“Lassiter and the judge?”
“My money’s on Lassiter,” Sara said. “He’s the slimiest man I’ve ever met. He made my skin crawl.”
“Who came up with the idea of arresting us?” R.J. asked. “And who cut the cable?”
“I don’t know,” Gideon said. “They don’t tell me anything. The twins like to listen at doors and they tell me what they hear. I take that and what I know of Fenny and put it all together.”
“What do you think will happen if someone finds Nezbit
’s body?” Sara asked.
“Where is it?”
R.J. and Sara looked at each other, weighing whether or not they could trust this young man this much. R.J. made a decision. “It’s in the freezer in Phyllis’s basement.”
“Good,” Gideon said. “She’ll never find it there. She never uses that freezer.”
“You sound like you know her well.”
Gideon gave Sara a sheepish grin. “All the young men on the island know lots about Phyllis Vancurren and her house. Did you see the blue roses?”
“Yes,” Sara said, smiling, “but I’d already counted steps so we didn’t need them.”
“Counted steps?”
“Sara remembers things,” R.J. said before she could reply. “What will happen if they find the body before the hearing on Monday?”
“It won’t be good,” Gideon said. “Judge Proctor and Nezbit are—”
“Related,” R.J. said. “Yeah, we’ve been told.”
“Who really, really wanted Nezbit dead?” Sara asked. “Besides us, that is?”
“And me,” Gideon said. “My guess is it was whoever wanted the money but couldn’t find it.”
“Ah,” R.J. said. “Now we get back to that. What money?”
“Thirty-two years old,” Sara said softly. “Phyllis said Fenny Nezbit hasn’t worked since he was thirty-two years old.”
“That implies that he worked before he was thirty-two,” Gideon said, then waved his hand. “I would imagine he found a shipwreck. Not a big ship, but something from Florida, rich, retired people, maybe. Boats wreck around here often.”
“Very often?” R.J. asked.
“More often than is probably normal,” Gideon said, but looked away as he said it.
Sara knew what R.J. was thinking. Could it be possible that the islanders were supplementing their income with what they made by making ships wreck? How were they doing it?
“What we need to do is find out where Nezbit was getting his money, who wanted it enough to kill him, and to do it in less than two days.”
“ ’Bout sums it up,” Gideon said, his eyes laughing at the absurdity of that idea. “Two days to solve something that others on this island have been trying to find out for over ten years. Every three months Fenny leaves—or left, I guess—the island and returned with cash. He and his wife spent the money to the bone, then Nezbit went off to the mainland again and returned with more cash.”
“What does he do just before he leaves?”
“Goes to the middle of the island and disappears for about six hours.”
“And of course you followed him,” R.J. said.
“When ol’ Fenny left town it looked like the Pied Piper the way people followed him, but he always managed to give them the slip. I can attest to the fact that he vanished into thin air. Poof! He was gone.”