“I think that your wife went back to your room, maybe to rest. After Mrs. Prosper and she came downs stairs a little while ago, I heard her say that she was getting a headache.”
“Really?” I chuckled.
“Is there something that I said that amused you, Mr. MacKenzie?”
“No, I just had a funny thought. Thank you again for your help, Moira.”
She gave me a friendly nod good-bye and returned to her business, and I went upstairs to go back to mine. As I approached our room, I found Consuelo at the door about to deliver extra fresh towels. I took the towels and told her that I will take them inside for her. She was about to protest, but I assured it would be perfectly okay, adding, “My wife wouldn’t mind at all. She’d probably be upset if I didn’t.”
The housekeeper muttered something in Spanish and went about her other chores. When I entered our room, the bathroom door was open and I heard the shower was on. Without hesitating, I walked into the bathroom and announced, “Your clean towels, madame.”
“Sport!” Shot, the voice from behind the curtain, to be quickly followed by a head. “Hi!”
“Bo!”
“Thanks, Old Sport. You can put the towels on sink counter.” Without fuss or bother, Bo ducked behind the curtain and continued her shower.
I was more unnerved by the incident than she was. I dropped the towels down onto the counter and attempted a quick retreat. I was about to close the bathroom door when Bo protested, “Kept the door open.”
“What’s that?”
“Keep the door open.”
“Why?” I sheepishly asked.
“Well, for one reason I have nothing that you haven’t seen before, and two, I want to talk to you without having to shout through a closed door.”
“Talk to me when you are finished.”
“I want to talk with you now, alone. I don’t know how long we have before someone comes by. Stand to the side of the doorway, if you are self-conscious.”
For discretion’s sake, I left the door half closed not realizing that it had only two positions. When left to its own devices, the guardian of privacy slowly squeaked to its open position. Not wanting to fuss, I leaned my back against the wall that separated the two rooms and faced the bed.
“It’s becoming a habit,” I said over my shoulder.
“What is?” Bo’s words reverberated amid the shushing, swishing sounds of the shower.
“You wanting to talk with me alone.” My eyes wandered to the framed mirror that hung on the far wall, behind the bed. “How come you’re taking a shower in my room?“
“Because of the power outage, Old Sport. According to Hograve, your room and Mrs. Prosper’s are the ones that get the best access to the limited hot water. I hadn't had a good scrub since early yesterday. Mucking about with my car and examining Foley, I deemed it prudent for me to clean up. . . . And, Old Sport, before you start bothering me with more questions about my using your bathroom, it was Morgana who suggested that I shower here.”
“Really? Our shower?” I didn’t expect that. Nor did I expect the mirror on the opposite wall to reflect the goings-on in the bathroom behind me.
“Well, you didn’t expect me to use Mrs. Prosper’s shower, did you?”
I ceded Bo that point. “No. But — ”
“But nothing, Sport. Your lovely wife offered me the use of your shower.”
“Fine, I have no problem. I just like to be in the loop; that’s all. . . . To change the topic a bit, there was a guy downstairs talking — ”
“Well, what did he say?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t talk to him. In fact, I didn’t even see him actually. I just thought that I should —”
“There is something going on here,” interrupted Bo, “more than the demise of your friend, Mr. Foley. I can feel it.”
The idea that Mr Foley had somehow become my friend, was something that I was about to take issue with when the short squeal of the tap turning and the diminishing sound of rushing water broke my line of thought.
“This Foley was some piece of work,” said Bo with disdain.
“You have this feeling because of the gun and the second passport?”
“And my remembering his face from an old stack of photos.”
The tinkling and scraping sounds of sliding metal rings against the metal rod was the overture for Bo's reflected appearance from behind the shower curtain. With more grace than I could ever muster from my aging body, Bo easily stepped out from the tub and faced the open door. With both her hands briskly towel-drying her hair, Bo stood naked as the day she was born and as beguiling as the last time I saw her.
