Carolina Isle

  “No police cars?” R.J. asked.

  “I had half an inch between the curtain and the wall so I couldn’t see much,” Ariel said. “Would you mind telling me the plan?”

  Sara spoke first. “If the police are involved in this and are watching, we figure they’ll stop us as soon as we leave the house with a big roll across our shoulders. But if it’s an individual who’s watching—”

  “Or two,” David said.

  “Yes, if a few people are watching, they’ll follow us and see us dispose of what I hope will look like a body,” R.J. said. “Sara and I are to go one way, you and Jock here the other way.”

  No one moved. They just stood there glaring at R.J.

  “Okay. David,” R.J. said. “Ariel, you and David will go a second way.”

  “We found some useful things,” Sara said to Ariel. “There’s a treasure trove of stuff under the eaves.” She nodded to the little doors in the bottom of the slanting attic walls.

  “Ready?” R.J. asked.

  “I think it would be better if I went with you instead of David,” Ariel said to R.J.

  When Sara looked at David, his face turned red. So that’s what this whole thing is about, she thought in disgust. Another woman who wanted R.J. “I think that’s a great idea,” Sara said, stepping closer to David.

  The men looked at each other in silent, mutual agreement, then they traded places so they were back to where they had been.

  “Sara and I know each other,” R.J. said in a way that meant there’d be no more discussion of the matter.

  “So do Ariel and I,” David said, sounding as though R.J. had been the one who’d asked Ariel to go with him.

  R.J. turned to Ariel. “When we go out, play it suspicious, as though you’re doing something bad.”

  “We are!” David said. “We should have—” Breaking off, he looked at them. “Called the police” was not an option.

  Ten minutes later, they were ready. Over David’s shoulder was one of Sara’s dummies wrapped in a small rug. He was bending his knees to look as though whatever was inside the rug was very heavy.

  Sara had dressed the other dummy in clothes she’d found in a box under the eaves. She’d put a broomstick inside the dummy to make it stay somewhat upright, and they’d put the Ariel wig askew on its head. She and R.J. were going to try to walk the dummy out, as though they were carrying a drunken person between them.

  As they started down the stairs, Ariel silently pointed out the roses marked with blue to show the squeaky steps. It looked as though other people had stayed in the rooms with the barred windows, and they too had heard people sneaking upstairs.

  At the front door, they paused and waited while R.J. went down the basement steps to deposit incriminating evidence on the body. He was back in a moment. He turned off the porch light, then cautiously opened the front door.

  “It’s showtime!” R.J. said.

  Chapter Eleven

  “I CAN’T GO ON WITH THIS,” R.J. SAID quietly to Sara. “I want you and the kids to stay in the house and do whatever it is you need to to survive, but I have to …” He waved his hand to indicate that he had some ideas that he was going to keep to himself.

  Sara was struggling with the limp dummy between them, trying to keep the floppy thing upright. If it weren’t so dark outside, and if R.J. weren’t leading them into an even darker forest, she’d never believe that anyone watching them would believe they were carrying a dead body. “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “We need to—”

  “Get this body thrown over the cliff on the east side of the island. Yeah, I know that, but …”

  “So help me, if you start keeping secrets, I’ll drop this thing and start screaming.” She could feel R.J. laughing.

  “I think I liked it better when you didn’t speak to me. Was I really such a terrible boss?”

  “The worst. You rule and no one else is allowed to have any input.”

  “But it’s my company.”

  “Then run it all by yourself.”

  “You do hate me, don’t you?”

  “Could we talk about this later? Right now I’d like to keep us out of jail.”

  “Which brings us back to the beginning,” R.J. said. “I think there’s more to this than meets the eye. I’m beginning to think all this has to do with my work.”

  Sara hesitated, but she didn’t stop walking. The dummy’s feet were dragging and they had to shift its weight often. R.J. had put some rocks in the coat pockets and down the front so it weighed quite a bit, but it wasn’t enough. “What have you done at work that would make someone want to frame you for murder?” she asked.

