Flight To Remember

by Lori Woods

  Marionette watched Molly on her screen for a moment, and she could see that the woman’s gears were turning. “Amaya,” Molly said. “Did Patricia leave her bag behind?” Her voice was lowered so that her seat partner wouldn’t listen in.

  Amaya nodded. “Yeah, looks like it,” Amaya said.

  “Why don’t you start by searching her bag and see – ”

  Before Molly could finish what she was saying, the flight attendant Lewis was addressing the passengers. “I’m going to have to ask for some quiet, folks,” he said, his eyes darting over towards Molly. “Out of respect of what has just taken place, let’s turn off our video calls, shall we?”

  Marionette supposed they were being a bit disrespectful talking about what had just happened a bit loudly on video chat. They hung up the call, and instead the women began communicating through text messages. Amaya’s message came through a moment later.

  Looking through Patricia’s bag. I’ll let you know if I see anything – Amaya

  Marionette sat back in her seat, tapping her fingers nervously for a moment on her knee. She wanted to help, but she wasn’t quite sure how. She glanced over at Charles. He had seemed to know Ralph somehow – he had seemed rather concerned by the man in a personal sort of way. She wondered if there was something that the man could tell her. Marionette continued to keep up with her text messages that were coming in from her friends. With any luck, if the four of them pulled their heads together, they would be able to find out exactly who had poisoned Ralph Beard.

  Chapter 7

  By now, Amaya had gotten to know Marionette and Molly fairly well. Well enough to know that both of them had a knack for getting themselves involved where they probably shouldn’t, but there was no doubt in saying that they had a tremendous amount of luck where that was concerned. Amaya knew Marionette much better – her fellow French-American. The woman simply cared about people, and it was this reason she had wound up renting half her art shop out to Kris, the private investigator who was now a constant part of their lives for better or for worse. Marionette had been dragged into a number of his cases since. And Molly was no different. Daughter of a former big-city detective, girlfriend to a Savannah cop, and a former investigative journalist turned sweet connoisseur. Amaya, on the other hand, was not like these ladies.

  Amaya was a soft, shy sort of girl – also quite unlike Roxie, the unlikely new woman in their group of gal pals. There was no way Amaya would ever do anything even remotely unsavory, and yet she suddenly found herself digging around in Patricia’s purse that she had left behind after being escorted up to speak directly with the captain in the cockpit. Digging around in another woman’s purse was something Amaya would have never caught herself doing under any other sort of circumstances, yet she was rather thrilled by the idea now. Somehow, she found herself being pulled into this world that Marionette and Molly knew all too well. She felt like a detective.

  “Everything okay over here?” Amaya heard Trinity’s voice, and she promptly kicked Patricia’s purse under her seat so that the flight attendant didn’t catch her red-handed with her arm stuffed down into the woman’s personal belongings.

  “What?” Amaya exclaimed, sitting upright and attempting to regain her composure after the surprise. “Oh, all right? Yes, of course everything’s all right. Why wouldn’t it be?”

  Trinity smiled weakly at her. “Well… someone did just… die… a few rows behind you. And you were sitting next to his wife.” Trinity sighed and then leaned in slightly, speaking now in a whisper. “And I know how Patricia can be.”

  Amaya blushed slightly. “I’m guessing she and Ralph would use this airline frequently?”

  “Every other week just about,” Trinity said. “Always flying somewhere for Ralph and Charles’s business.”

  “That’s sweet that he would take his wife on business trips,” Amaya said.

  “It’s not sweet,” Trinity said. “She tags along to keep an eye on him to make sure he stays in line. Got arrested last summer for sexual harassment – taken right off one of the planes.”

  Amaya raised a brow. “Seriously?”

