Dead in the Water

boat joined them.
    “I reckon we go in now,” Henry said.
    “How deep is the water out here?” Stone asked.
    “Deep. We outside the hundred-fathom line.” He pointed to their position on his chart.
    “How much of a search will there be?” Stone asked.
    “You’re looking at it, I expect,” Thomas replied. “I reckon the two women must still be in the fuselage, but there’s no National Transportation Safety Board to go after the wreckage and the bodies, not down here in the islands. They’re gone.” They headed back toward the dock with their grisly cargo.
    Stone thought about Libby Manning and her new-found wealth, which she would never spend.

Chapter
30
    S tone poured himself some orange juice and sat down at a table. After a moment, Hilary Kramer from the New York Times came downstairs.
    “Morning, Stone,” she said. “May I join you?”
    “Please do,” Stone replied.
    Thomas came over with menus. “What can I get you folks?” he asked quietly.
    Kramer ordered bacon and eggs. “I’m hungry this morning,” she said.
    “Stone, you want something?” Thomas asked.
    “Just toast and coffee; I’m not very hungry.”
    “You’re looking kind of grim, Stone,” Kramer said. “Something else go wrong with your case?”
    Stone shook his head. “Plane crash this morning. Thomas and I saw it.”
    Kramer dipped into her handbag and came up witha notebook. At that moment, Jim Forrester joined them, looking not very well.
    “Morning, Stone, Hilary,” he said.
    “Morning, Jim,” Stone said. “You want some breakfast?”
    Forrester shook his head. “Thomas was kind enough to bring me something in my room this morning.”
    “Oh, yes,” Stone said. “He said you were ill; you’re looking better.”
    “Guess I got it out of my system,” the journalist said. “Hilary, take my advice; stay away from the street vendors in the capital, especially the ones selling conch. For a while there, I thought I was going to die.”
    “Apparently someone did, only this morning,” Kramer said. “Stone was just about to tell me about it.”
    “Yeah,” Stone said. “Chester’s plane went down; two passengers aboard; everybody died.”
    “Jesus,” Forrester said. “In that plane we all came over in?”
    “That’s the one.”
    “It looked in pretty good shape,” Forrester said.
    “Thomas and I watched them take off,” Stone replied. “Chester didn’t do a runup before he leapt off.”
    “What’s a runup?” Forrester asked.
    “With piston engines, you rev up to a couple of thousand rpms, then test the magnetos and the propeller and look for low oil pressure or other problems. It’s the last thing you do before takeoff, and it’s a very important check.”
    “Any idea what happened?” Kramer asked.
    “Engine fire; we saw the flames. He dived to try andblow out the fire, and when he couldn’t he ditched in the water, but he stalled and cartwheeled. We saw the airplane come apart. We went out in a boat and found Chester’s body, but the two women apparently went down with the fuselage.”
    “Who were the two women?” Kramer asked, scribbling in shorthand.
    “One was a local lady; don’t know her name; the other was Elizabeth Manning of Palm Beach. She stayed here last night.”
    “The lady in the straw hat?” Forrester asked.
    “That’s the one.”
    “Any relation to Allison Manning?” Kramer asked.
    “Not really; she was Paul Manning’s ex-wife.”
    “What was she doing here?”
    “I think she had some idea of claiming part of Manning’s estate,” Stone said. “But that’s all being handled in Connecticut, so she went home.”
    “Did she have some legitimate claim?” Kramer asked.
    “Not that I’m aware of,” Stone said. He was skating close to a line here, but he hadn’t quite crossed it.
    “Palm Beach, you said?”
    “That’s right.”
    “What did she do there?”
    “She said she wrote a society column for one of the local papers.”
    “That’s all you know about her?”
    “That’s it,” Stone said.
    “Is there going to be some sort of investigation of the accident?” Kramer asked.
    “Beats me,” Stone said, “but the airplane wentdown in water deeper than a hundred fathoms, so I doubt if they could find much of it, even with a load of experts, which they don’t seem to have around here.”
    “That’s over six hundred feet,” Forrester said. “No diver could go that deep; they’d need some sort of submersible, I think.”
    “Something