Drowning Lessons

by Rachel Neuburger Reynolds

  Poor Becky.

  I hoped she’d inspire a more sympathetic outpouring of emotion back in New York. Where she came from was a mystery to me, but I hoped that she had a lovely family home somewhere, with parents who were still together and a group of friends who loved her dearly. I hoped there were hundreds of gym executives who she visited with Nico and Walter, who were surely charmed by her quirky ways and enormous smile. I hoped that she would have a huge turnout at a celebration of life ceremony. Filled with music, poetry, and tears of hope. Down the line, I’d hit up Olivia and Walter to set up a scholarship in her name. I didn’t remember what Lloyd had said she studied.

  I ran my hand over the beautiful red clothing in my closet. Most of it I hadn’t worn, including the wetsuit, which is unfortunate as it is an item of clothing that can make anyone look good. I prettied myself up the best I could for the evening’s dinner cruise, picking the most beautiful dress I owned and putting my hair up as best as I could. Then, mocking my belief that I could actually be free from Olivia and obligation, there was a knock on the door.

  Behind the door was a bleary-eyed Emma, who at least had the courtesy to knock. She could hardly look me in the face, “Can I talk to you?”

  We went back to the restaurant for what would turn out to be my first of two dinners. That ten extra pounds was quickly going to reach fifteen. Emma still was amazingly beautiful, eating her burger while getting ketchup all over her childlike face, wiping it away with charm. She repeatedly looked at me, almost ready to talk, opening her mouth then closing it a number of times. She threw back half the burger, looking like she hadn’t eaten in weeks.

  “I feel bad,” she said. “Really bad. I shouldn’t have come to Panama. It was a huge mistake.”

  “No, you shouldn’t have come.” In an instinctual defense of Olivia, I continued, “It’s not too late for you to leave. You’ve done horrible things in the past, but this is really beyond what I could conceive.”

  She was inconsolable about Becky’s death, though I don’t believe that she’d ever actually spoken with her. She looked at me, wiping her tears on her arm. “I can’t get a plane ticket off the island. I’ve tried. Not yesterday, not today. I thought that coming here with Ryan would be the ultimate revenge. I could finally truly even the score. I really believed that.”

  “Even the score?” I was curious. “You’ve ruined every major event of Olivia’s life. I know she was terrible in the past, but her sleeping with your boyfriend, who you didn’t even love, five years ago does not warrant putting a cloud over every major achievement she’s had. Seriously, Emma, you are warped.”

  “There are things I don’t think Olivia told you. You really don’t know, do you?” she asked rhetorically before laying her story on the table.

  Olivia and Emma Fowler had a serious case of rotten. My first observation of this had been when Olivia was fifteen, and Emma was ten. Olivia had stuck so many M&Ms up Emma’s nose that her parents had to take her to the hospital. I watched Olivia do it, while she was supposed to be babysitting her little sister. I quietly told her to stop it, but she didn’t listen.

  Emma was ritualistically tortured by Olivia all throughout their childhood. Then one dreaded day, Emma grew up and came into her own as a woman freshly scorned.

  Emma admitted to being terrible as she confessed to me. There had been a lot of stealing of boyfriends once Emma became of dating age, but nothing was irreparable until Emma reached the tender age of 25.

  She’d been moving up the ladder in her dream job in movie production, becoming the Director of Creative Development in a very respected indie film company.

  “Olivia went through a lot of work to get me fired,” she said. Through questionable connections, Olivia had somehow been able to get Emma unceremoniously dismissed for embezzlement. She hadn’t. It could never be proved. A friend recommended bringing a wrongful dismissal suit against them, but what good would that do?

  The gossip started and for all intents and purposes, she was blacklisted. Whether or not the elder sister had planned it to go that far, word had gotten out and Emma could never get a job in film again, instead flitting from one administrative job to the next, being subsidized by rich boyfriends who couldn’t care less what she had done. After all, she was great eye candy.

  No. I had never heard that story.

