CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Shanelle is not in our room when I get back. I don’t know if that’s good or bad. Part of me wants to vent. Another wants to crawl under the covers and wait until Momoa releases us queens to leave Oahu, though at this point I expect one notable name would be absent from the CLEARED TO GO list.
I choose a happy medium. I unlock the mini bar and crack open not only the little bottle of chardonnay but the bag of potato chips. The happy-go-lucky time when I cared about calories, sodium, and saturated fat is long past. At the moment I’ve got problems way more pressing than water retention and thunder thighs.
I stand on the balcony to consume my wicked repast. After a while I notice several sunbathers on the opposite side of the pool shading their eyes to witness me nine floors up in my fuchsia satin gown, rhinestone tiara, and Ms. America sash devouring potato chips and glugging white wine straight from the bottle.
Maybe it’s the first time they’ve seen this behavior from a beauty queen. Let them stare. If by some act of God and Sebastian Cantwell I retain my crown, it won’t be the last.
I can’t even imagine how horrible it would be to lose my title, totally through my own doing. How could I hold my head up? I’d be an embarrassment to myself, Rachel, Jason, my parents …
In short order the chips and the wine are but a memory. I emerge from a quick shower to find Shanelle back. “How did the shoot go?” she asks me.
“The shoot was fine. It’s what happened afterward.”
Wrapped in a towel, I tell the tale. Shanelle is aghast. She shrieks, screams
No!
, paces, slaps her hand upside her head—in short, she exhibits all the symptoms of deep upset. Eventually I realize that she may not be concerned only about me. “Don’t worry,” I tell her. “I really don’t think they saw me with the box. So they have no idea you helped me hack Tiffany’s computer.”
She flops onto her bed. “I don’t know why I care anyway. Hell, my pageant career is over. You got a lot more to lose than I do.” She eyes me. “So what are you gonna do?”
I start to moisturize my face. “Be more careful.”
“You’re not going to stop investigating?”
“How can I? The only way I can get out from under this black cloud of suspicion is to figure out who killed Tiffany Amber.”
She gets up and heads for the mini bar. She’s disciplined enough to limit herself to a Diet Coke. “In that case, you up for the luau?”
“I completely forgot about that thing. Is it tonight?”
“Biggest draw on the island of Oahu.”
I’m not sure about that but the Royal Hibiscus does do it up big one night a week. “What the hell. I may as well enjoy my freedom while I can.”
Half an hour later I’ve got my face and hair done and am wearing a lime green chiffon babydoll dress with spaghetti straps and a twist of charmeuse at the bodice. Very on trend. Shanelle’s in a strapless lightly beaded hankie hem dress with a dramatic floral print on a black background. Her hair’s back to a natural Afro tonight.
“We look good, girl,” Shanelle pronounces.
I agree. “No one would guess we narrowly avoided incarceration today.”
And we’re off. The lobby is mayhem what with the crush of people assembled for the luau.
“Nothing like roast pig to draw a crowd,” I tell Shanelle.
Some people have taken the luau theme and run with it. I see one couple who are clearly ready to party. The woman is wearing a grass skirt, bikini top, lei and straw hat, and her other half is in boxer shorts and undershirt with a bright pink pool noodle around his waist and a snorkel mask over his face.
It’s such a horde in the lobby’s central courtyard that I can barely move. Shanelle is several people to my right, as immobilized as I am. The pulsing crowd is pushing me left into a palm tree and a stand of birds of paradise. One real live bird is only a few feet from my face. The blue and gold macaw, whose name I’ve learned is Cordelia, is perched on her tree just in front of me.
All of a sudden I feel hands in the middle of my naked back. They push, hard. I can’t help myself; I pitch forward.
I see everything like it’s unwinding before me in slow motion. My hands flail in empty space. In front of me is Cordelia. She’s looking right at me with astonishment written all over her narrow parroty face. I’m going straight at her; there’s no denying it. She knows it and I know it. She squawks. I shriek. I fixate on her beady black eyes and quite sizable black beak, both getting closer by the nanosecond. There’s nowhere to go but in one direction. My hands wave desperately in front of me. Then Cordelia’s beak latches onto the index finger of my right hand. And bites down. Hard.
“Owwww!” I scream.
Cordelia lets go, then screams, too. She’s terrified, I recognize that, but I will admit I’m more worried about myself. I lurch forward into the birds of paradise and end up sprawled on all fours in the exotic flora and fauna. All I know is one thing: my finger hurts like hell.
Actually I know a second thing. I’m bleeding like the poor stuck pig all we luau goers are preparing to devour for dinner.
It’s pandemonium behind me. I hear Shanelle’s shout cut through the noise. “What the hell happened to my roommate?”
