Last Resort (17 page)

TWENTY NINE

I got back to Windy Vista to find Jake and Wayne Hackerman in conversation.

I drove back from town and used the temporary pass card to lift the gate at the entrance of the campground. I obeyed the speed limit and crawled up the hill past the clubhouse and toward our cabin. I did a double take when I drove by Hackerman's massive black RV and saw him talking with Jake. No punches were being thrown, so I drove past, parked the car at the cabin and then walked back toward Hackerman's lot.

“I have no idea,” Hackerman was saying. “But I'm tired of this crap.”

“What crap?” I asked, coming up behind them, my feet crunching on the gravel in his drive.

Jake turned, surprised. “Hey.”

“Hey.”

Hackerman just frowned at me.

“How was your trip into town?” Jake asked.

“Fine.” I wasn't ready to share the details of my visit at the county jail. I looked at Hackerman. “What crap?”

He waved a hand in the air. “All the crap that's been going on around here. And it started when you two showed up.”

Jake rolled his eyes. “I was going for a walk after I woke and found your note. I was walking by and he asked if my wife found any more thieves. I didn't know what he was talking about, so I stopped to ask.” He forced a smile. “Here we are.”

“Look, I'm sorry,” Hackerman said. He lifted the cap sitting on his head, repositioning it. “I'm just a little on edge. I know you two aren't really responsible for all this, but I don't wanna lose this place, okay?”

“I understand,” I said. “I don't blame you.”

“And when I hear Delilah talking about selling and what-not, then I get a little worried about not having a place to go,” he said, frowning again. “Me and Rhonda and the kids have been coming here for years and I don't wanna go nowhere else, okay? This is our second home and I wanna keep it that way. No place else offers what we have here.” He sighed. “So with all of this crap going on, I'm just tired of it.”

“Maybe you can buy it then,” Jake offered.

Hackerman looked at him like he'd gone insane. “You know what this land will fetch if she sells it? A lot. Way more than I got in my bank account.” He shook his head. “There ain't no way. Rhonda and I, we do alright, but not that kind of alright.”

On cue, the door to the RV opened and Rhonda sauntered out in cut off denim shorts and a yellow bikini top, both of which were too small for her. Initially, her mouth was tightened into an irritated little knot. But then she saw Jake and the knot morphed into a blinding smile.

“Guests!” she said, stepping down from the steps of the RV. “How lovely!”

Hackerman and I rolled our eyes in unison.

“He told me what happened,” Jake said to me, ignoring her. “About those two kooks taking the router and chasing them down. You're alright?”

“I'm fine,” I said. “And Wayne was the one that caught them. Otherwise, they would've gotten away.”

Hackerman shrugged off my giving him credit.

“Yes,” Rhonda said, batting her fake eyelashes at Jake. “Wayne told me about helping out your wife.” She paused and a corner of her mouth turned upward. “Maybe you'll be able to return the favor.”

“Jesus Christ, Rhonda,” Hackerman said. “Put a cork in it.”

I tried to ignore her for a moment. “You said everything started when we got here. So there haven't been any other problems this summer?”

Hackerman thought for a moment. “Well, I can't say that. Ned Bailey had the windshield on his golf cart smashed a couple weeks back. Big old crack that ran right down the middle of it and he had to have it replaced. And Bruce Hanstad told me he had a busted window in his camper. Came back one night from dinner at The Landing and saw it. Nothing taken, though, that he found.” Hackerman rolled his thick shoulders. “So I guess there's been some stuff before you all arrived.”

“What about before this summer?” I asked. “Like last year?”

Hackerman thought for a moment, then shook his head. “Not that I recall, no. Everyone kinda watches out for one another and there ain't been no trouble. Those boneheads I clotheslined have always been around, but its been more like them hanging out because they had nothing to do instead of them stealing stuff.”

“People skinnydip,” Rhonda said, eyeing Jake. “Occasionally.”

Hackerman made a face. “Yeah, but that ain't the same as breaking into people's places and doing harm to their property. That's a whole different game.”

So it was happening all of a sudden. I didn't think Jake and I were responsible for it, but it sure sounded as if it was all something more than a coincidence. I could think of two possibilities. One, maybe someone wanted others to think that Windy Vista was an unsafe place. They wanted to drive people away, so that it would either have to close or be sold. It was hard to think that anyone would want it to close, though, especially given the fact that most of the people I'd run into seemed to love the resort.