  All she’d ever wanted, from the age of seven, was to work in the film industry, and that dream ended up dead in the water, thanks to Olivia. Emma considered every event she had terribly tainted to be partial payment for her sister having completely killed her dream.

  “Olivia could always go forward with her life. I gave her obstacles, and Olivia gave me endings.”

  Showing up at her sister’s wedding with her first high school love made them even.

  “I know you are right. I’ve got a feeling that I might have gone too far with this one. So, I made up for it. She doesn’t know it, but I’ve made everything right.” Emma started crying again. “But I can’t do this. I just can’t do this. I can’t be responsible for someone going to jail over a stupid wedding. I was with him. I was with Lloyd last night. He didn’t kill anyone…Not in Bocas Del Toro, at least.”

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with you Fowler women! This isn’t you sending your sister an apology! This is putting someone behind bars in a Panamanian jail!” Though it was a new level of terrible for her, I wasn’t 100% surprised. However, Olivia…

  I believed Emma. Her story rang true. This would be an unbelievable weight to bear for years, and a month ago I wouldn’t have believed that Olivia could be so devious. Everything had changed.

  And if she couldn’t trust her best friend, who would she trust with that deception? No one.

  The little sister was possibly just as morally corrupt. Emma seemed completely surprised that my next plan was to take her down to Bocas PD to fess up. The idea of helping Lloyd out was completely alien to her. The Fowler moral compass was back in debate. She had merely needed to confess her wrongdoings to me, but she had no intention of doing anything about it.

  Her flawed logic was that she’d still be able to give Olivia the wedding of her dreams, and eventually the cops would figure out that Lloyd was innocent, so ultimately no one was getting hurt. In her head, all ill between sisters had been put to rest, even if Olivia never knew. Emma could leave the event in peace and never speak with her again. But, I knew she’d have to tell Olivia one day. She’d want Olivia to know her sacrifice.

  She could just walk away. Could I ever do that?

  “Well, I’m going to go down there and tell them what you did, anyway,” I threatened as if I were her high school bully. Reluctant and in tears, she allowed me to bring her down to the dock and order a water taxi. I was so sick of water travel. A nice windowless van with a gas leak sounded better to me.

  “I’m going to have a panic attack,” Emma dramatically announced, as I escorted her onto the boat, telling the driver we were in a hurry.

  She looked sick as she sat in the back, further excusing herself. “You know, I was only sleeping with Ryan for like two weeks before I came down here. He was not part of the original plan. Me showing up was going to be torture enough, but I ran into him and told him I’d love to have him as my guest at an old friend’s wedding. He just never asked who the old friend was…” She started to dry heave over the edge, finally continuing, “He asked about Olivia, I think as small talk. Just once. But you? You came up a lot. He’s been thinking about you for quite some time.” She put her head between her knees and shut up for the next twenty minutes.

  That last part was nice to hear. Ryan had made it into my dreams quite a few times over the last fifteen years - a few times a year, not as a nightly obsession. The dream was always the same. I’d run into him somewhere randomly, where he might be in town just for a day, but he’d happen to have that day free.

  We would do everyday things like going to the beach, maybe seeing a movie, checking out a used record store. As the day
would progress it would become very clear that we had never been out of love. We’d drive around town in a rickshaw built for two, taking selfies of ourselves at various tourist locations. It would all become very obvious to the both of us, yet I would always wake up right before the kiss. No matter how hard I tried, I could never force myself back to sleep for just a little more time, for just one kiss.

  No, not again. Not in this lifetime.

  In desperation, I thought about calling Salty, asking him to help get me out of this tropical mess of a crime scene. His logic would be to just meet halfway in Miami, where we could just sleep for a week, his hand on my stomach in a way that didn’t make me uncomfortable. The week would be followed by his inevitable half-assed request to get back together again, followed by a passive-aggressive jab at what he perceived my life hadn’t added up to.

  No.

  Let the past remain the past.

  Comfort be damned.

