CHAPTER ELEVEN

Teddy’s reaction: “Carolyne! Whatever are you doing up?”

Her reaction: a subconscious which had, all along been expecting him to appear. There were shenanigans afoot, but she had nothing about which to be ashamed or guilty. She had a logical explanation for being where she was; Teddy might find it less easy to explain his innocence in being there. “Couldn’t sleep,” she said and tapped the book in hand—thank God for the book! She would have hated the excuse of hot milk with an inability to produce it.

She viewed his, “Me, too,” as plagiarism, then had second thoughts. He looked surprised, and, yes, even guilty, but didn’t come off as a jealous, green-eyed monster in hot pursuit of a two timing fiancée and her latest paramour. He would have materialized far more quickly had he intended to keep Melanie and Galin in view.

No accompanying demand of, “Where are they?”

On his way by Carolyne, he cocked his head to read the title on the spine of her book. “That will certainly put you to sleep. I’m no longer afraid you’ve made off with the only good reading in the house.”

She thought he’d continue down. They weren’t exactly a mutual-admiration society, and his comment on her reading material wasn’t exactly the beginning of pleasant small-talk.

Therefore, he surprised her with, “Why don’t you join me for a small nightcap in the library? You weren’t exactly falling off bar stools at the barbecue and can risk it.”

He wasn’t her ideal by way of someone with whom to share anything. A good time wasn’t to be had in exchanging sarcastic repartee with Melanie’s maybe, maybe-not, significant other. “I don’t think a drink would be a good idea.”

His shrug wasn’t exactly sorry to hear that; it was more thank god I’m saved. It made her more desirous to leave him where he stood. In fact, they were both on their separate ways, the breach widening between them, when she reconsidered. As much as she viewed separation from the potential mess in the making, she might be a mediating influence should Melanie and Galin suddenly re-appear.

Maybe, too, a few minutes with her would catapult Teddy back upstairs and out of the way. Despite his recent assurances that he contemplated a dignified withdrawal, Carolyne wasn’t anxious for Melanie and Galin to put him to the test. “Maybe I will have that drink.”

He didn’t turn back, and Carolyne figured he didn’t hear, or, hearing, didn’t like what he’d heard. Though, by the time she decided to walk the distance to join him, he had her drink poured. His smile might have passed for friendly but only in a pinch. “Curiosity get the best of you?” he baited and handed her a sherry.

She’d have to watch out for this one. “Curiosity?” She was too old and too world weary to come across convincingly innocent.

“Yes, curiosity.” He took his drink and sat in one of the chairs that faced her. “As to whether I really propose to toss off Melanie and all she offers, just because she’s flirted once too often with one too many other men.”

“I never thought you the type who’d consider me your mother-confessor.”

“I want to tell one person, so the world can know without my having personally to tell everyone.”

“How obnoxious!” She’d kept a lot of confidences in her time, including the twosome at the bottom of the basement stairs.

“It could be that I resent that you’re Melanie’s friend.” He seemed neither apologetic nor sincere. “She’s not my favorite person at the moment.”

“That doesn’t make your insinuation that I’m the local gossip any the less rude.”

“I’ve decided to give up trying so hard to please other people.”

“Congratulations, in that you’re succeeding.” She gulped her drink.

“Can I get you another?”

Fat chance! Melanie and Galin would have to fend for themselves.

“Stay,” he coaxed, “and I’ll tell you why I come across as less than your ideal scientist and gentleman?”

She poured her own drink, thank-you, still not sure she’d stay. She didn’t offer him seconds, although another swallow would drain his glass. “I once knew a bastard, literally, not figuratively,” she said. She wanted this different kind of bastard to know he couldn’t count on her to be sympathetic. “As a baby, he was left on a convent stoop with a note: ‘I don’t know his daddy, but his daddy wouldn’t want him or me.’ What’s more, his bad luck didn’t stop there. He caught scarlet fever, almost died, and had a lifetime recurring heart murmur as a result. He married and had a daughter; wife and daughter were killed in a car crash. He married again; his second wife suffered a debilitating stroke and was bedridden four years before she died. I never knew him to say an unkind word to anybody about anybody.”

Teddy wasn’t impressed. “You only get one living saint in your life, and that’s yours. The rest of us aren’t nearly as able to cope.”