Somebody pushed Shanelle’s roommate, that’s what happened. But what I care about now is the throbbing pain in my finger. I force myself into a kneeling position and look at my hand. It’s like it belongs to another person. It’s trembling and you’d think I could control it but I can’t. And that blood I mentioned? Oh, yes. It’s everywhere. Splotching my lime green dress and the birds of paradise like a crime scene.
Somebody rushes up behind me and takes me gently by the shoulders. I turn my head to look. I expect it to be Shanelle but it’s Mario. I’m happy to see him even though he’s fully clothed.
“What in the world happened to you?” he asks me.
I cock my chin at the macaw. “Cordelia. She bit my finger.”
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s find a doctor.”
In short order he has me vertical. Then I have a Moses moment. In the face of my injury, the crowd parts before me as if they have all the room in the world. With his arm around me—believe me, I’m not complaining—Mario leads me across the lobby and down a short corridor to the hotel doctor’s office. Clearly the Royal Hibiscus is equipped for anything.
Shanelle appears and she and Mario get me seated in the waiting area. I presume the on-duty doctor is in the examining room treating some other ill-fated tourist; that door is closed.
Meanwhile the blotch on my dress is getting more impressive by the second. Shanelle sits down next to me. “You’re bleeding bad, girl. Did you trip on those heels and fall into that bird or what?”
“Somebody pushed me.”
Mario halts his pacing to frown in my direction. “Are you sure about that?”
“No doubt in my mind. I felt hands on my back.” I wince. The pain is no joke.
Shanelle rubs my good arm. “They shouldn’t have that dang macaw free in the courtyard like that. It’s a menace.”
“Don’t blame Cordelia,” I say. “I provoked her when I launched in her direction. She must’ve been petrified.”
The examining room door opens and the doctor appears. I make that brilliant deduction from the young Asian woman’s lab coat and stethoscope. Her smile fades fast when she sees my hand. “What in the world happened to you?”
“Cordelia. It’s not her fault, though.”
“This is a first,” the doctor says. “I’ve never known her to bite anybody.”
Minutes later, still in the waiting room, the doctor cleans my wound and teaches me a bit of bird lore. I learn there’s only one poisonous bird in the world and it lives in New Guinea. I hope the hotels there have the good sense to keep it far from the tourists. Then I watch the doctor insert aloe vera gel into a short rubber thingie that looks like a condom. She slips it on my finger. “This will stop the pain,” she tells me. “It’s also good for helping to keep the bruising and swelling down.” She instructs me how to take care of my finger. And she proves right about the pain receding. But as one woe recedes, another advances.
Who pushed me? Was it a warning? Is my investigating, such as it is, making somebody nervous enough to try to shake me off? If so, it means that Tiffany Amber’s murderer truly does lurk among us. He or she must be one of the people I’ve talked to.
Mario sits beside me. He’s as adorable as ever in twill cargo shorts and a navy slim-fit polo with white piping along the color, placket, and cuffs. I have to say, it’s pretty fun being the object of his concern. “How are you feeling now?” he asks me.
“Better.” I raise my condomed finger in the air. “The aloe vera is working.”
“Do you really think somebody pushed you?”
“I’m positive.”
“Who would do that? Has one of the girls been giving you grief since you won?”
Misty, I think. Magnolia. Or one of the others who hates me for winning but hasn’t said anything to my face. And who else am I suspicious of? Sally Anne Gibbons. Keola. Dirk. Rex, though I don’t have a motive for him. And Sebastian Cantwell, who’s pretty mad at me at the moment. Though I have to think he would use more sophisticated techniques to make his point.
For that matter, I realize, looking into Mario’s eyes, I should be suspicious of Mario. I don’t want to be. Nor can I think of a good reason
to
be. But he’s an important deity in the Ms. America pantheon and who knows what dealings he had with Tiffany? Or she with him, more to the point. Maybe she asked him to intercede with the judges, too, like she did Cantwell. He was obviously in the vicinity just now for the macaw incident. And even though I didn’t see him backstage during the finale, I can’t be certain he wasn’t there. And I can’t let his apparent niceness, not to mention supreme hotness, hamper my investigation.
“I don’t know who would do it,” I say. “I guess I’ll just have to keep an eye out.”
“You certainly do. And if anything else happens, you come tell me. Day or night. After all, I’m the emcee of this pageant. I can’t let anything happen to our new title-holder.”
I nod and watch him leave.
So does Shanelle, who winks at me the second he’s out the door. Then, “Whoo-ee, girl!” she chortles. She bustles across the waiting room to sit next to me. “That man’s loins are aflame for the new Ms. America.”
“They are not.”
“Yes, they are! No way you can dispute that obvious fact.”
