Chapter 15
Tawny plodded unsteadily over to me, putting her sunglasses back on as she went. “This would probably be easier if I wasn’t barefoot,” she said. “Though maybe not, considering the shoes I have.”
Finally, she made it, looking down with me at the rolled-up sisal rug from Richard and Rachel Rose’s suite at the inn.
“Holy crap,” she said, looking from the rug up to the balconies soaring hundreds of feet above us, her face white. “This went far.”
“Yeah,” I said, excitement pushing a bit of my earlier anguish aside. “It came from Richard and Rachel’s room, and it was missing after he fell. I wonder what it means that it’s down here.”
“The cops told you it was missing? What did they think it meant?”
“No,” I corrected her. “We discovered it was missing. Ricky and I did. We reported it to the sheriff’s deputy, but she didn’t seem that interested.”
“Wait, you were poking around in Richard’s room? How come?”
“Looking for clues. Trying to figure out what happened.”
“Gosh, I thought you guys were joking around last night. You really are investigating. And you really don’t think he was alone. Well, what do you think this means?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I really wish I did.”
Tawny pondered the rug for a few seconds, then said, “Yeah, but, like, what’s it to you? Why investigate at all? I mean, like, this is definitely weird, but if there’s nothing else—nobody else—saying that anything happened, why waste your time?”
“For Ricky,” I said, without hesitation. “He saw Richard fall. He saw him die. He doesn’t show it, but it really freaked him out, and he’d feel better if we knew what had really happened.”
Tawny nodded, as if this made sense to her. “Okay, but if you find something … If, say, you find out who was with Richard—if he really wasn’t alone, I mean—are you gonna tell the police?”
My thoughts had wandered back to Ricky, but they had taken on an even more jumbled and distracted, slightly numb form, and as her question registered, my brain struggled to spit out a coherent answer.
“Probably? If that person pushed him, yeah, I guess we’d tell the police, right?
Wouldn’t you? But if that person was there, but he fell by accident and they didn’t see it happen, or couldn’t help him or anything …
well, I don’t know exactly what we’d do in that case.
That person would have been a witness who didn’t speak up, which is morally wrong, and maybe illegal, I’m not sure, but maybe the police wouldn’t need to know. ”
“Gosh,” Tawny said, looking back down at the rug.
“What are you two doing in there?” We followed the somewhat artificially chummy voice to see Wiley staring at us from back near our log, a smile not quite reaching his eyes. He was supporting Lis on his arm; her bemused smile seemed more genuine.
Tawny clutched my arm as we tramped through the bushes back to the beach.
I didn’t love that she kept touching me, but I reminded myself that supporting a barefoot woman tramping through bushes was the gentlemanly thing to do, and that flinching or yanking my arm away would be very ungentlemanly, plus if she fell, she’d probably lose her sunglasses again.
“We found something,” I said as we joined Wiley and Lis, not sure I wanted to be more specific, or if it would upset Lis.
“The rug from Richard’s room,” Tawny chimed in, blowing my attempt at tact and discretion.
“What? Down here?” Lis said, her smile gone.
“We had discovered that it was missing from his room,” I said. “It appears to have ended up down here somehow.”
Lis had tensed up, her eyes narrowing. “What—what do you think it means?”
“I don’t know,” I said again. I was starting to wonder if I knew anything. My thoughts were becoming very slippery.
“I bet I do,” Wiley said, his voice cutting through my befuddlement, his tone still blustery and still at odds with the hard glint in his eye.
“I bet Richard got drunk and thought the rug was talking to him, so he took it outside and threw it off the balcony. Hey, I bet that’s how he fell—he went down with the rug!
Right, Tawny? Don’t you think that’s what happened?
” He laughed unpleasantly. I found myself more confused than ever by his bizarre scenario.
“That’s not funny, Wiley,” Lis said sharply. “None of this is funny.”
“Yeah,” Tawny said. “Not funny.”
“Okay,” he said, putting up his hands in surrender, then lowering them to his hips. “Should we pull it out? Take a look, see if there’s important evidence on it? Maybe something he spilled?”
“No,” Lis said—nervously? Was it nervously? I couldn’t quite tell. Maybe the quiver I thought I heard was a trick of the wind. “Maybe it is evidence. In which case, we shouldn’t touch it, right?”