The other possibility was that someone was just mad at Delilah and were trying make her life miserable and force her out of business. The twins had openly said they didn't like her. I couldn't imagine that Chuck and Jaw were too fond of her, either.

But would either of those things be enough of a reason for someone to actually kill Harvey?

Hackerman glanced at his watch, then at his wife. “We gotta be getting down to bingo at the lodge at the resort.”

Rhonda Hackerman made a face as if that was the last thing she wanted to do. Then she glanced at Jake. “You should come. And play.”

“I'm not much for bingo,” Jake said, smiling at her. “But good luck.”

She murmured something I couldn't understand and looked him up and down like she wanted to cover him in chocolate and eat him.

I slipped my hand into his and stared at Rhonda. “Enjoy bingo. We'll find something to keep us busy.” I winked at her. “If you know what I mean.”

Rhonda's face darkened as Hackerman pulled her away.

THIRTY

“I thought you meant we were going to go have sex,” Jake said.

We'd left the Hackerman's lot and continued walking past our cabin, taking the long outer loop to stroll in the sunshine.

“That's what I wanted her to think,” I said. “I swear, I'm going to punch her in the face if she looks at you like that one more time.”

“Like what?”

“Like she wants to strip and throw you to the ground right on the spot,” I growled.

“I hadn't noticed,” Jake said, but he was grinning.

“Maybe I'll just punch you instead.”

“Back to my original question,” Jake said, squeezing my hand. “I thought we were going back to the cabin to—”

“I need to think,” I told him. “Clear my head. So you'll just have to keep your desire at bay for the moment. Unless you'd like to go chase down Rhonda Hackerman.”

He squeezed my hand again. “Stop. The only woman I'm interested in chasing down is you.”

“Good answer,” I said. “And I'm too distracted to have sex right now.”

“Why's that?”

“Because all of this is bothering me,” I said as we walked. “Those idiots stealing the router. The vandalism. The murder. What exactly is going on here?”

Jake didn't answer right away. “I have no idea, Daisy,” he finally said. “Maybe it's just not a great place.”

I shook my head. “I don't think so. Delilah loves this place. It's killing her to see this all go bad. She cares about it too much to not be a great place. Harvey loved it, too. I mean, even Hackerman sings its praises. It's not a bad place at all, but I think someone is trying to make it a bad place.”

“Maybe just bad luck then,” he said.

We turned the corner on the loop and I was about to tell him I disagreed when we heard a scream coming from the main office at the bottom of the hill. We looked at each other, then broke into a jog to get down the hill.

Delilah was sitting at her desk in the office, frozen.

I looked around. There was no one else with her.

“Delilah?” I asked. “Are you alright?”

She was staring at the phone in her hand.

“Delilah?” Jake asked.

She tore her gaze away from the phone. She looked like she'd seen a ghost. “What?” she said, her voice raw.

“We heard you scream,” I said. “Are you alright?”

Her eyes returned to the phone and she stared at it blankly. “There's no money,” she whispered.

I glanced at Jake. He was watching her with a puzzled expression on his face.

“There's no money?” I asked.

“There's no money,” she repeated, louder this time.

“Delilah,” I said gently. “What are you talking about?”

“I just called the bank.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “There's no money.”

“Your money?”

“Windy Vista's,” she said, swallowing hard. “The account is empty.”

“It's supposed to have money in it?” Jake asked.

She nodded slowly. “Harvey and I, we'd opened up an account. We'd taken both of our savings and put it together. We were going to use it to try and invest and see if we could make some more money. I didn't really understand it all. It was Harvey's plan. He said we could buy some stocks and if the stocks increased money, we'd make money. And if we did, then we'd have some extra cash for around here.”

That made sense. It was a bit risky, but if it they were investing money they didn't need, then I could see Harvey's thinking. Try to increase what they had in order to put it back in Windy Vista.

“But it didn't make money?” I asked.

She set the phone down on the desk, still looking at it. “It made a little. Not enough for him to cash out, but he thought in a few more months it might give us a little something.” She set her hands on the desk like she was trying to steady herself. Her knuckles were white. “But we're so low on cash right now and I have to pay our bills. I...I just checked the account so I could withdraw the money to pay them.” Her voice shook. “And it's empty.”

