Deaths Excellent Vacation

from its throat and spat out its mouth. A hundred miles off the continent’s northeast coast, Sint Pieter was narrow and twenty miles long. It had achieved independence from the Netherlands in 1970 and, in Nora’s view, had done little since then except misplace Jason Kirk. It was warm and wooded with stubby trees and studded with stunted little towns. The main town, called Willemstadt, boasted a half dozen luxury hotels, sparkling beaches, and fine restaurants. Tourism had made Sint Pieter rich until it lost Jason Kirk. Now that the island had been branded by Nora as dangerous, business was down fifty percent.
    They were staying at the same Willemstadt hotel that Jason and his parents had been staying in when he vanished. Molly had pulled strings to get the Kirks the same room they’d had before, and they’d reluctantly agreed.
    “Welcome, Ms. Dare,” the Hotel Sint Pieter’s manager said through a tight smile.
    “Thank you. I sincerely hope you have beefed up your security since Jason Kirk vanished,” she said. The first two weeks of the disappearance she’d regularly suggested the hotel had inadequate security, before it became a boring drumbeat and she could blame the Sint Pieter police.
    “We have,” the manager said. “We certainly want to keep you safe.”
    “Naturally,” Nora said. She grew conscious of the simmering stares from the staff. The nerve of these people, she thought. She begrudgingly waited for Molly to finish the check- in and then bolted halfway across the lobby, heading for the elevators. Molly followed, rushing, tossing multicolored Sint Pieter currency at the bellhop.
    “I have a real vision for tonight’s show, Molly,” Nora said. “We start with the family in the suite where they stayed . . . Are they here yet?” The Kirks had decided not to fly with Nora and the news crew, much to Nora’s annoyance.
    “Yes. They arrived yesterday. They went and scoured the countryside near Annie Van Dorn’s house,” Molly said quietly.
    “Hmmmm,” Nora said. “Without me? How odd. Did they find anything?”
    “No.”
    “I wish you’d sent a local camera crew with them.”
    “Nora, they want their privacy sometimes.”
    “Privacy doesn’t find the missing.” Honestly, she thought, she was doing everything to find Jason; couldn’t his parents just cooperate? “Okay, for tonight’s show, we retrace the steps Jason made on that fateful night.”
    “I would suggest you not call it by that term in front of his parents.”
    “Someone went shopping at the unsolicited opinion store.”
    “I’ve expressed only one opinion,” Molly said mildly. “I guess my second one is that you seem on edge.”
    “Do I? What an odd thing to say. I’m not nervous. I’m motivated.”
    “Nora,” Molly said. “It will be fine. Do the story, remember this boy. But I think it would be best if we moved on to a new case for you to focus on. I think you’ve done all the good you can do for Jason Kirk.”
    “If I’d found him, I would have done all the good. I need to find him, Molly.” Nora’s voice went low, and Molly looked surprised at the grit in her boss’s voice. “That girl who vanished hiking in Vancouver, well, we never found her. That couple from Illinois who went missing in Hungary. Never found them. This is a small island; I should be able to find out what happened to Jason Kirk.”
    Molly opened her mouth to point out that the small island was surrounded by a vast ocean, and that the police were actually in charge of searches, not Nora Dare, but instead she simply closed her mouth and nodded.
     
     
    THE suite. Then the nightclub where the mysterious and beautiful woman no one on Sint Pieter seemed to know had spirited Jason away, and then the beach where his torn shirt, the buttons ripped free as though in a fit of passion, had been found in the sand. The shirt was the only physical evidence of his disappearance.
    Gary and Hope Kirk—Nora loved the appropriateness of the mother’s name—sat in the suite where they had been staying when their only child vanished. Nora’s eyebrow arched when the Kirks gave Molly a hug. She didn’t believe in getting close to the subjects. Both were pale and wan, as though grief were a disease slowly claiming them. They did not spend much time looking at each other.
    But when the cameras started, Mr. and Mrs. Kirk joined hands, presenting their united face to the world.
    “So let’s recall the night that Jason vanished. You’d spent