Death Will Extend Your Vacation Read Free

someone who wanted her dead.
    I wished I had a cigarette. Better, the whole pack. I’d left them in Barbara’s backpack down the beach. Maybe they’d think to bring them. And coffee. I needed an antidote to sudden death. Booze had always topped my list. Did I want it now? Probably.
Too bad, buddy
, I told myself. As they said in AA, I didn’t need that one more problem. I had a feeling life was about to get complicated. Welcome to Deadhampton.
    I heard a shout and looked up to see Jimmy and Barbara plodding toward me. With them were a couple of guys in uniforms. I waved, then shivered as a gust of wind swept across the beach, stirring the tangle of curls and seaweed in Clea’s hair. I closed my eyes against the sting of sand. She didn’t.

Chapter Three
    “Full name, sir,” the younger of the two cops said, “and spell it, please.”
    He looked no more than thirty, with bright blue eyes and rosy cheeks. His thumbs flew over the touch screen of his mobile device. When I thought how hard I’d struggled to learn touch typing so I could temp, I felt old.
    “Bruce Kohler,” I said. “K-O-H-L-E-R.”
    “Local address.”
    “We told you—” Barbara burst out. She seemed to have recovered her moxie.
    “It’s okay, Barbara,” Jimmy and I said simultaneously.
    “We have our procedures, ma’am. Mike, why don’t you escort Ms. Rose and Mr. Cullen over there.” He jerked his head at the stump of a log half-buried in sand, about fifty feet away.
    Jimmy shushed Barbara’s protest at being called “ma’am.” He and the other cop, whose steel blue five-o’clock shadow made him look older, herded her toward the log.
    My cop’s cell phone rang.
    “Yes, sir. Arrived on scene. Yes, sir. No, sir. We’re about to secure the scene. Uh, extended.”
    He gestured toward the other cop. If I read the signals right, he was telling him to go get the car and start circling the wagons. I wondered how they planned to secure a beach.
    “Ten-sixty-one,” the officer said. I could hear an exasperated quacking on the other end of the line. “Sorry, sir. Witnesses present— I’m just getting their information. Ten-four— uh, affirmative. Yes. No. Understood, sir.” He thumbed the phone to end the call and slid it back onto his belt. “Bring it up behind the dunes, Mike,” he called.
    He cast a stern glance at Jimmy and Barbara, who sat obediently on their log.
    “Now, Mr. Kohler.”
    I arranged my face to look sincere and cooperative. I had to remind myself that I was just a witness. To tell the truth, cops made me nervous. I’d spent too much of my life out of control or unable to remember. Feeling threatened was one of those things I’d always done drunk and now had to learn to do sober. God grant me the serenity.
    He didn’t ask me anything I didn’t know. I kept my answers as straight as I could. To my relief, he stayed at the shallow end. He had just walked me over to the log to sit with the rest of the class when Mike came back, sliding over the dunes with his arms full. I guess they didn’t want to add police car tire tracks to a scene that even I could see would be hard to read. Mike started sticking stakes in the ground and stringing yellow crime scene tape between them.
    “Tide’s coming in, Frank,” he said as he rounded the seaward end of Clea’s body.
    “Do the best you can. Detectives are on their way, and we’ve got at least an hour.”
    “Got it.” Mike shoved a stake in the spongy surface that would be completely covered when the tide came all the way in. Bubbles formed around the area and spread outward, as if tiny sea animals were running for their lives.
    “How far do I take it?”
    “Back to where these folks came on the scene,” Frank said. “You can secure their car separately.”
    “Our car?” I blurted. “Sorry, but— how do we get back to the house? It’s at least four miles.”
    “The whole area has to be secured,” Frank said. “It will be a while before you can