Swan Dive (5 page)

FIVE

(Day #2 – Late Friday Night)

Most of the residential areas on Sea Pine were divided into gated subdivisions guarded by a range of security personnel from intimidating former lawmen who wore guns on their belts to retired folks who’d be just as happy working at Jellystone with Yogi and Boo-Boo.

Though Sugar Hill was a gated residential community, it also housed two hotels, two golf courses, miles of bike paths and beaches, and a handful of restaurants—all with public access. Gaining admittance required nothing more than a smile and a retail destination. Or a resident to call in a pass, which Deidre did for me. It expired in five days and I hoped I wouldn’t need it that long.

Once through the gates, I wound down the paved road toward the beach where the hotels fronted the ocean and the low-rise condos had their backs. Palm trees, magnolias, crape myrtles, and oaks were so plentiful, it resembled a mountain-top hideaway, one with high sand dunes and an ocean view.

Deidre Burch’s vacation condo was in a cluster development across the short road from a narrow beach path. I’d been there twice before and easily found the weathered wood building. One might think it odd that a resident of Sea Pine Island would own a vacation condo on the same island. But quite a few residents purchased properties for investment rentals. They also came in handy when out-of-towners visited. And when you live on an island, out-of-towners always visit.

“You’re sure Deidre left a key in order for you to purposely snoop around her condo tonight?”

“Absolutely. She knew I wanted to look around, and right now everyone is at the performance. I think she likes the clandestine aspect. She texted in code.”

“Oy,” Sid said.

We climbed the steps to the second floor landing. A hand-painted plaque hung on the door to number fifty-three: The Burch’s Sugar Shack. Sid went for the welcome mat, but I went for the sign.

“The mat has palm trees, but the sign has the surf,” I said. A brass house key was taped to the back. I peeled it off and opened the door. “As in,
key under the sea
.”

“I’ll be the lookout,” Sid said. “I’m not up for a B and E arrest tonight.”

“The dancers will be at the theatre for hours, Sid. And no one is around.”

The sky was a dusky dark blue, nearly pitch. The complex was quiet for a Friday evening. Most folks already out for the night. Though with a population dominated by the already- and the nearly-retired, the restaurants filled by six and emptied by nine. It may have been quiet at the moment, but it wouldn’t stay that way for long.

“You’ll be safer inside,” I said. “Plus, you can help me.”

“I’m serious. Orange may be the new black, but I prefer red,” she said and curtsied.

“Fine. If someone comes, what’s your cover?”

“I’m looking for my missing cat.”

“In a ball gown?”

“It’s not a ball gown, Valentino. It’s an evening dress. I came home early from a night at the theatre and noticed my cat was missing. Obviously, I wouldn’t take the time to change. I’d rush out and search.”

“Obviously,” I said. “I’m going in.”

“I’ll ring the doorbell if someone comes home.”

“Uh-huh.” I eased inside and clicked the door shut behind me. “Hello?” I called, just in case. Luckily, no one replied.

It was quiet and dimly lit. A single lamp illuminated the living room slash kitchen combo area: the kitchen and nook opened into the living room creating one combined space. It was generic. A typical vacation rental. Sofa, two chairs, inexpensive end tables, tv and entertainment center. Everything neat and tidy and shipshape. Johnnie Mae did a fine job on the cleanup.

Probably too fine. Not a personal item on any surface. I checked beneath the cushions and on the floor, behind the tv and under the sofa. I moved to the kitchen. The countertops were spotless and devoid of appliances, canisters, or knick-knacks like spoon rests and jars of poisonous berries.

I’m not much of a kitchen person myself. All those sticky ingredients and messy pans. Sixty minutes to make it, another thirty to clean it up, and then five minutes to eat it. The ratio just didn’t work for me.

A sheet of paper was on the front of the refrigerator door, held in place with a palm tree magnet. A rehearsal and performance schedule for
The Nutcracker
. Dress rehearsals every afternoon for a week leading up to opening night, then eleven performances including three matinees.

I opened the refrigerator door. Nearly cleaned out. Or maybe it never had anything in it to begin with. Plastic squeeze bottles of ketchup and mustard, an enormous container of what smelled like something gone over. Kale. A variety of salad dressings, all light. No leftovers, either. Maybe Johnnie Mae boxed them up or tossed them out? I checked the trash can. Empty, with a fresh bag in place.