  “Nothing specific, but I wonder if this has to do with …” He trailed off and she could feel him shrug.

  “For once in your life, I’d like to hear the truth out of you. What is really going on?” She could feel his smile and he took most of the weight of the dummy onto his own arms, giving Sara a break.

  “Kids!” R.J. said. “They talk you to death, don’t they? It’s a good thing both of them are rich or they’d starve to death.”

  She knew he’d changed the subject and hadn’t answered her question, but then that’s what he always did. “I assume you mean Ariel and David.”

  “Exactly,” R.J. said.

  “So what are you planning to do about them?”

  “I left them a note saying I wasn’t returning, that I’d see them in court on Monday—unless they could find a way to escape this place. I think that whoever planted this body on us, is after me, so I’m going to do my best to find out who did it.”

  “On your own?” Sara asked.

  “On my own. Just the way I run my company.”

  “I see,” Sara said.

  “Here,” R.J. said, turning into some trees.

  “You seem to know this place well. Have you been here before?”

  “Never, but I spent quite a bit of time reading about it on the Internet, remember?”

  Sara swung around with the dummy and they walked into the dark, dense forest. “Does this lead anywhere?” she whispered. She wanted to talk, wanted to get angry at R.J., for the reality of the situation might make her collapse. Someone had killed Fenny Nezbit and that person was still out there. If he—or she—thought that R.J. and Sara were carrying a dead body, why shouldn’t he/she shoot them too?

  Sara and R.J. walked in silence for a few minutes and Sara began to think about the truth of their situation. She could be accused of being an accessory to murder. Or would she be accused directly? Did they execute two people for one murder?

  “I want to drop this body off the east side of the island,” R.J. said softly. “There’s a cliff there. When I read about it I thought of hang gliding, not using it to discard a body, even a fake one.”

  Sara didn’t smile. She was thinking about what R.J. had said about going off on his own to find the truth. She didn’t want to admit it, but she too wanted to get away from Ariel and David. How could that be? she wondered. Her whole reason for being on the trip had been to be near David.

  “I’m going with you,” she whispered, then prepared herself for the fight she knew was to come. She’d have to argue with R.J. that she wasn’t a “kid” like David and Ariel, that she could be of some use to him. But R.J. didn’t say a word. When he didn’t try to argue her out of it, she knew that he had something in mind.

  “If all you want is a chance to try to seduce me—” She broke off at his suppressed laugh.

  “You never give up, do you, Johnson? What have I done to make you think I’m the lowest of the low?”

  “The women you seduce then abandon.”

  “What should I do? Marry them? Do you think I don’t know what they want from me? They want money, that’s all. If I didn’t have money, they wouldn’t give a short, ugly, old guy like me a second look. All those gorgeous young females would go out with gorgeous young males. Money is what gives old men like me a chance.” He stopped walking. “Let??
?s toss him over here. Let’s make a production of it, then when he’s gone, you can pretend to cry and I’ll comfort you.”

  Sara ignored the last of his statement as she took the legs of the dummy and R.J. took the shoulders. They swung it back and forth several times over an edge that Sara hadn’t even seen. She’d been listening so hard to what R.J. was saying that she hadn’t even realized they were at the edge of a drop-off into the sea.

  “Now,” R.J. said, and they let the body go.

  She could see it fall down and down until it hit the rocks below. “Why didn’t the killer just do that to the body in the first place?”

  “That’s what I want to know,” R.J. said, reaching out his arms for her.

  Sara pulled back. “What are you doing?”

  “Comforting you for a moment.”

  “Even in a mess like this, you never stop coming on to a woman. I must say that you had me going there for a moment with your sad little story about being rich and unloved.”

  “You didn’t believe me?”

  “Not a word of it.”

  “So I don’t get a good-bye kiss?”

  “I told you, I’m not going back. I’m staying with you, but before you get any ideas, I want to know what you’re up to.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said, looking around the dark forest. They could see no one and the only sound was of frogs and mosquitoes. “I think that whoever is watching has seen all he needs to.”

