Gone with the Twins

by Kylie Logan

  “Where are you going?” she called after me when I made for the door, but she didn’t wait to find out. Like the true friend she was, she told Martha she’d be back and was just a phone call away if she was needed, and she came along.

  • • •

  I think Kate was a little disappointed when I got in the car and didn’t go tearing out of my parking space hell-bent on the next step of the investigation.

  In fact, she sat quietly (if not patiently) in the passenger seat and watched as my fingers danced over the screen on my cell phone.

  “Something I need to know about?” she asked, and when I held up a finger because I was onto something and didn’t want to be interrupted, she drummed her fingers against the passenger door.

  “Aha!” I found what I was looking for and turned my phone so she could see the screen.

  Kate sat up and squinched up her eyes for a better look at the chair pictured there. It had a seat that was too close to the floor for my liking and a back that was too pitched to ever be comfortable.

  “That’s the ugliest chair I’ve ever seen,” she said.

  I checked the next screen. “Comes in orange, yellow, and turquoise,” I told her. “I’ve seen the turquoise number. In two places, as a matter of fact. Once at Zane’s and once at Vivien’s.”

  “So we know they both like ugly chairs.”

  I shook my head and poked my finger against the words on the screen. “We know something else, too. We know these chairs are sold by a place on the mainland. That they’re pretty pricey and”—the print on the screen was small and I knew Kate couldn’t read it from where she sat, but I turned my phone to her anyway—“we know they’re only sold in pairs.”

  • • •

  Kate took a few minutes to think about what I had said, and by the time she did, I was already driving away from the winery. “What do you suppose it means?” she asked.

  I slanted her a knowing look.

  “Oh.” Her ginger brows slipped over her eyes, then shot up. “Oh! You think Zane and Vivien—”

  “I think it’s a possibility.”

  “But they hated each other!”

  “Or they pretended to hate each other.”

  She thought this over for a second or two. “Or they started out hating each other and—”

  “Realized they had a whole lot in common.”

  “Or realized that their hate stoked a whole lot of passion.” Kate made a face and shivered. “Ick, Vivien and Zane.”

  “Vivien and anybody.” I did not include Levi in the picture that flashed through my head. After all, when it came to Levi and Vivien, it was only coffee.

  “Why would they pretend they hated each other?”

  When she asked the question, it was a good thing Kate had just turned a bit in the passenger seat so she could see me better. That way, she didn’t miss my shrug. “Who knows how people think. Maybe they liked the attention.”

  “They were the talk of the island,” she admitted.

  “And they did each have one of a pair of chairs,” I reminded her.

  “How are we going to find out for sure what was really going on?”

  Ah, that was the question. And though I didn’t have an answer, I knew where I had to go to start finding it. I drove downtown, worming my way through Friday traffic and over to Vivien’s office. I’d called Hank on the way and he was waiting for us and already had the door unlocked.

  He tossed me the key. “Lock up when you’re done. And Bea”—he stomped down the stairs and over to his patrol car—“don’t get conked on the head.”

  It was Hank humor, and since it made an appearance so seldom, I gave him a smile to let him know I appreciated it. That smile dissolved like chocolate peanut butter ice cream in the summer sun when I stepped into the office.

  I hadn’t forgotten that the place had been ransacked after I was knocked unconscious, but when the paramedics brought me around, I hadn’t had time to take a good look. Now inside the door, Kate and I assessed the mess and exchanged looks. The office hadn’t been cleaned up, and there were still files strewn everywhere. Kate’s mouth thinned, and I knew what she was thinking just like she knew what I was thinking—this wasn’t just looking like a difficult job; it was looking like an impossible one.

  Never one to let that stop me, I tiptoed my way through the file folders on the floor and went over to Vivien’s desk.

  Kate plunked down at the desk once occupied by Vivien’s host of assistants. “What are we looking for?”

