Murder in a Hot Flash (27 page)

Charlie drank. Mitch drank. Charlie drank. They splashed water at each other and on themselves beneath a sign warning them not to waste a drop because it all had to be trucked in. Charlie noticed her feet calling to her. They were stained with dull red sandstone dust and bright red blood.

His chin still dripping, Mitch lurched up the redwood steps to the door that led to the information desk, the phone you could never use, and the rangers' offices.

Charlie opened the door on the ice chest and lifted out one of the plastic bags of crushed ice that had to be hauled in by truck too. She stood there in her dirty bikini panties, her bra, her mud-streaked, sun-blistered skin and cellulite, hugging the bag to her as she would a lover. “Libby, baby, I'm coming home to you after all.”

The plump, healthy, and cheerful young ranger, Tim Pedigrew, offered Charlie more scrambled eggs and fried potatoes, which she hated to refuse. But she was so sated with water, orange juice, and coffee she thought she'd float.

All the other rangers were out searching for the superstar (oh, and his latest squeeze—what's-her-name) except Tim, who was holding the fort here.

Charlie and Mitch had showered and lathered and shampooed recklessly. They'd slathered themselves and each other with Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion with Aloe and Lanolin, and ointmented abrasions with antiseptic salves. They sat dressed in borrowed uniforms, looking more like convicts in their bruises and Band-Aids than like park rangers. Tim had even found a pair of soft bedroom slippers for Charlie.

Mitch accepted the offer of more food. Guys could go through ordeals and come out robust, looking rugged and cute. Women looked like shit.

“You know,” Mitch said, holding a potato slice aloft on the tines of his fork, “why we made it, don't you?” He popped the potato in his mouth and chewed while staring at her expectantly.

“We could be the luckiest people on earth.” And your ideas about keeping our brains and skin covered probably didn't hurt.

“I don't know about you, but at times I felt guided either by your psychic responses or by an alien presence. We did not do this astonishing thing alone. We had help.”

Which is not what our hero told the press and TV crews, for whom Charlie refused to appear. But she could hear most of it from a back bedroom where she hid with an EMT who checked her injuries, sunburn, and feet. He decided she wouldn't die right away and then got irate when she refused medical evacuation. Instead she crawled into some ranger's bunk, pulled his blanket over her head, and refused to play.

It wasn't simply that Mitch was acting the hero that society expected him to be out there with the press. Or that he could never be her hero if he was dumb enough to believe in “psychic responses” or “alien presences.” And Charlie
was
grateful for his intuitive man thing (the logic of the mud and head covering bit).

What she could not stomach was his insistence that now they'd conquered the challenge of imminent death, could she not see her way to reconsidering his modest request that she mention his name to the producers of the upcoming epic
Phantom of the Alpine Tunnel
for the role of the train engineer?

Okay, part of it could have been that her stomach was acting up again. Because she was back in civilization or because she'd cleaned up two plates of scrambled eggs, fried potatoes with onions, garlic, and chopped peppers, and watched him start in on a third just as he questioned her reasoning about “one goddamned simple role in a movie to a man out of work.”

“You're Mitch Hilsten, you don't need some little literary agent in a two-bit agency you'd never even heard of a few days ago mentioning you anywhere. Talk to your agent.” Here they were saved from the jaws of death and …

The poor rangers still hadn't returned from their search—to discover Charlie wearing their clothes—before John B. Drake, Scrag Dickens, and Sidney Levit arrived. And shortly thereafter, Rita Latham and Sheriff Ralph Sumpter. (Their former river mates had all been rescued at the beach within hours of losing Charlie and Mitch.)

Somehow they all ended up in the bedroom which Charlie had refused to leave.

“You look great, darlin',” Scrag whispered, and pulled back the blanket. “You don't have to hide.”

“Well, she looks alive, at least,” John B. said. She was on the lower bunk and he had to hunker next to it to be sure.

“God, Charlie, I was so worried about you.” Sid just sat his fanny on the floor and took her hand.

“I hope you guys can talk some sense into her,” the EMT man said. “This woman should be in a hospital. She won't move, even bit me.”

