“So what are we going to do with Courtney? Dump her in the ocean?” Jill asked.
“We can’t do that!” Annette cried. “Someone might see us!”
“We can’t do that because, on the off chance that this scheme to find the murderer actually works, we’re going to have to provide the police with Courtney’s corpse.” Dottie was blunt.
“So we need to store her somewhere.” Josie couldn’t imagine where. “What we need is some sort of large refrigerator or a freezer. Can you tell if a body’s been frozen after it thaws out?”
“Haven’t the foggiest,” Dottie answered.
“Well, if it got freezer burn…” Jill seemed about to giggle and Annette snorted.
Josie realized they were all tired and very close to hysteria. “Sam has a large refrigerator at the back of the store. I don’t know how we could sneak her in there-”
“No way.” Dottie was adamant.
“What’s wrong with that? We can trust Sam.”
“I’m not trusting anyone who was a prosecutor, I can tell you that right now.”
“If it weren’t for Sam, you wouldn’t be here. You might not even have a job. You might not have gotten parole,” Josie protested.
“You think he’s going to break the law just to keep me out of prison?”
It didn’t sound all that likely to Josie either. Maybe they could hide the body in his refrigerator without him knowing.
Jill seemed to read her mind. “How big is this refrigerator? Maybe we could sort of shove her in a place where she won’t be found.”
“I’ve got it!” Excited, Josie jumped up. “We can put it… her down in one of the freezers behind the Fish Wish.”
“That’s a restaurant?”
“It’s the bait shop. And they have a freezer in the back of the store just filled with boxes and boxes of frozen moss bunker. We could put Courtney underneath. She’ll be safe there for months-they don’t get down to the bottom of that freezer until late August.”
“And what are you going to do? Just walk in and ask if you can use their freezer to store a famous television personality?”
“No, I thought maybe we could sneak in there in the middle of the night and put her away. I have the key to their back door. We’re going to be adding a deck out back as soon as we finish this job.”
“Then I guess we know what we have to do,” Dottie said, getting up and stretching.
“What?” Annette asked.
“Go get Courtney and take her to the… what did you call it? The Fish Wish.”
NINETEEN
THEY SPLIT UP and drove back to the work site in two cars. Josie made sure that Dottie traveled with her.
“It was good of you to talk about your past.” She started the conversation as she steered her truck away from the curb. “I know it wasn’t easy.”
“Didn’t have a choice, did I?”
“You could have lied.”
“But you knew the truth.”
“When you came to work for me, I told you I’d keep your secret.”
“And you would, wouldn’t you? You know, you’re a good person. I haven’t run into a whole lot of good people in the past few years.” Dottie was silent for a moment. “You didn’t sleep with that Noel person to get him to leave you his business, did you?”
Josie was shocked. “I… No, is that what you thought?” “I didn’t know. It did strike me as a possibility. I mean, most men don’t just leave a business to a good friend.”
“Noel wasn’t most men.”
“Look, I’m offending you and I sure didn’t mean to. What I’m trying to say is thank you and that Noel Roberts left his business to the right person.”
“I shouldn’t get upset. You aren’t the first person to wonder about my relationship with Noel and you won’t be the last. It’s been a difficult day for us all.” She stopped the truck for a group of giggling teenage girls, their blankets dragging on the road as they crossed to get to the beach. “They look like they’re about to have a good time, don’t they? Not a care in the world, as my mother would say.”
“They’re young. Wait until they get older. They’ll do less giggling then,” Dottie predicted.
Josie thought about Tyler. He was probably the same age as these girls. “I hope you’re wrong,” she said fervently.
“That Annette is just a kid,” Dottie said.
Josie got the impression that the other woman wanted to change the subject. “Yes. In fact, I think she’s the youngest carpenter Island Contracting has had. But I think she’s going to work out.”
“She knows what she’s doing.”
“She went to a vocational school upstate. Their graduates are working for other contractors on the island. Far as I know, everyone’s pretty happy with them. Of course, the others are male.”
“Women have to be twice as good as men to survive in this business.”
“You know, I used to think the same thing, but then I ran across some truly incompetent women, so bad I had a hard time figuring out how they got their licenses, who trained them. And then I realized that there were men who wanted all those women to be bad carpenters or whatever because that confirmed their own prejudices. I’ve been a bit more careful about hiring people since I figured that out.”
“Bastards.”
“I won’t argue with you about that,” Josie said, remembering a few of the disastrous hires she’d made before she realized what was going on. It had been difficult for the company, but worse on the young women who, thinking they had the training necessary for a viable career, suddenly found themselves out the money it had cost them to be trained and without employment.
“What do you think about Jill?” Dottie suddenly changed the subject.
Josie was reluctant to discuss one worker with another. “She seems to be a good carpenter. And she’s worked for four or five years. She wasn’t hired straight out of school. And she had very good references from her last job. She worked out in the Pacific Northwest.”
“She didn’t want to tell the police about the body.”
Josie thought about that for a minute. “Neither did I. Neither did you.”
“And we both have good reasons for that. But Annette thought we should. If you think about it, you realize anyone who is innocent will think we should.”
“I don’t know about that,” Josie answered slowly. “Maybe Jill just doesn’t like authority figures or something.” They had arrived at the house; Josie parked at the curb and both women jumped out before resuming their conversation.
“Like maybe she knows what they can do to an innocent person,” Dottie suggested as they walked up to the front door.
“That’s not necessarily so.”
“Maybe not. But it’s something to think about because there’s one thing wrong with all this.”
“What?” Josie asked, turning the key in the lock and pushing open the door.
“We all have to depend on one another. If one person goes to the police, we’re all in trouble. That’s what’s wrong with this plan.”
“Maybe,” Josie said, walking in the door and flipping on the light switch. “But it looks to me like it’s not all that’s wrong with this plan.”
“What else?”
“It looks like someone got to the body before us.”
Dottie peered over Josie’s shoulder. “Oh, shit.”
There was a scrambling behind them and then Jill and Annette appeared.
“What the-”
But Jill’s assessment echoed Dottie’s. “Oh, shit.”
The canoe was in the middle of the floor. Empty. The blanket that had been tucked around Courtney had been left behind.
“Turn off the light,” Dottie hissed.
“What… Oh, you’re right!” Josie reached out, flipped the switch, and plunged them into darkness.
“What are we going to do?” Annette’s question came out as a whimper.