CHAPTER SEVEN

Carolyne tried to be calm and coolly consider her alternatives.

Richard solved her dilemma with short-lived unconsciousness. “You’d better drive me to the ranch infirmary.” He attempted to stand but couldn’t quite manage.

“Maybe I should go get help?” The zone was dead, as was almost everywhere thereabouts, by way of cell phone.

His condition made him irritable. “Maybe you should just give me the hand I’ve suggested.”

If she could get him into her Jeep under some of his own power, it would be easier. On the other hand, “I’m not sure you should be up and around before a doctor sees you.”

As usual, he found her impossible! “I’m only moving as far as your Jeep.”

If they could make that happen. She made the effort. It wasn’t easy, because he wasn’t as capable as he thought and as she hoped. More than once, she had to support them both which nearly dropped them. His final deposit in the Jeep’s backseat wasn’t as graceful or as gentle as she’d planned. Nor was it any too soon, because, once again, he was dead to the world.

She estimated she hit every bump on her way out. The road was a washboard. She glanced back several times to see Richard slide farther down in the seat. She stopped to reposition him, not pleased his head kept bleeding. Head wounds could be nasty things, but he’d seemed lucid enough for those few moments he’d been awake.

The distance seemed endless; there was little consolation in Georni land stretched as far as the eye could see.

When she reached the main complex, she had visions of Richard quite dead. Of all her alternatives, this one had become the wrong one. She should have never listened to him, or moved him, because the easiest way wasn’t always the best way.

Roy saw her and waved. He read something in her failure to stop and ran after her to the infirmary. “What is it?”

“Richard’s car crashed on that steep section of roadway between here and Manaus.”

“Better get him inside.”

Having gotten him this far, she was more cautious. “Maybe, we’d better have Dr. Seln check before we move him.”

“Maybe,” Roy agreed. He was already en route to the door. Shortly, he produced Dr. Ferdinand Seln who gave permission to move Richard inside. Roy managed the transfer with no need of assistance—for which Carolyne was grateful.

Dr. Seln assigned chairs outside the curtained examination area.

Roy didn’t stay. “I’d better tell Kyle.”

Shortly, Kyle appeared, sans Roy, before the doctor was ready with any verdict. “Ferd?”

“Take a seat with Mrs. Santire, Kyle. I’ll be with you both as soon as I’m ready.” The doctor’s accent was some hybridization that Carolyne couldn’t place.

Kyle turned to Carolyne. “Roy said it happened on the Tlesselan Grade. No one can persuade old Tlesselan to shift his bananas.”

Carolyne didn’t know Tlesselan, but his stubbornness was a menace. Not that he was totally to blame. “Richard said something about his brakes gone out.”

“Wrong place for that to happen.” Kyle’s observation was superfluous. He phoned Inspector Barco, came back, and sat down.

A short, dull hum indicated an x-ray. After that distraction, Carolyne realized Kyle eyed her strangely. “I put my head on wrong this morning?” She sounded testy and was glad he laughed.

“You look fantastic,” he complimented; she thought he was sarcastic—she didn’t feel fantastic. “Your hair, right?”

She remembered the beauty parlor. “Some major repair.”

Dr. Seln appeared, only briefly. “My preliminary doesn’t indicate anything serious, but I want to do a more thorough go-over of the x-ray.”

“We’ll be optimistic.” Kyle settled back, ready to wait.

Carolyne had no intentions of deserting her post, either, until final diagnosis. She didn’t like Richard but didn’t wish him harm. She wanted proof positive that her assistance hadn’t been detrimental.

Dr. Seln returned to the world behind the curtain.

“While in town, I had tea at the Leider villa,” Carolyne told Kyle. She wanted input and figured he was the man to provide it.

“Had you to the Villa Borgia, did she?”

“Is that what she really calls it?”

“An ‘in’ joke,” he apologized. “Reference, I guess, to the Italian influence.”

“Weren’t the Borgias Spanish?” It was her attempt to impress.

Kyle was no less astute: “Spanish in origin; Italian by temperament.”

“Rather unsavory reputations, if I remember my history. Patricide, wantonness, vice, high crimes.”

“Perhaps my analogy was a little wide of the mark. Then again.…”

He had her curious. “I found Lucretia.…” Her reward for her further reference to the infamous Borgia clan was his smile. “I mean, Jane,” she needlessly corrected, “exceedingly charming.”