Many times, Carolyne had told many people: “That man is a one of a kind, living, breathing, saint.”

“We’re not talking a victim of love deprivation, mind you.” Teddy drained his glass. “My mother loved me until her aneurysm left all the loving to my father. When my father died, my stepparents loved me enough to mortgage their home, not once, but twice, to help me through school. But, it was so much just the bare necessities, and sometimes not even those, which made me wonder if I’d ever accumulate enough material possessions to erase my insecurities. I know I’m mercenary in looking at Melanie and seeing money, homes, business, social connections, and all the other things that spell ‘security blanket’, but I wake up nights drenched in sweat from dreams of some catastrophe sucking dry my life savings and those of everyone I love.”

He got up, poured himself a drink and carried it with him in his slow walk along one bookcase. Now and again, he tilted a book from its lineup. “I know you’re fond of Melanie, Carolyne. Look upon her as the daughter you never had?” He glanced over his shoulder. “Maybe not. The half-Cornelius in her might be okay, but you could never accept the half-Margaret in her, could you?”

“What would you know?” Carolyne was amazed by how many people accessed aspects of her private life.

“I know a good deal, because you played an important part in Cornelius Ditherson’s life, and I had plans to make his daughter my wife. I’ve since amended those plans.”

“Have you, Teddy?” Could Galin and Melanie come up those stairs now, and could Teddy dismiss them with, “What the heck?”

“You take a minute, Carolyne, and think about who’s more honest in my relationship with Melanie. Is it the poor kid, afraid of poverty, who makes no secret that money and background can be the pot of gold awaiting at the end of the rainbow? Is it the little rich girl who exploits by dangling the chances of all dreams come true, then pulls them back periodically for quick indiscretions? I’m frankly tired of being Melanie’s have-not of the week. I’m tired of her assumption that I should look the other way while she tries out whoever is the new man or boy on the block. I deserve better than Melanie Ditherson, and I have the education for which my stepparents paid, and my reputation in the field, to keep me from starving. If I don’t get super rich, or even rich enough to make me feel secure against the world, that won’t make me a failure. Nor is insecurity something to which I, alone, am susceptible. How secure do you view any young woman who has this desperate need to flirt with anything in pants?”

Maybe he could confront Galin and Melanie with, “C’est la vie!”

He pulled a book from the shelf, he’d made his selection. He finished his drink and brought his empty glass back to its tray. “Be sure to turn out the lights when you leave, won’t you, Carolyne?”

She finished her drink and followed him up the stairs.

In her room, she laid out the book from the library, her notebook, and a pen. In the bathroom, she splashed her face with cold water. “This fast living getting you down, is it?” Her reflection didn’t answer, except by showing her a few more wrinkles and worry lines.

She went back to the desk, sat down, and opened her notebook to the number sequence she’d copied from Roy’s field notebook.

There was an obvious, logical explanation for Roy to carry around his weathered, miniature edition of the Old Testament which he’d loaned Carolyne, momentarily, for her reading of the Twenty-third Psalm at Gordon’s funeral: If there were no atheists in foxholes, the same likely applied to prospectors in the deep jungle. Someone as desirous of traveling light, as was Roy, in order to cover the most area in the shortest period of time, might conceivably see the weight advantage of a two-in-one Bible and codebook.

* * * *

It took Carolyne seemingly forever to come up with anything, by way of decipherment, that was even vaguely intelligible. Even then.…

Assigning Roy’s code numbers, on a first come basis, with an Old Testament book, chapter, verse, then word (albeit, sometimes just a letter in a word) what resulted was:

“I have found rich and great abundance of—n-i-o-b-i-u-m—and as agreed I will proceed to seal off land on my way out to answer all thy questions.”

A viable translation? Maybe. Except, of course, for n-i-o-b-i-u-m. Niobium? What in the hell was that? Or, had Carolyne gotten everything wrong?

The nearest encyclopedia was in the library, but Carolyne in route was blocked by an hysterical Melanie who bewailed: “It was horrible! Galin and Teddy. I thought for sure he’d killed him.”

“Good God, where?” Carolyne shook the young woman until Melanie’s teeth chattered like castanets; the woman making such a scene desired just such a good shake.

