Sunny Side Up

by Daniel Stallings

  David, assigned to keep watch on Li until the police had a chance to talk to him, leaned against the railing and watched the birds dive toward people on the pier. “Boy, he was one messed-up bastard. Did you hear anything that he said?”

  “Not really,” Li croaked. His words scratched his throat like steel wool.

  “Turns out the police were keeping an eye on him ever since he got involved in some questionable dealings with his scummier clients. They were alarmed when he suddenly went on a cruise to Mexico and sent a Telex to the captain saying he should order a crew member to keep an eye on Mr. Brent. Guess who it was?” A toothy grin spanned David’s face. “It was Robbie, the sommelier! Captain Crayle thought it was best to make it someone Mr. Brent wouldn’t notice. It turned out to be the smartest choice. Robbie was able to suggest the wine tasting tour in Guadalupe, where he always went, to the Brents for their day in Mexico. They accepted the suggestion. While there, Mr. Brent slipped away and met with some locals to arrange for him and his wife’s escape into Mexico. Robbie is fluent in three languages and heard everything.”

  Li nodded. “I wondered why Aaron Brent went along with his wife’s wishes for this cruise. Clearly, he wanted the chance to get out of the country.”

  His brain added: And it explains why Sally said her husband was looking for someone to employ in his home instead of his firm. There wasn’t going to be a law firm anymore. Sally knew that. I would have ended up a personal slave to a couple on the lam.

  He shuddered at the idea.

  David turned to look at Li, and his eyes traced every battle scar his bunkmate earned. “Of course, the scary thing is what he became. Paranoid. Possessive. Believed there were police agents everywhere. He was obsessed with keeping his wife with him at all times, just in case she wandered off and told someone about their escape plan. And when she disappeared, he thought you were the agent following him, Li, and decided to kill you before you took everything away from him.”

  “It all fits.” The caffeine worked. Li’s words weren’t so raspy now. “When Charlegne saved Sally, Aaron saw that as the first attack. Someone took away his wife, who might possibly reveal the truth about their getaway. Charlegne even threatened him with jail time, which was the last thing a paranoid Aaron wanted to hear. So he decided to strike back. He was on the ship all day. He had ample time to go on the Sunbathing Deck, find her, take the bottle of sunscreen, and fling it into the sea. A bully’s crime, and who’s a bigger bully than Mr. Brent? He wanted to cause her as much as pain as possible.”

  David shook his head. “A sick, twisted man. He liked to beat his wife with his belt whenever she got out of line. Said that’s what his dad did to him.”

  They watched as the authorities hauled a handcuffed Aaron Brent down the Sports Deck, heading for the nearest ladder. Daphne Cole, swinging a heavy suitcase in her hand and rifling through her purse while muttering about misplaced keys, swept up the ladder. The suitcase slammed into Aaron’s groin. His eyes ballooned, and his face swelled purple. He squeaked in agony. Daphne burst into apologies.

  David chuckled after the authorities carted off their squeaking charge and Daphne slipped not-so-quietly out of sight. “Serves him right. I’m thrilled he’ll be shacking up in a prison cell. This cruise was a mess. Now we can return to being bored and aloof.”

  Li mumbled and became very interested in his shoes.

  “Is that a comment on the boring thing or did you forget that you have to open your mouth when you talk?”

  “I’m thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “Murder.”

  David’s eyes bulged. “Murder? What do you mean murder?”

  “I think Charlegne was murdered.”

  “By Mr. Brent?”

  “I don’t know if I like that answer.” Li pulled himself out of the lounge chair and joined David at the railing. The people clumped around the ship looked like ants attacking a crumb too big for one member. “I mean, it’s the nice, convenient answer, Aaron Brent being responsible, but I don’t know if it’s the right one. Too many details bother me.”

  David arched a cynical eyebrow. “Like what?”

  “Well…” Li swallowed to wet his throbbing throat. “First, there’s the manner of Charlegne’s death. Sunstroke. How would Aaron, or indeed anyone, have known that could kill her? Like Dr. Innsbrook said, people aren’t generally aware of the symptoms of sunstroke. So the killer would have to have prior knowledge about the condition, or at least have some way of learning about it.

