“Right. Then you went to the farmers’ market. Did you talk to anyone on the way?”
“I told you already, just you and Mike. Hey, maybe you two are in cahoots—”
“Very funny. Did you put the bag down anywhere at the market, or leave it with anyone?”
“No, why would I? The only one who came near it was Lily, there at the market and then when we came over here with our dresses.” I closed my eyes, remembering. “After that I took it with me to Lavender and Lace. I might have set it down by the pond when I went looking for Ethan. In fact I’m pretty sure I did. But we already know that the Nyquists didn’t kill Guy.”
“We don’t know it, we presume it.” Aaron sipped at his own coffee. “I want to talk to someone at that hospital. But go on. You went directly from the farm to Roche Harbor? No stops?”
“No stops. And I know for sure that the bag was over my shoulder when I took the boys to the marina, because it got in the way when I lifted Ethan up.”
“And Calhoun never got close enough to you to drop something in it? You’re sure about that?”
“Absolutely. Jeff made certain that he didn’t come anywhere near the boys. So if it wasn’t Calhoun . . .”
That was the crux of the matter. Not just that Larry Calhoun didn’t plant the device on me, but that he might not have killed Guy Price. All along, my woman’s intuition had been telling me that Guy’s murder was a crime of passion, not an execution. And if I was right, a murderer was still at large on the island.
“If it wasn’t Calhoun who put it there,” said Aaron, bringing me back to the question at hand, “then it must have been someone at the party. That’s what, forty or fifty people? Terrific. Was your bag out in plain sight?”
“Well, not exactly plain, but it was lying on the floor under my chair. With all the comings and goings, anyone could have stopped there for a minute or two, just long enough to drop that thing in it.”
We stared at the little device in silence, stumped. We hadn’t read Guy’s messages yet—we hadn’t even turned it on—but my fingers were getting itchy.
“Presumably,” I said, getting up and setting my mug on the desk, “presumably the messages in here don’t include any from the killer, or else he wouldn’t have left it with me.”
“He or she. Unless it wasn’t the killer who put it there, but someone who wanted the killer identified without coming forward themselves.”
“But why use me for that? Why not give it straight to the police?” I sent him a look over my shoulder. “Enough speculating. Let’s read the damn thing.”
“Stretch,” Aaron said, with his first smile of the night, “I like the way you think.”
Twenty minutes later my mug was cold and we were back to staring at the damn thing. It was demanding an eight-letter password, and rejecting our guesses with maddening monotony.
First I tried GUYPRICE.
Invalid Password. Enter Password.
PRICEGUY?
Invalid Password. Enter Password.
Aaron tapped in CARETAKE and AFTERGLO.
Invalid Password. Enter Password.
We even tried PASSWORD. Same infuriating result.
“This is either going to be ridiculously easy or completely impossible.” Aaron flopped back on the bed and spoke to the ceiling. “What do people use for passwords?”
“Lots of times it’s the names of their pets, but Price didn’t have any.”
“You don’t either,” he said, “so what do you use?”
“Wedding phrases, or sometimes my dad’s name. Or Gene Kelly.” He cocked an eyebrow at me. “I like Gene Kelly. How about you?”
“Baseball players, mostly. Batting averages.”
“That’s no help. We don’t know Guy’s birthday or parents, and I don’t think he was a sports fan, so— Wait a minute, his car! I rode in his sports car.” I took the e-mailer in my lap and Aaron sat up to watch. I typed in CORVETTE—and got the Invalid message again. “Damn.”
“Good try, Stretch. What year was it?”
“What do you mean, what year? I rode in it a couple of days ago.”
He rolled his eyes. “What year was the Corvette?”
“Oh. How should I know? It was . . . purple.”
“Jeez, you girls. Did it look vintage? Were the headlights covered or open?”
“Open?” Was it me, or was this conversation becoming surreal? “I didn’t know you could close headlights.”
“Never mind, let me try.”
He tried A53VETTE, and A54VETTE, and then I flopped back on the bed myself while he ran through the rest of the century. The tapping of the tiny keys was hypnotic, and my eyelids kept fluttering down . . .
