Bikinis in Paradise (Tj Jensen Pardise Lake Mysteries) (2 page)

“Who?”

“Kiara Boswell. The other girls said that a man met the bus and she left with him
when she disembarked. I’m going to go to look for her. Do we have a photo?”

“Yeah.” Leiani sorted through a stack of files on the desk. After a bit of a search
, she pulled out the right one. She opened the cover and handed Tj a headshot.

The girl was really beautiful. Lo
ng brown hair, a petite form, huge blue eyes, and a welcoming smile that greeted you like a warm embrace. “She looks familiar,” Tj commented as she studied the photo. “Has she visited with us before?”

“According to the file
, she listed Serenity, Nevada, as her hometown,” Leiani informed her.

“Really? It’s odd I don’t know her.” Tj took the file from Leiani. “According to this
, she’s eighteen. She must not have attended Serenity High School or I’d have had her in one of my classes at some point.” Tj was a teacher and coach at the local high school.

“Maybe she was homeschooled,” Leiani suggested.

“Yeah, maybe. Go ahead and get everyone else settled and I’ll see if I can find our missing model.”

Tj returned to the lawn and called her dog
, Echo, who had been napping in the shade, to her side as she headed to the beach. It had been such a busy day that she hadn’t had time to take Echo for much of a run that morning. It made sense to kill two birds with one stone, getting Echo the exercise he needed while she looked for the missing girl. The weather in June in the Paradise Mountains could be unpredictable. While most years they had beautiful weather, it wasn’t unheard of to get a late snowstorm as well. Thankfully, Mother Nature had been generous this year, and the daytime temperatures hovered in the midseventies, while the night-time temperatures dropped into the forties.

Tj was trying to decide
whether to walk to the north or the south when she was greeted by a young girl of about twelve or thirteen. The girl had long and thick, if somewhat stringy, blond hair. She had the most amazing blue eyes and a wide smile, which provided a welcoming appearance in spite of the fact that she wore a tattered yellow dress and worn tennis shoes with no socks.

“Can I help you with something?”
Tj asked.

“Are you the lady who
’s looking for Kiara?” the girl asked.

“Do you know Kiara?”

“I’m her sister. Half sister, really. Kiara and I share a father.” Tj immediately recognized the resemblance to the photo of the model. “Kiara was supposed to be here, but I can’t find her.” The poor girl looked like she might cry.

“What’s your name?”
Tj asked.

“Annabeth.”

“My name is Tj. I suspected you might be Kiara’s sister. You are very beautiful, just like she is.”

Annabeth grinned. “You think so?”

“I do.”

“So you’ve seen my sister?”

“Actually, no,” Tj admitted. “I saw a photo of her, though. Kiara was on the bus, but she left shortly after she arrived with a tall man with blond hair. Do you know who that might be?”

The
girl looked around. “I have to go,” she said before running back toward the resort.

“Odd,” Tj muttered.
She was worried about the girl but really needed to find the model, so she called Leiani on her cell and asked her to keep her eye out for Annabeth and then headed down the beach to the north.

Tj waved to several people she k
new as she trudged through the hot sand. She really loved the community she lived in. Like most of her peers, she’d gone away to college, but unlike many who chose to relocate to larger towns with more opportunities, Tj had come home the minute she graduated. She was lucky to get a job as a teacher at the local high school. As with most of the staff in the small high school, she took on many duties, including coaching the track team in the spring, the girls’ soccer team in the fall, and the ski team in the winter.

Tj took
off her flip-flops and walked barefoot through the warm sand. Although it was a weekday afternoon in mid-June, it seemed that everyone had decided to take advantage of the gorgeous weather. Families shared picnic lunches, while younger kids played in the sand and older ones played in the water. Tj didn’t know how she was going to find one girl among the crowd. She waved to a group of high-school students she recognized before heading in their direction. Maybe one or more of them had seen the girl walk by. She really was a beautiful young woman. Even if the girls hadn’t noticed her, Tj was certain the boys would have.

“Hey
, Coach,” Connor Harrington, one of her favorite students, called out. Connor was intelligent, hardworking, and athletic, but his best feature, in Tj’s opinion, was his boyish charm. He had been by far the most popular senior at Serenity High School that year. “Out for a walk?”

“Actually
, I’m looking for this girl.” Tj handed the boy the photo. “She’s one of the models staying at the resort for the bikini competition, but she never checked in.”

“Yeah
, I saw her. She walked by about a half hour ago.”

“Was she with anyone?”

“A tall guy with short blond hair.”

“Did you see which way she went?” Tj asked.

“She was walking down the beach toward the cove.”

Se
cret Cove was isolated, normally accessed by boat since it could only be reached by land by climbing down a fairly steep embankment.

“So is everything set for you to attend Stanford in the fall?” Tj asked.

Connor was her best snowboarder and the captain of the downhill team and had been offered a chance to train with one of the premier coaches in the country, but he’d turned it down to pursue his dream of becoming a doctor after her good friend, Kyle Donovan, offered to help him out financially. Connor was a great kid and she was going to miss him when he left.

“It looks like everything is set. Kyle paid my tuition
, and he’s going to help me get settled into student housing. We’re going to take a trip to the campus next month so I can get a feel for things.”

“You
’ll be sure to come back to visit?”

“Yeah,
my mom will make sure of that. Did you hear that the show choir has decided to get together one last time for a concert during the Fourth of July celebration?” Connor had been a natural leader in this group as well.

