Rum and Razors

Table of Contents

 

 

I went to the water’s edge and stepped in far enough to cover my bare feet. It was considerably warmer than I’d expected. Still it was refreshing. I decided I would end each evening on St. Thomas with a walk on this tiny beach because I knew if I did that, no matter what else might happen, my vacation would be a success.

 

It was near midnight, so I turned to retrace my steps, stopped, lifted my right foot and examined its sole. I’d stepped on something soft. A jelly fish? Seaweed? Laurie had cautioned me to not step on, or touch certain things on the beach. “They sting,” she’d said. “A few can make you sick.”

 

I turned my body so as not to block light from the moon, and leaned over to see what had been beneath my foot. It couldn’t be. A hand? A human hand... ?

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Murder, She Wrote
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eISBN : 978-1-440-67360-3

 

 

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“GLOTCOYB.”

N
ot another one. It was the fifth envelope I’d received in the past two weeks in which a piece of paper with the letters G-L-O-T-C-O-Y-B was enclosed. So amateurish, out of a grade-B movie—letters of varying sizes and fonts cut from magazines and newspapers, and pasted next to each other on a sheet of green construction paper. No return address. No signature. Each mailed from a different neighboring town. Obviously the work of an immature prankster with nothing better to do. Get a life, as they say.

Still, my palms felt clammy as I retrieved the dirty white envelope from the mailbox, knowing that yet another nonsensical message was contained in it. The air was damp and chilled; I felt a cough brewing deep in my lungs. It had been a cold winter in Maine, an oxymoron if there ever was one.

I scurried back into the warmth of the house where the fireplace and Vermont Castings wood-stove blazed, wrapped my arms about myself and went to refill my teacup. I sat at the kitchen table, the latest of the unexplained envelopes in front of me. I breathed in the rich fragrance of Orange Pekoe drifting up from my cup. What punctuation would the sender of the message use this day? That was what was most upsetting about the mailings, the use of different punctuation each time. The first hadn’t used any. The second was “GLOTCOYB” followed by a question mark. A comma followed the third “GLOTCOYB.” The fourth letter punctuated the gobbledygook message with a period. Here was the fifth.

I opened it. “GLOTCOYS!!!” The three exclamation points delivered a sense of finality. There was something ominous about it. On the other hand, I reasoned—as we are prone to do when wishing to dismiss unpleasant thoughts—it might mean the end of the letters.

I placed the fifth piece of green paper in a file folder along with the previous four and took it, and my tea to the office where the manuscript of my latest book was neatly stacked next to the manual typewriter I’ve used to write all my murder mysteries. I sat and stared at the half-finished page in the typewriter. This latest book was close to completion. A solid day’s work would wrap it up. It was due tomorrow at my New York publisher. Ordinarily, I would have completed it well in advance of my deadline. But this winter had been anything but ordinary for me.

I’d been progressing nicely with the book when the cough started. Then came the fever. “You’ve got yourself a good case ’a pneumonia,” my good friend and physician, Seth Hazlitt, told me after a thorough examination.

“I can’t have pneumonia,” I protested. “I’m in the middle of a book.” Each word was separated by a cough.

“Ayuh, I’m well aware of that, Jessica. But you’re about to put that book aside, climb into bed, take your medicine, and get better.”

I started to protest again but was silenced with, “Maybe I better check you into the hospital. Hire guards ’round-the-clock to make sure this stubborn woman does what the doctor orders.”

And so I took to my bed, consumed all the antibiotics Seth prescribed, and “got better.” It seemed as though I was out of commission for months, although it wasn’t that long. To be truthful, I cheated after a week, forcing myself to sit at the typewriter to grind out a painful page or two before succumbing to damnable fatigue and crawling back into bed, happy to be there.

Seth eventually gave me a clean bill of health, along with the admonition that I ease back into my usual busy lifestyle. No longer a prisoner trapped within my own body, I got back to work in earnest on the book, an occasional coughing fit triggered by cold air the only reminder of the compelling endurance test I’d been through. I dove back into the novel, my fingers trying to keep up with my mind as I crafted the final, climactic scene in which my detective-heroine unravels the mystery and, through her dogged pursuit of the truth, points the finger of guilt at the murderer.

Tomorrow’s deadline loomed large, of course. But there was another inducement for me to finish. In two days I would be on a plane headed for the Caribbean island of St. Thomas for two weeks of relaxation, rum fruit punch, and spicy West Indian food, balmy ocean breezes, tropical nights on the beach, and a few good books by other writers to read while rocking lazily in a hammock strung between palm trees.

I couldn’t wait. Just what the doctor ordered. In fact, Seth had suggested I spend some time in a warm climate. So had my good friends, Walter and Laurie Marschalk, who’d left Cabot Cove three years ago to buy and manage Lover’s Lagoon Inn, a small, chic and wildly expensive hotel on St. Thomas.

They had been inviting me to be their guest ever since taking over the inn, but I never seemed to have the time. But after this winter, their sales-manship was no longer needed. I would make the time.

The notion of basking in a balmy clime was, of course, appealing. And so was the contemplation of seeing Walter and Laurie again. Before becoming an innkeeper, Walter had been a highly respected travel writer, his articles appearing in hundreds of publications. His guidebooks to exotic, off-the-beaten-track destinations were considered the best of their genre. When the Marschalks lived in Cabot Grove, Walter was away most of the year. Fortunately, Laurie was the sort of self-sufficient woman who always had a dozen projects going at once. She missed Walter, of course. But there was never a hint of unhappiness or envy. Travel, and writing about it, was what Walter did. Just that simple.

Laurie had her own career. A superb chef, she’d studied at the world’s finest cooking schools. Her book on New England cooking, published ten years earlier, was considered a classic. When she and Walter left for St. Thomas, she was in the midst of writing another cookbook, this one a virtual encyclopedia of herbal cooking.