G'Day to Die (16 page)

I squinted at the tiny writing on the screen. “Does it say anything about the venom being more toxic on people whose immune systems have been compromised, or who might have preexisting medical conditions?”

“I don’t see nothin’. I bet he even lied about them other critters he was tellin’ us about. Taipan. Funnel web.” Nana cleared her screen and Googled ‘taipan.’

“Wait a minute. Before you do that, would you check out something for me?” I ran for my shoulder bag and dug out my memo pad. “Can you call up ‘Google Earth’ and type in these numbers? It’s Roger’s waypoint on his GPS. I got it when he was arguing with Diana. I just hope I remembered the numbers correctly.”

“Google Earth,” said Nana as her fingers flew over the keyboard. “Is this somethin’ new?”

“Etienne told me about it. I guess it can give you satellite images of just about anywhere on the planet. So if these numbers produce an image of the exact spot where Claire died, Roger Piccolo might have some explaining to do.”

“To whom?” asked Tilly.

“To anyone who might show up to ask questions about the ever-increasing number of deaths on this tour!” I shuddered to think how many more people might die from apparent natural causes before the authorities arrived.

“Looks like I gotta download a program before I can access the site,” said Nana. “You want I should do that, dear?”

“Go for it.”

We stared at the window that appeared on the screen. “Could be a slow download through the modem,” Nana predicted. She checked her watch. “This’d be a good time to hit the earring store and get Conrad taken care of. You s’pose they’d fax that photo for me downstairs at reception, Emily?”

“It’s worth a try, but pin a note to your jersey: Remove the photo from the fax machine when you’re done.”

Nana gave the keyboard a maternal pat. “I hope no one was plannin’ to make a phone call on account a the line’s gonna be tied up for a while.”

“There’s one phone call we could make that would make all this fuss unnecessary,” said Tilly. “Call Peter Blunt. See if he’ll give you the result of Claire’s autopsy report.”

Peter? Damn, things had gotten so complicated, I’d forgotten all about Peter. I gave my forehead a whack with my fist. “I should have thought of that before. What is
wrong
with me? Okay, I’ll just—” I regarded the download bar on the computer. “I’ll run up to the guys’ suite and use their phone. That’ll be easier.”

“You want we should wait on you for dinner, dear? Tilly and me are gonna take a cab to some famous seafood place.”

“Go on without me.” I grabbed my shoulder bag and headed out the door. “I’ll wing it.”

Tap, tap, tap.

Etienne answered the door wearing a towel slung low around his hips and nothing else. His hair was ruffled into a dark, wet tangle. His chest sparkled with errant water droplets. His skin gave off a delicious aroma of citrus, and wind, and sunshine. I sniffed appreciatively. “Oh, God, what is that? It smells wonderful.”

He hooked his hand around the back of my neck and pulled me against him. “The hotel’s shampoo/ body wash.” He tilted my chin and pressed a soft, lingering kiss on my lips. “I’ll share. It works up into an incredibly erotic lather.”

Eh!
I kissed him back and swallowed half his tongue. He kicked the door shut and wrapped me in his arms. I flattened my palms against his naked spine. His skin was warm and moist. His body hard. His mouth deliciously hot.

“
Amore, amore,
” he rasped.

I felt suddenly unbalanced. The arches of my feet tingled. Light danced behind my eyelids. I was either having an orgasm or a stroke. My hearing grew muffled. My fingers went numb. My bones turned to san—

My shoulder bag crashed to the floor.

“
Figlio di puttana!”
Etienne hopped backward, holding his foot.

“I’m sorry! It slipped!”

He fell against the wall, mustering a smile as he rubbed his foot. “No harm,
bella
. I don’t use my left foot that much anyway.”

“I’m sorry. Really. Are you okay?” I smoothed my hand over his ankle.

“I’m sure I’ll be fine once the bones mend.”

“Nooo. Seriously, do you think you broke something?”

“Every bone in my foot.” He wiggled his toes. “Do you know the best treatment for a man who has broken every bone in his foot?”

“Air cast?”

“Bed rest.” He gave my lips a hungry look. “With round-the-clock nursing care.”

Oh, my God. I hadn’t played nurse since I was nine, and I’d never played with a patient who had movable or expanding body parts.
Hoochimama!
I glanced down the narrow hall toward the living room. “What about Duncan?”

He cupped his hands around my face. “He’s swimming laps. Something about working his frustration off. But I have a better method.” He drew my bottom lip into his mouth, and as he kissed me, stutter-stepped me around the corner into the first bedroom. He backed me onto the edge of the bed and followed me down onto the mattress. “
Fammi l’amore, bella.”

“What?”

“Make love to me.”

