tired.

“I was so worried about Rory. I had to get to the marina to meet you all at the boat, so I left.”

“Did he give the money back?” asked Miss Gloria, her eyes wide.

Ray shook his head.

Mom said: “So he took off with your money and led Connie to believe the estrangement was your fault.”

Ray nodded. “He didn’t tell her what we fought about, just made it sound like I didn’t like him. And maybe I was too jealous to share her love with anyone—even her own father.” He gunned the boat’s motor, and we picked up speed. “He was right about one thing—I don’t like him.”

“You have to tell her the truth,” Mom said, gripping the gunwale and shouting over the wind.

“I tried to tell her,” Ray said. “She doesn’t want to hear it. And Keith was right: It’s not my place to ruin her relationship with him. He was right about that too—family trumps everything in her world.”

“But at what cost, Ray?” I asked, feeling impatient. “It’s a relationship built on lies. And she loses her chance to have the life she dreamed of with you because you’re protecting that scumbag?”

“It’s her father.” His set his lips in a grim line and looked off to the horizon. “You saw what happened the other day. She doesn’t want to hear
this
truth.”

I met my mother’s eyes and shrugged. We’d have to take this up again later. We were getting absolutely nowhere.

We circled around the bottom of the island, skirting the
Disney Magic
cruise ship docked at the Outer Mole—the far pier—dodging a line of Jet Skiers, and finally motoring past Sunset Key. Ray slowed the boat down when the live-aboards at the city mooring field came into view.

“I’ll putter along,” he said. “If you spot someone we could talk with, let me know.”

I showed Miss Gloria the empty mooring where we’d found Rory on the abandoned boat. A two-man kayak wobbled along a few hundred yards away and Ray cruised over to cut them off.

“Good morning,” my mother yelled. “Could we ask a quick question?”

Ray cut the engine and her words echoed loudly across the water. The man in the back of the kayak stopped paddling. “We’re late to work.”

“We’ll be quick.” Mom flashed a friendly grin. “We found my daughter’s brother injured on an abandoned sailboat the other morning. He’s been in a coma in the hospital ever since. We’re wondering if you might have seen something—or heard something—late Wednesday night. A fight, or anything unusual like that?”

The girl in the front of the kayak shook her head. “We’ve been working double shifts all week. Spring break. By the time we get home, we sleep like the dead.”

Or the dead drunk, I thought to myself. They looked that disheveled, with eyes red-rimmed and dirty hair pulled back into messy ponytails. Where did you shower if you lived on a boat with no facilities?

As if she could read my unkind thoughts, the girl dug her paddle into the water and the kayak glided away.

“Over there,” said Miss Gloria, pointing to a white sailboat, its deck stacked with plastic bags and shaded by a tattered blue tarp. “I saw a man duck into his cabin.”

Ray motored over closer and called out: “Good morning! Excuse me! Might we have a word with you?”

After a few minutes, an older man emerged from the cabin, wearing a tattered sleeveless T-shirt and weathered blue jeans. He had a scruffy beard and thick white eyebrows. “Help you?”

Ray explained who we were and asked whether he remembered any unusual noises or comings and goings over the past week, especially the night that Rory disappeared. The man combed his beard with stubby fingers and looked out over the landscape of wrecked boats. He kicked aside a laundry basket brimming with empty beer cans, some of them rusting around the seams. I was sure we’d struck out again.

“It’s always kinda noisy out here after midnight. We’re not what you’d call an upscale neighborhood.” He barked a laugh and studied my mother with rheumy blue eyes. “Your son, huh?”

Mom nodded, looking sober and sincere. No point in correcting that impression—it might help in this case. “And her grandson,” she said, pulling Miss Gloria close to her side. “We think he got involved in some serious trouble. Serious enough that someone might have tried to kill him.”

“Could be drugs,” I added, because after my visit with Rory, that’s how it was looking to me. They all looked startled at my pronouncement, which made me feel queasy.

“Drugs, huh?” He scratched his beard again. “I think I know a man who could lead a kid to that kind of trouble. He’s a dealer from what I can tell. And he uses kids to do his dirty work. He spent some time on that boat over yonder”—he pointed to a sailboat on the outer perimeter of the live-aboards. “Haven’t seen any sign of him today though. Maybe he’s cleared out. Though you never can be sure out here—people come and go. You get tired of the lifestyle, you know?” He grinned and chuckled, tapping the basket of cans with his toe. As though drinking too much beer off the grid was a “lifestyle.”

“What kind of dirty work do the kids do?” I asked.