by Liz Turner
“I wish I could’ve heard it.”
Charlie glanced at her before reaching into his case. He pulled out his phone and pressed a few buttons. “You can. I have a recording right here.”
By this point, Sakura had joined them in the clearing, and the two women waited as he searched for the recording. Once he found it, he held out his phone for the three of them to hear.
“They say that’s what I should achieve, but that’s not how it’s meant to be.” The voice was bright, but somehow sorrowful at the same time. “He doesn’t want to love my art, and all that does is break my heart.”
“Wow, she is good,” Sakura complimented.
“Sounds like she was expressing her feelings through song too,” Veronica added.
“That’s what I said too,” Charlie agreed. “Amber left to talk to her grandfather not long after that.”
“Did you see her again?”
“Not until this morning, when I heard the news.” Charlie put his phone away and stared at his painting. “I still want to finish this, even if Amber doesn’t get to see it.”
“I think she’ll see it,” Veronica comforted him. “All the more reason for you to finish. We’ll let you get back to that. Thanks for the talk.”
Charlie nodded before turning back to his work. Veronica watched him a few moments longer, and then she and Sakura left the clearing, taking the trail back to the resort.
“So Amber argued with both David and Janet,” Veronica summarized. “And it seemed that maybe it was worse than normal.”
“Sounds like it,” Sakura concurred. “And she went to talk to Martin after Charlie. We should talk to him next.”
“I think we need to speak with David first,” Veronica insisted. “Sounds like he might be able to shed more light on Amber’s disappearance more, since he was so against her being a singer.”
“But Martin’s the one she talked to after Charlie.”
“How about this? We talk to whichever one of them we come across first?”
Sakura nodded. “Deal.”
Chapter 9
It was too bad Veronica, and Sakura hadn’t made a bet on who they would interview next because if they had Veronica could have won. As they were waiting to see if Martin would show up downstairs at all, they found David Buckner sitting at the restaurant bar. He was the only one there, which made sense considering that it was still before noon and not a lot of people would be drinking that early in the day. Some people might, but not many.
David appeared to be one of those rare people, as he threw back drink after drink, putting each one on his father’s tab for the entire resort.
Good thing the Buckner’s have money, Veronica reasoned. He'd better not be planning on driving anywhere anytime soon.
“Mister Buckner?” Sakura called gently. “David? Do you remember us?”
“I remember you two,” he said, his speech only slightly slurred. “You’re that chef who was catering us, and you’re that girl my daughter was hanging around.”
“We heard about what happened to Amber,” Veronica informed him. “We’re sorry.”
“Yeah, I bet you are.” He took another gulp of his beer. “a fat lot of good it does me, though.”
“We’re looking into her death, to see if we can find out anything about it,” Veronica continued, trying to ignore the smell of alcohol permeating the air. “Would it be all right if we ask you a few questions?”
“I don’t feel like talking about Amber,” David sneered. “She’s been nothing but trouble these last weeks, and then she goes off and gets herself dead. Ha!”
“That’s what we’re trying to find out,” Veronica stated. “I’m sure you agree that it’s weird a trained lifeguard would drown in a swimming pool?”
David turned to her, standing up from his stool and staring her right in the face. She could see his eyes were red and puffy, and bags hung under his eyes, either from his drunkenness or lack of sleep, she couldn’t be too sure.
“Why don’t you mind your own business?” he hissed, and Veronica’s nose scrunched at the beer on his breath. “What’s it got to do with you? You can’t possibly know what I’m going through?”
“Hey!” Sakura shouted. “Lay off her!”
Veronica held up her hand to tell Sakura to stop, and she turned her attention back to David.
“No, I guess I wouldn’t know what it’s like to lose a daughter,” she admitted. “But I do know some things. Like how Amber wanted to be a singer and you didn’t agree with it. You two fought, and now that she’s dead you’re regretting it. Why else would you be here, drowning your sorrows in booze instead of spending time with the rest of your family?”
David seethed in her face for a few minutes before his face completely collapsed, and he returned to his seat and buried his head in his arms.
“What do you want?”
“We’re conducting our own investigation into Amber’s death, but we don’t have anything to do with police for the moment,” Veronica explained. “We just want to find out what happened to her. There’s just too much strangeness surrounding it, and we want to find out the truth.”
“You want me to tell the truth? Fine.” David looked up and ordered another shot of whiskey. “I fought with Amber all right. We’ve done nothing but fight lately. I just wanted…It doesn’t matter what I wanted. What matters is that I was a horrible father to her. I tried to convince her to do something useful, and instead, I just drove her to suicide.”
“Suicide?” Sakura repeated. “You think Amber committed suicide?”
“How else would a lifeguard die in a swimming pool?!” David declared. “She’d had enough of me telling her what to do, even thought I just wanted what was best for her…No, it wasn’t her fault. Either way, she’s dead.”
“I’ve got to admit, I never considered that Amber’s death might’ve been suicide,” Sakura stated. “But how difficult exactly is it to drown yourself?”
