Carolina Isle

  “David isn’t like that. He wants to be—”

  “Yeah, I know. President.” R.J. was trying to climb up one part of the wall that was less steep, but his feet kept slipping. Leaning against the wall, he removed his shoes and socks to try again. “I think Ariel would make a great first lady. She could wear pretty clothes that the government didn’t pay for and she’d love having her picture taken.”

  “She’s not as bad as you think. There are things in her life that you don’t know about. Ariel and I’ve exchanged letters for years, so we know about each other. She told me that when she was nine years old her mother took her to a psychiatrist in New York because Ariel kept making plans for her funeral.”

  “Her funeral? Was she suicidal?”

  “No. Ariel told the psychiatrist that since her mother had planned her wedding down to the color of the bridesmaids’ dresses, the only thing left for Ariel to plan was her funeral. What was so funny about it all was that when the psychiatrist asked Ariel’s mother if it was true, she said ‘of course.’ Then he asked her mother if she had the groom picked out too, and Ariel’s mother thought the man was crazy. She said, ‘How can you have a wedding without a groom? Of course he’s been chosen.’ Ariel told me that when the doctor said he wanted to see her mother next time and not Ariel, she left his office in anger and they went home to Arundel the next day.”

  R.J. gave a one-sided smile. “I can believe that story. I met the old bat. She threatened me with a lawsuit just for looking at her daughter. But if you ask me, Ariel is in danger of being just like her. Unless she can find a man who’ll stand up to her, that is, and from what I’ve seen, that’s not David the wimp.”

  “He …” Sara started to say that David wasn’t a wimp, but she took another drink instead. Under the current circumstances, it didn’t seem to matter what David Tredwell was or wasn’t. “They won’t come after us,” Sara said quietly, looking up at the tree that covered the roof opening. It was still daylight, but it would be dark soon. Then what would happen? “We didn’t find out anything, did we?” she said, and wasn’t fully successful in keeping the tears out of her voice.

  “I beg to differ,” R.J. said, rubbing his knee where he’d hit it on the rock. He couldn’t get up the wall; it was too slippery, too wet. “We found out pretty much all that we need to know.”

  Sara took another swig of liqueur. “So tell me, professor, what have we found out?”

  “That lots of people hated the victim and had a motive to murder him. I don’t think any court is going to believe that any of us killed a man over a dead dog. You know, don’t you, that I have a photo of the dog?”

  “You what?”

  R.J. stepped back from the wall and dug into the tiny watch pocket in the front of his trousers and withdrew a little disk for a digital camera. “There was a full fifteen seconds between when the police appeared and the handcuffs were placed on me. I took the disk out of the camera and put it in my pocket. I haven’t seen what’s on there, but I know you took—”

  “Several photos of the dog lying in the street.” She was looking at him in wonder and admiration. He was certainly able to think quickly in an emergency.

  “No,” R.J. said, “you took half a dozen photos of your precious David, but I think the dog is probably in there too.”

  Sara was feeling the effects of the booze, so she didn’t protest what R.J. was saying. Besides, it was true. Most of the time she was taking photos, she’d been in the car, but when David was looking at the dog, she’d snapped away. It seemed like years ago now, but she seemed to remember that she was thinking that someday he could use the photos in his political campaigns. When he was a young man he’d been concerned about animal rights, that sort of thing.

  “So you have photos showing that the dog was emaciated,” Sara said. “That doesn’t prove that we didn’t hit it.”

  “True, but it would have proven that Nezbit was a liar.”

  “But now Nezbit is dead. In our bathtub.”

  “In Phyllis Vancurren’s bathtub,” R.J. corrected. He was pulling on some weeds that were hanging down from the top of the hole, but they fell away in his hands. “The people on this island have changed their fates,” he said. “If none of this had happened, I would have gone back to Charley and recommended that he not buy an inch of this place, but now I might buy it myself.”

