Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Three
Kate pressed the heel of her hand against her mouth to muffle her scream as she scrambled across the floor, running into Jake as he reached down to help her up. She clung to him, her skin remembering the cold, rubbery feel of the body against hers, shuddering as she pressed her face into his shoulder.
“Holy shit, is that a body?” Jake asked.
“I think it’s Rebecca Hempstead,” Kate said.
“What, the Bitch Bull of Wall Street?” Jake asked in surprise.
“Okay, I don’t love that that’s the nickname you remember, but yes.” She pressed her eyes closed like that might get rid of the memory of Rebecca’s lifeless face, but nope—there it was, behind her eyelids in vivid Technicolor. The woman had been so full of vitality, such a presence yesterday, that it felt like a farce to see her reduced to a cold body.
“What happened to her?” Jake asked.
“Well, I’m pretty sure she died,” Kate said. “Judging by the way her dead body just fell on me.”
“Yeah, sure, but… how? She seemed pretty fine last night when she gave that big speech fucking over her entire family.”
“She really did, didn’t she?” Kate muttered. Jake had a point—Rebecca had been in the prime of life last night, with no hints of health problems or impending mortality. And with Kennedy’s poisoning, it was highly unlikely Rebecca would keel over from natural causes in the same night. Which meant Kate was going to have to go poking around a dead body for the second time this weekend.
Okay, sure. She could do this. At least she wasn’t drunk and terrified like she’d been last night. And nobody was accusing her of murder—yet. Plus, at least this time she was pretty sure the body would stay dead.
What would Loretta do?
“We need to examine the body for signs of trauma,” Loretta said, using her trusty swizzle stick to lift the edge of the woman’s dress along her neck to check for strangulation marks. “No obvious signs of a struggle here, but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one. The killer could have cleaned up after themselves. The body will tell us—”
“Kate,” Jake prompted. “You all right?”
Right, this wasn’t a Loretta case. This was a Kate Valentine case, and Kate was going to have to do her sleuthing herself.
The sight of Aunt Rebecca was no less upsetting on second viewing. Her body had landed face up, her mouth contorted to one side and her lipstick faintly smeared along the upper lip. She was wearing a caftan in a bold, geometric print, not the same outfit she’d had on for the rehearsal dinner. So, whatever happened to her, it happened after dinner. Her hair was looser, too, shiny and slightly mussed, like maybe she’d washed it.
“Well, I don’t see any bloodstains, no obvious signs of gunshot wounds or stab wounds,” Kate said, gingerly picking up one of Rebecca’s hands. Her skin was clammy and stiff, the fingers tightly wrinkled and the palms soft. “No obvious bruising, either. She’s not warm, so she’s probably been here awhile. Her fingers are all wrinkled up, though. That’s weird.”
“So, what, a heart attack? Brain bleed? Choked on a peanut?” Jake asked.
Kate gently lifted the woman’s head, feeling along her scalp for any kind of abrasions or cuts. “She didn’t hit her head. But her hair is kind of… damp? That’s weird, too, isn’t it?”
Jake shrugged. “Maybe she was out in the storm last night?”
Kate shook her head. Rebecca didn’t strike her as the type to rough it in the middle of bad weather. She seemed far more like the take a long, hot bath and read a stuffy book while the servants do all the storm prep kind of woman. Kate leaned in, lifting a lock of hair and sniffing as if she might catch a hint of shampoo. But Rebecca’s hair didn’t smell like shampoo.
Kate wrinkled her nose. “She smells funny.”
“Well, she’s dead,” Jake reasoned.
Kate shook her head. “Not that. I mean, also that, but she smells like… I don’t know. Smell her hair.”
Jake snorted. “You’re not tricking me into smelling a dead body.”
“It’s not a trick,” Kate said. “Her hair smells almost like… chlorine?”
“What, really?”
Kate motioned for Jake to smell it for himself, which he did extremely reluctantly. But he frowned as he straightened up.
“Huh, she does smell like chlorine. Is that a smell that dead bodies give off?”
“Not unless they’ve been in a pool recently,” Kate murmured. She shifted Rebecca’s head to peer at her face, her lips faintly blue beneath her bold lipstick. There was something white crusted around her nostrils, and as Kate tilted her head back farther to look more closely, her jaw fell slack. “Look at this around her nose. And in her mouth! There’s foam.”
“Foam?” Jake said, frowning. “You think she, what? Drowned? How is that possible? I didn’t see a pool on the estate map Abraham gave us. And how the hell did she end up here? Drowned people don’t climb a flight of stairs and hide in a plant.”
These were great questions. Kate stood, glad to have a task that didn’t involve manhandling a dead body, and peeked through the fern where Rebecca had been stuck. “Hang on, there’s something back here.”
She pushed past the plants, mindful of any other unsavory hidden surprises, to an antique wooden desk. The wood was a deep, rich brown, the drawers set with gold handles that were no doubt real, the top of the hutch open and decorated in a mini-scale replica of the grand staircase down on the first floor. It even had little carved cherubs the size of Kate’s thumb. A flat-screen monitor occupied the center of the desk with a mouse beside it, an old-school tower CPU tucked underneath the desk.
“Kate?” Jake asked from the other side of the ferns. “Did you get lost in the jungle?”
“I think this must have been Rebecca’s study,” Kate said, sitting in the leather seat that didn’t even creak when she tilted it back. Probably didn’t dare to squeak in the presence of Rebecca Hempstead. “There’s a desk back here, and a computer.”
She reached for the mouse beside the screen before remembering to preserve potential fingerprints in case the killer had used the mouse. So, she nudged it instead with her elbow, the screen blinking to life as Jake appeared and leaned over her shoulder, distracting her with his warmth.
