“For Godsake, woman.”
“Don’t make me a widow,” she told him.
He narrowed an eye at her. “The day I can’t swim out as far as that dinghy, I might as well be dead.” He winked, then grabbed her upper arms, pulled her against him and planted a big kiss on her mouth. “That’ll have to last you till I get back.”
“I wish you wouldn’t go.”
“Christ, now, you’re gonna jinx me!” He smacked her on the rump.
Hard enough to make her flinch and wince.
“Back in a flash,” he said.
Then he whirled around and marched with a jaunty swagger toward the water.
“The idiot,” Billie muttered. Even though she was annoyed, she seemed proud of him.
“He’ll be all right,” Connie said. “He can swim that far without even getting winded.”
“He is in great shape,” Billie admitted.
The way he was wading through the knee-deep water, I thought he looked rather like an old, bow-legged monkey. But I kept the observation to myself.
“Should I go with him?” I asked Billie.
“Get real,” Connie said.
“I wasn’t asking you.”
“He wouldn’t like it,” Billie told me, not taking her eyes off Andrew. “He thinks he’s perfectly capable of doing everything.”
“Made me climb the tree and cut down Keith yesterday,” I said.
Billie shook her head. “Did he? He isn’t fond of heights.”
“Dad’ll be fine in the water,” Connie said.
The water of the inlet was very shallow. Andrew waded out nearly as far as the point before he began to swim. Because of the reef, there was no real surf. Just small, calm waves that shouldn’t give a swimmer any trouble at all. He moved along smoothly, taking his time. The dinghy kept drifting farther away, but he was slowly gaining on it.
The next thing I knew, Kimberly stood beside me.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi,” she said. “What’s happening?”
“Your father’s swimming out to get the dinghy.”
“That’s our dinghy out mere?”
“Yeah.”
“How’d it get away?”
“We don’t know,” I said.
Billie joined in, saying, “Andrew thinks the killer snuck in and set it adrift last night.”
“Jesus,” Kimberly muttered. She put a hand against her brow to shade her eyes. “It sure is far out there.”
“We were going to have you go for it,” Billie said, “but your father insisted on doing it himself.”
“He didn’t want to wake you up,” I added.
“Figures,” Kimberly said. Then, without asking for advice or permission, she flung off Keith’s shirt and bolted for the water. She didn’t jog, she sprinted. It was great to watch. She dashed over the beach, shiny black hair flowing behind her, arms swinging, long legs striding out, feet kicking up sand, then water. The water flew as she splashed forward. It sparkled in the sunlight. It gleamed on her dark shoulders and back and legs.
“He doesn’t need her,” Connie whined. “God! She always has to butt in and take over.”
“It’s fine,” Billie said.
“Yeah, sure. What’s the point, anyhow? She isn’t even gonna catch up to htm in time.”
I’d been watching Kimberly splash through the water, but now I looked past her. It took a few seconds to spot the dinghy. And there was Andrew, closing in on it.
I got my eyes back to Kimberly in time to watch her dive. She vanished under the waves for a few moments, then surfaced and began to swim with quick, sharp strokes.
Man, she was fast!
Not fast enough, though.
She was only about halfway there when Andrew arrived at the dinghy.
“He made it,” Billie said.
Way off in the distance, he reached up out of the water with both hands. He grabbed a gunnel near the bow. Then someone stood up in the dinghy.
I thought I’d have a heart attack.
Connie made a gasp.
Billie cried out, “My God!”
We couldn’t see who it was. We couldn’t even see whether it was a man or woman. Just that it was a person, and that it came up suddenly out of the bottom of the boat and raised an object overhead with both hands.
The object looked like an ax.
It swung down and appeared to strike Andrew on top of his head. He let go of the gunnel.
He vanished under the water.
I felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach.
Connie went nuts. She started shrieking, “Dad! Dad!”
But Billie kept her head. Like me, she must’ve known it was a waste of time to cry out for Andrew. If we’d seen things right, he was past help.
Kimberly was the one in danger, now.
She was still swimming toward the dinghy. Hadn’t she seen? Maybe she had seen, and planned to do something about it.
Billie shouted, “Kim! Kim! Watch out! Get back here!”
“What’s happening?” Thelma called. I glanced around and saw her staggering toward us.
Billie ignored her and kept yelling at Kimberly.
Connie was on her hands and knees, head up, staring out toward the scene of the murder, shrieking, “Dad!”
I flung my shoes away and hit the water at a run.
God only knows what I hoped to accomplish.
Save Kimberly, I guess.
As I splashed my way forward, I heard the sound of a motor. So I stopped running. In water up to my thighs, I saw the dinghy start moving away to the right. The killer sat hunched over low at the stern, steering.
Maybe it was Wesley.
Could’ve been almost anyone.
The boat picked up speed.
Kimberly kept swimming, but the boat was long gone by the time she reached the place where it had been.
Three Down, One to Go
I’m the only guy left. On the surface, that might be an enviable position. Here I am, the lone male marooned on a tropical island with four women.
There’s one big drawback, though.
The other three males have been killed in quick succession. (That’s if you include Wesley, who is dead unless he’s the killer.)
The women are still here, intact.
Makes me think it isn’t safe to be a man on this island.
In other words, guess who’s next?
I’m not sure what to do about it. I can’t exactly leave—the killer made off with our dinghy. No telling where it might be, by now. The last I saw, it was heading toward the north end of the island. Kimberly and I had just dragged Andrew’s body onto the rocks around the end of the point. (About where Billie and I did the dishes last night.) Now that I’ve seen the wound, there’s no doubt that the weapon was an ax. It chopped Andrew’s head pretty much in half all the way down to his jaw. The back of his head was still intact, sort of. But the front was split open wide—including his face. Bloody yuck was slopping out when we pulled him onto the rocks. I’ve never seen such an awful mess in my life. You wouldn’t even know who he was, if all you had to go by was his face.
It was terrible for Kimberly to see her father that way. Ironic, too. He’d tried like mad, yesterday, to protect her from the shock of seeing Keith’s body. Now here he was, ruined a lot worse than Keith—and he couldn’t do anything about it.
I threw up.
Not Kimberly, though. After we hauled him out of the water, she sat on the rocks with her back to both of us. She was facing out to sea, her legs bent, her arms around her shins. It was the same way she’d sat for a long time yesterday on the beach after she’d finished with Keith’s body.
The dinghy, by then, was almost out of sight.
I thought about sitting down with Kimberly and maybe putting an arm around her. I sure wanted to do that. Comfort her. But it might look as if I was trying to put moves on her, so I gave up the notion.