“Sakura, stop being morbid,” Veronica commanded, although her tone was gentle. She turned back to David. “Mister Buckner, I’m confident Amber didn’t commit suicide. I think it was murder.”
David scoffed. “How would you know that? No one would have ever wanted to kill Amber.”
“You think so?” Sakura asked.
“I know so,” he insisted. “Amber and I had our fights, but she was a good girl, and everybody loved her. Only a moron would want to kill her. No…murder’s incredibly unlikely.”
How is he sober enough to use large words like ‘incredibly’? Veronica thought, but she kept that to herself. “Well, someone must have had something against her. Amber wasn’t the type to commit suicide.”
“I think I’d know my daughter just a little better than either of you,” David protested.
“For someone who was so against his daughter pursuing her dreams, I beg to differ,” Veronica stated.
“What did you have against her being a singer?” Sakura inquired. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Haven’t you seen what musicians become?” David asked. “The good ones make no money, and the ones that do manage to become famous are so because they are nothing but superficial mannequins.”
“That’s not true,” Sakura argued. “And Amber knew better than that.”
“I just wanted her to be a doctor, so she could support herself and have a good, respectable job.”
“A job like you?” Veronica asked. “That meant more to you than her being happy?”
“Of course not!” David yelled, jumping from his seat again. “But there’s nothing wrong with being a doctor! Why can’t you understand? Why couldn’t she understand?”
“Of course, there’s nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t what Amber wanted,” Veronica reasoned. “It’s important for someone to do what they love, what they can imagine doing for the rest of their lives. Otherwise, they’ll just be unhappy their whole lives.”
David snorted again. “You sound like my brother. Amber was al
ways more like him than she was like me.”
“Except for stubbornness maybe,” Veronica joked, attempting to lighten the mood.
“Amber didn’t even know him until she was grown up,” David recalled. “How can they be so similar? They certainly fight with their fathers the same way.”
“Did Amber learn that Charlie is a painter recently?” Veronica inquired.
“Charles…and yes, she only learned recently,” David corrected and admitted in one sentence. “I’d try to keep it a secret, but Charles has never been discreet about it.”
“Maybe she just related to him on a more subconscious level?” Sakura offered.
David finished his drink and slammed the glass down. “I guess. I don’t have to be happy about it, though. Bartender, another one.”
Seems like very little makes you happy, Veronica thought. She then spoke aloud. “We’ve already spoken to Charlie. He said you got into a fight with Amber again? Was it about the singing issue?”
“Yeah. The same old, same old,” David answered as he received another drink. “She stomped out afterward. I think I know the back of my daughter’s head better than I know her face…”
“And you just let her go?” Sakura questioned. “If you cared so much, why didn’t you try to talk to her calmly? Or try to see things from her point of view?”
“Believe me, I tried,” David admitted. “All I could think was how she would be stuck in a trailer somewhere, eating ramen because she couldn’t afford real food.”
Veronica knew that true ramen was more than the packaged, salty noodles sold in stores for fifty cents. In Japan, ramen was a fancy dish, with delicious broth, lots of vegetables, and sometimes even a steak or eggs. But this wasn’t Japan and most ramen is considered the fare of starving musicians and starving college students.
I’m getting off topic again.
“Amber didn’t want me following her,” David explained. “Especially not last night. She said I was just as cold and heartless as Janet.”
“She said?” Veronica asked. “Or she yelled?”
David sighed. “Given the number of our arguments, yelling is probably a better word for it.”
“It probably really hit you hard to be compared to Janet that way, huh?” Sakura realized.
“You said it,” David agreed. “Don’t get me wrong. I love my sister. It’s just…”
“She’s not the most relatable person in your family?” Veronica offered.
“That’s putting it nicely,” he affirmed. “And hearing Amber compare me to her that way…it hurt.”
David took a couple of gulps of his new beer and said no more on the matter. Veronica watched as Sakura wrote this all down in her notebook, and she wanted to make sure she had caught up before they continued their questioning. Once she was done Sakura gave her the nod, and the women returned their attention to the drunken man.
“We hoped we could talk to your father as well,” Veronica said. “We heard that Amber spoke with him last night too. Do you know if he might be available?”
“Don’t know,” David responded with a tight shrug. “I got into a fight with him last night too. Amber talked to him some time after our fight, but she was gone when I went to see him.”
“Did Martin say what their conversation was about?”
“Can’t you guess? About her wanting to be a singer of course.” David looked like he was going to take another drink but paused, staring at the brown liquid. “Father was telling me how he supported her about it…Maybe the problem was just me, and not her.”
“It’s not entirely your fault,” Veronica comforted him. “She just wanted you to listen to her, and let her follow her dreams.”
“It’s ironic, isn’t it? Didn’t anyone tell you? Father kicked Charles out of the house when he said he wanted to be a painter,” he described. “Father threw him out years ago for wanting to be an artist, but then he chews me out when I try to convince my daughter not to be a singer? I don’t understand him sometimes.”
