Death in the Orchid Garden

by Ann Ripley

  He leaned into her, wanting more. “This afternoon, though, I wasn’t one hundred percent sure you were a double murderer.”

  She looked up at him. “Well now you are and you’re my accomplice, honey. We’re what they call conspirators. And we’re going to be the king and queen at Bouting Horticulture when this all settles down.”

  “And what about your . . . condition?”

  “Don’t worry about that.” Then she broke away from him and said, “But enough of this, we really don’t have time. We’ll take the ocean path all the way up to Shipwreck Rock—that’s the best place to do it.”

  As he loosened the rope binding Louise to the chair, he said sarcastically, “With your experience, it should be a cinch to stage an accident up there.”

  Anne turned on him. “Don’t mock me! Things went wrong because I thought the bitch saw Matt and me up on that rock.” She reached over and abruptly grabbed Louise’s arm and heaved her up from the chair. Anger seemed to have given the woman extra strength. “Get up, bitch. You’re going to walk. Chris, help me here; get the other side. That dinner party will be breaking up—someone could go out for a smoke and see us.”

  With one supporting her on either side, they ushered Louise across the room, flipped off the lights, and shoved her out the door. Now they were out in the balmy Hawaiian night and Louise was headed for death. Although she couldn’t speak with the revolting tape on her mouth, she did not intend to go quietly.

  44

  Her hands were bound in front, as if she were in prayer. For that she gave thanks. The tape was tight, but this did not mean that Louise could not reach up a few inches to the bottom of her lei, which still hung round her neck, and grasp petals with the tips of her fingers. Scattering petals was the only hope that she had for survival and a scant one at that. Though Christopher Bailey and Anne Lansing each held an elbow, she used every bump or irregularity on the path as an opportunity to pull a petal from one of the white blossoms and let it fall to the ground.

  Pretending to be injured was not difficult. Her head felt like a large, aching balloon. Every scratch and cut from her head to her shins pained her. Though her leg muscle had improved, she limped along as if she had a sprain. She went slowly, stumbling over every small obstacle.

  Anne and Christopher were mostly silent, except for an occasional murmured exchange about how they needed to hurry and how they’d take to the beach if they saw policemen out on the grounds. They didn’t use their flashlights, an agreement they’d talked about when they left the hotel suite. Louise’s slow pace soon made Anne impatient. Occasionally Christopher lifted her along, as if she were a puppet. Soon they were past the rocky cliffs where she’d been shoved onto the rocks. Now they were in the danger zone, for they had to take her by the ocean-side path that ran in front of the hotel’s main building, past the lagoon in which Louise loved to swim, then on to Shipwreck Rock. Kauai-by-the-Sea landscapers kept the path by the hotel in perfect shape, so it was harder now to fake missteps and to drop the telltale plumeria petals.

  “Get up!” hissed Anne Lansing, after Louise’s latest stumble. Louise was sure she was on to her Hansel-and-Gretel routine. “I think you’re faking this. Get going!” She gripped Louise’s arm tighter and practically dragged her along the path.

  “Cool it, cool it,” warned Christopher, who had to crouch down to avoid anyone seeing his tall figure.

  They reached the south of the hotel property, marked with a line of gracefully curving gardens. No gate here, for this was Hawaii, where beaches were for everyone and high security gates reserved only for posh neighborhoods. Hotels were known for their open, welcoming ambience. So they went unimpeded, straight to the red dirt trail that led to the forty-foot cliff.

  Shipwreck Rock was classed as an interesting little side tour in the pantheon of Kauai tourist sights. Louise had wanted to climb the rock since the moment she’d seen it the afternoon she arrived on Kauai. John Batchelder had promised they’d hike it together. The irony struck her; she was finally taking the tour with two people intent on killing her.

  At first, there was a crowd of shrubs at the entrance to the trail, unidentifiable in the dimness; this was the place where Anne Lansing had posted the “closed” sign the night she killed Matthew Flynn. The ground became more open, with only the occasional dwarf tree emerging here and there through the light-colored sandstone.