“Right now?”

“I’m dressed for the occasion.”

“Yeah, but—”

“But what?” He made a slow, sensuous foray into my ear with his tongue.

“Yeah, but—”
Oh, God.
“Okay.”

“What?”

“I said, okay.”

He boosted himself onto an elbow. “You’re sure? You’re absolutely sure? You don’t need more time to—”

I pulled his head down to mine. “Shut up and kiss me.”

His mouth came down hard on mine. His breathing quickened. His hands were everywhere. Off came my top. Off came my walking shorts. I hoped I didn’t have holes in my underwear. This was it. This was really it!

He boosted himself up again, his breath ragged. “I need—We need—You know. In my shaving kit.” He crawled off the bed.

I reached for his towel and gave it a playful yank. “You won’t be needing this anymore, will you?”

He turned to face me.

JESUS, MARY, AND JOSEPH! HOLY MOTHER OF GOD!

Scalding warmth swept up my throat. Struck dumb, I stared in wonder.

“I hope this means you’re not disappointed. Don’t move. I’ll only be a second.”

I fell back into the pillows. Disappointed?
Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Holy Mother of God.
I stared at the ceiling, eyes wide and mouth agape.

The hall door clicked open. “Hey, Miceli, you left your purse in the hall. You want it?”

Duncan?
Eh!
I shot under the covers like Alice down the rabbit hole. I heard footsteps, then—

“Say, Em, a guy at the pool told me about a great restaurant where they do a killer roast squab with parsley ravioli in truffle-scented sauce. Sound good to you? I could be ready to go in twenty minutes. Will that give you enough time to get ready?”

I snaked my hand out through the covers and flashed a thumbs-up.

“Good. I’m psyched. Where’s Miceli?”

I aimed my finger at the inner wall.

“Bathroom? Hey, Miceli!” He pounded once on the wall. “Make it quick! I’ve gotta shower! And, Em, this restaurant apparently makes a passionfruit tart that’ll knock your socks off.”

I poked my head out just enough to send Duncan a withering glare.

“What? You’re not a big fan of passionfruit?” He braced his shoulder against the doorjamb and smiled innocently. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”

A
t 7:16 the next morning, I was still waiting for the computer to finish downloading the Google Earth database.

“Sorry it’s takin’ so long, dear,” Nana apologized when she got back from breakfast, “but maybe it’ll be done by the time we get back this evenin’. And to think that when modems first come out, we thought they was so fast.”

“What if tonight isn’t soon enough?” I fretted. “What happens if the killer strikes again before we have our answer? Wouldn’t we have a much better time today if we knew there
was
no killer? Or if the killer had been taken into custody?” Hmm. “How was breakfast? Anything noteworthy to report? Runny eggs? Limp bacon? Unexpected police activity?”

“The group was blissfully subdued this morning,” said Tilly. “Jake and Lola sat by themselves, staring out the window. Diana and Roger were at opposite ends of the room, and Conrad and Ellie ate with Henry. Your grandmother and I spent a relaxing hour drinking tea and reading the Adelaide paper.”

So the police
still
hadn’t arrived?
Uff da.
What was the hold up?

“The obituary section took my breath away,” said Nana. “It went on for pages.”

I regarded her oddly. “Why are you reading the obituaries in a place where you don’t know anyone?”

She shrugged. “Habit.”

“Were you able to learn anything when you called Peter Blunt last night?” asked Tilly.

“I got sidetracked last night,” I confessed guiltily, “so I, uh, never made the call.”

Nana beamed at me. “’Bout time you seen some action, dear.”

“Nooo! I didn’t see any action. I was about to see some, then Duncan showed up, so I spent the rest of the night sipping wine and eating parsley ravioli while the guys threw epithets at each other in Italian.”

“Are you sure they were cursing?” asked Tilly. “They seem to have become such good friends.”

“It wasn’t so much the words, as how they said them. On a brighter note, the parsley ravioli was surprisingly good.”

Nana tapped her watch. “If you wanna try Peter, I seen public phones downstairs. Maybe you can call before we board the bus. But we better move it ’cause we only got twenty-eight minutes to catch the elevator and make it out the front door.”

After spending ten minutes analyzing how to make a long-distance call on a pay phone and another five minutes gathering change, I got Peter Blunt’s voice mail and left a message for him to call me at the hotel at his earliest possible convenience. “It’s a matter of life or death.” Which was probably a slight exaggeration, but I figured it might grab his attention.

As soon as I took my seat on the bus, Henry veered into morning traffic. “Mornin’, folks. Wilcome to day five of your Great Aussie Advinture. Today we’ll be taking a thirty-minute flight to Kangaroo Island, which is a hundred and twinty-three kilometers off the coast. At Kingscote we’ll split into two groups since tour buses on the island accommodate fewer passengers, but no worries. You’ll all be seein’ the same sights.”

