RK02.5 - Trouble in Paradise Read online

  “So if someone recognized her, they’d know she was worth a lot of money,” Toni said.

  “Which is what has you worried,” Bailey said.

  Erica blanched visibly and wrapped her arms around her torso. “I’m just hoping she kept the scarf on. She had a red-and-pink scarf tied around her head, Gypsy-style. We were shopping for one of those long, wide skirts to match.”

  Toni frowned. “Wouldn’t it have been easier to buy the skirt and then look for a scarf?”

  Erica sighed. “Welcome to my world. Tammy Susie wasn’t about to let go of that scarf.” She described what the girl had been wearing. Other than the scarf, Tammy Susie was dressed unremarkably in a pair of cutoff jeans, a blue T-shirt with pink daisies, and white sandals. We told Erica we’d meet her in the lobby and went back to the room to change into kid-hunting attire. For Toni, that meant wedge sneakers that coordinated with her matching shorts and tank top. For Bailey and me, that meant running shoes and track pants. Bailey managed to make that look elegant. Me… not so much.

  When we got to the lobby, Erica was nowhere to be found. We walked out to the front of the hotel—didn’t see her there either. But then we heard her hiss from behind a large bush just outside the lobby door. “Get us a cab,” she whispered. “Tell him to take us to the Royal Plaza.”

  Toni rolled her eyes. “What are you doing in that tree? And by the way, I’m not sick of limos, so why don’t we use one?”

  “The limos work for the show. If I call one, everyone’ll know I’m out here without Tammy Susie.”

  I flagged down a cab while Toni muttered under her breath about white girls and their silly TV shows.

  Erica’s description of the Royal Plaza Mall as Disneyland on crack wasn’t too far off. Actually, it reminded me of Oz. Or the top tier of a wedding cake. You could probably see it from space. Ornately carved spires of bright pink lined the rooftop, and turquoise canopies suspended like eyelids over white balconies stretched across the front of the building. A huge gold dome sat at the center of the plaza. I’ve seen bigger malls, but none that were brighter. And it was situated on the waterfront, just a stone’s throw from the port. I didn’t blame Tammy Susie for liking the place.

  With Erica in the lead, we headed for the shop where Tammy Susie disappeared. I looked into the stores we passed and noticed that they were largely stocked with merchandise from high-end designers. If there was a casual skirt under two hundred dollars, I sure didn’t see it.

  “A nine-year-old shops here?” Bailey said.

  “For an outfit she’ll never wear again?” Toni added.

  “Money’s not an issue,” Erica said. “The whole family’s stinkin’ rich. Now.”

  As we wound our way through the mall, it occurred to me that it would be relatively easy for a kidnapper to blend into the crowd with Tammy Susie. Because Aruba had once been the property of the Netherlands—and before that had been conquered by Spain—there was a rich mix of ethnicities everywhere you looked. From tall and blonde, like Diederik, to short and black, there was every racial permutation in abundance here. A little blonde girl like Tammy Susie wouldn’t attract any notice, regardless of who was with her—unless you recognized her famous face.

  I still hadn’t ruled out the possibility that Tammy Susie had deliberately flown the coop. Being the center of a show can be a lot of pressure for anyone, let alone a nine-year-old. And Erica had said they were in their third season. But the fact that she hadn’t called in—by now it’d been about two hours—did worry me. I thought about who might have snatched her. If it was someone who recognized her, we could expect a ransom demand soon—unless it was someone who’d seen her show, pegged it as the demise of civilization as we knew it, and was holding on to her to prevent any further erosion in the collective IQ level in English-speaking countries.

  On a serious note, I was even more worried about the possibility that she’d been snatched by someone who didn’t recognize her…. I couldn’t bear to think about where that scenario might end. It would be far better if this was a kidnapping for ransom. At least Tammy Susie’s people would have no problem paying up.

  Finally, Erica stopped at a small boutique that featured brightly colored oceanscape and flowered clothing.

  “You took her here?” Bailey asked.

  It was a fair question. I didn’t see any kids’ clothing in the window.

