Cooks, Crooks and Cruises: A Humorous Cruise Ship Cozy Mystery (Cruise Ship Cozy Mysteries Book 2)

by A. R. Winters

  That was the plan.

  You can do it, Adrienne, I could hear my grandmother's encouraging words in my ear. Show them some Nebraska charm and that you're the best thing that ever happened to this old boat.

  “It’s a ship, not a boat,” I muttered under my breath with a grin.

  I forced a smile onto my face. I'd read that smiling, even if it was fake, could improve your mood, and I sure as heck needed it. So I forced the corners of my mouth up against their will, and I think I did actually feel a little better.

  Pushing open the final door, I exited the interior of the ship through a staff-only maintenance hallway to emerge near the side of the Lagoon Pool.

  Both the pool itself and Hemingway's bar shut down at sundown, and now that night was fully upon us, the area was devoid entirely of people.

  I slowly walked around the perimeter of the pool. The lighting was very dim; there were just a few security lights scattered about and the light from the nearly-full moon and twinkling stars above. It was quiet, too, and I hear the water from the pool lapping against the edges as it shifted ever so slightly with the almost imperceptible roll of the ship on the calm sea.

  There was no immediate sign of Beverly. I walked to the front of the pool where the fake beach was located. If you were going to meet anyone at the lagoon pool at night, this would be where you would do it.

  With no sign of Beverly, I sat down on one of the sun loungers. Looking to my right, I could see the exact spot where Olivia had tackled me earlier. I shook my head at the memory of it. I suppose I had gone a little overboard when I basically accused her of killing Hannah. At the time, though, it’d made sense.

  "Remember that, Adrienne," I said to myself quietly. "Don't accuse people of murder until you have all the facts." Then I giggled a little. Was I going crazy, talking to myself like that?

  I shook my head. Of course not. I'd always talked to myself, since I was little.

  I pondered that thought for a moment.

  Maybe I'd always been a little bit crazy...

  With nothing happening, I stood up again. Where was she? I began to walk over to the spot where Olivia had pushed me. The site of my shame. Maybe even the downfall of my fledgling career if I couldn't smooth things over with Beverly—and HR, when we got back to port.

  I figured Beverly had chosen this location because it was the scene of the incident, as I was now calling it. I hoped that didn’t mean she had some grand gesture in mind, like me getting down on my knees and begging Olivia for forgiveness. That wouldn’t happen. It couldn’t happen. Could it?

  Fretting, I began to pace.

  Why were we meeting out here, in the dark?

  Before I could follow that train of thought, I finally caught some movement from the corner of my eye. I turned my head. At last!

  Beverly had appeared from some other door and was walking toward me. She was carrying something that hung loosely from her arm but I couldn’t yet make out what it was.

  I raised a hand in greeting and gave a little wave.

  “Hi,” I said.

  Beverly was smiling at me, which I found a little unnerving. I was expecting our meeting to begin with a tongue lashing.

  As she came closer, I saw what it was she was carrying: it was one of the branded Vince DeLuca aprons that had been given out to those who participated in his cooking workshops and demonstrations.

  “I’m sorry about earlier,” I began. “I shouldn’t have said what I said without—”

  Beverly raised a finger to her lips and made a shushing motion, cutting me off in my tracks. I stopped speaking. Maybe she was going to give me a proper lecture to start with.

  Beverly pointed at the sun lounger I had been sitting on earlier.

  “Shall I sit down?”

  Beverly nodded at me, and smiled again. It was making me uncomfortable. Why wasn’t she screaming and shouting at me?

  I did as requested and sat down, perching nervously on the edge of the white plastic lounger.

  When I was sitting, Beverly held up the Vince DeLuca cooking apron and then slowly placed it over my head. I didn’t know what to think. Was she going to make me go behind the counter in Hemingway’s and cook something? Or perhaps model for some pictures wearing the apron? Neither seemed likely.

  “What are we doing?”

