California Schemin': Book One in the Malibu Mayhem Trilogy (15 page)

We ran out on the deck and stared at the water. I could see what looked to be a fiery boat in the distance. The three of us raced to the beach. Police officers stood on the shore watching the boat too. With them, her hands in cuffs, was Inge.

“That’s Roland’s yacht!” Inge was crying. “He didn’t want to be taken alive. He didn’t want to be taken alive!”

“Roland set fire to his own yacht?” I gasped as we stared at the shooting flames.

“It’s more than a fire,” George said. “It looks like an explosion.”

“Nancy, the oil drums we saw on the yacht,” Bess reminded me. “Roland probably blew them up—along with the fuel tank!”

Blowing up the yacht didn’t make sense to me. But then again, neither did Roland.

“He probably wanted to go out in a blaze of glory,” I said with a sigh. “Literally.”

“The yacht isn’t all that Roland destroyed,” George muttered. “Look what he did to our beach.”

I saw rainbow-colored oil puddles drifting ashore and knew exactly what she meant.

“Oh, noooo,” I cried.

All those oil drums plus the fuel tank meant hundreds of gallons of oil. The damage to the beach and its wildlife would be catastrophic!

“And we thought the trash was bad,” I said.

“How am I going to explain this to Stacey when she gets back tomorrow?” George groaned.

“So this is our fault, isn’t it?” Bess asked sadly. “I mean, we provoked Roland, and this was his revenge.”

I looked out over the ocean. Soon the oil would reach our beach, turning the sugary-white sands a dusky black.

“I don’t know if it’s our fault or not,” I admitted. “But something tells me we’re not going back to River Heights…at least anytime soon.”