by Mara Webb
She strongly emphasized the quotation marks. “Steph wanted to be important and also spend most of her day on social media, so she found a way to do both. Nick had a fiancé that he stole from his own son, a son-in-law he treated like the office punching bag and then you two that I don’t know from Adam, but you seem perfectly normal. Makes me wonder why you voluntarily boarded a yacht with these animals.”
“Free yacht trip, hard to say no,” I laughed. “I didn’t know Dominic was one of Nick’s employees.”
“He didn’t mention it?” Rose asked, sitting forward out of surprise. “Monty told me that Dom was just mind-blowingly incompetent, they kept him around to placate Stephanie and she was a burden on the company as it was.
“Dom was treated like a doormat and Nick actively encouraged other staff to make fun of him, call in fake orders and have him complete production forms by hand when they had already emailed over digital copies. I don’t know why he stayed so long, anyone else would have snapped a long time ago. Anyway, I should probably stop gossiping and go lay down before all this dessert makes me black out on the table.”
With that, Rose stood up and walked down the stairs towards the lower deck and cabin floor.
I pulled my cellphone out and saw that I had over fifty text messages and missed calls from Quin. Our bond allowed me to sense if he was in danger, so I already knew that he was trying to contact me over something trivial.
Ryan must be back down in the cabins and I was feeling a little apprehensive about him hearing me snore, the bed itself was so large that I would have to shout just to talk to him if we lay at the edge on each side, but I was still nervous. I thought that calling Quin would provide me with a suitable distraction for a few minutes. I pressed the ‘dial’ button and it rang twice.
“Nora?” Quin said.
“Yeah, it’s me, you rang me a million times, what’s up?”
“Oh…that. When I called you I thought there was a fire in the house so I was trying to let you know that I was using one of your credit cards to book us into an Airbnb as the place was about to collapse in a flurry of flames.”
“The house burned down?” I shouted.
“No! Jeez, let me finish. Anyway, so I booked the Airbnb, called 9-1-1 and then we all left, because obviously we can’t stand around chatting to the firemen, we’re cats! I packed us some snacks, a few cartons of milk, that DVD of Jurassic Park that I like, then we hit the road! We get to the Airbnb and they have one of those key locks, you know, the owner sends you the code for the little metal box thing and the key for the front door is inside.
“Well the owner was only a wizard, right? So, the key lock was way too high off the ground to reach and we couldn’t break in because it was magically protected! We tried climbing up on each other’s backs to reach the key, but we kept falling over.”
“Quin, the house?” I asked with a little more urgency in my voice.
“I’m getting to it, be patient. Holy moly, if I interrupted you as much as you are—”
“You interrupt me all the time!”
“Listen will you! So, the Airbnb was a bust. Couldn’t get in at all, I even messaged the guy to say, you know, like ‘Hey I’m gonna be honest with you, this booking is for seven cats’ and he just didn’t respond! So anyway, we figured since you guys are both away, and we were homeless, that we could just crash at Ryan’s house for the night.
“Then we get there, I break in because Ryan has made it almost too easy to do that, and we are watching TV or whatever and I remembered that I had burned some toast earlier and then when it popped out of the toaster I was so annoyed about it that I had swatted it underneath the table and that was what I could smell! It was old toast! Isn’t that silly?
“I wasted four hundred dollars from your card on an Airbnb and had the whole Sucré fire department zooming up the street, all for nothing.”
I wasn’t sure if I could send a curse to Quin and the other familiars through the phone, but it was tempting. The money wasn’t really a problem, Quin had more than enough in his own bank accounts that I knew I would get my money back, he just couldn’t enter the card details himself, so he used whatever was hooked up to my Airbnb account.
Breaking into Ryan’s house might be an issue, I didn’t want to ask how much mess they had made, or what the fine would be for wasting the time of the emergency responders that came to fight a fictitious fire.