  “And bulldoze it?”

  “No,” he said, looking at her in surprise. “I’m going to send in a team of geologists and spelunkers to explore every inch of this place. I’m going to find out what it is that ol’ Fenny Nezbit found, how he disappeared, and what he was killed for. I think the middle of this island is riddled with these little bowling ball caves, and I plan to get a report on every one of them. If tourists come here, we can’t have them falling through the center of the island.”

  “And breaking their legs,” Sara said. “And having trees cover the top so they can’t get out. And you’d better tell the natives to stop shooting at strangers. And kidnapping their children. And …” She took another swig of liqueur and stopped talking. Thinking about the future and what they were going to do didn’t help the present. “If we yell, do you think anyone will hear us? And if they do hear us, will they come to help or to shoot us?”

  “You really are a glass-half-empty type of person, aren’t you?”

  “It helps when you have a boss like mine,” she said, then looked at him. “Sorry.”

  “Okay, answer me this.” He was trying to move a rock that was against the wall to the center so he could stand on it. “If I didn’t make up things for you to do for me, how else was I going to keep you near me?”

  “I think I’m drunk. Why would you want me near you?”

  R.J. gave a little snort. “Can’t imagine. How’s your leg?”

  “Most of me is numb. I’ve never been much of a drinker. Imagine having a father like mine and not having a capacity for booze. Where are genetics when you need them?”

  “My old man was a drunk too.”

  “I know. All the girls at the office talked about you endlessly. Sometimes I listened.”

  “What else did … they … say about … me?” He was pushing against the rock so hard that he could hardly talk.

  “Just that you were rich and unmarried and that they wanted you.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No,” Sara said. “I want …” She trailed off. At the moment, she couldn’t think what it was that she wanted in life.

  “To be a great actress?” he asked, standing and staring at the rock. “You have talent.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “I saw your play three times, remember?”

  “Oh, yeah,” she said, smiling. “You told that to Ariel.”

  “I told it to you, and I knew it was you.” He was looking up at the tree lying across the opening. “Too bad your leg is busted or I could hoist you onto my shoulders and maybe you could grab a branch.”

  “If I drink any more of this, I’ll be able to do it on one leg. Did you really think I was good on the stage?”

  “Excellent, but then I’m prejudiced. The question is whether or not you liked being up there onstage. Did you? Or did you like being your cousin more?”

  Sara closed her eyes for a moment. The pain was a dull ache and she thought that if she didn’t ever move again she’d be able to stand it. “I wasn’t Ariel long enough to know. I think I want …”

  “What?” R.J. asked, looking through both their packs and seeing what he could use.

  “I don’t know. Or maybe I do. I think I want what everyone wants: a home, a family.”

  “With a jock like David,” R.J. said flatly. “Look, if you’ll stop talking about him right now, when we get out of here, I’ll get him for you. I’ll get him a job and you can work with him. Once he spends time with you, he’ll forget all about Ariel.”

  “I must be very drunk,” she said, her head lolling back against the rock, “because I keep hearing
you say good things about me. That couldn’t be.”

  R.J. stopped searching the bags and looked at her as her head fell forward onto her chest in sleep. Good things about you, he thought. Was being in love with her from the first moment he saw her a “good thing”?

  At the moment, his objective was to keep her from seeing how really frightened he was. He too had seen young Gideon following them. Was the boy skulking about in an attempt to protect them? Or was there something else? When Nezbit’s body was found, someone was going to take the fall for it. Was Gideon making sure that it was the tourists who were blamed?

  In the next second a light shone into the cave. Looking up, R.J. saw Gideon hanging over the edge, a flashlight in one hand and a rifle in the other.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “I HATE THAT MAN,” ARIEL SAID UNDER her breath. “Deeply and truly hate him. He has kidnapped my cousin and left us here alone.”

