Sara hesitated, but she didn’t stop walking. The dummy’s feet were dragging and they had to shift its weight often. R.J. had put some rocks in the coat pockets and down the front so it weighed quite a bit, but it wasn’t enough. “What have you done at work that would make someone want to frame you for murder?” she asked.
“Nothing specific, but I wonder if this has to do with …” He trailed off and she could feel him shrug.
“For once in your life, I’d like to hear the truth out of you. What is really going on?” She could feel his smile and he took most of the weight of the dummy onto his own arms, giving Sara a break.
“Kids!” R.J. said. “They talk you to death, don’t they? It’s a good thing both of them are rich or they’d starve to death.”
She knew he’d changed the subject and hadn’t answered her question, but then that’s what he always did. “I assume you mean Ariel and David.”
“Exactly,” R.J. said.
“So what are you planning to do about them?”
“I left them a note saying I wasn’t returning, that I’d see them in court on Monday—unless they could find a way to escape this place. I think that whoever planted this body on us, is after me, so I’m going to do my best to find out who did it.”
“On your own?” Sara asked.
“On my own. Just the way I run my company.”
“I see,” Sara said.
“Here,” R.J. said, turning into some trees.
“You seem to know this place well. Have you been here before?”
“Never, but I spent quite a bit of time reading about it on the Internet, remember?”
Sara swung around with the dummy and they walked into the dark, dense forest. “Does this lead anywhere?” she whispered. She wanted to talk, wanted to get angry at R.J., for the reality of the situation might make her collapse. Someone had killed Fenny Nezbit and that person was still out there. If he—or she—thought that R.J. and Sara were carrying a dead body, why shouldn’t he/she shoot them too?
Sara and R.J. walked in silence for a few minutes and Sara began to think about the truth of their situation. She could be accused of being an accessory to murder. Or would she be accused directly? Did they execute two people for one murder?
“I want to drop this body off the east side of the island,” R.J. said softly. “There’s a cliff there. When I read about it I thought of hang gliding, not using it to discard a body, even a fake one.”
Sara didn’t smile. She was thinking about what R.J. had said about going off on his own to find the truth. She didn’t want to admit it, but she too wanted to get away from Ariel and David. How could that be? she wondered. Her whole reason for being on the trip had been to be near David.
“I’m going with you,” she whispered, then prepared herself for the fight she knew was to come. She’d have to argue with R.J. that she wasn’t a “kid” like David and Ariel, that she could be of some use to him. But R.J. didn’t say a word. When he didn’t try to argue her out of it, she knew that he had something in mind.
“If all you want is a chance to try to seduce me—” She broke off at his suppressed laugh.
“You never give up, do you, Johnson? What have I done to make you think I’m the lowest of the low?”
“The women you seduce then abandon.”
“What should I do? Marry them? Do you think I don’t know what they want from me? They want money, that’s all. If I didn’t have money, they wouldn’t give a short, ugly, old guy like me a second look. All those gorgeous young females would go out with gorgeous young males. Money is what gives old men like me a chance.” He stopped walking. “Let?
?s toss him over here. Let’s make a production of it, then when he’s gone, you can pretend to cry and I’ll comfort you.”
Sara ignored the last of his statement as she took the legs of the dummy and R.J. took the shoulders. They swung it back and forth several times over an edge that Sara hadn’t even seen. She’d been listening so hard to what R.J. was saying that she hadn’t even realized they were at the edge of a drop-off into the sea.
“Now,” R.J. said, and they let the body go.
She could see it fall down and down until it hit the rocks below. “Why didn’t the killer just do that to the body in the first place?”
“That’s what I want to know,” R.J. said, reaching out his arms for her.
Sara pulled back. “What are you doing?”
“Comforting you for a moment.”