Death by the Sea

by Kathleen Bridge

  Kate wore a fluorescent yellow tank top over bicycle shorts, her long, light brown hair was pulled up in a sleek ponytail.

  “Elizabeth Holt, do you think you could pile any more food on your plate?” Kate was a quasi-vegetarian, occasionally eating fish and poultry, never red meat.

  Liz was on her second course. Her first course had consisted of mini crab cakes with a mustard remoulade and creamy seafood chowder. She pushed her twice-baked Brie-and-chive potato up against a large slab of medium-rare prime rib smothered in Pierre’s famous horseradish sauce. “Now I have room.” She tucked a rogue strand of strawberry-blonde hair behind her ear and took a bite of the potato. “Oh boy, did I miss Pierre’s cooking when I lived in New York.”

  “You’re as good of a chef as Pierre,” Kate said. “Isn’t she, Uncle Fenton?”

  Liz’s father wasn’t Kate’s real uncle, but the ties were just as strong.

  “Yes, she is, Katie.” He looked at an open file on the table. Liz couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t immersed in one of his cases. Even though her father was a retired Brevard County public defender, he was still an active member of the bar association and took on small cases for the locals in the Melbourne Beach area.

  Liz wiped her mouth with a napkin. “I love cooking, but there’s nothing better than someone cooking for you, especially if that someone is Pierre. I have to admit, with all the top restaurants in Manhattan and their molecular cooking hocus-pocus, using foams and freeze-dried techniques, not one came close to providing a meal that could match this.” She took another bite of prime rib, noticing Kate staring at her fork. Liz waved it in front of her. “Sure you don’t want a teensy bite?”

  Kate looked around to see if anyone was watching, opened her mouth, and said, “Hurry!” She swallowed the bite in ecstasy, her eyes glazing over.

  Did Kate think the vegetarian police would arrest her? Liz knew her friend’s Kryptonite—Kate never turned down a dare. Liz’s Kryptonite was the scar on her cheek. Kate had driven her to Vero Beach for the last procedure. Now that the healing on the outside had begun, she needed to focus on trying to heal the inside. Liz got up from the table, headed to the sideboard, and snatched a couple ramekins of crème brûlée.

  When Liz got back to the table, Kate whispered, “What the heck is Regina Harrington-Worth doing here?”

  “I have no clue. I’ll have to ask Aunt Amelia.” Liz turned to her father. “Dad, do you know?”

  He said, “Apparently, they couldn’t find an open hotel that would take pets. You know your great-aunt—you need refuge for a four-legged pet or even a two-legged bird, the Indialantic by the Sea Hotel and Emporium will accommodate you.”

  Kate laughed. “Boy, did you say a mouthful, Uncle Fenton. I think she’d even take in a no-legged snake—possibly drawing the line if it was poisonous.” Kate reached over and grabbed one of Liz’s brûlées.

  “Hey, hands off. Get your own.”

  “Try and stop me. Too much sugar for you. You have to learn balance.” Kate finished the brûlée in three spoonfuls.

  Aunt Amelia was on the other side of the dining room, her arms gesturing wildly in their theatrical splendor as she talked to the hotel’s housekeeper, Iris Kimball, or “Battle-axe Iris,” as Barnacle Bob called her. Iris was the lucky one assigned to feeding him and cleaning his cage. BB was a creature of habit, bordering on obsessive-compulsive. He didn’t like his routine upset. “Two p.m. Polly wants his freakin’ cracker. Dammit!”

  Liz glanced over at Brittany Poole, proprietress of the women’s boutique Sirens by the Sea. Knowing Liz and Brittany’s murky history, she was surprised her great-aunt would rent out a space in the emporium to Brittany. In the center of Brittany’s plate were three spears of asparagus, which explained her waif-like appearance. Sitting at the table with Brittany were Edward Goren and his son, Nick. Edward rented Gold Coast by the Sea and was well-known in the area as a deep-sea treasure hunter. Per Aunt Amelia, he’d sold his business to another salvager based out of Miami. Edward’s son, Nick, assisted him in appraising gold and coins and had recently started dating Brittany. Liz wished him good luck on that one.

  Francie Jenkins and Minna Presley, who leased the emporium shop Home Arts by the Sea, sat at the table closest to the arched French doors that opened to a view of the ocean. Both women were in their forties and recently divorced. Like Liz and Kate, they’d been friends since childhood and lived together in a small cottage a mile south of the hotel.

