by Laura Durham
He reached over and slipped his hand inside the pocket of the jacket draped over my shoulders, producing his silver iPhone and holding it out to me on his palm. “I’m going to let this slide since I know you get bossy around crime scenes.”
I took the phone from him and stood, squeezing his shoulder. “Thank you. I’m sorry for being bossy.”
He crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair. “Luckily for you, I find your overbearing tendencies charming.”
I brought up a list of recent calls and redialed the last number called, shooting Richard a look as I walked a few feet away. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised this was his most recent call considering I’d recently outed him as a spy.
“What did she do now?” Reese asked when he answered the phone, clearly thinking he was speaking to Richard.
“She didn’t do anything,” I replied, giving him a beat to recognize my voice.
“Annabelle?” Reese asked. “Why are you calling me from Richard’s phone?”
“Don’t you mean from your mole’s phone?” I asked, tapping my shoe against the stone terrace.
Silence.
“Well?” I asked.
“If you’re expecting me to apologize for enlisting your best friend, and one of the few people you listen to, to keep you from getting yourself into more danger, then you’re going to be waiting for a long time, babe.”
I spluttered for a moment, then fell silent, unnerved by his logic and by him calling me ‘babe.’ It was the first time he’d used a term of endearment, and I felt glad he couldn’t see me flush in response.
“I’d hoped he wouldn’t crack under the pressure so soon,” Reese said with a sigh.
“He let it slip by accident,” I said. “And because he was upset with me.”
“Dare I ask why?”
“Because I suspected Jeremy’s involvement in the first two murders, and I insisted on trying to get to the bottom of it. You’ll be happy to know he tried his hardest to stop me.”
“Did it work?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Yes and no. I told the security team everything I knew about Jeremy, including my theory that he killed the two victims.”
Reese let out a breath. “That’s a step in the right direction. Now let them take it from here.”
“But it doesn’t matter what I told them.” I heard my voice quiver. “We just found Jeremy floating facedown in a swimming pool. My number one suspect is now victim number three.”
“Are you telling me another person was murdered?” Reese’s voice rose. “So that’s three people in as many days?”
“I guess,” I said, trying to blink back tears as they stung the back of my eyes. “And now I’m back to square one with no idea who’s behind all of this.”
“Annabelle.” Reese had steadied his voice. “You do not need to figure out who’s behind all this. That’s the job of the police.”
I looked up at the dark sky and blinked rapidly to staunch the tears that threatened to ruin my composure. “But I don’t know how good the Balinese police are. I haven’t even talked to a detective yet. I don’t think they have a lot of murders on the island.”
“Do I need to have Richard knock you over the head and put you on a plane back to DC?”
I touched a hand to my head. “You want me to leave in the middle of all this?”
“Yes, I do.” Reese’s voice had grown loud again. “The longer you stay, the more likely you’ll become the next victim.”
I shook my head. “All the victims were connected. I don’t have any connection to that group, aside from the fact that I knew Jeremy.”
“You don’t need to have a connection if you keep poking around where you don’t belong. What if the killer finds out that you’re trying to piece it all together? Then what?”
I hadn’t really contemplated the killer getting rid of me to keep me from learning the truth. Probably because I’d been convinced that Jeremy Johns was the killer and having him taken into custody would solve everything.
“I promise to be careful,” I said.
“Promise me you’ll drop your one-woman investigation,” he responded.
I shifted the phone to my other ear. “You know, the reason I’d called you was to get some of your detective’s insights on the case.”
He laughed. “You didn’t think I was going to help you dive deeper into this mess, did you?”
I had thought I could tempt him with the prospect of an unsolved murder, but I’d clearly misread the situation.
“If it was up to me, you and all your friends would be on the next plane off that island.” His voice cracked. “I can’t stand the thought of you being halfway across the world, and I’m unable to help you. At least when you do crazy things here, I can keep an eye on you and run interference.”
Part of me was touched that he cared enough to worry so much, and the other part of me was furious he felt I needed protecting. It was hard to tell which part was winning at the moment.
“It’s sweet of you to worry, but I don’t need babysitting,” I said. “And when is the last time I did something crazy?”
He paused. “Do you really want me to answer that?”
I probably didn’t. “I’ve got my entire crew here to keep me safe. You have to admit that Buster and Mack are pretty intimidating.”
“Is there any way they’d agree to camp outside your hotel room until you leave?”
“We’re only here a few more days,” I said, spotting the head of hotel security heading my way. “I’ll be home before you know it. Right now I have to run.”
“Annabelle, I . . .”
I clicked off the phone, wishing I’d had longer to talk to Reese, and wishing I’d been able to tell him how much better I felt when I heard his voice. The second I hung up, I felt a fresh rush of panic. I tried to calm my nerves as the security officer reached me.
His face was solemn. “You were eager to share your suspicions with me about the victim, miss, but you failed to mention your public altercation with him.”
Chapter 21
“Is anyone else noticing a pattern here?” Fern asked as we made our way through the thinned-out crowd in the villa.