  Beverly just made another shushing motion with her finger over mouth, and stepped around me to stand behind the sun lounger I was on. Her two hands appeared either side of me, pulling the apron strings.

  “Shall I stand up?” I started to rise to my feet. If she was going to tie the apron properly it would be much easier if I was standing. But no. Beverly pressed her hands on my shoulders to make me remain seated, and then reached down for the strings again.

  It was making me nervous. Just the simple fact that she wasn’t speaking to me, and acting so strangely, was worrying me no end.

  I felt her doing something with the strings of the apron. I was waiting for her to pull them tight around my waist, half-tensing my stomach in anticipation. If she was angry, she might yank the cords a little tight, I thought.

  And that’s exactly what she did.

  Yanked the apron strings tight.

  But not around my waist.

  While I was sitting nervously, there was a sudden flurry of movement behind me, and before I knew what was happening the apron strings had appeared like a noose around my neck.

  Beverly had her hands on both ends of the strings and was yanking hard on them.

  I couldn’t breathe!

  Instinctively, my hands flew to my neck, and I managed to slip a couple of fingers under the string to stop my windpipe from being instantly crushed.

  My mind wasn’t as fast as my reflexes though. Initially, I was confused and panicked, but it was several seconds before I fully grasped what was happening—she was trying to kill me!

  I tried to shout out for help but all I managed was a strangled wheeze. My fingers clutched at the strings, trying to pull them off. But fingers can’t compete against the full strength of someone with two hands and a solid grip. In seconds, I could feel myself beginning to lose consciousness. This wasn’t like holding your breath. She was cutting off the blood flow as well as my air supply. I didn’t have long. Just moments. I had to do something before she, quite literally, killed me.

  “Argh!” With the energy of the crazed, I launched myself up and backward like a spring, shoving my upper body right into her face. Her grip didn’t falter, but she was knocked off-balance, taking a couple of steps backward.

  “Oh!” she shrieked in surprise. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” I couldn’t tell until a few seconds later, but at the time she was teetering precariously on the edge of the pool, her shouted ohs were Beverly trying to maintain her balance.

  Now standing, I tried to twist around and crouch down, and this sudden movement caused her teetering to turn into a full-on topple.

  With a mighty splash, Beverly fell into the pool, and half a second-later I fell in right on top of her. She lost control of her grip on the apron strings, and I felt the blood rushing back to my head at the same time as the water submerged us both.

  While it may seem illogical, in that dark and wet confusion I found myself furious that my only pair of dry sneakers and jeans were now wet as well. Now I was properly mad.

  The water roiled around me as both Beverly and I flung out our arms and legs wildly, trying to get ourselves upright and back in control.

  Using my feet, I tried to push myself off the bottom like I had earlier in the day, but Beverly was under me and instead I think I pushed her head into the bottom, which was fine with me.

  I bounced backward and reached the side of the pool. My hand latched onto something tube-shaped. A weapon to defend myself!

  In front of me, Beverly’s head burst out the water and I saw her hands going to her eyes to rub the water out of them.

  I swung my new weapon at her. It turned out it was a pool noodle, which slammed into the side
of her head with a wet slapping sound.

  “Ow!” She sounded outraged.

  I swung it again and gave her another smack.

  “Stop it!” she said, as if I was about to start respecting her authority as my boss again, despite her trying to kill me.

  I smacked at her two more times, before she escaped me be wading backward toward the middle of the pool. I used that opportunity to clamber up the side and out of the pool, and, quick as I could, I stood up again, clutching the long pool noodle like a sword, ready to beat her with it if she tried to approach.

  I stared out at Beverly, full realization now dawning on me. It was her. Not Olivia. Not Meredith. Not Vince or even the captain. It was Beverly all along. I shook my head to myself in dismay. I’d made a right fool of myself earlier.

  Beverly started to make her way to the other side of the pool. I didn’t want to let her escape, so I circled around the edge, waving my pool noodle threateningly as she approached. She turned and started heading for the other side.

