Drowning Lessons

by Rachel Neuburger Reynolds

  “Nice needle, BTW. Surprised the tip could break but not my field of expertise. That is US-manufactured, born and bred. But, you guys are on fire! It’s frog secretion, uh-huh, but I have to have the guys at the Gamboa station do the final specific analysis. They’re super excited to get their hands on this as soon as we can get it over. Dr. Nolan seems to be right for once.

  “Durán needs to take a look before I can tell you the specific toxicology. We talked it out. He’s fascinated. First item on the list as soon as it hits the station. I tested it on a few mice and they went belly up in minutes. I cannot conclude to you that it is an oophaga pumilio… your red poison frog that is… because though I stress that it’s the only known poison frog in this region, but we do find new species all the time. IMHO, you should wait for the official word.”

  The needle tip would go out on the medical plane, which was taking “the dead guy” to Panama City, the only flight currently cleared to leave the island.

  “Well,” McDonough said to me, “how about that? Fascinating.”

  LaGuardia said, “I’ve seen the signs saying not to lick the red frogs, but wow, I thought that was just an inside joke to play with tourists. But this could narrow it down. How many people are going to have any knowledge of how to make the modern equivalent of a blow dart?”

  Lloyd. That’s your man. Take the keys and lock him up.

  Suspecting Lloyd was my kneejerk reaction, but that wasn’t quite fair considering the facts.

  I muttered, “Well, actually, everyone I know down here does. I was teaching people about making blow darts yesterday. It was part of the entertainment.”

  Trying to explain the training, planning, and scheduling behind the wedding bored and annoyed them quickly. And all these fun loving guests, save a few, were in the water, masked and identically garbed.

  “See, I can’t swim,” I exclaimed, knocking myself out of the motive pool.

  “Did you see anything strange?”

  Stranger than a large group of people doing a dead man’s float over a school of sea turtles?

  No, but Migs would have. Underwater photography was going to clean this up in

  a flash. The detectives were delighted at how quickly this all was coming together.

  Migs was shirtless on the deck of his hotel, Tango Vista, the subpar quarters for Olivia’s staff and exiled relations. Nonetheless, he was drinking a beer, happy in his habitat, and impressively reading a thick biography about FDR, while a dozen other random cocktailers started to get their buzz on. He knew he looked good. He counted on it.

  The sound of a motor turning over refocused our attention. Olivia and Walter were pulling away from the hotel on her speedboat, leaving the resort.

  “Olivia!” I yelled after her, drowned out by her motor. “Olivia!”

  She finally smiled and waved. Showing up on a police boat with two surfing detectives didn’t seem to tip her off to the fact that something hadn’t gone quite right.

  Quite convenient…

  We walked towards Migs, and he smiled at me, looking momentarily jealous of the two handsome locals behind me. He was shocked about the murder, leading us immediately up to his room to look at his underwater documentation.

  The door to his room was ajar and the sunlight flooded the room, illuminating chaos and destruction. There hadn’t been much in the room to destroy, but everything was shattered. His two camera backs were smashed, tripods were thrown in the corner, and dozens of rolls of exposed film were strewn around the room like party streamers.

  “Oh, Jesus,” Migs exclaimed, immediately dropping to the floor, cradling his medium format Hasselblad like a sick child. Flash tubes were broken to smithereens, shards shimmering in the light like diamond chips.

  “It will all be replaced,” I said softly, offering out of Olivia’s own bank account. Nico wouldn’t be picking up this tab.

  “This cannot be happening. This is not happening,” Migs yelled at no one in particular, eyes still on his destroyed tools of the trade.

  McDonough picked up a roll of exposed film and examined it, holding it up towards the ceiling. Olivia’s insistence in using actual film exclusively was biting us hard in the butt.

  LaGuardia put his hand on Migs’ back. “I’m sorry. I really am. But I need to ask, is there any way we can save anything on that film?”

  Migs shook his head and leaned against the bed in shock.

