“I... tripped when I came in. I was looking at the boas.”
“You tripped? Walking into the shop?” Rolf peered at the devastation behind me. “And that happened? Goodness.”
“What on earth are you doing, Rolf?” said a voice over my shoulder.
The owner of the voice stepped around me, and the mess I’d made, and took him by the arm. It was his wife, Autumn, and she seemed even more bewildered and annoyed by the scene she was witnessing than Rolf did.
“The social media girl tripped when she came in,” said Rolf with a shrug.
“Adrienne,” I said. “My name’s Adrienne.”
“Yes. It looks like you’ve got some cleaning up to do,” said Autumn, casting an eye over the heap of boas and the semi-dismantled rack they had come from.
“Where have you been, Rolf?”
“I... went for a swim,” he said. “I felt like I needed some exercise, to stretch out the old limbs. We’re going to be doing a lot of sitting down today, after all.”
Goodness, I thought, looking at him. It was hard to believe that he’d had time for a swim already. And not only that, he’d managed to dry his hair and dress himself immaculately. All I’d managed to do so far was eat a hurried breakfast and make a mess.
“Well, come on! We’ve got to be there in five minutes. We don’t want to keep the girls waiting, do we?”
“No, dear,” said Rolf to his wife. He turned his attention back to me. “I think we’ll leave you to it.” He looked down at the mess I’d made.
A real gentleman would have stayed to help me clean up. Rolf looked the part, but he didn’t act it.
Arm in arm, the happy, shiny couple left me behind.
Glancing across the room I saw a girl of a similar age to me standing behind the counter. She looked down at the mess on the floor.
“Are you going to pick that up? Only I’m supposed to stay behind the counter at all times. I’m on the checkout today.”
I glared at her.
“Yeah, sure, no problem. I’ve got it,” I said sweetly through gritted teeth.
Complaining to myself under my breath, I began to clear up the boas. They’d fallen in a big heap and somehow managed to get themselves tangled up with each other, despite having only fallen moments ago.
First, I reaffixed the hanger from which they had all been draped, and then I began to pick them up and hang them up again.
“They’re because of the show,” said the mousy-haired girl behind the counter.
“The beauty pageant?” I asked her.
“Beauty pageant? No. The cabaret show. It’s supposed to be just like Las Vegas. We got the boas in so that people can dress up.”
I didn’t care one bit.
“That’s great,” I said, picking up a sparkly silver monstrosity.
As I did so, something tumbled out and fell onto the floor. Abandoning the boa for the moment, I rummaged around in the pile underneath to see if I could find what it was that had tumbled out. It hadn’t been a boa, and I didn’t think it was one of the accessories that was affixed to some of them either.
My fingers closed on something metal, and I withdrew it from the heap. I held it up to the light, examining it. What I had discovered was a beautiful silver bracelet.
And I knew I had seen it before.
“Excuse me?” I said to the counter girl, who was staring vacant-eyed across the shop. Her eyes flickered back to life and she raised her eyebrows at me. “When did you put the display up?”
She frowned at me, shaking her head.
“No, no, I told you, I’m on the counter today, not the floor. I didn’t put them up. It was Jeanie. She did it this morning.”
I peered down at the silver bracelet in my hand. It looked to be exactly the same as the one Diana had been wearing on the day of the feminist stage invasion. Was it a coincidence? Could it be one?
“Do you sell silver bracelets in this shop?”
The girl shook her head. “No. There’s some plastic ones with names on them though. But they’re mostly for kids.”
“But nothing in silver?”
She shook her head. Diana had told me the bracelet had been a gift from an old friend, but now I’d found it in the gift shop. She couldn’t have dropped it there; the boa display had only been put up that morning, and Diana certainly had not been wandering around the ship in her current condition.
Someone else must have dropped it.
“Did you find something?”
“Yes,” I said absent-mindedly while I picked up the last of the boas. I quickly hung them back onto the metal railing and checked the floor for any other finds. There was nothing else apart from a few bits of tinsel, glitter, and feathers that had detached themselves from the boas above.
“What?” asked the girl. She was looking at to me expectantly, as if to receive whatever it was I had found.
But she wasn’t getting it. No way.
“Sorry, I meant no. Nothing. I was in a world of my own.”
I shoved the bracelet into my pocket next to the disc from the heel and made to leave the shop.
“But didn’t you just find something? I thought you—”
“Sorry, got to go! I’m working!” I said over my shoulder.
I mean, I wasn’t stealing. I knew who the item belonged to, and it certainly didn’t belong to the gift shop. No, it would be much better for it to remain in my possession instead of handing it in.
As I left the shop, I knew I had to check Diana’s room. Since the bracelet had somehow made its way from her room to here, someone must have broken in and stolen it. Unless it had been on her body, in which case someone must have stolen it from the crime scene.
And it seemed to me the most likely person to have dropped the bracelet was none other than Rolf Monteith.
Surely it must have fallen when I crashed into him. It would have to be a crazy coincidence for any other explanation to be true.
As I started to walk away from the shop, fingering the bracelet in my pocket, I suddenly realized that I had completely forgotten about the whole reason I was in the shop in the first place: the mystery housekeeper.
