Death on Tour - Janice Hamrick [52]
She bounced back up immediately. “Say no more.” She vanished into the tiny bathroom, and I sat down to wait for her.
“What do you think about that guy being dead?” she called through the door.
I knew I should be used to her habit of talking while on the toilet, but I wasn’t.
“I think he was murdered,” I called. “And I think it has something to do with our group.”
“What?” she shouted. Because of course by this time she was washing her hands and couldn’t hear the conversation she’d started.
I didn’t bother to repeat myself until she reappeared. There should be rules about talking on the toilet. In fact, there probably were. I was pretty sure Miss Manners would have something to say about it.
“Murder’s a pretty strong word. But it does seem to be too much of a coincidence,” she admitted, as she stepped out.
“Millie was killed exactly the same way. You remember, Alan told us she’d been stabbed in the back of the neck. We just didn’t see it on her because she was lying on her back. This guy was on his face.”
“That must have been pretty awful.”
“Well, yeah. What with being dead and all.”
“No, I mean for you. More awful for him, of course,” she admitted. “But still not much fun to see.”
“The really weird thing was Alan,” I blurted out. I hated the feeling of mistrust that I couldn’t put aside. “He was checking the body and asking questions.”
“Pretty sexy, huh?”
“No!”
She raised her eyebrows.
“No!” I insisted. “Checking dead bodies is not sexy.”
“Methinks thou doth protest too much,” she misquoted gleefully.
“Are we in high school here? Focus!”
She opened her bag, pulled out her makeup kit, and emptied the contents onto the vanity. “Look, maybe he’s just a take-charge kind of guy,” she said, applying lipstick. “He just likes to know what’s going on. You can’t honestly think he’s involved in any way.”
I didn’t reply. That was just what I was beginning to think. “We don’t really know anything about him,” I said slowly.
“We know lots of things. He’s from Dallas, he’s a financial analyst, his wife’s dead, and he’s got a nice ass.”
“Okay, we know that last one,” I admitted. “We’ve seen that for ourselves. But we don’t really know that other stuff. If you think about it, we don’t know anything about anyone here, except what they tell us.”
“What do you mean?”
“Look. I’ve told everyone here that I’m a high school teacher, God help me. It happens to be true. But I could just as easily have said I was an artist or a programmer or a financial analyst. You’d know I was lying, but no one else here would. They have to take what I said on faith. It’s the same with everyone else. Anyone could be lying.”
She frowned. “But why would they?”
“Well, normal people wouldn’t, because they don’t have anything to hide and because keeping up a lie is a lot of work. But if you were planning to kill someone, you’d probably want to use an alias,” I pointed out.
“So what, you think Alan is serial killer?” She rolled her eyes.
“No. Of course not. Not exactly, anyway. It’s just…” my voice trailed off. I wasn’t sure what I meant.
She put her hands on her hips. “Now you’re just being ridiculous. No one would come on a tour to commit multiple murders. That doesn’t even make Hollywood sense. You have to do better than that.”
“I can’t,” I said. “You’re right, it doesn’t make sense. But you have to admit something really odd is going on. And I want to know what it is.”
* * *
Later that afternoon, however, I wasn’t thinking about murder. The next evening’s entertainment was to be a costume party, and Anni was pushing hard for all of us to come to the party in full Egyptian dress. After lunch, she suggested we meet her in the ship’s gift shop, where we would be able to purchase one of the inexpensive Egyptian tunics called galabias as well as jewelry and other accessories, all about as authentic as the plaster statues in the street stalls. We knew it was a chance for her to get us to buy something from someone who was almost certainly a friend. We didn’t care. I, for one, was dying to acquire a few Egyptian things, and she had promised