Chapter 6 #2
I hadn’t thought of it as a job perk at the time, but I was realizing now that I could be as proud, if not more so, of that fact as I was about the article I had written about the trip. “Yes, we”—I indicated Ricky, who gave Erik a wave—“we did figure out what had happened, I guess.”
“God!” Erik seemed positively thrilled. “I love to travel, you know, but what I really want is adventure. I can’t believe your job is even better than I was hoping!”
I knew we wanted Erik to help us, but I didn’t want to lead him on too much. I had some sense of professional ethics to consider. “Um, you know that’s not a normal part of this job, right? I don’t think you should expect anything like that to happen if you become a travel writer.”
Erik’s enthusiasm was undiminished, which was perhaps a good sign of his potential usefulness to us in the present circumstances. “And now you’re here and there’s been another death! Do you think this one was murder, too? Are you going to solve another case?”
Ricky leaned in. “Maybe it was. What do you think?”
Erik became solemn. “It was definitely weird. Who falls off a balcony? Maybe he was pushed. Or maybe he was already dead, and his body was thrown off the balcony!”
Ricky and I exchanged a glance. There was a look in Ricky’s eyes that I had seen before, one that used to make me nervous.
It was a look that usually preceded some impulsive action, and it was the look of a man who I was powerless to stop—that had been my lie to myself, anyway.
Now I knew that it was the look of a man who was going to take me somewhere I wanted to go but was afraid to enter on my own.
He turned back to Erik. “So have you heard anything? Did you hear about anything the cops found in his room?”
“I was there,” he said, his chest swelling a little with pride. “I let them into the room, and was there while they searched.”
I didn’t stop myself from being almost as shameless as Ricky. “Did they find anything?”
He deflated. “I don’t think so,” he shrugged. “They seemed sure that he had just fallen by accident.”
“What about you?” Ricky asked. “Part of being a writer is being observant, right? Did you notice anything amiss? You probably know these rooms better than anyone else.”
“Dang, I should have looked more closely.” Erik seemed disappointed in himself.
One of Ricky’s eyebrows shot up, an even surer sign that he was looking to stir things up. “Has anything been touched in the room since last night?”
“No,” Erik said slowly, looking skeptically at Ricky. “The sheriff asked us not to clean it up yet. Nobody’s even been in there.”
“But you could get in, right? You have a passkey?”
Erik brightened, sensing adventure. “Oh, snap! I do have a key! Do you guys want to go look with me?”
Ricky was grinning broadly. I grinned, too, knowing that my former urge to protest would have been a waste of effort and feeling liberated at giving up the pretense.
Ricky had maneuvered Erik as successfully as he usually played me.
I nodded my permission to Ricky, saying to Erik, “Yeah, okay, sure. Lead the way.”
Erik made a show of skulking through the lobby as we passed from the lounge to the hallway leading to Richard and Rachel Rose’s suite on the main floor, ostentatiously looking over his shoulders to make sure we weren’t observed.
He put a finger to his lips as he slid his passkey into the lock on the door, and waved us through as quickly as he could.
The room we had entered was similar to the ones Ricky and I had already seen, except that the corridor leading from the door to the main space was longer, with a small second bedroom opening off the hallway in addition to the usual bathroom and closet.
I poked my head through the bathroom and bedroom doors.
Rachel Rose had removed her personal belongings, and the room hadn’t been slept in since Erik’s last cleaning service the previous morning, so there was little to note.
There was a used hand towel on the bathroom counter, but the other towels were still neatly folded, and the bathroom wastebasket contained only a single wadded tissue.
The bed in the bedroom was still neatly made, as was the one in the main room at the end of the corridor.
The main room was very similar to our room, with a sitting area between the king-size bed and the windows to the balcony.
There was a TV mounted to the wall above a credenza, on top of which were two stacks of books.
I quickly scanned the titles, most of which seemed to be about the minutia and arcana of economic theory.
Not my idea of fun bedtime reading, and probably not particularly relevant.
Erik was stalking around the room, trying to hone his powers of observation. Ricky and I met in front of the sofa in the sitting area, both of us putting our hands on our hips and looking around from this vantage point.
“Not much jumping out at me,” I said.
