[ - ]
Table of Contents [Report This]
Printer Chapter or Story Microsoft Word Chapter or Story
- Text Size +
Nick went back up on deck.  He handed the toilet paper to Jo and looked out over the water as she blew her nose and wiped her eyes.  When she had regained control of herself, Nick held up the cell phone.

“Let’s call Mickey,” he said.

“Okay,” said Jo, doubtfully.

“What’s her number at work?” asked Nick.  He flipped open his phone and stared at the screen for a moment.  “Damn!”

“What’s the matter?” asked Jo.

“Oh, we’re just in a bad area.  There’s no signal.”

Jo’s shoulders sagged a little.  “Well, we can try later, I guess, but…”  She didn’t sound hopeful.

“Tell me more,” said Nick.  “You said that Mickey said she was in danger.  This was before you left for Europe, right?”

“Yes, when we had lunch.  She asked me to go on this trip with her.  She said that Pete had been doing some strange things, and it had made her nervous.  She said that she didn’t want to tell me everything until she’d checked out all the facts, but she knew one thing for sure, she didn’t want to be alone on the boat with him.”

“Pete said that he was going to ask her to marry him on the trip,” said Nick.  “Do you think that’s what it might have been?  That he was secretive or whatever because he was planning a surprise?”

Jo thought about it. 

“Maybe,” she said.  “But why was Mickey checking him out then?  She told me it had something to do with his past…that she couldn’t have a future with him until she figured out his past.  And what she was finding out was making her nervous.”

Nick thought about it for a moment.  “So you think that she found out that he didn’t go to college, and so…even if that didn’t matter to her, you know, that he wasn’t a college graduate…it meant that he could maybe have lied about other stuff too.”

“Yeah,” said Jo, nodding, “something like that.  Something was making her uncomfortable about him…uncomfortable enough that she asked me to go on this trip when I got back from Europe.  I remember her saying something like she didn’t want to end up like his last girlfriend.”

“Did you see her when you got back?” asked Nick.

“I saw her once, but she was with Pete, so we didn’t get to talk much.”

“What did she tell Pete…to get him to let you come on this trip?…I mean, if he was planning on proposing and all, then he wouldn’t want you here.”

“IF he was planning on proposing,” insisted Jo.  “We don’t know that’s true.  That’s just what he told you.”

“Still doesn’t answer the question,” said Nick.  “What did Mickey tell him?  I mean, what could she say…that you needed a vacation?  You were just getting back from a couple of months in Europe.”

Jo looked pained.  She pinched her lips together and stared over the side of the boat for a moment.

Then she said, “She didn’t tell Pete that I was coming until the last moment.  She didn’t want him to have time to back out of it or find a reason for me not to come along.”

Nick waited. 

Jo knew she hadn’t answered the question.  “Okay,” she said, “Mickey told him that I had got my heart broken in Europe, and that I needed to have some time with her to…decompress it, get over it, whatever.  She told Pete that I was…”

“Fragile?” asked Nick.

Jo looked at him in surprise.  “Yeah, that’s right.  How do you know that?”

“That’s what Pete said,” replied Nick.  “The first night we met.  He told me that he was going to propose to Mickey but that she had insisted on having her friend along and that her friend was a bit fragile.”

“What did you think that meant?” asked Jo.

“Hell, I didn’t know,” said Nick.  “And then you came in, and you were all sleepy looking and said you had jet lag.  And then you weren’t eating, and I heard you throwing up once, and Pete told me the story, so I figured that’s what ‘fragile’ meant.”  He paused.  “I still don’t understand why he told me that story.”

“Okay,” said Jo, “this is the way I have it figured.  Pete killed Mickey because she found out something about his past.  I know she did that because of what she was able to say to me before we left.  She told me that she’d be paying very close attention during this trip to Florida and that, at the end of it, she had a hard decision to make.”

Jo held up a hand to keep Nick from speaking.  “And I know it wasn’t whether or not to marry him.  I think it was whether or not to turn him in to the police.”

Nick shook his head in exasperation.  “Jo, you can’t make a leap of logic like that.  If it was something that serious, Mickey would have told you.  Or she wouldn’t have agreed to go on the trip in the first place.”

“Yes, she would have if she thought she’d get the answers she wanted.  You didn’t know her.  She was a very determined sort.  And a very fair one, too.  So she wouldn’t turn Pete in, or whatever she was planning, until she knew for certain.  And she thought she’d find something out in Florida.  She told me.”

“Okay,” said Nick, “but you are still a very long way from ‘Pete killed Mickey’.”

“I know,” said Jo.  “I can see that you don’t believe me.”  She sighed.  “Let me try again.  The day before we were supposed to leave, I got a message on my voicemail.  It was Mickey.  She said she hoped I wouldn’t be too disappointed if we didn’t make the trip.  She said that she had one more piece of the puzzle to find, and if she found it that day, we would stay home and not go with him.  And that’s the last I heard from her.”

“But here you are,” said Nick.

“Yes, here I am, but Mickey’s not here.  Pete came over the next day and picked me up and said that the plan had changed because Mickey had to work late.  We drove down to the boat and got everything ready.  He had Mickey’s suitcase and everything.”

Nick nodded.  So far, that was exactly the story that Pete had told the day they met.

“What did you talk about in the car?” he asked.