  The trail continued up a series of steep, rugged switchbacks. Anne occasionally used her flashlight to guide the way, quick bursts of light no more than the glint of a firefly. With the rough ground, there was plenty of stumbling about and thus opportunity for Louise to drop petals on the way up. Occasionally, she glanced at the quarter moon and prayed it wouldn’t reveal what she was doing. They came to a wider place in the path, where just ahead lay the pile of rocks that Louise had heard about from John. Getting over them was difficult, he’d said. For Louise to do it with her hands tied was going to be a problem for her two adversaries. But it was a good place to mark with flower petals. This time Anne noticed Louise pulling at the lei.

  “What are you doing?” she hissed, pulling Louise to a stop and causing Christopher to lose his grip on her other arm. Anne pulled out her flashlight again and shone it down on the path and saw a few white petals on the red earth.

  Pulling in a noisy breath, the woman grabbed the lei from around Louise’s neck. “She’s probably been spreading these petals along the way,” she told Christopher. “More reason to hurry.” She turned and slapped Louise’s face. “You are too much trouble,” she spat out. Louise promptly put down her head, as if hurt again.

  Anne pulled Christopher a step away and made her pitch. “Look, Chris, I’ve helped you get her almost all the way. She’s still in one piece, so it’ll be clear she drowned and didn’t die of some injury. I’ll help shove her sorry ass over this pile of rocks. Then you can even carry her to the top from there. Don’t forget to take off the rope and the duct tape. Then give her a tap on the head and pitch her out. Her body will fall in deep water.”

  “There’s no way, Anne, that I’m going the rest of the way without you. As you told me back in the room, we’re in this together. Now, let’s get going.”

  “Chris,” she demurred.

  It was hard, Louise observed, for Anne to use her gentler wiles in this rough setting. She said, “A strong man like you can easily do it alone.”

  Ignored during this argument, Louise half-turned her body so they couldn’t see what she was doing. In her right bottom zippered pocket was her last resource, a can of pepper spray. She had to pull her bound hands far to the right to reach the zipper, then laboriously shove it open to reach the spray. At any second she expected one or the other of them to see what she was doing and stop her. At last she had the small cylinder clutched in her fingers. This probably was her last chance to save herself, she well knew.

  Trembling from the effort, she unbuttoned the leather flap, put her index finger on the trigger and turned around to face her antagonists. And just in time. Her disagreement with Christopher temporarily resolved, Anne approached her. Louise tilted the spray upward slightly and shot her in the face and kept shooting.

  “No-o-o!” cried Anne, her hands clawing at her eyes as the burning pepper cut into them.

  “Shut up, Anne!” cried Christopher, as Louise was about to redirect the spray on him. Before it reached him, he grabbed her and threw her bodily down on the ground, as easily as if she were a rag doll. Her last effort was to put her bound hands up, praying for her life.

  For a moment, she was no longer the center of a star, she merely saw them. And then all went black.

  45

  When Louise regained consciousness, she heard a man’s voice from a long distance away. He seemed to be giving people orders about where to search. Gingerly, she tried to move her aching body and found that she could. She was lying beside the pile of volcanic rubble.

  It took a few moments to remember that she was up on Shipwreck Rock trail with
two people who were bent on killing her. Where were they now? She lay quietly and opened her eyes. The smell of pepper spray wafted through the air, so she knew she’d been unconscious for only a few moments. She turned her head to avoid the acrid smell. As she did, she saw two silhouettes against the moonlit sky, looming almost directly above her. Louise froze in fear. Then, one figure bent down, overcome with a paroxysm of coughing—Anne was suffering the effects of the pepper spray.

  “Listen,” whispered Christopher, “I hear them coming. “We’ve got to get out of here.”

  In a rasping voice, Anne croaked, “We still have to get rid of her.”

  Louise closed her eyes and wished she could shrink into the ground.

  “Don’t be crazy,” hissed Christopher. “For God’s sake, you can hear their voices. Look, you can even see their lights.”

