by Kylie Logan
“Estelle was nothing if not a smart businesswoman.” I smiled at the memory. “She called me, too, about a Queen Anne curly maple highboy I admired when she invited some of us over for cocktails one night. Mid–eighteenth century,” I said, “and it’s going to cost me a small fortune, but it’s worth it.”
“And you can afford it.”
He hadn’t meant the comment as anything more than a casual reply, but let’s face it—I was a little touchy when it came to my background and Levi’s treachery.
I clutched my hands at my waist.
He pretended to study the single fat cloud that drifted high above our heads.
There didn’t seem to be any point in standing there and being uncomfortable. “We should go in,” I finally said. “I’m sure Vivien is waiting for us.”
“Right.” He turned to the house. “You in a hurry?”
It was the first time I stopped to think that a Friday evening in the summer was probably the worst time for Levi to be away from his bar. “Go on, go right ahead.” I stepped back to let him up the stairs first. “I’ve got nothing going on tonight and no one staying at my place.” Did I somehow manage to make this sound like it was no big deal? “You go.” I made a little shooing motion with my hands. “Get your business over with so you can get back to the bar, then I’ll take care of what I need to do.”
“Not what I meant.” He put a hand on my arm, and don’t ask me why, but I let him. I let him leave it there, too, at least for as long as it took for the heat of his skin to seep into mine. That’s when I couldn’t control a shiver, and that’s when he let go. “Everything is under control at the bar. We’re busy, but not slammed. I don’t need to get back for a while. I thought if you weren’t busy we could—”
Could what, I could only imagine, but I didn’t find out, and maybe that’s a good thing. A sleek and very shiny black BMW Z4 roadster convertible purred up to the curb, and first Riva, then Quentin Champion, got out.
“Oh, is this a party? I love parties.” Riva giggled and, like it was the most natural thing in the world, wound an arm through Levi’s. “Especially when there are handsome men around.”
“More of a buying expedition than a party,” he told her.
Riva managed another giggle. “That’s exactly what we’re here for, too. How cool is that! Vivien told us she’s getting rid of some of her aunt’s stuff and, well, you know how it is.” Though she hadn’t bothered to even look my way before she closed in on Levi, now Riva slid a grin in my direction. “When you have a busy inn, you need all sorts of furniture. Actually, I’m surprised we had the chance to get away at all this evening. Aren’t you surprised we had the chance to get away this evening, Quentin?” She turned to her brother, who might have been listening if he weren’t so busy watching two young, leggy ladies walk by.
With a flick of her corn-colored ponytail, Riva turned back to me. “Well, it is amazing that we had a chance to get away. I mean what with all the people staying at our place this weekend. Is it always this busy in the summer? Are you filled to the rafters this weekend, too?”
“Bea’s place has the best reputation on the island.” Like he had all the practice in the world (and for all I knew, he did), Levi managed to untangle himself smoothly from Riva’s grip. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Her place is always busy.”
“Which means we really should get down to business here,” I announced and retreated from Levi, from the emotions that erupted inside me at his touch, and from the sly smile on Riva’s face by racing up the front steps. I’d already raised my hand to knock on the front door when something caught my attention from the direction of that big rhododendron. The plant twitched, I swear it did, and I guess Levi noticed, too, because he walked over to that side of the house.
“You need some help, Cody?” I heard him ask.
The answer was muffled. But then, the man who Levi was talking to was behind the rhododendron bush.
“How about you come on out of there and say hello?” It might have sounded like a friendly suggestion, at least to anyone who knew Levi well. But Cody obviously wasn’t one of them. Or maybe he just wasn’t about to argue with a guy nearly twice as tall as he was.
When he stepped out from behind the bush, I recognized Cody Rayburn even though we’d never formally met. He worked at the island’s only gas station and I’d seen him there a time or two, tinkering with cars. He was in his thirties, short, and scrawny. His long, dark hair stuck out the back of his red baseball cap, and that evening, he was wearing a dark T-shirt and jeans dotted with oil stains. He scrubbed a finger under his nose.
“How ya doin’?” Cody asked no one in particular.
“You can’t be here to buy something from Vivien.” How Riva decided this so quickly was anybody’s guess. Or maybe just one look at Cody and she knew he wasn’t an antiques-loving kind of guy.
“You looking for something?” Levi asked him.
Cody backstepped his way closer to the porch and farther from Levi. “Just heading home,” he said. “Taking a shortcut, heading home. Thought I’d stop in and talk to Vivien for a while. She’s here, ain’t she? She said she would be here tonight.” He cocked his head and looked at the house. “I’ll just hang out here with you and talk to her for a while, maybe have a beer or two. We do that all the time, you know,” he added as if someone might challenge his statement. “I stop in and we have a couple beers and a couple laughs.”
Knowing Vivien, I wasn’t convinced, but hey, who am I to judge? Again, I turned to knock on the door. Again I was interrupted, this time when a green motor scooter zipped into the drive.