  “First of all, I didn’t take her anywhere. Tammy Susie took me here. And depending on the cut, she’s big enough to wear women’s sizes. She takes after… both sides of the family.” Translation: it was a big-boned family.

  Just to lighten the mood, I cracked a little joke. “Look on the bright side, Erica. You wouldn’t have known Tammy Susie’s dress size if you’d gone to work for Scorsese.”

  Erica glowered at me. Hey, they can’t all be gold. Jeez. I shrugged and we entered the store. The decorator had a penchant for sensory saturation. Caribbean music and an overly sweet scent filled the air, and every inch was packed with bright clothing and accessories. Blouses hung on the wall, pants were draped on bamboo chairs, and costume jewelry dripped fetchingly from the branches of tiny metal trees. It was no mystery why a young girl was attracted to this kaleidoscope of the senses. A small, light-skinned Hispanic girl with waist-length hair who was standing behind a glass counter smiled at us hopefully. “Can I help you?”

  Erica had entered behind us, and now I felt her tugging on my sleeve. I turned. “What?”

  “She’s the one who helped us. Don’t let her see me, okay?”

  It didn’t seem worth arguing that this girl’s identification of Erica was the least of her problems. “Send Tammy Susie’s photo to my phone. Right now.”

  Erica backed out of the store, and I approached the salesgirl. “We’re looking for a girl, about so tall.” I gestured four feet in height. “She was wearing a red-and-pink scarf on her head and she tried on some clothes here a couple of hours ago?”

  The salesgirl’s brow wrinkled, and she stared off for a moment. “You mean Tammy Susie?”

  I didn’t need her blabbing that the little celeb had dropped off the radar, so I tossed out the first lie that came to mind. “Yes. We’re working on the show, and Tammy Susie lost her uh… scarf. We need it for the episode we’re taping now. Can we check out your dressing rooms?”

  “Sure, no problem.” She led us to the back of the store, where drapes closed off the fitting area. She pulled them back and gestured to the dressing rooms. We checked every room, looked behind mirrors and under chairs… no Tammy Susie. Bailey moved back toward the draped archway and pointed to a door that was next to the first dressing room on the left. “Where does that lead?”

  “Just to the office.” The girl opened the door and showed us a small room that held a chair, a sofa, and a dusty computer sitting on a wooden table.

  I walked around behind the table and scanned the room. A full-length mirror on the wall to my right looked a little askew. Crooked hanging things always make me nuts, so I went over and straightened it. And that’s when I noticed the mirror was actually hanging on a door. The mirror was large enough to hide the knob and obscure the seam where the door fitted into the wall. “What about this?” I asked.

  “I never saw that before,” the girl said. “The owner’s the only one who uses this office, so I hardly ever come in here.”

  I turned the knob and pulled, taking care not to knock the mirror down. It led out of the store and into another side of the mall. I stepped through and studied the knob from the outside, searching for pry marks or some evidence of forced entry. It looked pristine to me. I waved Bailey and Toni out to give me their opinions.

  “Looks clean,” Bailey said.

  “Yeah,” Toni said. “But what’s that?” She bent down and picked up a little red beaded bracelet with a silver smiley face in the center.

  We all exchanged looks. It appeared to be a kid’s bracelet. If it was Tammy Susie’s, the theory that she’d just wandered off on her own or even
sneaked away on purpose could pretty much be ruled out. No way would a nine-year-old have discovered that office door, let alone the door behind the mirror. The possibility that we were dealing with a kidnapping had just been upgraded into a likelihood. I leaned down to examine the area for blood, hair, or some other signs of a struggle. “What’s that?” I pointed to a smudge on the door frame.

  Bailey peered at it. “Hard to tell just by looking. Might be blood, but it could be dirt.”

  Toni called out to the salesgirl through the doorway. “Where’s the store owner?”

  As the person most likely to know the layout of the mall and where all the doors were in this store, the owner made for an attractive suspect.

  “At home, probably. She doesn’t come in much.”

  She. A woman was less likely to be a kidnapper, but then again Tammy Susie was a pretty small target, even if she was, as Erica intimated, a tad chunky. “Why not?” I asked.

