Digging Up the Dead (22 page)

He adjusted the speed, and the Riviera settled down to a slower pace to conform to the boating limit of five knots while in the harbor.

“You haven’t even asked me if I am free to accompany you. In fact, I was on my way to the dentist.”

Blair turned his head to smirk at her. “I doubt you’d go there dressed like that; you are much too proper.”

“Proper? Really?” A smile of delight lit up her face. “I’m glad to hear you say that, because J.J. thinks I am a bit of a strange duck, especially with my parasol.”

He made no reply, and once clear of the harbor and into open water, he increased the speed, steering the boat into a wide arc before slouching back in his seat with both hands resting lightly on the wheel. Within minutes the weather radio sounded its alert. A metallic male voice broadcast a brief advisory about the fast-approaching storm.

Blair’s gaze was fixed straight ahead, but he kept the boat circling a few times as the waves began to rise higher and higher. Frightened, Tosca decided to go down to the deck. No knowing what this madman is doing, but I’ll feel safer down there, she thought, with the boat rocking the way it is. She got up from the captain’s chair and was immediately overcome with dizziness. She clutched the stair rail to steady herself. Blair put the controls on autopilot and grabbed her arms, forcing her back into the chair.

“No, Tosca, you haven’t seen my favorite place yet.”

“I have no interest in seeing it.”

“Ready for another drink? I see your glass is half empty again.”

“No, thank you,” she said, suddenly suspicious he might drug her. “The boat is rocking a bit too much for my comfort. Can you slow down?”

“It’s not the boat, Tosca, it’s the swells. The storm has come in from the Southern Hemisphere, as predicted, and pretty fast, looks like. See those clouds out there? They mean no surfing at the Wedge today due to the riptide. No one goes in the water, it’s too risky. I’ll know more when we get closer.”

“Shouldn’t we turn back?”

“We won’t go much farther. I want you to see the Wedge at its most dramatic. ”

“Graydon, while it is most kind of you to take me for a ride, I insist you take me back.”

“Don’t you want to hear about the manuscripts?”

Flustered at the abrupt change of subject, Tosca alternated between her panic at the turn of events, her anger at Blair’s refusal to turn back and intense curiosity about the books she’d discovered on the flash drive.

“Ah, yes. The manuscripts. And Sally, of course. Let’s focus on the publisher’s murder first. I assume you were the one who poisoned her, and I believe I’ve figured out how. I noticed that you never use your cigar holder. I got a good look at it at Karma’s party when you left it on the table. It’s covered by a cap, so you certainly weren’t using it to hold a cigar. Does the cap on it serve to keep something inside? A large dose of giant milkweed sap, perhaps, that you added to the White Russian you gave Sally?”

Blair twisted the wheel and made another sweeping turn, forcing Tosca to clutch the armrests with both hands as hard she could. The force of the action caused her feet to move back, kicking at her open-top tote bag under the seat. She gingerly released one hand from the armrest, reached down to steady the bag and make sure its contents were still inside. Her fingers touched her cell phone, her wallet, the keychain and the small cosmetic pouch holding a lipstick and tissues.

The boat had been bucking and rolling for several minutes, caught up in the waves that had increased alarmingly in height. Although they were still well in sight of land, the Riviera was the only boat on the water. On the beach she saw a small crowd of people gathered far enough away from the surf to watch the towering waves safely.

“I can tell you, Tosca, that you are right. I did poison Sally.”

“Why?” For once she didn’t pepper her listener with extra questions.

“Sally and I convinced Swenson to ghostwrite three books that we were going to claim were Sanderson’s lost manuscripts. Not one, but three. Swenson has been working on them for almost two years. He’d already ghostwritten Sanderson’s own last book when the author was too ill to finish it.”

“Yes, I read it and was a little taken aback by the slight change in style, but I knew Sanderson’s health was failing, and I figured that as the reason for some of it being jumbled, and one or two threads in the plot left untied. Tell me more.”

“Sally got cold feet about the three fakes we were going to claim were the lost books. She said it was too risky and, besides that, unprincipled. Stupid woman. Her business was floundering, and here we offered her a way out. That wasn’t too bad, though, because I thought, all right, I’ll break the contract and take the books to another publisher. I knew we’d get a big advance.”