“Yeah. But what about the music? I don’t see a radio.”
“Erik,” I called, “Richard was listening to music before he fell. We could hear it downstairs. Do you know how he might have been playing it?”
Erik stopped mid-stalk and looked around him, then shrugged. “Maybe on his laptop or his phone? I don’t see either of those, though. His wife probably has them.”
Ricky reached for the TV remote on a side table next to the sofa. “Maybe he had one of those music channels on,” he said as he pressed the power button.
The TV blinked on, and after a second’s delay, classical music burst out of the speakers.
“Shhh!” Erik lunged for the remote, powering off the TV. We all stared at the now-dark screen.
“Guess that was it, anyway,” Ricky shrugged.
I turned to Erik. “You said you let the police into the room when they arrived last night. The music wasn’t playing when you came into the room?”
Erik scratched his head and thought for a moment. “No,” he said slowly. “I remember thinking how quiet it was when we came over here. There wasn’t any music.”
Ricky and I exchanged a meaningful look.
The music had been off, so someone had turned it off.
I screwed my face up, trying to remember whether the music was still playing when I heard the splash of Richard falling into the hot tub.
If it was, that would mean somebody else had been in the room with him.
My gaze drifted down to the remote next to the couch, and I could tell Ricky’s eyes had followed mine when I heard him mutter, “Oh, jeez.”
Oh, jeez, indeed. Maybe there had been fingerprints on the power button that could have told us who had pressed it last—Richard, or someone else. But now those fingerprints were Ricky’s and Erik’s. When our eyes met again, Ricky flashed me an apologetic grimace.
“Well, I guess we kind of messed up any potential evidence there,” he sighed. “Does anybody see anything else?”
I realized that something about the room did feel odd, though I couldn’t figure out what it was.
I looked around again. Thinking vaguely of the bedroom on the other side of the wall next to the bed, I remembered something I’d heard the night before, when Lis and Mary Alice had been figuring out how to shuffle rooms.
“Last night, your mom mentioned that Richard and Rachel had a second room, for their daughters,” I said. “So why did they need a separate bedroom here?”
Erik knitted his brows. “I don’t know. I hadn’t thought about it before, but when they checked in, Rachel made a big deal about needing this suite, which is why it wasn’t available for you, and … well, I did have to make up both beds yesterday.”
“So they were sleeping separately,” Ricky mused. “Maybe that’s something.”
“There’s something else bugging me,” I said, “but I can’t put my finger on it. Ricky, this part of the suite looks more or less like our room, right?”
He looked around. “Yeah, basically identical, I think.”
“Most of the furniture is the same in all the rooms,” Erik nodded. “Only some of the small decor items are different, like the paintings on the walls and some of the lamps and stuff.”
“I feel like I’m missing something,” I insisted. “Something’s not the same as our room.” We all looked around again.
“Would it help to go down to our room, look there, and see if you can figure out what’s different?” Ricky offered.
“Maybe,” I said.
We all trooped out of the room, Erik reprising his cartoon cat burglar act, then took the elevator down to our room.
As we entered, I thought I caught Erik glancing jealously back and forth between Ricky, me, and the bed, but I tried to ignore him and focus on what was different from the room we had been in a moment before.
The walls were the same clean eggshell white. The couch was upholstered in the same sturdy olive-green twill, the chairs in the same dusty blue. The furniture was the same lustrous golden-toned wood. The paintings on the wall weren’t identical, but were the same general sizes and color palettes.
But there was something here that I hadn’t seen upstairs. The floor in our sitting area was warmed by a cream-colored sisal rug layered on top of the wood-grain laminate, and I realized that the Roses’ room hadn’t had a rug.
I pointed down. “Does every room have a rug in the sitting area?”
“Yeah,” Erik said. “I have to vacuum them every day.”
“But there wasn’t a rug upstairs,” I said.
“There wasn’t?”
Ricky was excited. “Are you sure? Can we go back up to double-check?”
Back up we went. Erik forgot to make a show of going into the room this time, and we all rushed straight to the sitting area. Our steps echoed off the bare faux-wood floor. There was no rug, though some streaks of dust on the otherwise clean floor suggested that there had indeed been one.
Ricky was the first to speak. “Well, gang, what do we think this means?”