Page 139 of Beach Reads and Deadly Deeds

“The worst thing he can do is hide from the police,” I said. “That makes him look guilty.”

“I’ll try to find him. Maybe I can talk sense into him,” Jason said. “Thanks for listening.”

He leaned in and kissed me, caressing my face in a romantic gesture. Now I knew what swooning felt like in all those historical romance novels I’d devoured in college, because my knees wobbled, and I wanted to fall into his arms.

“Please be careful,” he said. “I still don’t know exactly what’s going on here, and I’m not ready to sign off that Gino’s death was an accident.”

“You be careful too.”

“I’ll be by around ten, if that’s not too late.”

“Anytime,” I said, and hoped I didn’t sound desperate.

He kissed me again and said, “We should probably leave before I need to lock the door.” I blushed, and Jason laughed softly. “I love how you’re so shy about these things.”

“What things?” I said, trying to force my body to behave.

He pushed me up against the door and pressed his body firmly against mine. I gasped, then said, “I wasn’t shy last night.”

“No, you weren’t,” he said, and kissed my neck. I closed my eyes and let all the feelings wash over me. Lust. Need. Excitement that we were making out in the storeroom.

What if someone needed another keg?

Jason laughed into my neck. “You just realized anyone could find us making out in here, didn’t you?”

“Okay, I’m not as much into PDA as some.”

“That’s okay. I like it. I like you. Tonight.”

“Tonight.”

We left, and I realized I was in way over my head with Jason Mallory, but surprisingly I didn’t panic.

I didn’t know if that was good or bad.

Brie wasn’t back when I returned to our table. I finished my champagne, still a little overheated from the make-out session in the storeroom. I thought about poor Georgie and wished I hadn’t told Tristan about his confronting me. Tristan brought in Gino, and Gino then ended up dead.

I remembered the missing page. I couldn’t read most of it even after I rubbed a pencil over the impressions, but there were a few letters that popped out.

I flipped through my notebook until I found what I’d written. A lot of blanks that I had marked withx’s, but I now rewrote it without the missing letters.

77 emz $50 522 car

The 77 was definitely Gino Garmon. All the other coded numbers fit for Andrew, Sherry, Amber, Trevor, the others. The only coded numbers I didn’t have names for were the list of five numbers that had also been on the missing page.

“Emz” was embezzlement, in shorthand. I couldn’t see all the letters, but it worked in context. And I thought “car” with the missing letters was “cards”—he was stealing money, embezzling, because of a gambling addiction. Tristan knew he had a problem, which was why he asked about his trips to St. Croix on the employee evaluation.

It made a lot more sense that he lost his job as a Miami cop because of gambling. He had debt, he was stealing, and Diana knew all about it and was blackmailing him. 522—that was Ethan Valentine. She could have threatened to tell the resort owner about his gambling problem, which may have prompted a full audit of the resort.

Motive and opportunity, I thought, proud of myself.

How did Diana know about Gino’s problems in the first place? Had she connected with him in the past? Or knew someone who was?

Where did Georgie Arendt come in? He’d admitted totaking the page from my book, and he called Jason and told him he did it for Gino. Maybe Georgie wasn’t the clean, honest kid Jason thought he was. Maybe he was in on something with Gino. Something that could have pushed him to kill his partner.

I wasn’t going to figure this out just staring at my notes. Instead, I focused on something more fun and less dangerous: finding the documents Diana had hidden somewhere on the island.

I had been thinking about this ever since Brie and I had followed Parker and Amber to St. Claire Peak. They were using the book to find out where Diana had hidden the documents she’d stolen from Parker, but they didn’t know how she’d coded the information. The list of numbers in the margin had been torn out with the evidence about Gino’s gambling, but I had recreated them from the impression they left on the page beneath. And I wondered if they weren’t names of guests and staff, but a different code—one that led to treasure—namely, the file Diana had stolen from Parker.