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“I was on the beach. When the Kents found Diana Harden’s body.”
Her hands paused. Then she cleared her throat and said, “That must have been awful.”
“And I’m trying to forget, but I can’t.”
“I can imagine,” Ginger said and moved from my shoulders to my right arm. “Relax, Ms. Crawford.”
“She came here before she disappeared,” I said.
“Mmm-hmm,” Ginger said vaguely.
“Did you help her?”
“Uh-huh,” Ginger answered in the affirmative. “If you want to relax, you need to empty your mind.”
She turned up the nature sounds, and it was impossible to ask questions without practically shouting. By the end of the hour, she hadn’t shared anything I didn’t know. I had no idea what Diana had said or done that had made this sweet woman cry.
I did finally relax, as if I was melting on the table. When Ginger was done, I was half-asleep. She said in a soft, soothing tone, “Stay here for a few minutes. I’ll be back with a refreshing smoothie.”
“Mmm-hmm,” I said because I couldn’t speak.
I thought about what the honeymooners had said about a couples massage, and then I pictured Jason on the table next to me, a grin on his lips, his eyes half-closed, his body naked. Instead of being nervous and unsure, I smiled as I remembered how he almost kissed me last night, the way he made me feel comfortable and desired. Maybe it was the island, maybe it was the freedom that I could do something spontaneous and not think about every way it could go wrong. I wasn’t even all that upset that I hadn’t been able to get Ginger to gossip about Diana.
My mind drifted to Amber and her conversation with Trina, demanding information about a book. I distinctly remembered at the Sky Bar that the three staff members talked about packing up Diana’s room after she disappeared. If the book had been left in her room, they would have packed it up with the rest of her belongings.
Which suggested that the book had been found elsewhere. Maybe on the beach. That made sense with the damaged pages and sand. Yet why did Amber think it should be in the gift shop?
As security chief, Gino would have access to Diana’s belongings. Maybe that’s why Amber had talked to him. Had he allowed her to go through Diana’s personal items? When she hadn’t found the book, maybe she went to housekeeping then to the gift shop then back to Gino to complain it was still missing.
ButIhad Diana’s book.
I needed to be more careful with it.
I returned to my room to get ready for the Caribbean luau. I really didn’t know much about what Diana was doing, other than likely blackmailing people on the island. Now she was dead. Was it all that big a leap to assume that she was killed because she’d blackmailed the wrong person? I didn’t think so. But because I didn’t understand most of Diana’s shorthand, I didn’t know exactlywhoshe had blackmailed—or attempted to blackmail. Just because she was tracking the net worth of her fellow guests didn’t mean that she had confronted them with a deep, dark secret they would kill to keep buried.
Why write in a stupid code anyway? I thought as I applied a bit of makeup to my tan face—I’d definitely gotten some sun today, and it looked good. Mid-swipe with my bronzer, I remembered the missing page—thestolenpage. I had an idea.
I quickly dressed, then retrieved the book and my notebook from the safe. After leaving them out when housekeeping was here, I’d decided to be more discreet.
I turned to chapter twenty-eight. I didn’t know who had torn the page out, or why, but surmised it was because Diana had written something about them—and it was only on this page. How they knew, I could only guess. But there was a reason they took it, and I wanted to know what it was.
And I knew how to make the words magically appear.
I took the book to the desk and dug a pencil out of the bottom of my laptop case, then turned on the lamp. Every crime show I watched used this trick.
I tilted the page under the light to see if I could detect an impression on the paper. There was something here, but I couldn’t read it. Carefully, I rubbed the pencil over the paper, then turned it again under the light, straining to read what Diana had written.
There were two distinct impressions. One in the margins on the front side of the page that had been torn out. I could barely make out the letters. There were too many missing letters, which I replaced withx’s hoping something would jump out at me. But thexcould also mean a space.
I wrote them down, but they made no sense.
77 xxx emxxz $50 xxx xx 522 xxx carxx
The numbers were better defined than the letters, maybe because she was writing in script. I put it aside to look at later.
At the bottom of the back side of the page—at what would have been the end of the chapter—Diana had written a list of numbers.
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