“I suppose Sally threatened to sue you,” said Tosca.

“Oh, yes. She told us she was going to blow the whistle on the ghostwritten books. She also let slip she’d agreed to publish Swenson’s tell-all. She had to be silenced, of course.”

“What about the poison?”

Blair went on to explain how Karma told him about the toxicity of the giant milkweeds when he saw the blotches on her arms. When he commented on them out of sympathy, she blamed her own foolishness. She said her handyman had reminded her that the sap was poisonous, and she was a little anxious about the plants she’d added to her customers’ yards. Then she’d nicked one of the stems by mistake.

“I jokingly asked her what the plants looked like,” he said, “so I’d know enough to stay away from them. A plan was already forming in my mind. Karma took me to one of the front yards on the island where she’d planted them, so all I had to do was to go around looking in the yards and come back at night to cut the stems to fill up my cigar holder.”

As she sipped more of the Domecq, finding its taste not so great after all and in fact somewhat sour, she listened to Blair’s tale with mounting horror as he set the boat straight and headed toward the coastline. Tosca breathed a sigh of relief that he was going back to the dock, but then her head began to spin again, and although she’d never been prone to seasickness before, she was feeling more and more groggy. Had he poisoned her sherry?

She let her hand holding the glass slide to her side, spilling the rest of the drink on the floor and dropping the glass. She hoped that Blair would think she was becoming unconscious.

I can hang on until we get back to the dock, she told herself, now that Blair has decided to give himself up by his confession to me. Through half-closed eyes she watched him standing up at the controls, gripping the wheel and barely able to keep his balance as the swells became higher and higher. He continued to head inland.

“What about Swenson, Graydon?” she managed to gasp. “Tell me about Oliver.”

“The Tubby Ghost? He had to go, too. He got cold feet, just like Sally. He told us he was backing out and letting the cat out of the bag. That would ruin our plans, so I took him for a boat ride up the coast where it was clear that, sadly, he didn’t know how to swim.”

“But first you strangled him, didn’t you?”

“Uh, yes, I did. But the cops can’t pin it on me, because there’s no proof. All they have is a guitar string.”

“No, not quite, Graydon.” Tosca spoke with an effort, the narcotic taking more effect. “You didn’t use a guitar string. You strangled Swenson with the gut strings you were going to use as replacements on your Kinnor. I saw the difference when Parnell showed me the evidence bag. I know that gut has to be specially ordered from Europe. I’m sure Detective Parnell will very easily trace it back to you when I tell him how mistaken he is.”

Blair stared straight ahead, then turned and pointed to the right, toward the shore.

“Oh, look, Tosca, here we are almost at the Wedge. There’s the peninsula. My God, look at the height of those giant waves! Must be thirty feet. Never seen them that big.”

“Should you get this close to that jetty?” Her words came out with a hiss and she struggled to stay conscious. “Aren’t you afraid of the rocks?”

“Too close? Oh, no. I know exactly how close I can get before turning away. I’ve done it a few times. No, Tosca, I thought you might like to see the Wedge close up and at its most furious.”

He turned from the wheel, grabbed her arm and shoulder, lifted her bodily from the chair and shoved her off the flybridge and into the broiling water. “I don’t have a body board to loan you, but it would get torn apart against the rocks anyway,” he called as she sank below the waves. “Watch out for the riptide, it’s an awesome, terrifying experience. It will kill you!”

He turned the boat around as if on a dime, despite lurching violently from side to side in the heavy seas, and sped away.

The shock of the cold water brought Tosca’s senses alive. She suddenly felt free of the effects of her drugged drink. Sputtering and spitting out seawater, she kicked her legs and rose to the surface. In an instant she was sucked back down again as the Wedge’s infamous undertow tried to claim its latest victim. Her head hit the sandy, stony ocean floor, snapping her neck back.

The roar of the roiling surf as she was rolled over and over like a doll in a cement mixer told her she was in a deep underwater shore break where the land dropped steeply off, forming a strong backwash that dragged her down again and again. The noise was terrifying, as if a freight train was bearing down on her.