“I’m sure she was.” Jane had a way about her that he’d come to resent more and more over the years. “She can be quite charming when she puts her mind to it. It’s the result of all those years in private finishing schools.”

“She was interested in Melanie’s recovery of the ‘J’ emerald.”

“Wants the gem back, does she?”

“Actually, she seemed more concerned about the whereabouts of her husband.”

“Could be, but she always seemed so much happier whenever he was away.”

Carolyne gave him silence in which to continue. Some people were acutely uncomfortable in silence and would fill it with the most marvelous tidbits if given the opportunity by a skillful listener. Of course, there were those not at all cowed by it; Kyle was one. If Carolyne wanted anything more on Jane Leider, she’d have to work for it. “Mr. and Mrs. Leider weren’t the ideal couple?”

Kyle contemplated not taking the subject farther. He never had spent all of his venom, regarding Jane and her family; whether or not Carolyne was the right sounding board, she was at least available. Better yet, she wouldn’t be around for long to remind him of any slips of the tongue, here and now. “I’d hate to have any of this come out as sour grapes.”

If he thought that would have her diplomatically cut him off at the pass, he was mistaken. “Actually, Mrs. Leider seemed almost too attractive, too gracious, too good to be true.”

“Would you like a drink of something?” Kyle detoured.

A jigger of rubbing alcohol, you mean?” She didn’t mind the tangent, as long as it was only temporary.

He smiled, which put his dark good looks to their best advantage. He liked anyone who held their own in a conversation, and he appreciated Carolyne’s wry sense of humor, noticed as far back as their first meeting. “Ferd, I’m raiding your liquor cabinet!”

A reply came from somewhere behind the pulled curtain: “You know where I keep the key. You might ask Mrs. Santire if she’d like something, too, while you’re at it.”

“The good doctor still sees me as a self-centered brat apt to forget simple good manners.” It wasn’t really criticism.

“You and the doctor go back a long ways, do you?” She calculated the doctor’s age, based on his shock of pure white hair and his myriad worry lines.

“I was a difficult delivery, and he’s never forgiven me the extra work I caused him.” He brought her two fingers of liqueur in a clear glass. “Curacao,” he identified.

“How’d you know I was fond of oranges?” She gratefully sipped while he again settled into the chair beside her.

“This used to be Fernelli land,” he said. “Not just the Georni Ranch but all of the other ranches, large and small, around here.”

“Fernelli land?”

“Jane Fernelli Leider,” he provided clarification. “Thomas Fernelli was the real powerhouse and made the family fortune in rubber. Also, he got out of rubber before it went bust. After which, he bought up cheap land and supplanted rubber as king in these parts.”

“We’re talking Jane’s grandfather?”

“As opposed to Arthur Fernelli, her father, who, as a walking catastrophe, gave poor Thomas many a cause to turn over in his grave.”

They clinked glasses and drained off the resulting liqueur; Kyle went for refills which Carolyne didn’t refuse. There was nothing like alcohol to smooth tattered nerves and foster bonhomie.

“Thomas Fernelli founded the dynasty and enlarged its net worth; Arthur Fernelli let Thomas’ legacy slip away, slowly at first, then in a great, huge hemorrhaging. John Leider to the rescue! Of course, there were a few of us as willing to play White Knights, too: myself, Roy, Janner Tyrol, Simms Mason; but, John beat us out, because he had founded lucrative Leider Platinum by then and came from a family fashionably old guard. Before the rubber bust, the Leiders were really even a few steps above the Fernelli on the social ladder: a definite advantage over those of us late on the scene and seen only as scavengers eager to gulp down whatever Fernelli holdings Arthur let slip. One thing about John, he might have had none of the polish the Leiders had before him, but he did have luck as a prospector and the skills to exploit his findings into a stockpile of profits. You’d have to look far and wide to find anyone in the whole Amazon Basin who did as well off its natural resources.”

“A little rough around the edges, was he?” That had always been Carolyne’s assumption before getting a counter-glimpse…of Jane and the Leider villa.

Kyle answered indirectly. “Before you can exploit platinum, gold, silver, or emerald finds, you have to do a lot of dirty digging to get to them; John was good at getting down in the dirt. Years in the wilds, with only animals for companions, didn’t match Harvard or Oxford as imparters of social grace.”

Carolyne found it difficult to imagine such a man master of all she’d surveyed at the Leider villa.

