Deaths Excellent Vacation

pinot noir. She paid with cash and she tipped very well. I thought they were on a date. I’d never seen her in here before, and I would have remembered her, I think. He was drunk. Not obnoxious, but not in full control of himself.”
    “Maybe she drugged him?”
    “I think the bottle of wine drugged him. I mean, I never saw her slip anything into his wine.” The waitress shrugged at Nora. “She steadied him as they walked out, her hand on his back as they walked out. I see it all the time. He looked besotted by her. Any man would have been.”
    “Have you seen this woman before or since?”
    “No.” And that had been the answer of all Sint Pieter: No one knew this remarkably lovely woman.
    The bouncer at Jake’s Tallboy, who wore a suit for the occasion of his interview, said, “I might not have let the kid in; he’d been drinking a bit too much, not loud but walking unsteadily. But no way I could keep her out. The boss would kill me. It’s a bar for people on vacation; we’re supposed to accommodate beautiful women. She thanked me for letting him in.”
    “You heard her speak?”
    “Yes. Slight accent, a Caribbean/British mix. Elegant. But . . .”
    The pause was an opening. “Yes.”
    “She gave me a cold chill. Listen, I could see she was a stunning beauty, but I’m gay. I wasn’t seduced by her charms, you understand? I looked in her eyes and there was no there there, if you know what I mean.”
    “No,” Nora said, “tell us.”
    “The old saying is the eyes are windows to the soul. That soul was blank. I don’t know how to say it. Blank. But not like drunk blank. Just unsettling. Empty wrapped up in pretty, you see?” The bouncer cleared his throat.
    “Fascinating,” Nora said.
    “I would say she gave me a chill, the kind you get from having to deal with an extremely unkind person. I remembered her immediately after the story about this boy broke. She gave me the creeps, and I’m sticking by my story.”
    “You saw them leave.”
    “Yes. He staggered a bit; she held him. I asked if they needed a cab, and she shot me a rather nasty glare. She said she was fine. She. Not they. A bit cold toward the boy, I thought.”
    While the bouncer spoke, the police sketch of the mysterious woman came up, with the caption Last seen with Jason Kirk .
    “And the security tape, did it show her?” Nora asked. She already knew the answer.
    “Um, we didn’t put cameras in until after all the attention you gave us from Mr. Kirk disappearing.” A bit of anger colored the bouncer’s tone. “There was no tape. But when they were leaving, I heard him say he was at the Hotel Sint Pieter but in a room adjoining his folks’, and I laughed a bit, because I thought, Dude, you will have to find another bed for you and that lady .”
    Nora thanked him, turned back to the camera, and said, “Next, the final stop on Jason Kirk’s tragic night.”
     
     
    THE bar at the hotel where Jason Kirk stayed was called the Eclipse, for no good reason. But Nora, touring it with the camera following, pointed out that eclipses had once been seen as portents of doom and approaching evil. The bar was not busy, and people cleared out when the cameras started rolling. As if the tragedy might be contagious.
    The hotel manager stiffly told Nora that several people saw the couple having a quiet drink in the corner, locked in conversation, heads close together. Jason charged a bottle of pinot noir to his parents’ room account. They drank half the bottle, then headed out the rear of the hotel toward the private beach.
    “And no one has seen him since?”
    “No, ma’am.”
    “And the hotel security cameras at the entrance and exits?” Again she knew the answer, but the facts bore repeating.
    “The tape malfunctioned . . . It showed mostly white static.”
    “Bizarre timing,” Nora said, and while they spoke, the hotel’s mangled footage of Jason Kirk and the woman, flooded with digital snow, played on the screen. “You can make out Jason, and the outline of the tall woman, Jason leaning close to her as they stumbled out the back door.”
    “Yes. Then the static clears up a few minutes later. We can’t explain it.”
    Nora thanked him and turned to her final guest, who had joined them at the last stop. “The recent alleged sighting of Jason Kirk near Marysville, on the northern tip of the island, has suggested one theory: that Jason is hurt, suffering from amnesia. I’m here with Dr. Kevin Bayless, an expert on