I walked to the Grand Atrium and searched around. Of course he wasn’t there. He was long gone. I’d seen him twice this cruise already. Maybe I wouldn’t have to wait too long to see him again. At least I hoped not.
In the meantime, he’d dropped down a notch in my priority list. I had Diana’s bracelet now, and I had to find out how it ended up in the gift shop.
Rolf was going to need some serious looking into.
But first there was something else I needed to check, and I knew just the person to help me: Cece.
Chapter 14
I wanted to go and hunt down Cece right away, but as I started to head to her housekeeping section, I realized I couldn’t. Not quite yet. I still had a job to do.
The event that Rolf had almost been late for should have been starting about then. Luckily, this wasn’t one that would require my continuous presence. I could show up, take some pictures, and be on my way.
The contestants were each going to be interviewed by the team of judges on an individual basis. It was going to take them all of the morning to get through them all.
When I arrived at the conference suite, there were three girls waiting their turn on chairs outside Conference Room C. It was almost opposite the room in which I had found Diana Penn, which was still taped off with bright yellow security tape.
The girls kept looking at the room nervously. I was tempted to make a crack about the taped-off room being less scary than being interviewed by the judges, but I thought it might have been in poor taste.
The door to the judges’ interview room was slightly ajar, so I made my way over and peeked in. They hadn’t yet begun, so I entered the room with a cheerful smile.
“Good morning! Are you ready for the interviews? Do you need anything?”
It wasn’t actually my job to get things for the judges, but it seemed li
ke a polite thing to say. I just wanted to get their pictures in the interview room.
“Yes,” said Autumn, barely looking up. “I need sparkling mineral water, European only I’m afraid. I’m intolerant of American water and I won’t have anything from the Pacific. They’ve only given us still water.”
I gritted my teeth and smiled, as I so often did with demanding passengers or VIP guests.
“Right, I’ll see if that can be arranged. Could I get a photo of you all? It’ll be nice to have one of all the judges before they begin devouring the contestants!”
Martin looked up sharply. “We don’t devour them. We try to reveal their inner beauty. As pageanters, we truly believe that, in some ways, inner beauty can almost be as important as that which you really work for—your outward appearance.”
“Yeah, right,” muttered Autumn under her breath.
I wasn’t sure if they were joking or not, so I simply responded by lifting up my phone to take some pictures.
“Say cheese!”
“As a lactose intolerant semi-vegan pescatarian, I don’t say that word,” said Rolf with a frown.
“Smile!” This time I snarled it as a command, not a friendly request. This worked even better than I’d hoped, the three of them responding with shiny white grins immediately like a Pavlovian response.
“Wonderful,” I told them encouragingly. “I’m going to get some of the girls outside as well. Then perhaps I’ll see you later.”
“With the water,” said Autumn.
“Right. The water.”
Japanese still water, was it? I knew it was something special but couldn’t quite remember what it was. I was sure the catering staff would know; they’d been dealing with the judges and the contestants for a good couple of days now. I bet it felt like weeks to them.
“Smile, girls!” I said brightly to the line-up of them on the folding plastic chairs outside the interview room.
All except one immediately did as requested.
“Ten dollars, darlin’,” said Kimberly Dawson, taking a break from trying to chew the gum that was in her mouth into oblivion.
“Hey,” I said shaking my head at her. “We’ve been through that.”
“Just teasin’ you.” She snapped her gum and gave me another toothy smile. When she grinned like that, her mouth seemed so big, and with so many teeth, that I couldn’t help but be reminded of Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother—or the wolf that replaced her, anyway.
“Good luck to all of you!”
“Thank you, darlin’. They’re going to need it,” said Kimberly with a nod of her head toward the other two girls beside her. They both gave her nasty sideways glances which she just seemed to absorb, and turned up her smile another notch.
It was amazing how they could live their lives being so catty to each other each and every day. Wouldn’t it just get exhausting?
After quickly checking my phone to make sure I had enough photos for the morning I added a few captions and set them up to be slowly trickled out to the social media feeds over the next few hours.
That would give me the time I needed to follow up on Diana’s silver bracelet.
I found Cece happily complaining to herself just as she exited one of the smaller guest suites. She tossed some wet towels into her cleaning cart.
“Hey Adrienne, would you believe some people can use six towels in a single day? What do they do with them all?”
“Mop the floor?” I suggested.
“Yeah, multiple times by the looks of it,” said Cece in annoyance. “What’s up? Please tell me you’ve come to whisk me away from all this for an adventure.”
“I’ve come to take you away from all this for a mini-adventure.”
“Just a mini one, huh? No helicopter or speedboat waiting for us outside?” She looked at me with such a wide-eyed, serious expression I couldn’t help but laugh.
“I’m afraid not this time. Just a regular bit of snooping.”
Cece pushed her cleaning cart up against the wall to stop it from blocking the hallway. It crashed into the side with a gentle thunk.
“I suppose that’ll have to do. It wouldn’t be a cruise with Adrienne without some breaking and entering.”
I gave her a fake scowl.
“I’ve told you this before. No breaking, just entering.”