Most of the guests had been questioned and released long ago. The only people who remained were either material witnesses like Kate and me, friends of the witnesses, or people who were loitering out of curiosity. A few waiters gathered empty glasses from tables and had begun to pull tablecloths off high cocktail tables. Candles had been snuffed out, filling the air with the faint scent of smoke and burned wax, and lights were turned up. The soft background music from earlier in the evening had been turned off. Now the only noises were the muffled clinking of plates in the kitchen and the low murmur of voices drifting up from the pool area where the police still attended the dead body.
“If you mean did we happen to notice someone turning up dead right before or during every dinner? Then yes,” Richard said, holding open the heavy wooden door as we filed outside. “That little detail stuck out in my mind.”
“Not that.” Fern tightened his black leather belt, adjusting the brass buckle embossed with a Balinese emblem that looked suspiciously official. “The pattern of Annabelle finding the bodies and getting questioned at length.”
“I didn’t find the first body.” I lifted the hem of my dress as I walked down the stone steps.
“I stand corrected,” Fern said. “You’re only a suspect in two murders.”
“Annabelle isn’t a suspect.” Kate teetered on her stilettos down the wide stairs. “Is she?”
“Of course I’m not,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “I have alibis for both murders.”
“You were with us when Dina was killed,” Kristina said as she and Brett walked out of the villa behind us.
Kate turned around quickly, clutching my arm to keep from falling down the remaining steps in her absurdly high heels. “What are you two still doing here?”
Brett shrugged. “Proba
bly the same thing as you. Being questioned by the police.”
Kristina adjusted the strap of her black one-shoulder dress, and flipped her thick blond hair to the other side. “I think they saved us for last.”
“I’m exhausted and starving,” Brett said, sinking down onto the bottom step.
Fern snapped his fingers. “That’s right. We didn’t finish dinner.”
I put a hand to my stomach as it growled in apparent response to the reminder that I’d only eaten one bite of food in the past two hours. Unfortunately, that bite had been congealed crab and caviar, and I’d yet to get the salty taste out of my mouth.
Richard glanced at his watch. “At least room service is still available.”
Brett got to his feet as a golf cart swung into the circular drive in front of us. As it slowed to a stop, the door to the villa behind us swung open and Sasha barreled down the stairs and pushed past us.
“It’s about time,” she said as she sidestepped Kate and got into the idling cart, the chiffon layers of her dress and a perfume cloud trailing behind. “I can’t bear to stay here another minute.”
“Hey,” Kate began to protest.
Sasha waved a hand in the direction of the driveway. “You can take the next one.”
Even though there was a seat behind the brassy planner, no one made a move to join her. I studied the woman’s face to see if I could detect any trace of sadness that her assistant had been found floating facedown in the pool, but her expression displayed nothing but her usual irritation and disdain.
“We’re sorry about Jeremy,” Kristina said, breaking the silence as we waited for Sasha’s cart to drive away.
Sasha’s shoulders twitched as she dug in her purse. “He’s been nothing but a liability on this trip. If I’d known, I never would have brought him.”
“Known what?” I asked.
“He had feuds with everyone.” She produced her long electric cigarette holder and waved it at me without meeting my eyes. “With you.” She pointed it at Richard. “With him.” She leveled it at Brett. “With him.”
I looked at Brett, whose cheeks had colored.
Sasha rapped her long holder on the driver’s knee. “I’m not getting any younger here. Let’s go.”
With a lurch, the golf cart took off down the driveway and disappeared into the darkness as another cart drove up to take its place.
“We’re saved,” Kate said, heading for the cart as it slowed to a stop.
I glanced over my shoulder to see Alan coming out of the villa.
“I couldn’t find you,” he said when he spotted me. “I thought you’d gone walkabout.”
“Aren’t you coming?” Richard asked, sliding into the back seat behind Kristina and Brett.
I assessed the seating arrangements in the cart. I could squeeze in between Richard and Fern, but Alan would have to wait by himself. I shook my head. “You all go ahead. We’ll take the next one.”
Richard pursed his lips but didn’t say anything as the cart took off down the drive.
Alan grinned at me. “Thanks for waiting.”
“No worries,” I said, looking up at the black sky dotted with stars. “It’s actually nice and quiet out here.”
Alan joined me in looking up, his hands clasped behind his back. The only sound breaking the silence was the chirping of Indonesian frogs. I knew what was going on behind the heavy wooden doors of the stone villa, but in the quiet of the night I could almost forget the police, the emergency personnel, and the lifeless body of Jeremy Johns.
“You missed Sasha’s dramatic exit,” I told Alan after a few minutes.
He laughed. “I can only imagine. Did she seem upset about her friend’s death?”
“Hardly. She called him a liability.”
Alan cringed. “Ouch.”
“Exactly. She said he had too many feuds with people on this trip.”
“She got that part right, didn’t she?” Alan stroked two fingers down his beard. “He stirred up trouble with you and all of your team.”
“Not only us. The guys from New York who just arrived, Seth and Topher, hated him.” I peered into the darkness, wondering how much longer we’d need to wait for a golf cart back to our part of the resort. “And Sasha claimed that Brett had an issue with Jeremy, but I think she may have been confused.”