“Vivien here?” A man with hair the color of walnuts whipped off his helmet and joined us on the porch. “I’m supposed to meet her here this evening. Alex Canfield.” He shook hands all around. Well, except when it came to the Twins. One look at them and his eyes got as wide as hubcaps. He blushed and stammered something about what an honor it was to meet them.
“I’ve got to get to work over at the Yardarm,” Alex said once he’d recovered. “You know, that new restaurant over near the marina. I just wanted to stop in really quick because Vivien said she was getting rid of some of the old tools in Estelle’s garage. When I was a kid I used to come over here to cut the lawn and I remember that Estelle had this incredible tool that belonged to her grandfather. Cast iron, three-strand rope maker from 1901 with some old rope still attached!” He spoke these last words on the end of a reverent sigh. “That rope maker made me fall in love with antique tools. I can’t wait to get my hands on it, and maybe some of Estelle’s other old stuff, too.”
“Join the crowd.” This time, I didn’t wait for anything to interrupt me. I rapped on the front door.
There wasn’t any answer.
“Well, that’s weird.” Levi took the steps two at a time and stood on the porch next to me. “I know she said seven thirty, and—”
I checked my phone. “It’s after.”
I knocked again.
Still no answer.
“She keeps an extra key over there, in that phony rock.” When Cody Rayburn spoke up, we all looked to where he was shuffling a nervous little dance on the front lawn. He shrugged. “Hey, like I said, me and Vivien, we’re friends. She told me about the extra key. You know, in case that old aunt of hers ever needed anything and Vivien couldn’t be here to help her. She told me where the key was so that I could stop by and lend a hand.”
Levi and I exchanged looks, and we didn’t have to utter a word. Vivien and Cody were about as much of a friendly couple as the Gulf of Mexico and an oil spill. Even when he produced a key from inside the faux rock, I wasn’t convinced. Rather than use a purloined key to get in the house, I tried the doorknob. The front door swung open.
“Vivien!” I called out to her. “It’s me, Bea. I’m here. I mean, uh, we’re here! A bunch of us are here.” I stepped into the living room. L
evi was right behind me, Riva was behind him (and standing a little too close if you asked me), then Quentin and Alex, with Cody bringing up the rear. “I came to pay you for the highboy.”
Considering what she was charging me for the dresser, I thought Vivien would have come running, but there was no sign of her.
Come to think of it, there was no sign of the highboy, either. The last time I’d been to Estelle’s it was in the living room directly opposite the front window. Now that spot was empty.
Automatically, I stepped farther into the small, neat room, with its smoky gray walls and white woodwork, and looked around. There had been other, smaller things I’d told Vivien I’d be willing to purchase along with the highboy: a pair of silver candlesticks and an old lamp that had long ago been converted from oil to electric. It had a glass shade decorated with blue and green flowers and wasn’t my style, but it would look good in one of my guest rooms and would be a nice memory of Estelle. The lamp was gone, too.
“She probably just ran out for something,” Riva declared and plunked herself down on a dark gray couch with rolled arms and elegant wooden feet. The couch was as understated and sedate as vivacious Estelle never was, but one look at the rug on which it stood—squares inside squares in shades of red and green and yellow—and I couldn’t help but remember Estelle’s exquisite taste. As a matter of fact, when I’d visited to share a drink with Estelle, I’d sat right where Riva was sitting. It was the perfect spot from which to admire the curly maple highboy.
“What’s the sour face for?” Levi had the sense to keep his voice down when he leaned close and asked.
“My highboy.” I waved at the empty spot along the wall. “Where’s my highboy?”
“Maybe Vivien’s out back helping someone load it into a van or something,” Levi suggested. He swallowed his words when I gave him a look. Vivien helping someone do manual labor? Not in this universe, and we both knew it.
“Maybe she’s got a sort of staging area for the stuff she’s selling,” I said, and I made my way through the living room and into the dining room in search of the highboy. Quentin Champion followed along, and once he fell into step behind me, Levi trailed him. So did Cody and Alex.
As it turned out, there was nothing in the dining room but a table piled with archive boxes, and nothing in the kitchen except appliances, an oak table, and a collection of cookbooks with a sign taped to them that said Library Donation in Estelle’s loopy handwriting.
No curly maple highboy.
I paused to consider this while I dragged out my phone and called Vivien. The only number I had for her was for her office, but for all I knew, she’d been delayed by an impending real estate deal.
No answer.
I tapped the phone against my chin.
“Let’s try her cell number,” Levi said, and he pulled out his own phone, checked his list of contacts, and called.
From somewhere in the house, we heard the strains of “Sexy and I Know It.”
“That’s it,” Cody chimed in. “That’s Vivien’s cell phone.”
I shushed him with the wave of one hand. “We need to listen to know where the ring is coming from.”
But by then, the snippet of song had ended.
Levi dialed again and we all held our breaths and bent our heads to listen.
We actually might have been able to locate the direction of the sound if Riva didn’t saunter in and chirp, “What are you guys doing?”
We groaned in unison and Levi tried one more time.
This time when Vivien’s phone rang, we were ready for it.
“Basement,” Cody said, and pointed to a door at the far end of the kitchen.
