Page 13 of The Girl Who Knew Too Much

“Don’t remind me,” Oliver said.

“You actually gave that reporter lady a quote?”

“Her name is Irene Glasson, and I didn’t exactly give her a quote. What I tried to do was warn her off the story. I told her that if she wasn’t careful, the police might conclude that she had something to do with Maitland’s death.”

“Looks like you didn’t do a very good job of scaring the daylights out of her.”

“No,” Oliver said. “Apparently not.”

He brooded over his impressions of Irene. He didn’t have to dredge up the memories. He had been thinking about her nonstop since the moment he met her. That had occurred last night when Tom O’Conner, the head of hotel security, summoned him to the spa chamber.

Irene was soaking wet, shivering in the cool night air. Someone had given her a towel, which she had wrapped around her shoulders. She clutched it closed in front of herself with one hand. In her other, she gripped a handbag that looked like something a professional woman would carry. Her whiskey brown hair hung in damp tendrils. Her wide-legged trousers and thin blouse were plastered to her slender frame.

Aware that Irene was both the only eyewitness and the principal suspect, Oliver had whisked her into his private villa before any of the guests could see her. At that point, Jean Firebrace, the head of housekeeping, had taken charge of her for a while. The two women disappeared upstairs to the guest bedroom, a room that, until that moment, had never housed a guest.

The next time Oliver saw Irene she was bundled up in a thick white robe and ensconced in one of the two big chairs in front of the fireplace.

What had surprised him the most was that he found it difficult to read her. He was usually very good when it came to figuring out what made someone tick. He could pick out a stranger in an audience and come up with an accurate character analysis in a few short minutes. All it took were some key questions and a quick study of the individual’s clothes, jewelry, and voice. It was amazing how much you could tell about someone from just a pair of shoes.

One thing had been clear from the start. He was damned sure that Irene didn’t trust him. But for some reason, that just made her all the more interesting. There were secrets hidden in her big eyes and a haunted quality that told him she had learned some things the hard way.

Well, that gives us something in common,lady.

She would never have survived a casting call in Hollywood because, with the exception of her fine eyes, everything else about her was too subtle for the camera. She was attractive but not spectacularly so. She had an edge, though, an intensity that aroused his curiosity. He was very sure that, like with any good illusion, there was a lot hidden under the surface of Irene Glasson.

By the time he had limped back to the villa after seeing her off in her nondescript Ford sedan, he concluded that he was more than merely curious. He was downright fascinated.

He probably ought to be worried by his reaction to her, he thought.

“So where is this famous quote from management?” Chester asked, scanning the article.

“It’s somewhere near the end of the piece, and I told you, it’s not a quote.”

“Ah, here we go,” Chester said.“The management of the Burning Cove Hotel refused to respond to this reporter’s request for clarification.”

“In other words, I wouldn’t confirm that Nick Tremayne was staying in the hotel or that he was rumored to have had an affair with the dead woman.”

“Which is as good as telling her straight out that he was here and that he probably did have an affair with Maitland.”

“Miss Glasson already knew that much.”

Chester did not look up from the article. “I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you. It’s just the usual Hollywood gossip.”

“Except for the reporter’s speculation about the possibility of murder.”

“Except for that part. Where’s the stuff about how the reporter had to jump into the pool to escape the killer?”

“She left out that bit of drama.”

Chester frowned. “Wonder why?”

“Probably because she wants to keep the attention on the death of Gloria Maitland. She’s convinced it was murder.”

“Why is she so determined to prove it? Just to get the story?”

“I don’t think so.” He had been asking himself the same question since Irene Glasson had landed, soaking wet, in his otherwise well-organized, well-controlled world. “Got a feeling there’s more to it than that. She says she needs the story in order to keep her job, but I have a hunch that she’s got another reason. Something personal.”

“Something personal involving murder? That strikes me as peculiar.”