  We couldn’t keep on like that. I needed backup. I stuck my hand into the wet pockets of my jeans and pulled out my smartphone. Thank goodness Swan had issued me with a recent model that had waterproofing. With one hand on my foam weapon, I used the other to unlock the phone and call Ethan’s personal number.

  While it was ringing, I paced around the edge of the pool, following Beverly’s moves as she tried to find a way to escape me.

  Ethan answered on the fifth ring.

  “Ethan? It’s me, Adrienne. You need to come to the Lagoon Pool right now. It’s Beverly. She’s the killer. And she tried to kill me!”

  While I was talking Beverly had turned over, and instead of wading and hopping, she’d started a powerful crawl toward the other side of the pool.

  “Quick!” I yelled into the phone. I shoved it into my pocket and sprinted around the pool. I just about made it before Beverly, and as she raised her head triumphantly, I greeted her with another wet smack to the side of her head.

  “Let me out! I demand you let me out right now!”

  SMACK.

  “Adrienne! It was just a prank! Let me out!”

  Just a prank? Yeah, right.

  SMACK. SMACK. SMACK.

  Hurry up, Ethan!

  Chapter 29

  When Ethan arrived Beverly and I were still engaging in our circuitous stand-off. While she tried to escape the pool, I thwarted her every attempt with my mighty sodden pool noodle. I wondered whether they had ever been used for such a purpose or whether I was a pioneer in the field of pool-noodle-weaponry.

  The first officer did not arrive alone. It turned out he had been dining at the captain’s table until I’d rudely interrupted, along with Olivia, the chef Greg Washington, and a gaggle of excited looking VIP guests I hadn’t yet had the pleasure of meeting.

  “Help! Help!” shouted Beverly from the pool when she saw the crowd approaching.

  “Ignore her,” I said, angrily.

  “She tried to kill me!” shouted Beverly again from the pool. She was wading toward us now. As she approached, I lifted the noodle high in the air and brought it down with an extra-loud smack right on the top of her head.

  “Murder! She’s murdering me!”

  I tossed the noodle into the pool so it landed on Beverly’s head with a thwap. I didn’t need to contain her any longer.

  “What is going on?” asked the captain as he approached me.

  “She tried to murder me with an apron.” I pointed at my neck. Although I couldn’t see it, I could feel the red marks that would no doubt turn into bright bruising before the morning.

  Ethan stepped up to me and peered at my neck. I caught a waft of his pine and cedar cologne as he examined me and I immediately felt reassured.

  “Someone’s tried to choke her,” he confirmed, before standing up straight again. “Get Beverly out of the pool but don’t let her leave. Restrain her if you need to.”

  “With pleasure,” said Greg, stepping forward.

  “We’ll take care of that,” said two security guards, stepping forward out of the assembled throng.

  Greg let out a loud, dramatic sigh before declaring, “I never get any of the fun.”

  “What happened, Adrienne?” asked Ethan.

  “When Sam and Cece went to dinner I stayed in my cabin. I didn’t want to leave. But the phone rang and I answered it. It was Beverly, she told me to meet her out here.”

  “Out here? At night? Didn’t that seem odd to you?” asked the Captain.

  I shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. But it was where the thing with Olivia happened earlier. I figured that was why she chose here.”

  The captain gave me a quizzical look, as if he would never have fallen for such a silly trick. Yeah right.

  “And then?”

  “She put one of Vince DeLuca’s aprons over my head and she tried to throttle me with the apron strings.”

  “She’s lying!” came a screeching voice from the pool. This was immediately followed by the loud sounds of splashing as she was dragged out of it.

  “I’m not lying,” I said softly, staring down at my wet sneakers. Ethan put a hand on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. I could tell he believed me at least.

  “And then?”

  “I fought her off. We ended up in the pool. I managed to get out, and I called you. I’ve been making sure she didn’t try to escape ever since.”

  “She stood on my head underwater and tried to drown me!” came a complaining voice. This time it was followed by a shh from the security team who were now holding her by the arms to stop her from approaching us.

