Really Dead Read online

  “God, no! That’s my brother’s thing, not mine.”

  “So it be true, then? You coming to do a surprise inspection at the hotel?”

  I shook my head and silently cursed Dan. “No, I’m just coming for a quick holiday. I don’t have anything to do with Butler Hotels. Did someone say otherwise?”

  “I heard a few whispers, but nobody’s saying much out loud.” He pointed ahead. “Looks like I’m not the only one who’s heard the whispers.” He geared the engines down and I looked up to see what he was talking about.

  The island we were approaching reminded me of a Bactrian camel — it had two humps, only the island’s humps were volcanic, not hairy. The northern hump was covered in emerald green foliage. The southern hump wasn’t as green and I could see boulders poking out here and there, as well as some villas scattered on the hillside. On either side of the humps the land sloped down to the water, the island’s shoreline was scalloped with sparkling white beaches. The hotel itself sat in the dip between the humps. Only four-stories high, it was fronted by a large covered veranda. A wooden walkway led to the front steps of the hotel from the dock we were pulling up to. The solitary dock was wide, wide enough to still look uncluttered despite the fact that at least six Butler uniformed people were standing in a perfectly straight line, presumably waiting to greet me, and beside them, behind them, kneeling in front of them, everywhere around them, was a swarm of television people, each person holding some sort of equipment. I tried to see who was holding the cameras, just in case Rob was one of them, but I couldn’t see their faces behind the large lenses.

  Two Butler employees from the line came to the edge of the dock and caught the ropes that Malvin threw to them. A small group of television people scurried along beside them. The man at the head of the line came forward.

  “Welcome to Soursop, Miss Butler. I’m Ted Robarts, one of the acting managers. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” He had movie-star, dark good looks, in a rugged life-lived-hard middle-aged sort of way, a devilish George Clooney smile, shockingly white teeth, and startlingly blue eyes. They reflected the same ethereal blue as the densely compressed ice in an iceberg. He looked perfect for the part of a reality show winner. From what I’d seen, ugly people didn’t usually make it to the final episodes.

  “Hi.” I felt uncomfortable being stared at by so many people. James’ editors were going to have a really hard time editing me out of the shot — all of the cameras, except for the one that was focusing on Ted Robarts, were pointed straight at me.

  “Andy!” Ted shouted and snapped his fingers. “Take Miss Butler’s bags.”

  A man from farther down the line stepped forward and walked crisply toward me.

  “It’s okay,” I said more to Andy than Ted. “I’ve got it.” I pretended not to see Ted’s outstretched hand and stepped onto the dock without assistance. Malvin handed me my bag and I heaved the strap onto my shoulder.

  “As you wish,” Ted almost bowed. “If you’ll step this way,” he waved his arm out from his body, “we can obviously forgo the formality of checking you in.” He walked a deferential one pace behind me as we made our way down the dock. “I’ll take you straight to your room. We’ve put you in Cottage 7. As I’m sure you know, it’s our most private cottage.”

  “Watch out!” I yelled at the cameraman who was walking backwards in front of me. He was about trip over a large dock cleat. Another production person, a girl with a blonde bob and Sheepdog long pink bangs, put her hand on his shoulder and guided him around the cleat.

  A shiny white golf cart was waiting for us at the end of the dock. It looked like it wanted to be an all-terrain vehicle when it grew up — there were two bench seats, plus a storage bin in the back, and it had the biggest tires I’d ever seen on a golf cart. The awning had a Butler B printed on it. Ted took the driver’s seat. I dropped my bag in the storage bin and got in the front with him. A cameraman and his camera, someone holding a big microphone that was covered in fuzz, and the clipboard clutching girl with the Day-Glo bangs somehow all managed to squeeze themselves, and their equipment, onto the back bench. Once seated, I noticed the smaller camera mounted on the front of the golf cart, its lens pointed straight at Ted and me.

