Death Will Extend Your Vacation Read Free Page B

scene tape.
    The CS folks literally sifted sand. Detective Butler did the verbal equivalent when she questioned me. She wasn’t hostile, but she was thorough. Clea probably hadn’t even handled the two bagels I’d eaten, but Butler sure was interested in the fact she’d bought them. I didn’t much like admitting that I couldn’t have afforded a share in the Hamptons if Jimmy hadn’t paid for it. But I couldn’t think of any reason not to tell her. The point was that I hadn’t picked the house or known who’d be there before the season started.
    I hated to do it, but I broke the house’s anonymity. Butler had trouble understanding how people could share a house without knowing each other’s last names. I could only repeat, “It didn’t come up,” so many times before I broke down and mentioned AA and other twelve-step programs. They interviewed me first, since I’d been alone with Clea’s body the longest— if they believed what all three of us said about how long it had taken Barbara to walk down there, see she was dead, and run back. I didn’t know what Jimmy and Barbara would say. Jimmy holds the program sacred, and he has a lot of self-control. Barbara has the discretion of a mouse, but she loves the program too. I didn’t know how they’d feel when the detective said, “Mr. Kohler told us it’s a clean and sober house.” I’ve tried not to disappoint Jimmy since I got sober. I’ve got a lot of bad years to make up for.
    Once they’d finished with the three of us, we still had to hang around while they looked for evidence of any connection with Clea and what had happened to her. Checking all our belongings, including the car, took ages. They let us sit on the beach. The sun beat down on us. People started walking by and had to be stopped from continuing on toward what I thought of as the real scene. A few turned and walked the other way. Most of them stayed and gawked.
    “This is embarrassing,” Barbara said. “They’ll think we’re criminals.”
    I opened my mouth and shut it again. Why bother asking a chronic codependent why she cares what other people think?
    “Speaking of turning red,” Jimmy said, “if I don’t get out of this sun soon, we are all going to regret it by this evening.”
    “Oh, baby, no!” Barbara exclaimed. “Let me tell them. They’ve got to give you the sun block or let you sit under the umbrella.” They’d both be up all night if Jimmy got a bad sunburn.
    She started to jump up, but Jimmy pulled her back down.
    “I can do it myself, petunia.”
    He used his grip on her arm to lever himself from the sand where we were sitting to a standing position.
    “Officer!” he called. The uniformed guy was still there, keeping an eye on us and acting as a gofer for the detectives. “Is it okay if we move into the shade?”
    “Sure, go ahead.”
    The shadow the umbrella cast had moved off the blanket. We moved it and plunked ourselves down again. Officer Mike even got a tube of sun block from the patrol car and handed it to Jimmy.
    “I’m starving,” Barbara announced.
    “Sorry, ma’am. Can’t help you there. Please be patient. It won’t be much longer.”
    He lied. There was a mild commotion when another police car squealed into the lot and headed down the track. I would have thought they’d use four-wheel drive vehicles, which could go on the beach. But tire tracks would stir up the sand, maybe contaminate the crime scene. Worse, they might damage a baby piping plover. Lewis, the guy who’d organized our house, had already told us that not just Dedhampton, but the whole East End, got passionate about environmental issues. Actually, the word he used was “nuts.”
    “Look, it’s Lewis,” Barbara said, “in the back of that police car.”
    “You’re right,” Jimmy said. “He’s so tall that that firecracker hair of his is practically hitting the roof of the cop car.”
    “I bet they asked him to identify the body,” Barbara said. “Wouldn’t he