“Hey, Stretch!” Aaron bounced the mattress to rouse me. “Stay with me here. You said Price was a ladies’ man?”
I hauled myself upright. “Ladies and gentlemen both, from what I could tell.”
He keyed in LOTHARIO. No dice. “Probably too literary for someone like him.”
“Not really. Guy was quite articulate. He just dealt drugs and slept around a lot.” Either hobby could have gotten him killed, but I was betting on the latter. “Try CASANOVA.”
Aaron tried it. Nothing.
“So what’s another word for a man who sleeps around?”
“Men get all the good words,” I complained. “He’s a womanizer, she’s a slut. He’s Don Juan, she’s a whore. He’s . . . he’s . . . Give it to me.”
I grabbed the e-mailer and typed in HOROLOGY—and up popped Guy Price’s in-box, just like that.
“Clocks?” Aaron muttered, as we squinted at the screen. “He collected clocks?”
“Repaired them. It was his hobby, and he probably did it for spare cash too. Remember I told you about Adrienne’s wristwatch?” I clicked through the folder menu with unsteady fingers. The coffee was making me jittery without waking me up. “Guy used to come over here and work on Pamela’s hideous cuckoo clocks, too. OK, I found Sent Messages. See, there’s the ones I wrote to Lily and Mike. And the deleted ones I saw that day . . .”
There was Katy, whose message called You must be kidding conveyed the fact that in her considered opinion, Guy was a totally heinous bullshitter. AnnJ, in more tasteful phrases, implored Guy to come to her party next week, which was now this week. And various other correspondents, male and female, gave us a sense of Guy’s amorous adventures.
But there was nothing that suggested criminal activities, and nothing about a Sunday-night tryst—until we reached the final message, from Penny.
Meet me tonight??? she pleaded. I won’t ask you about other women ever again. I want you to take me tonight. I want you to . . .
Penny wanted quite a lot, some of it semiviolent, and she was so graphic about her wishes that I turned away. Aaron, reading to the end, seemed to have no such scruples, but I noticed that he closed the message when he was done instead of leaving it on the screen.
“Well, well,” he said. “We may have a winner. So who’s this Penny? Ring any bells?”
I shook my head. “I haven’t heard the name since I’ve been here. Penny . . . is that short for Penelope? Not that I’ve heard that either.”
“It’s also a nickname for redheads,” Aaron pointed out. “Any coppertops around here besides you?”
“Not that I know of, but I haven’t met that many locals, remember. And no sexy young women except Kimmie and ZZ’s granddaughter. This could be from anyone on the island.”
“Yeah, I suppose so.” Aaron drummed his fingers on the plastic clamshell. “What’s the granddaughter called? You said Price was sniffing around her.”
“I’m sure they were lovers, but her name’s Peggy.”
“Close but no cigar.”
“No. Except . . .” We looked at each other, mouths gaping. Tired minds think alike. “Except her last name is Nickles!”
“Penny Nickles, yes!” said Aaron, and hugged me. “The perfect nickname. I bet she sent this.”
“Maybe.” My weary head sagged against
his shoulder. “But that doesn’t make her the killer. Who’d want a romantic tryst at a mausoleum?”
“True. Price probably met her somewhere else, like a motel, and then ended up dead in the woods sometime afterward. Maybe your woman’s intuition is wrong and it was a drug hit after all.”
“Maybe,” I said into his shoulder. The excitement of unlocking the e-mailer’s secrets had fizzled away into a dull weariness. “But it still seems like a crime of passion to me. What do we do next?”
Aaron kissed the top of my head and said, “Nothing tonight, Sleeping Beauty. But tomorrow morning we’ll talk to this Peggy and see if she knows where Price was heading after he left her.”
I sagged further. “I can’t. Lily’s coming here first thing to get dressed for the wedding.”
“All right, then, I’ll talk to her. Meanwhile,” he murmured into the back of my neck, “we appear to be in a bed. Now, I know you prefer islands”—he lowered me onto the pillow and began grazing on my lips—“but you have to admit it’s an awfully nice bed.”
When the racier women’s magazines draw up their lists of Ten Torrid Tricks to Drive Him Wild, they almost never include dozing off under a man as he’s trying to make love to you. It’s not much of a compliment to him, somehow.
