Page 87 of Sunburned

“And neither did I,” Cody said, his patience growing thin. “This is ridiculous.”

“It will be more easy to run the company without him, no?” Gisèle prodded, her gaze bouncing between Cody and Allison.

“No.” Cody’s chair scraped the deck as he pushed it back and stood. “You know nothing about it.”

Samira raised her chin, a note of warning in her voice. “You will be surprised how much he told me.”

“At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised by anything my brother did,”Cody said darkly as he strode toward the phone on the wall. “But that doesn’t mean I had anything to do with his death.”

“Which brings me back to my earlier point,” Allison said coolly. “Tyson was a complicated man, and we all had complicated relationships with him. It doesn’t do us any good to turn on each other.”

“But one of us did kill him,” Jennifer pointed out.

“And that person isn’t going to confess just because you accuse them,” Allison leveled.

She was right about that. Accusations would only make the killer more careful about covering their tracks.

“We’d like dinner now,” Cody said into the receiver. “And please send up staff to take care of us. We no longer wish to be left alone.”

He hung up and spun to face the table. “Enough of this. We’ll have a civil dinner.”

As he sat heavily into his chair, running his fingers through his hair exactly the way his brother used to, I had to blink to make sure I wasn’t seeing a ghost.

Chapter 31

Shortly after the chateaubriand arrived, I excused myself from the table. The steak was delicious, but I realized this might be the only time before we left the boat tomorrow that everyone was in one place, allowing me to slip away and explore their rooms.

No matter their protests, someone at this table was a killer, and I didn’t want to think about what might happen to me if that person caught me snooping.

No one asked where I was going, but as Samira moved aside to let me out of the banquette, I muttered something about needing to take my medicine. I had no medicine, but I didn’t want anyone to wonder why I felt the need to go all the way downstairs, when there was a powder room on the other side of the game room, just a few steps away.

Unfortunately, the entry to the primary suite was up the stairs, which were in full view of the table, so instead I hurried down the staircase, hoping for the chance to pop into Cody’s and Allison’s rooms on the main deck. But that was not to be, either, as the staff was busy in the lounge cleaning up our mess from earlier in the evening.

“Can I help you?” one of the girls asked as I passed.

“Just forgot something in my room,” I said.

I scurried down to the cabin level, relieved to find it quiet and empty, and slipped into my room, where I disconnected my phone from the charger and pocketed it. I had just stepped back into the hallway when a crew girl carrying cleaning supplies came down the stairs. She smiled at me as she went into Rémy’s room.

That left me a choice between Gisèle’s and Laurent’s rooms.

It was only becoming harder for me to be impartial about Laurent, so if he was involved in Tyson’s death, the sooner I found out about it, the better. With a furtive glance over my shoulder, I quietly opened the door to his cabin and slipped inside.

It was laid out exactly like mine, a queen-size bed centered in the room, the gym clothes he’d been wearing earlier left in a pile on the comforter, next to his open canvas duffel bag. Feeling like a traitor, I ruffled through his stuff, relieved when I found nothing out of the ordinary. I extracted a French paperback and flipped through it, but Laurent was apparently not a person who annotated as he read.

His bookmark, however, caught my attention.

It was a printed receipt from a company called EazyShip, for the amount of €3,950 for the transport of one 1995 Land Rover Defender from St. Barth’s to Port of Calais, France, departing on April 10.

That was roughly three weeks from now. Laurent hadn’t mentioned shipping his car back to France, but perhaps he was selling it, or giving it to a family member? Regardless, I snapped a photo of the paper and replaced the book in the bag, then stepped into the hallway, taking comfort in the fact that I hadn’t found any incriminating evidence in his room.

I could hear the vacuum going in Rémy’s cabin, so I stole across the hallway to Gisèle’s.

Her room was a mirror of mine and Laurent’s, her silver hard-shell suitcase stowed in the corner, two dresses hanging in the closet. The bathroom was spotless, her matching monogrammed toiletries and makeup bags resting on the counter. I hoisted Gisèle’s suitcase onto the bed and unlatched it to find her clothes neatly folded inside.

I’d just started to go through a stack of T-shirts when I heard thedoor to Rémy’s room open and close. I looked desperately around for a place to hide, but the closet was tiny, the bed built into the floor. Praying that the maid would go into Laurent’s room, I darted into the bathroom, closing myself inside just as I heard the door open and someone enter. I held my breath, listening to the maid whistle as she began to clean Gisèle’s room. There was nowhere to hide in the tiny bathroom, not so much as a shower curtain. I had to get rid of her before she came in and found me.

I swallowed my nerves.

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