Third Degree (25 page)

“What are you doing down there?” I heard Greg bellow from above me.

“Nothing!” I bellowed back, throwing the envelope across the room as if it were a hot iron that I had picked up in error. The pictures flew from the envelope and scattered across every flat surface. I sat on the bed and put my head between my legs. Between my panic at being brought out to the middle of the river and seeing what could only be described as extremely unpleasant amateur shots of a sexual nature, I was feeling queasy. The boat continued its steady path toward the deeper part of the river, a competent Greg at the helm.

If Ginny Miller had thought that the photos that Carter had posted on his Web site were incriminating and unflattering, they had nothing on this set of prints. Seems that
The Lydia
did more than sail; the boat also provided the trysting spot for Carter and Ginny, whose naked body was prominently featured in every single photo.

I don’t know how long I sat but at some point during that time, I realized that there was only one reason that Ginny Miller had been on
The Lydia
and it was to find those pictures, something that she was unable to accomplish before her death. She had lied to me about her original intent but that didn’t matter. She had found the arsenic … or had she? Had the arsenic already been in her possession? One thing I did know was that George Miller was never going to see those pictures if I had anything to say about it. I picked them all up and shoved them in the back of my waistband, thinking that we would have a bonfire later this evening when I was home and in the pleasant company of Kevin and Queen.

Greg appeared in the doorway of the cabin just as I had finished shoving the pictures into my underwear. “What are you doing?”

“I’m looking for a life preserver,” I said. And that was the truth. I just hadn’t been successful in my quest and I had come across a set of photographs that would require me to gouge my eyes out when I returned home.

He opened a door in the floor that I hadn’t noticed and pulled out a bright orange flotation device. He tossed it to me. “Why do you want a life preserver? Planning on going for a swim?”

I grabbed the life preserver and held it in my hand. “I can’t swim.”

“Dude! Really?”

Why does this shock everyone so much? So I can’t swim. It’s not a skill that’s required on a regular basis and it certainly is one that you can avoid having to do if you’re smart and prepare ahead. I got a little indignant. “No. I can’t swim,” I said, starting for the stairs. I pulled the life preserver over my head. “You got a problem with that?”

Greg followed me back up to the main deck. “No. It’s just surprising. You look like someone who’d be able to swim.”

“And what does someone who’d be able to swim look like?”

“Like you. Tall. In pretty good shape.” He walked back up to the steering wheel. “Broad shoulders.”

“Let’s end this conversation before I have to kill you,” I said. “Can we go back now? I don’t want to go for a ride.”

“This is really freaking you out?”

“Yes. It’s really freaking me out. Please, can we go back?”

He fiddled with some dials on the dashboard and turned around. “You got it.” He smiled, something that he had done a lot since I had boarded the boat and which had put me at ease. “Sheesh—you see a guy die of arsenic poisoning in my shop and you don’t freak out, but we go for a little boat ride and you become a complete mental case.”

“Wait,” I said before I could think. “Arsenic?”

“Yeah,” Greg said casually.

A pregnant beat hung heavy in the air, both of us realizing at the same time that there had been no mention in the paper about exactly what kind of poison had been used to kill Carter. Greg looked down at me, and seemed to read my mind, which wasn’t hard; I don’t have much of a poker face. “Hey, let’s continue the ride,” he said cheerily.

My fencing skills were going to come in really handy now, I thought, as I watched the twinkling lights of the village fade. As were my scrapbooking abilities. That was another class that I had been subjected to by my mother, her hope being that I would meet other nice nerdy girls with similar interests. I looked over the side of the boat and stared into the murky depths of the Hudson, trying to judge exactly how far we were from shore and how deep the water was. I pulled the straps of the life preserver around my body and attempted to tighten them. No luck. It was so dark that I couldn’t see what I was doing, and it became immediately apparent that whoever had worn it prior to me had the circumference of a three-year-old. The straps wouldn’t come all the way around and they wouldn’t reach the buckles in which they needed to be inserted.

From his perch, I heard Greg muttering. “Gosh, dude, I wish you hadn’t followed me.”

“You poisoned him,” I said. I continued to fiddle with the straps, my fingers shaking.

Greg looked at me, still in front of the steering wheel, sad.

“God, Greg! What were you thinking?” I asked. I hugged the life preserver, my arms wrapped tightly across its puffed front.

“That guy ruined me!” he said, taking a step away from the steering wheel and closer to me. “Have you read any of the shit he posted on his blog? Every week, the same thing. And still he had the nerve to come into Beans, Beans every day! Like nothing had ever happened between us. It was all I could do not to kill him with my bare hands.”

“So you poisoned him.”

“So I poisoned him! I didn’t mean to kill him,” he protested. “I just wanted to make him sick. To keep him away.”

“If that’s the case, Greg, he’d be writing about how Beans, Beans made him sick. And you’d still be out of business.” I thought it necessary to point that out. That turned out to be a giant miscalculation on my part. Greg exploded.