Kyle saw where Carolyne’s thoughts wandered. He emphasized the picture he’d painted. “He was the bull in that China shop. Not that he didn’t enjoy the role, because he wanted all the trappings. He liked the Leider name back in prominence. He liked the Fernelli beholden to him. Hadn’t Thomas Fernelli lorded it over everyone, John’s grandfather included, when the bottom dropped out of rubber? The Leider properties had been some of the first Thomas had swallowed up at rock-bottom prices. So many complicated egos, superegos, ids, libidos, and angst; enough Freudian stews to keep a team of psychoanalysts smacking their lips for years: all pretty much unrecognized and ill-understood by one poor simpleton who merely thought, ‘Isn’t Jane Fernelli beautiful, and wouldn’t it be grand to have her as my wife?’”

“You: that one poor simpleton?” She wanted to hear it again to be sure ‘poor and simpleton’ came off as ludicrous from her lips as it had from his; it did.

“Oh, I wasn’t always this suave, cosmopolitan, sophisticate you see before you.” He scratched one armpit, like a monkey.

Her laughter said more than words how Jane had come out on the short end of any bargain that had lost her Kyle. Carolyne didn’t forgive him for allowing Richard Callahan’s burning of jungle acreage for a video, but no one was perfect.

“To Arthur Fernelli, my dad was newly arrived and newly rich and took advantage of Arthur’s rampant cocaine, gambling, and womanizing habits, and his catastrophic business sense, to set up housekeeping on sacrificed Fernelli land; no matter the land had passed into Fernelli hands at the expense of gentry fallen on hard times.”

“Jane, I suppose, had nothing to say about anything?”

“She loves that house. She loves her jewels. She loves the haute couture of Paris. She loves the discos of New York. She loves being rich. She couldn’t survive poor, and even she had to know her father drained family coffers at a dangerous rate. I doubt she put up much of a fuss at the solution. I’m sure it was coincidence her father dropped dead two weeks after the wedding, no chance for him to reap the benefits of John’s hard-won money. There’s nothing clandestine about John’s disappearance, if you ask me; the jungle is a very dangerous place to be, as Gordon Wentlock might bear witness. It’s merely coincidence that John conveniently happened to disappear at a moment in time when Jane no longer needs him to bolster faltering finances.”

“You think she killed her husband, or had it done?”

“It’s so very easy for a man scorned to think only the very worst of the woman who scorned him.”

Carolyne was empathetic. All these years later, she still smarted at how Cornelius had opted for Margaret, that bit of rejection occurring without the additional indignity of Cornelius needing to balance bank accounts.

“Ironically, I can thank Jane for how well-off I am today.” The liqueur was warm in his stomach and provided an enjoyable flush behind the tan of his cheeks. “At the time of her engagement, I was as crushed as much as any of her other rejected swains, but my father was livid—for all the wrong reasons, many of which I’ve criticized in Arthur Fernelli. Dear dad had been hyped on the possibilities of our social upgrading. When I failed him in my failure to storm the palace and make off with the princess, he worked harder to make the Georni name something to be reckoned with. I certainly own more land than Jane, although those little plots of mineral-rich soil John left her are more valuable. If I have contacts in high places, whom I count as personal friends, that doesn’t mean Jane can’t buy the same favors.”

“A debt owed or one repaid: you allowing Richard to burn those acres of your land?” She had a one-track mind when an estimated one plant species bit the dust with every acre of rain forest burned. Kyle had no doubt she’d already advantaged the rumor grapevine; Carolyne confirmed. “Something to do with a problem similar to the one riding on Arthur Fernelli’s back.” There was something, even at her age, about an attractive, intelligent male, that made her want to shine—and simultaneously get his goat. “Cocaine?”

“Suffice it to say that the young man in question, a very silly son of an old family friend, is nonetheless the favorite of his father, the father so feeble as to the point he would most assuredly not have survived the apple of his eye having fallen on desperate times. I suspect the young man will eventually do something of equal foolishness, from which not even Richard Callahan’s connections will be able to extract him, but the old man should be dead, of more natural causes, by then, and I couldn’t be bothered.”

“It’s true, then, that this burn was the exception to your rule?”

“I no more want suffocation in an atmosphere of carbon dioxide than the next guy.”

Carolyne could expound the pros all day. “Not to mention the destruction of unique animals, insects, and plants, any of which could provide major scientific and medical breakthroughs.”

“Yes, not to mention those.”