  I riffled my hands through the files scattered over Vivien’s desk. “I wish I knew. But you’d think if there was something up between Zane and Vivien, there would be some indication of it somewhere. In a date book . . .” I pulled open the desk drawers, one after another, and didn’t see hide nor hair of a calendar of any kind. “Or something scrawled on a piece of paper.”

  Kate got the message. Never one to shirk work, she went through the garbage can next to Vivien’s desk and another one out in the kitchen where the office supplies were kept.

  When she was done, she stuck her head out of the kitchen doorway. “Nothing.”

  I was just going through the files closest to me and separating them into piles, the ones for Vivien’s clients on my right, the ones for Estelle’s clients on my left. (And just for the record, I did not look through Levi’s file again. I didn’t want to take the chance of Kate finding out his secret.)

  When she was done in the kitchen, she joined me. “You’re sorting.”

  “I’m not sure it will help, but it’s a place to start.”

  That’s all Kate needed to hear. One by one, she went through files, too, making two piles, one for Vivien’s real estate deals, one for Estelle’s.

  When we were finished, she stacked the piles on Vivien’s desk along with mine and stepped back.

  “So what does it tell us?” Kate asked.

  “For one thing, that Estelle closed more sales in the last few years than Vivien did,” I pointed out; the Estelle pile of files towered over Vivien’s. “But I guess that’s not news, and it sure doesn’t tell us anything about why anyone would want to kill Vivien or if she and Zane might have been involved in some way no one knew anything about.”

  “That’s for sure.”

  My sigh and Kate’s overlapped. Neither of them was loud enough to drown out the sound when someone rapped on the front door.

  It was a woman in white shorts and a peach-colored T-shirt, and I waved her inside.

  “I hate to bother you.” She stuck out a hand to both me and Kate. “Marie Brisbane. I’ve got a . . . that is, Vivien was . . . Oh, my.” Marie sniffled. “I live in Cleveland, I haven’t been up here for a couple weeks and I just got here for the weekend and heard what happened to Vivien.”

  “You were friends?” I asked her.

  Marie pulled a tissue out of a tote bag that smelled of coconut sunscreen. She dabbed her nose. “Not exactly friends. I didn’t know her all that well. But we own property over on Middle Bass.” She waved in the general direction of the small island that is a half mile north and west of South Bass. “It was my parents’ place and we used to go there all the time when we were kids, but these days, everyone’s so busy, we hardly ever get up here. When we decided to sell, we listed the house with Vivien. I’m sure our keys are somewhere over there.”

  Marie pointed across the room to a row of hooks in the wall. Each hook had a set of keys on it, and each set of keys had an address label attached to it.

  “I’m not sure how this works,” she admitted. “I mean, your real estate agent dying when she’s supposed to be selling your house. But I figure I’ll need to list it with someone else, and . . .”

  She didn’t need to finish. I knew what she was thinking. “I’m sorry, I can’t give you the keys,” I told her. “I don’t have the authority. But if you g
o over to the police station and talk to Chief Florentine and produce the proper documents to prove ownership, I’m sure he’ll help.”

  Marie said she understood and told us she’d be back with the chief.

  After she was gone, I stood for a while staring at all those keys.

  “It would be easy, wouldn’t it?” I asked, and I was talking more to myself than I was to Kate.

  Which didn’t stop her from replying. “What would be easy?”

  “For a real estate agent to get into a whole lot of houses.”

  “Well, sure.” Kate shrugged. “That’s what real estate agents do.”

  “And if that real estate agent wanted to meet somebody and didn’t want to be seen around town with that person?”

  Kate’s face lit up. “Then she could use those keys to come and go and have a whole lot of privacy.” Just as quickly, her expression fell. “But look at all these folders.” She pointed to the pile we’d made for Vivien’s clients. “How are we going to narrow down the possibilities?”

  “We don’t have to,” I told Kate, and I grabbed one set of keys from the hooks.

