“So what are we supposed to do if the police search our cabin and find the goods?” persisted Grace. “Plead the Fifth, throw ourselves on the mercy of the court, or send them down to Alice’s cabin? She swiped a lot more than my Dick.”
Alice gasped. She threw me a desperate look. “They can’t arrest me, can they, Emily? It would be so unfair. I’ve never even had a parking ticket.”
“Don’t listen to Grace,” I soothed. “She was just pulling your leg.”
“No I wasn’t,” quipped Grace.
Dick studied his wife’s face, thunderstruck. “Grace Stolee, I can’t believe my ears. After all you and Alice have meant to each other through the years? The friendship, and church groups, and book clubs, and fundraisers? What kind of heartless creature are you? Can you actually sit there and tell me you’d be willing to throw Alice under the bus to save me?”
“Damned straight.”
He threw his shoulders back, his chest swelling with pride, his eyes a little dewy. “Aw, shucks, honeybun. That’s the nicest thing you’ve said to me in decades.”
“Okay, that settles it.” Alice dusted off her hands. “I’m throwing my stash over the balcony rail. Sentence commuted.” She arched a self-satisfied brow at the Stolees before turning back to me. “If the police don’t know I have the rocks, they can’t haul me away for destroying evidence, can they?”
My eyelid began twitching like a Mexican jumping bean doing the Macarena.
Tilly thumped her walking stick on the deck. “I’m not so sure I’d count on the police conducting a cabin-to-cabin search. If Krystal ingested an over-the-counter drug, like aspirin, ibuprofen, or acetaminophen, a search would be entirely futile. All of us probably carry the big three. But if she overdosed on an exotic prescription drug, now that’s a different matter.”
“If I killed someone with meds I brung with me,” said Nana, “I’m chuckin’ ’em over the side with Alice’s rocks. No way I’m lettin’ anyone find ’em in my pill caddy.”
“Are you sure it was pills?” asked George. “What if the killer used something more common, like a cleaning compound or hair product or … or hand sanitizer?”
Alice sucked in her breath. “You think Margi did it? Oh, my stars. Why would she kill someone after buying all those new clothes? They’ll never let her wear them in prison.”
“Margi Swanson did not kill anyone,” I stated firmly. “And furthermore, we don’t have any information about when Krystal ingested the drug, so no one’s going to know anything until someone figures that out.”
“Emily’s right,” Tilly agreed. “If the drug was fast acting, the implication would be that someone on the tour might have slipped it to her. But if it was slower acting, then she could have ingested it even before she boarded the plane. Is it possible that someone back home wanted her dead?”
Uff-da. I hadn’t thought of that. Bobbi and Dawna had reason to want her out of the picture, but had someone back in Texas beaten them to it? “I’ve just realized that I don’t know anything about Krystal other than she was blonde, beautiful, turned heads, had a fondness for snakeskin, and was probably the top sales rep for her cosmetic company.” I regarded the gang expectantly. “Anyone want to volunteer to dig up more background on her?” This was the nifty part of traveling with seniors with major iPhone addictions. They were always looking for an excuse to surf the Web.
Breathing stopped. Heads froze. Eyes shifted. Phones remained idle in their hands.
Hunh. What was wrong with this picture? They should have been gunning to see who could access Google first by now. I frowned. Ohhh, I got it. “Cell signal down?”