Marty Ambrose - Mango Bay 01 - Peril in Paradise by Marty Ambrose Read Free Book Online Page B

Chrissy slid into a chair across the table.
    “Was it m … m … murder?” George asked, raking
his long hair back from his face. He displayed no redrimmed eyes. Just an expression tight with strain.
    “Apparently.” I noted that Betty shot a furtive glance
in Burt’s direction, but he gave an imperceptible shake
of his head. “I gave my statement this morning to the
police.”
    “Do they have any suspects?” Betty took a deep swig
of her Bloody Mary.
    “Can’t really say,” I hedged. “My guess is you’ll all
be questioned as to your whereabouts when Jack was
killed.”
    “I was watching a video on organic farming” Chrissy
tucked her hair behind her ears. “Though not the whole
time.”
    “We drove back here to the Lodge for drinks,” Burt
offered. “Then to our room” Betty nodded in agreement.
    Where you both probably passed out, I added silently.
    “I took a long b … b … bike ride,” George said.
    “Alone?” I prompted.
    “Well … yes.” He raked his hair back again.

    A waitress wearing a splashy tropical print shirt with
tight jeans appeared at my elbow. I ordered the blueberry pancakes and a yet another cup of coffee.
    After she left, I scanned the writers’ group. Their
alibis were lame, and they looked like they knew it.
Chrissy dabbed at her eyes with a shaky hand, Burt and
Betty were preoccupied with their drinks, and George
seemed very intent on cleaning a spot off the white linen
tablecloth. Any of them could’ve murdered Hillman.
    “After I left yesterday, did you notice anything odd?”
I asked.
    George shook his head, followed by Burt and Betty.
Chrissy, however, lowered the handkerchief and pursed
her mouth.
    “Now that you mention it … about twenty minutes
after you left, Jack got out of the hot tub. I stayed in to
catch some afternoon rays and work on one of my new
poems. I was right in the middle of rhyming `the joys
of compost’ with `those who love you the most,’ when I
heard him yelling at his neighbor-this old guy who
has the house right next door. They were really going at
it-and it wasn’t the first time I’d heard them arguing.”
    “Could you make out what they said?” I inquired,
trying not to conjecture how compost had anything to
do with love. Or anything else in the romantic department.
    “Not really”
    “Think hard, Chrissy. It could be very important,” I
pressed her.

    “Uh …” She drummed her fingers against her cheek. “Oh, yes, I did hear something.” She straightened in her chair. “The old guy mentioned a land survey that Jack had done a week ago. That’s what the
argument was about. Yeah … I remember now …
Jack told me his neighbor was disputing the property
division between their two lots. Jack had staked out
where he wanted to put up a fence and the neighbor
said it was partially on his lot. The whole thing kinda
mushroomed into this running argument-that’s why
Jack ordered the survey”
    “How angry was the neighbor yesterday?” I asked.
    She grimaced. “Absolutely livid. I could hear him
yelling for almost half an hour.”
    “B … b … but that doesn’t mean that he’d want to
kill Jack,” George pointed out. “I mean, he made me so
angry sometimes, I couldn’t see straight.”
    “You never know,” Betty waved her glass. “This
neighbor could’ve gone berserk.”
    “That’s always possible,” I agreed, eyeing George.
So he had a temper under all that shy diffidence. Was
he a ticking time bomb that had finally gone off last
night? My musings were interrupted by the waitress
who placed a heaping plate of blueberry pancakes under my nose. I doused them in extra sweet maple syrup
and dug in.
    “Isn’t that stuff full of refined sugar?” With obvious
distaste, Chrissy wrinkled her nose at my three large
pancakes swimming in syrup.

    Burt picked up the plastic syrup bottle. “Nope.
Worse. See the label? It’s artificially sweetened. That
can’t be good