“Downstairs; basement.” Melanie’s wave of her hand could have directed anywhere. “Dr. Seln is there now.”

Carolyne headed for the basement. Somebody—take her pick—had turned on the lights. Carolyne still wasn’t sure where to go once she reached the bottom of the stairway: Left? Right? Straight ahead? “Dr. Seln?”

She continued her hails for direction as she headed, on pure impulse, to the right. However, she’d turned right yet again, then made a left, before she finally got any kind of response.

“Carolyne?” Not that it was Dr. Seln suddenly appearing through the open doorway only a few feet away. Nor was it Teddy.

“Galin?” He didn’t look nearly dead to her. When Carolyne got her hands on Melanie, she’d wring the woman’s neck for overacting. “Melanie had me written in as your pallbearer.”

Galin looked as surprised as she’d been to see him. “Actually, it’s Teddy down and out.”

“Teddy?” Once more for incredulous emphasis: “Teddy?”

She looked beyond Galin into a storage room which hadn’t changed much since the last time Melanie, Teddy, and she had seen it on their introductory tour of the house. Kyle had been disgruntled that the servant assigned as their guide had showed them: “It reeks of conspicuous consumption in its accumulation of ‘stuff’ from generations who confronted game populations truly assumed inexhaustible at the time,” Kyle had apologized in reference to the stored collection of trophies and stuffed animals, all rejects from upstairs, all stacked, floor to ceiling, like pieces of cord wood. Except for a covering of dust, the room contents, mainly examples of artful taxidermy skills, were in good condition, except for at least one obvious exception—make that two, what with Teddy laid out on the floor between a horn-damaged toppled water buffalo and a slightly askew capybara.

Dr. Seln, knelt beside this patient, diagnosed without coaxing: “A broken nose. The assumed death rattle is only air trying unsuccessfully to find its way around crushed cartilage.”

“What happened?” Carolyne’s obviously flawed chain of events still had her wondering how it was that Teddy ended up a victim.

Dr. Seln opted for patient-doctor confidentiality. Galin, as usual, proved more candid. “I’d call it a case of flagrante delicto interruptus.” He tried again: “…interrupto? I never was good at Latin.”

Carolyne didn’t smile: “Do get on with it, Galin. Save your witticisms for a more appreciative audience.” She meant: “Save it for Melanie.”

“It was dark, for atmosphere, you know? Melanie had predicted I’d find this room a turn-on, and she was right. She was turned on, too, since I guess Teddy isn’t really as experimental at these things as Melanie would like him to be. Any wonder she sometimes goes shopping?”

Carolyne wanted to know how Teddy ended up on the floor.

“He came in, and I reacted—spontaneously,” Galin put words to it.

“Spontaneously, you caved in his nose?” All of this time, her concern had been that Galin would be the one creamed.

“A guy picks up a bit of self-defense when he hangs around as many professional bodyguards and stalkers as I have on my concert tours.”

Carolyne didn’t need this asinine distraction. She had an appointment with an encyclopedia.

“Could you both give me a hand? He’s coming around,” Dr. Seln requested.

“Doctor, I don’t see that much room in which to maneuver,” Carolyne complained of things as she saw them.

“Here.” Galin leaned against the horn-damaged water buffalo and shifted it two feet; two capybaras and a three-pawed jaguar were pushed two feet higher up the wall; a stuffed monkey toppled from the pile with a thump. “Plenty of room.”

“Let’s get it over with!” Not very Florence Nightingale, but it fit Carolyne’s mood. As far as she was concerned, Teddy could move himself. What happened to all his fine talk about letting Melanie go?”

Teddy groaned his equivalent of, “What the hell happened?”

“You don’t want to know,” Dr. Seln beat Carolyne to the punch. He stopped Teddy’s exploratory hand en route to the bandaged nose. “You don’t want to go there, either. Can you get up?”

Somehow, they managed, although Teddy remained wobbly and disoriented. They had more room once in the hall. Galin and Dr. Seln did most of the manhandling to the top of the basement stairs where Kyle, awake to the latest unscheduled event, had a couple of ranch hands take over. There was an exodus from the main house to the infirmary, from which Carolyne disengaged.