“Okay, well I’m gonna need you to go home, don’t break anything at Ryan’s place. If you have already broken something, fix it.”
“He has a cute photo of you in a frame, did you know that? I cried when I saw it. He also had some beef jerky in his pantry and that is definitely all gone, and we were reading through his—”
I hung up.
I felt lighter inside at the thought that Ryan was keeping a picture of me in his house, of course this made me the weak link in the chain as I didn’t even think I’d taken a single photograph of us since we got together.
Tonight probably wasn’t the time either, there had been a murder on the floor above our bedrooms. I couldn’t run down to see my boyfriend and start snapping pics of us on this yacht, it wasn’t turning out to be the romantic getaway we had hoped for.
Could anything just go right?
I could feel the ache in my stomach from the mountain of food I had just consumed, although my dress was loose around the waist, I still had concerns that if my body kept expanding, I would tear right through it. All I had to do was stop eating, how hard could that be? As if on cue, Sean wandered out of a staff area and saw me sat alone at the table.
“Would you like any to take to your room Ms. Wildes? I apologize if that is inappropriate, some guests would hate the idea…” he said, looking down as if he had spoken out of turn.
“Sean, did we just become best friends? I’ll take a couple of brownies, one of these mini apple pies, a couple of those cookies and, hmmm, yeah that should be enough.” He smiled at me and ducked back through the door before returning with Tupperware boxes. “What happens to this food if the guests don’t eat it?” I asked.
“This is normally what we end up eating, the staff I mean,” he replied. “Mr. Blatham-Ford wanted us to stay alert and he said the best way to do that was to maintain a slight hunger. Ms. Blatham-Ford, Stephanie that is, she would become furious when our rumbling stomachs disturbed her ‘aura’, so we began sneaking food from the leftovers. Officially this food is discarded though. Mr. Blatham-Ford was a kind man in many ways, don’t get me wrong. I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead.”
Sean packed up the desserts and handed me the box, I thanked him and made my way down the stairs onto, what I was now referring to as, the murder deck. I was just about to head over to the next set of stairs when I heard a noise, there was someone in Nicholas’s office, the area he had forbidden us to enter.
8
I was torn between investigating the noise and taking this box full of treats down one more flight of stairs and watching a movie with my boyfriend on our private yacht vacation. Perhaps I could sneak down and just ignore it, after all there was a killer on this boat, and I would be putting myself at risk by going into someone’s private office on my own. I took careful steps towards the top of the next staircase and was almost in the clear, when Sean stuck his head down from the top of the stairs I had just descended.
“Just a reminder, we might have some rough water tonight. Rick is a great captain, but there may be some disturbances. Goodnight!” he shouted. He disappeared back out of sight and I was now by myself on the murder deck. The sounds from inside the office had stopped and I could now just here faint, frenzied whispers before Jonathon opened the door and stepped out, followed closely by Leslie.
“Ah, hello. We were just…” Jonathon began.
“I was just telling him that he needs to cut back on his drinking, especially now that he may have the whole company to run,” Leslie interrupted.
The lights on this deck had been switched off an
d the two of them were gently illuminated by the lights on the outside area of the deck behind me. I could just about make out that Leslie was wearing significantly less of the ruby red lipstick she had carefully applied earlier in the day, and Jonathon was now wearing significantly more of it.
He had lipstick on his mouth and neck, his shirt looked slightly disheveled and there seemed to be a tear in Leslie’s gown. It seemed fairly obvious what the two of them had been doing in there, but why in that office of all place?
“Okay, well…I’m off to bed. Goodnight,” I mumbled as I walked towards the stairs with my head low. I just wanted to pretend I hadn’t interrupted the victim’s son and fiancé making out in his office. I didn’t know what I was supposed to read from that, had their relationship never ended? Was this some bizarre grief response?
