Death of a Bachelorette

by Laura Levine

  Chapter 25

  Back at the mansion, I made a beeline for Brianna’s room, hoping to question her about Dallas’s blackmail theory.

  But her room was empty when I got there, and I figured she was out at the pool, airing her Double D’s.

  Taking advantage of her absence, I decided to do a little snooping.

  Clearly not a neat freak, Brianna had left her bed unmade in a tangled mass of sheets, her pillow squished from where she’d been sleeping.

  A night table next to her bed was crammed with makeup—an artillery of lipsticks, mascara, bronzers, and blushers—along with a cuticle pusher, nail clipper, eyelash curler, and other instruments of cosmetic torture.

  Then I noticed a book poking out from among the rumpled sheets. I pulled it out and saw it was a copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.

  I have to admit, I was a bit surprised. I had Brianna pegged as the type who moved her lips while reading the National Enquirer.

  And I was about to get a whole lot more surprised when, in the course of my snooping, I opened the drawers to Brianna’s night table and found them crammed with even more books. Brainbenders like The Prince, by Machiavelli. Das Kapital, by Karl Marx. And No Exit, by Jean Paul Sartre.

  True, I also found a Buns of Steel video along with a hot pink vibrator, but the rest was all advanced smartie stuff.

  Whaddaya know? It seemed Brianna was not half the bubblebrain she appeared to be.

  On the contrary, from the looks of her reading material, she was a very smart cookie, fully capable of plotting and pulling off a cold-blooded murder.

  If Hope had been blackmailing her, Brianna may well have been the one who cut the cords on her parachute.

  I was wracking my brains, trying to figure out what hold Hope might have had over Brianna, when I happened to glance down at the floor and saw another book peeking out from under the bed.

  When I reached down and pulled it out, I recognized it right away. It was Hope’s yearbook, the one she showed me my first day at the mansion. I remembered how proud Hope had been as she’d pointed out pictures of her teenage self.

  Sitting at the edge of Brianna’s bed, I began leafing through the book, gazing at Class President Hope, Class Treasurer Hope, and finally, Hope, the Girl Most Likely to Succeed.

  How irrevocably that last prediction had been dashed.

  I was idly turning the pages, glancing at the head shots of Hope’s classmates when I came across a picture that made me stop dead in my tracks.

  Smiling up at me from the glossy yearbook page was a handsome young man with full lips, delicate features, and bright red hair. His name? Brian Scott. There was no mistaking his resemblance to Brianna, whose last name, I now remembered, also happened to be Scott.

  Good heavens. Was it possible? Had Double-D Brianna started out as a guy?

  When Hope warned Brianna to “pay up” at that Monopoly game, had she been blackmailing her former classmate, threatening to expose her past life as a man?

  I didn’t have time to ponder this train of thought, because just then I looked up and saw Brianna herself standing in the doorway, clad in a string bikini, all five feet, eleven inches of her. Why had I never noticed she was so tall, her arms so muscular, her hands so large?

  “So,” she said, eyeing the yearbook in my lap, “you’ve discovered my little secret.”

  Then she sailed across the room and plopped down on the bed beside me. Reaching across me, she grabbed a cuticle pusher from the night table and began pushing back her cuticles, totally unfazed.

  “Yes,” she said, gazing at the pretty young man in the yearbook, “once upon a time I was Brian Scott. A girl trapped in a boy’s body. But that’s all behind me now. Thanks to some marvelous doctors in Denmark, I’m one hundred percent female.”

  “And Hope was blackmailing you,” I said, going for the jugular.

  “Through the nose,” she nodded. “I had no idea when I showed up for the show that Hope would be one of the other contestants. She recognized me right away and, calculating bitch that she was, threatened to tell the world the truth about me unless I coughed up ten grand.”

  “Is that why you sneaked off to the prop shed and cut the cords on her parachute?” I asked, hoping to prompt a confession.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” she said, with a toss of her flaming red mane. “I didn’t kill Hope. I didn’t care if she blabbed. I’m not ashamed of starting out as a man. And I don’t give a flying frisbee if word gets out. It’ll probably get me a whole lot of publicity.

