Chapter 6
Ricky wasn’t in our room, so I returned to the lounge and found him sitting at the far end of the bar.
He had a book open in front of him, but he was staring out the massive picture window toward the infinite westward expanse of the Pacific, his chin resting in his hand.
At the other end of the bar, the two redheaded girls we had seen the night before, Richard and Rachel Rose’s daughters, were slumped together, talking listlessly with Erik behind the bar.
I slid onto the stool next to Ricky, saying in a low voice, “Well, that was interesting.”
He turned, smiling at me. I had been feeling confused and unsettled after my conversation with Cecilia Rose, but Ricky seemed genuinely happy to see me, which both recentered me and, in a whole new way, threw me off my guard.
“You’re back! What did you find out? Do you know who’s in the will? Tell me everything!”
I was still dazzled by his shining eyes for a second, but as I gathered myself, the one solid thought about the meeting that settled in my mind was that I had been sworn to confidentiality.
“I can’t tell you everything. Mrs. Rose is very rich, and also kind of a racist homophobe.
I think that’s all I’m allowed to tell you. ”
He knit his brows. “What do you mean, you can’t tell me?”
“I mean, they asked me not to say anything. About the will, anyway—I was given permission to talk about the racism and homophobia.”
“I like gossip as much as the next person, but I thought we were going to get some intel—and by ‘we,’ I mean we, not just you.” Ricky poked my arm accusingly.
My stomach knotted a little. Didn’t Ricky understand confidentiality? “But I promised,” I protested. “I said I wouldn’t say, and that means I won’t say.”
Ricky looked a little hurt. I felt awful. “Okay, I understand,” he said. Then he brightened again. “How about I take a guess. You don’t have to say anything, except whether I’ve guessed right.”
I considered this. I felt like looking for loopholes was not really in keeping with a confidentiality agreement, either, but I had hated that hurt look on Ricky’s face. The knot in my stomach twisted. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
Ricky stroked his chin in a pantomime of deep thought. “Richard and Lis are her only kids, right? Can you tell me that?”
I nodded. That was fair, I figured.
“So, logically, if Richard is dead, that means Lis is now the sole heir, right?”
I shrugged as my stomach did a couple of somersaults.
“That’s it? A shrug? How about you blink twice for yes, once for no.”
I kept my gaze steady on Ricky, not blinking. He gave me a strange half smirk.
Finally, he shrugged, too. “Okay, I get it. You’re not going to tell me.”
“It’s just, I promised I wouldn’t,” I squeaked.
His face softened, and so did the pit in my gut. “I won’t push. I’m sorry.” He stuck a bookmark into his book, closing it, then looked back at me out of the corner of his eye. “But Lis is now the sole heir, right?”
I tried to summon an enigmatic smile, and blinked three times. Let him figure that out.
“Anyway,” he said, rolling his eyes and turning fully back toward me, “I’ve been thinking.
About what we overheard, and about this will you won’t tell me about, and how they might be related.
Lis and that other woman were concerned that Cecilia should change her will as soon as possible—and now, here she is, changing her will.
That’s an odd coincidence. And it also seems odd, immediately after the death of a brother, for the sister to only be concerned about how it affects her standing in a will.
Which makes me wonder whether she wasn’t concerned about this will before Richard died, and maybe did something to help him die to allay those concerns.
Can you tell me what you think about that? ”
I considered this. The whole way that the Rose family related to one another, with every family tie wrapped up in financial considerations, seemed odd to me, and the conversation Lis had been having had seemed callous at best, if not outright suspicious.
“I think,” I said carefully, “that you’re right that there is something strange about this family. Maybe being super rich does that to you—makes all your relationships about money.”
“Which,” Ricky said, “is awfully dehumanizing, and might make it easier to do something to someone who’s standing between you and even more money. To Lis, maybe Richard only represented the difference between half a fortune and a whole fortune.”
“That’s possible,” I said, with some relief that Ricky had landed more or less on the truth about Mrs. Rose’s will without my having to tell him anything.
Ricky continued, “What do we know about the circumstances of Richard’s death? We know he was in his room upstairs, supposedly alone. His wife and daughters had gone somewhere, right?”
