Death on Demand (12 page)

He shoved the tiller out of the way. The cat jerked, whipped, then started to tip.

Max reached out for Annie as they began to fall, and he felt her long, warm length against him. It was, he discovered, quite possible to choke on salt water and smile at the same time.

“H
ow old were you here?” His finger rested on the black-and-white picture of a scrawny, pigtailed girl standing in front of a palmetto.

“Eleven. That was my first summer on Broward’s Rock. See, here’s Uncle Ambrose.”

Oh, and she remembered that magical summer so well, the way the hot sand felt on her bare feet, how it smelted sitting on the end of a dock with her first pole in her hands, not expecting a thing to happen, the excitement when something yanked on her line, and her delight when Uncle Ambrose helped her haul out a toadfish.

The photograph of Annie and her toadfish was on the
next page. It had curled a little with time, but it clearly showed the slimy brown, large-mouthed fish and Annie, grinning through a filigree of braces.

“Mouthwise, you and that fish were neck and neck.”

But she was looking at the pictures of Uncle Ambrose. His hair was still a chestnut brown then, only lightly touched with white. Uncle Ambrose, who taught her so much more than how to cast a line or dig for clams. Because she never knew her father, she felt shy and uncomfortable around men until this gruff old curmudgeon given to long silences took the time to spend his summer days tramping the beaches with his niece and summer evenings pointing out the constellations that glittered in the southern sky like diamonds against black velvet.

“He made all the difference in my life,” she said simply. “When mother died, he helped me with school, and he always made it clear I had a home with him.”

She flipped to the last page of the album, then reached out and gently touched the photograph of a distinguished-looking elderly man standing on the deck of a sailboat, the
Sleuth
. The aquiline face looked amused, skeptical, fiercely intelligent.

“A hell of a guy, huh? So why would anybody kill him?”

“He was a hell of a guy—to me, to his friends. But there were people who would have feared him at one time. Remember, he was a prosecuting attorney for years in Fort Worth, and he hated crooks. He had a passion to catch lawbreakers. He called them renegades, and he had no pity for them. He said pity should be for victims, not abusers.”

“So somebody out of his past, somebody with a grudge, comes to Broward’s Rock twelve years after the guy retires here and shoves him off of his sailboat?”

“I know, I know.” Annie thumped a pillow in frustration. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense. But people can hold grudges. Think about
The Count of Monte Cristo.”

“But he was the guy who’d been screwed. You’re talking about a crook wanting revenge for going to jail.”

“High Noon.”

“That wasn’t twelve years later. No, it has to be something immediate, something urgent.”

“Something here on Broward’s Rock,” she said thoughtfully.

Max closed the scrapbook. “You said he had a passion for justice. Right?”

Annie nodded emphatically.

“If he spent his life putting the baddies in jail, he’d find it hard to ignore it if he ran into something criminal on Broward’s Rock.” Max’s shoulders hunched forward. He looked like an All-American tackle ready to spring.

She was concentrating on her uncle’s life, trying to think, but she did take pleasure, purely aesthetic, of course, in the animal grace so close to her.

“Don’t you see,” he continued earnestly, “if Elliot could come up with stuff serious enough to get himself murdered, what’re the odds your uncle had picked up on the same information?”

Annie clapped her hands to her head. “My God, true crime. That’s it. That has to be it! Uncle Ambrose’s book.”

“He wrote books, too?”

“Not like the others. He’d been collecting material for years for a different kind of true-crime book. He was fascinated by the ones who got away, always on the lookout for accidents or suicides that might really have been murders.”

“A shove down those attic stairs for dear old Grannie Whipple? Or over the cliff with Cousin Alice?”

“Or the side of a boat. Like Emma’s husband—and, oh, Max, Uncle Ambrose himself!”

“Better wait until after dark,” Max urged.

Annie disagreed. “I can’t see in the dark. Besides, there are snakes and things. No, I’ll pretend I’m out getting some exercise. I can see if anyone’s lurking around. I’m going to go now.”

“I’ll come with you.” He did look wonderfully like an anxious Mountie, stalwart and true.

“We don’t have time. You do as we’ve planned. I can take care of this by myself.”

“Dammit, I don’t like it.”

He continued to frown reprovingly as she rolled her bike out of the shed. She dropped the neatly folded towel in the white vinyl basket, then turned to beam at Max.

She maintained the smile until she was out of sight, a
matter of riding six feet, then dipping down into an aquamarine world. The late afternoon sunlight filtered through the trees in a green and gold haze. The three-foot-wide bicycle path wound through luxuriant swamp growth. Live oak trees, pines, palmetto palms, and flowering shrubs vied for life in the spongy, wet ground. Thick vines hung from trees, wrapped around trunks, snaked along the ground. As she pumped the old-fashioned bike, twigs skittered from beneath the wheels, and her approach disturbed the seen and unseen inhabitants of this peculiarly private domain. A flock of blue-green tree swallows circled noisily, looking for their last insect snacks before dusk. Three sunning turtles slipped into dark green water. An alligator raised his head.

Annie pedalled harder. It was eerily silent on the bicycle path. In the summer, families wobbled through the damp heat, and daredevil ten-year-olds rode fast enough to imperil anything in their way. But now, late on an October afternoon, the sunlight already waning, it was pleasantly warm but isolated.

She was pleased she had decided not to turn the disk over to Saulter. There was no reason on earth to put the innocent writers at risk. But Capt. Mac had made it clear to Max that Saulter wasn’t impressed by Elliot’s threat to reveal some nasty truths about his fellow writers. For the chief, that was entirely too fancy a motive for Elliot’s murder. Instead, Saulter saw her as a killer driven by purely financial fear. That was an understandable motive. Money mattered. Saulter knew it, and Annie knew it. Still, she thought, reputations mattered, too, especially to the Sunday Night Regulars.

