Everybody Called Her a Saint Page 5

  He stared at me as if begging me to tell him Twila was going to be all right. I touched his arm. “Pray. If she is alive, we’ll find her.”

  “If?” he asked, and I thought I was going to have to comfort him, but he turned around and sat down at the end of the table. He stared into space.

  I walked over to the coffeepot, not because I wanted another cup but because I didn’t want to hear the discussion among the other passengers. I knew they would continue to speculate, and it would end with something negative. I wasn’t ready for that.

  Twila is missing.

  I wanted to cry, but I held back. I knew. That terrible sense of foreboding I had felt back at Ushuaia lodged inside my throat, and I felt as if I would have to vomit.

  “Twila is missing,” I said aloud to myself, because I wasn’t quite ready to say the word dead.

  That she was missing was the only fact I knew. As soon as that thought flashed into my mind, I wondered if she had taken her own life. Surely if that was her plan, she wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of booking the cruise and paying our expenses. That kind of suicide would be incomprehensible.

  No, not Twila. She was too strong a person and too committed a Christian to do such a thing.

  But still.

  Surely no one would harm her. I held a cup of tea in my hand, but my gaze shifted from person to person. I’m not sure what I expected to see, but no one had an appearance of guilt or remorse. I saw confusion on almost every face.

  “I can’t believe anything has happened to—” Betty said and started to sob.

  “We don’t know anything yet,” Burton said. He wrapped an arm around her.

  “Of course you’re correct,” she said, but her words didn’t sound convincing.

  As I half-listened, I thought again about Twila telling me she had cancer. On the plane she assured me that she experienced little pain and had sufficient medication to take care of it. “It will be a few months before the pain becomes acute,” she said. “For now, you are not to be concerned.”

  She had turned her face from me and stared out the window. It was too dark to see anything, but I knew it was her way to say the discussion was closed.

  No, Twila wouldn’t take her own life.

  But she was missing.

  These people—all of us—loved her. We were her friends. I didn’t know everybody, but I couldn’t believe that any of them would do anything to harm Twila.

  If it wasn’t suicide, what other explanation could there be?

  We heard the lowering of the anchor. I wasn’t sure, but I thought I heard another Zodiac leaving. Along with several others, I hurried to the launching door and watched it push away from the ship. I soon lost sight of the small motorized boat. It was impossible to see the land from where we were.

  It was cold standing there, but I couldn’t move. My body began to shake, and I didn’t know if it was from the weather or from my sense of loss. Just then someone wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. “Thank you,” I said. I didn’t turn around because I didn’t care who it was.

  I had been on the third Zodiac and remembered the desolation of the place. There was a small hillock—perhaps a rise of six or seven feet—but that was the only place that wasn’t quite flat until we walked perhaps three hundred feet. After that, it was all steep, almost like mountains. It just didn’t seem possible that anyone could have done Twila harm on Brown Bluff.

  At that very moment, I knew what I had not been willing to say aloud: Twila was dead. I turned my back to everyone and tried to stand straight and tall, but tears slid slowly down my cheeks. I loved her. It shouldn’t end like this for anyone. Especially not for Twila. I had never met anyone who exemplified the Christian life the way she did.

  Just then a hand touched my left shoulder, and I knew who stood behind me. I didn’t have the strength to resist him, but I didn’t surrender. I stood as I was.

  “I loved her, too,” he whispered. “She’s gone, isn’t she?”

  Without thinking, I twirled around and buried my face in Burton’s shoulder.

  This time the tears fell freely, and I couldn’t hold back.

  Several minutes passed, and I pulled away from Burton. “Please, please don’t talk to me,” I said.

  Burton said nothing, but he didn’t move.

  I have no sense of how long we stood there, but I heard the Zodiac before I saw it. As soon as it got close enough, I spotted a blue-suited body lying flat on the floor. The hood was pulled so that I couldn’t see the face. I didn’t notice the life jacket beside her, but Burton later found out that they had discovered it next to her body.

  “Someone killed her,” Burton said.

  His words threw me into convulsive sobs, but I didn’t turn away. He tried to wrap his arms around me, but I pushed him away. “No! No! No!” I shouted.

  By the time the Zodiac pulled alongside the ship, the captain was at the entrance and stepped in front of me. “Please return back to the dining room.” He said please, but it was a command.

  “She is—she was my best friend—”

  “Please. Now.”

  Burton forced me to turn around. He wrapped his arms around me, and I didn’t have the strength to resist. He kept his arms around me as he led me back to the dining room. Several others looked up as the small group of us walked into the room. I’m sure our faces told them the truth.

  A hush came over the entire room.

  Someone screamed.

  “What happened?” Jon Friesen called out. “Did they find her?”

  “How badly is she—” Heather asked. She had enough sense to stop in mid-sentence. “Oh no! Oh, Lord Jesus, no!”

  I couldn’t answer any of them. I sat down. Burton sat next to me, his arm still around me. I knew his arm was there, and I felt a strange kind of comfort at that moment. I didn’t move until the captain joined us.

  Eleven

  “Something has happened to Mrs. Belk,” Sunil Robert said.

