Carolyn G. Hart_Henrie O_01 Read online

  Rosalia spoke immediately. “No. I have never seen it, Mrs. Collins.”

  Betty stared at it with a sick fascination. “That is what killed Mr. Prescott?”

  “Yes.” I glanced around, spotted a pad by the telephone. It was easier to explain with a drawing. I drew the hot tub and its interior steps. “The hair dryer was taped against the right side of the interior steps”—I marked an X there—“then the cord, taped at five-inch intervals—waterproof tape, of course—came up the side of the tub, curled over the top, and ran down the redwood siding in the shadow of the exterior steps. The tape was tightly fastened at the bottom, then hidden under the monkey-grass border until it was plugged into an outlet.”

  The wet dryer reeked of chlorine. Would I ever smell chlorine without a sickening lurch of memory?

  “The bubbles,” Betty said faintly.

  I understood what she meant and once again recognized the working of a shrewd mind.

  Rosalia stared at Betty, puzzled.

  “That’s right,” I agreed. “Mr. Prescott didn’t see the hair dryer down there—no one who used the tub saw it—because the water jets kept the surface moving.” Bubbles, lots of bubbles. I would never listen to Don Ho’s champagne music again with pleasure. “I don’t know if the hair dryer would have been noticed, even with the jets turned off, because this is a deep tub—five feet, I think—and the steps probably cast a shadow. In any event, he obviously didn’t notice.”

  Betty’s fingers picked at her polished-cotton uniform skirt. “I can’t say for sure. But I saw a hair dryer just like this one. Gray and big. I left it in the suitcase because we have hair dryers in all the bathrooms.”

  God, was it going to be this easy? I couldn’t believe my good fortune. “Whose suitcase, Betty?” I asked quietly.

  Her hands clenched. She knew how much this mattered. Her answer was almost a whisper. “Mr. Dunnaway’s.”

  Thunder boomed.

  I passed Lyle in the upstairs central hall, sprawled in a crimson silk loveseat. He still worked the phone, his red hair still unbrushed, his bony, unshaven face intent. He ignored me as I walked by. I saw no one else.

  Eerily enough, in contrast to the cataclysmic roar of the storm, the creaking and groaning of the house, the clatter and bang from outside as trees crashed and debris hurtled through the air, the inside of the house—all the lights blazing—was totally quiet. When I reached my room and stepped inside, I felt like a ghost returning to an ages-distant haunt. My covers were thrown back, just as I’d left them when the banging shutter awakened me early that morning. There was the notebook—with its list of information to seek—that I’d dropped when the Miranda B. exploded.

  I placed the box with the hair dryer on the desk and picked up the pad.

  Now I could never ask Chase why Trevor Dunnaway wasn’t among those his private detective investigated in regard to the vicious gossip supplied to the author of The Man Who Picks Presidents.

  Betty had identified the deadly hair dryer as Trevor’s.

  But Trevor and I had stood together and heard the shots fired at Chase on Friday morning.

  Surely we weren’t dealing with two separate murder plans—the shooting and the electrocution?

  I couldn’t believe that.

  Though they certainly were entirely different methods. Weren’t they?

  I pulled off my soggy clothes, draped them in the bathroom. I looked longingly at the shower. It would be wonderful to get warm.

  Like an echo in my mind, I heard Chase saying: “I’m going to get warm first.”

  I yanked a towel from the heated rack—oh, God, the luxuries on this island—and briskly rubbed the warm, soft cotton against my chilled body. I took time to dry my hair, then hurried back into the bedroom, slipped into a fresh blouse, slacks, and socks. But I put my soggy tennis shoes back on. They might be wet, but they afforded a good deal more traction than leather-soled shoes. They would work better if I had to scramble into a rescue helicopter or boat. Not that a boat or helicopter could reach us now. No transport made by man could survive these battering winds.

  But all of this merely occupied the perimeter of my mind. I was trying to sort out what had happened and what I should do. But I couldn’t get past the fact that nothing jibed.

  I picked up a brush, swiftly brushed my hair, and began to pin it up.

