Murder Takes the High Road(18)

Just as my eyes were beginning to spin in my head, John poked his head out of the bathroom. “More bad news. The shower doesn’t work.”

I covered the phone. “Doesn’t work at all?”

“The shower head doesn’t work. You could take a bath, I guess. If you had time. Which we don’t.”

I relayed this to the front desk who, sounding sweetly patient in the face of extreme provocation, finally agreed to send the handyman up.

“A brush and a flush,” I decided, as I replaced the receiver. “And a change of shirt.”

“A shave and a splash,” John concurred and retreated again to the bathroom to turn the sink taps on full blast.

A gust of windy rain hit the small window in the corner. It sounded—and felt—like someone had thrown ice tacks at the glass. I opened my suitcase and dug around for the least wrinkled shirt I could find, and ended up selecting a black soft-wash long sleeve crew T-shirt. I remembered enough from my country dance days to know a ceilidh was not a formal event.

The door rattled noisily in its frame as someone banged on it.

“At this point he’s just going to be in the way,” I grumbled.

John leaned out of the bathroom and opened the door.

Trevor stood on the landing wearing a ferocious scowl and the blue cashmere sweater I’d bought him for his thirty-ninth birthday.





Chapter Six

“Hey, it’s for you,” John told me.

I gave him the look that speaks volumes, as we say in the librarian biz.

Trevor too was giving him a look. “Do you mind?” he said.

“Yep. I do,” John replied. “I’ve got thirteen minutes left to get ready for dinner and you’re about to take up way too many of them.” He withdrew into the bathroom once more, though the door remained open.

“Fine. Whatever.” Trevor swung back to me and realigned his glare. “Are you completely crazy?”

Not the question I was expecting—besides being rhetorical, right? I began, “I—”

“How dare you go around telling everybody that Vance tried to shove you in front of a car?”

“Me? I never said that.” There wasn’t time to stop and argue. I hastily kicked out of the blue jeans I’d been wearing all day and pulled on a clean pair of black jeans.

Trevor watched my hurried efforts, still glaring. Weirdly, his glare seemed to deepen when he noted my scraped knees. “Bullshit! Everyone on the bus was whispering about it.”

“I can’t help what people saw.” Okay, yes, I probably could have phrased that more tactfully. Trevor’s face got redder. I said quickly, “What they think they saw.”

“You sure didn’t try to correct them!”

I pawed through my suitcase for a clean pair of socks. It wasn’t that I didn’t have plenty of clean clothes, but from the state of my belongings, you’d think Hamish had thrown our bags down a cliffside before stowing them in the bus’s luggage compartment. I threw a harassed look over my shoulder. “How do you know what I did or didn’t do?”

“I know you, Carter. I know how you operate. You’re doing everything you can to ruin this trip for me.”

That got my attention. I stopped digging through my suitcase, and straightened up so fast I’m surprised I didn’t throw my back out. “Explain how I’m ruining this trip for you?”

“Every time I turn around, there you are again with that—that accusing stare.”

“Really?” John said from the bathroom. Trevor jumped. I may have started too. I think we’d both forgotten he was still in the room. I certainly hadn’t thought he could hear us over the sound of running water. We both stared at him, framed in the bathroom doorway, slowly, deliberately drawing the razor across his square jaw. He scraped away another snowy drift of shaving cream and said to Trevor, “Because you’re the one who keeps showing up at our door.”

“Our?” Trevor looked even more taken aback. “How does this involve you?”

“It’s my room. Half my room.”

I think it genuinely threw Trevor. He looked from John to me. “Do you really want to do this here?” he demanded.

“I don’t want to do it at all. Look, I’m not accusing Vance of anything. I don’t know that—don’t think he deliberately pushed me into the road. If you’d—”

“You think that’s helping?”

“It’s the best I can do under the circumstances. Jesus. If you’d shut up about it, people would lose interest in the subject.”

“He’s right,” John said.

“Nobody asked you,” Trevor snapped.

“If you’re going to have this conversation in my room, then I have a right to express my opinion.”

It probably wasn’t funny, but suddenly it seemed funny.

Trevor opened his mouth but I cut him off. “Okay, look, time out. In fact, game over. Trevor, I don’t know what to tell you. I’m not leaving the tour. And if that’s going to ruin it for you, sorry. I have as much right to be here as you do.”

“This is just more of your passive-aggressive—”

“Uh, no,” John said, rinsing off his razor. “That’s aggressive-aggressive.”