  “Yeah,” Trinity said with a slight eye roll. “Don’t get me wrong, he was a decent guy, but he was handsy. A fellow flight attendant punched him last summer. Airline almost fired her, but someone had caught the whole exchange on video, and she was going to sue the airline if they did because it was so obvious who was at fault. Anyone in their right mind would have socked him for the way he was acting. He’s normally fine so long as he doesn’t drink on the flight – which he normally wouldn’t do so long as his wife came along. They usually get seats right next to each other, but things got a little screwy this time. Well, I just wanted to make sure you were good. Can I get you a water or anything?”

  “I’m set,” she said and watched Trinity as she walked away to check on other fliers. Amaya breathed a bit more easily and then pulled Patricia’s purse back out from where she had kicked it a moment ago. Inside, she found Patricia’s phone and smiled at this discovery. What was even better was that Patricia did not have any sort of passcode on her phone.

  She pulled up Patricia’s most recent messages, and she saw a rather alarming conversation between herself and someone she had simply put in her phone as “PI.”

  Yes, I got the pictures. I’m appalled – Patricia

  I imagine so. I’m here for you – PI

  I appreciate that – I knew those bad girls were his type – Patricia

  I’m going to send you more when you touch down in Vegas – PI

  Thank you – the evidence is just what I needed – Patricia

  I’ll be sending them straight to my lawyer – Patricia

  Amaya scrolled backwards through the messages and eventually came across the pictures the conversation was alluding to. She found a picture of Ralph with a younger woman, a very Roxie-esque woman in leather. No wonder she had been so paranoid about Roxie, Amaya thought with an eye roll. Amaya snapped a picture with her own phone of what she had just found on Patricia’s phone before stuffing it back into Patricia’s purse and returning the purse as she had originally found it.

  She looked at the picture she had taken and elected to inform the others what she had just found, sending the picture of Ralph with the biker woman through the group message along with the caption, Looks like you are his type, Roxie, her ill-fated attempt at a bit of humor.

  A moment later, a man’s voice came over the loudspeaker. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. Just informing you all that, despite the abrupt loss of a passenger interruption, we will be flying straight on to Vegas with no unexpected stops.”

  A few people clapped, which Amaya found to be rather inappropriate. She imagined that Patricia had had to be talked into that one, that or someone at ground control wouldn’t approve the stop. Amaya, deciding she wanted to try to do more, went for Patricia’s purse again. However, she hit the woman’s phone with her palm. She was calling a number. “Oh, no…” Amaya said, scrambling for the cell phone, realizing she was calling the PI whose conversation she had been viewing. Though she couldn’t quite place it as to where, she heard a phone going off somewhere on the plane. “What…” she said under her breath in surprise. Was the private investigator Patricia hired on the plane?

  Amaya felt a wave of panic. She shoved the purse down, but she wound up dropping it as she hung up. She jumped to her feet, attempting to get into the aisle where quite a bit of contents from the purse had fallen, but she didn’t see Molly, who was coming up the aisle from the lavatory. They collided suddenly, and Molly was shoved forward.

  Amaya watched Molly fall as she heard a distant sound of glass shattering. Molly went straight into the flight marshal who, it seemed, was darting up the aisle in preparation to tackle someone else who had gotten out of their seat. Amaya covered her eyes in her startle and shrieked at the sudden onset of madness that had abruptly ensued.

  Chapter 8

  Molly set her phone down and
turned towards Robyn. She had just finished telling Amaya that she needed to look through Patricia’s belongings, and she was hoping that Amaya wouldn’t chicken out. Amaya seemed very much like a rule follower, and Molly wondered whether or not she would be too timid to actually do it. Molly, on the other hand, had a tendency to be a bit nosy. She blamed it on all those years she had spent as an investigative journalist. Her job there had taught her to always ask questions and to stick her neck out a bit in order to get things done. It was no wonder she got along so well with Marionette who seemed to have a bit of a dangerous side herself – which lately had been proven to be exceptionally true through her friendship with Kris, the private investigator who had opened up shop in the back of Marionette’s art studio.

  She turned in her seat, making eye contact with Robyn who smiled awkwardly back at her. “You good?” he asked her.

