Death Will Extend Your Vacation by Elizabeth Zelvin

you come?” Barbara said. “Stephanie’s going to show me how to use the board.”
    “If the waves are right,” Stephanie said. “If it’s too calm, you can’t even body surf. And if there’s a rip tide, you may not want to risk going out past the breakers. We don’t want another accident.”
    So Stephanie thought it was an accident. Or she wanted us to think it was. Could she have something to hide? What was her relationship with Clea? Who was she? I knew she had a tendency to push her food around on her plate and was afraid of getting fat. Now I knew she was at home in the ocean. If she’d left the house the morning Clea died, would we have known? Could she have slipped out early, when Clea did? Even if she had, she had come home before the police arrived, after we found the body. Or had she? All the rest who’d spent the night in the house were accounted for when they strung that damn yellow tape around it. Could Stephanie have gone out and slipped back in during the commotion? She was almost skinny enough to slither through the keyhole.
    If it turned out Clea’s death was a simple drowning, the police would drop the investigation. That would be better for all of us. But I wasn’t so sure I’d be satisfied. Our housemates seemed to have a tangled web of relationships. When you added Oscar and his crew into the mix, things got downright knotty. To mix the metaphor, I sensed currents beneath the surface.
    “Earth to Bruce,” Barbara said. “Are you coming?”
    “No, I’m going to stay and help get this boat seaworthy.” I would have said “help Cindy,” but I didn’t want to kindle the matchmaking gleam in Barbara’s eye. “I’ll be along later.”
    “How will you get there?”
    “Someone will give me a ride,” I said. “Don’t worry, Mommy. I can take care of myself.”
    “We can take Stephanie’s car,” Jeannette said. “Barbara offered to drive, but we could leave her car for you.”
    “Whatever.” Stephanie shifted the board from one arm to the other. Her shell necklace jingled as she moved. “Let’s make up our minds and get going.”
    “Here!” Barbara tossed me her car keys. I caught them on the fly. “Try to talk Jimmy into coming down. Tell him I left a whole tube of sun block on our dresser.” Stephanie was already throwing the boogie board into the trunk of her sand-colored Chevy as Barbara scurried after Jeannette. “We’ll be on the beach by Oscar’s house,” she called over her shoulder.
    Clea had run the four miles to the beach that morning. She hadn’t planned to get killed. She’d simply gone for a run. Still, she might have told somebody she’d meet them on the beach. Wouldn’t anybody planning murder come by car for a quick getaway? Our car had been the only one in the Dedhampton parking lot. We hadn’t passed any cars on the one through road from the group house to the highway. Clea had given us directions to Dedhampton Beach. It was the only public parking on that stretch of the beach. But Stephanie could have left her car at Oscar’s or hidden off the road between the parking lot and where we found her. So could anyone else in the house who had a car.
    Or maybe there was no car. Maybe the killer lived within walking distance of the beach. If the murder was premeditated, he could have checked the tide table and deliberately walked close to the water, where his footprints would soon be washed away. His or hers. Or in the shallows, leaving no footprints at all.
    In the next hour, I learned how come the word barnacle is the usual metaphor for clinginess. I took off my shirt. Cindy took off her sweatshirt. She had a bikini underneath. I discarded my sweat-soaked bandanna. Cindy produced a dry one from the pocket of her cargo shorts. Karen and Lewis came out of the house and asked us if we wanted to go to the beach. We remained industrious.
    I was filling a bucket from the spigot on the side of the outdoor shower, planning to dump the contents over my head