  Not in this lifetime.

  Chapter 31: Phyllobates Terrebillis

  A small group of tourists stopped to watch outside the Police Station as I dragged an unwilling Emma towards the front door. She stamped her feet and eventually sat down on the filthy street getting ready for a full out temper tantrum.

  “Do you want to be a YouTube viral sensation?” I barked after one of the onlookers took his phone out. She wiped dirt across her teary face and followed me into the station.

  I lead her through the station to present her to the detectives. The atmosphere in the station was semi-serious and filled with cigarette smoke. Lloyd was outside of the cell, sitting on a desk, deep in conversations with the detectives and Crabby Paolo.

  The Dissector pulled his glasses down the bridge of the nose, assessing the fact that I finally looked like a real female. “Well, you sure do clean up well.”

  Do I really?

  This seemed to be the consensus, but Lloyd couldn’t hold back. “Has Encyclopedia Brown solved the case of the three-toed sloth in the bramble?”

  Emma stepped out from behind my shadow, looking at Lloyd with adoring terror, whispering, “Hi.”

  Lloyd took a deep drag of his cigarette and turned away from her.

  Emma immediately came clean about Lloyd’s alibi, while tearing at her fingernails.

  A family trait it seemed.

  She stared at Lloyd the whole time, and despite her quiet pleading, he remained the Iceman. No words directed in her direction whatsoever. He directed his speech at the detectives only, suggesting that their best plan would be to let him stay in prison the rest of the weekend, allowing the chance for the guilty party to get sloppy and overconfident.

  “It’s the best plan that I’ve heard,” Lloyd casually threw out there. “Plus, it would be a great favor to me. I can continue working on the case, and stay as far away from this group of nitwits as possible.”

  Emma swore to the group, and specifically to Lloyd, that she’d keep it silent. There was only half a chance she wasn’t lying.

  My heart had gone out to her when she had told me about being fired, but it didn’t mean that I actually thought she was a good person. As if I didn’t already know it, I was clearly seeing there was something inherently wrong with the Fowler family.

  “Let’s consider,” LaGuardia said, “detaining her as well.”

  Panamanian law was certainly convenient.

  Though it was obvious to the room that they were joking about her impending incarceration, terror quickly spread over her face, immediately looking at Lloyd as her savior. Lloyd slyly smiled and shooed her out the door, “You may withdraw.”

  As soon as Emma left, Lloyd’s expression immediately transformed to that of detached entertainment. He and Paolo metamorphosed into two little boy science geeks as they disclosed the newest bit of information that had been uncovered: the poison found in Nico was not that of a red frog at all.

  “Phyllobates Terrebillis,” Lloyd said, with great respect.

  The frog in question was a golden dart frog, indigenous to the Pacific coast of Colombia only. Unfathomably, a quarter of a gram of pure toxin from the one-inch terror could kill a man in minutes. Its maximum capacity of one milligram could kill ten people.

  The weapon of choice had not been a red frog; it turned out it would take days to kill a man, if ever, if it went untreated. She’d have to be examined but the smart money was on the same cause of death for Becky. Red frogs had been losing some of their toxicity over the years, and so an injection could possibly be fatal over many days, but no one could die in an instant. It was going to take a much tougher frog than that. It was an exceedingly clever bait and switch.

  “Do you understand, Encyclopedia Brown, how much more interesting this is than the wedding?” Lloyd smirked in perpetuity.

  “Can you stop calling me that?” I asked.

  “Do something to change my mind. Your involvement up to now has been limited to randomly walking into the wrong facts and having things dropped in your lap.”

  The Dissector was right. I was a complete fraud, and I knew it from the start.

  The detectives looked like they might come to my defense, but they didn’t. As usual, I swallowed my pride and listened to Paolo’s discourse. One would have extracted the poison from the yellow frog and stored it as a solid crystalline salt, with a stable shelf life of up to three years. It would resemble something like pink bath salts to the untrained eye. Even touching it could make your arm numb for a week.