“The land already cleared is sufficient for your needs?” She was dubious, because land claimed from the jungle wasn’t as fertile as the original lush growth would seem to insinuate. Continued fertility depended upon constant recycling of minerals from the ground, to vegetation, to ground again; that cycle broken by any introduction of livestock into the equation.

“I’ve more than enough money to last me a lifetime. A few less dollars and cattle, down the road, won’t change that.”

Outside, a car crunched gravel that wasn’t as pink as that of the Leider villa, but was definitely just as noisy.

“Company!” announced Kyle and knew, since the auto proceeded directly to the infirmary, that the newly-arrived was probably Rodrigo Barco. He was right.

Rodrigo greeted them with the news that the brake fluid of Richard’s wrecked car had purposely been drained. He asked after Richard’s health as the three proceeded into the infirmary.

An invisible Dr. Seln answered: “Not bad, as far as I can tell. No broken bones, a superficial head cut that bled a lot but isn’t deep. Of course, it’s hard to tell about bumps on the head, and he did receive a nasty one of those, probably when his car hit whatever the immovable object.”

Rodrigo had questions, but Richard was still unconscious.

Galin’s appearance was unexpected only in that Carolyne had expected it earlier. She’d forgotten he was scheduled for an afternoon shoot. He’d only just returned, steamed at Richard’s no-show, to hear of Richard’s accident from Roy. “Is Richard all right?”

Dr. Seln: “He’s momentarily in a coma, but that’s not uncommon in these cases. I won’t underestimate the potential for concern, but the prognosis is good. If he’s not come around by morning, I may amend.”

“Someone drained his car’s brake fluid.” Carolyne hadn’t missed Rodrigo Barco’s announcement, and she knew what it meant.

So did Galin: “Who’d want Richard dead?”

“Is Susan Delaney about five-eleven, auburn hair?” Carolyne’s subconscious had worked overtime. She had a good record of going to bed with a problem and awaking to solutions provided by sleep; this time she’d skipped the sleep.

“So are a lot of women, even in Brazil.” Galin’s rendition of the Richard-Susan altercation might have led Carolyne to such a conclusion, but, as far as he knew, Susan was a few thousand miles away.

Except, Carolyne was privy to information Galin didn’t have: “Richard met such a woman this afternoon, not all that long before his ‘accident’, and he didn’t seem all that happy to see her.”

If the police inspector had even less facts than Galin, Rodrigo was soon filled in.

Rodrigo called his headquarters and gave someone Susan’s name and her description. He hung up and asked to speak with Carolyne in private.

“You two are sharing a lot of secrets these days.” Galin remembered Carolyne and Rodrigo’s tête-à-tête of that morning.

Rodrigo’s smile was noncommittal. He indicated by pantomime that Carolyne should join him on the porch. He led her down the stairs and invited her to join him on a stroll.

Carolyne was as curious as Galin; though, if Kyle had seemed unsurprised, it was because he was already aware of the subject about to be discussed.

To Carolyne, Rodrigo admitted to having had a talk with Felix, after one of Rodrigo’s men had spotted Felix doing some heavy drinking at the floating bar of the Tropical Hotel. Rodrigo, there, having confronted Felix with Carolyne’s reference to Felix and Margaret Crystin Ditherson having had an affair, during Cornelius Ditherson’s lifetime; Charles had by then confirmed all that Carolyne had told Rodrigo earlier. Rodrigo punctuated with a cough.

Carolyne guessed, right then and there, what had happened. “He denied it?”

Rodrigo admitted that Felix had done just that.

Carolyne had more trouble with Felix’s denial of the facts than she expected. “You believed him?”

Rodrigo assured that he was making every effort to check out the facts of Felix’s denial. At least for the moment, Rodrigo had concluded that Felix did have a logical reason for all of his meetings with Margaret Ditherson: valid above and beyond taking Margaret to bed.

“What reasons?”

But, as a matter of courtesy, Rodrigo had promised Felix to keep them confidential. However, Rodrigo did suggest that Carolyne might, sometime, want to bring up the subject with Felix, if just to put her own mind at ease; although Rodrigo wouldn’t suggest she do it any time soon. Felix was decidedly distraught that Carolyne had passed on her suspicions of adultery, with additional suspicions from Charles.

“May I remind you,” countered Carolyne, “that Charles saw them twice at that seedy hotel?”

