Chapter 7
Erik plunked dazedly down to the floor. He landed cross-legged and absently ran a finger through a ridge of dust left behind by the missing rug. “I can’t believe I didn’t notice that,” he muttered.
I felt bad for Erik. “Don’t beat yourself up,” I said gently, lowering myself onto the edge of the sofa. “There was a lot going on. You weren’t specifically looking for anything—we made you think about it after the fact, and it wasn’t on your mind in the moment.”
Erik nodded glumly on the floor.
“Anyway,” Ricky chimed in, “I think the important question is, why is the rug missing? Was there something incriminating on it?”
Erik looked up at us, his eyes going wide. “Like blood?”
Ricky shrugged, looking at the floor. “Maybe, but I don’t know. There wasn’t a lot of blood after he fell into our hot tub. Matter of fact, I’m not sure there was any.”
I had a disturbing thought. “Could he have already been dead awhile before his body fell into the hot tub? There wouldn’t have been bleeding if he’d been dead long enough. Maybe he was killed in here, on the rug, and then his killer threw the body off the balcony.”
We all grimaced at each other. After a thoughtful moment, Ricky said, “I wish we could find out what the medical examiner determined was the cause of death. I had assumed he died of internal injuries sustained when he fell onto the hot tub, so there wouldn’t have been much blood anyway. But maybe it happened like you said. …”
He rubbed his chin slowly. “I don’t know, though. Erik, are all the rugs the same?”
Erik nodded. “Yeah, they’re all like the one in your room.”
Ricky nodded back. “That’s a woven fiber material, right? If there was blood on the rug, I have to think it would seep through and get on the floor underneath, too. I don’t see any trace of blood here, do you?”
We all scanned the floor, which showed no stains. “The killer could have cleaned the floor after removing the rug,” Erik offered.
“But then there wouldn’t be any of this dust,” Ricky pointed out. Erik inspected his dusty fingertips, meditatively rubbing them together.
“Okay,” I said, “so we’re back to asking why the rug is gone. Also, where did it go?”
Erik leaned over, peering under the sofa. I got up and Ricky and I began opening closets and kneeling down to look under beds. We ventured out onto the balcony. There was no sign of the missing rug. We regrouped in the sitting area.
I pondered this latest wild goose chase Ricky and I had set out on.
We had no concrete proof of Richard Rose’s death being anything but a weird accident.
Were we making something out of nothing?
My instincts said no, that there was too much about this situation that didn’t smell right.
The Rose family’s immediate focus on the chain of inheritance seemed too cold, and between the music and now the rug, I was increasingly, uneasily convinced that Richard hadn’t been alone in this room before he went over the balcony railing.
Maybe this was a promising tack: who could have been here with Richard?
“Erik,” I said, “I’m going to test your memory and your powers of observation again. But I know at the time you weren’t necessarily trying to be observant or remember anything, so it’s fine if you don’t have answers.”
“Okay?” His expression was somewhere between eagerness and anxiety.
“Last night, when we came by the lounge, most of the family was gathered there, right?”
“Yeah, that’s right. I think everybody was there at one time or another.”
Ricky chimed in, “When we arrived, Richard had already gone to his room, and his sister, Lis, wasn’t there, either. Right?”
“That’s right,” I agreed. “And while we were there, Richard’s wife Rachel and their two daughters left to go see a movie. And Tawny followed us out. Did she ever come back?”
Erik thought for a second. “No, she didn’t.”
“It was about twenty minutes between the time we left the lounge, and the time Richard fell into our hot tub. Did anybody else leave the lounge during that time?”
“We already covered almost everybody anyway,” Erik pointed out.
“I think Wiley left a minute or two after you guys, which left me, my mom, and Aunt Cecilia. My mom and Aunt Cecilia talked for a minute while we cleaned up, but I’d say after you left, everybody was out of the lounge within about ten minutes. ”
I deflated a little. “So that’s not very helpful. I suppose Rachel and the daughters are in the clear since they actually left the premises, but as far as we know, everybody else stayed here, right?”
“Nobody else drove away, anyway,” Erik said.
“I took some trash out after we left the lounge, and all the cars were in the parking lot except Richard and Rachel’s BMW.
” His eyes darkened as a thought flashed across his face.