Next I checked the cupboards. Dishes, pots and pans, plastic containers, a pantry. Mostly staples Deidre probably provided. No berries, no exotic ingredients, no leftover cupcakes. Though I doubted any of these dancers ate cake. They probably wouldn’t eat cupcakes before a show. Or after. Or ever.

I surveyed the rest of the layout. A master bedroom with a balcony, two smaller bedrooms, two full baths and a half bath, a nice laundry room (especially to someone whose washer/dryer combo is stacked in her kitchen and not in its own room). A linen closet stocked with beach supplies: towels, chairs, buckets, umbrellas, Frisbees.

I started with the master. It was a disaster.

Or half a disaster. Two queen beds were placed on either side of a patio door splitting the room into two separate but equal groups. I wondered who was the Felix Unger and who was the Oscar Madison. I remembered Lexie’s dressing room and guessed she was Oscar. Clothes, shoes, hangers, pillows, makeup, bottles, and brushes were flung around her side of the room. On every surface, dangling from the nightstand, the chaise in the corner, and the handle to the sliding glass door. The laundry basket looked to be gorged; the plastic shower carrier placed on top of the lid tilted precariously on the basket’s weaved surface.

I tossed clothes, looking for anything important. Which I had no idea what would be important. An old beat-up jewelry box sat on the nightstand amidst the mayhem. I opened the lid and the tiny ballerina twirled a wobbly dance to the music.
Lara’s Theme
, maybe? Nothing but cheap jewelry, a handful of plastic rings, three loose keys. I picked up the box and checked underneath. A dry cleaning stub marked RUSH SAT (which to me immediately ruled out Ransom’s ridiculous suicide theory, which I wasn’t even considering, because one did not rush dry cleaning to be picked up two days after one planned to off themselves) and stack of tickets to
The Nutcracker
. One for every night’s performance. Weird, since her friends were in the ballet, and her parents (two of them) would get tickets at the Will Call window. Why the one ticket for each show? Why hide them? I snapped a picture to overanalyze later and gently set the music box back on top.

A charger cord looped around the edge of the nightstand. A second charger? Who used their phone that much? I searched under the bed and in the drawers, nothing hidden, but plenty to be found, just not useful to my investigation. I bumped into the engorged hamper and knocked the shower carrier over. After I righted it, I opened the hamper lid. Might as well be thorough. Sometimes it paid off.

Buried deep inside, nearly at the bottom, was an iPad in a black leather protective case. Now that was interesting. Did she hide it there or simply keep it there? Not as if there were any clean surfaces to set it on. I wasn’t complaining. The police might’ve taken it when they searched earlier if it was in plain sight. On the other hand, who kept their iPad in the bottom of a hamper?

Courtney’s side of the bedroom would make Mary Poppins proud. Clothes either folded neatly in the drawers or arranged by color on padded hangers in the closet. Two pictures on her nightstand: one of her, Lexie, and Berg; the other of her and her mother, whom I recognized from the theatre bragging about her daughter, the Sugar Plum Fairy. There was no secret diary tucked into a drawer or a stack of fashion magazines bedside. Though she did have a deluxe bathroom carrier twice the size of Lexie’s, neatly arranged with salon shampoos and body scrubs.

I didn’t want to misplace the iPad I planned on pilfering, so I stuck it on the countertop by the front door. Then figured I’d walk right past it when I left. I moved it smack in front of the door itself, leaning on the jamb, then resumed my search.

The two smaller bedrooms both held boy stuff. The one on the right was Vigo’s. Framed pictures of him and Lexie were on the dresser and the nightstand, at least a dozen of them. I guess those two really liked looking at themselves. The room was messy, though not to the Lexie level by any stretch, and mostly all man things. Man magazines, man hair products, man perfume. Bulky sweats, clunky weights, old-fashioned headphones with the big earmuffs. The only soft touch was a velvety brown teddy bear in the back of the closet. A caramel-colored formal dinner napkin tied around its neck like a kerchief. I recognized it—the signature color of the Wharf restaurant. He had two more folded beneath the bear. As I was closing the closet door, I noticed a poster taped to the wall behind his clothes. Pushing the hanging shirts out of the way, I saw it wasn’t a poster, it was a shot-up target. The human silhouette kind. And Vigo was a really great shot. No fancy sharpshooting bullets to the head. They were all center mass, one on top of another.

