Page 11 of Safari Murder Party
She reached for the body of the camera—thank god she packed a spare 55 mm lens—but Dyer’s cane hammered down once more against the viewfinder. Again and again and again. Narrowly missing her fingers as she tried to salvage it. The razored edge of a glass shard pricked her thumb, one long slice down the pad. Copper stained her tongue as she sucked the blood away. Only then did the cane still.
“My dearest apologies,” Dyer said insincerely as he loomed over her. “Perhaps I’ve overreacted.”
No, Dyer Cartwright never overreacted. He calculated every move and countermove. A conductor for his own symphony, a grand master in his own game.
A hot flare of embarrassment slashed across her cheeks. Was everyone watching, faces pressed to their windows? She wouldn’t cry. Shewould notcry. This was a test. A test she was determined to ace.
For months during college, she had set aside half her work-study paycheck to upgrade from her point-and-shoot to a real DSLR. And then Dyer hired her, and her hours were filled with scanning memos and making dinner reservations and coordinating travel, running around until her budget pumps left festering blisters on her heels.
But the dream never wavered—Photo by Fletcher Spence. Now the prospect of a byline had been reduced to a bludgeoned pulp.
Dyer crouched next to her, his arthritic knees popping on the way down. It did nothing to lessen the chill that crawled under Fletcher’s skin, slithering around her skeleton, as he pressed the cane’s ivory handle beneath her chin so that she had nowhere to look but at him.
“You play by my rules, Miss Spence, and you could have everything you’ve ever dreamed of.” He stood. Smartened his suit jacket. As if everything was perfectly normal. “No photos on the island. I hope you understand.”
“On the island?” The cogs in Fletcher’s brain spun. Dyer vanished into the plane, but Fletcher stayed rooted right there on the tarmac, afraid that if she so much as flinched, he’d change his mind. “On the island. Lydell Island.I’m going to Lydell Island.”
Of course, by that point, she was talking to herself. The airport employees started glancing at her.Pull it together, Fletch.
She pinched her eyes shut and pulled in a long stream of air that smelled distinctly like jet fuel. And possibilities. Shania Twain’s voice punctuated her thoughts with a swift “Let’s go girls,” and Fletcher rushed toward the boarding stairs before Dyer reneged on her invitation.
All eyes settled on her in the cabin. Her coworkers’ hushed gossip fell silent. Rows of cream leather seats lined each side, each filled with a colleague. Suddenly, Fletcher was far too aware of the way her stomach clawed at the base of her esophagus like it needed somewhere to go.
Then an attendant guided a crystal flute brimming with something fizzy into her palm. Fletcher sipped and sipped, praying for liquid courage. As she paced down the aisle, every face was one she knew. The Cartwright Media org chart had been seared into her memory. Fletcher forced herself to smile, even if it meant biting her tongue.
The C-suite clustered together toward the front with Dyer at the helm. Next to him, the CTO, Raul Diaz, typed furiously on a laptop after acknowledging Fletcher’s existence with a cursory glance. Deepti Kaur, the CFO, leaned over her briefcase to whispersomething to Jackie Caldera, who peered up toward Fletcher and offered her a red-lipsticked grin.
Then there was Melv Lexington, the company’s general counsel, dressed like he was caught halfway between running the New York marathon and breaking a case wide open—a three-piece suit paired with tortoiseshell glasses strapped to his head with a neon-green Croakie, skin tanned down to the dermis from hours jogging Hudson River Park.
Behind him, the Sales team took up the middle, flocking around their ringleader, Theo Groff. For as long as Fletcher had been at Cartwright Media, Theo had sulked around the office, eyes glimmering with greed. Several members of his team had been invited—and they all watched Fletcher, eagles hunting a field mouse.
“Look who showed up!” Rick Evanston had a gap-toothed grin and a knack for dropping things in front of women so that they’d pick it up for him. He was, unequivocally, an asshole, and Fletcher routinely daydreamed about volunteering him for the first manned mission to Mars.
Next to him, Opal Meena daubed lip gloss onto her full bottom lip. Over the last four years, she had easily become one of Cartwright Media’s top-producing salespersons ever. “Oh, Fifi’s here,” she said before going straight back to lip-glossing.
Of all the things Fletcher’d been mistakenly called over the years, Fifi was hardly the worst.
Opal turned and asked the intern, Sheila Day, to hold her compact mirror. Sheila’s job description literally included selecting call-holding music and doing lunch runs for the Sales team. How could she possibly be one of the company’s top performers when she spent half her hours picking croutons off Opal’s Caesar salad? But she was Dyer’s niece, and a little nepotism went a long way.
The Marketing team was much less concerned with Fletcher’s arrival. Two Paid Ads henchmen Fletcher knew best as Brian and Other Brian were in a heated debate about conversion rates, refereed by the SVP of Marketing and Publicity, Denis Bertram. Between rounds of bickering, Bertram patted his round, bald head with a silk handkerchief, sweat forming on his dark skin.
“Fletcher Spence.”
Fletcher would deny under penalty of perjury the way her heart thumped around in her chest the minute Waylon spoke her name from the last row. It was purely adrenaline. A biological response to breathing the same air as someone she was clearly allergic to.
There was a tinge of bewilderment in Waylon’s tone. To the untrained ear, he almost sounded impressed by her arrival. He wasn’t. Surprised, certainly. Agitated, maybe. But impressed? No.
And across from him? The only empty seat.
Waylon kicked one ankle over the opposite knee, the picture of casual cool, but a muscle in his jaw strained like he barely refrained from sticking his tongue out at her. “A receptionistanda stowaway. Who knew you could be so multifaceted?”
Fletcher spared him the satisfaction of a response and melted into the buttery leather seat, becoming smaller and smaller as New York did the same outside the oval window.
Somewhere over the Atlantic, while blue surrounded them on all sides, even the caffeine and adrenaline couldn’t keep Fletcher awake. Night navies yawned across the sky, and she dozed, off and on over Africa, until a particularly blinding ray of light seared her retinas. With half a mind to draw the shade down and roll over, she propped herself up on her elbow and peeked out the window.
Sleep was suddenly out of the question. They’d arrived.
Tucked between Port Louis and Réunion island, Lydell was a thin strip of land shaped like the tip of a French manicure. A steepmountain jutted up from the center, two ends curling down in spindles on either side. At its base, thick swatches of green coated the landscape, fading to dried-brown chaparral and sagebrush the farther the land extended from the peak. A swirling cerulean sea lapped at the craggy shoreline, clearer and bluer and deeper than any ocean Fletcher had ever known.
