Death in Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page A

already felt like I was about knee-deep in the stuff. Meanwhile, we had to get back to the other business at hand. And I, who pride myself on being calm and competent, was feeling awfully shaky, my thoughts scurrying around like frightened mice.
    "All right. Jolene, you can deliver the bad news, eulogize a bit, and declare that the show must go on. To create a transition, maybe Shannon or Zannah should introduce me and explain that I'll be the speaker. Which means"—I heaved myself to my feet, feeling ancient and heavy—"that I'd better go upstairs and use my remaining twenty-five minutes getting ready to deliver something coherent in the way of a speech." Jolene looked so relieved I realized she must have been afraid she was going to have to give the speech. "What's after breakfast?" Suddenly I couldn't remember. If my brain didn't come alive soon, I was in for an embarrassing time.
    "Bus tours with lunch stops, followed, in the late afternoon, by a choice of workshop topics on 'The Value of Single-Sex Education in the Middle-School Years,' "Jolene reminded me. "Are you sure you're up to this? The breakfast speech, I mean? I could muddle through something, you don't..." She bit her lip. "You don't look like you're feeling very well."
    "Rotten," I agreed. "But I worked with Martina on the speech. I know the subject pretty well." Worked with was a euphemism. Typically, she had let it go to the last minute and then called on me to write it when she found she couldn't produce anything of quality on such short notice. "The show must go on."
    It almost didn't. I found Rory leaning against the wall outside my room. When she spotted me, she ran at me and consumed me in the grip of a lost child recovering her missing mother. I practically had to pry her off before I could get the door open. She followed me inside and collapsed into a chair. "It's horrible. Wasn't it horrible? Wasn't it the worst thing you've ever seen in your life?"
    It wasn't, but I didn't need to tell her that. Even if I was interested in telling horror stories, which I was not, this was neither the time nor the place. I had less than half an hour to compose Rory and myself before I had to give a speech. And she was more in need of composing. She huddled on the edge of the chair, bent low with her arms wrapped around her knees. Her eye makeup had smudged under her eyes and run down her face in little rivulets. She looked like an actor made up to play a chimney sweep.
    "They're going to think I did it," she whispered. "Because of last night. I should just go jump off your balcony and be done with it. I can't take it, Thea. Those cops! You saw them. Big as houses and mean. They wanted me to talk, but I got so upset I told them to come back later."
    "You haven't talked with them yet?"
    She shook her head. "I've been hiding, since then, because, you know, they scare me." She clenched fistfuls of her dress in her hands. "I didn't do it, Thea."
    "Why would they think you did it, Rory? You're her assistant. The two of you were very close. You admired Martina. Everyone knows that."
    "And everyone in the hotel knows we had a fight last night, too. You know you can't keep a secret in this group. I don't think I can take it." She jumped up and started pacing in the small area between the foot of the bed and the windows. "I don't think I can take this... being questioned, everyone looking at me, prying into my private life, prying into hers. Of course it will be me they ask... who else knew her like I did? They'll make me sit there and keep asking me questions until I say things I didn't want to say and poor Martina won't have any privacy left at all and it will be horrible. I can't take it. You know. I just can't take it." She was working herself into a state of hysteria, with churning arms and bobbing head and her speech coming faster and faster.
    I picked up the phone to call for help. "What are you doing? Put that phone down!" she wailed. "I'm not ready to talk to