  It wasn’t even daylight, Saturday morning, and she was holding the note R.J. had left behind. David turned away to hide his smile. The note was curt and to the point, saying that he, Brompton, and Sara wouldn’t be returning to the house. He told Ariel and David to stay in Phyllis Vancurren’s house and wait for their return.

  “Wait for him?” Ariel said. “Should I knit while I wait? Or would he rather I just take some laudanum and prostrate myself on the bed? I thought Sara was exaggerating about him, but I can see that she wasn’t.”

  David was stretched out on the couch and pretending to yawn. In spite of the fact that last night had been harrowing, he was very pleased by Ariel’s reaction to R.J. He’d never believed she was in love with him, but oh! the satisfaction of hearing her say she hated him.

  Last night he and Ariel had taken one of Sara’s dummies through the outskirts of town, having no idea where they were going or what they were supposed to do with the fake body. Brompton had said, “Dispose of it so no one can find it,” then left them. He was too eager to get back to Sara to say anything else.

  It was after David and Ariel were outside alone that he again began to wonder who had put Brompton in charge. Was it his age? Or his selfmade status? Whatever he thought it was, Brompton had taken over and David didn’t like it at all.

  When Brompton had disappeared with Sara and their dummy into the woods, David realized that the old man knew a great deal more about the layout of King’s Isle than he’d let on. He has secrets, David thought. Yeah, well, David had a few of his own, secrets that not even Ariel knew. David had spent a month on King’s Isle when he was nine years old. That had been a difficult summer for his mother, and, as always, she’d dumped all her troubles onto her son. Never mind that he was just a child, his mother expected David to fix whatever was ailing her. That summer, her problem had been loneliness, so she’d taken a cruise— and David had been sent to a camp on King’s Isle. The camp had been a bust, run by a hippie couple that just wanted to sit around and smoke grass. The good part was that the children in their care had been left on their own, so David had done some exploring—and some thinking. Even though he was only nine, he knew he needed to figure out his life. His mother had no husband to speak of. She had one on paper, but on their honeymoon they’d found out two things about each other. One was that he’d married her for her money, and two, that her money was tied up so he couldn’t touch it unless she said so—and she rarely said so. When it came to money, Inez Tredwell resembled her father, which was why David had been sent to a very inexpensive camp. After a year of hell, David’s parents came to an agreement. If he’d give her a baby, she’d pay him to live elsewhere. It had worked perfectly.

  Inez had often said that what saved her sanity was Ariel’s mother. To the rest of the world, Pomberton Weatherly was a snob without equal, but to Inez Tredwell, she was kind and loving. They were two women alone, raising children alone, fighting the snickers of a gossipy small town by themselves. Whereas Miss Pommy was a bulwark of strength, Inez Tredwell seemed to be a portrait of feminine helplessness. Of course no one knew about her rule of the purse strings, or how she’d stood up to her bully of a husband and the deal she’d made with him. To the outside world, Inez seemed to be the neediest, weepiest woman on earth. She certainly used her tears often enough on her son.

  On the day David entered first grade, his mother told him that he was now the man in her life—and from that day on, she’d treated him as such. She told him all about her life, cried on his shoulder about anything that upset her, and expected him to handle problems. By the time he was eight, David was dealing with tradesmen and the servants who ran the big house that had been in his father’s family for generations.

  When his mother told David he was to marry Miss Pommy’s daughter, on principle, he’d wanted to refuse, but he couldn’t bear his mother’s crying fits that could go on for days—or however long it took before she got what she wanted. But then, David had known Ariel and her mother all his life, and to him, their house was a haven of sanity. Yes, Miss Pommy wanted everything around her under her control, but she gave warning before she attacked. She told people under her charge what she wanted and if they didn’t do it, there were consequences. David had never once seen her cry, and a lack of tears was a relief to him.

  To David, Ariel was just like her mother. In all their years together, he’d never seen Ariel cry. She made up her mind about what she wanted, then went after it.

