CHAPTER NINE
First order of business: choosing lounge chairs.
There is strategy involved.
You want sun but a way to get out of the sun. You want a wide viewing area to be able to appraise a large fraction of your fellow sunbathers. You don’t want to be too close to the bar, because there’s too high a chance some sunbaked reveler will drop his Singapore Sling on you. Nor do you want to be too near the rental hut, because then you’ll spend the day listening to parents tell their kids what’s too expensive to get. And you don’t want proximity to the deep end, because then you’ll get soaked fifteen times an hour by boys doing cannonballs into the pool.
Given those parameters and how many prime lounges are already crammed full of oil-slicked bodies, there are remarkably few good options left, even at 9:12 AM.
Trixie and I claim our spots and pull out our dogeared paperbacks. Mine has a pink and green striped cover with a picture of a woman’s tanned, toned legs in cute tangerine-colored sandals. Trixie’s cover is mostly gray and features a stormy ocean with a woman in a baggy sweater walking alone on the beach looking forlorn.
“Book club?” I ask.
She nods. “Maybe I can finish it this morning.”
“How many characters have died so far?”
“Only one.”
“You’re getting off easy.”
So am I, truth be told. Magnolia gave me a 3-ring binder filled with info I need to digest now that I’m Ms. America. I should be reading that but I don’t feel like it. I’m rationalizing my laziness by pretending I won’t risk smudging the binder with sunblock.
I glance at Trixie, whose nose is buried in her book. I wonder if her background is at all like mine. Probably not. No doubt she was smarter than me. I got pregnant at 17 and then Jason and I got married. Only when Rachel was a year old did I get my high-school equivalency. And only when she was in first grade did I go back at night to study toward my bachelor’s. Since I have to work full-time, it’s taking me forever to finish it. But I’m determined to graduate some day, regardless how long it takes.
I suck down the last of my breakfast drink and eye the crowd. I must say, the male guests at the Royal Hibiscus should be paying extra this month. The presence of us queens at the hotel has considerably improved the poolside eye candy for them. For us gals, not so much. As usual, there are a few delusional men who think they look good in Speedos. Others sport so much body hair they could double as Sasquatch. There are some handsome forty-somethings, though, with a little gray at the temples, and a few buff young studs who look like they work out twice a day.
They remind me of Keola. I tell Trixie what I learned the prior evening.
Her eyes bug out as I relay the final details. “Even if he were smart enough to pull off killing Tiffany, though,” she says, “he couldn’t have done it because there’s no way he would’ve been allowed backstage.”
“I was thinking that, too.” My cell phone rings. I look at the display and my heart lightens. “It’s my daughter,” I tell Trixie. “I haven’t spoken to her yet today. Do you mind if I take the call?”
“Don’t be silly!”
I flip open the phone. “Hey, Rach!”
“Hey, mom. You still jazzed to be, like, a total celebrity?”
“I am if you’re still psyched to be the daughter of a total celebrity.”
It takes her a second too long to answer. Then, “Sure. I mean, it’s cool.”
Not exactly a ringing endorsement. “You’re not getting grief about it at school, are you?” That happened when I won Ms. Ohio. Mean boys asking how did it feel to have your mom be cuter than you. Mean girls saying it must be hard to have your mom be a throwback to the dark ages.
“Well,” Rachel says, “it’s not like you’re saving the world or anything but it’s cool.”
That is what my daughter would rather I do. The truth is I’m not up to it. “That’s going to have to be your job, Rach. For when you’re done with college,” I specify.
“Can we talk about college another time, mom? I mean, we don’t have to talk about it
constantly
.”
“I didn’t think we did.”
“You bring it up, like,
incessantly
. Anyway, I gotta go. I have class.”
“Okay. We’ll talk later.”
“Bye.” She’s gone.
Trixie sets down her book. “How’s she doing?”
“Great,” I lie. I am saved from further discussion of my angst-filled relationship with my teenage daughter by the arrival of a girl bearing skewers of cut-up strawberries and pineapple. Trixie and I both partake.
“Look,” Trixie says. “Right across from us.”