  Ted commented on everything — and I mean everything — as we drove to my room. I heard about how many lights lit up the tennis courts at night, how many gardeners were needed to keep the beautifully landscaped grounds beautiful, how big a helicopter the island’s helipad could handle, how many suites there were in the main building and how many cottages were scattered around the island, how many threads of Egyptian cotton were in the sheets on the bed I was going to sleep in (did someone actually count them?), how the luxury soaps in my bathroom were flown in from France, how the heated rocks that were used in the spa had been flown in from Polynesia, how my meals would be prepared by a two-star Michelin chef who was also a member of Relais & Châteaux — Relais Gourmands … the more he talked, the more out of place I felt. I knew that the Butler chain liked to cater to the ridiculously wealthy, but I wasn’t one of them and I didn’t feel comfortable around them. I was more of a jeans, T-shirt, and cheeseburger kind of person. Thankfully the people we passed as we drove along the smoothly paved road looked like they were, too. (And I doubted that they cared any more than I did about how many barges had been used to bring the road construction equipment over to the island.)

  Ted turned into a small driveway and the golf cart struggled to carry the weight of all five of its passengers, plus their equipment, up the short hill. With a jerk we stopped in front of a hexagonal cottage. The television crew jumped out of the cart and positioned themselves on the little veranda by the door. Again Ted let me lead the way, but this time I used it to my advantage. Using the keycard Ted had given me, I unlocked the door, opened it just enough to get one foot inside the building, and then turned around to face him.

  “Thanks for the ride. I can take it from here.”

  He looked so disappointed that I almost felt sorry for him — almost. “Don’t you want me to show you around? Point out the features of the cottage?”

  I didn’t want to know how many grains of sand were in each line of the grout I’d seen between the terracotta tiles on the floor. “No thanks. I’m good.”

  “All right,” but he didn’t look as if it was all right, really. “Well, if you need anything just pick up any of the phones in the cottage and you’ll be connected with the front desk. They’ll know where to find me.”

  “Thanks, Ted.” I backed into the cottage and closed the door, smiling sweetly at him until I heard the bolt latch. There was pampering and then there was suffocating. Ted had taken pampering to the painful extreme.

  Free of Ted, I went in search of a telephone. I didn’t have to look very far. In fact, everywhere I looked there was a phone — in each of the three bedrooms, on the walls in all four of the bathrooms, on the sideboard in the dining room. There were two in the living room. I chose to use the cordless phone on the large patio, instead of the hardwired phone on the patio bar.

  “Hello, Miss Butler, this is the front desk. How many I help you?” The front desk was female and her thick Caribbean accent was beautifully musical.

  “I need to make an outside call.”

  “Certainly. I’ll connect you.”

  I punched in the numbers of James’ cellphone as soon as I heard the dial tone.

  “Hello?”

  “If I find one single camera in this cottage or on the patio I’m going to strip naked and give your editors nightmares for years!” I sat down at the side of my own personal infinity pool and put my feet in the warm water. The view from my patio was almost as good as the view from James’ villa.

  He laughed. “They wouldn’t have had time to hook the room up. You’re safe.”

  “Promise?”

  “I’ll call the TD and make sure. Okay?”

  “What’s a TD?” I thought it might mean television director.

  “Technical Directo
r. He knows where all the cameras are. Where’d they put you?”

  “Cottage 7. It’s huge!”

  “It’s the Butler BVI version of the presidential suite.”

  “Is this all Dan’s idea? Some guy named Ted Robarts met me at the boat and gave me the royal treatment. Do they think I’m here as an owner?”

  “Ted’s one of the last two contestants. He’s probably just trying to make a good impression.”

  “You didn’t answer my question about Dan.”

  The line crackled. “I’m losing the connection, Ri….”

  All I heard after that was static. I was pretty sure it was artificial static, produced by James’ mouth, but it didn’t really matter. By not answering my question, he’d answered my question. Everyone thought I was there to judge the contestants. Hopefully the other contestant wouldn’t try to get so in my face.

  She didn’t. She knocked on my door, instead.