“Completely empty?” Jake asked, his brow furrowed.

“Completely empty.”

“Who had access to the account?” I asked.

Delilah set her head in her hands, staring down at the desk. “Just me and Harvey. That was it. It was our money. My savings and his. We were the only ones.”

I wanted to put my around her and hug her. Her streak of bad luck was unbelievable.

“Can you check the account?” Jake asked. “See when the last withdrawal was made?”

“I already did,” she answered. “It was two days before you found Harvey. And he made the withdrawal. I just called the bank after I logged into the account.” She paused. “It's gone.”

All of it had to be more than a coincidence. Jake had accused me plenty of times in the past about being an overzealous conspiracy theorist, but this was too much. A dead body. Missing money. I didn't believe for one second that it wasn't all connected.

I just wasn't sure I could do anything about it.

“Can you call your vendors?” I asked. “Tell them you'll be late with the bills? Ask for an extension?”

She shook her head slowly. “I've been doing that for the last two months. This was it. There will be no electricity, no water, no nothing. I'm not even going to have time to get it ready to sell. We can't even make it through the summer.” She coughed and even though I couldn't see her face, I knew she was crying. “I'm just going to have to close it down.”

I looked at Jake, pleading with him to do something. But he just held his hands up, like he had no idea what to do. He was just as helpless as I was.

Delilah finally lifted her face from hands and wiped at her eyes. “I'm sorry.”

“Don't apologize.”

“I don't mean to dump all of this on you,” she said. “I'm just at a loss.”

“We understand,” I said. “It's okay.”

Jake's hand touched my elbow. “We'll give you some space. We'll check on you in a little bit. Is that alright?”

Delilah was staring straight head, her eyes focused on something outside the window. “Sure. Yes. Of course.”

I didn't want to leave, but I wasn't sure what else to do. Reluctantly, I let Jake pull me out of the office and we left Delilah sitting there, staring off into space.

THIRTY ONE

“I know your bleeding heart wants to help,” Jake said, shaking his head. “But my head says we need to start making plans to leave.”

We'd left Delilah and stopped off at the pool. Not to swim, but to think. We'd found a couple of chairs under an umbrella. It was crowded, the blue water filled with campers. Most of the chairs were covered in colorful beach towels and discarded clothes. Water bottles and tubes of sunscreen littered the table tops.

“There's not a lot we can do here,” Jake continued. “We don't have money to give her and quite honestly, I don't want to get involved in this any more than we already are. I feel badly for her, but there isn't anything we can do.”

“We could donate,” I suggested lamely.

He frowned. “So, what? Write her a check for a hundred bucks?”

“Yes.”

“And what good is that going to do?” he asked.

I frowned at him.

“Think about it, Daisy. She needs way more than that. And we don't have it.”

“We could do a fundraiser,” I offered.

“She needs the money now,” he pointed out. “There isn't time to plan something.” He looked around. “And, again, I think the kind of money she really needs isn't going to come from a spaghetti dinner or a raffle. It sounds far more significant than that.” He shook his head. “She's in a bad spot.”

That was putting it mildly. She was about to lose her livelihood. She'd already lost her best friend. I tried to put myself in her shoes to sympathize with how it would feel. And it wasn't good. If it had been me, I would've been running around, shrieking and crying. She was actually far calmer than I would've been. But I knew how much it had to pain her. You couldn't fake caring about Windy Vista the way she did. I truly believed she loved it and that it was going to wreck her to lose it.

“I think the best thing for us to do is to start packing up,” Jake said. “Because it sounds like she's really going to have to close it down. And I don't mean to sound selfish, but I don't want to get caught up in that whole mess because it might not be pretty.”

I sighed. “I know. You're right. I just hate it. She's going to be ruined.”

Jake hesitated, then nodded. “I know.”

“What do you think happened with the money?” I asked, watching a little boy in neon green swim trunks cannonball into the water. “Don't you think that's odd?”

“I think everything that's happened here is odd, Daisy,” he said. “None of it makes sense. I have no idea what happened to the money.”

“Someone is doing this to her,” I said.

