Chapter 11
I was roused by Ricky moving around the room. Morning light streamed in from the windows fronting the balcony, and as I blinked myself awake, I realized that Ricky was gathering his things from the drawers and packing up his duffel bag.
I had a moment of panic. Was he leaving me, abandoning our assignment because I actually had scared him off? I thought I’d at least get a chance to try to save face after my mini meltdown, but maybe he’d simply had enough of me.
I tried to keep my voice steady. “What are you doing?”
“Oh, hey,” he said. “You probably want to pack up, too. We can leave our stuff here for the morning, but we should be ready to go when we get back.”
“Huh?”
Ricky regarded me coolly, only a hint of a smile in the corners of his mouth. “What’s happened to you, man? You used to be so in tune with your plans and itineraries. You’re spacing out on me.”
The grogginess of sleep and the panic of waking up to Ricky leaving were beginning to fade, and my brain scrambled to catch his drift.
Plans … itineraries. Wow, I had really been a mess the last couple of days.
It had completely escaped my notice that we were supposed to be leaving the Rose Beach Inn today; we were booked at another resort, about a hundred miles down the coast, tonight and tomorrow night.
My heart sank as I dragged myself out of bed and into the bathroom to freshen up.
I had wanted to help Ricky figure out what was going on here—but how could we do that when we weren’t here anymore?
I had wanted so badly to try to make things better for Ricky, but kept getting so distracted that I’d overlooked this giant hitch in my plans. What would I do now?
I was also embarrassed that I kept falling down on the job in front of Ricky. As I brushed my teeth, I dredged my memory to make sure I knew what else our day’s itinerary held, so I could save at least a tiny bit of face.
We were supposed to drive an hour or so north this morning, I remembered, to tour the facilities of a collective of dairy farmers known throughout the region, and with a growing national profile, for their cheeses, butter, and ice creams. Remembering our brief, I wondered what was so romantic about dairy products.
I mean, I liked cheese and butter and ice cream as much as the next person; but if I wasn’t entirely sure what would put me in an amorous mood, well, I was pretty sure cows weren’t it.
But maybe Ricky knew something that I didn’t about the erotic allure of cheddar.
Ricky tapped on the bathroom door and said he was going to the lounge for a cup of coffee. Left alone to gather my own stuff and pack my bag, I tried and failed to ignore a gnawing little thought that Ricky seemed less sociable than usual this morning.
I was still in my head about yesterday, I told myself. Ricky’s fair and reasonable, I thought. He’ll give me a chance to apologize. He’s just not much of a morning person.
Yet there was still a small pit in my stomach when he came back and all he said to me, a dull look in his eyes as he sipped coffee from his travel mug, was, “Ready to go?”
He was quiet in the car, too, as we set off, leaving me alone with a swirling eddy of thoughts that were determined to suck me in and drag me down. Something is wrong. He’s upset. He isn’t talking to me.
I tried to break free with a conversational gambit. “So, do cheese and ice cream make you feel romantic?”
“Not since I turned thirty,” he said, looking down the road ahead but seeming to relax a bit. Or maybe I had imagined the tension. “I can’t really do a lot of dairy anymore.”
“Oh,” I said.
He flashed a weak smile at me. “Something for you to look forward to, youngster. Meanwhile, you’ll have to let the cheese get you hot and bothered for the both of us.”
“Is that … a thing? Have I been totally oblivious to the romantic possibilities of dairy products?”
Ricky thought about this. “I guess whipped cream has its uses.”
“Huh.” I looked out my window and counted a few trees to clear that thought from my mind. I turned back to Ricky. “Okay, but seriously. How does this fit in with our assignment? I hated the massage, but I sort of get why somebody else might think it was nice. I don’t get this one.”
Ricky shrugged. “It was probably put on our itinerary at the request of the ad department. Or maybe we’re trying to boost readership in the upper Midwest or something. You’re overthinking it.”
“Sorry,” I mumbled, worried that I had annoyed him, that I was losing even more ground, having already started the day from behind.
“You don’t have to be sorry,” he said a little testily, then, more softly, “See, but now I do. I’m sorry I snapped. Got up on the wrong side of the couch this morning.”
I tried to take his apology at face value, to let it sink in and convince me that whatever mood he was in wasn’t my fault.