Cece gave me a gentle punch on the arm.
“Let’s go.”
Diana Penn’s cabin was only a short walk away, and from the outside, it looked no different than any of the other balcony suite cabins. The three judges had all been given pretty good rooms with ocean views, though they didn’t quite run to the level of the exclusive VIP staterooms that our richest guests chose to use.
On the way over, I showed Cece the silver bracelet I’d found and how I thought Rolf might have been in possession of it.
“I wouldn’t trust any of those pageant people as far as I could throw them. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if Rolf stole the bracelet.”
“You could throw them a good distance, though. You’re pretty strong.” I squeezed her bicep, which she obligingly flexed for me.
“I am, aren’t I?” she said with a grin. “Still don’t trust any of them though.” She stopped outside of Diana’s cabin. “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got.”
Cece held up the keycard in her lanyard to the electronic lock, and the door dutifully unlocked itself. She claimed her card would open any door on the ship, and I’d yet to see her proven wrong. We’d even broken into the captain’s cabin once.
“Smells nice,” said Cece as we entered.
It did. For a moment. The air was filled with the thick scent of an expensive perfume and it immediately put me on guard. If someone was wearing perfume, then that meant there was someone there wearing the perfume.
I squeezed Cece’s arm and whispered in her ear, “Be careful. Someone might be here.”
She gave me a sharp nod and we tentatively peered into the room. It was a mess. Ahead of us was a living area with a couch and coffee table, and behind it sliding french doors which led out to the balcony. The cushions from the couch had been removed and tossed onto the floor, and the door to the balcony was open, making the white curtain in front of it dance in the breeze.
On the right-hand side of the open-plan room was a large double bed, and on top of it was the beauty queen’s suitcase—and strewn all around were a wide array of her clothes.
There was no immediate sign of a person.
Cece tapped my arm and pointed toward the bathroom door. The two of us tiptoed over there, each gripping the other’s forearm in nervous solidarity. The door was almost completely shut, but a small crack remained open. We stood outside, listening for sounds of life.
But there were none.
With a sudden kick that made me scream, Cece slammed her foot into the bathroom door, sending it flying back to bang against the wall. The bathroom beyond was empty, but the smell of perfume was even stronger than before.
“What did you do that for!?”
Cece let go of my hand so that she could shrug and raise her palms in the air.
“What can I say? I hate suspense.”
She walked into the bathroom ahead of me. It was a brightly lit room that was entirely decorated in an art deco black-and-white color scheme, even featuring a beautiful, perfectly oval tub.
“I guess that’s where the smell was coming from.” There was the sound of glass on tile, and the remains of a broken perfume bottle skittered across the floor from another of Cece’s kicks.
“Someone’s been in here.”
“It sure looks that way. Let’s see if anything’s missing.”
I gave her a curious look. “How will you know if anything’s missing? Do you have an inventory of her stuff?”
She shook her head and gave an enigmatic smile.
“Let’s just see. I have a feeling we’ll be able to tell if anything’s gone.”
Cece opened the bathroom cabinets and peered aroun
d the room while I waited outside.
“Nothing in here apart from the broken bottle,” she announced. Her footsteps crunched as she crushed broken glass crossing the small room.
“Come on. Let’s look out here.”
We returned to the main living area and bedroom. We began with the bed and the closet. On top of the bed was Diana’s empty suitcase with various dresses, blouses, pants, and underwear strewn around. Cece began to rifle through it while I turned my attention to the closet.
The sliding door was already open, and when I peered inside, I wasn’t surprised to see two more suitcases, both of which had also been unzipped and their contents emptied out. Some of the stuff was hanging up, but most of it appeared to be in a pile on the floor.
“Either she was really messy, or someone’s done a thorough search through her stuff.” I knelt down above the pile of clothes and began to rummage through it without much luck.
“Hey, check this out,” said Cece after a couple of minutes.
Standing up again, I looked to see what she had found. My friend was holding up a rectangular box.
“Is that a jewelry box?”
Cece opened it up and revealed that it was indeed a jewelry box. Inside it had been divided into different sections. One area was filled with earrings, another with necklaces, and another with bracelets.
“Notice anything funny?” she asked, eyebrows raised.
“Yeah,” I pointed my finger, “it’s half empty.”
“Very good.” Cece tapped the inside of the box. “And do you know how we know stuff has been stolen?”
Now she had me. “Umm, how?”
Cece tossed the box back onto the bed where it bounced once, causing its lid to close on top of it.
“Do you think this was the entirety of Diana’s jewelry collection?”
That was an easy one to answer.
“Nope, no way.”
“So...” said Cece with a leading grin.
“So...” I racked my brains. Then I got what she was driving at. “If she brought that jewelry box with her, there’s no way she would have brought it half empty, right?”
“There’s my detective!” said Cece with a squeeze of my arm. “I knew I’d get it out of you. Exactly. Someone like Diana wouldn’t bring along a jewelry box half-full. If she was going to bring the box along, she would have filled it up to make the most of it.”
Beauty Queens and Cruises: A Humorous Cruise Ship Cozy Mystery (Cruise Ship Cozy Mysteries Book 4) Page 9