Chapter 10
Shawn tearfully ushered Ricky and me back to the changing room, where we quickly traded our robes for our clothes.
I was almost too shell-shocked from the roller coaster of emotions that the afternoon had taken me on to notice my clothes clinging a little to my oily skin.
Almost, but not so shell-shocked that I didn’t desperately want a shower, right now.
This was not to be, however. As we passed back into the lobby of the spa, ducking to let a pair of EMTs with a stretcher pass, we nearly collided with Deputy Duncan from the sheriff’s office. She did a double take on seeing us.
“Two days in a row, two deaths out here, and both times I run into you two?” She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. Pointing to a pair of chairs by the door, she said, “You better sit here. Don’t move until I come back.”
“Oh, boy,” Ricky said as we sat down. “She thinks we’re suspects!”
Ricky seemed to think this was amusing, maybe even exciting.
At this point, having been through such a busy day, I was starting to simply feel exhausted.
And I really wanted that shower. I was sitting on the edge of the chair, trying my hardest not to increase the contact between my clothes and my greasy skin.
Everything I was wearing was probably ruined by now, I figured, but I didn’t need to make it worse.
“Oliver, relax,” Ricky said when I didn’t respond. “I’m joking. She’ll talk to Shawn and Cole and she’ll know we couldn’t have done anything. And how could we have pushed Richard onto our balcony from our balcony? It doesn’t make any sense. We have nothing to worry about.”
“I’m not worried,” I said, a fair bit more crabbily than I had intended. “I’m sticky!”
“Huh?”
“She spread this … stuff … all over me, and I’m all slimy and my clothes are sticking to me, and I hate it.” We had been too busy today; too much had happened. I could tell I was getting overstimulated. I had to figure the wine wasn’t helping, either.
“The massage oil?” Ricky jumped up, ducking down behind the registration desk and coming back with a big, rolled-up white towel.
“Here, give me your arm.” He rubbed vigorously all up and down my arm, pushing up my sleeve to get almost up to my shoulder.
Relief washed over me as I felt the greasy residue sloughing off my skin into the towel.
I willingly gave him my other arm when he was done, and then he crouched down in front of me to rub down my legs.
“Is that better?”
My gratitude layered on top of my exhaustion to nearly overwhelm me. “So much better,” I sighed. I was trying to figure out if it would be too much to ask him to go over my back as well when Deputy Duncan returned.
“I talked to the massage therapists,” she said, more friendly than before but still maintaining her professional veneer of gruffness.
“You’re in the clear. The EMTs say it looks like a pretty clear-cut heart attack, anyway.
But it’s kind of like you two are a kiss of death!
If I find any more bodies with you guys around, I might not arrest you, but I might have to call a priest for an exorcism or something. ”
Dang it. I had so nearly forgotten about my worry that Ricky and I were cursed, but now Deputy Duncan brought it roaring back.
I tried to think what we had done this time to activate the curse; Ricky hadn’t asked me out, but I had a vague memory of maybe trying to get him to agree to be more than just pretend boyfriends.
That might be an even more serious offense.
“Oliver,” Ricky said sternly, reading my thoughts, “we are not cursed. She’s not serious. It’s a weird coincidence, that’s all.”
I looked to Deputy Duncan, hoping for confirmation that Ricky was right, but she merely raised an eyebrow and shrugged. It appeared she came down more on my side than Ricky’s. Cursed in the eyes of the law seemed like a major problem.
“Anyway,” Deputy Duncan said, “you can go. At first glance, it doesn’t look like this was a murder, either, so we’ll have to talk to the family, but not much else to do unless the medical examiner finds something suspicious after all and decides to order an autopsy.
Talk about coincidence.” She shrugged again, and watched us leave the spa.
Ricky had reduced my need for a shower, but he hadn’t eliminated it.
As we began moving again, passing from the spa into the lobby of the inn, my shirt still clung stubbornly to my still-oily back.
I was gritting my teeth, making a beeline for the elevator, when Erik called to us from behind the front desk.
“Psst,” he said, waving us over. I reluctantly followed Ricky in heeding his call. Erik’s eyes shone in excitement. “I just heard the news—the sheriff’s in the lounge talking to the family. Another death! So soon after Richard,” he whispered. “Are you guys suspicious of this one, too?”
Ricky and I spoke at the same time.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Maybe,” Ricky said.
I looked at him incredulously. “Really? You heard the deputy. There’s no sign of foul play.”
I was maybe not whispering quietly enough; as I said “foul play,” Tawny passed into the lobby from the lounge and her head immediately swiveled our way.