  “Second, I tripped over a doorstop in Charlegne’s cabin. We don’t have rubber doorstops onboard. And it made me wonder about the DO NOT DISTURB sign I saw on the doorknob. A doorstop props a door open. A DO NOT DISTURB sign is a request to keep the door closed. You really can’t have a door open and closed at the same time. So why were both there?

  “Third, why didn’t Charlegne place her breakfast tray outside her cabin when she went off to sunbathe? Why was it left in the room? She couldn’t have thought a steward would come and take it away, because she hung a DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob. Wouldn’t it have been easier just to leave the tray outside her door for us to collect it? Why didn’t she?

  “Fourth, her eyes were dilated. Very obviously dilated. She had been drugged unconscious for around six hours. Surely, some of the dilation would recede? But it didn’t. So someone gave her another dose to ensure she wouldn’t wake up too soon.

  “Finally, there’s the problem regarding security. Ian sees everything. He’s a voyeur; he likes to watch people on the ship. He says nothing happened on the day Charlegne died. But he should have seen Aaron Brent throw the sunscreen overboard. He should have. He wouldn’t miss something like that. So why did he? I thought about the smell coming from the Lost and Found box. The smell affected Ian’s breathing. He’s sensitive to fragrances. Suppose it was perfume? Clothing carries fragrances really well. Someone soaked a piece of clothing in perfume and turned it in to Lost and Found. The fragrance affects Ian’s asthma. He takes out his inhaler. A drugged inhaler. Someone must have swapped his regular inhaler for one dosed with a drug that would knock him out. He would be as unconscious as Charlegne and miss everything that happened on deck. That’s why no one responded at the security desk when you called, David. But to accomplish this, the killer had to know about Ian’s asthma and have access to the crew area on Deck Three.

  “Isn’t that how it happened, Dustin?”

  Both of David’s eyebrows arched high into his forehead. “My name’s David, Li.”

  “No, it isn’t.” Li’s smile gleamed as sharply as the swords in his eyes. “Fifteen years ago, you went by another name. Isn’t that right, Mr. Dustin Cole?”

  David said nothing, but his breathing started to fray.

  “You made a mistake about the sunscreen. Charlegne always used it. If you had daubed even a little on her body, it might have thrown us off. But sunstroke is an invisible killer, and you wanted to watch her burn.”

  Li heard the faint crackle of knuckles.

  “Did she deserve to suffer, Dustin? Don’t you know how many times she tried to kill herself, so she could be with you again? Don’t you know how much she loved you?”

  “No one will believe you,” David replied. His voice was like molasses: thick, dark, a little gummy in his throat. “No one will believe a single syllable. Not that you’ll have much time to talk…”

  He lifted his hands toward the bruises on his bunkmate’s throat.

  “And what if I believe him?”

  The new voice froze them in a tableau of murderer and victim. Rosemary stepped from the shadows behind them, her hair limp, the whites of her eyes bright with fear. She clutched her purse like a lifeline to safety.

  “I heard him,” she said. “I didn’t want to believe him, but I…I had to make sure.” She walked to David and brushed her fingers against his dark, rage-mottled face. He flinched. Her eyes swam with tears. “Oh God…Dustin…You…How…I thought…You’re
supposed to be dead!”

  Dustin/David seized his sister by the elbows. “Rosie…Sis…Think about what she did to us! Charlegne destroyed our family! She didn’t deserve to live!”

  “And what about Sally Brent?” Li’s words sliced through the spell the man tried to cast on Rosemary. “She loved you. She did everything for you. She helped you with your insane plans. She agreed to marry an evil man who hated and abused her, all because she loved and feared you. Didn’t she suffer enough?” His young voice rose to almost a shriek. “Did she deserve to die too?”

  David glared at Li like he wished he had a knife to drive into the boy’s face.

  “You…You monster!” Rosemary wrested herself from David’s grip. “I spent all these years blaming Charlegne, but it was YOU! YOU caused all our misery! YOU broke your brother’s heart and made him a monster! YOU drove away the sister I accepted in my heart! This is all your fault, Dustin!”

  David reached for her again. “Rosie—”

  “Get away from me! I hate you!”

  She shoved him.