“Do you feel that bad, Charlie? Or is this guy trying to hustle you?” Rita Latham asked.

“I've got a lot of questions to ask you, Miz Greene, and I don't want you talking to anybody until you're debriefed,” the sheriff of Grand County told her. “You understand me?”

“I've got a few questions about all this,” Mitch said as they huddled in the ranger bathroom to avoid their friends.

“If you mention
Alpine Tunnel
, I'll knee your nubbin.”

He sat on the edge of the bathtub and she on the lowered lid of the stool, unable to believe how exhilarating in the face of overexertion, bodily harm, and sleeplessness, simply being alive was beginning to feel. The emergency medical type had treated his wound and left a dramatic swath of bandage around Mitch's head before being forced off without a paying patient to justify his trip. Charlie had little doubt they'd be charged regardless.

Mitch, too, was doomed to death in a few days or hours if he didn't let himself be sirened off to the expensive magic of a hospital.

Rita Latham had insisted upon sitting in on the sheriff's debriefing when Charlie and Mitch went over where they were and what they saw at the time of both Earl's and Tawny's deaths. And Edwina was still in jail.

“Could just be, we have two murderers here,” Ralph maintained, trying to stifle the overflow of Charlie's sputtering anger. “I'm not letting one go until I'm sure.” What's more, no one on that river trip would be allowed to leave the county until the little sheriff had himself some answers. “And all Mr. Seabaugh said before he died was, ‘There wasn't any sand'?”

“And for me to run away.”

Scrag had denied hitting Mitch over the head with a rock. He'd apparently been teamed up with John B. on the search for Mitch. And they hadn't parted before Earl's death.

Sid had teamed up with Earl and they'd gotten separated and Sid became lost himself.

“Somebody's lying,” Charlie whispered now.

“I know. I just don't know who.” Mitch was dejected and disgusted with himself again because after everything else, and posing heroically for the paparazzi, he'd been kneed in the ego when the rangers began to return from, the hunt.

The first one achieving access to the room where they'd all gathered was absolutely furious. “When you made it to the river after being lost for a day and a night, why didn't you stay put? There's boat traffic up and down it all day. If you'd waited somebody would have come by, tour boats, or search boats—somebody. That suicidal walk out of there was just plain dumb.”

Mitch had been speechless, everybody else exceedingly uncomfortable. Charlie was hastily trying to arrange some form of damage control to ad-lib their way out of the embarrassment when Ralph the sheriff-prick came to the rescue of his matinee idol.

“Well now, let's not be so hasty to judge here, fella. Mr. Hilsten is not a native of these parts and what seems obvious to you might not to him. Plus which the man had been hit on the head with a rock and could not be accountable for the state of his reasoning, plus which he was shackled with this female … that's an awful lot to load any man with who's suffering from heat, exhaustion, thirst, and hunger.”

Chapter
32

Mitch Hilsten was finally coaxed out, but Charlie refused to leave the rangers' bathroom.

“What are you going to do, sleep in the bathtub?” Rita said outside the door. “I've got a nice motel room for you two lovebirds in Moab. It'll be a lot more comfortable than in there and the people who live here need the bathroom.”

“What lovebirds?” Charlie opened the door long enough to yank Rita into the room and then lock it again.

“You and Mitch. Charlie, what's wrong with you?” Rita looked absolutely stunning in a lavender suit, with bright cranberry-colored blouse, earrings, lipstick, and shoes. The only wrong note was the perspiration beading under the makeup on her forehead. “Do you realize how narrowly you escaped death? The press has been playing up your liaison to the hilt, makes for good heartstring coverage. Charlie, you're from Hollywood, you know the ropes.”

“Well, now for sure I'm not leaving this room. Look at me. Would you want to be splashed all over the tabloids looking like this?” And if you had a history like mine and a rebellious daughter as well as an unreasonable, judgmental mother would you want to add fuel to the press-driven fire? “Rita, has the sheriff decided for sure that Tawny's death was murder?”

