Killer Calories (8 page)

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Authors: G. A. McKevett

Tags: #Mystery

BOOK: Killer Calories
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“What was wrong with her?”
How ironic,
Savannah thought as she relocked the metal cabinet. Kat Valentina had been the subject of so many male fantasies over the years, and one of her most famous assets had been her generous bustline.
“What was it, Savannah?” Tammy asked again. “What did it say?”
“It says she had a tumor in her left breast.”
“Cancer? Kat had breast cancer?”
“They didn't know if it was malignant or not. According to Dr. Freeman's notes, she wouldn't let them biopsy it to find out.”
“But why not? If it was cancer, they needed to know so they could ...”
Savannah could tell by the tone of Tammy's voice that they were thinking the same thing.
Tammy's friend and idol had been so vain that she had chosen to risk death rather than have her famous body disfigured by surgery.
“Let's go, sweetie,” she told Tammy as she gently guided her back to the door. “I'm afraid we found out what we needed to know.”
CHAPTER NINE
A
s Savannah led Tammy out of the clinic and back along the shadowed path they had come, she wondered if “knowing the truth” was all it was cracked up to be. Sometimes, ignorance was a blissful, dark, cavelike refuge where one could hide from the blinding light of knowledge.
Judging from the painful silence radiating from her young friend, Savannah decided this had been one of those times.
The problem with “knowing” was that you couldn't “unknow” it. Tammy's image of her glamorous friend would never be the same again. It was one thing to think your idol had died of a tragic accident, but quite another to believe she took her own life.
So much for enlightenment.
“Are you okay, Tam?” she whispered, as they crept along behind the oleander bushes that lined one side of the pool.
“Yeah, I guess so. I just don't understand why—”
“Quiet! Listen.”
Savannah grabbed Tammy's shoulder and held her still, straining to hear.
Voices ... a man's and a woman's ... coming from the pool area. The woman sounded as though she were in distress.
Or maybe not, Savannah decided when the female uttered another, “Oh, God ... oh, oh ...”
“What is it?” Tammy whispered, her lips next to Savannah's ear.
“No big deal. Somebody's making it in the pool.”
“Making ... ? Oh, right.” Tammy stood on tiptoe and tried to look over the oleanders. “Who is it?”
Savannah yanked her back down by her sleeve. “It's none of our business.
Now
who's violating people's privacy.”
“Yeah, but I want to know ...” She shook off Savannah's restraining hand and did a little hop, again trying to see over.
“Tammy, mind your manners. Let's go.”
She hopped again, a bit higher. “It's Lou! Hey, Savannah, it's Lou and Bernadette.”
“That scrawny, self-righteous redhead who checked me in?”
“Yeah. Wow ... who would have thought that Lou and Bernadette ... ?”
“Ehhh, who cares? They deserve each other. Come on.”
Savannah was about to grab Tammy by the scruff of the neck and drag her away, when she noticed a change in the couple's tone. Apparently, the sex was over, and they were discussing some contentious subject.
“It does too matter,” she was saying in a tearful, angry voice. “Kat's dead now. That changes everything.”
Tammy gasped. Savannah reached over and put her hand across her mouth. “Sh-h-h-h.”
“Nothing's changed,” they heard him say. “Not between us, anyway. I told you before, I'm not going to marry anybody, ever again.”
“But you said you loved me.”
“What's that got to do with it?”
“If you love somebody, you marry them.”
“Only in fairy tales, Bernadette. Get real.”
“But you
promised.”
“I promised you a job. You've got it. I don't know what you're bitching about.”
Tammy leaned closer to Savannah. “That scumbag! I have a half a mind to go out there and tell him what I think of him.”
“You will not! Shut up and listen!”,
“But the only reason I wanted the job ...” Bernadette continued between sobs, “... was so I could be close to you.”
“So, you're close to me.” He gave a nasty little chuckle. “How much closer can you get than what we just did, huh?”
“That's not what I mean, and you know it. You said you couldn't marry me because of Kat. You even said once that you'd be happier if she wasn't around.”
“I never said that!”
“Yes, you did. And I thought that since Kat was dead, you'd ... oh, God ... you really are a jerk. You've just been using me.”
They heard a vigorous splashing of water. Bernadette was leaving the pool in a huff. A second later, wet, splatting footsteps came their way. They pressed into the oleander as Bernadette exited the pool area only a few feet from them. She had a beach towel wrapped tightly around her and a miserable look on her pretty, young face.
“You didn't seem to mind getting used a few minutes ago,” Lou called after her.
“Go to hell!” she yelled back as she stomped down the path toward the employees' dormitory.
Savannah and Tammy listened intently as Lou climbed out of the pool, dried off, and left. Thankfully, in the opposite direction.
Tammy turned to Savannah, her eyes wide and shining with excitement by the faint, blue-green glow of the pool lights. “Now
that
was interesting!” she said. “I'm starting to like this Nancy Drew routine.”
“No kidding,” Savannah replied thoughtfully. “I'll have Dirk add little Miss Bernadette to his list of suspects to check out.”
 
