Hard to believe the slam-heavy sun on her head and the parched air smelling of rain. At the same time lightning blazed from a black cloud much too near them and moving closer on a powder-dry wind that rippled the water and shuddered the sunken end of the boat.
Sidney Levit straightened his shoulders, stretched his chin toward the unpredictable sky, and blew a couple of audible breaths through his nose. “This is unforgivable, unwarranted, unnecessary, and banal.”
Mitch Hilsten stood slumped and ashen, the California tan overpowered. Then again, he was an actor. “No, Sid, this is one good-sized problem.”
Dean Goodacre spit out the weed stem he’d been chewing and wiped sweat off his forehead with a beefy forearm. “This problem could be deadly.”
Scrag Dickens rolled his eyes, shook his ponytail. “Let us not get carried away. One night in the wilderness does not a catastrophe make. All kinds of people knew we were coming up here. They’ll be searching for us by morning if not before.”
That’s when Charlie decided the self-styled desert rat must be the murderer. Anybody without an agenda could see one night in the wilderness in such a situation could easily a dead body make.
Earl Seabaugh, however, looked the most suspicious of them all, causing Charlie to shift yet again. He had to be the murderer. After all, she could feel the hatred emanating from the cameraman, instead of just the fear and suspicion being given off by the others.
Damn it, Charlie, you don’t feel anything of the sort and you could miss noticing something important that would help Edwina if you don’t concentrate on what you know.
Oh, help Edwina. Sure.
Charlie’s mother might be up a creek without a paddle but Charlie was down the river with a killer.
Chapter 25
The intelligent thing to have done would have been to stick together by the injured boat until discovered by a search party.
But the earth jarred with the force of a lightning strike. Smoke rose from something on the other side of a mound of slickrock across the river. The palpable static charges in the air on this side were reminiscent of the fatal shoot at the power substation last night. Everybody dove for cover.
And thus separated. Not the intelligent thing to do.
An onrush of wind blew sand into Charlie’s face and it wasn’t until she opened her eyes that she realized she’d lost a contact. She closed the good eye with the lens still intact, leaving her operating with the nearsighted one.
She flattened herself in a dry arroyo next to somebody else. Maybe the murderer.
“Be over in a minute,” Homer Blankenship said close to her ear. Thank God. He was the only person here Charlie did not suspect. “Weather moves through pretty fast in this country.”
“Don’t you have a patch for the boat?”
“Nothing strong enough to withstand that load.”
You don’t think of rain as your biggest worry on a desert, but Noah would have been hunting building supplies about then. Not so much where Charlie winced next to the river guide as upslope from their shallow depression.
“Well, wouldn’t it hold enough for one or two to go upriver for help?”
“Might. Have to wait out the storm to know though.” He added in apology, “Never rains hard in this country until it decides to.”
There was moisture seeping under Charlie, trying to get to the river but soaking up in her clothes instead.
“Think we might have to move.” Homer pointed out the obvious. “Just kinda roll up on the edge next to you, but stay flat.”
Charlie did and ended up buffeted by alternate waves of blowing grit and gigantic drops of cold wind-driven rain. She’d gone from sweaty hot to shivering chill so fast her body couldn’t adjust to the change if she continued to breathe normally. Sort of like Edwina used to before beginning estrogen-replacement therapy.
Well, I sure as hell better stay in better control than she did. This is no time to lose it.
Uh-oh, there we go, admitting to ourselves that our mother’s change of life could make her dangerously unstable. Playing right into the hands of Sheriff Ralph Sumpter and those who won’t vote for women in government.
Oh my God. Now what? There was Scrag-the-desert-rat and Earl-the-cameraman duking it out by the boat. Charlie changed eyes quickly, realizing she couldn’t have identified the fighting figures if she’d been protecting the one with the lens. And immediately the battle degenerated to a blur.