He watched the boy climb out of the water and launch himself in again. “Okay, don't freak out when I say this.”

“Don't freak out when you say what?”

He shifted in his chair. “She really could be the one responsible for all this.”

“What?” I looked at him indignantly. “No.”

“Just listen,” he said. “All that we really know, we've gotten from her. She had some relationship with the dead guy. They had money in an account together. They were already struggling. The sheriff found that deposit slip or whatever it was. You told me that. What if
she's
the one making this place look bad just so she can close it and then sell it?”

I thought for a moment, then shook my head. “No. Why go through all of the trouble? If she wanted to sell it, she could just put it up for sale and sell it.”

“But this gives her a reason,” he said. “So it doesn't seem like she's just trying to cash in. If she just up and announced she was selling, she'd have to deal with angry campers. And we don't know that she's telling the truth about the money. Or about anything, really.”

I wasn't buying it. “I think that's too much of a reach, Jake. I don't think she's lying.”

“I'm not saying she is,” he said. He drummed his fingers on the table top. “I'm just saying it's a possibility. And, the truth is, we're probably not going to ever know what's really happened. It's not up to us to figure it out. There are about a million different possibilities and we aren't here to sort them out.”

I hated the way he could be so logical.  “Sometimes I wonder if you have a heart.”

He offered me a smile. “Sometimes I wonder if you have three.”

I watched the cannonball kid try to boost himself out of the pool but his arms were tired and they failed him, dropping him back into the water. He tried one more time, they failed again. and he laughed and swam down toward the shallow end instead.

I knew Jake was right. It wasn't on us to help or figure out what had been going on at Windy Vista. We weren't detectives, no matter how much I nosed around like one. We didn't have the resources to fix all of Delilah's problems and maybe Jake was right about those problems, too. Maybe some of them were of her own doing and she'd shaded them in a different light. Maybe she was just as much to blame for what was going on at the campground as anyone else. I didn't think she was, but I couldn't deny that it was at least a possibility.

“Double trouble,” Jake whispered under his breath.

“What?”

He nodded toward the far end of the pool. “Looney Tunes squared.”

I turned and saw Mary and Carrie sauntering around the far end of the pool. One had on a red bikini top and black bottoms and the other wore a black top and red bottoms. Mix and match. Their faces were expressionless as they laid their towels down on the lounge chairs and surveyed the pool. When they noticed us, one whispered to the other and they both nodded. Then they waded into the shallow end, still whispering to one another.

“They creep me out,” I said to Jake.

“It's like they share one brain,” he said, adding, “A very small one.”

The twins moved slowly away from the far wall, toward the middle of the pool. They simultaneously dipped beneath the rope that divided the two ends of the pool and reemerged on the other side at the same time. They took synchronized strokes in our direction.

“It's like they're sharks,” Jake said. “And we're the chum.”

“Should we leave?”

“I like to think of us as brave chum.”

“I think you just like seeing them in their bikinis.”

“They're wearing bikinis?” Jake asked innocently.

I shook my head just as they reached our end of the pool. They both set their elbows up on the pool deck and looked at us.

“Hello,” I said.

They looked at one another and then the one on the left said, “Hello.”

A massive, awkward silence followed.

“Are you just enjoying the water or did you swim down here for a reason?” I finally asked.

They looked at one another and the same one as before said, “We swam down here for a reason.”

Another awkward silence.

Very, very small brain.

“We heard Chuck and Jaw got arrested,” the talking one said.

I nodded. “Yep.”

“Because of you,” the other said.

“Because they broke into our camper, yes,” I corrected.

They exchanged looks again.

“We don't like them anymore,” the one on the left said.

“Are you Mary or Carrie?” I asked, unable to stand it any longer.

“Mary,” she said, then pointed to her sister. “That's Carrie.”

“Good to know. Why don't you like them anymore?”

“Because they are weasels,” Mary said.

“Yeah,” Carrie chimed in. “Weasels.”

“Okay.”

“Do you think they did that thing to Harvey?” Mary asked.

“I have no idea,” I said honestly. “I don't know what happened to Harvey.”

“We heard there's no more money,” Carrie said. “To run the campground.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“When Delilah screamed 'I don't have any more money to run the campground' a little while ago,” Carrie answered.

“Oh.”

“Is that true?”

