When he found Cindy, she was sitting at a table with a pink sun umbrella over her. He saw again the bruise on the side of her face from where Joanna had struck her. There was a glass of orange juice and an omelet and two pieces of toast in front of her. She paid no attention to them. She kept pulling up the falling left strap of her sundress and writing heatedly (Balzac must have composed this way, Tobin thought) on baby blue stationery.
He ate half her toast and all of her eggs and drank most of her orange juice before she looked up.
'Oh, gosh, Tobin.'
'Hi.'
'I was just writing to Aberdeen. About all the murders and everything and how I got slugged and how Susan almost died and Joanna is under arrest. I was really scared.'
'Ah.'
'Aberdeen just won't believe it. She really won't.'
'I don't blame her.'
'But she'll be thrilled.'
'I'm sure.' He had every reason to smile. He phoned Snoop with the whole story. They had promised a bonus.
'She'll tell everybody in the insurance office and by the time I get back there, there'll even be something about it in the company newsletter.'
'Should I be happy for you?'
'Nobody's ever put me in the company newsletter before.'
'Then I'm happy for you.'
'You don't sound happy.'
He reached out and touched her sweet Kansas City hand. 'It's not a morning to be happy,' he said.
He thought about it all: Joanna and Susan and how they'd looked when the Coast Guard had taken them away; Cassie revealing that she'd been forced to pay Ken a special 'talent fee'-another form of blackmail-to stay on 'Celebrity Circle'; Sanderson and Iris Graves learning that the winner of a nowhere talent show in Indiana was actually Susan; Ken turning crazed and extorting money from his own accomplices in setting the trailer fire-and them being so afraid of losing their careers that they'd gone along.
She put down her ballpoint pen. 'Look at the sun and the blue water, Tobin. Then you'll be happy.'
He laughed. 'You promise?'
'Sure,' she said, laughing too. 'I promise.'
When a steward came by, Tobin ordered a rather large glass of orange juice, this one with some vodka in it, and then he sat back beneath the pink sun umbrella while Cindy went back to writing Aberdeen, and he looked at the yellow sun and the blue water and he tried very hard to be happy.
He tried very hard.