A blur that both Homer Blankenship and Sidney Levit were crawling toward on hands and knees. Them she could see, even nearsighted, because they passed her on their way. Being either wiser or more cowardly, Charlie followed on stomach, knees, and elbows. Her focus was not on the macho histrionics but on what appeared to be a plastic bag she imagined to contain patching material and maybe glue to repair their boat. It looked in danger of being kicked into the mighty Colorado River. Even when she checked out the scene with her one good eye.
She was wrong again. It was a Ziploc which, when she unzipped a corner, smelled like more bologna sandwiches with mustard and pickle. So much for psychic intuition.
But she held on to the bag and inched an awkward reverse crawl out of the scuffle, nearly choked by the kicked and blowing sand. Somehow keeping both the correct eyelid and her mouth closed at the same time was too much under the stress of the moment.
Hey, I survived backing off a goddamned cliff a zillion feet high. I can handle this. We’re talking one murderer and five people in the same boat I am, right?
Poor choice of words.
It was clear that Scrag was merely defending himself, and quite well, when Homer-the-guide and Sid-the-producer brought a struggling Earl to the ground with a knee tackle, ending the fight.
Scrag wiped blood from his nose with the back of his hand. “You are really overreacting, Earl-my-man. All I said was it would be logical if anybody torched poor Tawny on purpose, then it must be somebody from our crew, and if it was an accident, it was somebody from Sid’s. I didn’t say you’d killed her.”
“Yeah you did.” Earl struggled out from under Sid and pushed Homer off him with an ease that made Charlie uneasy. But the cameraman didn’t advance on the desert rat, who obviously took time from his hitchhiking to work out and had biceps to go with his chest. “You accused me of scuttling the boats. Same thing.”
“Not if you were just trying to trap her murderer. That’s what I meant.”
Earl scuttled the boats?
Where were Mitch and John B.?
Scrag winked at Charlie. The consummate ham. Ever aware of an audience.
Charlie pushed herself up to a sitting position. Hell, most of the men were standing. Lightning didn’t strike them. Earl followed Scrag’s look at Charlie as if contemplating a conspiracy. Dean braced behind him.
And the drama dissolved, not because of the threatening weather, but because of John B. Drake’s laughter. It dripped scorn. “Earl, you scuttled the boats?”
“No, you did. The first one at least. Where’re the sugar packets you keep your pockets stuffed with for that sweet tooth, Drake? Dumped them in the gas tank, didn’t you?”
“Why would I use sugar when there’s all this sand?”
Charlie sat on the sidelines munching on the bologna sandwich, watching the interplay, the personalities revealed under stress. Everyone would be afraid of the murderer and he afraid of exposure.
Where was Mitch Hilsten?
Dean watched Sidney Levit for orders but every now and then glanced at Charlie Greene for approval.
Sid was talking up a storm trying to smooth over hard feelings and to encourage them all to plan a strategy for survival until rescue came. His was the voice of reason—listing the options, greasing the wheels to smooth out life, particularly this sticky part at hand.
Good film producers are like building contractors. They can keep their cool and convince others to keep theirs when the plumber doesn’t get there before the dry wallers and both are scheduled elsewhere into the next cen
tury and starting tomorrow. Or when the director’s fired halfway through the filming and the new one hasn’t read the script.
Pleasant, relaxed, practical—Sidney Levit used his cool on them until it was obvious it wasn’t going to work. And then he lost it. He was about as wrinkled and wet as his white shirt. His white face had lost its sunburn, his white hair its part and the air of aplomb it helped him give off. His deep voice cracked. And he was just an angry, helpless, old man.
His ace pilot looked to be chewing on his cheek as he glanced around the group hoping for another leader. Dean Goodacre, Charlie decided, couldn’t be a murderer because he was such a follower.
Not that the ace detective sitting bedraggled and stringy-haired and smelling of bologna and mustard was that great an inspiration at the moment.
Homer rose stiffly to his feet to deliver an incoherent diatribe. But Charlie couldn’t hear it and nobody else seemed to be listening anyway. He finally backed up to sit deflated, a fellow noncontender, next to her.
