T.
T? I couldn’t drag my eyes away. T, as in Torres? Torres, as in Fast Freddie?
Oh, my God. Erik Ishmael might not exist, but it appeared that Fast Freddie Torres was very much alive. And I had his monogrammed handkerchief to prove it.
I checked my phone. Still no signal.
Damn. I had to tell Etienne. His background check on Erik Ishmael might have been a bust, but I bet there’d be a whole boatload of information on Fast Freddie Torres.
I retraced my footsteps back through the museum, running into the gang as they piled out of the prehistoric hut. “I think the fellas are gonna head outside to try and get rid of us,” whispered George as he brushed by me. He winked playfully. “Ain’t gonna work.”
I hurried toward the restroom area, hoping the line to use the phone had disappeared.
No! It was twice as long and snaking around the corner.
I approached the ticket counter and smiled at a dour-looking woman behind the register. “Would you have a phone I could use?”
“Der pooblic fone es roon der kaner.” She pointed to the sign.
“But it’s really important.”
She raised her eyebrows as if they were lead weights and pointed to the sign again.
I took my place at the back of the line and nodded to Dick Teig as he hustled out of the men’s room.
“Where are they now?” he asked in a rush.
“At last sighting, they were heading outdoors.”
He gave me a thumbs up and scurried down the hallway. I checked the time, located my energy bar, slouched against the wall, and began to munch.
Fifteen minutes and two energy bars later, the line had decreased by three people, and I was no closer to tightening the noose around Erik Ishmael’s neck than I’d been before.
“Somebody!” Margi Swanson cried as she raced toward the ticket counter. “Call an ambulance! We’ve got casualties!”
NINETEEN
“I MOST CERTAINLY DID not say ‘attack’,” insisted Helen.
“Did so,” grumbled Osmond.
“I said distract. Emily wanted us to distract them.”
While we killed time in a small conference room, Osmond sat with his pant leg rolled up and an ice pack pressed to his knee. “You mighta thought you said distract, but what I heard you say was ‘a-ttack.’”
Which explained why an emergency vehicle was parked outside the building, ready to whisk Alex Hart off to the hospital in Kirkwall.
Osmond heaved his narrow shoulders as he cast an anxious eye out the window at the ambulance. “Looks like I ruined that fella’s whole vacation.”
But not as much as “that fella” had ruined Isobel’s and Dolly’s.
The initial diagnosis was that Alex had broken his leg, an injury sustained when he’d fallen backward into one of the pits on the excavation site.
“Tell me again what happened?” I asked gently. “I’m a little confused about the sequence of events.”
“We were stickin’ with them like peas in a pod,” explained George. “Just like you told us.”
“Then Helen suggested we take an outdoor picture of the ‘kilted ones’,” said Grace. “Mostly because the wind was blowing their kilts up to their navels, so I could tell she was thinking, ‘slide show.’”
“I was not!” defended Helen.
“You were, too,” insisted Grace.
“Which is when Alice attempted to grab my cane out of my hand,” said Tilly.
I looked at Alice. “Why did you want Tilly’s cane?”
Tilly gave the stick a hard thump on the floor and in an imperious tone said, “She apparently wanted to be allowed an opportunity to shoot a picture of me landing flat on my arse.”
Alice stared back at me, crestfallen. “While the boys were posing for a picture seemed a good time to pound on the two younger fellas, like Margi said we should do, but I didn’t have anything to pound with, so I thought maybe I could borrow Tilly’s cane.”
“Hound,” Margi wailed. “I said to ‘hound’ them.”
Alice crooked her lips. “How many people think Margi’s overbite is causing her to lisp?”
“No voting!” I snapped. “Do. Not. Vote.”
Osmond lifted the ice pack to inspect his knee. “So while the girls had everyone distracted with their tug-of-war over Tilly’s walking stick, I decided to attack. I mustered my courage and a head of steam, and I charged straight at those boys.”
Awkward silence.
“And?” I prodded.
“He tripped over his shoelace and hydroplaned across the grass on his stomach,” whooped Dick Teig. “You should have seen it, Emily. Water spraying in every direction. People leaping out of the way. George got a pretty good picture of the chaos.”
I winced as I visualized Alex Hart going down like a candlepin in a