  Who were these golden frogs fighting?

  Lloyd was right. Things did keep falling into my lap.

  “I’ve seen it,” I told them, all of a sudden understanding the tingly fingers, still not quite right. They’d only started to subside, but I was still overwhelmed with a new sickness. The pink crystals I’d spilled when snooping through Becky’s drawer could have killed me. Forget swimming and skiing and all the things I avoided for safety’s sake. It’s all out there. The poison had been left in clear sight. Did that mean no one else was going to die?

  “I’ve been poisoned,” I quietly said, and filled them in on my clumsy spilling of the Victorian bottle. “I’m dying.”

  Paolo assured me, “You are not dying. You merely touched a few crystals. If you were poisoned with a lethal dose, you’d have been dead in ten minutes yesterday. Ghastly stuff, really.” He took my hand in a way that made me feel dirty, looking at my fingers, which displayed nothing in particular. “Just fine…”

  LaGuardia’s metamorphosis into a respectable policeman of note was complete. He told Paolo and me to go with him back to my resort and to see if the poison was still there. I was nearly out of the door when Lloyd called after me, “Do some good work, Encyclopedia. Show us how a junior ranger becomes a real grown-up one.”

  Tired, frustrated and finally pushed a little bit too far, I lunged at Lloyd, knocking him off the desk and to the ground where I put my hands to his throat. While I was able to get a satisfying look of terror from him and a few moments of strangulation, Lloyd quickly disarmed me by getting a swift kick into my ankle wound. The wound pulsed as I slumped away from him across the floor.

  LaGuardia took him by the neck and pinned him against the wall, “You never hit a woman. What’s wrong with you? You never do that. She’s helping us. She’s helping you. You don’t do that.”

  Lloyd looked surprised that they weren’t laughing, while Paolo helped me off the floor. It was clear that an apology would not be forthcoming, so I pulled myself together as best I could.

  Lloyd finally opened his mouth. “I think you’re really making a mistake if you aren’t really wondering about Josh, just because you’re running around together or whatever you are doing. Aren’t you curious why he’s been so keen to be involved?”

  “Josh and I already talked about that, Lloyd. There was no injunction. There was a cease and desist on a synopsis. You’re the one grasping at straws.”

  He snickered and waved me away, dismissing me in the manner he got rid of Emma. “And may Encyclopedia
Brown be on her way.”

  It is a completely regular thing for police to return to the scene of a crime, even when they’ve arrested a suspect. After all, they’ve got to build a case, review a scene, and account for every detail.

  Despite the normalcy, my heart was beating triple time and my breath was short as I took Paolo and LaGuardia toward the second floor of Becky’s quarters. Only the staff was hanging out when we returned, but every creak of the dock, every boat that motored past, every unknown animal noise made me feel like our guilty party was watching us intently and close by.

  The crime scene was gone; the mattress was replaced, the room had been aired, and all evidence of frog inhabitants had been eradicated. Flozzie would be ready to rent it out after the terrible wedding party left on Sunday. We had all donned latex gloves, but Paolo still didn’t want us going anywhere near the night table. Hands shaking, he secured and bagged the bottle and placed it in his kit, so they could take it back to the lab.

  “Leave the bottle,” LaGuardia whispered. “If that is the poison, the guilty party knows it’s there. It’s all we have right now, the hope that someone is going to want to reclaim it. I’ll send an officer up here to act like hotel staff and watch what goes on.”

  “I think that’s a very bad idea,” Paolo said while returning the bottle.

  I agreed, wondering if the absolute last place the criminal would go back to would be to the murder weapon at the crime scene.

  LaGuardia threw his hands up in exasperation. “They may not come back to get it. They probably won’t. But if they do…”

  Paolo pleaded, “Let me take it to the lab, look at it, and see if we can replace it with something benign that at least looks the same.”

  A short, heated conversation spoken in Spanish concluded that they were going with Paolo’s request. There would be no more murders from frogs that night.