“Homer, where’s the patching stuff?” Charlie asked when there was nothing more to eat and her discomfort refused to be ignored.
He squinted at her in disbelief. “Those jerks aren’t going to let me near that boat.”
“They might not notice. But then again some people just sit back and watch.” Feeling guilty for baiting him, she crawled on hands and knees between Dean Goodacre and the bullying match. When she reached the boat she found the deflated section hadn’t widened so the pontoon rim was, as would seem logical, segmented. The tear in the floor was still pretty ugly though.
Homer, suddenly beside her, reached into a compartment next to the thing that held the jet engine onto the boat and extracted a thick plastic bag and cut it open with his knife. Its handle was wrapped in leather strips.
The bag held smooth-edged patches in graduated sizes, a tube of what Charlie hoped was glue, and a disposable plastic air pump.
The patch, if it held at all, might help the boat hold the two of them, he explained as he worked. And the rip in the bottom, too large to patch, wouldn’t sink them because the pontoon would keep them afloat. But not dry. So Charlie spent the time piling anything movable onto the beach.
She was soaked anyway, sick of detecting, and just wanted out of here. But where was Mitch?
She’d been staring at rocks and into bushes awhile before she realized both the weather and the combatants had grown quiet on her. The guys were hovering all of a sudden.
“Just what is it you are doing here?” John B.’s exaggerated confusion sounded more threatening than it should and seemed to rally the other warriors to his allegiance.
“Well, Homer and I are going up the river to bring help back and the patch won’t hold up with any more weight than ours and … and we’re leaving all the supplies for the rest of you and—”
“And leaving the rest of us alone with the murderer.”
Seemed like a good idea at the time. “We don’t know the murderer is along on this trip.” Just because someone wrecked the boats doesn’t mean anything—much. “And just because he murdered once or even twice doesn’t mean he has any reason to again.” There wouldn’t be anybody left on earth if they never quit. “Anybody know where Mitch is?”
Blank stares all around.
“I thought he was right behind me.” John B. looked over his shoulder and then called, “Hey, Hilsten?”
No answer.
What to do? Leave the boat unprotected to search for Mitch and risk the murderer returning to sabotage it for good this time? Or leave one person behind to guard it and risk the one person chosen being the murderer? Or leave two people behind and risk one of them being the murderer and killing the other as well as destroying the boat? Charlie wasn’t sure that’s what all but one of the disheveled little group was thinking but it should have been.
There could be more than one murderer.
Oh great.
And it could be somebody else wrecking the boats. Someone wanting to force the killer’s hand for instance. Someone single-minded enough not to care that he’s endangering us all in the process.
Charlie, so miserable her stomach forgot to hurt, wished mightily that there were such things as Unidentified Flying Objects. Real life was too unpredictable.
Chapter 26
The storm had been a late afternoon affair and it never did warm up afterward. Charlie began an awkward freeze-dry process—sitting with her back against a cooling slickrock shelter that wasn’t really high enough for shelter. It brought to mind a lump of scrambled dinosaur eggs or a heap of nature’s gallstones.
She sat on the river side of it, facing the ruined boat and load of supplies. The men decided she was the only one they’d trust to guard these items while they strode off to search for Mitch Hilsten, superstar.
Charlie sat there, aware that suspicion itself had become the enemy that might destroy them all. That she’d be a sitting duck if the murderer returned to do her in with the boat as Homer Blankenship had warned/worried when forced/persuaded to march off and lead the search, leaving Charlie behind.
When Charlie suggested she and Homer go up the river for help while the others looked for Mitch, Sid insisted that if the movie star were hurt, he should be the one to go out on the boat with the guide. Charlie could think of all kinds of arguments against this logic now that she had nothing else to do, but then she’d been too tired and too worried about Mitch to demand her say. Homer was delegated to pair up the searchers and choose the appropriate directions for the teams since he was the one least suspected of murderous intentions.
