Page 18 of Death By Llama (Friendship Harbor Mysteries #7)

TWELVE

“ What ?” I gaped at Oliver. “How? Was anyone else hurt?”

Cameron was nowhere to be seen. “Oh no, please tell me Cameron is okay…”

I’d never figure myself if something happened to Cameron now that my mother had put it into my head that I wasn’t being a great girlfriend to him.

“He’s fine. He’s inside the inn talking to Justin.”

“What about Daphne?” I was firing questions at Oliver rapidly, but I couldn’t help it.

This was the last thing I had expected.

Henry came up behind Oliver, looking grim. “Hey, Sophie.”

“Hi, Henry, I was just asking about Daphne, Nick’s girlfriend. Or former girlfriend. Lover?” I wasn’t sure how to classify her given what I’d seen in Bar Harbor and what Daphne herself had told me.

“She’s the one who found Nick dead.” Oliver glanced around and lowered his voice. “Soph, Nick was found in the exact same location as Peanut. He went over the edge of that same cliff.”

“What?” I looked back and forth between him and Henry. Henry nodded. I couldn’t even wrap my head around it.

“Two Santas dead in two days,” Henry said. “This is just unimaginable. Who is going to want to stay here now? They’re going to start calling this place the Homicide Hotel.”

Oliver frowned at him. “That’s the least of anyone’s concerns right now.”

“Not mine. Do you know how much money we’ve sunk into this place?”

Oliver looked as disgusted with Henry as I felt about Cameron’s same reaction to Peanut’s death. Maybe it was easy for me to be dismissive about losing money because I’d frankly never had any, but it still seemed offensive that losing cash was more important than the loss of lives.

Even a gambling alcoholic like Peanut and a jerkface philanderer like Nick. They were still human beings with people who cared about them.

“I don’t know how much money you’ve sunk into it and I don’t care,” Oliver said flatly.

“What makes you think it’s a homicide?” I asked, mainly because I was very curious but also because I didn’t want Oliver and Henry to argue further when everyone was so stressed out right now.

Henry stared at me. “What?”

“You said people will call it the Homicide Hotel. They won’t do that if it’s not a homicide. So you must know it’s a homicide.”

“I don’t know that at all. It was just a figure of speech! People will start to gossip. They’re not going to call it the Before His Time Bed and Breakfast. Or the Fall Off a Cliff Captain’s Inn.”

Huh. I stared at Henry and decided he and Oliver could fight all they wanted. I was going to speak to Justin. Though I had to give Henry credit for a clever ad lib of titles.

Without a word, I just moved past him and started toward my parents. I could hear Oliver saying, “What is your problem?” in a voice Oliver reserved for people who spilled drinks on him on the dance floor at LA nightclubs. This wasn’t going to end well for Henry.

“Mom. Dad.” I found my parents, who were huddled together on the south lawn. “Are you okay?”

“This is just horrible,” Mom said, wringing her hands. “That poor man. That poor, poor man. Two Santas falling off a cliff? What are the odds?”

“The elves better watch out,” my father joked. “They must be next.”

“That is in extremely poor taste,” my mother told him with a grimace. “I’ll pray for you, Will.”

My father seemed to be in as much trouble as Henry.

Death didn’t bring out the best in people.

Dad winced. “Sorry. Couldn’t resist.”

“Well, try harder. Sophie, you need to go and make Cameron some tea. He was beside himself.”

“Probably because he’s worried about financial liability,” I said, before I realized that was a thought better left to myself.

Now I was in trouble too.

Mom’s jaw dropped. “That was also inappropriate. You know, right now I’m wondering if you even deserve a man like Cameron.”

I was wondering that myself, for entirely different reasons.

“Now, come on,” my father said. “That’s a little harsh.”

“Do I hear my name being called?” I asked, pretending to cock my head. “Yes, yes, that’s—I’m coming!” I called to no one in particular, rushing toward the steps of the inn.

I left my parents arguing.

When I got on the porch I realized that Daphne and Vance were also arguing.

“How could you say that to me?” Daphne demanded, her face flushed with anger. “I loved Nick!”

“You sure didn’t love that he was smoochy-smooch with Ashley yesterday,” Vance said. “Maybe you gave him the ‘ole heave ho! Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned and all that.”

“That’s reprehensible! I would never…and why are you so choked up? You didn’t even like him!”

“The man was a fine, fine actor. He honestly made me believe he suffers from hemorrhoids in his last commercial. Talent like that shouldn’t go to waste.”

Daphne started softly crying. “He really did seem like he had hemorrhoids.”

I paused awkwardly as I passed them on the front porch. “I’m so sorry to hear about Nick. Is there anything I can do?”

Her face immediately went from distressed to flushed with anger. “You can tell the owner of this Hell Hotel to put up a guardrail or something! I almost died running down those steps to get to my Nicky.”

He was her “Nicky” now? Mere hours ago she thought he was a complete jerk. Death did funny things to the perception of a person. Also, Henry was right—Daphne had already given The Captain’s Inn an unflattering nickname.

“Did you see him fall?”