But there was a potential problem with that theory, and I couldn’t stop myself from pushing a little deeper, giving him another chance to lay the blame on me. “Why did you sleep on the couch?”
He chewed the inside of his cheek for a minute before he answered, still keeping his eyes straight ahead. “I thought maybe you needed some space. To decompress.”
There it was.
I wanted so badly to protest, to say that I’d wanted him closer, not farther away. But I wasn’t sure that he wasn’t really saying that he’d needed the space. And I wasn’t sure what to say anyway.
All I could do was say again, “I’m sorry. I’m really embarrassed.”
Ricky considered this for a couple of miles. “Maybe,” he finally said, “we chalk this one up to a learning curve. I’m still learning to read your signs, and I missed some red flags yesterday. And you should know that you can always be up front with me about what you need.”
Now it was my turn to mull a few miles away. “I’m not sure that’s entirely fair,” I said. “To you, I mean. You should be able to get what you need, too, even if it’s not what I need in that moment.”
He shot me a glance, his eyebrows slightly raised. “What do you mean?”
“I mean,” I said slowly, “that figuring out if Richard and Cecilia Rose were murdered, or what happened, is important, too. You and Erik and Tawny wanted to try to talk through it, but I didn’t let you, and I don’t like that I made out like my problem was more important than yours. Because it wasn’t.”
“Murder is kind of important,” Ricky agreed with a small smile. “Feeling slimy is maybe less important, but more urgent.”
I was so grateful to him in that moment. I still felt stupid about the whole thing, but at least he understood.
“So,” he continued, “we took care of the urgent matter last night—right? You’re not still oily, are you?”
I stuck my tongue out at him.
“Now we can get back to the important matter of murder,” he finished.
“Possible murder,” I countered.
“You’re still not convinced?”
I tried to sort through my thoughts. “I guess I’m more confused than ever.
It feels like there’s more of a motive to kill Cecilia, but her death looks more natural, less suspicious than Richard’s.
I know the timing is suspicious, but is it really so hard to believe what the EMTs said, that an old woman under a great deal of stress would have a heart attack? ”
“Maybe not, but if it really is about money, about the chain of inheritance, both of their deaths make sense as murder,” Ricky pointed out. “Take out Richard to move to the front of the line, then take out Cecilia to get the loot. Which points to Lis.”
“Yeah,” I said dubiously. “Which makes her a really obvious suspect. Plus, the sheriff’s office doesn’t seem to be investigating either death as a murder. They’re calling Richard an accident, and Cecilia natural causes.”
“That’s the genius of Lis’s plan,” Ricky insisted. “Yeah, it would point to her—if it looked like anybody got murdered. But she made sure everything looked accidental or natural, so it looks like she just got really lucky.”
“Okay, how did she do that?”
“Um …” Ricky’s confidence faltered. “Well, we think Richard wasn’t alone, and we don’t know where she was,” he said unconvincingly.
“That’s true,” I conceded. “And how does the missing rug factor in?”
Ricky drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he thought. When he stopped drumming, he said, “I got nothing.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said. “And what about Cecilia? The deputy said no sign of foul play.”
“Maybe Lis poisoned her? Put something in her coffee?”
I thought that sounded awfully far-fetched, but at least, unlike Richard and the rug, there was a theory.
Something came back to me. “When we were in the waiting room at the spa, Lis said she thought her mother hadn’t been feeling well.
If she had given her some kind of slow-acting poison—for the sake of argument, let’s say I agree with this theory—maybe she was planting a story, with us as witnesses, so Cecilia’s death a short time later wouldn’t seem strange. ”
Ricky’s face brightened. “See, now you’re getting on my wavelength! I like that.”
I smiled, too, happy to make him happy.
The highway had meandered inland, navigating first through coastal forest, and now through lush green farmland, the valley distantly framed by hills covered in logging forests. A roadside billboard with a picture of a smiling cow told us that our destination was only a few more miles ahead.
“It’s all academic, though, isn’t it,” Ricky said, the light dimming from his face again. “We have to leave this afternoon, so probably we won’t ever really know what happened.”
I felt myself deflate, too. If only there had been something more we could have done this morning, some clue we could have uncovered before we had to leave, so we could find at least a little bit of closure.
Instead, here we were, miles away, and I was about to have to eat cheese for two by myself and figure out how to feel romantic about it.