“Nothing much,” said Jo.  “I wasn’t feeling well…jet lag, remember.  Pete stopped off at a 7-11 and got me a cold drink.  An hour later, I was really sick.  He had to stop the car, so I could throw up on the side of the road.  It wasn’t pretty.”

“And you think he poisoned the drink?” asked Nick.

“I don’t know if he did or if it was something else and he just got the idea from that or what…” Jo shook her head in frustration.  She knew that she wasn’t getting through to Nick.

“Okay, let’s fast forward,” she said.  “Just for the sake of argument, let’s agree that he killed Mickey.  Let’s take it from there.”

“Okay,” said Nick, even though there was no way he agreed with that.

“Here’s what I think his plan was.  He wanted to establish an alibi.  So he picks me up, and we come down to the boat just like we’d planned it.  His idea is to make me think that Mickey’s still alive, and that when we find out she’s not, he’ll have an alibi…me.  Except that an even better alibi came along…you.”

“Me?” said Nick.

“Yeah, you were even better because you were a stranger.  But a famous one, so if he had to come up with a name, it would be easy to do.  That’s why I think he faked the phone call in the restaurant.”

“How do you know that was a fake?  It sounded pretty real to me.”

“I know, but…I mean, even I didn’t think it was fake at the time.  It was only later when he kept saying that she’d called and I never got to talk to her.  I think he was making it all up.  There’s no way Mickey would have talked to him that many times and not insisted on speaking with me.”

“Okay, but he said that she was still at work, that she was going out to dinner with the boss.  How was he gonna square that away if she was already…gone?” asked Nick.

“What do you mean?” asked Jo.

“Look,” said Nick.  “If the police talked to you or me, we would tell them what she said.  Then they would ask her boss, and he would say, no that’s not what happened, and they would know Pete was lying.”

Jo shook her head.  “He’d just have another lie ready.  He would just say that Mickey had said something else, but he’d hadn’t wanted to tell us the truth.  He’d have a story ready, I know he would.  Besides, that’s not the way it was supposed to work out. You were supposed to go off on your boat, go on with your life, forget all about the conversation, and I was supposed to be dead.”

“And you don’t think anyone would have been suspicious that both you and Mickey turned up dead?”

“I wasn’t supposed to turn up dead.  I was supposed to disappear.  There’s no way Pete could let me go back home.  He didn’t know what Mickey had said to me, how much I knew.  I think if you hadn’t kept turning up, he might have tried to brazen it out with me…and then just killed me after we got to Florida.”

“What?”  Nick couldn’t believe this.

“I think he was making it up as he went along.  Maybe he killed Mickey in the heat of passion.  This was his desperate attempt to cover it up.  I think he kept changing the plan.  No…let me talk…”  Jo waved off Nick’s attempt to interrupt.

“I think he killed her.  He wanted an alibi so that when she was found, he could say that he’d talked to her and that she was alive after he’d got on the boat.  If he could make me believe that too, then everything would have been fine.  I would have been a great witness for him.  Except that he knows I don’t like him.  So then you come along.  He tells you the story.  Like within the first five minutes of meeting you, right?”

Nick nodded.

“Yeah,” Jo went on.  “I mean, before you even sorted the groceries, he’d spilled his story to you.  Who does that?”

Nick shrugged.  He didn’t know.

“And then he asked you out to dinner.  This was perfect for him.  He fakes the phone call and everyone goes their merry way.  You would go off thinking that Pete and Mickey were very happy together, he was going to propose, she was alive and well and going to meet him in Charleston, and that I was a bit…fragile.”

Nick nodded again.  Yeah, that’s what he had thought.

“But then you showed up in Charleston.  You weren’t supposed to do that.  You were supposed to be leisurely cruising the Waterway, miles behind us.”

“So then he had to keep up with the story,” said Nick.

“Yeah.  If you hadn’t showed up, he could have just played it by ear with me.  If I was buying into the story, fine, if not…then…he’d do whatever to me…and just tell people that I’d decided to go home, and he didn’t know what happened to me after that.  He wasn’t pleased to see you in Charleston.  Now I know why.”

Nick remembered how he’d tracked them to the right marina in Charleston.  He also remembered that Pete hadn’t seemed pleased to see him.  And that, the next day, Pete hadn’t showed up in Beaufort like he’d said he was going to.  And in Savannah too.  Pete had been surprised to see him again there.

Jo continued talking.  “It was right after we left Charleston that he started insisting on giving me herbal tea.  He’d already told you the story about me, right?”

“Yeah,” said Nick, “that was in Charleston.  He said he hoped that Mickey would get there soon because he didn’t know how to deal with you and your illness on his own.”

“Right!  So, if asked, you would have had to state that not only was Pete expecting Mickey to show up, he was truly hoping that she would.”

“Yes,” said Nick, “that’s what I would have said.”

“And you would also have had to say that you thought I was a mental case.”

Nick nodded.  Yes, he would have had to say that.  He wished he was more certain in his heart that he didn’t still believe that about her.

“Jo,” he tried, “there’s no evidence.  It’s just your theory, and for everything you’ve said, I’m sure that Pete has an explanation.”

“A lie, you mean.”

Nick sighed. 

Jo’s eyes filled with tears.  “You didn’t know her, Nick.  She would never have let me come on this boat with him by myself.  Never!  We were Mickey and Jo.  We were a team.  And she would never, ever, ever have allowed him to say that she couldn’t speak to me on the phone because I was sleeping.  The phone calls were fake, Nick!  I know they were!  So if Mickey didn’t call, where is she?”