  Anne broke into another fit of coughing, but choked out the words, “Don’t you get it, Chris? If we don’t take the tape off this woman, they’ll catch on to everything.”

  “No!” cried Chris, forgetting to keep his voice down. “I didn’t want to do this in the first place. Now, goddammit, let’s go!”

  The figures disappeared from Louise’s view. She heard their fading footsteps and realized that they’d headed for a back trail off the rock.

  She smiled as she realized her emergency equipment had worked. She’d driven her enemy away.

  Now, a man’s voice. His words were echoing up to her from forty feet below. “. . . keep your eye out, folks,” he was saying. “. . . we’ve found more over here . . . we’ve picked up her trail . . .”

  Then another excited cry from below. “This way—let’s get going!”

  Her heart thumping with excitement, she knew she had to tell them that she was up here. She sat up and struggled dizzily to her feet. Peering over the side of the precipice, she saw lights probing the darkness almost below.

  She took her fingertips and clumsily ripped the duct tape off her mouth. Hoarsely, she yelled, “I’m up here!” Balanced precariously on the edge, she waited for someone to glance up.

  “Hey!” said a voice from below, “where did that voice come from? “ A light played on the nearby rocks, while another beam shone into her face. She blinked her eyes and nearly fell.

  “She’s up on the cliff!” cried someone. “I see her.” Overwhelmed with relief, Louise slumped back to solid ground.

  “Louise, is that you? Hold on. They’re coming!” It was Steffi’s voice. Comforting, wonderful Steffi Corbin.

  The first to reach her were two policemen, who immediately set up a couple of flares on the path so they could see. One was Sergeant William Yee. As he discreetly examined her with his flashlight, he murmured, “Take it easy now, Mrs. Eldridge, we’re going to help you,” then gently removed the duct tape from around her hands.

  “Oh, thank you,” she said, cautiously wriggling her arms to stretch the muscles. Next he directed the light at the tape on her forehead. “Do you want that off?”

  She reached up a hand and touched it. “Maybe not; there’s quite a cut under there. It might start bleeding again. But thank you,” she said.

  The other policeman had been on his radio, communicating with the ground. He said, “Mrs. Eldridge, we need to know who did this.” But then more flashlights bobbed up the trail. Marty Corbin and Tom Schoonover appeared from around a switchback, followed by a man in ragged shorts and flip-flops—the beach oracle.

  Marty, gasping for breath, rushed up to her and hugged her. “My God, Lou, we’re glad to see you alive. I shoulda tailed you out of that restaurant the minute I saw you get out of your chair.”

  “Marty, you don’t know how good it is to see you.”

  Tom Schoonover came over and laid a gentle hand on her arm and smiled down at her. “Good thing we had a little help from our friend here.” He cocked his head at the disheveled Bobby Rankin, who hung back, a large, blank grin on his face. “Bobby was, um, having a smoke on the beach when he sighted three figures rushing in this direction along the hotel path.”

  Bobby, red-eyed and unsteady on his feet, tried to assemble his thoughts. “For a minute I thought it was an apparition. And that made me think maybe I ought to give up my beach life because I was goin’ crazy. Thank God I finally realized it was real people I was seein’.”

  The policeman with the radio interrupted. “Gentlemen,” he said, “step aside for a minute, please. Mrs. Eldridge, before we take you out of here, we need urgently to know who did this to you. Do you have an idea of where they might have gone? Can you confirm that your assailant was Christopher Bailey?”

  “Christopher Bailey and Anne Lansing. Don’t ignore Anne Lansing. She’s worse than he is—she killed Matthew Flynn and Bruce Bouting.”

  “My God, Lou,” cried Marty, “you don’t mean it!”

  The policemen looked at one another in wonder. Sergeant Yee said to her, “I know you wouldn’t say this unless you were sure.”

  “I’ve never been more sure of anything in my life.”

  “When did they leave?”

  She sighed. “Not more than a few minutes ago. I’d say, five to six minutes.”

