“Yeah,” I said. “We’ve got her untying her hands so she can tie them more tightly so she can come over here and trick me into untying them for her. That doesn’t make any sense at all.”
“Yeah. It does.” Kimberly nodded and nibbled her lower lip for a few seconds. Then she said, “Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. We’ve been looking at it wrong. This wasn’t about Thelma getting herself untied so she could escape. This was about killing Rupert.”
“Terrific,” I said.
She raised a finger. “Here’s what I think happened.” Looking at me, she said, “Back at the lagoon, Thelma tried to kill you by throwing that rock over the falls. She missed you, and hit Connie by mistake.”
That’s according to Thelma’s version of what happened,” Billie pointed out. “Might not be the truth.”
“Whatever Wesley has in mind, he wants all the men dead first. That’s how I see it,” Kimberly said. “The thing is, he was too injured to try for Rupert, himself, so he ordered Thelma to do it. She screwed up and hit Connie. Then—her story—Wesley trashed her, so she killed him and came back to join up with us. I don’t think so.”
“You don’t think he trashed her?” Billie asked.
“Somebody sure did,” Connie said.
Kimberly nodded. “Yeah, Wesley probably did it to her. Or some of it. I bet most of it was self-inflicted.”
“Would she do that?” Billie asked.
“Beat herself up? Maybe. I don’t know. It wouldn’t surprise me.”
“You think she’s a masochist?” Billie asked.
Connie snorted. “She’s gotta be, she married Wesley.”
“She couldn’t have bitten herself in all those places,” I pointed out.
“Not in all of them,” Kimberly said. “I think it was probably a joint effort. The beating was supposed to be Thelma’s excuse for killing Wesley, so it had to look good. She almost had to do some of it, herself. The beating was just too severe for Wesley to manage it by himself. In his condition? He might’ve given her some bites, but he couldn’t have slapped her around and whipped her like that. She had to do that to herself. Most of it, anyway.”
“Sick,” Connie said.
“It was her ticket into our camp,” Kimberly pointed out. “She could come in, show us those terrible wounds, and we’d be all set to believe she’d paid Wesley back by killing him.”
“But we didn’t believe her,” I pointed out.
“No. Not entirely. I had my doubts all along that Wesley could’ve done that to her. But what I suspected— and I think the rest of us did, too—was that she’d been sent in here to set us up. If we believed her about killing Wesley, we’d let our guard down. That’d leave us open for a surprise attack. We also suspected that she might try to lead us into an ambush when we went looking for Wesley’s body.”
“Right,” Connie said.
“But we were wrong. Completely wrong. She didn’t come in to distract us or lead us into a trap so Wesley could nail us. You know what it was? From the very start? It was a one-woman mission to take out Rupert.”
“Kill me?”
“Right.”
“What does it mean?” Billie asked.
“Means, for one thing, Rupert’s a very lucky fellow.”
“That’s me, lucky.”
“Also means that Thelma’s in this all the way with Wesley. She’s perfectly willing to commit murder for him. She’s a lot more dangerous than we thought.”
“And trickier,” I said.
“I always knew she was tricky,” Kimberly said. “I just didn’t know she was homicidal.”
Billie, frowning, shook her head. “Do you think she was in on it with him?”
“In on what?”
“Setting us all up. Blowing up the boat. Trapping us here. Is it possible that Thelma helped Wesley plan it? I mean, I’m beginning to wonder. For that matter, maybe this whole thing was her idea.”
“I tend to doubt it,” Kimberly said. “She might be a hell of an actress, but I think she really and truly believed that Wesley got killed in the explosion. She didn’t know what was going on. She just got into this whole mess when she found us trying to ambush her husband. That’s the way I see it, anyhow.”
“If Thelma wasn’t in on the plan,” Billie said, “then all this was Wesley’s idea like we thought in the first place. So how does Thelma fit into it?”
I saw where she was heading. “If we’re right about Wesley’s motives,” I said, “she’ll be killed like the rest of us.”
“He can’t possibly let her live,” Billie added.
“That’ll be her tough luck,” Kimberly said. “But he won’t kill her as long as he has uses for her. And maybe he doesn’t intend to kill her at all. We suspect he’s doing all this so he can be the sole survivor and inherit and so forth, but we don’t really know what the hell his reasoning is. Or what to expect from him.”
“I expect he’ll try to kill me again,” I put in.
“I suspect you’re right,” Kimberly said, and smiled at me. “We’ll try not to let that happen.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“So, what do we do?” Connie asked.
“Nothing,” Kimberly said. “Not today, anyway. You’re in no condition to go on another hunt for those two. I’m sure Rupert has a lot of writing to do in that diary of his.”
“Big deal,” Connie muttered.
“It is a big deal,” Kimberly told her. “I want him to keep current with it. I want there to be something—a record of what’s happened here. In case we don’t make it.”
“That’s a laugh. I’m sure Wesley’s gonna kill us all and then let Rupert’s little diary incriminate him. Are you kidding me? He’ll burn it.”
“Thanks, Connie,” I said.
“Oh, get real.”
“Anyway, I’m not planning to get killed. I’m gonna make it out of here—I hope we all do. And then I’ll find a publisher. We’ll be famous. I’ll make a ton of money. And everybody who reads my true-life adventure book will see just what a bitch you are.”
“Maybe I’ll burn it myself.”
“Just try, and see what…”
“Knock it off,” Kimberly said. “Both of you.”
“And you leave Rupert’s diary alone,” Billie told her daughter.
Her daughter said, “Yeah, right, take his side, why don’t you?”
That was pretty much the end of the conference. It hadn’t turned out so badly, after all.
Being the intended target of Thelma’s hit, I came out of things looking a lot better than expected. I was now the survivor of an assassination attempt, not the dork who’d let Thelma escape.
I couldn’t help feeling a little scared, though.
It’s one thing to have somebody pull a razor on you because she’s your prisoner bent on making a getaway. It’s a whole different ballgame if she dropped in on us with a battered body and a load of lies just so she could get close to me, late at night, and rip me open.
I’m damn lucky to be alive.
DAY? ANYBODY’S GUESS
Musings on My Return to the Journal
