CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 25
If One of the Dash Girls Isn’t Sleeping with a Criminal, Is It Even a Vacation Mystery?
“I can’t believe this,” Harper says an hour later over a stiff scotch one of the bartenders was kind enough to pour her. The party’s finally been shut down and everyone shepherded back to their rooms.
We’re supposed to be there, too, but Officer Anderson is occupied getting everyone locked in for the night with the help of Mr. Prentice and a couple of the staff.
I’m sure we’ll get in some kind of trouble when she finds us, but what more trouble could we be in? 90
Two people are dead, and we have no idea who did it.
Not Mrs. Winter. She was revived off the floor by a few words of kindness from her husband and a stiff drink of brandy brought by the hotel manager. Mr. Winter then led her to their room, and I think we all breathed a sigh of relief.
But it’s what gave me the idea to bring Harper in here. She’s been acting strangely since Shawna went missing, but I didn’t want to question her about it in front of everyone.
“What’s the matter?” I ask. “I mean, besides the obvious.”
“I just can’t believe Shawna had something to do with it.”
“Well, we don’t know her, do we? So who knows what she’s capable of.”
Harper shoots me a look. “You’re very dense sometimes.”
“Rude.”
“It’s true.” She starts gesturing to our images in the mirror behind the bar. “You thought I was sleeping with Connor.”
“You’d done it before. And Oliver did hear a compromising conversation.”
“Uh-huh. Two plus six equals seven.”
“Harper, I know we’ve all had a shock, but what am I missing?”
She stares down into her drink. “It’s Shawna.”
“Who’s the murderer? I mean, probably, but why?”
“No, dummy. She’s the one I’m sleeping with.”
“ Plot twist. ”
She glares at me. “We’re fine with it.”
“Of course we are. Sorry, I just...You took me by surprise.”
I take a large gulp of my drink. I’m having a scotch, too—okay, it’s a double, which I’m sure Oliver will disapprove of when I return to our room. 91 But I told him that the Dash sisters needed a moment, and the fact that I was talking about Harper and me in the third person convinced him to give us a beat.
Anyway, I am 100 percent okay with my sister sleeping with whoever she wants.
I’m just taking a minute to process.
“How did...how did you meet?”
“On set. We have a lot in common.”
“You do?”
“Our jobs, for one.”
“Working for unreasonable women, you mean?”
“You said it, not me.”
“Fine. So where is she?”
“I don’t know.”
“Maybe this is all some misunderstanding,” I say, patting her on the hand.
“How can it be?” Harper’s arms are slumped in front of her, her body hunched over in defeat. She didn’t have to wear a bridesmaid dress, so she’s in a slinky black number, which she told me with defiance when she showed it to me a couple of weeks ago was giving “sexy funeral vibes.”
“I don’t know, Harper.”
“You don’t have to be nice to me. I know I fucked up.”
“This isn’t your fault.”
“Connor, Shawna...What’s wrong with me.”
“You see the good in people.”
“I get taken advantage of.”
I look into my glass. The half finger of Scotch I haven’t downed yet is glowing under the bar lights. We’re sitting at a mahogany bar on red stools reminiscent of the ones I met Connor on in Italy, and which were so accurately re-created in an early scene in the movie.
I’m not jet-lagged, but it feels like it.
I can only imagine what Harper’s feeling.
“I should’ve seen it coming,” she says.
“Why?”
“Because I’m the smart one, remember?”
I laugh, but it’s true. “Even smart people make mistakes.”
She tosses back part of her drink. “Maybe she is a Giuseppe. She was always apologizing. They grew up in Canada, right? That’s where they shipped those girls after you and Connor exposed the dad. A fitting place for future criminals.”
“Canada’s not Australia.”
“It might as well be in our lives.”
“Okay, fair. But...apologies are not enough to equate to master criminal.”
“Right. But wait, wait, wait...She speaks Italian. She does! I heard her tell Inspector Tucci to shut up in Italian. How does she know Italian?”
“Lots of people know Italian. You can’t go around thinking everyone in your life is out to get you. It’s okay to trust. It doesn’t make you stupid.”
“So you say. But why, though?”
“Why what?”
“Why seduce me ?”
“I don’t know. But she can’t be a Giuseppe. It doesn’t make sense. She must be involved somehow, but not because of that.”
She rests her head on my shoulder. We sit there like that, under the muted lighting, breathing together as I count out the beats in my head.
After a moment, I feel calmer.
I doubt it makes a difference for her.
She’s going to need time, but we don’t have that much of it.
We need to solve this thing before the storm clears. Because I don’t think I can just go back to my life with a murderer on the loose. Not again.
“What are you two doing out of your room?” Officer Anderson’s voice sounds weary. One of her braids has started to come undone, and she looks exhausted. When I’m tired, I look old. But Officer Anderson looks like she’s gone through one of those de-agers they use on Star Wars actors. She was in her mid-twenties when she started, but now she’s just a kid.
“You’d be drinking if you were us, too,” Harper mutters, then finishes her drink and motions to the bartender to bring her another.
Officer Anderson shakes her head but doesn’t disagree. Instead, she pulls up a stool and sits on the other side of Harper.
