Everyone's Dead But Us Read Online Free Page B

said.
    Sherebury said, “I could try it. Although it wasn’t working a few minutes ago, and I’m not sure who I’d e-mail.”
    I said, “What difference does it make who you e-mail? You could e-mail my lawyer in America. He’d know who to get in touch with, or he’d find out who the proper authorities are.”
    “This thing isn’t wireless,” Sherebury countered.
    I said, “Someone on the island must have a wireless computer.”
    “Mr. Tudor might have. I can look in his villa later.” He tapped at the computer keys and worked the mouse. After several minutes, he said, “I still can’t get the thing to connect to the Internet.”
    “May I try?” I asked. He nodded. I walked around to his side of the desk and looked at the screen. It had the dreaded “Page not found” words scrawled in large letters across the top. I wondered if someone had sabotaged the server. I fiddled with the computer, tried to call up my home screen, my Internet account. I messed with the mouse. It had the kind I hate, embedded in the keyboard between the keys and you. I fiddled and fumed. Nothing.
    “We’re cut off from the rest of the world,” Sherebury said. He sounded as if it wouldn’t take much for him to give hysteria a try.
    I asked, “How many are on the island now?”
    New Year’s is not the high season for the Chaldean Islands. Most of the islands are shut during the nontourist, winter months. Business on Korkasi, however, didn’t fluctuate as wildly with the seasons.
    “Maybe twenty. Less than half of the villas are occupied. Most of the help aren’t here. Without the night shift, we’ve only got a few of us who live here on a year-round basis. I’ve tried the radio every few minutes. It’s not working. I guess the backup generators only do so much.”
    I said, “Or the murderer planned well and destroyed all communications as part of his plan.”
    “That’s frightening,” Scott said. It would have been nice to think that fear was not an option at that point. I wouldn’t have wanted to put it to a vote.
    I said, “With fewer help on the island, it cuts down on the number of suspects.”
    I’d left our room at nine to meet Scott. The night shift sailed at eight. I figured we could eliminate them as possible killers. Unless he’d been murdered somewhere else and his body moved. Corpse toters? Too gruesome to contemplate right then.
    Scott asked, “Is that twenty not counting us or does that include us?”
    “Without,” Sherebury said.
    “Did you count guards and hangers on?”
    Sherebury said, “We have several security guards. I didn’t count them among the guests. We never do. What are we going to do? Nobody is going to get here from Santorini to investigate, if that’s who sends someone. Will whoever they send know how to keep things quiet? Our guests put great value on their privacy. We have to protect that. We can’t have any kind of scandal. We have to be able to control what gets out. We haven’t had a public scandal in years.”
    I thought I knew what he was obliquely referring to. Supposedly sometime in the early fifties, there had been another murder. The nineteen-year-old heir to an American industrial fortune had killed his working-class lover and then committed suicide. Supposedly there had been lurid headlines “around the world.” Although why someone in Bombay India would care about a minor European tragedy was beyond me. I suspected gross exaggeration on the headline claim. I’d never heard the incident talked about among the guests on the island. We’d heard the story from the man who suggested the island as a place of respite from the pressures of the world. He thought the possibility of an old romantic love gone awry would add to the allure of the place. I’d seen enough love gone awry in my day. I wasn’t eager for more, but fifty years ago had seemed safely long ago enough.
    I said, “Maybe we could use the yacht. If it’s big enough to get through this kind of