  17

  The place was furnished. The shelves next to the fireplace were piled with books, and from the quick tour I took of the kitchen, I could see that the cupboards were stocked with dishes and pots and pans.

  Still, it felt empty there in the house with the Own a Piece of Paradise! sign out front.

  “So?” Kate whispered the single word—it must have been an automatic reaction to the pressing silence. “Why here? Why do you think—”

  “I saw him here.” I spread my arms to indicate the house in general. “Well, not here, exactly, but I saw him outside. The evening of the murder. And Zane Donahue said he was just out to get ice cream, but we know it’s not true. So if he wasn’t out for ice cream, maybe he was here. Maybe this is one of the places he and Vivien met.”

  Kate nodded. “What are we looking for?”

  “I’m not sure,” I admitted, and because I didn’t whisper, my voice pinged back at us from the beige walls decorated with pictures of fishing boats and seashells and sunsets over water. From outside, I could still hear the faint buzz of weekend traffic, but here in the house next door to Estelle’s, the windows were closed and the air was summer-heavy and starting to smell musty. “I guess I just wanted to be sure Zane and Vivien could come and go.”

  “Just like we came. So now let’s go.” Kate hugged her arms around herself. She’s not usually squeamish when it comes to the kind of snooping that always goes hand in hand with a murder investigation, but I couldn’t blame her for feeling a little nervous. I’d called Hank before we came over just to be sure there was no official objection to what I had in mind, and still I felt like a trespasser.

  “We’ll go,” I promised Kate. “But not until we’ve had a chance to look around.”

  She glanced at a closed doorway on the other side of the kitchen. “I’m not going in the basement.”

  “That’s good, because I’m not going in the basement, either.” I laughed. “Come on, use your imagination. If you were Zane and Vivien and you were looking for a place where you could get together for a little tryst, you think it would be the basement?”

  She made a face and, with one finger, pointed up to the ceiling. “How about . . ?”

  I knew she was onto something. With her right behind me, I made my way back through the living room and up the steps to the second floor. Like the rest of the house, these rooms had been left furnished no doubt because a house that looked homey was more appealing to potential buyers than one that was empty and cavernous. There was a kids’ room decorated in a jungle theme, a small but tidy bathroom, a room that contained a desk and a guest bed, and a master bedroom, where there was a flower-print quilt on the bed in shades of green and blue, a dresser with a mirror above it, and a single wing chair in a color that didn’t quite match the green in the quilt or the blue of the carpeting, either.

  “Well, this would have to be a better place for a little rendezvous than the basement,” Kate admitted. “But everything’s neat and tidy. There’s no way to know if Zane and Vivien were ever here together. There’s no way of telling who’s ever been here.”

  She was right, and I had no choice but to admit it.

  I don’t know what I was expecting—I love you, Zane written on the mirror in Vivien’s lipstick?

  The thought sitting heavy on my shoulders, I did a turn around the room, hoping for inspiration, and when it didn’t come, I plunked down on the bed. “I’m not sure what I thought we’d find,” I admitted. “Maybe just some . . .” Something poked my butt and I shifted against the mattress. “I guess I was just . . .” I still couldn’t get comfortable, and I slid off the bed and looked down at the flowered quilt where I’d been sitting.

  “It’s just like ‘The Princess and the Pea’!” I shouted, and before Kate could ask what in the world I was talking about and why I was suddenly smiling like a loon, I plucked what had been poking me off the bed, cupped it in my hand, and hurried down the stairs and out the door.

  • • •

  From what I’d heard around town (back in the day when folks were still talking to me and not backing away like I had cooties), Zane Donahue had every intention of showing up at the gala at Tara the next day. But that was Saturday and today was Friday, and a glorious one at that. Blue skies, sunshine, calm waters.

  If I were Zane Donahue, I know where I would be, so I didn’t waste a minute. As soon as Kate hopped into the passenger seat of my SUV, I drove over to the yacht club.