  I looked into his eyes, waiting for him to tell us something more. I willed for him to say that she was only sick or badly hurt.

  “A heart attack? On the island?” Betty Freeman asked. “Is that what it was?”

  “She looked healthy to me,” Donny Otis said.

  There seemed to be a long pause as if the captain tried to make up his mind how much to say.

  “Mrs. Belk is dead.”

  “But how—” Sue Downs cried out. “I can’t—”

  “She was stabbed.”

  He obviously didn’t want to say more, but several people persisted. He finally admitted that as far as they could tell, she had been stabbed repeatedly in the neck. “She either died from the wounds or was left to die.” He would say no more.

  “Murdered?” Mickey Brewer said. Mickey owned the largest insurance agency in the county and was one of the church’s most faithful ushers. “Not Twila! Not that wonderful, godly woman!”

  “I’m not sure what procedures to follow,” the captain said. “Already we have notified the American Embassy in Buenos Aires. As you will agree, the rest of the trip is canceled. We are returning to Argentina immediately.”

  “Aren’t you going to search us?” someone behind me asked.

  “I think not.”

  “But why not?”

  “I seriously considered doing that very thing, but chose not to do so. First, we do not know what we’re looking for except that it was some kind of instrument—likely a knife. Second, I believe it would be impossible to search every place on board. Third, on a ship like this, it would take little effort for someone to throw the weapon of death overboard unobserved.”

  “So it’s possible the weapon has already gone into the ocean,” Burton said.

  “Yes, but of course, that is a strong possibility,” the captain said.

  “So what happens now?” Betty Freeman asked.

  “We have already turned the ship around, and, as I said, we are on our way back to Buenos Aires.”

  We knew i
t would take two full days to get through the Drake Passage and back to the continent.

  Several people asked questions—most of them out of shock. He answered none of them. He waited until the noise level had lessened. “I would like to talk to each passenger, one at a time.”

  “All the passengers?” someone asked.

  “Yes. All.”

  He asked Burton to send in the passengers to see him one at a time. He went into the second, smaller dining room and sat down.

  No one stayed in the room with him for more than three or four minutes. From the muted conversation, apparently he asked everyone essentially the same questions, such as “Which Zodiac did you take to Brown Bluff? To whom did you speak going across and coming back? What did you do on the island? Were you alone most of the time or with someone?”

  When my turn came, I told him the truth: I had talked to no one either way. “Captain, I’m going through a difficult period right now,” I said. “I recently broke up with a man—he’s also a passenger. I came on the trip only because Twila is—was—my best friend and she begged me to.”

  “Precisely what did you do on the island?”

  “I walked by myself,” I said. “I wanted to get away from everyone. I needed to be where I could feel alone for a little while. I walked around and avoided everyone.” Again I remembered the pelting snow. A few skua birds hovered around the penguins.

  He asked me two or three more questions, and I know I answered them, but at that moment, I was so heavyhearted I don’t remember what they were. I think he took notes, but I’m not sure.

  As he got up, he said softly, “I am sorry for the loss of your special friend. No one has said a negative word about her, which makes this so strange. People do not murder those whom they love.” He shook his head slowly. “Would they lie at a time like this?”

  “I doubt that you’ll find anyone to say an unkind word—” I stopped. “Of course, whoever killed her must have hated her.”

  “Yes, that must be so. Someone stabbed her—an act of great violence. That was no accident. It might have been done in a frenzy, but that I cannot say.” He said he knew nothing about stabbing, so he couldn’t say whether it was a large knife or what the person had used. Medical examiners would have to make that determination. “But it is a cruel thing for someone to do such a thing to another human being, is it not?”

  I lost it then. He was very kind and his voice was tender, and I could feel my shoulders heave and I couldn’t stop. It was the most convulsively I had cried in my life. Just as Burton had done earlier, the captain wrapped his arms around me. I dropped my head on his shoulder and let the tears flow. He spoke in soft, quiet tones. “There, there, my little one.” He patted my head gently as he might to comfort a child.

  When I calmed a little, he pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket and handed it to me. I wore no makeup and didn’t worry about what my face looked like, but I completely soiled his handkerchief.

  I handed it back.

  “I have another one if—”

  “No,” I said. “I’m better now. Thank you.”

  When I finally turned to leave, he said quietly, “It is none of my business, of course, but I do hope you and Mr. Burton will patch up your—your differences.”

  “How did you know who—”

  “What is the word in English? Lovesick, is it? That is how he looks at you. I had noticed it earlier,” he said and smiled.

  I wanted to tell him that it was impossible for us to patch things up and that Burton and I would never get back together. But I couldn’t say those words—in fact, I couldn’t trust my voice again. I turned and left the dining room.

  Twelve

  When I searched for Twila, I had hurriedly raced in and out of her room. Hours later, as I left the dining room, I realized that something about Twila’s room hadn’t been right. At that time I was more concerned about finding her than anything else. I decided I needed to go back to the room. To my surprise, I felt no trepidation or new wave of sadness. I made my way back to her cabin and opened the door, snapped on the light, and stared. On my previous visit, I hadn’t paid attention to anything in the room itself. This time I stared at an opened suitcase. Twila never would have left a suitcase out and opened. She was too neat.