She went to the library card catalog: even encyclopedias melded into the uniform blood colored background. The volume she wanted told her what she wanted to know, and she Xeroxed a copy for the pocket of her robe. She closed the book and put it back. She sat down.

She had all of the pieces, now; in fact, she had one too many. What did she do with the drunk hired for murder? Accept him with the assumption that all the other culprits already shared enough guilt without murder added?

Carolyne didn’t know how long she sat there until Galin performed the magic that removed the murder from the drunk’s ball court; it was long enough for him to have reached the infirmary and returned. “Hear the bad news, good news, bad news about Richard? Seems he did hire a certain someone to kill Gordon, but the contract was invalidated by a downed bridge the killer decided was too difficult to go around, especially as he had down payment enough to keep him awash in booze for a very long time. Rodrigo called to tell Kyle that time sequences don’t any more jive to put the guy at the scene of this crime than those others jived to put Susan with the brake fluid of Richard’s car. The consensus is that the guy sabotaged Richard’s car to protect money already paid for services never to be rendered. Not that any of that takes Richard off the hook. There’s apparently no denying the exchange of dollars—Richard’s—for a murder—Gordon’s—even if the murder, by that planned means, never happened. I’m afraid Richard is in so much trouble that I’m here, this minute, to make the call to summon Dillon Crane to salvage film footage already in the can, not to mention a concept too good to blow at this stage. What’s extra bucks to assure a completed and quality music video package?”

“You’d like to use the phone?”

“The house is full of phones; I don’t particularly need this one.”

“Be my guest.” What she had to do couldn’t be done in the library, patting herself on the back while bemoaning the greed and avarice of certain people. “I was on my way out.”

She went to her room and got dressed, without a shower. She put Bible, notebook, and Xeroxed reference in a tote bag. She went downstairs and successfully ran the gauntlet of possible encounters. The only exception: the man at the motor pool who had her sign out the Jeep.

Out on the road, she felt safer but no more content. An unpleasant picture was made more so by the people painted as villains. She’d truly, more than once, almost swallowed some of their lines of bunk. The duplicity of their corruption made her ache. The world was something far less likable because of them. She was bolstered by a need for justice, or she would have wished she’d been less clever: ignorance is bliss.

She didn’t go to police headquarters. Nor did she plan to look up the government representative, Jean-Michael Teruel. No confrontation with any fox in its own lair. She drove to the Tropical Hotel Manaus and asked the desk clerk to ring Felix who’d checked in permanently once he’d grown tired and disgusted with the company at the ranch. Smart man!

“I’m sorry, Mr. Tenner checked out earlier this morning. I believe he’s returned to the United States.”

Was that one bit of information passed on that morning to Kyle, lost in the relay to Carolyne through Galin? No way could Felix have left without Rodrigo’s okay.

“Could you check to see if his plane has left the airport?” She didn’t need him personally for the name of the newspaperman in Rio. She could call Felix at the airport and get it. Would he answer a page?

“I’m afraid it left fifteen minutes ago,” the hotel desk clerk informed.

She thanked him and asked if he’d book her on the next flight to Rio. She didn’t really need Felix at all; it wouldn’t be difficult tracking down the reporter who’d written the piece on, and printed the photo of, the dead Gordon. Mainly, she wanted to clear her conscience and let Felix know she knew him guiltless. His departure from Brazil had merely saved her penance for another day; that was all.

She told the desk clerk she’d changed her mind. She hadn’t, but it struck her unwise to add her name to any airport computer readout that could be accessed from police headquarters. She’d come too far, gleaned too much, to be careless now. One man had been killed; one dead woman, more or less, wasn’t too much additional ante for the pot of this one particular poker game.

She cashed traveler’s checks in three different banks, none for a sum large enough to cause any interest. In combination, she had enough cash to clear out of town.

She drove to the airport and called the ticket counter from outside. Was the next flight for Rio full? No; would she like to make a reservation? No; she’d be a last-minute passenger, squeezed in just under the wire. If a fully booked plane meant she’d miss out, she’d fly a last-minute to Belem, or to some other spot, on from there to Rio. No international flights, because she didn’t want to show her passport.

All wrong, Carolyne! Everyone would notice a last-minute. The help would be ticked at needing to rush her thorough. People for other flights would be reluctant to let her crowd in, no matter how loud, her, “I have to catch a plane!” and they’d remember her nerve.