“Think, Tosca,” she told herself. “Think. What did my father tell me when he was teaching me to swim in Cornwall? What was it he said when he made me swim into those terrible waves crashing against the rocks in St. Ives? Yes, yes, that’s it. Swim parallel to the coast!”

The next time she came up from the riptide she twisted her body to the right, away from the rock jetty where the swells were the highest. She struck out as strongly as she could using the butterfly stroke, one of the most difficult to master but one of the most powerful and effective that her father had taught her. She focused on kicking her legs and using every bit of strength to swim parallel with the coastline instead of toward the beach. It was the natural instinct of every swimmer trying to escape the sea to head for shore, but her only way to beat the monstrous waves was to go against that instinct and fight her way through the troughs.

Trying to get into a rhythm, but having to crest some of the waves as they became smaller the farther north she swam away from the jetty, she managed to keep going. Every time her head broke free of the surface, her arm muscles burning with the effort of every stroke, she glanced toward the beach to ensure she kept it on her right.

She saw a small line of people watching the waves. She tried to signal them but the high waves blocked the view, and high winds were sending the sand swirling in every direction. Their faces were turned away, toward the jetty she had just escaped.

Tosca’s sandals had been lost, and her shorts had been torn off by the riptide, but her halter top clung to her body. Deciding she had moved far enough away from danger, leaving the undertow behind, she realized she could now turn and swim toward the shore. The waves were still high, though, and she struggled to stay afloat.

Moments later Tosca believed she was close enough to the beach to feel firm sand beneath her feet. She let her feet touch the ocean floor. The water reached only up to her waist. Struggling, groggy and exhausted, her legs almost buckling beneath her, she managed to keep her balance long enough to step onto the beach.

Tosca lay down on the sand, gasping, trying to slow her breathing down to normal. She was grateful that her stretch bikini underwear had survived the trauma. In fact, she realized, anyone looking at her would figure she was wearing a two-piece swimsuit and had just finished a swim.

After a while she was able to stand and slowly looked around, believing she must have swum at least ten miles although, when she saw the Isabel Island pier jutting out on the Newport Beach Peninsula, it must have been only a mile or so. Satisfied and relieved she was now safe, she looked around. The beach was empty, the heavy, low dark clouds moving slowly.

“So I guess I have not landed in Fiji or Bali, then. Just almost back where I started.”

She saw blood on her arms and legs where the skin had been scraped, but she determined it was mostly surface scratches from the gravel on the ocean floor. The worst damage was to her feet where the skin on the tops of her toes was badly lacerated. She sat back down again to rest some more and muttered. “Right, Mr. Blair. Be warned. I am coming for you.”

When she felt strong enough to walk and seek help to get to a telephone or even a ride home, Tosca walked barefoot, shivering with cold and exhaustion, toward the nearest house. She was glad that the stormy weather was keeping people away from the beach. Despite her condition and the situation, she felt she looked an awful fright with bloody limbs and dripping wet hair plastered with sand.

Normally, beachgoers wore as little as possible and being shoeless and practically naked were common sights. The left side of her face was painful, and she touched the area carefully, deciding the long scratches on it, as if raked by fingernails, had been caused by the riptide’s sharp undersea pebbles as she was dragged across the bottom.

She looked back across the beach to the Wedge, only several hundred yards away, where the huge waves were still pounding the shore. No surfers were brave enough to challenge its danger, and only a few people stood well back on the beach to observe for a few minutes before leaving.

Tosca realized she was on the Peninsula, a three-mile stretch of land shaped like a fat snake with the Wedge jetty jutting out like a striking tongue. The area was an eclectic mix of expensive homes and low-priced student and surfer rentals. The closer to the ocean, the pricier the mansion, despite being spaced close to its neighbors like those on Isabel Island.

At its west end the Peninsula fed into the mainland of Newport Beach and was surrounded by Newport Bay on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. This section of the Peninsula, Lido Isle, was crammed with restaurants, bookstores and galleries and was crowded year-round. Tosca and J.J. occasionally dined there at the Crab Shack, and Thatch took her to his favorite surfer bar near the beach. The other end of the Peninsula, where the Wedge was located, was almost palatial, judging by its homes.