The Dark and Deadly Pool by Joan Lowery Nixon Read Free Book Online Page A

fine,” I said.
    “I just wanted to make sure,” Mom said.
    “You don’t need to worry about me.”
    “Oh, darling, I wouldn’t! Not for a minute!” Mom answered, then began a list of questions, beginning with “Are you eating a nourishing breakfast?” and ending with “Are you sure you’re fine? I just had this strange, shivery feeling that everything might not be quite all right.”
    “Relax, Mom. Things are okay,” I said. I didn’t tell Mom that I was carrying around a strange, shivery feeling too.
    I arrived at the Ridley the next afternoon at the same time as four men dressed in white duck jumpsuits. A fifth man had backed a large van up to the double doors next to the employee entrance. The men followed me into the hotel. I planned to hold out my plastic handbag to be examined, but I dropped it, and as I suddenly stopped to pick it up, one of the men fell over me.
    “I’m very sorry,” I said, trying to help him up, pick myself up, and get a grip on my handbag at the same time.
    “No problem,” he grumbled, and glared at me.
    He was young and tall and kind of cute. I smiled and started to say something casually friendly. But it’s hard to be casually friendly to someone who’s rubbing his elbow because it hurts, and it’s all your fault, so I let the whole thing drop and held my handbag out to the guard at the desk.
    But the man who was carrying a clipboard leaned overthe desk and said to the security guard, “Somebody gotta sign this order form.”
    “The manager’s always out for lunch at this time, so I’ll get Mr. Boudry for you,” the guard said, and he pressed a couple of buttons.
    “Will you please look at my handbag?” I asked the guard.
    He took it, and the man with the clipboard looked at it too. “What’s so special about it?” he asked me. “I’ve seen better-looking handbags than that.”
    “It’s a security regulation,” I told him.
    He shrugged. “You got tight security here?”
    “Absolutely,” I said.
    “The best,” the guard said. He handed back my handbag just as Lamar strode in. Lamar ignored me, eagle-eying the men in white uniforms. As I left I heard one of them telling Lamar, “We got orders to pick up two ten-foot sofas to be cleaned. Have you got enough authority to sign this?”
    I walked on to the health club through the side lobby, glancing into the main lobby as I passed. There were only two ten-foot sofas in the hotel, and they were gorgeous and probably terribly expensive, with hand-carved mahogany framing coral-and-silver brocade. They didn’t look as though they needed cleaning to me, but hotel managers must know what they’re doing.
    Mr. Jones and Mr. Kamara were seated as far from the pool area as they could get, behind a large potted palm tree. Their plastic lounge chairs sagged under their weight as the men leaned close to each other. Mr. Kamara was wearing bathing trunks, but Mr. Jones was dressed in a wrinkled gray suit. He was probably hot, because his face was red, and he kept rubbing at his forehead with a handkerchief. With his other hand hekept batting away a palm tree frond that dipped low enough to tickle his head. All that mopping and batting made him look like a wiggling gray spider.
    But Mr. Kamara wasn’t the fly. Instead, he looked as though he could eat Mr. Jones, with or without ketchup. I couldn’t tell what the two men were saying, because the gurgling, bubbling Jacuzzi drowned out their words, but each time Mr. Kamara hit his fist on the arm of the lounge chair, Mr. Jones winced and shuddered.
    “Liz!”
    I jumped as Art Mart yelled at me from the open office doorway. “You’re five minutes late!”
    “Sorry!” It took only seconds to reach the office.
    “A large convention of insurance salesmen will be here for the next three days, and they’ve already started coming into the club. So get with it, will you?”
    I’d never seen him this grouchy, but I didn’t let his rudeness bother me. What can you expect