“Wait!” Leslie cried. “Please, I would like to speak to you. I think it’s time.” I turned on my heels and looked at her, back down at my Tupperware box and then up to Leslie’s face again. So close. If I had just moved a little bit faster, even if I had just not had Sean screaming down the stairs to get my attention, then I could be sat in bed right now with Ryan. Jonathon gave an awkward wave and then descended down to the cabin floor. We were now alone on the murder deck.
“What is it you want to talk about?” I asked. Leslie walked over to one of the chairs that faced out through the glass onto the outer deck where we had all boarded the boat. She sat down and blankly stared at the clouds brewing in the sky.
“I know you have probably heard a lot about me by now, none of it good,” she said. She was right, but I shook my head as if her notion was paranoid and incorrect. “The people on this boat do not like me very much and I know they have their reasons, justified ones at that. But I need to defend myself against any accusations of murder that may have been thrown around tonight, I didn’t kill him.”
“Where were you this afternoon?” I sat down in the chair next to her and swiveled in the seat so that I was facing her, my back up against the arm of the sofa.
“I was in my room for quite a lot of it, trying to use my magic to solve my problems. Jonathon and I are in love, that’s the first thing you should know. I dropped out of school to care for my parents, I have no qualifications and no rich daddy to employ me.
“I met Jonny and we hit it off right away, we made promises to each other that no matter what happened, no matter what it took, we would make a life for ourselves and so when we have our own kids they wouldn’t have to struggle like I had to. We would set them up for success, get them a good education, take them to see the world, love them so much that they feel brave enough to take bold risks and become brilliant people. We dreamed a lot.
“Nicholas taking all of Jonny’s money away was obviously a huge roadblock to our fantasy. We cooked up this stupid scheme of me trying to marry the old guy and take all the cash anyway, but Jonny didn’t think it would be so hard for him, he started drinking, threatening to expose the plan.
“It’s stupid, we are just stupid, naive children in a world of dollar signs and private yachts. I have wasted almost a year of my life pretending to love an old man, almost lost my soulmate a million times from drinking and now Nick is dead, we never got married so it was all for nothing.”
“Stephanie suspected you were after the money, I think everyone did,” I replied.
“Everyone on this yacht is a gold digger, they just come in different forms. You have Steph, the daughter that acts as the ‘yes man’ to every ludicrous idea daddy has so that he keeps signing those checks. Dominic is willing to be humiliated on a daily basis to get paid, Jonny wanted a fortune so badly he rented out his fiancé to his own father, Monty was willing to sell out his oldest friend to a rival company for a bit of cash, the list goes on.” She had a point.
“Who do you think would have killed Nicholas then?” I asked, unsure of a way to narrow it down.
“I sat in my room and consulted my ancestors. I had salt circles and charms; you name it. My mother came to me in a vision and told me to follow my heart, she said that money couldn’t pay for the life I wanted if it didn’t have true love in it. I knew she was right, this whole ‘marrying Nicholas for the payout’ plan was never going to work, and I should have just stayed with Jonny for the sake of my sanity.
“I had decided to tell him, to call it off with Nick and then when we got off this boat I would leave with Jonny and we would get away from all of them. All I can tell you, Ms. Wildes, is that I wanted to get out. If Monty was discovered then they may have argued, Dom might have snapped…I don’t know. It wasn’t me; I need you to know that. After my ritual I went to find Jonny to tell him, that’s where I was the rest of the afternoon. We were…reconnecting.”
That was all I needed to know for now.
Out of fear that Leslie may continue opening up and describe exactly what her and Jonathon had been up to in the privacy of his room, I thanked her for her time and said goodnight. I was finally making my way down the stairs to the cabins.
I could hear muffled arguing through the door of room two again and I realized that this was the room I had heard arguing in before. I hadn’t known the faces at the time but looking back now I realize that it had been Stephanie and Dominic that had walked out after the screaming match earlier.
I scanned the card for room four and hurried inside. “Good haul?” Ryan asked. He had changed into a long sleeve navy cotton shirt and a pair of checkered pajama bottoms. He was winning all of the cozy awards tonight; I was still in my dress that I had worn all day. I looked down at the Tupperware box in my hand and grinned.