  “You know,” she said, pointing to the copy of The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People, “this guy has a lot of good tips for getting ahead in the world, tips I plan to use to become a star in Hollywood.”

  And from the look of sheer determination in her eyes, I had no doubt that she and her boobs would make their way straight to the top in Tinseltown.

  “Sorry to disappoint you, hon,” she was saying, “but I didn’t kill Hope. Her threats didn’t scare me a bit. If you want to talk to someone who was out at the prop shed the morning of the murder, go see Akela.”

  “Akela?” I asked. “The maid?”

  “I’d forgotten all about it when we talked the other day, but afterward I remembered seeing Akela scurrying out to the prop shed. I didn’t think much of it at the time. Akela’s always scurrying somewhere, scared as a mouse. I figured she was on an errand doing her housework. But now,” she added, “I’m not so sure. Maybe she’s not as mousy as I thought. Maybe she’s the killer.”

  Maybe so.

  It was definitely time to pay my skittish maid a little visit.

  In the meanwhile, I bid Brianna farewell.

  “See ya,” she said, barely glancing up from her cuticles, still totally unflustered.

  But when I looked down at her hands, I saw a drop of blood where she’d shoved her cuticle pusher just a bit too hard.

  For all I knew, Brianna was faking this whole cool as a cucumber thing. Maybe she was deeply ashamed of her transsexual identity. And maybe, just maybe, she’d killed Hope to keep her secret safe.

  * * *

  Happy to get away from Brianna and her cuticle pusher, I returned to Sauna Central to give Prozac a hunk of ahi tuna I’d saved from my lunch.

  I found her sprawled on the bed, watching Godzilla, our resident waterbug, pushing something across the floor.

  Upon closer inspection, I saw that the object being pushed was one of my favorite earrings—a delicate seed pearl dangler I’d been foolish enough to leave on top of my dresser.

  I should have known nothing was safe from Godzilla’s slimy grasp.

  Prozac eyed him, utterly rapt, as he made his way across the room with my precious cargo.

  Wow! What a bug! He ought to be on America’s Got Talent!

  Determined to put an end to this nonsense and kill Godzilla once and for all, I marched over to where he was nudging my beautiful pearl earring across the floor.

  But as I approached, instead of skittering away like any normal insect in danger, the sneaky devil slithered up and sat on top of my earring.

  No way could I stomp on him now, not without ruining my earring.

  I could practically hear him chortling in triumph.

  Heaven only knew what ghastly gook he was secreting onto my beautiful pearl, and I stood there helpless to stop him.

  Utterly disgusted, I tossed Prozac her tuna chunk (she certainly didn’t deserve it!) and stormed out of the room.

  Good grief. I’d been outsmarted by a waterbug.

  And I actually thought I stood a chance at solving Hope’s murder?

  Chapter 26

  Next stop: Akela, the maid.

  According to Brianna, she’d been heading to the prop shed the morning of the murder.

  At last, I’d found a suspect at the scene of the crime!

  Leaving my humiliating encounter with Godzilla behind me, I made my way downstairs to the mansion’s kitchen—a huge room with two hulking stainle
ss-steel refrigerators, a massive granite island, and enough cabinets to stock a small grocery store.

  The room was deserted when I got there, and the lure of those refrigerators was just too great to resist. I opened one and discovered it was a freezer, jammed to the gills with trays of airline food.

  Well, that sure was no fun.

  The good stuff had to have been in the other fridge. I trotted over to it, my salivary glands on alert, wondering what treasures I might unearth.

  But as I approached, I groaned to see a padlock on the stainless-steel door.

  “Manny keeps all the good stuff under lock and key.”

  I turned and saw Polly coming in the kitchen, her boyish bod clad in capris and a tee.

  “How infuriating,” I said, fuming at the thought of Manny eating royally while the rest of us ate cardboard.

  “I’ve got a splitting headache,” Polly said, taking an aspirin tin from her pocket. Then she reached for a glass from one of the cabinets and filled it from the tap at the sink. “Manny’s been driving me crazy, dictating notes on some idiotic new show about mothers-in-law in Miami.”