  “You feel it too?” Sara asked, rubbing her arms as the hairs were standing on end. It was probably eighty-five degrees but she felt cold. When R.J. started to put his arm around her, she pulled away. “I want to know what you’re planning to do.” She didn’t look at him but she knew that he was in a dilemma. For all that he called her, fifty times a day sometimes, he was still a very private man. For the first few months she worked for him, she thought that there wasn’t anything in his life that she didn’t know about. But then he’d announced a merger with another company and she realized that she’d never heard a word about it. He’d done all the research and the paperwork by himself. If she knew nothing else about R. J. Brompton, it was that he was a man of many secrets. Now he was trying to decide whether or not to share his secrets.

  Sara was silent as they walked back toward the town. She knew better than to try to force him to tell her what he was planning to do—or even to persuade him. He had to make up his own mind.

  “I’m going to visit Mrs. Nezbit,” R.J. said at last.

  “You’re going to seduce the widow?” Sara asked, aghast.

  “Could you get your mind above the belt for a few minutes?” R.J. snapped. “She’ll know something. If nothing else, she’ll know his enemies. Who hated him enough to kill him?”

  Sara remembered the man’s angry hostility when they’d seen him in the bar. “Based on my experience, I think maybe several people wanted to kill him. Even Ms. Vancurren said he was a liar and a thief.”

  “A liar and a loser,” R.J. said quietly. “Are you slipping on me that you didn’t remember that?”

  “I remembered. Maybe it was something else that made me think he was a thief.”

  “Could it have been the twenty-thousand-dollar watch he was wearing?”

  “I didn’t notice that.”

  “I did and I think you did subliminally. Phyllis said he was rich.”

  Sara stopped walking. “You want to find out how he got rich, don’t you? Maybe he was blackmailing someone and his victim got fed up and murdered him.”

  “And we happened along and they tried to pin it on us,” R.J. added.

  “What’s going to happen when there is no body found?”

  He started walking again. “I thought about that. How can we be accused with no body? That freezer was plugged in but the food in it was old. I don’t think it’s been opened in a long time, certainly not on a daily basis. It could be a while before they find the body in there.”

  “But then the killer will be looking for it over the side of the cliff.”

  “And wherever the kids tossed their dummy.”

  “Why do you keep calling them ‘kids’? Ariel is the same age as I am.”

  “I’ve heard that great emotion is what makes you grow up. If that’s true, are you and Ariel the same age?”

  “I think that with my dad I may be about a hundred and fifty.”

  “And I’m a thousand.”

  “You?” she asked. “Since when do you have any emotion? I’ve seen you dump women without a backward glance.”

  “Their tears were over losing my bank account.”

  “Not all of them. What about Tiffany?”

  “She ran up accounts at Bergdorf’s and Barney’s in the six figures, all on the prospect that I was going to marry her. After I got rid of her, Harry Winston’s called me and asked if I wanted to continue holding the ten-carat pink diamond ring.”

  “Ah,” Sara said. They had reached the Vancurren house and she felt R.J. take a step backward. She turned to him, her eyes pleading. “You’re not going in, are you?”

  “No, and you can’t go with me. This is something I need to do alone. I don’t need a committee meeting every time I want to get something done.”

  Sara looked up at the top floor of the old Victorian mansion and saw a light behind the curtain, then a shadow. David and Ariel were back. Sara knew that what R.J. was saying was correct. It had taken as much time to get David and Ariel calmed down about the body as it had to try to deal with it. Part of her wanted to go back to them. This would be her chance to get to know David better. She’d show him that she was calm under stress, that she could handle things. R.J. was the natural leader of the four because he was the oldest and more experienced, but with R.J. out of the picture, maybe Sara could take over.

  Yes, she thought, she’d take over and David would hate her for it. Ariel would swoon in his manly arms and David would sweep her up and carry her to the altar. And Sara would be left behind. Strong, capable Sara would be left behind.

  “I’m going with you,” she said more firmly, bracing herself for the coming argument with R.J.

  “You’d miss your chance with Mr. Politician.”