She went inside, said she was Maria Lanis, a name picked out of a hat, and bought a ticket to Rio.

She located a nondescript corner and tried to blend into it. She had an hour until flight time.

She wasn’t thinking clearly. She should have waited nearer to departure before buying her ticket; she was vulnerable to anyone flashing her picture.

“Why would they flash your picture?” Her mumble was undecipherable but loud enough to garner a couple of curious glances. So much for fading into the woodwork.

No one knew she was here. No one knew she knew what she knew. How could they? She hadn’t known until that morning. She had her worksheets and reference material with her.

She wasn’t up to cloak and dagger. She was a scientist, better suited to benign plants not malign people.

She couldn’t relax. She went over the facts, and the implication of the facts; she didn’t want Felix’s friend in Rio thinking she was a lunatic. She had to be lucid, intelligent, and well-meaning. There was a story here for him if she only got it across in a way that didn’t have holes or wasn’t shaded by emotion.

She considered too trivial for consideration the mess Melanie and Teddy had made of their lives, with the help of Galin. So, why did all of that intrude into her every thought and mix its banality with the really serious issues?

There were fifteen minutes to flight time, her plane actually scheduled to leave on time, when she surrendered to the nagging, but persistent inconsistencies in the Melanie, Teddy, and Galin ménage-a-trois. It would only take a few minutes to clear them up; then, maybe, she could devote full concentration on things really important.

She dialed the ranch and asked for Melanie or Galin.

She got Galin. “All I needed was the library phone for a few minutes, Carolyne. I didn’t mean to drive you out of the whole house.”

“It’s the first time I’ve been up early in ages.” True. “I decided to take advantage and squeeze in a bit of nonsense shopping.” False; there was nothing nonsense about buying her ticket to Rio.

“Don’t bother to stop by to say hello to Felix while you’re in town. The word going around is that he’s outbound for the States.”

Carolyne at her most innocent: “Oh?”

“Seems his story checked, whatever that story might be. Think you’ll ever tell me about Felix and the mysterious Margaret? Rodrigo let him slip the noose. Felix was spending way too much time at the hotel bar, getting sloshed; hotel guests were complaining. We all know how fast the law acts when tourist groups, with their dollars, start to complain.”

Carolyne wished she could be headed home, too.

“What’s up, Carolyne” Galin fed the pause.

“Did I hear you right: you’d never been in that storage room before? Not alone, not with Melanie, before last night?”

“You called for the latest scoop on my love life?”

“Be a pal, Galin. Indulge me. I know you enjoy the subject.”

“Do you want to preface this with heavy breathing? Mine? Yours?”

“Give it a rest, Galin!”

“I don’t know whether to be flattered or hurt that you chose a phone call instead of the kind of private tête-à-tête you granted everyone else.”

“Galin!”

“Okay. When have you known me not to play your game?”

They announced Carolyne’s flight as ready for boarding.

“Carolyne, you there?” Galin sounded doubtful.

This wasn’t important. It was the voyeuristic curiosity Galin said it was. Which made her what: a dirty old lady, with a raincoat, whose next stop was a theater balcony showing sex flicks?

“First time, Carolyne,” Galin intruded. “Last night, I mean. Although, I would have been there sooner had I known about it.”

Hang up, Carolyne. “What time did you head down to the basement?”

“I had other things in mind besides the time, Carolyne.” Nevertheless, he followed with an estimate that matched hers for him.

“Did you or Melanie come up for air, once you were down there?”

“It was a basement storage room, Carolyne, not the deep, blue sea. You have Melanie and me confused with seals, dolphins, or whales. Walrus?”

“Did either of you leave once you were in place?” The last of the boarding passengers disappeared through the gate. “Did you go for more champagne?”

“Saw the empty bottle, did you?”

She’d seen the full one, hadn’t she? “Did you go for another blanket? Did you want a snack and go get one?”

“We were settled in for what we thought was the duration, Carolyne. Blanket spread; lights out; door shut but unfortunately not locked—definite oversight, but who expected visitors? Shadowy and easily imagined menacing wild animals stacked to the rafters; glasses filled with champagne to be imbibed by flashlight: a fantasy to compete with any x-rated novel. Then, Teddy spoiled the party. Just opened the door and appeared, no by your leave, or here I come.”