  But the problem was that Ariel had decided she wanted an old man, R. J. Brompton. David had disliked him from the moment he’d seen him. Brompton was a man experienced in the world and in the ways of women—all the things that David wasn’t, and all the things he despised. David had only seen his father six times in his life, but Brompton reminded him of the man. Ruthless, experienced, without conscience. Not wanting to be like his father had been a driving force in David’s life.

  The other force in his life had been the love he bore for Ariel. In school, David had been president of every class since he was in the fifth grade. He was always on the honor role. He was the captain of the football team. At graduation, he was voted both “best looking” and “most likely to succeed.” Since he was a child, he’d been confident and self-assured. “My little man,” his mother called him.

  But when he got around Ariel, he was a blithering idiot. She was like a princess living in her richly decorated house with her elegant mother, never going to school with the other children, never wearing clothes that had been made for anyone but her. Ariel had never owned a pair of jeans.

  His friend Wesley said David loved Ariel because she was unobtainable. “All the other girls are writing their phone numbers on your arm, but Ariel says, ‘Are you here again?’ You love it.”

  Maybe so, David thought. But whatever it was, he’d been her slave since they were kids—and Ariel had treated him as such. When they were children she’d give him a list of what she needed, things such as one-inch-diameter wheels, transparent fabric, and glitter. He’d swallow his embarrassment and get what she wanted, then he’d sit in silence as she used the set of miniature tools he’d bought her and create little houses for fairies to live in. She never played with him, but she would grant him the honor of allowing him to watch her play.

  When he got older, he heard Miss Pommy referred to as “the Queen of Arundel” and Ariel as the princess. “Waiting for the queen to die,” someone would say, then everyone would laugh. Ariel’s family wasn’t the richest in a rich town, but it held the most prestige and the longest lineage.

  Sometimes he’d take her to a movie. The other girls would be wearing cheap tank tops that showed their belly buttons, while Ariel would have on a suit that buttoned up to her neck. Her idea of casual was a thousand-dollar pair of slacks and a pristine white shirt. “I just want the best,” David learned to say to Wes and to anyone else who made a comment about Ariel.

  It had seemed natural to David to go from being in love with Ariel to wanting a political career. With his ability to persuade people and his belief in the fundamental goodness o
f mankind, he thought he could do some good in the world. And with Ariel’s beauty and style, and her knowledge of manners and etiquette, he could imagine the two of them in the White House together.

  Until recently, David thought that it had come to the point that Ariel was going to give in to her mother and marry him. He knew that if he could get her past that hurdle of the actual ceremony, she’d be his. Ariel was a sensual person, a virgin at twenty-four, and he longed to make love to her. He was sure that underneath her protests, she loved him. She didn’t know it, but he did.

  But then she told him she’d seen R. J. Brompton and was in love with him. In love with a man she’d just met? After David first heard of her intentions toward Brompton (and he’d worked hard not to go berserk), he’d researched the man and seen what it was that Ariel wanted. She wanted someone she believed could stand up to her mother. That David had charmed Miss Pommy for all his life seemed to make no difference to Ariel.

  Unless he wanted to make his love for her known—and risk permanent rejection—David had to go along with whatever Ariel wanted. He’d helped her with her asinine scheme to trade places with her cousin, and had agreed to go to King’s Isle with them. It had been his help that had enabled her to get to Brompton. Did that mean it was David’s fault that they were in the situation they were in now?

  But David was a man who believed in looking at the situation as it was, then trying to fix it. He had to work to keep from smiling at what Ariel was saying about hating Brompton, but he knew from experience not to take her side. Ariel liked something to fight against.

  “I’m sure he meant well,” David said. “After all, he’s had experience in situations like this.”

  “How can anyone have had experience in a situation like this?” she asked. “Unless he’s in the Mafia. Are you trying to tell me that the business world in New York is so cutthroat that bodies in the bathtub are routine?”