  And they were too close to the railing.

  David slipped on the wet deck and twisted over the edge. His face stretched with a huge scream. Li lunged forward and grabbed David’s foot, but the shoe—Li’s old dress shoe—slipped off in his hands.

  This time, the fall was accurate. The loud crunch and the screams from down below confirmed that.

  Rosemary dropped to her knees and screeched.

  “DUSTIN!”

  “What happened?”

  Martin Hale draped his arm around his wife’s waist, while Rosemary nursed a brandy. Her fingers trembled, and her skin had all the color and vitality of a ghost.

  Li fidgeted, unsure whether he was allowed to sit in a booth in the dining room now. But Rosemary made it clear he had to join them. “I’m not sure if Mrs. Hale—”

  Rosemary gulped her brandy. “I want to know the truth. What did he do? How did this happen? Why?”

  Li tried to curb his nervous habits. “Well…I saw the first glimmer of truth when you told me about you and your brothers, Mrs. Hale. The Three Musketeers. All for one and one for all. I saw that as all three siblings united into one family after the accident that killed their parents, and one type of temperament developed for all three of them. Dustin inherited a nasty temper, his brother’s quick, violent tendencies, and his sister’s ability to hold onto a grudge.” He flushed pink. “Oh…I didn’t mean to say it like that. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t stop. I want to hear it. Everything.”

  “Well…only if you’re sure…” He cleared his throat. “Most of all, he inherited a desperate desire to rebuild his family. The Cole children had tried over the years to restore the family they lost, but all their attempts to have kids of their own failed. Dustin wanted kids in the most eager and determined way a youngest child can feel. And he had Charlegne…

  “But Charlegne was a practical girl with an eye on her future. She didn’t want kids right away. They were barely engaged. She wanted to see her modeling career through to the end, finish design school, and start her fashion line. Children weren’t in the master plan she outlined for her life. She loved Dustin and might have become a mom one day, but not until she had her career firmly established.

  “Dustin didn’t care. He wanted a family. Now. They must have argued. I’m not certain about this, but I believe Charlegne must have said something about not wanting kids. That unlocked her fiancé’s fury.” Li looked down at his tightly knotted hands, wishing that he could stop picturing the scene he believed happened. “And he raped her.”

  A soft, strangled squeal came from Rosemary. Tears sprang to her eyes. “Raped her?”

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Hale, but…yes, he did. It was all there. In her eyes. The story of a girl raped by the man she loved.” Li gave a quick thought to Melanie, and his heart cried.

  “And she…she got pregnant? Just like you said?”

  “That’s what Dr. Innsbrook told the captain and me. She described Charlegne as ‘two months along’ when the girl visited her husband’s clinic. It must have been awful for Charlegne. She was carrying a child conceived from a rape. The man she loved sexually assaulted her. All her dreams and plans started to crumble. She did what she felt she had to do to get things back on track.” He looked Rosemary square in the eyes. “She had an abortion.”

  “Oh, that poor girl…” The tears fell freely now. “Why didn’t she tell me? I would have helped her.”

  “She was too scared. You had a nasty temper like Dustin and you were Dustin’s sister. She probably felt outnumbered. She just wanted it to go away and have things return to normal. Of course, now her letter to Dustin makes more sense.”

  “How so?” Martin asked.

  “Nowhere in it did she say that the engagement was a mistake. I don’t think she ever broke it off. When a woman ends her engagement, she usually hands back the ring. Charlegne kept Dustin’s ring. So she never ended their relationship. His suicide ended it. When she said she needed to ‘go away,’ she only wanted to get away for a little while to reevaluate her plans. And the sentence ‘I’ve found someone who can help me…’ referred to her seeing the abortion specialist.

  “When Dustin read her letter, he became suspicious. He found out about the abortion. In his mind, Charlegne murdered his child, the child he wanted so desperately. He could not live with a woman who killed his chance for fatherhood, no matter how much he loved her. So he decided to kill her, to punish her. He would wait for his revenge. He could hold onto a grudge as long as his sister could.”

  “Oh God…” Rosemary’s voice wavered.