“Have you heard anything from Heath Acres?” Lola Silverthorn called out.

Wow. The woman didn’t know when to leave well enough alone.

“Thanks for asking. He rang me up last night. They haven’t released his mum’s body yit, but whin they do, he’ll be taking her back to Coober Pedy for burial.”

“Do they know what killed her?” asked Dick Teig.

“No word yit, but he’ll probably know by the ind of the day. And speaking of that, I bought a sympathy card that I’ll sind around for all of you to sign, if you like. Make sure it gits back to me sometime today, and I’ll post it to Coober Pedy.”

Aw, that was so thoughtful. I dug out my memo pad and wrote a note to myself. Things to pack for next trip—sympathy cards. Maybe if I prepared for the worst, nothing bad would happen. It was worth a try. Nothing else seemed to work.

Two snazzy Mercedes-Benz buses awaited us at the Kingscote airport. “Doesn’t matter which bus you git on,” Henry announced as he herded us toward the parking lot. “But once you decide, stay with the same group the entire day so you don’t foul up my hid count.”

My group charged toward the nearest bus like race-horses out of the gate, Nana and Bernice in a footrace at the head of the pack, elbows flying and boots clacking.

“Marion! Marion!” shouted Conrad.

Nana arrived first and did a little jump-around to celebrate. In fact, she looked fast enough to challenge Bernice in the five-yard dash at this year’s Senior Olympics. Conrad caught up to the group, staggering against the bus as he gasped for air.

“Hey, back of the line,” Dick Stolee admonished.

“I’m not
in
line,” Conrad choked out. “Marion, I have exciting news from the university search team.”

“They found the rat?”

“Not yet, but the photo you took
is
the desert rat kangaroo, so they’re pulling out all stops to track it down. They’ll want to interview you when it happens. You’ll make headlines all across Australia. You’ll be the celebrity du jour!”

“You s’pose they’ll take pictures?”

“Of course, they will. You’ll be a media darling!”

“I better find me a beauty parlor.”

“I’ll keep you informed. They’re going to call Henry with any news. Has anything this noteworthy ever happened to you before?”

“Well, I found a hundred-million-year-old plant earlier in the week.”

He dismissed that with a wave of his hand. “Besides that.”

“I won seven million dollars once.”

Conrad’s mouth puckered like a drawstring pulled too tight. “Oh.”

When we got the okay, we crowded onto the bus, gushing over the luxuriously cushy seats and fancy TV monitors. I claimed a window seat at the back, and Nana sat beside me. “I’ll move if one a your young men wants to sit here, dear.”

I glanced out the window to find them climbing onto the other bus. “Looks like they’ll be sitting with each other today.”

“Probably brushin’ up on new cusswords. If you overuse the old ones, they lose their effect.”

Guy Madelyn strolled down the aisle, taking candid shots of everyone. “I’m sorry, Marion,” he said when he reached us, “but I couldn’t help overhear your conversation with Conrad. I hope you won’t let his promise of pie in the sky influence your decision about coming to work for me. Has he fessed up about Australia’s track record with other significant discoveries? I hope you realize they have a habit of losing everything they find.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“Gold reefs in the central desert. Ancient fossils. The topography is so monotonously similar that people make discoveries one day and lose them the next. That rat kangaroo I heard Conrad talking about? Don’t get your hopes up. Remember, here today, gone tomorrow. I’m offering you a sure thing, Marion. Give it some serious thought.”

He snapped our picture and moved on, leaving Nana in an uncharacteristically pensive mood. I squeezed her hand. “Will you be terribly disappointed if they never find your rat kangaroo?”

“Nah. But I was kinda lookin’ forward to havin’ my hair done.”

After introducing us to our driver—a typically young and handsome Australian named Trevor—Henry took a quick head count, then hurried down the aisle and handed me an envelope and pen. “Could I trouble you to be in charge of the card, Imily? That way, I know I’ll git it back.”

I agreed to be keeper of the card, though I worried a little about how to carry it around all day without dog-earing the corners. As we left the airport and headed south, I wrote a little note to Heath, signed my name, and handed the card to Nana.

“I’d like to offer you a frindly wilcome to Kangaroo Island,” Trevor said pleasantly, “the third largest island off the coast of Australia. We’re isolated from the mainland and haven’t sold our souls to devilopers, so our landscape and wildlife are the same now as they’ve always been. The last hundred pairs of scarlet fan-tailed glossy black cockatoos on the planet live on Kangaroo Island. Tin percint of the world’s sea lions waddle onto Seal Bay. We don’t offer nightlife or glitz, but we have an abundance of salt air, clear water, and the kind of solitude you’ll niveh find in Sydney or Milbourne.”