  No, I wasn’t a member, and for that matter, neither was Kate. But though a newcomer like me might have been easy to turn away at the door, a powerhouse like Kate wasn’t anyone to mess with. Her family was legendary on the island, and legendary goes a long way in a small town.

  We sashayed into the yacht club and no one questioned us when we took a quick look around the bar.

  There was no sign of Zane Donahue in there, but I didn’t lose heart. Following the path we’d walked the day Vivien led us outside to lay the stone in honor of her aunt, I pushed through the back door and headed for the club’s private marina.

  “That’s it,” Kate said, pointing to a twenty-five-foot Catalina sailboat with the words Ladies’ Man painted on the back of it. “That’s Zane’s boat.”

  Zane’s boat—and Zane was on it, his back to the dock, busy stowing life jackets under a built-in bench.

  I didn’t wait for an invitation.

  The moment my tennis shoes slapped the teak deck, Zane looked up. “What are you doing here?”

  So it wasn’t the most gracious greeting, but I could hardly blame him.

  I did have a self-satisfied smile on my face.

  I waited for Kate to catch up, climb aboard, and stand by my side before I crossed the deck. There was a table near where Zane stood with his fists on his hips and, I noted, an open bottle of scotch and a glass filled with ice on it, and I took the prize I’d plucked off the bedspread and set it down next to the liquor bottle where Zane couldn’t fail to see it.

  He looked from the table to me, totally confused, and honestly, I couldn’t help myself—I thought of all the fictional detectives I’d seen in all the old black-and-white movies on TV and how they would handle this particular Aha! moment. With a little swagger. With a whole bunch of panache. Maybe even with a big dose of self-congratulations.

  I came to my senses in an instant. None of that seemed as important as getting right down to the truth.

  I pointed at the table. “You do know what that is, don’t you?”

  Since I’d never told Kate what I’d found in the bedroom of the house that was for sale, she peered over my shoulder for a look just as a V of confusion settled between Zane’s dark brows.

  “It’s an orange Tic Tac,” they said in unison.

 
“Exactly!” Okay, yeah, so I shot a finger into the air in what I imagined was a very Hercule Poirot manner. There is only so long I can control myself when it comes to these sorts of things. “You and Vivien . . .” I used that same finger to point to Zane. “You were meeting in the empty houses Vivien was selling.”

  It was a sunny afternoon and Zane was dressed in white shorts and a navy T-shirt with the word Captain embroidered over the heart. His inky hair gleamed in the light. His arms were bronzed from hours in the sun.

  His face, though, was a little green.

  “How do you . . ? How could you . . ?” He shook away his surprise. “That’s crazy. What are you talking about?”

  I pointed down at the candy I’d left on the table. “I’m talking about two people each having one of a matching pair of chairs. And I’m talking about that candy. At Estelle’s neighbor’s. On the bed.”

  Zane’s shoulders didn’t so much droop as they deflated. There was a boat berthed in the slip next to his and no one on deck, but he looked that way anyway, as if to make sure there was no one who could overhear. A muscle jumped at the base of his jaw. “Maybe we better go down below,” he said.

  With Zane leading the way, we went down to the boat’s galley. It wasn’t big, but it was neat and looked to make an efficient use of space. There was a built-in bench along one side of the boat and Zane motioned us to sit down, then went to the half-pint fridge and got out three bottles of water and handed them around. He twisted the cap on his own bottle and took a long swig.

  “You think Vivien and I were involved? Why do you care? What difference does it make?” he asked.

  “It makes a difference because it means you’ve been lying all along. To me. To the police.”

  He took another drink. “Like I said, what difference does it make?”

  “What difference did it make if people knew you and Vivien were seeing each other?” I asked him.

  He dropped down in a chair across from where Kate and I sat, then popped up again and walked over to the other side of the boat. (Port? Starboard? I could never keep them straight.) His back to us, he propped his hands against the sink, his arms rigid. From this angle, I couldn’t fail to catch the way his shoulders rose and fell.