He Gave Our Helicopter Away, So I Stopped Waiting to Be Rescued novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Seven Names

I showed him the photograph at first light.

Fraser had slept on the porch, with his back against the wall and his boots beside him.

I sat down on the boards in the grey air and held out the phone, and he looked at it for a long time.

"Who sent it?" he said.

"I don't know yet."

"That's Ostby's quarter-zip."

"It's Corinna's hair."

He handed it back without a word, and his big hand lingered on mine for a second.

"No pity," he said, very low. "Does that still stand, this morning?"

"Ask me after I've been sick in a sink."

"Understood."

"But it's not pity," I said. "I'll tell you that for free."

His mouth did the thing that showed the broken tooth.

Then the bungalow door opened behind us, and the head housekeeper stood there with a tray of coffee and her chin up.

She set it down on the step.

"It was me," she said. "The photograph. I took it off the guest-services phone, the one Ms. Frost forgets to lock."

I looked at her.

She was sixty, with grey cropped hair and a shirt that said BROOKS across the pocket, and she had worked on the island since before I drew my first villa.

"Why?" I said.

"Because I have a daughter your age. And because last night I watched Mr. Ostby carry that woman through my kitchen in both arms."

"Which woman?"

"Ms. Frost, Mrs. Ostby," she said. "Who else bled on my floor?"

Fraser stood up.

The housekeeper did not move. She looked at me, and I saw her decide how much to say.

"I'm sorry. I thought you knew."

"Tell me what you saw."

"It was a little after two. The party was in the shelter. The palm came through the roof near the buffet, and a piece of the ceiling caught Ms. Frost across the head. Mr. Ostby ran to her. He ran. He shouted for the doctor, and he kept saying her first name over and over."

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