  If the murderer had put the hair dryer in the hot tub on Thursday night, why hadn’t Chase been electrocuted when he jumped in the tub on Friday morning?

  Had the hot tub been intended merely as a backup plan in case the shooting at the point failed—as it had?

  How did the destruction of the Miranda B. fit in?

  Its sole effect—so far as I could see—was to maroon everyone on the island with a hurricane approaching.

  Surely that was the act of a madman. Was there a single person on this island who didn’t understand the gravity of remaining on this sliver of low-lying land in the path of a huge storm? Was killing Chase worth risking the murderer’s own life?

  Could the shooting on the point and the booby-trapped hot tub have been independent efforts? Murderer One and Murderer Two? And how about the poisoned candy? Who got credit for that?

  As a young police friend of mine would urge: Get real.

  But weren’t these efforts so different that they argued independent origins?

  I jammed a last pin into my upswept hair, reached for my lipstick.

  I shook my head at my reflection in the mirror. My eyes narrowed. “No.” I said it aloud. “Hell, no. Candy and a gun and electricity. But they all have one common denominator: an effort to remain unseen and unknown by their object.”

  That still didn’t explain to me, though, the greatest anomaly. Why hadn’t that deadly hair dryer been plugged in when Chase jumped into the tub Friday morning?

  If I understood that, I knew I would understand everything.

  The house shook. The wind thudded against it like the frenzied hoofbeats of a thousand runaway horses.

  I looked at the windows, opaque with rain. Yes, I would understand everything … except the thought processes of the murderous person who had stranded us on this island.

  How long would Chase’s beautiful house withstand this inhuman battering? I pictured Haskell’s tiny, insubstantial raft, caught in a maelstrom of foam and spearing rain. Oh, Haskell, dear God I hope you’ve made land. Please, God. But it did no good to imagine his fate.

  I turned, grabbed up the soggy cardboard box. While there was time left, I would use it.

  • • • •

  Even over the roar of the storm I could hear the crashing chords from the music room when I stepped into the hall. I wondered if Valerie was trying to drown out the shriek of the wind, or if she was simply determined to spend what might be her last hours immersed in the transcendent glory of Rachmaninoff, caught up and transformed beyond fear, avidly sucking out of her life its last creative endeavor.

  I stopped at the door closest to the central hall and knocked.

  I was lifting my hand to knock again when the door opened.

  I looked up at Trevor Dunnaway.

  There was only a trace of the cosseted, comfortable, self-assured man I’d met at tea two days before. His thick blond hair was neatly combed, his pale pink sports shirt crisp, his white cotton slacks immaculate, but he stared at me hollow-eyed, his handsome face slack with heartsick fear.

  It told me one fact, and I was hungry for facts: This man hadn’t blown up the Miranda B. This man knew what could happen in hurricanes.

  I smelled bourbon.

  I looked at the glass in his hand.

  He followed my glance, held up the tumbler, half-full of amber liquid. “Want some?” His voice was just a little slurred.

  “No, thanks. Can we talk for a minute?” I shifted the box to my hip.

  He blinked, then shrugged. “Sure. Come on in. What do you want to talk about? Modern art? Communications in the next century? The wonders of electricity?” He
shook his head violently. “Not funny, Trevor. Goddamn not funny.” He stumbled to a linen-upholstered settee with a green and tan background of marshland and geese flying overhead. He hunched in one corner and lifted the glass.

  I crossed to the couch and plumped the box down beside him.

  He swallowed the bourbon and choked a little.

  I flipped open the lid. “Take a look.”

  The lawyer wouldn’t turn his head. He held the tumbler in both hands and stared at the scant half-inch of bourbon remaining. Abruptly, he downed the rest of it. “I don’t have to look at the goddamn thing. I saw it in the goddamn hot tub.”

  “I want to know if you’ve ever seen it before.”

  Slowly he lifted his head. “You’d make a great little prosecuting attorney, lady. And if I were my client, I’d tell me to keep my goddamn mouth shut. But what the hell difference does it make? We’re all going to die.” He looked toward the windows. “I wonder what will break first, the wings or the central part of the house? Maybe it’s time we went to our nice hidey-hole with the food and the flashlights.” But he made no move to go.