  “Pops” Stone, the elderly proprietor of Deli-cacies by the Sea, sat at a table near the open doors to the hotel’s inner courtyard, the crowning glory of the Indialantic’s early twentieth-century Spanish Revival architecture. When Pops’s wife died a year ago, he’d sold his thriving deli in Melbourne and rented one of the emporium spaces. At Pops’s table was someone Liz had never seen before. Almost on cue, the guy turned toward her, his gaze stalling for a moment on Liz’s face. Was he looking at her scar? Doubtful, but something about him irritated her. She just couldn’t put her finger on it. Liz turned her head toward Kate and whispered, “Don’t look now, but who’s that sitting with Pops?”

  Of course, Kate twisted in her seat and looked straight at him. When she finally caught the guy’s attention, Kate frenetically waved, like she was ushering in the winning car at the Daytona 500.

  “Kate, stop!” Liz said, then slapped her friend on the wrist. “Could you be more obvious?” Oh no. Liz had just given Kate a dare.

  Kate stood, grabbed Liz’s shoulder, and pulled her back from the table, chair and all. “Stand up. Let’s go meet that raven-haired, dark-eyed, scowling man of your dreams!”

  “Say what? You mean man of your dreams, Kate Fields.”

  By the time they got to the table, both Pops and the man were gone.

  Just as well. Who needs complications. The next chapter of Liz’s life would be all about serenity.

  Chapter 3

  Liz helped Pierre in the kitchen with the cleanup. It was usually Iris’s job, but she was MIA. Aunt Amelia had even checked the housekeeper’s rooms. Iris had come to work at the hotel four months ago and had rooms on the second floor. The housekeeper was stiff and proper, almost emotionless, and she performed the mechanics of cleaning the hotel with military precision. She wore rubber-soled work shoes that always made it easy for her to appear silently in a room like a ballerina-toed cat burglar, causing Liz to startle on more than one occasion.

  After they were finished, Liz sent Pierre off to bed, took off her apron, and hung it on the hook by the door. As she was ready to leave for home, the intercom buzzed and a light lit up next to the Oceana Suite. Liz pushed the button on the panel, and Aunt Amelia’s acting voice boomed over the intercom. “Dar-r-rling Lizzy, could you please be a peach and gather the valises in the lobby? Mrs. Worth’s husband has arrived and I still can’t locate Iris.”

  She heard laughter in the background and a man’s voice telling Aunt Amelia that he could get the luggage himself, and then his wife saying, “Don’t be absurd, David! Let the girl grab them.” Liz recognized the voice as Regina Harrington-Worth’s, their new celebrity guest who’d been sitting at dinner with the caged blue-eyed pet.

  Liz went to the lobby and grabbed David’s valises, aka suitcases, and hauled them up the spiral staircase to the second floor. At the top of the landing, Liz paused for a breather. Captain Netherton must have heard her drop the heaviest of the two and opened the door to his suite. He held a pipe in his hand and looked like the actor from the late-sixties television show The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, with his VanDyke beard and mustache, tall, lean frame, and erect posture.

  Through osmosis from her thespian great-aunt, Liz was a sixties television aficionado. After Liz’s grandfather’s death, Aunt Amelia moved from Burbank to take over the responsibility of the hotel. The first thing she’d done was to turn the old card room next to the library into her “viewing” room—a th
eater that also passed as a shrine to Amelia Eden Holt’s early days of television glory. Liz had grown up watching a myriad of sixties shows with her great-aunt. From her earliest memory, Liz and Aunt Amelia would typecast hotel guests as characters from one of Aunt Amelia’s shows. On Liz’s first day home from New York, before Aunt Amelia had had the chance to christen Captain Netherton with his alias, Liz had yelled out, “Captain Daniel Gregg!” Then they’d both leapt in the air for a community high five. Liz knew from that day on, Aunt Amelia’s jocularity would be the perfect balm to banish Liz’s dark, woe-is-me thoughts.

  Captain Netherton stepped out of his suite and laid his pipe on the hall table, then reached inside and grabbed his cane. He walked toward the suitcase Liz had dropped. “Elizabeth, dear. Let me help you with that.”

  “Please call me Liz. Where’s your better half? As if I don’t know.”

