Chapter Twenty-Three
Juliette had to hand it to June Piedmont, she had really committed to the renovation bit.
There were massive opaque plastic sheets hanging all throughout the club, held up with unsightly blue tape, blocking the halls beyond the medical center.
Juliette lifted the corner of one such sheet, wincing at the crinkling and ripping sound the tape made as she slipped through.
Charlie had wanted to kiss her; she would have staked the missing manuscript on it.
Whatever his hang-ups about her had been before—and after meeting Sporty Ex, she could guess where his irrational fear of unintentionally flirting with her had come from—he was clearly getting over them.
They’d had a moment—well, almost—and Katarina had ruined it.
This was worse than the time Juniper snagged a date with Tommy Childers to the homecoming dance by spreading the rumor that Juliette had mono.
It had only been a sinus infection, but try getting a guy to kiss you with electric green snot crusting up your nose.
She was so caught up in memories of being ostracized at the dance that she blew right past a sign pointing her in the direction of the men’s locker room.
See, this was what came of getting tangled up in “feelings” and “vibes.” They distracted her from her real goal, which was to locate the missing duffel bag with the stolen whiskey bottle and deliver it to Detective Marks to have it tested for digitalis.
Only then could she start to make some headway on finding Warren’s killer and recovering his stolen manuscript.
This business with Charlie Hawkins was nothing more than a distraction, and Juliette Winters did not get distracted.
She simply pivoted and regrouped and obviously prevailed.
She certainly had plenty of suspects to choose from after her enlightening day on the greens of Pacific Pines Country Club.
June Piedmont was doing the most to derail Juliette’s investigation, and she had plenty of motive if the gossip about the Piedmonts’ financial straits was true.
Plus, they delivered the whiskey bottle to Warren, June personally handed off the microphone to Warren, and they both had unlimited access to the yacht and its emergency medical supplies.
Then there was Chipper Floyd, who had nearly taken her head off with that backswing of his when she suggested the police might have a suspect in the manuscript theft.
He had been in the room with Warren and drank the whiskey, too.
But he never touched the microphone as far as she knew, and she didn’t figure even a former golf star would be allowed to roam the yacht the night of the party without someone noticing.
Of course, he could have had a partner in crime.
Which brought her to Bradley Ellingham, the most likely suspect of them all.
He stood to gain the most from Warren’s death, and there were those comments he’d made in the luncheon tent about trying to cut his daddy’s puppet strings.
Juliette couldn’t place him in the room with the whiskey bottle yet, but there had been five glasses.
Had he visited his dear old dad before Chipper?
Dosed the bottle then? He’d had the microphone and insisted on making an introduction speech, and he’d been the one to order the helipad be converted to a dance floor, which prevented them from bringing in emergency services.
Could he also have been discharging the defibrillator during Warren’s speech?
He’d been conspicuously absent, as had Chipper.
Juliette continued to prowl the halls, passing something called the rumpus room and a frosted glass door leading to a defunct sauna.
She figured the men’s locker room had to be close by, but before she could continue her search there was another sound in the hall.
She froze as the distinct sound of ripping and crinkling reached her.
She knew that sound, considering she’d only recently made it herself.
Someone had pulled open the taped plastic tarp to let themself into the sealed-off section of the club.
She pivoted left and right, looking for somewhere to tuck herself away. Footsteps approached her location rapidly, clinking like dog claws on a tile floor. She’d be caught if she didn’t find a hiding place ASAP. Nasty old sauna it was, she thought, as she wrenched the door open and ducked inside.
Oh, it was so much worse than she had imagined.
She had figured it would at least be a normal temperature, being inactive and all, but the air was swampy and thick, clogging her lungs as she stepped to the side and pressed herself against the wooden wall that was still somehow wet and warm.
A shadow passed the frosted glass, pausing just outside the door, and Juliette held her breath, as much against the stink of several decades of sweaty old man smell that pervaded the room as against the threat of making a sound.
Eventually the shadow shifted, the clinking sound quickly receding as the person left.
She waited a few beats more, her head swimming from the wound and the lack of clean air, and finally tumbled out of the sauna when she couldn’t stand the humidity any longer.
“Disgusting,” she breathed, gulping down the exterior air with only a faint tinge of plastic sheeting.
The hallway was empty, no distant clinking sound to alert her to which direction they had gone.
Whoever it was, she didn’t figure they belonged back there any more than she did.
Juliette tiptoed her way down the hall in the direction the shadow had disappeared, contemplating the clinking sound.
What kind of shoes made that sound? Something spiky, maybe, like a heel.
But she was very familiar with the sound of a pair of heels, and that wasn’t quite what she had heard. What other shoes had spikes like that?
Someone was talking, and she pressed against a nearby wall as the voices filtered through the empty space toward her.
They sounded sharp and angry; they weren’t just talking, they were arguing.
And from the vibrations, it sounded bad.
Someone’s voice raised into a shout, followed by a crunch, and then a thud.
A door swung open and slammed shut, and footsteps carried down the hall away from her.
She pressed against the wall, holding her breath, waiting to be discovered.
No one came, though, and she had continued down the hall a few dozen feet when a door swung wide and Chipper Floyd barreled toward her, his golf shoes sounding like a Chihuahua having a panic attack as he ran.
That’s what she’d heard: golf shoes. He barely glanced at her before he ripped through the plastic sheeting, leaving it hanging by a few strips of tape.
“What the hell was that?” Juliette wondered aloud. It was only as she crept closer to the door where he’d come out that she realized she’d found what she’d been looking for all along—the men’s locker room.
Juliette tried the handle and it opened freely. The lights were off, making it almost impossible to see. She didn’t have her phone, either, which was annoying. She’d have to find the whiskey bottle by feel alone, apparently.
Except she didn’t know the layout of the locker room and Duffel Bag hadn’t actually told her where he’d stashed it.
She took a hesitant step forward, feeling along the tiles with her bare feet, hoping the cleaning staff did a decent job of scrubbing the place down.
The last thing she needed was a nasty case of athlete’s foot.
She swung her hands out as she moved forward, trying to prevent herself from receiving a second blow to the head today.
Her hands met the edge of a locker as she stepped on something long and narrow that rolled under her foot as she scrambled for balance, splaying her hand against the locker.
She hopped to the side away from whatever she’d stepped on, reaching down and feeling blindly until she picked it up.
It was cold, and much heavier on one end, possibly made of metal. It swung into her, hitting her in the shin and leaving something wet behind. She moved her hands up along the narrow metal shaft until she found a handle. She flipped it around, feeling the other end.
“A golf club?” she wondered aloud. But there was something on the head of the club, something wet and sticky that left a tacky sensation on her fingertips. “What in the hell—”
“Stop!” someone shouted from the door, blasting her with a flashlight beam. “Put the weapon down!”
“Weapon?” Juliette said in confusion. “What weapon?”
“Put the club down and step away from the body,” the voice commanded.
“Body?” she said, and now she knew she was really screwed.
Because there on the dated tile floor of the Pacific Pines locker room was Brad Ellingham, a nasty gash in his forehead and a pool of blood spreading beneath him.
And in her hands she held a golf club, the wedge sticky with blood. “Well, shit.”