Page 47 of She Doesn't Have a Clue
“Well, she’s dead,” Jake reasoned.
Kate shook her head. “Not that. I mean, also that, but she smells like… I don’t know. Smell her hair.”
Jake snorted. “You’re not tricking me into smelling a dead body.”
“It’s not a trick,” Kate said. “Her hair smells almost like… chlorine?”
“What, really?”
Kate motioned for Jake to smell it for himself, which he did extremely reluctantly. But he frowned as he straightened up.
“Huh, shedoessmell like chlorine. Is that a smell that dead bodies give off?”
“Not unless they’ve been in a pool recently,” Kate murmured. She shifted Rebecca’s head to peer at her face, her lips faintly blue beneath her bold lipstick. There was something white crusted around her nostrils, and as Kate tilted her head back farther to look more closely, her jaw fell slack. “Look at this around her nose. And in her mouth! There’s foam.”
“Foam?” Jake said, frowning. “You think she, what? Drowned? How is that possible? I didn’t see a pool on the estate map Abraham gave us. And how the hell did she end up here? Drowned people don’t climb a flight of stairs and hide in a plant.”
These were great questions. Kate stood, glad to have a task that didn’t involve manhandling a dead body, and peeked through the fern where Rebecca had been stuck. “Hang on, there’s something back here.”
She pushed past the plants, mindful of any other unsavory hiddensurprises, to an antique wooden desk. The wood was a deep, rich brown, the drawers set with gold handles that were no doubt real, the top of the hutch open and decorated in a mini-scale replica of the grand staircase down on the first floor. It even had little carved cherubs the size of Kate’s thumb. A flat-screen monitor occupied the center of the desk with a mouse beside it, an old-school tower CPU tucked underneath the desk.
“Kate?” Jake asked from the other side of the ferns. “Did you get lost in the jungle?”
“I think this must have been Rebecca’s study,” Kate said, sitting in the leather seat that didn’t even creak when she tilted it back. Probably didn’t dare to squeak in the presence of Rebecca Hempstead. “There’s a desk back here, and a computer.”
She reached for the mouse beside the screen before remembering to preserve potential fingerprints in case the killer had used the mouse. So, she nudged it instead with her elbow, the screen blinking to life as Jake appeared and leaned over her shoulder, distracting her with his warmth.
“What did you find?” he asked, his voice an intimate vibration in her ear.
“Nothing yet,” she said. The computer screen was locked. “It says biometric authentication required.”
She peered closer at the mouse and realized the left button was transparent, a small red laser shining up from underneath. It must be some kind of fingerprint reader, coded to only unlock for Rebecca. She grabbed Jake’s arm in excitement.
“Fingerprints!” she squealed. “I know what happened! Somebody must have killed her, drowned her in some secret pool somewhere. Then they dragged her body up here to use her fingerprint to unlock the computer. Except her fingers were too wrinkled from the pool, so I bet it didn’t work. They must have stashed her body in the fern to come back and try again later.”
“What do you think is on her computer worth killing for?” Jake asked.
“You said it yourself, she just gave a big speech fucking over her entire family. I bet whoever killed her wanted access to those trust documents. To stop her from signing over the family fortune and cutting them off.”
“You mean like our sullen tablemates last night?” Jake said dryly.
“Or the raccoon-eyed cousin,” Kate added. “Or, hell, even Kennedy herself.”
Jake tilted his head to the side in consideration. “I don’t know, she has an awfully compelling alibi. Mainly that she was technically dead herself at the time.”
Kate had to concede that point. “True. Oh, of course! Kennedy’s poisoning must have been a distraction, and Rebecca was the real target all along! It makes perfect sense.”
“But you said Kennedy’s poisoning was staged to look like one of your books, to put you on the hook for killing her,” Jake reasoned. “So how does Rebecca’s death point to you?”
Was this why Rebecca had invited her for the weekend? Because she suspected someone would be making an attempt on her life? Did she suspect they might be using Kate’s own stories to plan their attack? Maybe Rebecca had wanted Kate’s insights on who would do this and why, but she hadn’t had the chance to ask Kate in private. It made more sense now why she hadn’t wanted to talk in front of Richie, if she’d (rightly) suspected him of foul play.
How did Rebecca’s death point to Kate? Kennedy’s poisoning had been so obvious—the sliver of rosary pea, the necklace stashed in her suitcase, the body at the bottom of the stairs. What was obvious about Rebecca’s death? She was obviously drowned, just like—
“It’s not me!” Kate gasped, turning suddenly to Jake. “It’syou.”
“What’s me?” Jake asked.
“Loretta book one,Shaken, Stirred, and Stabbed. Remember? The wealthy older woman goes overboard and drowns on the party boat, and everyone thinks she got drunk and fell in. That’s how I knew about the foam in the mouth. But Loretta figures out she was pushed, and Blake takes the blame when they find out he was set to inherit the woman’s estate. It’s not me they’re targeting this time, it’s you!”