“We have no idea,” Jake said. “We don't know.”

“What will happen if there's no money?” Carrie asked.

“Again, no idea,” Jake said. “We're here on vacation.”

Carrie looked at Mary. “I wonder if that's why Harvey got so mad the other day.”

“Hmm. Maybe. He was really mad.”

“When was Harvey mad?” I asked.

“Remember how he was swearing?” Carried asked her sister, ignoring me. “And wouldn't stop?”

Mary nodded. “Yeah. And he never swore. But he said, like, every word that day.”

I snapped my fingers at them. “Hey. When was Harvey mad?”

They both turned to look at me.

“After we took him to Frenchie's,” Carrie said.

“What's Frenchie's?”

She stared at me. “Duh. The grocery store.”

The grocery store? I thought about my grocery shopping trip to the little convenience store. But now was not the time to focus on that.

“And you took him there?” I asked. “And he was cussing the whole way there?”

“Yeah. He needed a ride,” Carrie explained. “And he was, like, all red-faced and muttering to himself the whole way there.” She paused. “But that isn't really where he wanted to go.”

“You've lost me,” I said.

“He didn't really want to go to Frenchie's,” Carrie repeated. “Or he wanted us to think that's where he wanted to go.”

“Yeah,” Mary chimed in. “Like he wanted to fool us. But we were too smart for that.”

It was hard to think of them as being too smart for anything or anyone. “You've lost me again.”

Carrie sighed, like she couldn't believe she was still having to explain. “Okay. He came to us. Said he needed a ride into town to go to Frenchie's. But it didn't make sense, okay? Because he'd gone to the store the night before and he didn't need anything.”

“How do you know that?”

Carried looked at her sister.

“Um, we just know, okay?” Mary said. “We know things.”

“No,” I said, trying to be patient. “How did you know that?”

“She thought he was going to meet another girl,” Carrie said. “So she followed him into town. He actually went to get groceries, though. That time.”

Mary shrugged.

My temples throbbed. “Okay. Got it. So he tells you to take him to Frenchie's. But you said that isn't where he really wanted to go. How do you know?”

“Because we waited for him,” Mary said. “He told us just to drop him and that he didn't need a ride back, that he'd get back on his own. I didn't believe him.”

“So we parked across the street and waited,” Carrie said, dropping her voice a little. “Like, surveillance.”

Just like.

“At the ice cream place,” Carrie said. “I had strawberry while we waited.”

“I had bubble gum.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to stay patient. It was worse than waiting for Emily to get out of the bathroom when we were at home. “But then he came back out?”

“Yeah, like two minutes after we got our cones,” Carrie said. “And he totally looked around, like he was checking to see if we were still there. He didn't see us. And he didn't have any groceries.”

“So then you waited to see where he went?”

They both nodded.

“And where was that?”

“To Mr. Ellington's office,” Carrie said. “We had to drive slow and be tricky so he wouldn't see us.”

“Davis Ellington?” I asked.

“Yeah,” Mary said.

“Why would he go there?” I asked. I glanced at Jake but he looked like wasn't following or wasn't listening. Or both.

“I dunno,” Mary said. “We saw him go in there and then we waited and then we got bored so we came back here. We figured he was just gonna be mad if he saw us there, waiting on him.”

“We didn't want him saying any of those bad words to us,” Carrie said.

I leaned back in my chair, my brain working overtime. I immediately wondered if Harvey was mad about the joint account he'd set up with Delilah or if he was upset over another account. And I was curious why he wanted to go right to Davis Ellington after visiting the bank. What did one have to do with the other?

“I'm burning,” Mary said. “I need more sunscreen.”

“Me, too,” Carrie said. “I'll spray you first.”

“You're the best,” Mary said.

I watched the weird twins swim away toward the other end of the pool.

“Just stop,” Jake said, as they ducked under the rope into the shallow end.

“Stop what?”

“Thinking,” he said. “Or hypothesizing. Or whatever it is you're doing in your head right now.”

“I didn't think you were paying attention.”

“I wasn't,” he said. “But their words just ate away at my brain, anyway. Like zombies.”

I ignored his wisecrack. “Why would he have been so mad?”

“Daisy.”

“And why would he have gone to Davis Ellington's?”

“Daisy.”