The Flaming Luau of Death Read Online Free Page A

How many glasses of champagne had she drunk? I checked my watch. Even accounting for the time change, it was still only seven o’clock Los Angeles time. Not late at all. And yet, we’d been partying pretty hard all day.
    Wes was encouraging Holly to come in and sit down. She didn’t look so chipper, he was saying.
    “No,” she said, “I can’t. You’ve got to come and help Liz.”
    “What’s the matter?” I asked.
    “She passed out,” Holly said, and tears were beginning to well up in her eyes. “I’m afraid she may have hurt herself when she fell.”
    “What?” Wes and I shared a brief worried look. He stepped outside our room, and I followed. “Was she sick or was she drunk?”
    “Don’t get scared,” Holly said, keeping up with us as we walked down the pathway toward her room. “I mean it,” she said, her voice getting squeaky. “Don’t get freaked.”
    “What scared?” I asked.
    “What freaked?” Wes asked.
    “And keep your voices down. I don’t want my sisters to hear us,” she said in a loud hush as we walked past the closed doors of their rooms. “They worry about everything.”
    “We should call the front desk,” I said, “They can call a doctor for Liz. Maybe…”
    Whatever I had meant to suggest, in my zeal to fix yet one more little problem—our friend Liz, who may haveoverimbibed—remained forever unspoken, because just then Wes and I reached Holly’s room. The self-closing door had been propped partially open. There was now a leg sticking out.
    Liz, Holly’s very best all-through-school friend, was lying crumpled on the floor, just a few steps into the room. She looked peaceful, thank God, and unhurt, her cheek pressed into the clean green carpet, but altogether too unconscious for my taste.
    Wes knelt by her side, felt for her pulse. “She’s okay.”
    I opened the door fully, hoping to help lift her up to one of the beds. It was then that I saw the broken lamp, shards of azure pottery strewn all over the coverlet of the nearest bed. And the tousled bedspread.
    “You ever hear about how sometimes people check into their hotel room and get a little surprise?” Holly said, gulping air. “They go to the front desk, let the clerk swipe their credit card, and then they are given their key card.”
    “Holly, what happened in here?”
    “You know,” she continued, eager to get her point across, “stories about a time when things go a little flooey? They open the door only to discover that the room has not yet been vacated? You remember Carol McCoy, my friend from Dallas? She checked into a room in Omaha and actually walked in on a lady.”
    Wes and I exchanged glances. Why was Liz lying unconscious on the floor? Why was there a smashed lamp on the bed?
    “I had a friend who opened the door at some big hotel in D.C. only to find someone else’s stuff all over the place—you know, showing the room was still occupied.”
    “Are you saying there was someone already here in your room when you and Liz came in?” I asked, impatient to get to the truth. “At the Four Heavens?”
    “What the hell?” Wes, the guy least likely to use a fourletter word, followed my eyes over to the nearest bed.
    Atop the neat blue bedspread, embroidered with yellow pineapples, was a pattern of several stains—still wet and bright red.
    “Now don’t get excited,” Holly said, her voice getting higher as she tried to keep us calm. “He was dressed in brown shorts and a brown T-shirt. The T-shirt had something written on it in Japanese, you know, like two white Japanese characters on the front.”
    “A man? Holly, are you saying there was a man here in your room?”
    “Yes.”
    “ Who? Who was he? What happened?”
    “Just some strange guy, Maddie. Like about our age, maybe late twenties. He looked Asian-American. I don’t know who he was. I mean, I never saw him before. I couldn’t figure it all out; everything happened so fast. One minute Liz and I were laughing so hard we