“To a movie,” I said. “Rachel said he was working in their room.”
“That’s right. When we came back to our room, we could hear that he was playing music. Then the music stopped, and he fell off the balcony. Or, it was made to look like he fell, I should say.”
Ricky’s last words were lost to me as I got caught up in a strange sense memory. I snapped back into focus. “Ricky,” I said, “are you sure the music stopped before he fell?”
He went still for a moment, thinking hard. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “Logically, I assumed that he had to have turned it off before he fell. But I don’t actually know.”
“And if the music went off after he fell …” I said.
Ricky completed the thought. “… Then that means he wasn’t alone.”
We both thought in silence for another minute. What had come first, the music stopping or the fall? I couldn’t remember.
Ricky cast his eyes down to the bar. “I’m sorry, all I can think of when I try to remember the sequence of events is the body falling. I don’t have any idea whether the music was on or off at that point.”
I felt bad for forcing him to revisit that moment.
I wished I could remember, but all I kept coming back to was how strangely still Ricky had gone, and how much it had terrified me.
“Don’t think about it,” I said, rubbing his arm lightly.
“I’m sorry. I’ll try to remember, don’t you worry about it anymore. ”
He shuddered. “Yeah. Didn’t need to go back there.
But it makes me wonder what the cops found in his room.
Like, was anything amiss there? Nobody’s talking about suicide, so I assume they didn’t find a note or anything.
But was there any clue to what he was doing before he fell?
Or any sign of another person in the room? ”
I looked at Ricky curiously. For someone who didn’t want to revisit his memory of seeing Richard fall to his death, Ricky seemed awfully willing to dwell on every other aspect of the situation. “Are you sure you want to be asking all of these questions?”
He looked pensively away from me for a minute, out the big windows again, then turned to stare across the bar and shrugged. “It’s hard to explain. I don’t want to picture that moment, but I guess it feels like if I understand what happened, maybe I’ll be able to face it. Does that make sense?”
I considered this. The Rose family’s drama had felt like a big distraction, none of our business, but we kept getting dragged into it, and I had to admit that my curiosity was bubbling up.
And, on the one hand, I wanted to be sensitive to what Ricky had witnessed and not upset him, and maybe try to focus on working on our article, but on the other, he seemed to think that getting involved would help, not hurt.
What was a good fake boyfriend to do in this situation?
Oh, who was I fooling? My anxiety, my fear of failure, my impostor syndrome always made me feel like Ricky’s excitement for these extracurricular shenanigans was a distraction, from doing my work and achieving my professional goals.
But on some level I knew that all he was doing was giving me permission to do what I really wanted to do—to color outside the lines a little, try something risky for once, and dig into something and find some answers purely because we wanted to, not because someone else wanted us to.
He was the little devil on my shoulder, but the little devil is always voicing your own true impulses and desires, isn’t he?
All a good fake boyfriend had to do in this situation was smile and go along with it.
So I smiled. “Sure, I think that makes sense. So how do we answer those questions?”
“Maybe this will help,” Ricky said, looking past me down the bar.
I followed his glance and caught the backs of the two girls leaving the lounge, and Erik ambling toward us, giving me a little wave and a bashful smile.
“Hi, Mr. Popp,” Erik said shyly, ignoring Ricky as was his custom. “It’s Erik, remember me?”
I groaned inwardly, but tried to keep my outward expression neutral. “Of course I remember you,” I said, as patiently as I could.
Erik was chewing a little at the corner of his mouth and seemed to be trying to make his eyes as big and brown as he could.
It sobered me to realize that he and I were closer in age than Ricky and I were, and under other circumstances he might come across as appealing, even cute, but right now his act seemed a bit much.
“So, um,” he was saying, “remember how I said I want to be a travel writer, too? I hope you’re not embarrassed or anything—I Googled you, to see what you’ve written.”
I hoped that this exercise had taken away some of my shine for him; there would not have been a very impressive number of results.
But instead, he leaned over the bar with a conspiratorial smile, suddenly seeming far less coquettish and far more confident.
His voice became husky with excitement. “Did you really get to solve a murder in Washington, DC?”