Read Death In Paradise for Free Online

their class rings to a girl."
    "Makes last year's class seem embarrassingly unromantic," Lilly said.
    "Embarrassingly," Jesse said. "Seven of these kids can account for their girlfriends' whereabouts, and we've verified it."
    "Which leaves you five."
    "Four of them are supposed to be at summer homes with their parents, but we haven't been able to reach them yet. One boy doesn't know where she is."
    "And her parents?"
    "Kid didn't know anything about her parents," Jesse said.
    "How could that be?" Lilly said. "What are the names?"
    "Boyfriend's name is William Royce," Jesse said.
    Lilly smiled. "Hooker," she said.
    "And the girlfriend is Elinor Bishop."
    "Oh dear," Lilly said.
    "You know them."
    "Yes, of course."
    "You have an address for her?"
    "She called herself Billie. Yes, I have her address."
    "Could you talk to me," Jesse said, "about Hooker and Billie?"
    "How long do you have?"
    "If it's a longish story we could do it over lunch."
    Lilly smiled. She was wearing a pale yellow silk dress today.
    "What a very good idea," she said.
    Â 
    It was low tide. They sat in a small restaurant that looked out over Fisherman's Beach at the gunmetal Atlantic rolling stolidly in onto the shiny sand. The ocean smell was strong. Even if you didn't look at it, it was there in that mysterious way that the sea asserts itself.
    "I hope it's not Billie," Lilly said.
    "It's going to be somebody," Jesse said.
    They ordered iced tea and looked at their menus. Lilly ordered a house salad, dressing on the side. Jesse had a tuna fish sandwich.
    "Hooker Royce," Lilly said, "is our All-American. Honor roll since first grade. Three sports, captain in all of them. All-state in football. Scholarship to Yale."
    "And he's handsome and self-effacing," Jesse said.
    "How did you know?"
    "They're always self-effacing and handsome."
    "All of them?"
    "All the small-school heroes, it's part of the heroism. The expectations of the town force it upon them."
    "Even the handsome?"
    "Might be sort of circular. Probably wouldn't be the town hero if he were ugly."
    "Even if he were just as good?" Lilly said.
    "Maybe," Jesse said.
    "Well, that's cynical."
    "Or observant."
    She smiled at him. "Being observant would make you cynical," Lilly said. "Wouldn't it."
    "You seem observant," Jesse said.
    "I try."
    "But you don't seem cynical."
    "I'm in the hope business," Lilly said.
    "Education?"
    "Yes."
    "You think you might be saving them?"
    "I have to think so, or hope so," Lilly said. "Otherwise what have I done with my life?"
    Jesse sipped his iced tea and looked at her. Lilly's eyes were almond shaped and dark brown, maybe black. Her skin was smooth. She wore quite a bit of makeup, but carefully.
    "What about Billie?" Jesse said.
    Lilly breathed deeply through her nose. It made her chest move.
    "Billie Bishop," she said.
    Jesse was quiet. Lilly shook her head gently.
    "Billie was…" She stopped to think about it. "Billie was our town pump," she said.
    "Don't beat around the bush," Jesse said.
    "I know. It's a terrible thing to say, isn't it?"
    "We used to say it when I was a kid," Jesse said.
    "We all did," Lilly said. "It says everything and nothing."
    Jesse nodded. There were potato chips with his sandwich. Jesse ate one.
    "I'm more interested in everything," he said.
    "Yes."
    Jesse looked at the ocean. It was uninterrupted here, stretching to Spain. In Jesse's imagination, the Atlantic was a gray ocean. The Pacific had been blue.
    "Teachers hear things, and they gossip."
    "I'm shocked," Jesse said.
    Lilly smiled. "Billie," she said, "was probably what we would have called, in less enlightened times, a nymphomaniac."
    Jesse smiled. "Not a bad thing in a woman," he said.
    Lilly looked at him thoughtfully.
    "Sexuality is not a bad thing in a woman," she said.
    "It certainly isn't."
    "But frequent indiscriminate sex probably is," Lilly said. "However outmoded the phrase, it at least served to identify sexuality rooted in something wrong."
    "So does 'town pump.'