“People can change their minds,” Veronica said. “Don’t tell me you wouldn’t eventually change your mind? As I understand it, Amber was more than determined to study music, going as far as getting a job if you weren’t going to help pay for school?”
“…That’s right,” David confirmed. “Look, I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I just want to sit here and get slobbering drunk.”
Are you not already? “You don’t plan on driving anywhere, right?”
“No, the bartender won’t let me,” David said, waving a hand to the person serving drinks. “They’ve got a policy here. If they suspect anyone is too drunk to drive, they're sent to their room to sleep it off. They’ve got good security here for that.”
Veronica felt like she would have to take his word for it. She had yet to see this security the Starlight Resort apparently had but perhaps the fact that she hadn’t seen it was part of the point. She nodded at this sorrowful man and then turned away.
“Come on, Sakura,” she said. “Let’s see if we can meet with Martin now.”
Chapter 10
Since Veronica and Sakura had already been to the door of the Buckner family’s suite earlier, they knew the way and were able to find it again much more quickly than last time. They paused at the door to the suite to ready themselves. This conversation could be the hardest of the interviews since Martin was the eldest in the family. He was always a fun and loving sort of guy, but who knew how he would be when he was dealing with grief.
Veronica gently knocked on the door. “It’s unlocked. Come in.”
As the two chefs entered, the first thing they noticed was the swarm of fluffy creatures running towards them. The Golden Retriever puppies cried and yapped for attention while Angel sat on the other side of the room on the couch. She panted as she watched the women play with her puppies, apparently not concerned at all.
Veronica spotted the puppy that had sat in her lap before. Her coloring was more of a white than golden, and she sat on her hind legs in a begging position, hoping for attention. Veronica laughed.
“Oh yes, I remember you, little one!” She picked up the puppy, who proceeded to lick her chin. “I missed you too.”
“She likes you,” Martin commented. He sat on the small chair next to the couch, which Veronica thought he only took instead of the couch because the chair was placed more directly in front of the television. He turned the machine off and turned to them. “I knew you two would be here eventually. Charlie texted me. You’re trying to figure out what happened to Amber.”
“We sorry about what happened,” Veronica began, putting the puppy down and walking over to him. “It’s horrible.”
“Most horrible,” another voice called out. Anthony Cugno stood next to the chair, almost like a sentinel for his best friend. “Everyone’s understandably upset about it. Why would you want to rub salt in the wound?”
“Because an accident or suicide just doesn’t make sense,” Veronica insisted. “Amber was a trained lifeguard, so she would know how to prevent such an accident. And did Amber ever seem the type to commit suicide?”
“Why would someone who murdered her put her in the pool?” Anthony demanded. “When they could dump her body in a perfectly good lake? It’s barely thirty feet from the resort, you know.”
Veronica already had an answer to this. “To make it look like an accident so that no one would suspect murder.”
“That makes sense, in a strange, roundabout way,” Martin responded, and Anthony frowned. “But to answer your question, no, Amber wasn’t the type to commit suicide. She had problems and arguments, but she wasn’t depressed or anything.”
“So you see our point. Is it okay if we ask you a few things?”
“I expected it,” Martin replied. “Charlie said you would. What would you like to know?”
“We know Amber said she was going to see you last night after she visited Charlie,” Sakura began.
“Yes, she was upset after yet anothe
r argument with her father, and Charlie encouraged her to talk to me about her singing,” Martin finished for her. “She was getting tired of David dismissing her dreams, and how most of the family kept trying to convince her to be a doctor…including me.”
Martin’s expression turned ashamed at this last statement. Veronica and Sakura waited for him to continue.
“Honestly, I didn’t know she had such an important dream,” he explained. “I didn’t realize how much it meant to her. I didn’t even know she wanted to pursue singing until last night. It never came up during her and David’s arguments.”
“She had a wonderful voice,” Veronica announced. “Charlie let us listen to a recording of her.”
“She gave me a demonstration too,” Martin confirmed, his gaze looking off in the distance. “Her singing sounded like angels. I wish I had known about it sooner.”
“What happened after that?” Veronica inquired.
“Amber started begging me to help with some money, so she could pay for college courses to earn a music degree,” he continued. “She said that if I didn’t, and David wouldn’t either, she was going to get a job to pay for it herself, but she didn’t want that to affect her time studying. Janet might think Amber had no ambition, but she just wanted to take it in a direction other than medicine. I promised I would give her, at least, some help paying for college. I didn’t want to make the same mistake with her as I did with Charlie.”
“That’s what Charlie told us,” Sakura added.
Martin nodded. “I learned it the hard way. I wasn’t going to repeat the same mistake.”
“Was that the last time you saw your granddaughter?” Veronica asked.
“That’s right,” he verified. “I gave her a letter to give to Anthony, asking him to come up and see me last night. But after that…”
“I never saw Amber last night after dinner,” Anthony insisted from his standing position. “I never got the message.”
Martin looked at his friend out of the corner of his eye, and if Veronica didn’t have the eye for detail she had perfected during her years as a chef, she might have missed how his lips twitched into a tiny, annoyed frown.