The scenery was unremarkable. Meadows and trees. A few fences. We could have been driving down a road anywhere in the Midwest. When we turned east, it got a little more exciting because the pavement ended, forcing us to continue down a rutted dirt road that bounced us around worse than the Star Wars ride at MGM Studios. Meadows and trees still abounded, but looking out the window at them was like watching a movie with a jumpy video track.

“Our first stop this morning will be Emu Ridge Eucalyptus and Craft Gallery. Sixty years ago the island supported forty eucalyptus oil distilleries. Today, Emu is the only one lift. They dimonstrate the extraction prociss every half hour, but if that’s not your cup a tea, you can shop the gallery for souvenirs and crafts. I ricommind the Ligurian honey, collected from hives first imported from the Italian province of Liguria back in eighteen-eighty-one. All the bees on the island are pure Ligurian and descinded from that original strain.”

We pulled into the parking lot of a rustic compound of squat bungalows with red roofs and whitewashed siding. Perched atop a building that identified itself as
MACGILLIVRAY POST OFFICE 1953
was an emu weather vane that kept watch over derelict machinery in various stages of decay, mangy undergrowth, and a huge cauldron whose contents steamed like witch’s brew.

“We’re here for forty-five minutes,” announced Trevor. “The comfort station’s around back.”

I decided that watching eucalyptus leaves being pressed didn’t interest me, so I hit the gallery, amazed at how much merchandise could be shoehorned into a compact space. Hats, cloth bags, books, cards, dream catchers, paintings, magnets, T-shirts, honey, and all things eucalyptus, from candles and soap to shelf liners and lotion. I felt as if I’d stepped into a mini Mall of America.

“Listen to me, Marion, this will be the best decision you ever make. Trust me. It was too bad about Nora, but I believe things happen for a reason. Maybe Fate intended that
you
be the face of Infinity Inc., not Nora Acres.”

I looked over my shoulder to find Diana Squires directly in Nana’s face. Rolling my eyes at her persistence, I grabbed a jar of the famed Ligurian honey and marched over to them.

“I’m sorry for interrupting your conversation, but Mom would love this.” I handed the jar to Nana. “I think you should buy it for her. And look, there’s no line at the cash register at the moment, so this is a good time to check out.”

Nana flashed me a grateful smile. “If there’s no waitin’, maybe I oughta buy two.” She shuffled off.

Diana crossed her arms, displeasure in her eyes. “You obviously don’t have your grandmother’s best interests at heart. Why are you holding her back? What are you afraid of? That she might start looking better than you?”

“Oh, please.” I whipped out the sympathy card. “While I have you here, can I get you to sign this?”

She scribbled her name and handed it back. “I hope you realize you’re looking a gift horse in the mouth.”

“Gift horses can have a lot of nasty side effects.”

“Infinity manufactures the safest products in today’s market. Ask anyone.”

“I could ask Nora Acres, but unfortunately, she’s no longer with us.”

Diana blinked erratically, as if her eyelids were collapsing beneath the weight of her liner. “Are you implying that an Infinity product may have been responsible for Nora’s death? Heath refused to let her sample any of our product! Who knows, maybe if he’d loosened up a little, she’d still be alive. When a woman is as old as she was, I think it’s criminally negligent to deny her treatment that could reverse the aging process.”

“She was only fifty-seven.”

Diana’s bottom lip sagged open, either from shock or an excess of gloss. “Get out of here.
I’m
fifty-seven. She was decades older than I am. Her face. Her hands.”

“Fifty-seven.”

“Holy shit, she must have led one hell of a hard life.”

“But a pretty quick death. You were there when it happened. Did you notice anything unusual?”

“Other than her dropping her glass and passing out? What is this? A roundabout way of asking me if I slipped her a deadly dose of face powder?”

I heard the click of a camera shutter. “Nice profile shot,” said Guy, as he checked his display screen.

“I told you to stop taking my picture!” Diana shouted. “What part of ‘Don’t take my picture’ can’t you understand?”

“I’m sorry, I—”

“Erase it.” She grabbed his camera. He slapped her hand.

“Get your paws off my equipment.”

“Erase it!”

He punched a button. “There. It’s gone.”

“Good. And so help me, if you ever try taking my picture again, I’ll smash your freaking camera and have you arrested. You got that? Now stay away from me.”

She stormed out of the shop. I raised my eyebrows. “Do you suppose this means she’ll be a no-show for the group photo at the end of the trip?”