Carolyn G. Hart by Death on Demand/Design for Murder Page B

out of his past, somebody with a grudge, comes to Broward’s Rock twelve years after the guy retires here and shoves him off of his sailboat?”
    “I know, I know.” Annie thumped a pillow in frustration. “It doesn’t make a lot of sense. But people can hold grudges. Think about
The Count of Monte Cristo.”
    “But he was the guy who’d been screwed. You’re talking about a crook wanting revenge for going to jail.”
    “High Noon.”
    “That wasn’t twelve years later. No, it has to be something immediate, something urgent.”
    “Something here on Broward’s Rock,” she said thoughtfully.
    Max closed the scrapbook. “You said he had a passion for justice. Right?”
    Annie nodded emphatically.
    “If he spent his life putting the baddies in jail, he’d find it hard to ignore it if he ran into something criminal on Broward’s Rock.” Max’s shoulders hunched forward. He looked like an All-American tackle ready to spring.
    She was concentrating on her uncle’s life, trying to think, but she did take pleasure, purely aesthetic, of course, in the animal grace so close to her.
    “Don’t you see,” he continued earnestly, “if Elliot could come up with stuff serious enough to get himself murdered, what’re the odds your uncle had picked up on the same information?”
    Annie clapped her hands to her head. “My God, true crime. That’s it. That has to be it! Uncle Ambrose’s book.”
    “He wrote books, too?”
    “Not like the others. He’d been collecting material for years for a different kind of true-crime book. He was fascinated by the ones who got away, always on the lookout for accidents or suicides that might really have been murders.”
    “A shove down those attic stairs for dear old Grannie Whipple? Or over the cliff with Cousin Alice?”
    “Or the side of a boat. Like Emma’s husband—and, oh, Max, Uncle Ambrose himself!”
    “Better wait until after dark,” Max urged.
    Annie disagreed. “I can’t see in the dark. Besides, there are snakes and things. No, I’ll pretend I’m out getting some exercise. I can see if anyone’s lurking around. I’m going to go now.”
    “I’ll come with you.” He did look wonderfully like an anxious Mountie, stalwart and true.
    “We don’t have time. You do as we’ve planned. I can take care of this by myself.”
    “Dammit, I don’t like it.”
    He continued to frown reprovingly as she rolled her bike out of the shed. She dropped the neatly folded towel in the white vinyl basket, then turned to beam at Max.
    She maintained the smile until she was out of sight, amatter of riding six feet, then dipping down into an aquamarine world. The late afternoon sunlight filtered through the trees in a green and gold haze. The three-foot-wide bicycle path wound through luxuriant swamp growth. Live oak trees, pines, palmetto palms, and flowering shrubs vied for life in the spongy, wet ground. Thick vines hung from trees, wrapped around trunks, snaked along the ground. As she pumped the old-fashioned bike, twigs skittered from beneath the wheels, and her approach disturbed the seen and unseen inhabitants of this peculiarly private domain. A flock of blue-green tree swallows circled noisily, looking for their last insect snacks before dusk. Three sunning turtles slipped into dark green water. An alligator raised his head.
    Annie pedalled harder. It was eerily silent on the bicycle path. In the summer, families wobbled through the damp heat, and daredevil ten-year-olds rode fast enough to imperil anything in their way. But now, late on an October afternoon, the sunlight already waning, it was pleasantly warm but isolated.
    She was pleased she had decided not to turn the disk over to Saulter. There was no reason on earth to put the innocent writers at risk. But Capt. Mac had made it clear to Max that Saulter wasn’t impressed by Elliot’s threat to reveal some nasty truths about his fellow writers. For the chief, that was entirely too fancy a motive for