  LaGuardia continued, “We’re going to find out who do this.”

  I confirmed, “And this will all be replaced.”

  Migs just stared at the tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of beloved camera equipment. Fun in the sun would have to wait.

  Chapter 12: Public Enemy #1

  The detectives were talking intently in Spanish, McDonough taking notes all the while. The slam book was becoming an interesting tool. I could rule out Marianna and Walter’s mother, who had not gone in the water. Including myself, that made three innocent guests. Plus Max, but she didn’t count. So then there were 35 suspects left.

  The silly slam book had ruined the mystery for me; not in a Caribbean murder caper way, but in a human way. Everyone had skeletons in their closets, but knowing them all ahead of time made me feel all the more isolated. There was no need to discover things about people if you already knew the end of the story.

  It had begun as stats and FYIs and deteriorated into a serious case of Olivia dirt digging. You couldn’t separate fact from filth. For instance, yes, I needed to know Colleen, Olivia’s Princeton roommate, was allergic to shellfish, but I didn’t need to know that she had been issued a restraining order by an ex-boyfriend in 2002. It was innocent enough, Olivia had said, and left it at that.

  All the guests were gluten-free these days. Olivia’s neighbor Chad didn’t eat tomatoes. And Walter’s movie producer friend, Theresa, didn’t like any of her food to touch. That was needed information. I didn’t need to know that she stripped to pay for college. I didn’t have to read it all, but like a car crash, I couldn’t walk away. Theresa was also allergic to bees.

  After Theresa’s page came Walter’s, where it was written in big blood-red letters: “Walter is a serious diabetic. Confirm that he does go into diabetic shock.” It seemed I had stumbled one step closer to the truth, the suspect list potentially diminishing to those who had access to Walter’s villa.

  “LaGuardia,” I called, excited at my findings, “Walter has needles! Someone must have got one from him!”

  “Or maybe it was just Walter himself. More likely the case,” LaGuardia said.

  I clearly hadn’t thought that one out very well.

  The conversation went back to English, now that I might be of some help. Migs concentrated on his experiences with Walter, whose bachelor party he’d been taking photos of the night before, much later than he was scheduled to be working. There had been a dozen people, but no one was allowed to enter his Red Frog Beach villa. Walter knew that his friends were already way too drunk and he didn’t want anyone passing out or puking in his fat pad.

  “Major suspect found in less than 24-hours,” McDonough noted and gave his partner a high five. Probable cause didn’t concern them much; authorities were allowed to detain anyone for 72 hours on suspicion.

  Walter was staying in Casa Paradiso, a 2-bedroom villa at the Red Frog Beach Resort, with a private pool and all the expected luxuries. Walter wasn’t around, but that wasn’t going to stop the cops from having a good look. I’d never seen Walter’s bachelor pad, but the beach house was probably representative of his New York City apartment.

  There was certainly evidence that an after-hours man party had gone on the night before; empty beer and rum bottles, filled ashtrays (ironic for those so entrenched in the fitness industry), commemorative wedding condoms blown up as balloons, now half wilted like a bad metaphor.

  While they rummaged around, I stepped outside to get an emergency call out to Olivia. I paced the length of the short pool, calling repeatedly with no connection available.
It seemed like a thousand years since I’d woken up that morning.

  I had failed my duties big time, and when it rains, it pours.

  What could be worse than the best man being murdered? The maid of honor leading the cops toward suspecting the groom, that’s what.

  It wasn’t my day. And it certainly wasn’t Walter’s.

  Chapter 13: Give Me Back My Man

  My usefulness to the detectives had soon run its course. After helping them come up with a list of possibilities of where they could find and question Walter, they took me back to my hotel. I’d become an annoying song stuck on repeat, insisting that they’d need me so they could talk with the groom. They told me that they had their job and I had mine, so let them get to it; I should go plan a party or something.

  I guess we weren’t the three musketeers.