The disk. Annie’s only hope was to load it, read the information it contained, and, armed with this knowledge, face down each suspect. If she were lucky, it might shed some light on what had happened to Uncle Ambrose.

She and Max would discover the murderer before Chief Saulter came to arrest her. Max was on the phone right now, seeking information about the Sunday Night Regulars, seeking some lever to help them break through a false face of innocence. Emma Clyde, Janis and Jeff Farley, Harriet Edelman, Capt. Mac, Fritz Hemphill, Hal Douglas,
Kelly Rizzoli. One of them had a secret that must be kept—whatever the cost.

Annie braked and let the bike coast to a stop. Here the path curved, crossed over a short wooden span, then melded into the dusty gray road that led to Elliot’s tree house. She dragged the bike down the short incline, keeping an eye out forsnakes, and put the bike beneath the wooden bridge. Carrying the folded white towel, she climbed back to the path, and peered over the railing. Good. The bike wasn’t visible.

She stopped in the shadows of a towering pine and stood there for at least five minutes, listening to the occasional honk of a frog, the slither of a woodland animal, the sibilant rustle as leaves slipped down through the green and gold air to land on the road and among the underbrush. It was
so
beautiful and peaceful on the island. It seemed impossible to believe two people had been murdered there. Three, if the chief were right about her uncle.

Even though Elliot hadn’t been dead twenty-four hours, his tree house had already acquired a deserted air. The blinds were closed. There was a dusting of sand on the steps. Leaves bunched along the walk, already carpeted with pine needles. On Broward’s Rock, the swamp didn’t take long to reclaim its own.

Satisfied that she had his tree house to herself, she stepped briskly onto the road and walked swiftly, the gray dirt scuffing up beneath her tennis shoes. She stopped once and looked sharply around, nagged by an uneasy sense of being watched, but no one moved on the rutted, uneven road, so she hurried the last few yards to the steps and ran lightly up them, the towel in her hand. She tried the front door. Locked. She moved around the porch. She stopped at the kitchen window and pushed. It moved grudgingly, caught, then, after a hearty shove, screeched sharply and rocketed up.

Annie’s heart thumped. She looked frantically around, but nothing disturbed the silence.

Knowing Tessa Crichton had never hesitated in search of clues, she balanced awkwardly on the sill, stepped into the sink, then jumped to the floor.

In Elliot Morgan’s living room, a microphone taped to the underside of a chair picked up the sound of the opening window and Annie’s arrival, recorded them, magnified them, and carried them to a receiver in another living room on Broward’s Rock.

The occupant of that room was lifting a glass to drink, but the sounds halted the movement of the hand. So someone had come. That bastard Morgan must have been telling the truth: he had given a copy of that damned disk to someone.

Too much curiosity killed cats—and people.

Harriet Edelman wore baby blue jogging pants and a yellow t-shirt. She hadn’t been jogging, but she was comfortably dressed for a long vigil on her widow’s walk. She’d waited most of the day, eating her lunch here, carefully staying in the shadows, but always keeping her field glasses trained on Elliot’s tree house. She’d been certain someone would come. It was too much of a coincidence for Elliot to be killed on the night he was going to reveal all the garbage he’d gathered about all of them. Somebody was bound to come searching for what Elliot knew.

Her thin mouth twisted. Served him right. Such a know-it-all, such a busybody. She smiled grimly. Not a busybody now. The smile turned to a grimace. To claim she’d stolen the plot to
Deadly Diamonds.
She hadn’t even read the manuscript that idiot woman had sent her to critique. She’d mailed it back without looking at a single page. It was coincidence, that was all. Coincidence.

And let anybody try to prove differently.

But it could have been awkward, Elliot having an affidavit from that woman and threatening to send it to her publisher. Publishers were so antsy, scared of their shadows.

Shadows … My God, look who was here, creeping around the side of Elliot’s porch, breaking in. If that wasn’t the damnedest thing. She’d never expected it to be Annie. Not pretty-faced Annie Laurance, of all people. Why, she wasn’t even a writer. What could Elliot possibly have known about her?

Harriet picked up her Minolta, removed the lens cover, and focused it. She snapped two pictures as Annie climbed
in the kitchen window. That ought to be enough proof the girl was up to no good.

She could just envision the newspaper headlines:
Mystery Writer Solves Crime.
That ought to jack up her sales. Grimly, she trained the camera again on Elliot’s tree house, took two more pictures, then lowered the camera and snatched up her binoculars to watch another familiar figure walk up the steps.

A dull flush suffused her face.

She was the one who had watched all day. By God, she was going to get the credit. Dropping the binoculars and the Minolta on the wooden seat, she hurried to the ladder. It would only take her a minute by bike path to get to Elliot’s house.

The phone rang. Annie jumped three feet, her heart thudding. The phone rang and rang and rang.

Frozen in the doorway to the living room, Annie thought,
Lord, this room gives me the creeps!
The last shafts of sunlight glittered on Elliot’s collection of steel drums. One entire pane of glass in the hexagonal room was covered by carnival masks—several shaped like bats, one of the Devil with horns, a tail and spear, another of a red-haired Viking. A massive painting of an old black man, his face fierce and threatening, rested against an easel. Papa Bois, the spirit of the forest. He protected animals, Elliot had told her. Any animal in his right mind would take one look at Papa Bois and head for the city. The furniture, blood-red leather chairs and ebony black tables, contributed to the aura of unhealthy darkness.