In spite of my embarrassment — and some guilt — I couldn’t help but to assess that Bo’s statuesque figure had definitely fared well over the years. She still had the tight curves of an athlete, only her lower abdomen displayed a little more fleshy-softness than I remember, a feature which gave Bo, at least to my tastes, an extra dose desirability. And with every move Bo made her breasts, fuller and more pear-shaped than when I last saw them, swayed with hypnotic allure and licentious sensuality. Her nude image intermingled with the painted landscape border of the mirror, an effect which rendered a scene similar to one of an old French Art Nouveau poster I once had in college.
With just a few passes with the bath towel, Bo cast it aside for a white terry cloth robe. “What really bothers me, Old Sport, are the chaps who are associated with Foley.” Oblivious to me, Serena quickly walked out of the bathroom to a black suitcase which was nestled on the chair. — Why I didn't notice her luggage when I entered the room, I don’t know.
Pulling out from her bag a black bra and a matching pair of panties, Bo asked, “Would I look alluring enough in these?”
“Ah . . . alluring? . . . Ah, yeah . . . I think you would look nice in those,” I said, tripping over my tongue.
“I see your tastes haven’t changed much over the years.” With her undies in one hand, she grabbed a purple blouse that was lurking in the recesses of our coat rack and returned to the bathroom, shutting the door after her. In less than two tics of a watch’s second hand, the bathroom door partially opened. Bo stuck her head out. “Oh Sorry, Old Sport, show’s over.”
My quick-witted response was a tongue-tied, "Huh, what?”
My ex-girl friend nodded her head in the direction of decorated mirror behind the bed. She smiled as she opened the bathroom door wide. Her robed reflection seemed like an angel hovering above the sleepy hand painted Green Mountains that graced the bottom portion of the reflecting glass.
“You really haven’t changed after all these years.”
I saw a wistfulness in her eyes when she spoke, but before I could answer in my defense, she shut the door. “Well, you have.” I lamely said to a closed bathroom door. “I don’t remember you wearing glasses.”
“I’m getting old, Richard,” said the voice from the other side. “About five years ago, I needed reading specs for close work. I may be someone you met thirty-plus years ago, but I’ve changed. I’m not the same person.”
“Closer to forty years, I would say,” I countered.
“But still, I’ve changed. I’m not the person that you once knew.”
“Really, you seem pretty much the same to me.”
“Morgana was right, you can be quite dense.”
“She told you that I’m what?” Before I got a chance to question Bo further, there came a knocking at the door.
“Rich, are you there? It's me.”
“Kyle?” I said as I opened the door to find my brother, still dressed in his temporary regalia, holding his sheriff’s uniform and wearing his campaign hat. He wasted no time bulldozing by me and entered the room. “What can I do for you, Kyle?” I said as I closed the door.
“I need a place to change back into my things for one,” he snapped. “And two, I can't walk around the place looking like a pimp from the 1890s.”
I immediately noticed the scent of burnt wood that follow
ed Kyle into the room.
“You could have changed in Mr. Foley’s room,” I countered.
“What? I don’t think I could change in front of a dead guy. And who knows, I might contaminate the scene if I did.”
“Are you auditioning for Smokey Bear? You smell like a forest fire.”
Kyle took several deeps sniffs of himself and his clothes which I could see were still discolored with dampness. “It must be from the fire.”
“That’s a good deduction. Well, don’t get too comfy here. Morgana specifically reserved a smoke-free room.”
“Is she here?”
“Who?” I said with some trepidation.
“Morgana. Is Morgana here?”
“No. In fact, I don’t rightly know where she is at this very moment. But she definitely isn’t here.”
“Good, that brings me to the second reason why I’m here. I want to talk with you alone.”
“That seems to be the request of the day,” I uttered.
“What was that?” Kyle asked.
I just waved him on, “Nothing.”
“Well, what do you think about old Boswell lurking being here? I can’t believe that she’s an FBI agent.” My brother dropped his sheriff things on my bed and proceeded to undress. “Maybe we should call her Boo rather than Bo, now that she’s kind of a government spook and all.” Off came the red pajamas bottoms, leaving Kyle only in his overstretched tidy whities.