  “There was a bit of a struggle,” I admitted, “but I didn’t try and kill her. That was all one way.”

  The captain sighed and Ethan tapped his fingers against his chin.

  “But why? Why did she do any of this?” asked Ethan.

  The captain opened his mouth as if to speak, then closed it again. We all looked at him. When he realized we were all waiting for him to say something, he gave a half-shrug.

  “I have an idea as to what she was thinking. Beverly was counting on this cruise—with the celebrity chef—being a big success. She needed it. She was looking to be promoted. The new flagship, the Swan Empress Angel, is being launched next year and she wants to be the cruise director. Wanted to be, I should say.”

  “But why would she kill Hannah? Weren’t they friends?” asked Ethan, shaking his head.

  He couldn’t understand it. Having known him for two cruises I knew why: he was a logical, by-the-book kind of man, and he couldn’t understand people who broke the rules for their own personal gain. Or in Beverly’s case, did things a whole lot worse than just breaking a few rules.

  “I know,” said Olivia, stepping forward.

  She took a moment to give me a brief glare before she continued. I doubted she’d ever forgive me now. Not that I needed her approval. “She knew Hannah was Vince’s daughter and it would be a big scandal. Vince might have canceled his part in the cruise, and who knows what other side-effects there could have been? She killed Hannah to stop Vince’s secret getting out.”

  As I listened to Olivia, I couldn’t help but hear a faint tinge of approval in her voice. As if killing Hannah to protect Vince’s career was actually a decent thing to do. Some people, huh?

  “Hannah was no good!” shouted Beverly from the side. We all turned to look at her. “She was supposed to be my friend! She brought Vince on the ship, but then was going to ruin everything with her stupid sob story.”

  “But killing her?” asked Ethan, frowning. “Did you really think that would help make the cruise a success?”

  “I didn’t kill her!” shouted Beverly, angrily. Yeah, right. “It was her own fault!”

  Ethan spoke very calmly and very carefully. “What happened, Beverly?”

  “She wouldn’t listen to reason! I told her to forget about Vince, forget about her silly reality TV-worthy ‘I’m a poor abandoned orphan’ story and just let the cru
ise be a success. But she wanted to ruin it for me, and for Swan! The company should be rewarding me! Everything I do, or ever did, was for Swan!”

  Ethan nodded at her slowly as if he completely understood her deranged rant. “So you argued?”

  “Argued? Ha! It wasn’t an argument. I told her what was what. I told her to just forget about it all. But she wouldn’t! She went for me. She grabbed me and I pushed her away.”

  “You pushed her away?” I asked, prodding her on.

  “Yes. I pushed her. But she was so stupid she tripped over her own feet and landed on her head. CRACK! Like an egg! She was an egghead! An egghead!” One of the security team squeezed her arm and indicated for her to stop. Beverly stopped shouting, but I could still see her whispering under her breath, egghead, egghead, egghead.

  I suppressed a shudder. She really had lost her mind. I half-wondered if her head hadn’t cracked at the same time.

  And also, whether there wasn’t a bit more to the story. It seemed unlikely that Hannah could have died just from falling over. Most likely, Beverly had done something more to facilitate Hannah’s death. That would be for the police to figure out, I guessed.

  The captain looked back and forth between Ethan and Beverly. “What about Meredith? Why did she poison Beverly?”

  I had to stop myself from rolling my eyes. Captain Derrick Carver clearly wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed.

  “I don’t think she did,” said Ethan, clearly couching his words for the captain’s benefit. “It was a ruse. Beverly poisoned herself and used the opportunity to frame Meredith. Isn’t that right?”

  We all turned to look back at the cruise director. Both of her arms were being held by the security guards, but she didn’t seem to be paying them the slightest bit of attention.

  “I did what had to be done! I took one for the team, for Swan! I poisoned myself so that we could get that awful woman out of the way—she upset half of Vince’s fans!”

  “And you thought you might get a sympathy promotion? If you were poisoned in the line of duty, Swan would ‘owe’ it to you?” asked Derrick.