  He smiled. “You got it. Killer’s with his lover, Caro, in Betty’s suite. He spends more time with Caro than he does with me.”

  Carolyn Keene, nicknamed Caro, was Betty’s black and white cat, who had an adorable white milk mustache. Aunt Amelia told Liz that the dog/cat love affair had started the day Captain Netherton came to the Indialantic. The Great Dane and Caro both had black fur with white tuxedo fronts. Caro could be found sleeping in Killer’s humongous arms most afternoons on the second-floor veranda that overlooked the back garden.

  Captain Netherton picked up the designer-emblemed suitcase.

  Liz said, “Thank you, kind sir.”

  “My pleasure, Liz. What’s in this thing? Gold bullion? Point the way, fair maiden.”

  “We don’t have far, just next door to the Oceana Suite,” Liz said, with a laugh. “But I still appreciate your help.”

  He had a limp, but seemed strong enough to carry the suitcase in one hand and use his cane in the other.

  “Ahh, Mrs. Regina Harrington-Worth. You wouldn’t happen to know if she’s still married, would you? There’s lots of buzz at the Eau Galle Yacht Club that she was seen dancing at some social event with a star polo player from the Vero Beach Polo Club.”

  Recalling what she’d overheard on the intercom, Liz said, “Yes, Captain Netherton, as a matter of fact, there still seems to be a Mr. Worth.”

  “‘Captain’ is sufficient, young lady. You can drop the ‘Netherton’.”

  Liz might have only been home for a short while, but she’d seen the effect Captain Netherton had on octogenarians Betty Lawson and Aunt Amelia. Liz had even witnessed a shared intimate moment next to the dumbwaiter between Iris and the captain. He must be twenty years the housekeeper’s senior, and now he was asking about the fifty-something Regina. It seemed the captain was an equal-opportunity lothario.

  Captain Netherton placed the suitcase in front of the largest guest suite in the hotel and went in search of Killer. There couldn’t be too many places a dog his size could hide. Perhaps Betty had shanghaied the Great Dane as an excuse to steal a private minute with the distinguished captain.

  As Liz raised her hand to knock on the suite door, it flew open.

  Aunt Amelia filled the doorway, wearing one of her flowing green-and-mauve peignoir sets, like something from a Doris Day–Rock Hudson movie. Her bright red hair was piled on top of her head, coiffed into large-sectioned banana curls. There was something strange about her face, and Liz realized what it was. One eye had her signature pearlescent baby-blue eyeshadow that went straight up to her pointy arched brow, along with black eyeliner, and false eyelashes. The other eye was wiped clean. Liz smelled Pond’s cold cream from where she stood. David Worth’s arrival must have caught Aunt Amelia at the beginning of her nighttime beauty regime.

  Liz would never let on to Aunt Amelia that in her later years she reminded Liz of Endora from the sitcom Bewitched. When her great-aunt looked in the mirror, she probably saw the same young ingénue from her first television appearance. It was a commercial that had Aunt Amelia standing on a tree swing in a petticoated, floral dress with a lit cigarette dangling from her mouth as a young man pushed her from behind. In the background a song played, “Fresh as the breeze. Inhale the great outdoors with every puff...”

  Aunt Amelia said, “Thank you, Liz. Just place the luggage on the stand next to the bed.”

  A man, whom Liz assumed was David Worth, hurried toward her. “Let me help you.” He grabbed one of the suitcases, then reached in his pocket, took out a twenty-dollar bill, and stuffed it into Liz’s now-empty hand. He had sharp features on a weatherworn face and eyes the color of Kalamata olives. His thinning, dark hair had patches of shiny scalp showing through. He wore casual but elegant clothing, and a gold- and diamond-encrusted Rolex watch.

  “Not necessary,” Liz said.

  Aunt Amelia gave her the zip-it glare, the one she usually reserved for Barnacle Bob.

  “‘Not necessary’ is right, David. We’ve been waiting for over an hour!” a nails-on-chalkboard voice said from the other room. Regina entered the sitting room, still dressed in what she’d worn at dinner, a low-cut jersey dress in a medallion print that hit well above her knees. Her hair was dark brunette, with a slight curl, and way too long for her age. Liz suspected she used hair extensions. She had the same dog-sticking-its-head-out-the-window expression she had at dinner on her lineless face.