  Mariposa del Mar was empty when I returned, except for Becky, who sat reading on a lounge chair. Sitting up and giving me a huge smile, she called “Birds were a number one!”

  I pretended to be on the phone and mouthed to her, “Wedding business,” while holding my other hand up, questioning the universe.

  My cabin was nice and cool. I sat on the bed upstairs in the loft under mosquito netting, finally getting through to Olivia, but not being able to get a word of my own in. It was a quick call. It turned out that the detectives had no intention of questioning Walter at all. They had immediately arrested him.

  I met Olivia outside of the police station. She’d been forcibly removed for what she would only refer to as a “minor scene.” Her hair was piled on top of her head like a Samurai warrior and she was down to the butt of another cigarette.

  We’d spent a lot of time five years ago getting her off the butts, but we could wait to work on that again until she’d get back from her honeymoon. Her reversion to chain smoking was the least of either of our problems right now.

  Chain smoking, she ignored me and repeated to me in desperation that it turns out that Panamanian law stated that the police could hold someone for seventy-two hours on mere suspicion, and an arrest for up to three years with no chance of bail.

  “You can fix it, can’t you?” she whined, immediately regretting her tone. “Please. You’re the smartest person I know.”

  That phrase was always the one that got me.

  Though I don’t think it was true.

  She did cheat off me in math for most of elementary school. What a surprise to her AP Algebra teacher that she was not the genius she’d put forth. Well, you can’t be perfect at everything.

  But the glassy eyes of ten-year-old Olivia pleaded with me, now; Olivia was as lost as I’d ever seen her. She was looking at me with love and need, perhaps forgetting or ignoring that I was the reason that Walter was in prison.

  She wasn’t the pure and kind soul that she used to be, but I know that person was in there somewhere. Deep down.

  I was now looking at the girl that risked her A-list junior high school popularity status by even standing next to me. She’d got me out of trouble a lot in our younger years, and if I was the only one she trusted, I’d just have to rise to that obligation.

  It was party central inside the station. The detectives and a few other officers, nearly the whole police force, were having congratulation beers for the swift success of their investigation. The island’s tourism couldn’t stand to have another Landis case on their hands. They’d quickly dismissed me less than two hours ago, but now they were welcoming me back into the gang. They were getting a kick out of this; Walter locked in an open cell with a six-pack of Soberana of his own.

  His eyes brightened when he saw me, standing up. “Thank god you are here, Lexie. Explain to them how ridiculous this is.”

  LaGuardia and McDonough relived the tale of Olivia gone out of control. She had attempted to rip them a new one, yelling about their New York lawyers and how she’d make sure they’d crush all tourism on Bocas del Toro for the foreseeable future. ‘What idiot,’ she had said, ‘would kill his best friend at his own wedding? Put your thinking caps on!’ She had gone on to say that ‘only a “backwoods badger-brained cop” would even for a second, look at the circumstantial drivel and implicate Walter’.

  “She might have gone a little overboard,” Walter admitted.

  Now, she rambled on to the officers that it was impossible, that Walter had not been in Migs’ room, that they’d been having a drink. Olivia tried to console Walter. She swore he had never left her side, absolutely, maybe.

  She was pleasantly told that she needed to get out before they held her for suspicion as well. Before the door closed in Olivia’s face, she strongly said ‘contemptible vilification’.

  We went over the scant, damning yet circumstantial evidence they had. LaGuardia ended the conversation with, “If it looks like a fish, and swims like a fish, it’s a fish.”

  “You mean duck,” I said.

  “Potato potat-oh. Now go back to your party. And have a nice night.”

  I went back to the cell and clung on to the bars like I was in a bad movie. The kind of bad movie when you say things you never thought you’d say, like, “Don’t worry. I’m going to get you out of here.”