She could have caught the plane, but she didn’t. She spent the next hour summarizing on paper all of her facts and suspicions. After which, she called the newspaper in Rio and got the name, Manuel Marlin, of the reporter who’d submitted the published article on Gordon. Carolyne mailed Manuel all the information she had, plus all her extrapolation on it, and she headed back to the ranch.

Intuition told her she was missing something, right in front of her eyes, that could be lost forever if she ran away without personally tracking it down while she had an investigative “edge.” Her sixth sense had done right by her too many times for her to ignore it now.

There was especially something off-kilter about this latest business with Melanie, Galin, and Teddy. If her thought process was operating true to form, her subconscious might already have identified the inconsistency and have the solution; it merely needed coaxing to slip into conscious mode.

She pulled in at the infirmary and passed by the guards at the door with, “I’m here to see the guy with the broken nose.” In pantomime, she pinched the bridge of her nose and shifted it left, then right.

Teddy occupied the bed that Richard had had before the latter’s involvement in a scheme to buy a murder had secured him a room all his own. Teddy’s voice was strange without benefit of amplification through nasal passages now stuffed with cotton. “I know, I know, Carolyne, you want to hear how I could, one minute, tell you I’m tossing off Melanie and, the very next minute, proceed to make a jealous fool of myself.”

“You can certainly try.”

“I just wasn’t in as much control of my emotions as I figured I was. The idea of her and Galin together just…well, need I go into green-eyed monster detail?”

“You followed them into the basement?”

“I had my methods of tracking them down. You’re not the only one able to utilize a bit of detective skills. If they had found it such an ideal spot for what they had in mind, they couldn’t have chosen a better place for me to take on Mr. Rock Star and Miss Rich Bitch without disturbing anybody else’s sensibilities with something that was best settled in private.”

She wished him speedy recovery and headed for the house. She didn’t slow down to talk to Kyle and Rodrigo Barco who turned up in the infirmary as she left it.

She found Melanie by the pool.

Melanie saw her coming. “Oh, Carolyne, give me a break and don’t start with the third-degree. Pleeeease.” She pulled her wide-brimmed straw hat to cover her face.

Carolyne sat on the adjoining chaise longue. She paid no attention to Melanie’s put upon posturing. “When I left you and Galin in the den, you were soon to be headed upstairs.” No need to reveal how she’d spotted them, later, coming back down. “How did you end up in the basement?”

“I remembered the storage room. That’s all. I knew if Galin thought the den kinky, with lights out, he’d love the other.” Her voice was muffled through her hat.

“You went to his room to tell him your great idea?”

“I didn’t have to go to his room, did I, Carolyne?” She pulled her hat abruptly away and stared—I wish you’d mind your own business. “As I suspect you very well know. I was already in his room at the time.”

“Game-playing to make Teddy jealous?”

“Maybe.” She was uncertain. “Maybe not. This time was somehow different from the others, even insofar as I actually thought Teddy didn’t.…” She left it.

“Didn’t what, Melanie?”

“It’s a point made moot by his actions that proved he obviously did care.”

“Do you know he went out of his way to convince me he didn’t care? He said he was tired of you walking all over him, and he planned to drop you like a hot potato and get on with his life.”

“He told you that?” She was incredulous. “Why on earth would he tell you?”

Good question. Carolyne knew what he’d said was the reason: “He thought I would get the word around.”

“Oh.”

Carolyne would have appreciated an argument against the suggested tell a phone, tell a graph, tell Carolyne mentality. “Why don’t you tell me exactly what happened?”

“Why on earth should I?”

“Because I’m a woman, a sympathetic ear, and talking about it will help clear the air, maybe let you get things in perspective, maybe let you sort out if you like Galin, and why; whether you like Teddy, and/or just maneuvered him into a position wherein he could prove, once again, how much he desperately wants and needs you.”

The argument sounded good, but Melanie had to insist, “There’s really not that much to tell. I was with Galin, and I thought of the storage room downstairs. I said, ‘If you thought the den was a turn-on with its lights out…et cetera, et cetera.’ He said, ‘Let’s grab a blanket, some champagne, get flashlights, and do some exploring of the possibilities.’ We did. Teddy showed up. End of story.”