  “I feel your pain,” I said. “I was the designated note-taker this morning.”

  “If you ask me,” Polly said, gulping down two aspirin, “the wrong person got murdered on this island.”

  Amen to that.

  “Do you have any idea where Akela is?” I asked.

  “She’s on her break this time of day—probably in her cabin. It’s the first one on the left as you head down the path to the main road. Is there anything I can help you with?”

  “No, I need to talk to Akela in person. Brianna says she saw her heading to the prop shed the morning of the murder.”

  “Really?” Polly asked, wide-eyed. “Do you actually think Akela had something to do with Hope’s murder? The woman’s scared of her own shadow.”

  “I know it seems unlikely, but I can’t rule anyone out.”

  “So how’s it going with the murder investigation?”

  “Lots of suspects, no real evidence.”

  “Try and pin it on Manny if you can,” she said, rinsing out her water glass. “The man deserves to do some time in prison, for cruel and inhuman treatment of his staff, if nothing else.”

  “How true.”

  Then she put her hands on my shoulders, her brow furrowed in concern.

  “Just be careful, okay? Whoever killed Hope is dangerous. If he killed once, he can kill again.”

  “Don’t worry,” I assured her. “I’m a trained professional.”

  Okay, so I’ve never received any actual training. But I have watched umpteen seasons of Law & Order. That must count for something, right?

  I sure as heck hoped so.

  * * *

  Minutes later, I was knocking at the door of Akela’s one-room cabin.

  “Come in,” I heard her say, her timid voice barely audible through the door.

  I walked into the cabin, a no-frills room with a cot, a dresser, and little else.

  A short, squat gal with a round moon face and enormous brown eyes, Akela was stretched out on the cot, still in her maid’s uniform. Her hair, normally caught up in a bun, now lay loose and flowing down her back.

  As I walked into the room, she sat up straight and slipped something under her pillow, something she clearly didn’t want me to see.

  “I hope I didn’t wake you,” I said.

  “No, no,” she assured me. “I was just resting.”

  “Do you mind if we have a little chat about Hope’s murder?” I asked.

  Suddenly her moon face froze.

  “No.” She shook her head firmly. “No talk about the murder.”

  Then she hunkered back down on the bed and closed her eyes, dismissing me.

  If she thought she was getting rid of me that easily, she was sadly mistaken.

  “Look, Akela. We can do this the easy way, and you talk to me. Or,” I added, in my best Bad Cop voice, “we do this the hard way, and I get my cat.”

  At the mention of Prozac, Akela’s eyes sprang open, wide with panic.

  “No kitty!” she cried, bolting up in bed. “No kitty!”

  Who says a PI in a CUCKOO FOR COCOA PUFFS T-shirt can’t play hardball?

  “Thanks for being so understanding,” I said, gracing her with a victor’s smile.

  Looking around the room and seeing no chairs, I plopped my fanny at the edge of her bed and got down to business.

  “Brianna said she saw you heading to the prop shed the morning of the murder. Is that true?”

  Her eyes grew big as Oreos, alive with fear.

  “Yes, I went to the prop shed. But I didn’t go near the parachutes. I went to get Mop & Glo.”

  Mop & Glo? Were the bachelorettes going to compete for Spencer’s hand with a cleaning competition?

  “Manny keeps cleaning supplies in the prop shed. We were out of Mop & Glo, and so I went to get some. I swear on the name of Wahili.”

  “Wha-who?”

  “Wahili. The Paratitan God of Truth.”

  “So that’s all you did? You picked up some Mop & Glo?”

  She squirmed uneasily, her eyes darting around her rustic cabin, refusing to meet mine.

  “No,” she finally admitted, red-faced. “I did something else.”

  “What was that?” I asked in my most confession-inducing voice.

  “I hid a cheesecake.”

  “A cheesecake?”

  “Sara Lee,” she nodded. “Manny keeps them in his freezer for his dessert. But every once in a while, I take one and hide it in the prop shed. Then, at the end of the day, I bring it back to my cabin. Manny, he is a selfish man. Keeps all the good food for himself.”