  Yee told the other policeman, “They must have taken the back path down. Better tell them that below.” The other got on his radio.

  Louise continued, “I squirted Anne in the face with pepper spray and she yelled a lot. Then they probably saw lights approaching below. They ran away after that.”

  “Any idea of where they’d have gone?”

  She focused her jumbled thoughts. “They might have gone to Bruce Bouting’s suite—it’s the President’s suite. They want his computer, I know that much. I saw Christopher trying to work out the password. After that, I don’t know what they’d do. They can’t escape this island, can they?”

  Sergeant Yee looked at her and shook his head. “No, ma’am, I don’t think so.”

  Tom Schoonover quietly said to her, “Can you walk, Louise?”

  “I think I can, with help.”

  He turned to the policemen. “Then if you don’t mind, we’ll escort this lady down the path,” and he put an arm around her waist. “Marty, want to take the other side?”

  “Yeah,” said Marty. “She doesn’t look good for doin’ much of anything on her own.”

  His little attempt at humor somehow set the tears in motion. They trickled silently down her cheeks, but her snuffles gave her away. Tom handed her a handkerchief and she wiped the tears away. “Sorry. It’s just that I’m so glad to be alive.”

  46

  Monday night

  “I really feel fine,” lied Louise, as she sat in the small white clinic. Actually, her head ached and so did her bruises and cuts. But she feared if she told the truth, she’d end up in the hospital in Lihue. Instead, she was back in the basement medical clinic of Kauai-by-the-Sea, with the smiling, gray-haired doctor pointing a light in her eyes.

  This time, she took a closer look at him. Around fifty, he was the picture of happiness and good health, with a deep suntan on his face and muscled arms. Louise decided he was another escapee from the mainland. The nurse efficiently took a few X-ray photos and within minutes the doctor reassuringly reported that she had no broken bones.

  He snapped off the light and said, in a faint Southern accent, “There’s no doubt, Mrs. Eldridge, that in the course of your adventures you’ve suffered a slight concussion. But look at it this way—you’re not nearly as bad off as the man I treated this afternoon. He was swimmin’ out too far and got shoved up against some lava rock; suffered both a serious concussion and a broken leg. He ended up in a cast and traction.”

  “Good heavens,” murmured Louise, “that’s terrible.”

  “Not the worst I’ve seen, either,” said the doctor. “I’m always busy. The ocean brings me lots of business.”

  “There are quite a few drownings, I hear.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how many. People who don’t pay attention to those discreet warnings posted on the
beach. Actually, they ought to print them in one-foot letters. This land isn’t always paradise, you know.”

  He cocked his head and surveyed Louise’s droopy eyes. “Now, my dear, I’m warnin’ you: if you go to sleep right now, which I know you want to do, it could be dangerous. You might never wake up again. But if you stay up for an hour or two, you’ll be just dandy. You have friends here with you, I understand.”

  “They’re waiting for me upstairs in Options.”

  “Good,” said the doctor. “The police chief, who insists on asking you more questions, and those friends ought to keep you up long enough. Be sure to eat somethin’ and drink a lot of liquids, but lay off the mai tais. Now let’s take care of your wounds.”

  After getting a booster tetanus shot, she was washed up and stitches and bandage applied to her forehead. Her lacerated hands were wrapped until they resembled white gloves. Finally, she was released. “Remember,” said the doctor, “you take it easy tonight, Mrs. Eldridge. And that’s no kiddin’. Tell that police chief not to be too hard on you. And check in with this office tomorrow mornin’ to get new dressings.”

  Louise went upstairs to the police chief’s borrowed office and slumped down in the nubby lime green chair. She told him everything that had happened since she left the Lanai Room party less than two hours ago.

  Even to Louise, it sounded barely credible, more like the Perils of Pauline—“I was window-peeping, then I was thrown off a cliff, taped and bound like a UPS package, slapped around a bit and dragged up to the top of a cliff where I was supposed to be thrown off into the sea . . .”