The lawyer nodded. “There wasn't much left of the poor thing, but after Earl was murdered, the state lab did further tests and found a residue of acetone in fragments of her boots. It's used in nail polish remover, solvents, that sort of thing. It's highly flammable and there was a bottle of it missing from the production crew's supplies.”

“Scrag thought he'd smelled lighter fluid on her.” Charlie hugged her stomach and turned away.

“If you come back to Moab with me you can call your daughter and reassure her you're all right and you can visit Edwina. Please, Charlie.”

“The murderer's still out there.”

“I can't imagine why you'd feel safer here.”

What you don't understand, lawyer my dear, is that I can't face Libby or Edwina at this moment. Not after all the publicity that's gone out about me and Mitch. “I'm too stressed by my ordeal to make any decisions right now, okay?”

Rita put up her hands, palms outward. “Okay, but I do think you're a little old for this kind of behavior.”

Charlie did too. She just wasn't in wonderful shape and didn't completely trust her own judgment either. She used up the rest of some ranger's Intensive Care Lotion to soothe the tormented skin of her entire body. She gave herself a good talking to and then tried some deep-breathing exercises. She would have loved to crawl back in that ranger's bunk and cover her head.

The rangers' quarters were built barrackslike, with old linoleum tile and no wallboard over the studs in places, and the windows were not spacious. But Charlie managed to crawl out of one. Almost.

Rita Latham had been dressed to meet the press. Charlie would find another way out of here. It was fairly dark night by now and she had vague plans to commandeer a vehicle or something.

You're going to have to face your kid and mom sometime.

Well, maybe I'd like the privilege of doing it in private.

One of your most treasured dislikes in print, on the screen, or especially in reality has always been some dippy victim trying to save her self-esteem by walking into danger on her own. Even if that's all the guys are buying now in Hollywood, you resent it and you know it.

I'm not walking into danger, I'm climbing out a window and this place is crawling with reporters, rangers, sheriff's deputies, and tourists. Nobody's going to pull anything funny now with so many witnesses around. And I need some space.

Charlie lived in the modern world, thrived in Hollywood, and had just survived her second near-death experience in a week. What more could happen?

“Hey, darlin', let me help you there.”

“Oh shit.” I can't do anything right.

The window was farther off the ground than it had looked from inside and she was in the awkward position of having part of one leg still in the room and the other unable to reach the earth, trying to support her weight with already sore hands gripping the sharp edges of the cheap metal window frame. Scrag helped her pull the second leg over the sill, while holding her around the waist from behind.

“Listen, Dickens, you don't let go of me, I'm going to scream loud enough to blow your eardrums down your throat.” He had a viselike grip on her waist that kept her from squirming around to face him. She tried to kick him in the shins with her heels but the slippers she was wearing were too soft to be much of a threat.

“It's Mitch. Charlie, you've got to help him.”

“And you've seen too many movies. He's a big boy, he can take care of himself.”

“He's hurt.”

“Tough titties, I'm no doctor.” Charlie's scream ended in a croak when he clamped his other arm around her chest and deflated it of all her screaming air.

She wanted to tell him to give her up, that with all the people around here now, there was no way he could drag her off unnoticed. But she didn't have much talking air either and the minor squawks she did manage wouldn't alert anyone not within touching distance. So she tried to make scuffling noises with the soft slippers, which was also futile. All the while, Scrag was dragging and pushing and otherwise moving her along.

On the way around the side of the ranger barracks, they passed a lighted window. The shapes of two men in the room gestured in hot debate. The shapes most certainly brought to mind Scrag Dickens and Mitch Hilsten.

Ooops.

If that weren't bad enough, when Charlie and her captor started across the road toward the Visitors' Center—she, held so her feet were off the ground by now and his hand clamped across her mouth—the lighted parking in front of the barracks was all but empty. Just a few blurred lumps, sort of truck size. Even worse, the parking lot at the Visitors' Center was completely empty.

What, Charlie had told everybody to go away and leave her alone, and they did? She tried to bite the hand clamped across her mouth but that hand had her lips pressed together so she couldn't get her teeth out.