  Chapter 14: La Gruta

  Olivia was still waiting when I exited the station. She was pacing while on the phone with Lloyd, begging him to keep Nico’s “state of non-existence” under wrap. She relayed that he didn’t seem to mind and found it sorrowfully amusing, thinking that his late friend would get a kick out of it as well.

  She smiled widely at me.

  And then we fought.

  We bickered all the time, like family, but seldom had a drag down, knock ‘em out fight. She impatiently listened to my rundown of what happened in the station and she was resigned to the fact that Walter would indeed be spending the night in prison.

  Then I said, “Let’s go to a café and figure out how we are going to reschedule the wedding and how we can get everyone back home.” There was no chance of saving the event.

  Cancellation was still not an option in her crazy mind. She had an insane but convincing counter for every logical point I brought up. Between the cigarettes and the yelling, her voice was getting hoarse.

  Olivia kept circling back to her moments in the police office. When she had seen that she was losing the fight with the detectives, she had begged them to not disclose to the general public that there had been a murder. Lucky for her, the police didn’t particularly mind. They’d got their man, no one was in danger, and the island couldn’t handle another murder in the press.

  She couldn’t tell the officers apart, but one of them had told her that if she wanted to go waste her time trying to clear his name, she was more than welcome. She took this as license to do what she wanted, and not the rhetorical rebuttal the detectives had intended.

  Olivia took a romantic break to tell me about love. The wedding marked the third anniversary of their first trip to the island, and that was special enough for him. He had taught her how to dive here, and she had randomly taught him a few slight-of-hand hard tricks. This is also where they first said, “I love you.”

  He was a pretty decent guy. He really was.

  The location had been a surprise to everyone, especially based on Walter’s monied taste. It had been astonishing to arrive at the relatively remote location.

  Olivia pulled me down the street, away from the docks, her voice cracking. “We know he didn’t do it. These pseudo detectives are the laziest lazies in Lazyville, and if they’re too lazy to figure out who did this, then it’s up to us.”

  I already felt a loyalty to LaGuardia and McDonough. “They aren’t that bad. They are doing their job.”

  “So you say…”

  I followed her over to a rusty old jeep that she borrowed from the bartender at the Koko resort. Olivia navigated the small streets of the town and then drove north, on one of the island’s two roads, deserted and humid, foreign insects at every step. The island was only four square miles so we couldn’t be g
oing too far.

  But she might actually kill me.

  By accident or otherwise.

  Lighting another cigarette as we bounced down the rocky road, she said, “I’m sorry. You know I’m just not myself. Even I hate me right now.”

  No kidding.

  Walter’s best man was murdered and her fiancé was in jail, and to boot, Ryan and Emma never made it off the island.

  “My oh-so-loving father found me today and refused to even come to the wedding unless I acted like an adult and let them stay. Can you believe this insanity?” Olivia took her eyes off the road and blew her smoke in my direction. “Emma probably killed Nico. Just to ruin my day. What do you think?”

  I liked it better in the sun.

  “So, Lex,” she said, quickly switching back to semi-normal. “This was going to be a humungous surprise for everyone on Saturday, so you need to actually see the most important reason that this can’t be postponed. Hell’s bells, we just missed the turn.”

  She pulled an impossible U-turn, almost rolling the jeep, and then followed a partially covered sign pointing towards a place called La Gruta. We drove until the road deteriorated into an impassible state. Olivia’s random path took us to a small statue of the Virgin Mary, masking the entrance of a cave. She had a flashlight clamped to her belt hook, running towards the entrance in a familiar way.

  This struck me as 100% bad. Religious paraphernalia and caves could only lead to human sacrifice or organ harvesting, in my humble opinion.

  I was about to join the ranks of liverless ladies on vacation in Aruba, who had once said to their stupid selves, “Ooooh, an abandoned cave. Let me investigate.” I was not a registered organ donor, sure that once you became one, your name went on a list, and then it was just a matter of time before the windowless white van would follow you home. The next thing you know, you wake up in a bathtub of ice with a note saying, “You have no kidneys”.