  I wasn’t going to be deflected. “The hair dryer. It’s yours?”

  “Mine all right. I recognized it. Stupid little crack on the nozzle. I dropped it when I was in San Francisco last week. Cracked it. Still worked fine.” He looked faintly sick. “God, yes, it works. Worked. Killed Chase, didn’t it?” His mouth quivered. “Somebody took it and used it to kill him. God, a hair dryer.” He wasn’t too numbed to be indignant. “Why me? Why the hell me?”

  “When did you see it last?” The window behind the couch rattled like castanets.

  He blinked. “Damned if I know. I’ve been trying to think. Maid unpacked my stuff. I didn’t need it, got one in the bathroom. The hell of it is, I don’t know. I never looked in my suitcase—not till I came back here from that damn tub and went to the closet and it wasn’t there.” He blinked again. “I knew it wasn’t there, I’d just seen it. But I had to be sure.” Without warning, he lurched to his feet and shambled across the room. He picked up the open bottle of bourbon on the dresser, poured another slug. He drained the glass and stared at me owlishly. “Why take my damn hair dryer?”

  It was a good question. But not the most important question that needed answering.

  12

  The second-floor hallway was deserted. I saw the mobile phone lying on the crimson silk loveseat. I wondered where Lyle was. I knew what he would be doing: thinking, struggling, working to devise a means to survive. I never doubted that. Lyle was a man determined to prevail—just as Chase had been. Finally, Chase had not prevailed. Was Lyle the reason why?

  I stood there, trying to decide in which direction to go. Thoughts glimmered in my mind with the swiftness and incalculability of goldfish darting deep in a summer pond. I listened for a moment. Valerie had left Rachmaninoff for Debussy, and I took some comfort from—when the notes could be heard above the shrieking of the storm—the elegant strains, played with great delicacy.

  I hadn’t liked her when we met. I wished now we’d had more time. I still might not like her overmuch, but there was more to Valerie than her sleek veneer suggested.

  I wished, too, that in what looked to be the waning moments of my life I had a hand to grasp, loving eyes to look into. But perhaps it was better to reach the end while engaged in the pursuit of a task. Certainly that was the way I’d spent my life. “Work for the night is coming”—that verse by Annie Walker has been my touchstone. I could have done worse.

  It was much too late to waste time now.

  I was beyond worrying about niceties such as entering rooms uninvited.

  When no one answered my knock at the first bedroom in the opposite second-story wing, I opened the door. The bed was unmade, of course. Betty hadn’t followed her usual housekeeping routine. Not this morning. But the untidiness went further than rumpled covers. A sandy beach towel was flung carelessly over a chair. Damp swim trunks lay on the floor halfway between the door and the bath. A half-empty soda bottle and a crumb-littered plate were on the bedside table. Two boating magazines lay beside them. There was a bronze picture frame on the dresser. I picked it up. The young woman with curly black hair laughed into the camera. Her arm lay easily around the shoulders of the sturdy little boy. He held a basketball in the crook of one arm. Haskell’s mother had been a very beautiful young woman. I put down the frame and said, once again, one more time as I had so often this long morning, a prayer for the safety of her son.

  I knocked at the door across the hall. Again no answer. I opened it. Except for the unmade bed, this room was immaculate. Betty wouldn’t have had to do much cleaning here. When I checked the closet, I knew it was Burton’s room. The clothes hanging there were too small and too inexpensive to belong to any of the other men. I took a couple of minutes to prowl through his things, looking in the obvious places. I lifted up the apparent bottom lining of his large suitcase and saw a lurid magazine cover featuring a blindfolded, naked woman, her back bloodied with welts, her hands chained. So much for Burton’s boyish appearance. I wondered what Chase’s response would have been had he realized his secretary’s preoccupation with brutal, exploitive sex. Distaste? Disinterest? But if Burton’s ugly little hobby hadn’t affected Chase personally, he wouldn’t have cared, would he?

  He hadn’t cared about Rosalia.