“Yeah, I already ate like five of everything upstairs, but Sean packed up some extras for me to bring down here.” I placed the box down on one of the shelves and saw that Ryan had the TV on, I recognized the music score before I focused on what was happening on screen. He was watching Jurassic Park. I gulped nervously.
“You look nervous, are you scared of dinosaurs as well as tentacled sea creatures?” Ryan asked, he smirked at me and I realized it was already too late.
“You’ve spoken to Quin?” I asked nervously. I waved a hand over myself and my dress morphed into my own comfortable pajamas, my makeup evaporated away from my face and I could feel the air against the moisturizer that was now soaking into my skin.
“Oh yes, he had a lot to say about how I ‘didn’t need to worry about the house’ and that he had ‘fixed everything so well it would be hard to know what had broken’, he landed you in it pretty hard too and told me not to tell you that I knew. He talked for a long time about nothing in particular, something about burnt toast and an Airbnb incident.”
“What a delightful little creature he is,” I scoffed.
I prized open the Tupperware box and brought the container to the bed, perched myself on the edge of the mattress and shuffled back until I was sat next to Ryan. “Dessert?” Ryan leaned over to adjust the lighting in the room until it was dim enough to give a movie theatre atmosphere.
He wrapped his arm around me, and I leaned into him as we ate the cookies and watched dinosaurs terrorize children. Despite the ongoing murder investigation, there was a sense of calm in the room that I hadn’t experienced for a long time. I was content.
As the credits began to roll, I could just about hear shouting in the corridor outside our room. The choppy sea had really picked up, just as Sean had warned us it would, and the yacht was beginning to wobble aggressively. Ryan instinctively held me a little tighter as he knew I had been fearful of going on an ocean adventure and that this was the worst-case scenario.
Dead bodies I could handle, rough waters were more difficult.
“Do you think Steph and Dominic are yelling at each other so much the ocean is trying to lure them down to the depths just to shut them up?” I joked. “They seem to have been arguing all day, they’ve barely come up for air.”
“Some couples thrive off constant conflict, maybe this is their thing,” Ryan replied. “I don’t even think D
avey Jones would take those guys though. They are… persistent.”
A scream from the corridor caused us both to sit up and rush for the door. Before I could grab the handle, I could see that my vision was impaired, something was creeping into my thoughts that I couldn’t control. Was this a premonition? I looked over at Ryan and something seemed to be affecting him too.
Someone was invading our minds.
9
Something wet slowly wrapped around my ankle, pulling me down until I couldn’t stand anymore. I fell to the ground. I looked down to see what had grabbed my leg and was met by the sight of a giant orange tentacle dragging me underneath the bed.
I screamed so loud that I wasn’t even sure if it made a sound, I was using every bit of energy in me to make a noise, but I couldn’t hear my own voice. With my free leg I started to kick at the tentacle that was pulling me and the harder I kicked, the tighter it grabbed me.
I tried to grab onto the furniture that was close to the door, but I couldn’t reach. A second tentacle slithered out from underneath the bed and worked its way across the carpet until it was able to snake around my waist.
It was squeezing so tightly that I couldn’t take a deep breath, my scream was stifled in my throat and the suckers on the tentacles strengthened the creatures grip on me. I could feel my pulse racing and as the panic was flooding my system, I tried to figure out what was going on.
Before any of this madness, I had been standing at the door. I had heard a scream and was about to see what was happening, then my eyes had gone all funny.
My vision had altered, right? This was clearly some sort of augmented reality, none of this was real, but it was such a powerful nightmare. Whatever was going on, this was tailor made for me with every element of fear that could be added to make this a personalized horror movie.
I heard screaming from elsewhere on the yacht and I started to focus as hard as I could on the fact that none of this was real. A third tentacle emerged from beneath the bed and approached my face.