Rodrigo admitted that Carolyne’s deductions, based upon the facts she had, were logical. And not until Rodrigo had thoroughly checked out Felix’s story would Rodrigo absolutely be assured that Felix’s explanations were the real ones. However, at the moment, Rodrigo was prepared to give Felix the benefit of the doubt.

“Without allowing me the facts to do the same?” Carolyne was disconcerted.

Rodrigo’s upturned hands gestured his helplessness. He had, after all, to respect Felix’s privacy, just as he had promised Carolyne, during the meeting with Carolyne, that morning, to keep Melanie in the dark.

“I see.” Except, Carolyne didn’t see.

Not that Rodrigo thought her wrong to have relayed the rumor; quite to the contrary.

Rodrigo steered them on an angle that intercepted the main house. He bid her farewell at the front porch and headed back to the infirmary.

Charles, Melanie, Teddy laid in ambush, and Carolyne was roped into telling her story of how she’d rescued Richard. In finale, she pleaded tiredness in a way that invited Charles to accompany her as far as her room.

When she farther isolated the two of them behind a closed door, Charles asked, “What’s up?”

She told him.

“You’re not serious! Felix came up with something Rodrigo actually bought?”

“That was my definite impression.”

“And he didn’t give you a clue as to what?”

“‘Ask Felix, but not any time soon’ was, I believe, how he put it.”

“Felix has probably been working on some logical cover story ever since you confronted him with his adultery. The man is no fool.”

Carolyne checked her watch. “Agreeing with that, I think my day would be improved by my having a short nap.”

Charles took the hint. “Yes, of course.” He did add, before parting, “You do look smashing.”

“You do say the nicest things.” She pecked him on the cheek in a way allowed between friends who went back as far and as long as they did.

When he was gone, it hit her how tired she was. Nonetheless, the nap she craved wasn’t summoned by her lying down. She settled for a leisurely wander along the upstairs outside balcony that was momentarily hers alone to enjoy.

There was a breeze, cool, as if it had managed the miles from eastern seaboard, or western glaciers, without a loss of chill. Carolyne faced it and the rustling leaves of a tree whose sole occupant, a macaw with scarlet plumage, sampled an assortment of green-to-overripe figs. The view through gnarled branches was of ranch buildings and parenthesizing pastureland. The only indication the ranch once sat in a claustrophobic choke of vegetation was an attractive island, here and there, of virgin trees: someone’s effort to control erosion by retention of occasional root matting. Carolyne considered such holdovers as genetic banks from which Mother Nature could someday draw for regeneration if and when some catastrophe erased interfering humans.

The balcony extended around the entire exterior of the second floor: an antebellum-like walkway hung on the same square pillars that supported the roof.

There was a lived-in quality to it all that Carolyne now realized she’d missed in the formal gardens, antique furnishings, and rose-quartz driveway of the Leider villa whose fairy-tale setting was look but don’t touch.

She was brought up short by movement in what had been Gordon’s room on their trip out. Now, Gordon dead, it was assigned to someone else.

Its curtains were pulled across its windows and French doors, but some piece of furniture interfered, or some flaw of the curtain mechanism made the cloth cocoon incomplete. A peephole offered itself through which Carolyne had spotted the movement.

Without forethought, she moved closer and expected a maid. However, it was Roy behind a desk.

Carolyne was embarrassed, her position easily that of a Peeping Tom. When Roy looked up, Carolyne’s wave was an automatic fancy spotting you there; she hoped she came off innocent.

To her surprise, he paid her no mind but returned to what he’d been doing. Obviously unseen, she felt wrapped in a Tarnhelm of permanent invisibility as she determined her view of him was secondhand, a mirror reflection of his section of the room.

There was nothing unusual about Roy’s examination of his notebook, but Carolyne felt uneasy about seeing and not being seen. She sidestepped to the French doors and knocked on a pane.

Roy had trouble with the curtains and the latch; they both finally opened. “Carolyne, how’s Richard?”

“The long-range prognosis is good, although he’s still unconscious.”

“Dr. Seln will have him up and around in no time.”

The jungle was safer with the pyromaniac bedridden, but she didn’t say so.

She was surprised when Roy invited her in; sometimes, she forgot the days were long gone when such an invitation might be misconstrued as something other than harmless.

He asked her something more about Richard; she calculated the angles of desk to mirror to window and asked him to repeat his question.

“He’s not said how it happened?” Roy complied.

“Rodrigo said the brake fluid was drained from Richard’s car.”

“Drained: as in attempted-murder drained?”