  “What makes you think he wants a political career?”

  “I listen and I watch people. You thought you might be in love with him, didn’t you?”

  “Yes. No. I don’t know. It’s complicated. He belongs to my mother’s family and I’d like to be a part of them.” She glanced up at the window. “But I think I inherited all my genes from my father’s sharecropper family.”

  R.J. looked around. They were on the edge of the town, hidden under some trees, and Sara could feel that he had something to say, but he didn’t say it. “Are you sure you want to go with me?” he asked. “I could use your help.”

  She waited, her breath held. It seemed that she’d never wanted anything as much as she wanted to stay with R.J. If there was any way for them to get out of this mess, he would find it.

  “Okay,” he said at last and started walking rapidly. “But you do what I tell you.”

  “I always do.”

  “Actually, you don’t,” he said softly. “In fact, you’ve never taken me up on any offer I’ve ever made you.”

  Sara didn’t want to talk about them. She was having trouble following him in the dark at the rocky edge of the road. Ariel’s expensive Italian sandals weren’t made for actual walking. “How can you plan something with Nezbit’s wife when you haven’t even met her? Maybe she’s as much beneath your standards as the beautiful Phyllis Vancurren.”

  “You twist everything around, don’t you? If I like a woman, that proves I’m a leacher. If I don’t like her, that makes me a snob.”

  “Just so we understand each other,” Sara said.

  R.J. laughed. “Come on, let’s get some sleep.”

  “Where?”

  “How about a front porch? I’ve seen a lot of those what-do-you-call-’ems with cushions on them.”

 
“Chaises. Daybeds. Lounges. I guess we better not try to break into a house.”

  “No, I think not,” R.J. said. “You up for a night of mosquitoes?”

  “Sure. Mosquitoes aren’t as bad as bullets. Do you know anything about Nezbit’s widow?”

  “I know that if she knows she’s a widow, then she’s in on it. My plan is not, as you seem to think it is, to seduce her. I mean to seduce her six children.”

  “What?! You can’t—”

  “You always believe the worst of me, don’t you?” he said, putting his hand on her elbow and steering her toward a dark house with a huge porch. There were half a dozen pieces of furniture on the porch. “When you were a kid, was there anything that your father did that you didn’t know about?”

  “No,” Sara said slowly, walking up the stairs of the porch. She smiled as she thought about what R.J. was saying. To get information out of an adult would take a long time, but they had only days. But what child didn’t blab everything they knew to anyone who asked?

  Still smiling, she sat down on one of the two cushioned daybeds on the porch. The cushions were musty and she could feel torn places in them. If she saw them in daylight she’d probably be horrified. Were there mouse nests in them? Bugs? What about snakes?

  “Come on, Johnson,” R.J. said softly, reaching across the distance until he felt her hand. “The worst is over. If the police knew about the death, by now they would have arrested all four of us. My guess is that, at the most, two people know about Nezbit’s death.”

  “One is Phyllis Vancurren.”

  “I’m not so sure of that. Whoever put the body in the bathtub may know she drinks herself to sleep every night. And the creaking stairs are marked.”

  She was quiet a moment, looking up at the stars and trying to relax. It wasn’t easy since she feared that at any moment police cars would arrive, sirens blaring, and arrest them. “Ariel will be frightened if I’m not there.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” R.J. said, his voice sleepy. “That girl is made of steel. She may be stronger than you and me put together.”

  “You’re wrong. Her mother—”

  “Her mother! That’s where I saw her before. In New York. I was at a party with Tiffany. It was just before we broke up and she knew it was coming, so she was putting on a great show of jealousy. There was a pretty girl there and she kept staring at me. But every time I took a step toward her, she ran away. It was an interesting game but I got tired of it fast. Then, out of the blue, this woman comes up to me and tells me that if I so much as touch her virginal daughter she’ll have me arrested. The whole thing was too much. Tiffany was on the verge of making a scene, some girl was flirting with me then running away, then some woman nearly accuses me of being a rapist. I left the party.”