After an excellent dinner of grilled chicken, in a light tomato and garlic sauce and mixed local vegetables, paired perfectly with white wine, Charlotte and I headed back to our lodgings. With an escort, of course.
I slipped my shoes off and tossed them in the wardrobe. Charlotte pulled out her night clothes.
“Do you remember Nan’s friend Norah?” I asked.
“No,” she answered.
“The one with all the cats,” I added to prompt her memory.
“Oh…that friend.” Charlotte shivered. “Tried to block that out. Geez, why would you bring that up?”
“You remember how she died, right?”
“Do I remember how she died?” she repeated. “Have you lost your mind? It’s the only thing I remember about her. Goodness, it has to be the only thing anyone remembers about that woman.”
“Charlotte, she was a nice lady. She made the best spice cookies.”
“How could you possibly think of food and her in the same thought?”
I walked over to the mini-fridge and grabbed a cookie. A surprising feature of the rooms was a fully stocked fridge with snacks and drinks, alcoholic and nonalcoholic. And it was complimentary.
“You didn’t just take the last sugar cookie, did you?”
“Oh, there’s another.” I held it out to her. “Do you want it?”
“No, I do not want it. I’m nauseated now.”
“Want a ginger ale?” I asked, holding out a bottle.
“No, I would like you to shut up.”
I took the cookie and the ginger ale and went to the couch. “That’s harsh. What would Mother say?”
“She’d say that we’ve had a nice day. Don’t ruin it.”
I plopped on the couch and looked out the window into the brightly moonlit landscape. “So anyway, you remember how she died?”
She sighed, loudly, but did answer. “One only needs to hear that story once and never want to have cats.”
“Lucky for you Nan didn’t show you the photos.”
“No!” Charlotte sat next to me on the couch and held her hand out. I passed her the ginger ale and got up to get myself another one. “How did Nan get the photos?”
“Nan’s a curious sort. She made friends with one of the responding officers and he texted them to her.”
“We should have never gotten her that iPhone.”
“Agreed.” Nan was better with technology than our mother. We learned this the hard way. No one likes waking up to Nan’s Twitter feed loaded with photos of your naked three-year-old bottom.
We sat quietly drinking our sodas for a few minutes. “I think that’s what happened next door.”
“You have to let this go, Naomi. Enjoy our vacation!”
“Maybe someone had gone in there…maybe they planned to kill him, maybe not…but they killed him, probably with a knife to the throat. That would cause a lot of blood, right?”
“If they cut the carotid artery, yes. Arterial blood flow would be messy.” She mimicked blood squirting out of a neck, in rhythm to a heartbeat.
“The scent of blood drew the hyenas and they devoured his neck, masking the evidence. Maybe the person knew hyenas would come to mask the evidence. Maybe not and they just got lucky.”
“Let it go, Naomi.”
“You were all over it this morning. You believed it then.”
“That was this morning. Now, well-rested me realizes that’s insane.” She took a sip of her soda. “And if, and I stress if, he was murdered, it’s not our problem.”
“That’s cold.”
“It’s realistic.” She finished her soda and placed the empty bottle on the coffee table. “You are not a detective. Is this your next big thing?”
“No, solving crimes on vacation is not my next big thing. I don’t think there’s any money in it.”
Without looking at her, I knew she had rolled her eyes. I could almost hear it. “Being a police officer or private detective? Is this a test run? The next thing you’re going to dive into blindly and then get bored with?”
“I do not dive into things blindly and then get bored,” I snapped back.
“Oh, yes you do. How’s your job at the salon?”
“I didn’t like working weekends.”
“And the classes to become a mechanic?”
“Very useful.” When my ex-boyfriend’s car broke down, I knew it was the starter. I didn’t know how to fix it but I was able to diagnose the problem. The lessons would have been even more useful if I had continued beyond the two classes.
She shook her head in disgust. “I don’t know how Dad didn’t raise you to have more focus.”
She didn’t realize the damage was done long before I left with Dad. “How’s Mom’s Pilates classes?”
“What?”
“Or her real estate license? How’s that going?”
Dad wasn’t to blame for my lack of focus, if there was one. Mom was definitely the source. Nature or nurture, I didn’t know. Maybe that’s why I left with Dad, so I wouldn’t become her. I had seen too much I didn’t want to be.
I returned us to the problem at hand.
“And no, I did not suggest we go on vacation in the hopes I could solve a murder.”
“Solve? You can’t even prove there was a murder.” She got up and threw her ginger ale bottle in the trash can. “In the days you’ve been working on this what have you proved?”
“That he was murdered.”
“You have not proved that.”
“I’ve proved it enough that you believe it.”
She pursed her lips. “Fine, I don’t disagree with you that he was murdered. But why? Why would someone kill him?”
“Motive doesn’t matter,” I retorted.
“Fine, by who then? That definitely matters. Who killed him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you say who didn’t kill him?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Other than you or me, can you say who didn’t kill Dr. Higgins?”
I shook my head. “It could have been any of the travelers or any of the countless people who work here.”
“You have a problem. You can try to solve a possible murder and you can fail, like you usually do. Or you can choose to enjoy our vacation.”
I stopped her as she walked away. “Last thing,” I said. “What was the lodge’s reviews on Wi-Fi reliability?”
She smiled and answered. “Five out of five. Never a problem.” She went to the bathroom to prepare for bed.
I looked at my phone, which had no internet reception. And that was the problem.