  “I’m fine,” Molly said. “You?”

  “Little shaken up over what just happened if I’m being honest,” he said. “Wasn’t exactly expecting a fellow passenger to drop dead.”

  “No, me either,” Molly said. “The doctor and the flight marshal seem to think he was poisoned. What do you think?”

  “I mean, I’m not a doctor, so I guess I’ll just trust what she was saying,” Robyn said. “Definitely wasn’t expecting this sort of thing to happen today. Thought this was just going to be a regular old flight.”

  “Yeah,” Molly said in agreement and sighed. She leaned back in her seat.

  “So…” he said, breaking his stare that had been focused out the window for a while. “What do you do?”

  “That’s an abrupt change in conversation,” Molly said.

  He shrugged.

  “Okay, fine,” Molly said, smirking slightly in amusement. “Well, I run a dessert shop in Savannah. Right on River Street. We do mostly ice cream, but we also do cakes, pastries, and fudge. Ice cream is my specialty.”

  “How did you get into that?” he asked.

  “I always liked ice cream,” Molly said. “I quit my old job, got an ice cream truck, and I tried opening a shop out in Brooks, but it fell through. I moved out to Savannah and tried my shop out that way, and it really took off.”

  “What were you doing before you went into sweets?” he asked.

  “I was an investigative journalist, believe it or not,” she said.

  His eyebrows raised. “Oh…”

  “Oh?”

  He cleared his throat. He glanced around for a moment and then lowered his voice. “We should talk… privately…” he said. “Follow me to the bathroom.”

  “You are out of your mind if you think you’re about to join the mile-high club with me, big guy,” Molly said.

  He laughed. “No, that’s not what I was thinking at all,” he said. “Though if that’s on the table…”

  “No.”

  He laughed again and lowered his voice. “I’m a PI.” He stood up and climbed over her, gave her a knowing nod, and then headed towards the back of the plane.

  There was a private investigator on the plane! Molly felt that this could certainly be useful. She waited a moment so as not to alert anyone’s attention and then headed towards the bathroom herself. She knocked twice in the door, and he allowed her to slip inside. It was rather close quarters, and she could feel his breath on her face. “Sorry,” he said. “Not sure who we can trust, you see. I wasn’t planning on telling anyone I was a PI But if you’ve got some experience as an investigative journalist, I thought I’d keep you close.”

  Molly smiled. “My dad was an Atlanta detective, and my boyfriend’s a detective in Savannah.”

  Robyn smiled at her. “I’m taken, sweetie. I just have a flirty personality. Sorry.”

  Molly tired not to laugh. “Just making sure we’re on the same page,” she said and put her hands on her hips. “What can you tell me? You know anything?”

  “Yeah, actually,” Robyn said, digging around in his pocket before pulling his cell phone out. “So, I specialize in cheating spouses. And I was just working a case. Ralph.”

  “Ralph?” Molly questioned.

  “He was cheating on Patricia,” Robyn said.

  “Oh!” Molly exclaimed. “You were working her case.”

  “I’ve been following Ralph for months,” Robyn said. “Collecting evidence. He’s a serial cheater like I’ve never seen. Flashes his money to impress them. Beds them and ditches them and moves on to the next one. Likes the bad girl types. Patricia didn’t take it well at all, let me tell you…”

  “You think Patricia might have poisoned him?” Molly asked.

  “For sure,” he said. “But we are going to need some evidence if we’re going to prove it.”

  Molly’s phone buzzed. She glanced down to see that Amaya had just sent a picture to the group message. As she had told Amaya to look through Patricia’s belongings only moments ago, she suspected she might have found something. Molly smiled as the picture came through. “Looks like Patricia was keeping this close and personal,” Molly said, turning the phone around. “I’m guessing you are the PI who sent this picture to Patricia?”

  “You’ve got your friend digging around in Patricia’s belongings?” Robyn asked, smirking with an amused gaze.

  “I like to work with a team,” Molly said.