I follow her line of sight to the other side of the pool. Ms. Arizona Misty Delgado. “I like her suit.” A tankini in a burnt sienna color, with lots of ring detailing.
“Goes with her olive skin tone really well. That must be her husband.”
A buff blond guy is on the lounge next to her. They’re clearly together but they seem awkward. They’ve pushed their loungers together but their bodies are facing opposite directions.
“He’s hot,” Trixie opines, and I agree. “So why was
she
having an affair? Uh oh,” Trixie adds.
Uh oh, indeed. A kid is approaching them passing out brochures that I can read from here: VENTURA AERIAL TOURS. He hands one to Misty’s husband, who takes one look, then rises from his lounger and calmly tears the brochure into about ten pieces, which he dumps into his wife’s lap. He then walks away. Meanwhile Misty’s eyes have not left her magazine. She’s doing a good job of pretending that nothing in the least untoward has just occurred.
“I don’t think they’re going to be taking the aerial tour,” Trixie observes.
“Well, Misty’s already been flying with Dirk Ventura, if you take my meaning.”
We know that, and every YouTube aficionado knows that, thanks to the video which appeared hours before the pageant finale showing Misty and chopper pilot Dirk Ventura not exactly
in flagrante delicto
, but damn close.
“If it hadn’t been for that video,” Trixie says, “Misty would’ve been in the top five. She probably would’ve knocked me out.”
This is a pageant for married women, after all. Cavorting with men who are not your husband is verboten if you want to place, or win.
Then again, Tiffany appeared to get away with it.
“Misty wouldn’t have knocked you out,” I tell Trixie, “but she would’ve been in, I agree. So who shot that video? And uploaded it?”
Trixie is silent. It was the big mystery of the pageant until an even bigger one loomed: Who killed Tiffany Amber?
Maybe the two episodes are linked. After all, Tiffany and Misty were roommates until Misty moved out. How weird is it that the two of them were embroiled in the two big bizarro things that happened in this pageant?
“You were on that first aerial tour, right?” Trixie asks me.
I nod. I’m chewing pineapple.
“With Misty,” she prods.
I swallow. “And Ms. Alaska and Ms. New York.”
“What did you have to do to win that again?”
“Answer a math question.”
“Oh, that’s right.”
The Ms. America pageant’s two weeks of preliminary competition involve a variety of skill tests for us queens. Who can pitch a golf ball closest to the hole? Who makes the best brownies? Who can diaper a baby doll the fastest? Sometimes the winner earns points that count toward the pageant finale; other times she wins some perk. In this case, the first contestants to answer a math question correctly won an aerial tour of Oahu provided by none other than the strapping Dirk Ventura.
“What did you think of Ventura?” Trixie asks.
I ponder for a moment. Then, “I thought he was cocky. He’s a good-looking guy but he struts around. It’s like all of Oahu is a campus and he thinks he’s the Big Man On.”
“A lot of women like that.”
“Misty must. She made sure to ride shotgun during the tour and the two of them talked a lot over the headsets. I don’t think she even looked out the window. The rest of us were in the back seat and didn’t say a word.”
“You got to concentrate on the scenery.”
“Which was amazing. Diamond Head, Waikiki, Hanauma Bay …” I’ve seen things on this trip I’ll never forget. Above and beyond Tiffany Amber tumbling dead out of the isolation booth.
Trixie leans closer. “So who are you going to investigate next?”
It’s more
what
am I going to investigate next. “I don’t want to tell you because I don’t want to jinx it. Plus”
—
I hesitate
—
“it’s kind of risky.”
“So was going in Tiffany’s room! But look what that got you. You never would have known about Keola if you hadn’t smelled that citronella in there.”
“True.”
“Nancy Drew wouldn’t have solved a single mystery if she hadn’t taken risks.”
“Nancy Drew didn’t have Detective Momoa on her tail.”
“She had other impediments,” Trixie pronounces.
Somehow Trixie has a way of firing me up. I rise and drop my cover-up over my bikini. “All right, I’ll put my plan into action.” I grab my things and slip into my flip flops. “I may or may not be back.”
“Whichever. I’ll be waiting for a full report.”
“Just make sure to answer if I call from the jailhouse.”
