Chapter 18
Ricky and I stared at each other, dumbfounded. “What did that all mean?” I wondered.
Ricky leaned forward, thoughtfully hugging his knee. “It sounds like Tawny has some things she wants to get off her chest. To clear her conscience, maybe?”
“As in,” I said slowly, “you think she killed Richard? Or Cecilia?”
“I don’t know about that,” Ricky said. “She was so agitated, it was hard to understand her. It sounded more like she knew what had happened, not necessarily that she had done anything, but she certainly seemed to feel guilty about something.”
My mind was a jumble. I realized that, all day, Tawny had been giving me fragments, cryptic, half-finished thoughts, tiny pieces of a story that seemed too big even for her to wrap her head around fully.
She’d wanted to know what we’d do if we found out who had been in the room with Richard.
She had, I now realized, been asking for assurance that she could talk to us.
She’d apparently weighed what I’d told her, and decided it was safe to tell us her story—or, at least, maybe safer than the alternative.
I grabbed the notepad and pen from the coffee table, desperate to get as much as I could remember out of my head. Before I could start, Ricky muscled in on my thoughts. “What was it that Wiley kept insisting had happened to Richard?”
“That he fell while throwing the rug off the balcony,” I said distractedly. “We have to figure out how that ties in. Give me a sec.” I took a second to reorient myself, and started writing as fragments of what Tawny had just said came back to me.
We were desperate—who is “we”?
He didn’t have any money without Rachel or Cecilia = Richard. “We” above = Tawny and Richard?
Tawny in the room with Richard!
I had nothing to do with Cecilia dying.
I don’t know if we would really have done it. We got carried away. … What is “it”? What were Tawny and Richard planning?
I looked up, gnawing on the end of the pen. Ricky was watching me intently. “Come up with anything?” he asked. “Show me what you’ve got.”
I handed him the pad as I sat back down next to him on the bed. “I feel like I’m circling the what, but I’m forgetting something that would tell us the why.”
“So that’s what we have to get from Tawny,” he said, beginning to nuzzle and softly kiss my neck.
“What are you doing? That tickles,” I giggled.
“Mmm, I’m thinking,” he said between kisses. “About Richard and Cecilia, of course. And about Tawny. About how she crashed our moment. Our romantic moment. Isn’t that what our job here is supposed to be? Something about romance?”
I laughingly pulled him up, gave him a single kiss on the lips, then pulled back before he could come in for more. “Now you care about our job? Anyway, I see the point you’re trying to make, and it’s a very good one, but we might have to come back to it later. We have some logistics to figure out.”
“Logistics? Like, who sleeps on which side of the bed? I’m easy,” Ricky said, trying to pull me back to him.
“No!” I scurried to the far corner of the bed, out of his reach. “Logistics like getting to this lighthouse meeting with Tawny. It’s probably going to involve some walking. How are you going to walk?”
“Oh,” he said, deflating. “We probably also need to talk about how we’re getting over there. I can’t exactly drive us there.” He waved to his bandaged ankle. “This here’s my clutchin’ foot. That requires a certain amount of finesse that I don’t have at the moment.”
I gulped. “Maybe Erik could drive us?”
“Can Erik drive? Does he have a car? If he doesn’t, can he drive a stick? Can we trust him to stay in the car and not follow us?”
“That’s a lot of questions,” I said.
“The alternative to asking him all those questions is you driving.”
“I’ll go ask him,” I said quickly.
“Ask him if he has any crutches or something, too. Maybe they have first-aid supplies,” Ricky said as I headed for the door.
Erik had returned to his book behind the front desk. He gave me a conspiratorial smile as I approached. “Nobody in the lounge to eavesdrop on now,” he said. “Wiley and Rachel never came back. I haven’t seen Lis tonight, and Tawny left a couple of minutes ago to go into town.”
“Good looking out,” I said. “On a totally unrelated note, do you know how to drive?”
“Yeah,” he said, his smile turning quizzical. “Can’t get much of anywhere around here without driving.”
“I suppose so,” I said. “Do you have a car?”
“No,” he said. “I can usually borrow my mom’s car, though. And I’m gonna get one before I go to college. I’ve been wondering what I should get. What do you think? A Jeep?”
“I don’t know. I tend to think Jeeps are a little excessive, but I live in the city. What about your mom’s car?”
“It’s a Honda. It’s okay, I suppose,” Erik said dubiously.
“No, I mean, is it here? Could you give us a ride? Ricky can’t drive with his sprained ankle.”
He leaned over the desk, a suspicious look in his eye. “And he won’t let you drive his car? Is he kind of a control freak?”