  “If that’s all, Auntie, I’m going to turn in.” Liz gave Aunt Amelia a kiss on her cheek and started toward the door.

  “Wait!” Regina barked, snapping the fingers on her right hand, which was laden with a huge emerald and gold ring that must have come from one of her father’s treasure hunts.

  Liz turned, her expression hard as she searched her brain for a nice thought about the abrasive woman. What was Aunt Amelia thinking? “Yes?”

  “Egads, what happened to your face?”

  After months of living with the scar, Liz and her therapist had christened it her badge of courage. Liz walked up, nose to nose with the woman, and said, “It’s really none of your business.”

  Regina looked at her husband and shrugged her shoulders. “I was only going to offer the name of a good concealer I special-order from Milan. It would camouflage that shiny raw skin beautifully, but that crevice might need a good plastic surgeon or collagen injections.”

  Liz’s attorney had suggested that she leave off the bandage during the trial to play on the sympathy of the judge. Liz had refused. Besides, the Daily Post reissued a close-up photo of Liz’s face on the night it happened, before the paramedics had arrived, followed by a blurb about golden boy Travis Osterman’s defamation-of-character lawsuit. And, of course, the media wasn’t allowed in the courtroom to hear her truthful side of the story.

  Liz said, “Gosh. ‘Concealer.’ I never thought of that. Thanks for the beauty tip.”

  Regina snarled, “Well, I never!” She looked to Aunt Amelia. “Is that the way you have your staff talk to your guests?” She walked over to a tiger-maple credenza and tugged on a table runner from under a handblown aqua bottle filled with flowers from Aunt Amelia’s cutting garden. The bottle teetered and water splashed onto the glossy wood. “Look at this ratty thing,” Regina said, as she used her long nails to separate the runner’s delicate silk threads. “David, in the morning, call around for another hotel. This one has seen better times.”

  Liz begged to differ. In the late 1940s Fred Astaire had stayed in the very same Oceana Suite while on hiatus from one of his films. A baccarat chandelier hung over a rattan love seat and mahogany coffee table. The table was topped with blue-and-white Chinese pots sprouting snowy white orchids. Granted, the carpets and some of the other furnishings were starting to show their age, but her great-aunt had a hard time parting with anything that came from the Indialantic’s original glory days. Liz’s favorite part of the suite was the balcony beyond the French doors that had a stunning view of the ocean, where guests could lounge on a pair of cushioned chaises, or have their morning c
offee at a marble bistro table. In her opinion, the Oceana Suite was perfect, and she didn’t want Regina Harrington-Worth to tell Aunt Amelia otherwise.

  Before Liz could defend the beauty of the room, David Worth said, “I’ve tried to find a place that will take Venus, but every hotel on the island that takes pets is booked. April is apparently their busiest month.” He took a half-dozen tissues from the box on the credenza and mopped at his perspiring brow. He was about six feet tall, but he seemed smaller than his wife, who was probably five-foot-two without her skyscraper footwear.

  Regina turned toward him, eyes blazing, “Well, try to look a little harder. I don’t know how you came up with this old dinosaur of a flophouse. I remember it from my childhood, and there’s not one modern improvement that I can see.”

  David lowered his head in acquiescence, but his right hand was clenched in a fist. “You wanted to stay close to Castlemara while it’s under construction. This was the most convenient.”

  Regina continued, “Daddy left me the old decrepit thing…” She looked around the sitting room, then continued. “As soon as they tear the damn thing down, I’ve been promised a five-month completion on my new pied-à-terre.”

  Castlemara was a gorgeous, oceanfront Spanish Colonial mansion built in the early twentieth century, around the same time as the Indialantic, and was situated east of A1A, ten miles south of the hotel. Liz glanced at the bamboo dining table. On top were unrolled architect’s plans, showing a three-story box of metal and glass. Liz admired modern architecture, but the renderings for Castlemara’s replacement were more akin to a suburban office building than a beach house and it looked like the perimeter of the proposed structure would gobble up most of the property’s natural terrain. Once, when Liz was on a book signing tour in California for Let the Wind Roar, she’d stayed at a friend’s Malibu beach house. When Liz opened the blinds in her guest room for a glimpse of the Pacific Ocean, she was stunned to see the couple in the glass box next door, sharing a shower. Talk about awkward.