“I don’t think so,” Alex said. He pointed in the other direction, past the dining room and back toward the living room. “It sounded to me like it came from upstairs.”
I wasn’t comfortable proposing that we go off in different directions and search. It wasn’t my house, and other than Levi, who I knew a little too well, I didn’t know any of these people. “We’ll check upstairs first,” I suggested, and when we trooped back into the living room and up the stairs and stopped at the top of the landing where there was a hallway and the open doors of three rooms, Levi dialed the number again.
Nothing.
As if we’d choreographed the move, we all turned on our heels and headed the other way. Riva, the last one to have joined our little procession, was in the lead when we walked back into the kitchen and toward that closed basement door.
“I . . . I don’t want to go down there.” She eyed the door and wrapped herself in a hug, and as much as I’d been trying to pay as little attention as possible to the story of the Twins and their lives in captivity, I couldn’t help but remember something about how she and Quentin had been tied in a dark basement by their kidnapper for days on end.
Call me a sucker, but I moved to the front of the crowd and opened the basement door so Riva didn’t have to, and this time when Levi dialed Vivien’s number, the music was loud and clear.
“I’m sexy and I know it.” A gravelly voice ground out the words to a driving techno beat. “I’m sexy and I know it.”
“Down here,” I said, though I guess I didn’t have to. I felt along the wall for a light switch, flicked it on, and started down the basement steps.
“I’m sexy and I know it.”
Apparently Levi thought we should make sure about the ringtone.
There was nothing special about Estelle’s basement. At the bottom of the steps, all of us but Riva—and Quentin, too, I noticed—stepped into a rectangular room where there were some boxes stacked, a ping-pong table, and an old sewing machine.
“I’m sexy and I know it” came from somewhere on my right.
There was a door there, and beyond it, Estelle’s laundry room. When I swung open the door, I could just make out the shapes of a washer and a dryer. There was no light switch on the wall and step by careful step, I inched into the room, swinging my hand over my head. My fingers smacked a long pull chain that turned on a single lightbulb hanging from the ceiling in the center of the room.
“I’m sexy and I know it,” the man with the gravelly voice sang again.
Only when I saw Vivien, she was looking as far from sexy as it was possible to get.
She lay on her back on the tile floor, one arm thrown over her head, her hair spread out behind her like a dark halo. Her right leg was bent in an impossible position, and her dress, a summery little number with bright flowers all over it, was bunched up around her thighs. Her eyes were open. So was her mouth. There was a raw red mark around her neck and an odd-looking contraption lying next to her head.
If I had to guess, I’d say it was a cast iron, three-strand rope maker from 1901. The rope that was still attached to it was wound around Vivien’s neck.
“Nobody move.” Levi had the good sense to stop the rest of the group at the door of the laundry room, and by the time I turned to him, my heart in my throat and my stomach doing flip-flops, he had already called the police.
3
“So . . .” Police Chief Hank Florentine was a bulky guy with a bullet-shaped head and a buzz haircut. He had big hands and a stubborn chin, and he didn’t smile nearly enough. Then again, in his business, I guess he didn’t often have the opportunity. Once Levi had called him, we’d stepped out of the laundry room and back into the main basement, and just a few minutes later, Hank arrived. He glanced from me, to Levi, to Alex, to Cody. The Twins were still upstairs. Lucky them—they hadn’t had to look into the face of their dead real estate agent.
Hank already had a scowl on his pug-ugly face, so when it folded in on itself, I knew he was even more unhappy than usual. “What are you doing here, Cody?” he asked, and maybe Cody Rayburn was smarter than he looked because he had the sense to step back and try to blend in with the wall. “You know better.”
“I do. I really do.” Cody’s head bobbed. “But I was just passing by, see, and all these people were coming in here to Estelle’s and they invited me to come inside, too, and—”
Cody knew he’d said too much and that we were bound to dispute his version of the story; he clamped his lips shut.
Hank scratched a hand along the back of his neck. “I’ll need to take each of your statements,” he said, and I guess he knew we wouldn’t take issue because he never even looked at me or Levi when he added, “Bea and Levi, here. I’ll start with you. Then you can help out with the rest of them.”
I knew I should take this as a compliment. In the little over a year I’d lived on South Bass, I’d assisted Hank in solving a few murders. He would never come right out and say it—and I would never expect him to—but I knew he appreciated my insights and my help. As for Levi . . . an all-too-familiar uncomfortable thumping started up behind my ribs . . . Levi was, after all, a professional private investigator. He was the ideal ally.
“Let’s leave these guys to do what they have to do,” Hank said, glancing toward the laundry room door and the paramedics who were at work in there. “We’ll go upstairs.” He gave Cody a laser look. “And we’ll talk.”
Hank let Alex and Cody go first, and we followed. When we got to the living room, he told a uniformed officer to keep an eye on Quentin, Alex, and Cody and looked around for Riva, who, her brother informed us with a wave at the closed door of the powder room, was currently indisposed.
“Estelle had an office upstairs,” Levi suggested. “You could take everyone up there and interview them privately.”