Daphne gasped. “My God, that’s insensitive. No! I wasn’t even looking for him. I just went for a stroll along with your famed craggy rocks and bucolic shoreline and I found Nicky’s crumpled body. A physique that gorgeous just…destroyed.”

She threw her hand onto her forehead.

She actually threw her hand onto her forehead. Like she was on stage.

I decided that the Boston thespians were an even whackier bunch than any actor I’d met in LA and I had done a commercial with Lambchop.

“Such a shame. I’m sorry for your loss,” I said and got the heck out of there. I went into the inn and immediately heard Justin’s voice.

He was pacing in the parlor, his phone at his ear. “No, I’m sorry, I can’t watch season two episode four of Riverdale with you tonight, Brandy. There’s been an accident.”

Oh, boy. That was not going to go over well.

Brandy lived for Riverdale and was still in mourning it had been canceled.

She had seen every episode but when she dated someone new or had new friends like me and Oliver she liked to start over again with the pilot and force them to sit through it.

Not that I didn’t like the show, because I did, but she was very intense about plowing through all the episodes with you in marathon binge sessions.

I had a hard time envisioning Justin watching very adult-looking teens engaged in a soapy murder mystery.

But then again, I also had a hard time envisioning Justin and Brandy together in general even though I had actually seen them together on dates. It just seemed like an ill fitting relationship.

As if I was one to talk.

“Sophie, there you are,” Cameron said, looking frazzled, also on his phone as he strolled out of the dining room. “I’m talking to my lawyer. This is just…bad. So bad.”

He kissed my forehead and then turned me and gave me a little shove in the direction of the kitchen. “Can you make coffee for the first responders?”

I was supposed to be making tea for him according to my mother, but I liked Cameron’s idea better.

But before I entered the kitchen I had one little stop to make.

I went to the entryway and the coat tree.

I dug into the pocket of the windbreaker I had worn in my death defying descent down the slippery stairs on the shoreline to look for clues.

I found the business card for Opulent Occasions and flipped it over.

The handwriting was feminine. Something I hadn’t noticed before.

I had to assume that Ashley had left the card for Nick. Did that mean that she was the one who had pushed Nick? I hadn’t seen Ashley outside just now, which was interesting. I wasn’t sure what to make of that.

“So we can file a claim?”

Cameron’s voice was hushed, but I could hear him clearly. I leaned toward the dining room, hiding behind the coat tree. He thought I was in the kitchen now so maybe he wasn’t as guarded as he might normally be around me, at least when it came to his business practices.

“This is the only way out of this money pit. File a liability claim with the insurance company, recoup our investment, and walk away. They won’t argue because they insured a dangerous property now that there are two deaths.”

The hair on the back of my neck rose. So two deaths benefited Cameron and one death hurt him financially?

That didn’t sound good.

That sounded like… no . I was being ridiculous. There was no way Cameron would push Nick off of a cliff to save a buck.

Would he?

How well did I know him, truthfully?

A cold sweat broke out all over my body. Was I dating a murderer?

If Peanut’s death was an accident, maybe Cameron had panicked and found himself a way out of a financial conundrum.

People had killed for less and tripping or shoving someone wasn’t as…intimate as other forms of murder. Maybe it was impulsive. Maybe he regretted it.

“I feel terrible for this poor man’s family,” Cameron said.

Or maybe I was losing my mind. That didn’t sound like the words of a killer.

Shaking my head, I went to the kitchen to start brewing a jumbo pot of coffee. Even in July, that would be welcome to the men and women who had to go down that cliff yet again and retrieve another body.

Flipping the card back over as I searched for the coffee grounds, I dialed the number for Opulent Occasions.

A man’s voice answered. “Hello, Opulent Occasions, can I help you?”

It should have been polite, but it sounded a little annoyed. This had to be Brad.

“Hello, may I speak to Ashley, please?”

“Who’s this?”

“It’s Sophie LaFleur from Friendship Harbor. I’m at The Captain’s Inn and well, we’re just, um, looking for Ashley. She seems to be missing.”

“Missing? What are you talking about?”

“She was in Bar Harbor yesterday and today she’s not here and there’s been an incident that the police need to discuss with her.”

“What do the police want to talk to Ashley about?”

“Nick Grayson has died.”

“Oh. Bummer. Well, I doubt she knows anything about that.”

“How do you know that?” I finally found the coffee and I started scooping it into a filter in the coffee pot. I had no idea how to use this machine but I was good at fudging it. That was probably going to be on my headstone.

Sophie LaFleur.

She fudged it.

“Because I just saw her. She’s in Boston.”

“Oh, right. Well have her give the sheriff a call just so he knows she’s safe.”

“How about he calls her? Why does she need to do his job?”

I had an answer for that but I didn’t want to make an enemy of Brad. I just pursed my lips. Then I said, “Thank you for your time.”

Tossing my phone on the counter, I sighed. So if Brad was telling the truth, Ashley didn’t push Nick. She didn’t push Peanut either because I had seen her too far away from the cliff at the moment of impact.

I was officially nowhere.

I turned the coffee pot on and nothing happened.