I think about offering her a drink, but that would be bad form.
Police aren’t supposed to drink on the job. Right?
Officer Anderson puts her elbows on the bar and sighs heavily.
“Tough day?” I say, and maybe I bury my sarcasm.
Maybe.
“This is my first assignment. I only started in the job last week. It’s why I got stuck here when everyone else evac’d with the storm.”
“Yikes.”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
She eyes Harper’s glass, but I’m not sure if it’s because she wants what’s in it or because she’s worried about Harper.
“Any sign of Shawna?” I ask.
Officer Anderson frowns at herself in the mirror behind the bar. “No.”
“What about her room?”
“She’s not there.”
Harper lifts her head. “I’m sure she’s inside somewhere. It’s dangerous out there.”
“Rain is letting up a bit. Storm should be gone by morning.”
There’s a loud CLAP of thunder, as if the weather disagrees with her.
“That’s what the weatherman’s saying, anyway.” 92
“So, we’re just supposed to wait till morning with a murderer on the loose?” Harper asks.
“It’s not an ideal situation.”
“You don’t say.”
“Did you find anything in her room?” I ask.
“She had several phones.” She opens her satchel again and plunks three evidence bags down on the counter, each with a phone in it.
I recognize one of them. “That’s Fred’s burner phone.” I point to the one in the middle. “The one that was missing after we found José’s body.”
“Interesting.”
“That one’s hers,” Harper says, pointing to an iPhone in a black case with decals on the back. I look more closely. It’s a sprig of lemons and a coastline that looks like the Amalfi Coast.
“How did she get this?” I say to Harper, pointing at it.
“What’s the significance of the sticker?” Officer Anderson asks.
“It’s a promotional sticker for Amalfi Made Me Do It .”
“Your next book?”
“I gave it to her.” Harper puts up a hand. “Don’t say. Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to say anything.”
“I can feel your thoughts. I had a box of them, and she asked for one, okay?” She picks up her drink and finishes it. “She said she was a fan.”
“Maybe she is.”
“No, she used me. For her sick plan.”
There’s nothing to say to that, so instead, I ask Officer Anderson if she found anything on the phone.
“It’s locked. With a real password this time.”
“I guess the techs will get into it.”
“Hopefully.”
“And what about this third one?” I point to the other phone, a larger Samsung device. “Have you seen that before, Harper?”
“No.”
“Is it locked, too?”
“Yes.” Officer Anderson picks it up as the screen flashes with an incoming text.
“What’s it say?”
She tilts it toward me. It’s a message from someone named Jim Post. Tyler, why aren’t you answering your —and the rest of the message is cut off.
“That’s a text to Tyler,” I ask. “Why would Shawna be receiving texts to Tyler?”
“It must be his phone,” Harper says, slurring her words a bit.
“No,” Officer Anderson says. “His phone was confiscated when he was arrested.”
“Cloned phone?” Harper says.
“Shawna cloned Tyler’s phone?” I say. “That would explain the texts to José.”
Officer Anderson flips the phone over slowly in her hand. “That’s pretty sophisticated.”
“Not really. I learned how to do it when I was doing research for one of El’s books. Remember, El? It was child’s play. Like, people believed Connor could do it, so...”
I stifle a snort. The alcohol’s getting to me, too.
“So, Shawna cloned Tyler’s phone and has Fred’s burner...Looking pretty bad for her,” I say.
“I agree,” Officer Anderson says. “Plus, there’s this.” She pulls another evidence bag out of her satchel and places it on the bar. It’s a copy of the When in Rome script with a white cover.
“It’s normal that she’d have a copy of the script, isn’t it?”
“Sure, but this one’s got a bunch of words cut out.”
“She cut the words for her note to Emma from the script of When in Rome ? Jesus. That’s not subtle.”
“Murder rarely is.”
“Are you quoting from something?”
She scrunches her face. “I’m not sure.”
“Hmmm.” I pull the evidence bag toward me. Something is off about this script.
Oh, the color!
This one is white. The cover of my script is green. 93
I start to open the bag.
“What are you doing?” Officer Anderson grabs it away from me.
“I need to check something.”
“You can’t. It’s evidence.”
“It might be a clue, though.”
“It is a clue.”
“No, I mean to what’s really going on. That’s an older version of the script.”
“So?”
“I’m not sure, it just feels significant.”
Harper sighs and picks up her drink, but all that’s left is ice. She rattles her glass at the bartender, but I shake my head no . She’ll thank me in the morning.
“Shawna has the script,” Harper says. “She has the burner phone. She’s missing . It seems like case closed to me.”
And then the thunder CLAPS again, the weather punctuation and underlining all at once.
90 Yes, this is also a rhetorical question.
91 Not because I have a drinking problem—I just tend to get drunk when there are murderers around, which is hazardous to my health.
92 Have you ever noticed that weatherman is the only job where you can be wrong every day and not get fired?
93 Scripts have different cover colors during filming depending on the revision, starting with white (the color you start with on day one of shooting) and then blue, pink, yellow, green, all the way to cherry (ninth revision).