“With the exception of a fairly different twist on the anticipated end.”

“I thought I was in a ninja movie. I never saw anyone act so fast as Galin when Teddy barged in and turned on the lights. He jumped up and automatically executed some kind of twirling that landed his foot in Teddy’s face. Teddy went down and made all sorts of horrible snorting sounds. I ran for Dr. Seln.”

“You’re sure this was the first time you’d mentioned the storage room to Galin?”

“Until I did, I’d completely forgotten that Teddy, you, and I had even seen the room on our grand tour.”

“You had no sense of Teddy following directly in your footsteps down the basement stairs?”

“If he were anywhere so close on our heels, how come he left us in the room for so long before he barged in?”

“Letting the incriminating evidence accumulate?”

“All the other times, the whole purpose was his not letting it go that far. Besides we would have seen or heard him if he’d been directly behind us. The basement was pitch dark. He would have needed a flashlight, unless he could see in the dark, like a bat. If he’d flipped on the hall lights, we would have seen that, too, at least while we were loose in the corridors.”

“You didn’t ever suggest to Teddy that you and he, instead of you and Galin, might take in the storage room for fun and games?”

“Suggest that to Teddy?” Melanie laughed so hard she dropped her hat. “Let me tell you about Teddy, if you want some serious girl-girl talk. I’d put his sexual repertoire on par with that of a missionary. You ever hear of the term ‘missionary position’? I think Teddy invented it. His background, middle-class mores, sees sex as something a little dirty and unseemly even as a means of procreation. I didn’t suggest to him that we might go down into the basement for fun and games. One, he would have bridled at the mere suggestion that I needed any extra stimulant when he was doing his best. Two, I already told you, I hadn’t thought of the room until Galin in the den obviously sparked the dormant memory.”

Carolyne’s next stop was the basement, and that one particular storage room in question.

Slowly, she surveyed what was there, including the empty champagne bottle; two champagne glasses, one broken: so much for a hundred bucks worth of bubbly and another hundred worth of Baccarat crystal; the wrinkled blanket, and the evidence that Galin and Melanie were into safe sex: give them credit for that.

Her once-over completed, she began again, this time slower, more analytical. She was a scientist, used to isolating the forest from the trees, or vice versa, and there was something here to be isolated. Some vague memory told her she’d spotted it before. Her chief disadvantage was in not knowing for what she looked; her chief advantage was her inherent knowledge that she’d know “it” when she saw it.

Macaw. Capybara. Monkey. Sloth. Tapir. Peccary, puma, possum. Jaguar, jararaca. Rattlesnake, sloth, turtle. In duplicate. In triplicate. In quadruplicate. Evidence of species that had known better times and better accommodations.

She didn’t know “it” when she saw it, after all. She knew it when she didn’t see it.

Galin greeted her at the top of the basement stairs. “If our phone-con got you so hot and bothered that you rushed back, you should hear the dirty talk of which I’m really capable.”

“Later, Galin.” That promise should put the fear of God into him. “For the moment, could you spread the word that I’d like to see Kyle and Rodrigo Barco in the library? You’ll find them at the infirmary. Also, I’d like to see Roy at the same time, if you can find him somewhere.”

“Damn, Carolyne, another of your now-famous private sessions?”

“Jean-Michael Teruel wouldn’t be around, would he?”

“The government man? Come on, Carolyne: not even you can expect to bat a hundred.”

No major loss. Jean-Michael, she suspected, would have the specifics within minutes of her saying them.

“For being so good about it, Galin, I’ll let you sit in on this one, if you’ve a mind to do so.” There were advantages to having a witness.

“Well, that’s more like it. Don’t you dare start without me.”

She didn’t. He was there when she faced the other three men in the room.

Be still, beating heart! “Gentlemen, it’s about time you and I had a little discussion about coded messages, greedy sonsofbitches, the intended rape of an ecological system, rampaging natives, a downed bridge, and niobium.” That got their undivided attention. “When we’re through with that, and I’ve registered my complete disgust and disappointment, I’ll tell you about a man-eating jaguar, emeralds, and how we might just entrap Gordon Wentlock’s killer.”