  “It all fits. Charlegne’s letter crumpled into a ball and thrown into a trash can…hardly the actions of a sensitive, grief-stricken man. The phrase ‘It shouldn’t have happened’…What had happened to scare her away from Dustin’s comfort and love? It must have been something he did to her.

  “The whole puzzle came together when I looked at a picture of Charlegne. I asked myself who would do this to her. Who would leave her to die from sunstroke? Who wanted to hurt her? Dustin. No matter how angry anyone would be at her, Dustin would be the angriest. She was his fiancée after all.”

  “So he faked his suicide?” Martin asked.

  Rosemary sheltered her eyes with her hand, and a sharp sob punctured her throat. Her husband pulled her into his arms, nuzzled his face in her hair, and whispered words of comfort.

  Li knotted his fingers together in his lap, tiptoeing with his words. “It had all the hallmarks of some of the greatest faked deaths in history, but with one clever, artistic touch thrown in. Blood. Blood on the rocks under a bridge. I had to wonder why Josh was so insistent about reminding his sister about the blood and the lab tests that proved it was Dustin’s. Why not remind her of the sight of his corpse? Surely, that would be more effective. Why the blood? Only one answer…” He settled a soft, sympathetic gaze on the weeping woman. “You never found Dustin’s body, did you?”

  Tears choked Rosemary’s voice. She shook her head. “The current was too strong. The police believed he would have been miles downstream, halfway to the ocean by then. They promised to keep looking, but…the blood…the blood was enough…”

  “The blood was enough to convince you he was dead. That’s what Dustin thought. All he had to do was cut himself, probably on the arm, and smear the blood on the rocks. Enough to suggest trauma. He didn’t worry about a serious investigation. He sent you those letters to give him a motive for his fake suicide. He was a despondent lover who killed himself when the girl he loved left him. He wasn’t under investigation by the police. He didn’t owe money to anyone. It was a tragic story of lost love.

  “But Dustin wanted to kill Charlegne. And the best alibi he could invent was to be considered dead himself.”

  Rosemary’s words were paper-thin and rustled in her mouth. “And he waited…”

  Li nodded. “He had to set up a new identity, keeping it as legal as possi
ble. He dyed his red hair brown and looked for a job, a job that would keep him in contact with Charlegne. He watched for her. With her success, she was easy to trace. After she sailed on the Howard Line the first time, he knew what to do. He would work for the cruise line industry. A perfect job for a man who’s supposed to be dead. Always at sea for months at a time. Not tied to any one place. Not too close to Charlegne to raise suspicion. He became David Kane, deck attendant par excellence.”

  Martin’s forehead creased. “But why did you suspect David and not someone else?”

  “Proximity. David was on duty that morning on the Sunbathing Deck. He was right when he said he should have noticed she was burning and called for help. So why didn’t he? Because he wanted to watch her burn.”

  “How did he know about sunstroke though?”

  “I suspect the idea for the murder was planted, quiet innocently, by Dr. Innsbrook. She loves to lecture people about their health and behavior. Perhaps he was on duty during the Caribbean cruise where a passenger nearly died from sunstroke. He thought it was perfect for his plan. It would look like an accident. So he set out to design an accident for Charlegne. But he wouldn’t do it alone. He had help.”

  “Who helped him?”

  Li chewed his lip before speaking. “Sally Brent.”

  Another squeal from Rosemary. “You don’t mean that tortured, abused woman who always looked like she would melt into tears, do you?”

  “I wish it wasn’t true…but, it is. Sally loved and feared David. Similar to how Daphne loved and feared Josh. She adored him. She even agreed to marry a man she did not love to disguise their relationship. And whenever she escaped her husband for a while, she met with David. He must have made all sorts of promises to her. Sally wanted to please David, to keep David from getting angry, and David bullied her in the worst possible way. With love.”

  “Did…Did he love her too?”

  Li avoided her direct gaze. “I think he only loved the fact she fit his plan for murder. Tall…blond…blue eyes…” He made a furious grunt deep in his chest. “I should have seen it. I’m an idiot for not noticing it right away. I always thought Sally’s face was familiar to me. I placed it in some sad story from my past, but I should have been more literal about it. Sally was familiar to me, because I had seen her face only a few minutes before…on Charlegne Jackson.”