Even shivering and scared, Charlie began again to think through the list of suspects. It was motive that threw her. If there were two murders, were there two motives?
But Earl Seabaugh interrupted her deliberation by wandering alone onto the beach without his hat and camera.
“Run, Charlie, anywhere, Charlie, hurry.” There was something mechanical in his hoarse whisper and something strange about his eyes. Earl wasn’t wandering, he was staggering. Charlie thought briefly of the rat staggering onto the road when she was changing the Corsica’s tire but the cameraman fell on his face before he reached her, Homer’s hunting knife buried in his back.
Charlie’s adrenaline rush was so strong it made her dizzy and she had to crawl over to him. She was never more mindful of the scarcity of odors out here than now with the unexpected potency of the metallic scent of his blood.
He raised his head a few inches. “No, sand, Charlie, run. No sand …” he said and dropped his head back down on some.
The sea-green eyes stuck open halfway through a blink. Faint blond fuzz coated patches of a scalp he probably hadn’t shaved today. And wouldn’t need to tomorrow.
Reminded of the squashed tour bus, Charlie felt for a pulse in his neck as if she knew where to feel. But the sigh of a slow fart as Earl’s body did the ultimate relax job convinced her he wasn’t faking the blood seeping from his mouth into the sand either. She grabbed her jacket from a nearby rock where she’d spread it to dry and made it out of sight of the beach before stopping to think.
Three murders, if Tawny’s death wasn’t an accident, were moving this situation from the realm of necessity, expediency, or whatever to serious insanity. Of the remaining five suspects, Charlie figured only four were candidates. Dean was real. Okay, he was a blowhard, but he was tethered to nonmurderous reality.
That left Scrag Dickens, John B. Drake, Sidney Levit, and, yes, Mitch Hilsten. If only because he was here. But Sid alone seemed to have a motive to kill Cabot. And that wasn’t much of one. But none to kill Earl or Tawny.
You’ve only known these people a few days. They could have motives and shared histories you know nothing about.
Charlie worried about Homer Blankenship. He was an innocent bystander pulled into the fray here. It might have been his knife but she couldn’t believe his hand had …
She crawled under a bush to hide. Her jacket hadn’t dried to the lining and only
made her colder and stiffer in her cramped position. She was crying silent tears and trying not to wash out the remaining lens, remembering poor Earl’s stuck blink. He’d worn contacts too, but his were heavily tinted. One of them had been dislodged enough to—
God Charlie don’t think or you’ll start screaming and the killer’ll find you!
“Charlie, I don’t want to startle you, okay?” a voice she recognized whispered behind her. “Try to back out from under that bush without making noise and then come over here. Hurry.”
It was Mitch. Charlie stayed where she was. She’d almost got him killed and now he was getting even. And he was on the shortening list of candidates for murderer.
“Charlie, I know you’re terrified, but your legs are sticking out in plain sight.” He sounded ever so patient. Yeah, wrong.
But Charlie opened her good eye to stare down along her body. He was right.
“Please, Charlie, I know it’s hard to trust anybody at this point, but there isn’t much time.”
She would never remember making the decision, but Charlie was suddenly snuggled up to his warmth in a vertical rock crevice with scratchy weeds for cover.
“Earl …” she breathed in his ear.
“I know,” he whispered back. “I saw it.”
“You what? You saw—”
“I didn’t see who stabbed him. But I saw him fall on the beach. I was watching the beach and you.”
“Everybody’s looking for you. We thought you were lost or murdered—you were watching the beach?” She had the urge to slug him and stomp off, but even a jackhammer couldn’t have dislodged her from this embrace she had no business believing was safe.
“Remember when you did something stupid? Backed off a cliff and nearly got us both killed? Charlie, I think I’ve done the same thing.”
And Mitch Hilsten explained in whispers in her ear that he’d decided to use her as a lure. That he’d hidden out to watch the beach, expecting the killer to come back for Charlie. “I was going to rush in and save you and unmask the killer.”