  “Guess I’m part of that team now,” Robyn said. “So Patricia saved the picture on her phone. I sent that to her the other day. Maybe it set her off.”

  “Can’t really blame her for being upset,” Molly said. “Question is how she managed to get poison into his drink. You think she could have snuck back here? Or maybe she had one of the flight attendants help her.”

  “Interesting,” Molly said. “You’d think Patricia would have wanted them to touch down as quickly as possible so she wouldn’t have too many state lines to transport a body through.”

  “She’ll probably wind up having to fly him back,” Robyn said.

  “How does that work?” Molly asked.

  “Not sure,” Robyn said. “I don’t know how that works, but at least I’m not going to have to find another flight to get me where I’m going. So are we working together?”

  “Definitely,” Molly said.

  “I’ll talk to the flight attendants. See what they can tell me. Maybe someone saw something,” Robyn said.

  “I’ll go talk to my girls,” Molly said. “See if any of them found anything.”

  “Agreed,” he said, and Molly left the bathroom first. She was glad that they weren’t going to have to stop at another airport. They had been on the flight for at least an hour, so they only had a few more hours to go. She wondered if they could figure out who killed Ralph before they landed. She felt like they were off to a good start – they already had their first suspect with a bit of evidence to support the theory that Patricia might have killed her husband.

  She started working her way back up the aisle. Up ahead, she could see that Roxie was standing. Suddenly, she saw Roxie reach an arm around the opposing aisle, snatch up a large, glass wine bottle from a couple toasting to their honeymoon, and bash it clear over a man’s head. Molly gasped, falling forward suddenly and bumping into the flight marshal who had been standing up when he too had seen what Roxie had done. He had been lunging towards Roxie when Molly smacked into him, and now he dove right on top of the woman in the midst of the utter chaos that had just erupted.

  Chapter 9

  Roxie had not been friends with Marionette and Molly for very long, and she hardly knew Amaya at all, and frankly she was starting to question whether or not this friendship was such a good idea at all. She was a former illegal street racer with a rap sheet to match it, and the last thing she needed was to keep finding herself into trouble thanks to these supposedly sweet and innocent women. But it seemed like no matter how straight of a path these ladies walked, they were always finding themselves in some sort of trouble.

  She was glad that she didn’t have to sit next to Ralph and his constant assurance that
she would be so pretty “if she’d just smile,” not that she wanted him to keel over for the harassment. Now, according to their interrupted video chat, Marionette and Molly wanted them to investigate. She supposed she should get used to this sort of thing; she was dating a private investigator now, Kris. Sure, their relationship was still fairly casual, but she was hoping to see where thing went. If she kept dating him, she was bound to continue to find herself wrapped up in this sort of world he and Marionette belonged to. A world in which they jumped at the slightest sign of trouble.

  Deciding she’d best make herself useful, Roxie looked around the now empty seat. Ralph’s personal belongings, it seemed, had been left behind – including his carry-on that was currently stuffed up underneath his seat. “Score,” Roxie said under her breath and set the small briefcase up in her lap, looking over her shoulder to make sure that no one was paying her any attention.

  Of course, Ralph was the type of guy who would keep a lock on his briefcase. Luckily, Roxie was the type who knew how to pick a lock. She timed herself, and at six and a half seconds she beat her personal record. “Nice,” she said when the briefcase popped open. He had a few files regarding some different companies he partnered with. From what she gathered, he was headed to Vegas to meet with a potential investor. Exactly what Ralph did was unclear to her, though she wrote it off as to some sort of investment firm.

  She found a folded-up note in one of the storage pouches within his case that stood out as it was handwritten and not some sort of printout from an email. She unfolded it carefully to give it a read.

  Ralph,

  The Begatta Account was a complete disaster. Your reckless decision-making is costing this company fortunes. If you think I’m going to let this latest catastrophe go, you have officially lost your mind. I might just have to have that conversation with Pat after all. That, or you can forward me the $1.3 million your poor judgment has lost me.