“Seems an old girlfriend may be in town from whom he parted on less than pleasant terms.”

“Thank God this one comes with a possibly logical explanation.” He motioned her into an easy chair. “Can I get you a Scotch? I’m afraid it’s the only thing I have on hand.”

Her two glasses of liqueur with Kyle had certainly produced some enlightening conversation. “Maybe a very small one.”

“Great!”

The bottle and tumblers were handy on a nearby dresser.

The segment of window through which she’d spotted him had a tendency to be glared over on the inside; her presence on the outside had been additionally disguised by distortions of the mirror’s surface on which he would have had to see her.

He brought her glass. She sipped very good Scotch; he sat across from her.

“I had tea with Jane Leider.” A now familiar refrain.

“The widow is out of mourning and into entertaining, is she?” It didn’t come out complimentary; he hadn’t meant it to.

“Kyle told me that you and he used to court Jane when her name was Fernelli.”

“Boasting, was he?” He sipped.

“Regretting might put it better.”

“Yes, maybe so,” Roy agreed.

“And you?”

He shrugged, settled back in his chair, and took another swallow.

Carolyne decided on another tack. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to pry. It’s just that, with Jane a suspect.” She left it at that, hoped for a response, and got it.

“You think Jane killed her husband, or Gordon? As for the latter, it would likely have been vice versa; it was she, after all, who wouldn’t give Gordon a tumble, even when he, like with every other woman within miles, tried.”

That was a bit of news. To mask her surprise, Carolyne swallowed too much Scotch and almost choked. By the time she recovered, flush from her efforts, Roy had wised up.

“You meant the death of her husband.”

“If John Leider is dead.”

“There is that, of course.” Where was the conversation headed, and was it any danger to him? “How is old Jane holding up? Did you know she and I are the same age? Of course, I haven’t had the benefit of a lifetime of creams, yearly injections of blender-reduced sheep glands, not to mention cosmetic surgery.”

“You haven’t suffered from the deprivations.” It was flattery but not fabrication. He looked good and must have known it. Surely, he preferred his rugged good looks to Jane’s milk-toast perfection.

“Is this where I say, ‘Flattery will get you anything’?”

“I’ll settle for conversation.”

“Through which you expect insights into the disappearance of John Leider?”

“And now, admittedly, maybe, even into the murder of Gordon?”

“Curiosity killed the cat?” he ventured. “To which you respond, ‘Satisfaction brought him back’?”

“I’m not all that convinced of reincarnation.”

He got up, got the bottle and brought it back. He filled his glass and offered Carolyne the same. “I’m not very talkative when I drink alone,” he coaxed when she hesitated.

She estimated the present alcohol content of her blood and weighed the benefits of playing detective against the horrors of a hangover at her age.

“So, what did Kyle tell you about our courtships of Jane Fernelli, so I won’t cover the same ground?”

“You’re mistaken if you imagine he was indiscreet,” she said. He’d filled her glass; then, again, no one said she had to drink it. “You were mentioned only briefly, in the same sentence as Jenner Tyrol and Timms Mason.”

“Simms,” Roy corrected. “Simms Mason.”

“Yes,” Carolyne conceded. “My memory isn’t as good as it once was. Not improved by.…” She lifted her liquor.

He looked dubious but had nothing better to do. “Simms was a buyer of gemstones for Sterns. Now, he’s in some jail in Sao Paulo, having bought at lower prices than he reported.”

Carolyne filed that away and waited for more.

“Jenner was the youngster amongst us. A wife, like Jane, would have eaten him for breakfast, but he thought he had a chance with her. Maybe he did. His grandfather had lost a bundle in rubber, but there was an uncle, Lord Somebody, in England, who was luckier in finances, if not in love, whose wife died in childbirth. Jenner was scheduled to inherit and did—just last year. At the time, though, Jane and her father.… I presume Kyle mentioned Arthur?”

Carolyne nodded. She matched him swallow for swallow but let most of her liquor stay in her glass.

“The Fernelli reasoning, as I suspect, went, ‘Why wait for Jenner to inherit, when we can work things out, here and now, by going with one of our other alternatives?’”

“You, Kyle, Simms, John Leider, or Gordon?”

His smile appreciated her return to a familiar theme. “Gordon wasn’t in the running. Not then. Not ever.”

“Because he was Lutheran?” Carolyne finished with that good possibility.