“Ow-w-w-www! Ouch! The pain! Oooo-o-o-o...the pain!” Right in the middle of her jumping jack, Savannah dropped to the ground, clutched her ankle, and began wailing.
The small class of five students, with Dion the Magnificent instructing, halted their first-thing-in-the-morning workout and stood, stunned and silent, watching her writhe in apparent agony.
Dion and Tammy were the first to snap out of it and hurry to her aid.
“Are you faking this?” Tammy hissed in her ear. “Because if you are, I have to tell you, I'm very disappointed in—”
“Savannah!” Dion knelt by her side. “What's wrong?”
“I think I pulled something,” she said through gritted teeth. “My ankle ... shooting pains ... o-o-o-o, it hurts!”
He peeled down her sock and studied the appointed ankle. “Really?” he said.
“Of course, really.” She gave an indignant snort. “Do you think I'd lie about a thing like that, just to keep from getting up in the middle of the night and coming out here to jump, push up, squat, and thrust with you fools?”
He cleared his throat and gave her a devilish grin. “It wouldn't be the first time.”
“Well, if I say my ankle's sprained, it's sprained, dammit. Now I wanna see the doctor.”
She glanced over at Tammy, who seemed to be wearing a new look of awareness.
“Yeah, I think we'd better have Dr. Ross examine her,” Tammy told Dion with great gravity. “She slipped on a snow-cone wrapper and fell in a Kmart, and she sued their asses off. She won, too.”
“Okay, okay. Can you walk?” he asked, pulling Savannah gently to her feet.
She felt his arms, hard and muscular around her waist. Sliding her hand along his equally developed shoulders, Savannah gave him a deep-dimple smile and donned her silkiest Southern accent. “Why, I don't believe I can. I'm afraid you're just going to have to carry me.”
 