  The girl shrugged. “It’s hard for her to get around. Grieta’s pretty old.”

  Old. But to this girl that might mean thirty-nine. “How old?”

  “We just threw her a party for her eighty-first birthday.”

  Eighty-one was a little too old to handle the kidnapping. At least, without help.

  “Does anyone work here besides you?” I asked.

  “No. Not anymore. Renzo, that’s Grieta’s nephew, used to work on the weekends, but he just left for school up in Amherst.”

  “How’s the store doing? Sales good?” Bailey asked.

  I knew she was fishing around for motive. If the store was going under, an owner might get desperate enough to collaborate in a kidnapping scheme for some quick cash.

  “Sales are okay…”

  The way she trailed off told me sales were nothing to write home about. Maybe we were onto something.

  “Okay… but not good,” I said. “Is Grieta maybe a little strapped for money?”

  “Grieta? Strapped for money?” The girl laughed. “Her husband left her a fortune. This store’s just a hobby.”

  I won’t lie. The owner wasn’t looking like our best suspect.

  “Do you remember seeing anyone else in the store at the time the little girl was here?” Toni asked.

  “I think the lady who works for Tammy Susie was here. I’m pretty sure I showed her a pair of Tahitian pearl earrings.”

  Tahitian pearls are not cheap. That Erica has nice taste. And I bet she’d love to hear that she works “for” Tammy Susie. Not to mention the fact that the salesgirl had called her a “lady”—teenage shorthand for “old.” It was probably best that Erica had stayed outside. “Did anyone else come into the store?” I asked.

  The girl frowned, then looked up at the ceiling. I watched her eyes move back and forth for a few seconds, as she played back her mental video. “It’s possible someone walked in and then walked out without my seeing them. But if you mean someone who could’ve gotten past me and into the dressing room area without my noticing, no way.”

  We’d reached the bottom of this well, and it was bone-dry. I asked Bailey to collect Erica and meet Toni and me outside the newly discovered back door.

  After a few minutes, Erica and Bailey came into view. Even if I hadn’t been looking for them, I’d have noticed Erica. She held her head down and shot furtive sidelong glances at the crowd around her as she walked. She may as well have been wearing a sign around her neck saying, I JUST DID SOMETHING HORRIBLY WRONG. I told her as much and warned her to chill out. Then I showed her the bracelet and told her where we’d found it.

  Erica paled. “That’s Tammy Susie’s. But I don’t understand. If even the salesgirl didn’t know about that back door, then how could some stranger figure it out? You said it was hidden by a mirror.”

  Apparently Harvard hadn’t been a complete waste. “Obviously, whoever took Tammy Susie out of there knew the lay of the land. Maybe the owner’s nephew told someone about it.” It was just a guess but, all things considered, not a bad one if I did say so myself. “But the salesgirl didn’t see anyone else in the store. So whoever took Tammy Susie came in through that secret door and left with her the same way.”

  “I didn’t notice any security cameras in the store, did you?” Toni asked.

  “No,” I said. “You see any cameras that might’ve picked up activity outside the shops on your way here?” I asked Bailey.

  She shook her head. “Nada. We’re going to have to do this the old-fashioned way: canvass the area and ask whether anyone’s seen her.”

  Toni added, “And hope to get very, very lucky.”

  Finding the hidden door and the bracelet had a sobering effect on all of us. With the last vestiges of hope that Tammy Susie had skipped out on her own now pretty much obliterated, we moved with greater urgency, working the shops most likely to be on the kidnapper’s escape route, showing Tammy Susie’s photo and asking if anyone had seen her.

  But we kept getting the same response: “No, sorry,” or just a shake of the head.

  I looked at my cell phone. We’d been at it for only one hour, but the pressure of time passing was making me sweat. We couldn’t put off notifying the police for much longer. The only thing that kept me from insisting on doing it right now was the knowledge that we were already way ahead of them. At this point, if we called in the police, they’d only waste precious minutes redoing all of our legwork. The best thing to do now was hit every place in the immediate vicinity that we—mainly Erica, who knew Tammy Susie and the area—could think of. Given our lack of success so far, that wouldn’t take long.