I went across the hall to Berg’s room. His bed was rumpled with one pillow on the floor and the sheet/blanket/spread twisted and bundled and hanging off the side. Same types of man items, though some effort to stay neat was evident. I checked his closet and drawers, but found nothing surreptitiously tucked away or taped to the wall. I even reached between the mattresses. I worried I might find a girly magazine, and that I didn’t have enough hand-sani to scrub my hands or my brain, but the space was empty. I opened the trunk at the foot of his bed and found it filled with artist supplies. Charcoals, pencils, sketchbooks.

Berg Guthrie was quite talented. Beautifully detailed drawings of dancers mid-air, sketched in elaborate scenes from forests to castles to ships on troubled seas. Page after page, each dancer was clothed in elegant costumes and headpieces. After about fifteen pages, I realized there weren’t multiple dancers. Just one. Lexie Allen. He captured her likeness as if she posed for each rendering. As I neared the end of the book, the content turned dark. Her airy tutu now tattered and torn. In one, she swung from a wood beam, a noose around her neck, her hands clutched to the rope. In another, her head rested in the swoop of a guillotine, the sharp blade merely inches above her. She was impaled in another, shot by an arrow in another, and on the final page, Lexie lay on a cushioned sofa, her arm outstretched, and a tipped-over vial falling from her hand like Juliet Capulet.

The doorbell rang and I jumped. It rang again, then again. “Oh shit, Sid!” I whipped out my phone and started snapping pictures. Another doorbell ring echoed through the condo. I flipped pages, capturing each one. I put my phone in my pocket and the book back in the trunk. Pulled open the shutters at the window. They opened like a door. As I pushed the window lock open, I looked up. Straight at the neighbors in the next building, their window not five feet away. They were playing cards with their blinds wide open.

I slammed the shutter shut and raced across the hall into the master. I slid open the glass balcony door. My skirt caught on the hamper and I remembered the iPad. Hesitated half a second, then ran to the entryway. Muffled voices were right outside the door. The knob rattled. I grabbed the iPad and ran back to the master.

It was now black as pitch outside. The moon barely shone through the heavy cover of palm fronds and oak branches.

I shut the glass door and turned. I was trapped on the balcony. It wasn’t a wraparound to the front as I’d assumed. It was a short, private balcony railed in on three sides with the glass door behind me making up the fourth. I peered over the side. Not too high up and the branches were fairly close to the rail. Voices got louder. I climbed one leg over the side. The bark of the branch ripped into my arm and I swore. Loudly.

The voices stopped. I held my breath, then did what needed to be done.

I meowed.

Holding onto the branch, I pulled my other leg over the side of the balcony, and shimmied to the ground, meowing all the way and keeping the swear words to myself. My skirt hooked on a baby branch near the bottom, and it poked my thigh. I landed on my feet with a soft thud.

I duck walked with my head dipped low back to the Mini. Its ice blue color looked bright beneath the street lamp. Note to self: when breaking and entering, do not park directly under the street lights. And don’t wear something billowy. I checked for rips and tears, but somehow managed to come away with only stains and smudges on my flowing skirt and once lovely white shirt.

Sid walked down the steps and over to the building next door. I drove around and picked her up.

“Who came home?” I asked. “I was only in there like five minutes.”

“More like twenty, Trixie Belden,” she said and strapped on her seatbelt. “It was the Mouse King.”

“Berg? Really? He probably didn’t stay for the second act.”

“What took so long? I was hanging out front like a call girl waiting for a trick to walk by. An expensive call girl, mind you.”

“Hey, I’m the one who got all scratched up.” I parked behind the building and took out my phone. “Check these out.”

The first three pictures were completely blurry. I couldn’t even tell they were sketches. The next was a clear shot of my finger.

“Slightly anti-climactic,” Sid said.

“There’s more.” I flipped through two more and then got to the money.

“A death sketch?” Sid said.

“There were a dozen of them, and all of Lexie. Drawn by Berg the Mouse King.”

“Wowza. He seemed so nice.” She leaned over the phone to get a better look. “I guess he’s your number one suspect. You sharing these with Ransom?”

“Um, no. And not only because I shouldn’t have seen these. Fruit of the poisoned tree, so to speak.”

“How apropos.”

“I know what I’m doing,” I said and tucked my phone into my handbag.

“You have leaves in your hair.”

I plucked at them and tossed a handful out the window. “Now I need to figure out a way for Berg to show me those sketches or for someone else to find them and show me or talk about them or something.”