Roy nibbled: “Because he was poor. Church-mouse poor.” There was no harm in fully following the bait: “I daresay the Fernellis might have overlooked his religion had there been any need to do so; the god of all capitalists is Mammon.”

Carolyne didn’t believe that camel through the eye of the needle generalization.

Roy, though, knew what he knew. “There was no money to be made by any Lutheran missionary, and what Gordon made as a guide was diddly-squat as far as what Arthur and Jane had their hearts set on. Arthur blew more cash in one night of ‘friendly’ poker than Gordon could expect to see in his lifetime.”

“The Geornis were wealthy and Catholic.”

“John Leider was wealthier, just as Catholic, and from a more socially acceptable background. The Leiders were in Manaus when the Fernellis were still looking for a tramp steamer out of Italy.”

“And you?” Carolyne braved another swallow of Scotch. She always forgot how good it tasted. Its smokiness contrasted nicely with the equally enjoyable sweetness of the Curacao gone before it.

“Protestant, not nearly as wealthy as Kyle Georni, and from a family of U.S. mine owners who would have passed social muster far better before a few key coal veins petered out. In short, I didn’t have a chance, knew I didn’t but couldn’t resist playing with the big boys.”

“I got the impression that Kyle figures himself a winner in having lost.”

“One, he’s alive. Two, the odds are good you’ll see him at supper. Neither can be said about John. Looking at things that way, I, too, consider myself a winner in having been a loser.”

“Kyle never even mentioned Gordon having ever made a pass at Jane.”

“Possibly he didn’t know. I didn’t until John appeared on my doorstep one evening and insisted I tell ‘my friend’ that Mrs. Leider was disturbed by his ‘unwanted attentions’. I never did learn, in any detail, to what unwanted attentions John inferred. Gordon wasn’t any more forthcoming.”

“You and Gordon were good friends, then?” They hadn’t seemed all that buddy-buddy the short while Carolyne had seen them together at the camp.

“‘My friend’ should be in quotation marks, although John assumed more than Gordon’s interest in geology kept him hanging around me; when in fact, Gordon just saw more money in prospecting than in being a guide, just as he’d seen more money in being a guide than in being a missionary.”

“You always give pointers to your potential competition?”

Old dame didn’t miss an opening, but Roy had been mellowed by the Scotch—a few lead-in drinks already under his belt even before Carolyne had arrived. “I’ve always been generous with anyone who wants to give prospecting a try. I remember how it was when I first got here, and John Leider acted as if I came expressly to steal all the area’s goodies meant for him—Jane Fernelli, later, included among them. He made so many people angry with his attitude that singling out his wife as his potential killer, even now, is probably not seeing the forest for the trees.”

Carolyne tried her some people naturally fill a silence method of interrogation; this time it worked.

“John’s likability wasn’t increased by his uncanny ability to search out and find the biggest and the best mineral caches,” Roy said. “Those who dig for years, and get nothing but dirty, experience attacks of the green-eyed monster when someone goes down every time and comes up a winner. Even I, with enough formal background in geology to know John’s finds were based on solid scientific foundation and hard work, felt short-changed on occasion, and I’ve made a better living than ninety-nine percent of those, like Gordon, who think a modicum of science and a landslide of luck are all that are needed.”

He paused for breath and punctuated with Scotch. Did Carolyne see any of this as anything but prerequisite red herring? “Did Jane or Kyle mention Prince Mahoud Najheez?” he asked, and didn’t Carolyne’s eyes light up at that bit of exoticism?

“No.”

“Of The Roundili Emirate?”

“No.”

“With its bottomless bank vaults of petrodollars and its ruler’s passion for emeralds?”

“No, Roy.” She didn’t want her information spoon-fed; she wanted it smorgasbord.

“He wants emeralds. He wants big ones. He’s so prepared to get anything really good that the potential for profit sent John back into the field this last time.”

“Apparently, John had at least five emeralds on him when he disappeared, over and above the one Melanie found. Anyway, so says Jane.”

“If that’s what Jane says, cross her off your list of suspects in the killing of her husband, unless she killed Gordon, too. She’s way too greedy to have killed John and not gotten the emeralds. If she got them, by killing John and/or Gordon, she’d have sold them, no one the wiser.” He could see the wheels spinning in the old babe’s henna-rinsed head.

“She wouldn’t have killed either herself.” To Carolyne, Jane pushing through the jungle was ludicrous. “She would have hired someone.”