  I moved quickly, more to put that thought behind me than with any expectation of learning much. Burton’s checkbook revealed a balance of two hundred and thirty-six dollars and eight cents. But a secret income—say for the juicy tidbits provided the author of Chase’s unauthorized biography—would certainly not be reflected in the secretary’s everyday bank account. Burton wasn’t a fool, and he knew all about Chase’s efforts to discover the source’s identity.

  Burton, defensive, unconfident, sullen. Had the little man already taken refuge in the music room?

  I doubted it.

  If Burton didn’t like women—and I was certain of that now—he would avoid as long as possible being at close quarters with an overpowering personality like Valerie’s.

  But he might want company. Maybe he’d gone down to the kitchen. The day I arrived flashed into my mind. I remembered the contempt with which Burton had treated Frank Hudson, who had brought me across the sound. No, the secretary saw himself as above the staff. Not quite a guest, but certainly better than a house employee. No, he wouldn’t be in the kitchen.

  When I opened the door of Chase’s study, Burton was at the desk, shoving folders into a couple of briefcases.

  “What are you doing?” I suppose the surprise was evident in my voice. I wouldn’t have expected Burton to be thinking about his job.

  The glance he gave me was hard to decipher, a combination of discomfort and smarmy self-assurance. His face was unshaven. He held up a folder for me to see. “I thought I should get the papers. About the refinancing. Roger will need them.”

  Why didn’t I believe him?

  I walked over to the desk. As he opened folders, flipped through the papers, I could see figures and letters, so it all made sense. But there was something about his expression—it reminded me of Richard Nixon responding to Watergate.

  “Exemplary of you. Continuing to give your best effort for your late employer, despite the difficult conditions. Heroism under fire, so to speak.”

  “I thought I should,” he snapped, his voice reedy with indignation.

  “Fine. Exemplary, as I said. But while you’re working, let’s talk for a minute.” I took one of the easy chairs by the desk. “You’ve been here to the island with Chase and Miranda a number of times, right?”

  He hefted a yellow folder, checked the tab, eyed the almost-full briefcase, shook his head, returned it to the desk, and selected another. “Yes.” He crammed this file into the second briefcase.

  “Tell me about Chase’s schedule.” The exquisite comfort of the chair only emphasized the weariness of my body.

  He gave me a blank
look. “What difference does it make now?”

  “A lot. I take it he had a regular schedule here. Or didn’t he?” I moved to the edge of the seat. The depths of this chair were too tempting. I wanted to sink back, let it all go, but my journey wasn’t finished.

  The secretary poked and prodded at the folders. “Yes, he did. Every morning he got up at six-thirty, swam for half an hour, then … then he relaxed in the hot tub for ten minutes or so. He got out and toweled off and came to the patio. He always had granola and yogurt for breakfast. After a shower and dressing he’d go to the point—if the weather was nice—and paint until lunchtime. In the afternoons he’d work for a while, then he and Mrs. Prescott would go out in the Miranda B.”

  I fingered the smooth linen of the chair arm. “So you could count on Chase being in that hot tub every morning about seven o’clock?”

  Burton’s head jerked up. “What do you mean I could count on it? Listen, I didn’t have any reason to murder Mr. Prescott. I’m not going to be blamed for—”

  “Burton, cool it.” I didn’t bother to hide my irritation.

  He broke off, his cheeks flushed.

  “I didn’t mean you in particular.” I kept it brisk and impersonal. “I meant anyone who’d ever visited this island—including you—would know that Chase would be in that tub at seven A.M.”

  “Yeah.” His glance slid sullenly away from me.

  “Okay. Who of the people here this weekend have been on this island before?”

  He didn’t have to think about it. “Why, everyone—except you.”

  Everyone. Haskell, too.

  “Did anyone else ever get in the hot tub?”

  Burton tried to pull the second briefcase shut, but it gaped open at least an inch. “I didn’t pay any attention. I think Roger did a couple of times.”

  “In the mornings? With his dad?”

  Burton shook his head. “I don’t think so. Nobody else was into exercise first thing in the morning. Except Mr. Stedman. But he jogs. I don’t think he ever came to the pool early. Haskell used the pool the most. In the afternoons.”