But Aaron didn’t take it too badly. I know this because I came half awake—or maybe only a quarter—as he pulled the covers over me and kissed me lightly on the forehead, then turned out the light and let himself out the porch door. I thought I heard him whisper something before he left. I thought it might have been “I love you.”
But I couldn’t tell, dammit, because I was deep asleep.
Chapter Thirty-One
Sometime during the night, my soft-focus dream of Aaron became a hard-edged nightmare about Afterglow Vista. Once again I was walking in the hush of dawn, once again I stepped through the dim silent forest of evergreens and madronas and saw the stone columns rising like tree trunks in the dappled sunlight. But this time my awed curiosity was replaced by the sickening foreknowledge of what I would find beyond them.
Unwillingly, inevitably, I peered over the edge of the platform and saw the sprawled figure of a man facedown among the leaves. In slow-motion terror I tried not to go to him, I tried to wake up, but the dream dragged me to his side to kneel in his blood, to crouch close and listen as the forlorn thread of a voice rose from pallid lips.
“Pen . . .” he pleaded. “Pen!”
“Penny!”
I wrenched myself upright, out of the nightmare and into the darkness of my bedroom. Guy wasn’t pleading for a pen, he was pleading with Penny. He was begging her not to leave him there to die.
I curled into a ball under the covers, hiding from the horror of it all, reliving the horror of it . . . Stop right now. I forced my arms and legs to straighten. Stop imagining and think. Think!
Peggy Nickles could easily have slipped the e-mailer into my bag. She was at ZZ’s throughout the party, moving from kitchen to buffet and back again, stopping to talk with guests at various tables. But why do it, when she knew about the message that would incriminate her?
Unless Peggy assumed that her message was deleted and therefore irretrievable. But surely that was too naive. Almost everyone knows by now that data can be salvaged from computers after a simple erasure. And Peggy seemed more savvy than most.
I thought some more. Suppose it wasn’t Peggy who planted the evidence. Suppose, as Aaron had said, it was someone who wanted to point an accusing finger at her without the police knowing they’d done so. But why? I could understand remaining anonymous if the killer was a dangerous criminal who might seek retribution. Was Peggy all that dangerous? A young woman who waitressed in her grandfather’s café . . .
Her grandfather. ZZ was a fiercely religious man who frowned on Peggy’s minor flirtations, let alone her possible affair with a notorious sinner like Guy Price. ZZ would never turn a blind eye to murder—but maybe he couldn’t bear the idea of Peggy knowing that he had informed on her.
So when ZZ needed a way to convey this evidence to the police, he’d thought of me. Why not, when he’d come upon me dining with a police officer? He probably knew, via the island’s highly effective grapevine, that I was a witness to one death and a suspect in another. Who better to plant Guy’s e-mailer on than someone with a vested interest in solving the crime his granddaughter had committed?
I went over this line of thought again—and again, and wearily yet again. The logic seemed solid, but I might not be seeing things clearly, as late as it was and as tired as I’d been for what seemed like weeks now. Maybe there was another way of looking at the situation. Maybe . . .
I drifted off again, and after a tumbled sequence of dreams I was back in the woods at dawn. All was silent, and then a woodpecker began to hammer on the broken column at Afterglow Vista. Bang . . . bang bang . . . bang bang bang . . . Which was odd, because wasn’t the column made of stone? Why would a woodpecker . . . BANG!
“Carnegie? Carnegie, are you there? No fooling, girl.”
Lily sounded very joyful and very tense—a mixture I didn’t hear from her often. I fumbled myself into my travel robe and stumbled my way to the door. Wrong door. I stared blankly at the empty hallway for a moment, then did a groggy 180 and let her in from the porch, still half asleep.
“You look awful!” she said gaily, slipping off her jacket. It was early, and the September sun hadn’t reached into the woods yet, so the air from outside was moist and cool. “But this should help.”
She stepped back outside to fetch what she’d left on the porch: four croissants in a bakery box, a bottle of chilled champagne, orange juice to mix with the champagne for mimosas, and two of the most enormous lattes I have ever seen.