“Her name is Serena, you know,” I interjected. “And she’s right–”
“Right, Serena — a name that no doubt shares the same root as the word serenity. In this case, her name is a misnomer if I ever heard one.”
I diplomatically tried to change the tenor of the conversation. “I may have been rough on Bo a few years back. We maybe should cut her some slack.”
“Yeah, right,” said Kyle with overt sarcasm.
For both our sakes, I scrambled for another topic. “Hey, have you lost weight?”
“I don’t know. . . . Do you think?” He began to eye himself in the mirror.
Would the loss of a pound or two be really noticeable from someone weighing over 300 pounds? “Yeah,”— I lied.
Sucking in his gut, Kyle said, “I remember when she wanted to be some kind of organic naturalist or something.”
“Who?”
“Bo,” Kyle stubbornly continued. “Looking back on the two of you together, I always thought that she was more interested in the birds and bees than organic food if you know what I mean. She was a true libertine — with an insatiable libido. Why, she couldn’t keep her hands off you. I can tell you now, Rich . . . I never liked her! . . . Ayuh, she really scared me back then when the two of you were an item. What am I saying? She still scares me.”
“Yeah, but we were young and naive — ”
“But she was really hot for you, Rich,” Kyle unflinchingly continued. “Maybe she still is. Do you think? . . . You liked her; I certainly remember that. And as a bonus, she was filthy rich. It wasn’t a bad combination. You had it made. Your old girlfriend was filthy rich, and a filthy, sexy bit — ”
“— KYLE. Let’s not go down that road, please.”
“Go down, that’s good,” Kyle started to chuckle. “How many times did she go — ”
The bathroom door suddenly swung opened; its handle slammed into the adjacent wall with a thud.With her blouse unbuttoned — only her sheer black bra and panties offering a modicum of modesty — Bo marched out from the bathroom with fire in her eyes. “Kyle. You’re here. What a surprise.”
Kyle’s eyes popped open like two umbrellas. He held his pants to his chin. “Serena! What are y . . . y . . . .you doing here?” I thought Kyle was going to keel over like a hippo does when hit with a tranquilizer dart.
“What do you think, Sheriff?” Serena snapped.
“Rich, wha . . . what is she doing here?”
“Ah, she was taking a shower, I suppose,” I said calmly.
“Does Morgana know about this?” Kyle countered in a harsh whisper.
“Morgana is the one who let me into the room,” countered Bo.
“Morgana? . . . Oh, I thought. Well, I just assumed.”
“You assume what, Kyle?” Bo demanded. “What did you assume?”
I felt sorry for my brother while he futilely tried to hide behind his pants from Bo’s ire. But he got himself into this pickle; he didn’t heed my hints to kept quiet. I knew what Bo could be like; I didn’t envy him.
But as fate would have it, the sound of an unexpected click and snap of a lock caught my ears. The room’s door squeaked open.
“Richard?”
All eyes went to the direction of the voice.
“Ah, Morgana,” I said, “why don’t you just strip down to your skivvies and join the party.”
#
CHAPTER 6
Morgana’s arrival spurred my unwanted guests to dress in a hurry and generated a flurry of conversations, explanations and deceptions — deceptions which made me a tad uncomfortable.
You see, I don’t like secrets; I like keeping secrets from Morgana even less. For one thing, I am not very good at it. My lovely wife has a sixth sense whenever I try to hold something from her. Throwing a surprise party for her has always been a problem. Then, when it comes to group held secrets, I am not good at that either. I have difficulty keeping track of who knows what and what is allowed to be said to whom. So, in the process of keeping Morgana out of the loop about Bo’s FBI affiliation, I let Bo and Kyle do most of the talking. And I, for a change, kept my mouth shut — for the most part.
From the ensuing conversation, I learned that when I was sleeping on the stairs, Morgana had the good luck to ditched Mrs. Prosper for a spell and went looking for me. Thinking that I might be with Kyle, Morgana stopped by Foley’s room and found Serena talking to Hograve by the doorway. Serena, it seems, was telling Hograve that she wanted to clean up. And so, to make a long story short, Morgana chimed in and volunteered our shower because, as Hograve put it, our “room was one of the few rooms on the floor that had any hot water.”