“Wait a minute. Rayleigh and Rielle told me their mom dropped them off at the movie. She didn’t go in with them. So we don’t know where Rachel was.”
Ricky and I exchanged a glance. He asked Erik, “How far away is the movie theater?”
“I dunno, five, ten minutes?”
“Maybe we should go there and see exactly how long it takes,” Ricky said. “The difference between five and ten minutes could be an important one.”
I knew what he was thinking. At five minutes there and five minutes back, Rachel might have had enough time to drop her daughters off and return to the inn before her husband’s death. At ten minutes each way, maybe not. Did she have an alibi, or not?
We didn’t exactly invite Erik to come with us into town, but as we passed through the lobby on our way to the parking lot, he breezily told his mother that he was taking his lunch break, and once outside, he clambered eagerly into the backseat of Ricky’s car.
He hovered between us as Ricky drove out toward the highway, leaning forward over our shoulders, offering directions and brimming with excitement to be shadowing a real travel writer, no matter how many different ways I tried to gently tell him that what we were doing was very much not normal travel writer stuff.
To get to the town of Rose Beach from the Rose Beach Inn involved taking Highway 101 up through the coastal forest for a couple of miles, until we reached a cross street, with signs pointing to a historic lighthouse to the left, on the water, and toward the town to the right, headed inland.
This road wound down through the woods from the highway into a small valley.
As we descended, passing only the occasional small house set back from the roadway, Erik peppered me with questions about the parts of my job that seemed to interest him most, almost none of which were actually related to the work.
Do you get to go everywhere for free? (Kinda, yeah.) Do you get to go to a lot of parties at the places you go to?
(Not if I can help it.) Do you get to travel internationally a lot?
(My mom took me to Vancouver once, does that count?) Do you think restaurants and hotels give you better service than everybody else?
(Probably, which I mostly find embarrassing.) Did you guys meet through your work?
(Yep.) You probably get to meet a lot of hot guys, though, going so many places, right?
(Ummm …) So, like, is it serious between you two, or … ? (What are you getting at, kid?)
I caught Ricky’s eye in the rearview mirror, and we each raised an eyebrow at each other. There were signs of a town forming around us, as the buildings became more frequent and got closer to the road, some even with cars parked in front of them that were more than yard art.
“We’re looking for the movie theater,” Ricky drily reminded Erik.
“Yeah, keep going. We’ll hit downtown in a couple blocks.”
Up to this point, blocks had been a loosely defined concept, but presently cross-streets did start appearing more regularly; the street sprouted sidewalks and decorative, vintage-style streetlamps, and the urban core, such as it was, of a small, early twentieth-century lumber town emerged around us.
The Bijou theater was hard to miss, its moderately elaborate neon marquee anchoring one of the three main blocks that constituted downtown Rose Beach.
I consulted my watch as Ricky angled the car into a parking spot in front of the theater. The drive from the inn had taken us seven minutes.
“Inconclusive,” I said. “We think it was about twenty minutes, but we don’t know exactly how long it was between when Rachel and the girls left the inn last night and when Richard died.
But she could have gotten here, dropped the girls off, and gotten back to the inn within about fifteen minutes.
She’d have had to work fast, but she might have been able to do it. ”
Ricky turned to Erik. “Any idea if anyone around here might have seen them here last night, and could tell us where Rachel went during the movie?”
Erik nodded in the direction of the box office under the marquee of the theater. “I know that kid working in there. He goes to my old high school. We could ask if he was here last night. He might remember.”
We got out of the car and followed Erik, stopping on the sidewalk as he ambled over to the little glass-enclosed booth. The bored-looking teenage boy inside brightened as he recognized Erik, calling out through his tinny microphone, “Yo! What up, bruh?”
“What up, K,” Erik said, self-consciously lowering his voice.
“Aww,” Ricky whispered to me, “looks like we’ve got a closet case on our hands.”
I looked up and down the street at the tiny, quaint expanse of Rose Beach. “Small town life, I guess,” I whispered back. No wonder Erik wanted to figure out how to travel out into the wider world.
“I can’t believe I gotta spend my summer here,” K was saying to Erik. “And then I still have another year. You’re so lucky you graduated.”
“I’ve just been working, too.” Erik shrugged companionably. “Listen, K, were you here last night?”
“Yeah, man, it was dead,” K said.