  We managed to get to all the stores closest to the back door of the shop before the island’s traditional afternoon break. Most of the stores had closed down, but we hit the ones that stayed open. Boutiques, jewelry stores, a pet store (because maybe the kidnapper had stopped there to keep her happy—a long shot, but we couldn’t afford to miss any kind of shot), and every fast-food place along the way (because Tammy Susie loved fast food). Zilch. No one had seen a little girl matching her description, with or without a red-and-pink scarf.

  By the time we hit our last stop—McDonald’s—it was a quarter to two. We had fifteen minutes before the rest of the stores reopened. Two men in bright-orange loincloths and matching feather headdresses stood in line.

  Erica saw me gaping. “Carnival parades,” she explained. But Bailey didn’t notice. She was staring at the menu that hung above the cashiers.

  “A Big Mac,” she said with reverence. “I’m starved. I couldn’t eat that cardboard junk they gave us on the plane. Anyone want to join me?”

  “For different cardboard junk?” I asked.

  Bailey stepped into line behind the men in orange. “I need fuel.”

  Erica, her face as tight as a drum, declined. I wanted to do the same, but the familiar greasy-yet-tantalizing smells were making my stomach growl. I compromised by ordering a plain hamburger patty on lettuce, and Toni followed suit. But Bailey, the sadist, got a Big Mac and a large order of fries. We sat down at one of the plastic tables and took stock of the situation.

  “Given what we’ve seen so far, I’m not all that optimistic about our chances of finding a witness in this mall,” Toni said. “And I still haven’t spotted any security cameras.”

  “Me either,” I said. That seemed a testament to the general claim that they didn’t have a serious crime problem here. Unfortunately, that wasn’t much comfort when the rare crime was committed. I sneaked a couple of fries from Bailey’s bag. “Granted we haven’t been able to get to all of the shops, but we did get to the ones that were most likely on the escape route. I hate to say it, but our chances of finding Tammy Susie without calling in the troops are not looking good.”

  “Erica, I think it might be time to go ahead and report this to the police,” Bailey said. “I don’t want you—or us—to be accused of letting the trail get cold.”

  Erica nodded glumly, then gave us another one of her damnably heartrending looks. “But can we try just one m
ore place? Tammy Susie really likes the Harbor Outdoor Market. She’s been making me take her there practically every day since we got here.”

  “And how long have you been here?”

  “Ten days, four and a half hours, and seven minutes—”

  “No, seriously, how long—any idea?” I joked. Erica just stared at me. “Right. Maybe she got someone to take her there.”

  It was unlikely but not impossible that the kidnapper might pass through the area as a way of preventing Tammy Susie from making a fuss in public. Besides, it was a place the police would have to cover anyway. I slid out a few more fries. “It’s worth a try. But I mean a really fast try.”

  “Then let’s get moving,” Bailey said. “If this doesn’t pan out, I’m pulling the plug and calling the cops.” She pushed her fries toward me.

  “No, thanks,” I said, and pushed them back. Bailey rolled her eyes and started to toss them into the trash, but Toni snatched them from her.

  “My mama didn’t believe in wasting food,” Toni said.

  “Your mama wouldn’t have let you say the word ‘french fry,’ ” I said.

  Toni gave me an icy glare, then turned to Erica. “Can we walk there? Or do we need a cab?”

  “We can walk,” Erica said. “It’s just a few minutes.”

  Erica led the way. The Harbor Outdoor Market was a series of connected stalls on the waterfront where lots of brightly colored gewgaws stamped ARUBA were sold—nearly all of which were manufactured in the United States. It reminded me of an upscale version of the boardwalk in Venice, California.

  Just feet away, the afternoon sunlight danced across the gently undulating water in the harbor. I deliberately turned my head to block out the sight. We moved from one stall to the next, showing Tammy Susie’s photo and, as before, getting nowhere. Suddenly, Erica stopped, her cell phone held out in front of her with both hands. “Shit, shit, shit!” she cried.