  “Hello, Miss Butler. I’m Judy Ingram, one of the acting managers.” Judy blew my beautiful-people-only theory about reality show finalists out of the water. She was much younger than Ted, a tall thin woman, with a synchronized swimmers’ nose, a dark brown Anna Wintour bob, and an elongated chin that made the shape of her small face remind me of a giraffe’s head. Like Ted, she didn’t travel alone. Behind her there was a cameraman (his lens pointing at me), a sound person (his microphone held in the air between Judy and me), and another female production person who was madly scribbling notes on a clipboard. “I just wanted to welcome you to The Butler BVI. If there’s anything, anything at all, that I can do to make your stay more enjoyable, please let me know.”

  “Thanks.”

  “To reach me …”

  “I just pick up the phone and …” I stopped talking when the cameraman lowered his camera.

  “Hi, Ria.”

  “Hi, Rob.” With his camera pointing to the ground he didn’t get to record the big smile that spread across my face.

  CHAPTER

  THREE

  Rob’s smile mirrored mine, but the same couldn’t be said of the flat-line lips on the face of the second cameraman who rose up from behind the aloe plant at the bottom of the steps, his camera aimed at me.

  “We’ll have to do another take.” The dark-haired note- writing woman behind Rob angrily scratched out whatever she’d just written down. “We can take it from Judy knocking on the door.”

  “Sorry guys, my bad,” Rob said sheepishly.

  “You know each other?” Judy looked from Rob to me to Rob and then back to me.

  Both Rob and I opened our mouths to answer her, but neither of us was given the chance to speak.

  “Can we mike her first?” The man who held the long metal pole with the big microphone at the end of it lowered the pole, pushed a few buttons on the electronic equipment that hung from the thick strap that was draped over his shoulder, and slipped the large headphones off his head. “She must have the patio doors open. There’s wind from somewhere hitting the mike and this wind sock sucks.”

  “Is that really necessary?” Judy tried to protest, but she was just as invisible to the crew as I was. “I don’t want to waste Miss Butler’s time.”

  “What if she just stepped outside and closed the door?” The note-taker asked. “I don’t want to stand around waiting for someone to drop off an extra wireless. Hang on.” She stopped writing and grabbed the radio that was hanging from her belt. “I’m vibrating.” She pushed a button on the radio. “What?”

  “Esther, what brainiac put chickens under the veranda at Ariel’s cottage?” A female voice crackled out of the radio.

  The note-taker, who I assumed was called Esther, laughed. “Did your chickens come home to roost?”

  “It’s not funny! Ariel’s scared shitless of birds and there’s like a whole flock of them stuck under there. Listen.” A loud chorus of chirps chirped out of the radio. “The mother chicken is going clucking nuts trying to get to her chicks and the chicks are screaming their fuzzy little yellow heads off. Ted’s calming Ariel down, but we can’t figure out how the birds got in there and we have to get them out, like pronto!”

  “I don’t do chickens …”

  “Wait a minute, I think I see something. There’s a loose board. Here, chickies. Come to Auntie Pam. No, don’t run away! Damn it, come!”

  “Make sure you get a credit for animal wrangling.”

  “Bite me.”

  The radio went silent just as Judy’s cellphone started to ring.

  “Don’t forget to put it on speakerphone.” The sound person grabbed his headphones, slapped them back over his ears and lifted the big microphone pole up into the air.

  The cameraman at the bottom of the steps turned to point his camera more directly at Judy.

  “Hello?” Judy held her phone out in front of her face and tilted it so that the speaker was pointing toward the microphone hovering above her.

  “Hey, Judy. Mike here. We, ah, we have a little problem.”