“What did you find?” he asked, his voice an intimate vibration in her ear.
“Nothing yet,” she said. The computer screen was locked. “It says biometric authentication required.”
She peered closer at the mouse and realized the left button was transparent, a small red laser shining up from underneath. It must be some kind of fingerprint reader, coded to only unlock for Rebecca. She grabbed Jake’s arm in excitement.
“Fingerprints!” she squealed. “I know what happened! Somebody must have killed her, drowned her in some secret pool somewhere. Then they dragged her body up here to use her fingerprint to unlock the computer. Except her fingers were too wrinkled from the pool, so I bet it didn’t work. They must have stashed her body in the fern to come back and try again later.”
“What do you think is on her computer worth killing for?” Jake asked.
“You said it yourself, she just gave a big speech fucking over her entire family. I bet whoever killed her wanted access to those trust doc uments. To stop her from signing over the family fortune and cutting them off.”
“You mean like our sullen tablemates last night?” Jake said dryly.
“Or the raccoon-eyed cousin,” Kate added. “Or, hell, even Kennedy herself.”
Jake tilted his head to the side in consideration. “I don’t know, she has an awfully compelling alibi. Mainly that she was technically dead herself at the time.”
Kate had to concede that point. “True. Oh, of course! Kennedy’s poisoning must have been a distraction, and Rebecca was the real target all along! It makes perfect sense.”
“But you said Kennedy’s poisoning was staged to look like one of your books, to put you on the hook for killing her,” Jake reasoned. “So how does Rebecca’s death point to you?”
Was this why Rebecca had invited her for the weekend? Because she suspected someone would be making an attempt on her life? Did she suspect they might be using Kate’s own stories to plan their attack? Maybe Rebecca had wanted Kate’s insights on who would do this and why, but she hadn’t had the chance to ask Kate in private. It made more sense now why she hadn’t wanted to talk in front of Richie, if she’d (rightly) suspected him of foul play.
How did Rebecca’s death point to Kate? Kennedy’s poisoning had been so obvious—the sliver of rosary pea, the necklace stashed in her suitcase, the body at the bottom of the stairs. What was obvious about Rebecca’s death? She was obviously drowned, just like—
“It’s not me!” Kate gasped, turning suddenly to Jake. “It’s you .”
“What’s me?” Jake asked.
“Loretta book one, Shaken, Stirred, and Stabbed . Remember? The wealthy older woman goes overboard and drowns on the party boat, and everyone thinks she got drunk and fell in. That’s how I knew about the foam in the mouth. But Loretta figures out she was pushed, and Blake takes the blame when they find out he was set to inherit the woman’s estate. It’s not me they’re targeting this time, it’s you!”
Jake crossed his arms, looking at her narrowly. “So, what you’re saying is… you finally admit Blake is based on me?”
“No,” Kate said, going red in the face. That was exactly what she’d just admitted, wasn’t it? “But obviously someone thinks he is. And they think you’re here with me this weekend, so they’re trying to get to me through you. They’re setting you up as my accomplice.”
“I knew I was going to regret coming to this thing,” Jake muttered. “So, what do we do now? Find the authorities? Report Richie and the lawyer and hold them in island jail or something until the police arrive?”
“We can’t do that!” Kate said. “The landlines are down, somebody’s already sabotaged the generator, and it’s not like we’re on the ferry route out here. The only way on or off the island is through the private yacht, and Abraham said it was damaged in the storm. We’re stuck here until the weather clears up.”
Jake put his hands out in exasperation. “We’re just going to hang about on an island with a murderer who’s trying to frame us?”
“We need to find where she was actually murdered,” Kate said. “There may be critical evidence that will lead to our killer.”
“Except I don’t remember seeing any pool on the estate map in the welcome bag.”
“There wasn’t a hidden crawl space between two rooms on the map, either,” Kate said, looking at the wall they’d just fallen through. “I’d guess Hempstead Manor has any number of secrets it’s still keeping.”
“So where do you hide a pool on an island estate?” Jake asked.
“The photographer,” Kate said suddenly, putting a hand on Jake’s arm. “I remember seeing Rebecca in the background of a picture, coming out of a red door, holding a towel . That must be where the pool is. There was some kind of stuffed… dog, I want to say?”
“Hang on, I know where that is,” Jake said. “I found it when I was hunting you down last night. I remember because it was a Tasmanian devil, and I had to wrestle one of those bastards once.”
“Wrestle?” Kate whispered in horror.
“Hiking trip gone awry,” Jake said dismissively. “That red door is on the ground level.”
“Which makes sense for a pool,” Kate said, nodding enthusiastically. “That’s where we go next.”
“One small problem,” Jake said, staring meaningfully down at Rebecca’s body.
“We can’t tell anyone about Rebecca,” Kate said. “We don’t want the murderer to know we’re onto them yet. Who knows what they might do if they feel cornered or panicked. We’ll just have to… keep this to ourselves, for now.”
“For how long?” Jake asked, bewildered. “I think people will notice if Rebecca Hempstead goes missing in her own home on her niece’s wedding weekend.”
“We’ll tell everyone,” Kate said, gnawing at her bottom lip after she’d said it. She didn’t want to imagine how that conversation would go. “Eventually. But we can’t waste the element of surprise. If we can catch the killer out in a lie, find the evidence we need before they destroy it, it could make all the difference. Plus, I mean, why ruin Kennedy’s wedding? Rebecca’s already dead, and she’s got to get married. What’s the harm in waiting?”
“What do we do about the body, then?” Jake asked.
Kate frowned at the woman, but it wasn’t like it was her fault she was such an inconvenience. “Right. She’s got to go back in the fern.”