“Do you know how long it took me to save up enough money to open that place? It might seem like a shit hole to you, but to me, it’s everything! And because of that bastard, I’ve lost everything! I can’t pay my rent, I can’t pay my vendors …” He looked at me closely, his face grim. “And now, dude, I can’t serve you coffee.”

Which, to me, was code for “And now, dude, I have to kill you,” because the look of sadness on Greg’s face just barely masked the rage beneath. He stepped all the way down the stairs and in one deft, strong motion pulled the life preserver over my head, tossing it to the other end of the boat.

“It all makes sense now. The nasty blog posts, the comments from Coffee Lover … Greg, you need to turn yourself in.”

He stopped walking toward me, a few feet separating us. “You know, I’d heard things about you. That you were nosy. Even a little crazy. Too smart for your own good. But I didn’t believe them because I’ve always liked you, Alison.” He frowned. “But now I’m not so sure. I’m disappointed, dude.”

“Yeah, me, too,” I said. “I never pegged you for someone who could kill.”

“I’m not,” he said.

“Yeah, well, what about the poisoning?” I asked. I swatted at a mosquito who was dining on my cheek.

“I already told you. I never meant to kill him.”

I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. He certainly seemed sincere but Lord knows I’ve been wrong before, reading a situation completely incorrectly and finding myself in a heap of trouble. I had known Greg in a casual capacity for several years and had never gotten the vibe that he was anything but an aging hippie who made terrible coffee and who didn’t have great business sense, based on some of his promotional activities. The Prostate Awareness Month promotion had been a huge disaster, what with its promise of providing men over fifty free blood tests and a free cup of coffee to make sure their PSA levels weren’t too high. Overzealous phlebotomists had lined the streets trying to entice older gentlemen into the store. I hope he had learned, like I did, that men didn’t want to think about their prostates when a cup of coffee was all they desired.

“How many ways can a man die?” I asked. I was thinking out loud. “Carter Wilmott had a lot of strikes against him and he was going to die one way or the other. He had a terminal illness—”

“He did?”

I nodded. “And then there was the car that was destined to blow up, coupled with the fight,” I said, making my way closer to Greg as I began to exit the vessel. “And finally, the poisoning.”

Even in the faded light, I saw Greg’s face change and it was then that I knew what was going to happen next.

I entered the water and now knew what it meant to hit something like “a ton of bricks.” My descent wasn’t pretty or especially graceful. I didn’t know what hurt worse: the feeling in my chest from doing a complete belly flop or the icy sting on my skin from water that should have been a lot warmer considering it was the end of the summer. Either way, it was damn uncomfortable, so uncomfortable, in fact, that I didn’t even register that I was drowning.

I sank deep beneath the surface of the water, watching the twinkling lights of the village and the dock become less defined and take on a golden glow the lower I went in the brown water. As I sank, I became aware that we weren’t as far from shore as I would have thought and, for some reason, this gave me comfort. Would my lifeless body be found sooner as a result? The water was deeper than I had imagined it would be and I sank like a stone, trying not to flail too much and exert too much energy. My dress pants, which had felt like the appropriate weight for wear on a summer day, were now heavy and weighing me down, along with the light linen shirt that I had donned that morning. My shoes, lovely black pumps, were gone, having fallen off somewhere between being flung into the river and my rapid descent. They were lost to the watery depths of the Hudson, never to be seen again.

The pictures of Ginny Miller and Carter Wilmott, in flagrante delicto, floated out from my waistband and away from me, lost forever to the dark depths of the Hudson River. In all probability, George Miller would never learn of Ginny’s infidelity. Too bad Ginny and I both had to die in order to protect her secret.

As I continued to sink, I observed Greg’s blurry face looking down at me from above, obviously not concerned at all that I was going to drown. After a few seconds, he turned and walked away, and it was then that I began to panic. The flailing began as I tried to hold my breath, even as I knew my lungs were close to bursting.

I thought about my mother, and if I hadn’t already been completely soaked, I would have begun to cry. A deep sadness welled up in me as I thought about how I had been manipulated by Ginny into helping her, not really knowing if she had attended to my mother during her illness or not. Maybe she had. Or maybe she had just used that information, easy enough to find out if one had access to hospital records and online obituaries, to make me feel sympathetic toward her. I had gone along with the whole thing, using my heart instead of my head, a sure recipe for disaster, particularly in this instance. My mother’s beautiful face appeared in front of me, the picture of health. I relaxed, filled with a kind of peace that I had never experienced in my life. The flailing stopped and I allowed myself to drift along in the dark waters of the river, not feeling the cold, not feeling the pain. I continued my slow descent to the bottom of the river.

My happiest memories of my mother flooded my mind—the summers we spent in Baie Ste. Paul together visiting family; the day she let me drive the car by myself the first time; the time she brought home my puppy, Coco, and presented her to me on my birthday. How she used to say
“je t’aime … je t’aime … je t’aime …”
exactly three times as she kissed my forehead every night before I went to sleep. And how, at the end, she was more concerned about me than she was about herself. I wondered if this was how she felt when her time was short, wrapped in the warm embrace of a death that came too soon and not soon enough.

She offered me her hand.

“Just relax and stay still. I’ll help you,” I heard just before blacking out.