  I entered the cabin and closed the door behind me. I don’t think anything had changed in the few hours since I had last been there. After I stepped inside, I stood quietly, allowing my eyes to get a sense of the room. Now I saw what it was that had only barely registered in my mind.

  The room wasn’t torn up—I had seen that kind of situation before—but it wasn’t tidy. It was even more than the open suitcase. If I hadn’t been so focused on finding Twila the first time, I probably would have noticed.

  Her bed wasn’t made. I didn’t know her habits that well, but it didn’t seem consistent with Twila for her not to make the bed. Maids came every third day, so most of us made our own beds. Twila wasn’t compulsive, but she was one of those people who lived with the idea of “a place for everything and everything in its place.” In fact, she had quoted that to me a couple of times.

  Surely Twila never would have left the room for breakfast that morning with a messed-up bed. I wasn’t sure, but my immediate hunch was that someone had pulled up the mattress as if searching to see if she had hidden anything under it.

  The suitcase was wide open on the desk. Why wouldn’t she have laid the suitcase on the bed? It was certainly large enough and a natural spot—only a foot or so from the closet. As I stared at her suitcase, her clothes seemed to be carelessly stuffed back inside. Again, that was not Twila.

  The door of the small closet was closed, but when I opened it, I saw that her clothes, no longer on hangers, had been carelessly dropped or thrown on the floor, and her second suitcase—empty—was on top of the clothes.

  At that moment, the obvious truth struck me—someone had searched her cabin.

  “Why?” I asked aloud.

  On one shelf lay her jewelry—a couple of necklaces, three or four sets of earrings, and two bracelets. All of the items were expensive; Twila never bought cheap jewelry.

  On the floor, next to the desk, lay her briefcase and her purse. All of us left our purses in our rooms most of the time, so that wasn’t unusual. The purse was open, and I saw that the items had been hastily thrown inside—again that wasn’t Twila.

  The briefcase lay on its side. Some of the papers had been carelessly strewn on the floor. I scanned them quickly, but none of them seemed significant. Aside from a few letters that she probably planned to post on our return to Ushuaia, the rest of the papers were travel folders, instructions about the cruise, and maps—that sort of thing.

  Inside the middle section of the briefcase was a selection of books. Automatically I counted them—she had brought six books on the cruise—that was typical of Twila. Even when we met for lunch, she always carried a book. “In case I have to wait a few minutes,” she said. “It helps me not to notice when the other person is late.” She seemed always to get to restaurants at least five minutes ahead of her reservation.

  I stood next to the desk and stared around the cabin. It was about eight feet wide and perhaps twelve feet long. There wasn’t a lot of extra space. It was obvious someone had been inside her cabin and had searched for something.

  “I wonder what it was?” I asked aloud.

  “I wonder if the person found it?” I answered myself.

  “What would Twila have that someone wanted?” Sometimes I talk out loud to myself, especially when I feel confused. I also answer myself, which to most people must sound strange, but that’s who I am.

  “How could she possibly have anything that would be important enough to kill her for?”

  “You’re assuming, Julie, that the murder and the search were done by the same person.”

  “Of course. Don’t be stupid!” I said. “Why else would the room look like this?”

  “Robbery?”

  I shook
my head. “No, her wallet is in her purse with money inside. Her jewelry is still here.”

  “Okay, then it must have been a search for something significant and—”

  “Oh, don’t be dense. I know that.”

  “Okay, smart mouth, what is it?”

  I didn’t know how to answer myself on that one, so I only shook my head.

  Just then the door opened. I looked up and Burton stood in the doorway. He moved inside and closed the door behind him. “Looks as if we both have the same idea. It’s not as bad as room 623. Remember that room at—”

  “No, it’s not.” I stopped him. I didn’t want to go back to that time. Not only had we worked on a murder case in a hotel, but it was also the time when my life changed. That’s when I knew I believed. That’s also when Burton realized I loved him. I didn’t want to go back to that again.

  “Okay, I apologize. I know you don’t want to talk about anything personal with me, but—”

  “That’s right. And you might as well know something else right now.” I heard the harshness in my voice. He looked so sad and so much like a boy consumed with grief, I had to harden my emotions to talk to him. I turned away from him and stared at the messy desk.

  “Listen, Burton, I came on this cruise only because Twila begged me to.”

  “I understand, and I don’t blame you.”

  That statement almost broke me. Almost.

  “We don’t have to have any personal involvement,” he said. “I mean between us.” He sat on the edge of the bed—which was the only place to sit unless he took the chair that I leaned against.

  “Suits me.” I’m good at showing suppressed anger. I sat down and folded my arms.

  “I have no idea who killed Twila.” He leaned forward and stared at the floor. “I have no idea why. If I ever met a true, living saint . . .”

  I almost could have written those words for him. When he paused after his long list of Twila’s virtues, I said, “Yes, I agree.” I hoped he would change his line of thinking. I didn’t like playing the hard-hearted soul with the mention of Twila’s name. I was trying to decide if I should walk past him or wait until he left.