“Wait,” she said in a low tone, hustling to join our little huddle around the desk. “Foul play? What are you talking about?”
“Aunt Cecilia,” Erik said. “Dying right after Richard like that. It seems suspicious, right?”
“The sheriff said she died of natural causes,” Tawny said. “And Richard fell on accident, didn’t he?”
“Maybe someone wanted it to look that way,” Ricky said. “It does seem strange—I’d believe natural causes for Cecilia, except for two things: the timing, and the fact that she was alive when the massage therapist left the room, and dead when she came back.”
“Hmm,” Tawny mused. “I dunno. It’s weird, but maybe it’s like—who was that? Debbie Reynolds! Remember? Her daughter died, and then the next day, she died, too. Of a broken heart,” she said, putting a sorrowful hand to her breast.
“You spent a little time with Mrs. Rose,” Ricky said to me. “Did she seem brokenhearted, like Debbie Reynolds?”
I tried to mentally compare Mrs. Rose to what I could remember of Debbie Reynolds. “She seemed old like Debbie Reynolds?”
“She was real old,” Tawny nodded. “I lost count, like, three times trying to put the candles on her birthday cake the other day. There were so many.”
“I heard they burned her dining room to the ground when the cake fell,” Erik agreed.
“It wasn’t me that dropped it,” Tawny said defensively. “Rayleigh was trying to carry the cake and make a TikTok at the same time. I told her I’d film, but she said I had to help Rielle do the dance.”
Tawny made more sense to me now that I realized that she saw Richard and Rachel’s teen daughters as her peers.
“Anyway,” she continued, “what about Richard? You think there was something suspicious about that, too? Didn’t he slip and fall?”
“It’s totally suspicious,” Erik answered. “There’s evidence that he wasn’t alone in his room at the time. What if the other person pushed him? I mean, falling off a balcony is awfully weird.”
“Evidence?” Tawny leaned in, intrigued.
“Yeah, and I helped find it,” Erik beamed.
“Shh-hh-hh,” Ricky cautioned, looking up furtively as Rachel Rose sailed out of the lounge, toward the elevator, though she altered her path when she saw us.
“Tawny,” she commanded. “Give me a cigarette.”
Tawny instinctively reached for her purse, which wasn’t there, then fruitlessly patted her empty pockets before catching herself. “I don’t have any,” she said, adding proudly, “I gave them up.”
“What about the rest of you?” Rachel demanded, encompassing Erik, Ricky, and me in an impatiently sweeping point. We all shook our heads.
“Fine,” Rachel huffed. “For the record, I don’t smoke, either.” Her point turned threatening. “You got that?” she barked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Erik said meekly.
Rachel took a breath to gather herself, drawing a smoothing hand over the front sweep of her auburn helmet.
“It had already been such a trying day,” she said, her attempt to sound calm slightly brittle.
“And now, this. I suppose we all need our releases. I’ll have to find one that’s less self-destructive.
Excuse me—you can resume your little cabal. ”
She stalked imperiously to the elevator, and once she had boarded, Tawny and Erik eagerly pulled us back into a huddle.
“You were saying something about evidence that Richard wasn’t alone when he fell,” Tawny said.
Erik bobbed his head excitedly. “Right, the evidence. And I was the one who knew that Richard and Rachel were sleeping in separate rooms, and that she didn’t go into the movies with Rielle and Rayleigh.
And then we found out that she went to the café and met someone there, but we don’t know who it was. ”
“Yeah, the hitman,” I said distractedly, trying to discreetly pull my T-shirt away from my back.
Everyone stopped and stared at me.
Delight danced in Ricky’s eyes. “The hitman? What is this theory? This sounds way wackier than usual for you.”
Shoot. I hadn’t said my goofy hitman theory out loud earlier, I remembered, and I remembered why. “It’s not a theory,” I said quickly. “It’s not anything.”
“It sounds like something,” Tawny insisted. “It sounds exciting!”
“You have to tell us,” Erik pleaded.
“No, forget I said anything, please,” I said, inwardly kicking myself for my loose lips. Could I blame the wine for my carelessness, I wondered? I could, I decided. No more Prosecco for me, ever again.
“C’mon, Oliver,” Ricky said, grinning. “Why should I always have all the fun of coming up with crackpot ideas? Tell us yours, and we’ll take it as seriously as you always take mine.”
“Hey, I try to engage intellectually with your theories as best I can, even when they’re totally silly,” I protested. “This is not worth intellectually engaging with.”
“Let us be the judges of that,” Ricky said.