  “So you sneaked off with Sara Lee, huh?”

  “You’re not going to have him punish me, are you?”

  “Punish you?” I grinned. “Are you kidding? You ought to get a royal lei for that.”

  A shy smile broke out on her face. “You want some?”

  She obviously did not know me very well. The only possible answer to that question was, “Bring on the forks!”

  “Why, yes,” I said. “That would be lovely.”

  Akela jumped off her cot and went to her dresser, where she opened the top drawer and pulled out a cheesecake, along with two plastic forks.

  We spent the next several minutes sitting cross-legged on her cot, chowing down on cheesecake and trashing Manny, both of which were immensely satisfying.

  Surely this darling woman willing to share a Sara Lee cheesecake couldn’t possibly be a killer, could she?

  So engrossed was I in the yummy goodness of Sara Lee that I totally forgot the reason for my visit. It wasn’t until I was scraping the last morsels of cheesecake from the tin that I remembered my investigation and asked Akela if she’d seen anyone near the prop shed when she was there.

  “No one,” she shook her head.

  “Do you have any idea who might have wanted to kill Hope?”

  “Could be anyone,” she said. “Miss Hope was a bad lady. She would not have been good for Mr. Spencer. He is a good man. So sweet. So kind.”

  Her eyes lit up with what I can only describe as love. Either that, or a cheesecake high.

  “Look what he gave me.”

  She reached behind her and pulled out what I’d seen her shove under her pillow when I first came in the cabin.

  It was a photo, an 8x10 glossy of Spencer Dalworth VII, Earl of Swampshire. Signed “To Akela—All my best wishes, Spence.”

  And adorned, I could not help but notice, with a large ♥.

  Suddenly a scenario started unfolding in my brain.

  Was it possible Akela had developed a psychotic crush on Spencer? Had she mistaken his casual kindnesses for love? Was it possible he was even diddling with her on the side? What about that ♥? And what about the two forks in her dresser? Clearly, she’d been sharing her cheesecakes with someone. Had that someone been Spencer?

  What if Akela h
ad fallen deeply in love with Spencer and then, learning he was about to marry Hope, had tiptoed out to the prop shed and cut the cords on her rival’s parachute?

  I licked the last morsels of cheesecake from my fork, wondering if I’d just shared a Sara Lee with a killer.

  * * *

  Still in a cheesecake glow, I didn’t even mind the particle board ravioli at dinner that night. I barely nibbled at them while, at the head of the table, Manny scarfed down a beautiful salmon filet.

  He really was a most insufferable man.

  I watched Akela as she ran around passing out food trays, darting lovestruck glances at Spencer. At one point, I thought I even saw him wink at her.

  Good heavens. Had the royal Brit been carrying on an affair with the Paratitan maid, after all?

  Meanwhile, Polly sat next to me, a troubled look in her eyes. Like me, she barely touched her food. But unlike me, I was quite certain she didn’t have half a cheesecake tumbling around in her tummy.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked, as she poked at one of her ravioli.

  “I’m worried about Kirk.”

  Glancing around the table, I realized he wasn’t there.

  “I stopped by his cabin on my way to dinner,” she said, “and he looked terrible. Sitting in his chair, just staring off into space. I’m no doctor, but I think he’s seriously depressed. He said something about how life didn’t seem worth living anymore.”

  “You think he’d try to kill himself?”

  “I’m afraid he might.” Under her shaggy bangs, her eyes were wide with concern.

  “Did you tell Manny?”

  “Yes, I told Mr. Empathy. All he had to say was, ‘Not my problemo.’ ”

  I made up my mind to pay Kirk a visit right after dinner. He was the one suspect I still hadn’t questioned—the one suspect with unbridled access to Hope’s parachute.

  I was asking Polly directions to his cabin when I looked up and saw Akela bringing in Manny’s dessert—a big bowl of strawberry ice cream.

  She was heading for our table when suddenly she looked down at her feet, horrified.

  I followed her glance and groaned to see Prozac, prancing around her ankles.