Tj had been assigned the task of serving as teacher representative for the newly formed Serenity High School Show Choir the previous fall. At first she had been less than t
hrilled with the job, but as she’d come to know the kids and realized that many of them had real talent, she’d begun to enjoy the adjunct duty. When Kyle, a recent transplant to the area with an extensive musical background, had agreed to help out, everything seemed to come together, and her kids ended up taking third place in the regional competition the first year they’d competed. Tj knew Kyle had high hopes of winning the competition the next year and was already recruiting new students to take the place of those who had graduated.

“Yeah, Kyle told me you guys were working on something. I’m kind of surprised you managed to get everyone
together.”

“Most everyone is still in town
, and the play we did at the end of the year was so much fun, I think we all hated to see it end. I have to confess I originally joined the choir because of a girl, but it turned out to be a total blast. I’m really going to miss it.”

The kids had put on an amazing rendition of the musical
Grease
a few weeks earlier. Connor had played Danny Zuko and had done a fantastic job. A reporter for the
Sacramento Bee
had even come up the mountain to review it.

“
Well, I for one am excited to see what you’ve come up with.”

“You sh
ould come by rehearsal tomorrow,” Connor suggested. “It’s in the community center at ten.”

“I’ll try to do that. For now
, I guess I should continue my search. If the model comes back by, will you remind her that she’s needed at the resort?” Tj asked.

“Sure thing.”

Tj really should get back to the resort and let the missing model find her own way back. She would certainly be penalized for not adhering to protocol by checking in and attending the orientation with the other models, but Kiara was an adult and therefore responsible for her own bad choices. On the other hand, walking along the lakeshore was a much more desirable activity than overseeing the orientation, which Tj knew Leiani and Julie would handle just fine without her. After a bit of consideration, Tj decided to continue on to the cove. If Kiara wasn’t there, chances were she’d run into her as she returned to the resort.

The sandy beach became less densely populated with sunbathers as she left the area where the resort was located and continued on toward the north. The only way to
get to the cove was via a rocky trail that left the beach and wound through the forest for a time before returning to the lakeshore. By the time Tj ran out of beach, it was already more than forty minutes since she’d left Maggie’s Hideaway. She was debating whether to continue when she remembered the panicked look on the face of the girl’s sister. Annabeth seemed to be afraid of the man who met Kiara. Perhaps the model was in danger and needed to be rescued.

Tj stood at the top of the trail where it looped back down toward the beach. The small strip of white sand
that bordered Secret Cove was deserted. Tj felt her phone vibrate when she was halfway down the path. She paused to answer.

“Did you find her?” Leiani asked.

“No. I’m at the cove now, but I don’t see her. I’m going to head back,” Tj replied.

“I spoke to one of the other models. She didn’t think Kiara left
willingly with the man who was waiting for her,” Leiani informed her. “She said that Kiara seemed surprised to see him when she got off the bus. According to the girl who was sitting just behind her, the man grabbed her arm and pulled her to the side. It appeared they were arguing, but after a minute or two, Kiara followed him toward the beach.”

“Did you manage to track down the sister?”

“No. I looked around, but there was no sign of her.”

“Okay
. I’ll see you in a few minutes.”

Tj turned to head back toward the resort when Echo took off down the path.

“Echo,” Tj called, but her normally obedient dog ignored her. “Echo,” she tried again, before following down the steep trail.

The dog
ran to the edge of the waterline and looked out toward the horizon.

“Echo
, there’s nothing out there. Now let’s go; it’s getting late.”

The dog
barked and swam into the water. Suddenly, Tj got a chill down her spine. There was only one reason Echo would flat-out disobey an order.

“Damn.”

Tj hugged her sometimes boyfriend and lead deputy for the Serenity branch of the Paradise Lake Sheriff’s Department, Dylan Caine. He’d arrived with fellow deputy Roy Fisher shortly after she’d called 911. Based on the direction from which they’d arrived, Tj assumed they’d parked on the road and then hiked down the steep embankment.

“She’s about thirty yards out in approximately twenty feet of water,” Tj informed Dylan as sh
e fought to control her shivering. The lake water was freezing at this time of the year, and the cove was entirely in the shade at this time of day. “It looks like she’s been hit on the head. I would have tried to bring her in, but she’s been weighted.”

Dylan took off his shirt and wrapped it around Tj. In any other situation
, she would have stopped to notice how gorgeous Dylan looked in the tank top he wore under his shirt, but the only thing Tj could see now were the empty eyes of the woman as she stared at her after she’d dove down to the spot Echo had led her to. Luckily, Tj was a triathlete and an excellent swimmer. The lake claimed more than one victim a year who underestimated the deadly combination of cold water and sheer drop-offs.

“And you said you recognize the woman?” Dylan asked.

“Yes. Her name is Tonya Overton. She works for the Tropical Tan Corporation. She was new this year, but Dad and I met her during the planning meeting we had with the administration a few months ago. And she made another trip here to verify photo-shoot locations a couple of weeks ago. She was supposed to accompany the girls to the resort, but she never made it to the bus. Leiani spoke to someone from the Florida office who confirmed that she flew into Reno from Miami today.”

“So how did she get here
if she didn’t come on the bus?” Dylan stated the obvious.

“I have no idea.”

“And you said you were looking for a missing model when you found the body?”

“Yes. One of the girls was met at the bus by a man the other girls describe
d as having short blond hair. They headed toward the beach together. I ran into one of my students on the beach, and he said he saw her walking toward the cove with a man fitting the same description.”