I looked around at the group. Everyone was shifting their weight around uncomfortably.
Maybe we were all cold. Being cold was one of the few things I was sure of; I was too distracted to get a handle on what was happening or what to do.
“We probably need to tell the sheriff’s office,” I finally said.
“Ricky and I already reported the rug missing, so we should tell them we found it.”
“You did? How efficient,” Wiley said.
“I agree,” said Lis. “We should tell the sheriff’s office. This is very … perplexing.”
“Yeah, okay,” Wiley agreed.
“I’ll do it,” Tawny offered. “I was ready to go back up to the inn anyway, and you gotta go back up there to get any reception. I’ll tootle on up right now and give the sheriff a call.
” She didn’t wait for a response, stomping barefoot double-time across the sand to the trail back up the bluff.
As she started to climb the rise, she called back, “I’m on it! ”
“She’s on it,” Wiley said, raising a cynically arched eyebrow.
I shivered, cold from the wind, but also unable to shake my persistent discomfort around Wiley.
I wanted to be somewhere warm, somewhere else, away from him.
I still had a hint of a notion that there had been a reason I had left our room to come down here, but the events of the last several minutes had pushed exactly what that reason was out of my mind.
Being around Wiley made me want to go be with Ricky instead, though I couldn’t put my finger on why that desire had a dark tinge around its edges.
“I’m about ready to head back up, too,” I said, reaching down to retrieve my computer from atop the log. “I should check on my patient.”
My head buzzed all the way up the bluff, thinking about the rug, wondering what it meant that it had ended up in that remote spot down on the beach.
Had someone hidden it there, or had it truly fallen?
Wiley seemed like he had been joking, but was it really plausible that Richard Rose had thrown the rug off his balcony and accidentally gone with it?
Why would he have done that? I tried to remember what Tawny and Lis and Wiley had said and done.
I knew the whole conversation about the rug had felt weird and uncomfortable, but even just a few moments later, the specifics were fuzzy in my mind.
Had their behavior seemed suspicious? Did Wiley’s behavior ever not seem suspicious? Why had I been so distracted?
What would Ricky think?
I was growing too excited to put my finger on any reason why that shouldn’t be my primary thought.
As I emerged from the top of the trail and crossed the parking lot to the inn, I noticed a tall, broad-shouldered guy about my age sitting on the bench by the door, a book in his lap. He noticed me, too, and looked up and flashed me a dazzling smile.
“Hey,” he said. “Oliver, right?”
I recognized that voice. I hated that voice.
Cole. Ricky’s massage therapist yesterday, who I hadn’t been able to see but who I had imagined was very handsome and unnecessarily flirty with Ricky.
I cursed myself to discover that he was almost even more handsome than I had imagined.
Model handsome, all muscly and chiseled and tan and cheekbony.
Like, distractingly handsome. Where had I been going?
“I’m Cole,” he said, mistaking my stunned stupor for a lack of recognition. “I was massaging your … partner? … yesterday. Ricky. We don’t get a lot of couples like you guys in around here.”
“Oh?” It wasn’t very articulate, but at least I’d been able to get something out.
“I hope you don’t mind me saying so,” Cole said, feigning modesty, giving me a beguiling blue-eyed look from under a Clark Kent curl that fell perfectly across his forehead. “You know, that I noticed you guys.”
“Oh,” I said.
“So, are you …? Where is …? What are you up to?”
Was he flirting with me now? “Huh?”
“Looks like you’re on your own right now,” he said, trying out a shy smile that, like his Hugh Grant stammering act, I felt certain had in fact been painstakingly honed in front of a mirror and deployed to great effect many times before. “If you need something to do, maybe I can help.”
“What do you mean?”
He laughed his appealing, handsome-guy laugh. “I mean, I’m from around here, that’s all. I can show you around if you want. Go to town, hang out. There’s a park where me and my friends go—we got pickleball courts, only, like, five years late this time instead of ten. Or we could go to a movie …?”
Suddenly breaking through the fog of Cole’s beauty, I found myself incensed.
He had been flirty with Ricky yesterday, and now he was trying to pick me up.
Who did this punk think he was? What gave him the right to presume anything about Ricky’s and my relationship?
Our admittedly pretend relationship, I reminded myself, coming dangerously close to remembering that it was now a defunct pretend relationship. But still.