“No!” I didn’t want to admit to Erik that I couldn’t drive, so I settled on half the truth. “I can’t drive a stick shift.”
“I got you,” he nodded. “I can’t, either. Anyway, I can’t give you guys a ride. Sorry. My mom’s out on a date, so I can’t leave the inn.”
“Aha,” I said, disappointed at having to endure this silly conversation and come away empty-handed. I turned to leave, then remembered the other half of my mission. “What about a crutch?”
Erik looked confused. “What about a clutch? I told you, I can’t drive stick.”
“No, a crutch,” I corrected. “Do you have a crutch Ricky can use? You know, for walking?”
“You guys are going to try to walk somewhere? Even in the daytime, I wouldn’t recommend it, especially with an injury.”
“No, we’re not going to walk somewhere,” I said, my impatience starting to leak out. “For general mobility, so he’s not stuck in bed. Do you have anything?”
“Actually, I do,” Erik said, rising from his seat behind the desk. “I have the crutches I used when I broke my leg. Turned out that was my last gymnastics meet. I can go get them right now and bring them to your room.”
“That sounds great, thank you,” I said, relieved to return to Ricky with something useful to show for this excursion.
Coming down the corridor toward our room, I encountered Wiley charging up the hall toward me. He pointed accusingly as soon as he saw me, his face red and his eyes wild. “You! Where is she?”
His intensity raised the hairs on the back of my neck. I keyed open our door, hoping that if Ricky could hear what was happening, he could be prepared to act as backup if I needed it, then tried to summon an innocent tone. “Where is who? Who are you looking for?”
“My wife, you jackass,” Wiley roared. “I know you’ve been cozying up to her, though god knows why. So where is she?”
Ricky hobbled into view, his own expression fierce under a thin veneer of control. “We don’t know where Tawny is,” he said, calmly but firmly.
“I think you’re lying to me,” Wiley hissed, his snarl swinging back and forth between me and Ricky.
“I think you’re a couple of lying busybodies.
If I find out you knew where she is, you’ll be sorry.
” He stormed off toward the elevator, where he nearly collided with Erik, emerging with the crutches for Ricky.
“Hey, kid,” Wiley snapped, holding the elevator door. Erik looked back at him over his shoulder as he handed me the crutches. “I’ll go back up with you. I need your help, because these two won’t tell me the truth.”
“Be careful,” I warned Erik under my breath.
“I’ll be okay,” he assured me quietly before saying more audibly to Wiley, “Sure, I’ll see what I can do to help.”
I watched them disappear back into the elevator, hoping Erik was right that he’d be okay, then turned into the room to give Ricky the crutches.
“Hey, sweet,” Ricky said, reaching for the crutches and limping uncomfortably on them over to the bed, where he sat down and began to adjust their height to better suit him. After a moment of fiddling, he hoisted himself back up, saying, “Let’s take these babies for a test drive.”
As he took a lap, swinging himself around the room on the crutches and his good right foot, he said, “Speaking of driving, what about our other problem?”
“No dice.” I grimaced. “Erik’s mom is on a date, so he can’t leave the inn.”
“Mary Alice has a date? Good for her,” Ricky said, still circling the coffee table. “I wonder who with.”
“If I were a betting man, I’d guess it’s with Cecilia’s lawyer, Brad Benson,” I said. “They seemed to have some kind of thing for each other. Anyway, what are we going to do?”
Ricky crutched his way over to me and planted a kiss on my cheek. “That’s for courage. You know what we have to do—what you have to do.”
“Oh, noooo,” I moaned.
“Would another kiss help? Gee, it feels good to be able to ask you that,” he marveled. “I think I’ll do it anyway.” He landed one on my other cheek.
“I’m not saying I don’t like it, because I do, but it’s not helping,” I said mournfully. “You’re really going to make me drive us there?”
“Nobody’s making you,” he said. “We don’t have to solve this mystery. We got close, but maybe the more important thing is we got each other. You can nurse me through my night terrors about not knowing why Richard died right in front of me.”
“Is that an attempt to guilt me? Because it sounds like a reasonable trade-off for not having to drive right now.”
“C’mon,” Ricky said, crutching his way to the door. “We’ll do a few practice laps around the parking lot. You’ll be fine.”
We stopped to check with Erik on our way out to the parking lot. “Where’s Wiley?” I asked in a whisper. “Is he gone?”
“Yeah,” Erik nodded. “He was looking for Tawny. I told him she went to town. I don’t think he believed me, but he left a few minutes ago.”
“Okay, good,” I said.
“Hey, are you guys going somewhere after all? I thought neither of you could drive?”