As I listened to the two women of my life chat away, I got a very strong feeling that something almost clandestine had transpired between Morgana and Bo when they met. Did they work out a truce, have a meeting of the minds, form an alliance of sorts. I didn’t know. But there was something new between Morgana and Bo, and they were keeping me in the dark about it. Whatever it was, I was sure that I was involved.
Inevitably, the conversation turned to my sitting on the back staircase. Ignoring Morgana’s inquiry about why I was on the staircase in the first place, I recounted my observation of Arezoo talking to some guy by the service door.
“Who was the guy?” asked Bo.
“I haven’t the slightest idea, but she knew him, and the strange thing was, she wouldn’t let him inside. The poor slob was getting drenched by the second, battered by torrents of rain and bathed with the runoff from the roof. Yet, to my surprise, he didn’t protest.”
“What does this guy look like?” asked Kyle.
“Again I don’t know. From where I was situated, I couldn’t see the man. I could just about hear him. Whoever it was, he had a non-European accent. I did notice when he took the plastic bag from Arezoo that he wore a big, golden watch band on his right wrist.”
“Odd,” concluded Morgana.
“Very odd,” voiced Bo.
I went on to explain that when Arezoo left the stairwell, I went downstairs and looked outside and saw no one around. Moira soon came by, and I indirectly asked about him without her knowing what I was doing.
“Well, did she give you any idea who it was?” Bo asked, who was by then handing Kyle his gun belt to put on.
“No, no, Moira couldn’t shed any light on the identity of my mystery man,” I said.
“Well, for what it’s worth, we at least have a partial description,” concluded Kyle.
“Description? A very wet foreigner who is wearing a watch!” Morgana scoffe
d. “And you,” Morgana’s attention was again on me, “I thought that you hated gossip and snooping. You are always the first one to complain about people’s space being violated. And now you have become the resident Peeping Tom and Busy Body.”
“Now that’s not quite fair — ”
“Sometimes I don’t know whom I married to,” Morgana said under her breath.
“I just found Arezoo’s behavior a tad curious,” I said. “Especially with . . . eh, you know, with Mr. Foley’s committing — ”
“Suicide,” concluded Morgana.
“Or worse,” blurted my brother and perked up everyone’s ears as if his words were the sound of breaking glass.
“Worse?” Morgana gasped.
“Gee, Kyle don’t tease your sister-in-law,” Bo remarked — an attempt to put the cat back into the bag.
“What am I teasing her about?” Kyle asked, and in doing so, he let the cat scamper completely out of the room.
“What do you mean by worse, Kyle?” Morgana asked again.
Bo pre-empted Kyle. “It isn’t that we don’t think it was suicide. It’s that we couldn’t find a suicide note. A note, you see, would usually be somewhere in the vicinity of the suicide victim.”
“And if we can’t find a suicide note,” said Kyle, “we . . . eh, I must keep the investigation open for all possibilities. It’s really just a matter of protocols and procedures, frankly.”
“Interesting,” Morgana said calmly. She then pulled out something from her right hip pants pocket and handed it to Kyle. It was a crumpled piece of paper. “Moira gave me this just now before I came upstairs.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“It could be what you have been looking for,” said Morgana as she eyed me with more than suspicion.
“How did she come by it?” Kyle asked.
“She said that she didn’t quite know.”
“Didn’t know?” Bo said.
“That’s what she said. She told me that when she went to the ladies’ room, she found it on the bottom of her shoe.”
The details about the document’s discovery had an immediate effect on Kyle, who began to grimace as he smoothed the paper very daintily with his fingertips. The tactile efforts of his meaty digits revealed the paper to be a torn sheet from the room’s complimentary notepad. The paper was a tad damp, scuffed up, and raggedy. From what I could immediately see, there was some smeared writing that appeared to be undersigned. My brother and Bo anxiously, but civilly, took turns examining Moira’s find.
FATED TO THE PURPOSE (Richard and Morgana MacKenzie Mysteries Book 2) Page 9