  Rob quietly lifted his camera, put it back on his shoulder, and focused on Judy. He still bore a striking resemblance to a young Clint Eastwood, but his face had changed in the years since I’d last seen him. A scar now ran along the sharp jaw line on the left side of his face. He wasn’t as tall as Glenn, barely touching six feet, and he wasn’t as beefy as Glenn … what was I doing? Rob and Glenn were very different people. There was no need to compare them. The fact that Rob’s dark hair was liberally streaked with greys and Glenn’s lighter brown hair was still mostly brown had nothing to do with anything; nor did the fact that they both had brown eyes — Rob’s were eighty-five percent dark cocoa, Glenn’s were creamy milk chocolate. Was there a rule in Glenn’s handbook about almost fifty year olds not being allowed to have a crush on someone? Not that it would apply to me, of course — I wasn’t fifty and I’d had a crush on Rob since before I was thirty. I gave my thoughts a mental smack and forced myself to concentrate on what mattered. What was that Zen thing? Be in the moment. Stay in the moment. If you keep it moment to moment then everything is clear. It was worth a shot. What was clear was that the man who’d called Judy sounded worried.

  “Chris is kind of tanked,” the man continued. “Actually, he’s totally wasted. He hooked up with two really hot young fans last night and their party just ended. He’s passed out and —”

  Judy cut him off. “I’ve got you on speakerphone, Mike.”

  “Oh. Okay. Got it. So, like I was saying … Chris bumped into an old friend from college and they’ve decided to have dinner together tonight, so he asked me to call you and apologize for the delay. He probably won’t be finished dinner until, um, ten or eleven, so can you let your helicopter pilot know that we won’t need him until then?”

  “The helicopter can’t bring him over after dark. It’s visual flight rules only over here.”

  “Shit! Sorry, you’ll have to edit that out.” The man on the phone paused. “What about a boat? Can you send a boat for him? He’s got that meeting with Christian and Dan tomorrow morning and he’d sure hate to miss that.”

  “Let me see what I can do. I’ll call you back.” Judy snapped her phone closed. “I need to get back to the office,” she said to the crew. “I apologize for the unorthodox visit, Miss Butler. Again, if you need anything please feel free to call me.”

  And with that she turned and bolted down the steps. The entire crew, with one notable exception, had to scramble to get themselves and their equipment into the all-terrain golf cart in the driveway. Rob simply lowered his camera and stood still. It was the note-taker who noticed he wasn’t moving.

  “Rob? Hurry up!”

  “My meal break starts in fifteen. I’ll call Harry and get him to catch you pulling up to the building and he can take it from there.”

  The note-taker didn’t get a chance to reply. Judy slammed her foot on the tiny accelerator in the golf cart and I learned something new — golf carts were capable of squealing their tires, especially if they had really big tires.
The sound man had the longest dreads I’d ever seen on a white man and they waved out the back of the golf cart as it flew down the driveway and onto the island’s main road.

  “Give me two seconds.” Rob, too, had a radio on his belt and he used it to call Harry, whoever he was. Once he had Harry’s commitment to meet Judy and her travelling band of technical miscreants at the main hotel building he turned the radio off. “Let’s do another take of that greeting. Hi, Ria.”

  “Hi, Rob.” I laughed.

  “Want to buy me lunch?”

  “Why do I have to pay for it?”

  “Because my last name isn’t a brand. You’re the hotel heiress.”

  “Yeah, right. And I have so much in common with Paris Hilton. Not! Nobody pays me to show up at parties.”

  “And you haven’t got a sex video on the web … have you?” He raised his eyebrows expectantly. “Because, you know, if you have, I wouldn’t mind taking a look at that. Purely for cinematic reasons, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  “So, are you going to invite me in?” He didn’t bother to wait for an answer and walked past me into the villa. “Hey, Will was right. You did have the patio doors open. Why don’t we eat out there?” He kept right on walking, down the hallway, past the dining room, through the living room, and out onto the patio.

  “Make yourself at home,” I needlessly called out as I closed the front door.

  Rob ordered enough food from room service to feed a small family, even though the only thing I asked for was a Diet Coke when I discovered that the refrigerator in my patio bar was stocked with Diet Pepsi. Where Rob was going to put all the calories he’d ordered was beyond me; he had a small frame with next to no meat on it, despite his appetite.