Thrown over his shoulder, like a sack of potatoes wasn't what Savannah had in mind, when she suggested Dion transport her to the clinic. By the time he got her there, so much blood had rushed to her head that she felt like her face was going to explode.
“Gee, thanks,” she told him, as he deposited her at the front door and left with some murmured excuse about having to continue the exercise session with the others.
Dr. Ross arrived moments later, his wavy, dark hair boyishly mussed, his shirttail half-out. He looked deliciously bedraggled.
“I see not
everybody
around here gets up at the crack of dawn,” she said dryly. “I guess you reserve that privilege for your guests.”
“Of course. Who, in his right mind, would want to get up at this ungodly hour and jump around like a lunatic? That is how you hurt yourself, isn't it?”
“Oh, yeah,” she said, remembering her supposed injury. “I think it was that last jumping jack that put me over the edge.”
He unlocked the front door—quickly, because he had a
real
key—offered her a supportive shoulder, and guided her inside the clinic, where she had been only a few hours before.
“Let's set you down right over here,” he said, leading her to the examination table. “And we'll have a look at you.”
He flipped on an overhead light, then walked by the counter where his instruments were laid in tidy rows.
Except for his ear thingamabob,
she thought as she spotted it, lying crooked and on top of his tongue depressor thingamajigs ... just where she and Tammy had left it.
He noticed, too. He paused beside the counter, looked puzzled and maybe a little irritated, then straightened the arrangement to his liking.
A second later, he seemed to have forgotten all about it, his attention fully on her. She breathed an inward sigh of relief.
“A wayward jumping jack, you say?” He grabbed his stool, rolled it over to the table where she was, and sat down on it.
“Yep. That was the culprit.”
“Would you say it's more of a throb or a sting?”
Was this a trick question? The mercury in her paranoia thermometer rose.
“Maybe a bit of both.”
“A bit?”
“Okay, a lot ... of both, that is.”
“Sounds serious. We may have to amputate.”
“How about if you just write me a note, excusing me from P.E. class for about a week while it heals?”
He gave her a searching look with those great eyes that were the same rich amber as his tortoiseshell glasses. She felt herself melting. In fact, if he kept holding her ankle like that and looking at her that way, she might just turn into a big, warm, wet puddle right there on his examination table.
“Is that what you want from me, Savannah?” he asked, every word, every syllable, dripping with sexual innuendo. Or was it just her hormone-stimulated imagination? It was hard to tell. “You want me to write you a note to get you out of class?”
“Oh, Doctor,” she said, leaning toward him, her eyes trained on his full, sensitive-looking lips. “I do want that from you. I do.”
“You do?”
“More than life itself.”
“Okay. No problem.”
“No problem? That's it? That's all?”
“You got it. One note, coming up.”
Savannah waited until she had the precious bit of paper in her hand before she ventured onto more dangerous ground.
“By the way,” she said as she walked toward the door, remembering halfway across the floor that she should be limping.
“Yes?” He paused from scribbling on her chart and looked up at her expectantly. “You need a note to excuse you from drinking the green guck every morning, too?”
“Wow, could you do that?”
“No. The green guck is mandatory.”
“Oh ... then maybe you could just squelch a rumor that's going around the spa.”
“Which one?”
“That Kat's death wasn't an accident. That she killed herself because she had breast cancer and didn't want to have surgery.”
There.
A direct, unexpected jab to his solar plexus wouldn't have garnered more spectacular results. His breath left him in a gasp and his face went a deathly shade of pale.
She seldom used the “Hit 'Em Hard and Watch What Happens” technique. Mostly, because it ended a conversation so abruptly, and you couldn't get anything more out of your subject.
But she had seen Dirk use it numerous times, when all he needed was one good, solid, honest reaction. Observing the victim during the five seconds after the blow could often tell you what you wanted to know.
Slowly, the color began to return to his face, but she could see his hands tremble as he clutched his pen in a tight fist.
Finally, he found his breath and his voice. “I haven't heard that rumor, Ms. Reid,” he said, each word clipped and deliberate. “But if I do hear it, I'll tell the gossipmonger that it's none of his ... or her ... damned business.”
She gave him her cheeriest, most nonchalant smile. “You're absolutely right, Doctor. And the next time I hear it, I'll tell him ... or her ... the same thing. Thanks for the note.”
She hurried out the door and closed it firmly behind her. One of the most important parts of the “Hit 'Em, Watch 'Em” game was to get the hell out of Dodge as quickly as possible before physical violence could erupt.
But her little doctor's visit had been a smashing success. She had a note to keep her out of that damned exercise class. And she had a new bit of information for her mental notebook:
Dr. Freeman Ross believed Kat Valentina had died at her own hand. Either that ... or he had helped her along.
There was no other reason for a man to turn
that
white.

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