“I don’t know. If Jeremy and Brett had a feud, that would explain what I overheard at cocktail hour.”
I snapped my head toward him. “What do you mean?”
Alan took a step back as a golf cart swung into the drive in front of us. “It must have been before you arrived. I was getting a drink at the bar and I saw Jeremy and Brett talking in the corner.”
“Talking?” I didn’t think I’d seen Brett and Jeremy interact directly at all so far, although Brett had seemed pretty knowledgeable about Jeremy’s track record at Inspire.
“Well, it was more like Brett telling him that he knew what Jeremy was doing,” Alan said, holding out a hand to help me into the front seat of the cart. “And that he never should have come to Bali to begin with.”
I sat down, gathering the fabric of my dress with both hands so it wouldn’t drag on the ground and twisting to face Alan as he took the seat behind me. “I think a lot of people felt that Jeremy shouldn’t be here.”
“But I’ll bet not everyone warned him that he’d be leaving in a body bag.”
Chapter 22
“What’s going on?” I asked Kate as we walked down to the hotel lobby the next morning.
Two of the FAM trip attendees I’d yet to meet were standing near the portico next to a pile of suitcases. One of the women, a skinny woman with sandy colored hair pulled back in a loose bun, looked nervous as she dug through her purse.
Kate draped a hand over her forehead and blinked hard. “Who knows?” She scanned the lobby. “All I know is I need coffee. For some reason, Not-Long-For-This-World-Natalie called me this morning.”
I cringed. “I must have had my phone on silent.”
“That’s okay,” Kate said. “Let’s just say that Natalie won’t be calling either of us again until we get back home.”
I put my fingers to my temples. “What did you say?”
“I told her that she’d gone over her allotted hours and reminded her that each additional hour is billed at two hundred dollars.”
“She hasn’t . . .” I began.
Kate held up a hand. “But she doesn’t know that, does she?” She inhaled deeply. “Now I must find coffee. I can smell it. I just can’t see it.”
I took a breath and could also smell the faint scent of coffee filling the morning air. I looked over the lobby’s lounge furniture and low tables, spotting several people enjoying breakfast near the floor-to-ceiling glass walls that opened onto the pool deck. The two center glass panels were pulled back, giving a clear view to the towering statues lining the pool and leading down to the turquoise blue of the ocean. Even though it was still early and the lobby held on to the morning hush, the sun was bright and the sky cloudless. I knew it wouldn’t be long before the sounds of people splashing in the pool echoed through the elegant marble lobby.
As Kate slid her sunglasses over her eyes to block the sun and stumbled off to hunt down her coffee, I walked over to the women guarding the suitcases.
“I don’t think we’ve met,” I said. “Annabelle Archer with Wedding Belles.”
Both women stared at me like I had two heads until the one with short, black, curly hair spoke. “You’re the one who keeps finding the victims.”
I shifted my weight from one foot to the other and took back the hand I’d extended. “Not all of them.”
“You found the guy last night who’d been hit over the head and pushed in the pool,” she responded.
I tried to think of a response to downplay what happened, but the woman was right. Instead of being poisoned like the two previous victims, Jeremy had been knocked over the head and pushed into the pool. At least that’s what the police
determined from the bloody knot on the back of his head and the fact he was floating facedown in the water. Not only had my theory of Jeremy being the killer been torpedoed, but since the killer’s MO had changed, I couldn’t even be sure it was the same person.
The skinny woman laughed, but there was no mirth in it. “Well, we aren’t sticking around to be the next bodies you find.”
A van swung up underneath the portico, and a uniformed bellman rushed forward to take their suitcases. Messy bun got into the van without looking back.
The dark-haired woman hoisted a black Prada tote onto her shoulder. “If you see Carol Ann, you can tell her that Stacy and Gwen caught the first available flight off this rock.”
I didn’t respond. Kate reappeared at my side, her hands wrapped around a to-go cup, as I watched the white van drive away.
“What was that all about?”
“Not everyone toughs it out when the bodies start falling,” I said.
“You know,” Kate said, taking a sip of her coffee, “we haven’t properly celebrated Jeremy’s demise.”
“Celebrated? That seems cold.”
She nudged me. “Come on. That guy was a horn in our side from the moment we met him.”
“A horn?” I asked.
“Yes. He was a misery to work with; he torched Buster and Mack’s business; he ruined our friend Alexandra’s cake business in New York; he trashed us to everyone here; he obviously ticked off someone else enough to get himself killed. This was a not a guy worth mourning.”
“Maybe,” I admitted, shaking the image of his limp body from my mind. “I just wish we’d been far away when he finally got what he deserved.”
I spotted Carol Ann, Kelly, and Dahlia walking toward us. All three women looked like they hadn’t slept in days, the dark circles under their eyes betraying the long night they’d had after Jeremy’s body had been found.
“At least we have two left,” Carol Ann said to Dahlia and Kelly as they joined us, running a hand through her hair that now looked more wild than wavy. I noticed that her Southern drawl became more pronounced the less sleep she got, so now her words dripped out like molasses on a cold day.