Was Carolyne serious, or did she expect Roy to play Devil’s Advocate? He said, “Why admit to you that she doesn’t have the gemstones if that puts you into someday asking, ‘How could you sell something to Prince Najheez that supposedly disappeared with your husband?’”

Carolyne wasn’t likely to be privy to any sale of emeralds to Prince Najheez, by Jane or by anyone else. Nonetheless, the world had, more than once, proved itself proverbially “small”, so why would Jane needlessly make such an obvious faux pas?

“While you think about that, ask if a geologist’s wife wouldn’t know better than to hit Gordon over the head with that particular rock.”

Carolyne was ahead of him. “She couldn’t know you’d be there to enlighten us. Therefore, she couldn’t have anticipated and said to someone she hired, ‘Be sure not to hit Gordon with a stone from the river, because that would look suspicious.’”

“I like things as clear-cut as this attempted murder of Richard Callahan by this ex-girlfriend of his.”

“See that as clean-cut, do you?”

“You don’t?” Did he have to ask?

Did Carolyne want to get into this? Should she presume the more input the better? Or, did a plethora of facts and opinions do anything but further muddy murky water? “The woman at one time left Richard Callahan to be Gordon Wentlock’s lover,” Carolyne said. “After Gordon dumped her, she headed back to Richard who no longer wanted anything to do with her. If Richard had Gordon killed and wanted to make it look as if Susan tried to take them both out, same trip through, he could have drained his own brake fluid; hell hath no fury…and all of that.”

“Mercy me! The complicated web we weave!” He shook his head and ran his fingers through his black hair. “So, why would she oblige Richard by showing up here?”

“I never said I had answers.” She finished her Scotch and was afraid he’d refill it; as interesting as farther conversation might be, she knew her limits and came to her feet. “Thanks for the talk and the drinks.”

He was getting a headache, and he needed a shower and a nap; so, what was she up to now in her going to a segment of curtain and giving it two hearty tugs? She turned back to Roy, who looked as if she were crazy, and said, “It wasn’t hanging properly.”

“Oh?” He sounded doubtful.

“A woman is better at telling. It’s fine now.” She was damned near babbling.

He gave her the benefit of the doubt. “Thanks.”

“I’m off.” Staying longer would accomplish nothing; her thought process was booze-induced deteriorating.

Her steps were uncertain. She had trouble finding the French doors; there seemed no access through the curtains she’d just realigned.

Gallantly, Roy helped and was no help at all. “Where in the hell is it?” He meant the means to her exit.

When “it” appeared right where it should be, right where Carolyne and Roy imagined they’d each looked for it at least ten times, it was a big surprise.

“I was beginning to think you’d yanked those curtains one too many times.” He’d not lost his sense of humor when he’d found his headache. He held the breached curtain to one side while Carolyne stepped through into blinding brightness and a breeze suddenly sucked dry of all coolness and moisture.

“I’m definitely drunk.” She thought she made that admission exclusively to herself.

Nonetheless, Roy responded through the now-dropped curtain, “Welcome to the club!”

With difficulty, Carolyne divined the shortest route back to her room and took it. Her fingertips dragged along windows and walls for balance.

Suddenly, a woman with very red eyes stared at her from less than an inch away. The woman was she, at the sink, three aspirins death-gripped in her right hand, and she had no idea of how she’d got there. The bathroom was filled with steam from water about to overflow the tub.

In the minute it took to decide whether she should stop the water, or take the pills, there was a waterfall of soap bubbles onto the floor.

When god-only-knew-how, she managed to turn off the water, she, then, tried to recall whatever the law of physics that promised: Enter the tub, and there will be even more water and soap cascaded onto the floor. Until she figured it out, she returned to the sink and swallowed the aspirins.

The next mystery: Why was the water level lower in the tub when she returned to it? And what was that obscene sucking sound?

“Overflow hole!” She wasn’t as far gone as she’d thought and watched the small opening, once completely covered, in not having been designed for the deluge she’d fed it, now manage to function better with the water turned off. Carolyne’s only complaint: “You really must learn to drink without slurping.”

She adjusted the temperature with a combination of concentration and fumbling dexterity that raised the plug and added cold water from the tap.

Finally, she was in. And wasn’t it heavenly? No doubt about it: her efforts had been worth it.

“Now, just don’t fall asleep, Carolyne,” she instructed, her eyes shut. “If you do, you’ll probably drown. And wouldn’t everyone have a field day trying to figure out the way and how of that?”