“My hero,” I croaked out, and let her set the drinks down before I hugged her. The curlers in her hair scratched my cheek, and beneath her T-shirt I could smell the body lotion I’d given her for Christmas. “Don’t you know that brides are the ones who get waited on? You’re supposed to act bitchy and demanding and throw hissy fits. What’s wrong with you?”
She laughed. “Guess I didn’t get the memo. I figured with all you’ve been through lately, you could use a little spoiling.”
“Could I ever.” I yawned so hard I heard my jaw click. “Gosh, it felt good to sleep.”
I began to make space for our breakfast and realized that Guy’s e-mailer was gone from the desk. Suddenly, every word of last night’s discussion with Aaron came flooding back, and so did my midnight brainstorm. Peggy! I didn’t want to darken Lily’s morning, but I had to warn Aaron to stay away from Peggy Nickles. The more I thought about Peggy’s violent jealousy, the more convinced I was that she was the killer.
“Lily, I need to make a quick phone call. Why don’t you open the champagne on the porch in case it erupts? Better close the door, there’s mosquitoes around.”
Aaron was in his room at the hotel for once, and still asleep by the sound of him. I spoke quickly.
“Listen, Peggy didn’t put the e-mailer in my bag.”
“Huh? What time is it?”
“Never mind that. I think I know who did put it there. I think it was ZZ.”
“ZZ . . . the grandfather?”
“It makes sense.” I began to explain why, but Aaron was awake now and took my point immediately.
“Got it, Stretch. He wants to point a finger at her but doesn’t want her to know it. You’re right, it does make sense.”
“So you see why I had to catch you before you went off to question Peggy about Guy.”
“Oh, yeah. She’d either stab me too or else skip town. Or both. Don’t worry, I’ll steer clear. In fact, I think I’d better report all this to Mike.”
“You can’t do that!”
“Why not? If I go to Orozco he’ll suspect you again. Mike will listen.”
“On his wedding day? Aaron, if you get him involved and ruin Lily’s honeymoon I’ll—”
“All right, all right! Look, we’
ll talk about it at the lavender farm. If the girl hasn’t run off yet, she’ll keep a few more hours.”
“OK. I’ll come find you at the reception.”
Not exactly the romantic scene I’d envisioned, but what else could I say? Lily was coming back inside with the bottle, laughing and shaking champagne from her fingers. The droplets sparkled in the morning sun, and her eyes were shining.
“I’ve got to go now,” I said. “No, wait!”
“What?”
“Aaron, I’m sorry about last night.”
“So am I,” he said. “Believe me, Stretch, so am I.”
I put down the phone. Lily paused in her mimosa-making and looked at me quizzically.
“That was a really sorry ‘sorry,’ ” she said. “None of my business, I’m just the demanding bride, but what’s up?”
“Well, Aaron was here last night . . .” I didn’t mention the e-mailer, but I did describe the finale of my evening—Aaron amorous, me slumberous.
“You’re kidding!”
When Lily laughs, the air around her dances, and it’s damn hard not to laugh along. This time she laughed so hard that a curler came loose.
“It’s not that funny,” I said, beginning to chuckle. “Aaron must have been so . . . so . . . OK, I guess it is that funny. The poor guy!”
We lost it then, snorting and hooting and carrying on, and we hadn’t even started on the champagne. Mostly wedding-morning nerves on Lily’s part and reaction to stress on mine, but still it was a good, good laugh, and I felt vastly the better for it. Let the police do their job, as Mike had said. I had my own job today, and it was a joyous one.
So my best friend and I dried our eyes and raised our glasses for a toast. I had a million good wishes to offer Lily, and I’d muster up a few of them later at Lavender and Lace. But for now I kept it simple, and said what we always said.
“Cheers, dear.”
“Cheers.”
The glass rims made a merry little clink, and the mimosa tasted sweet and cold and exhilarating. We savored our coffee and our croissants and chatted about Mike and the boys and the goodness of life in general. We didn’t talk any more about Aaron, or about my matrimonial prospects, and that was fine with me. It was Lily’s day. Then when breakfast was done we washed every iota of butter from our hands and began to dress the bride.
You May Now Kill the Bride Page 20
