* * *
It was obvious what Pamela’s mom was trying to do: simply be the most alluring, attractive passenger on the ship. Certainly to put a damper on her ex-husband’s love life, if she could. And definitely to make him wonder if he had made a mistake about not taking her back. That was the way we saw it, anyway.
She usually skipped breakfast and had a roll and coffee up on the sundeck in her short shorts and halter tops. She signed up for nearly every excursion and, Rachel heard from Stephanie, asked frequent questions of the guides, more for their attention, it seemed, than for the information.
Every dinner, Pamela’s mom was stunningly dressed in clothes that were one degree shy of too sexy, and by the fourth night of the cruise, she seemed to have caught on that Quinton always seated her on the opposite side of the room from Bill and Meredith.
“Oh,” she said, pausing. “I think I see a seat over there I’d prefer.”
What could Quinton say but, “Of course,” and follow her to the table next to Pamela’s dad, pulling out the chair for her.
“Did you see that? Did you see that?” Pamela whispered to me from the door of the galley.
Unfortunately, both of those tables were mine that evening, and as dinner progressed and wineglasses were refilled, Sherry’s laughter grew a little louder and more frequent, while Pamela’s dad, at the adjoining table, remained stone-faced and seemed to be eating faster than usual. He and Meredith were the first to excuse themselves after dessert and coffee had been served as Sherry lingered at her table, telling an impossibly long story.
“Oh, I wish this cruise were over,” Pamela lamented later, as we got ready for bed.
“Only a few more nights and we’ll have a whole new set of passengers,” said Lauren. “Hang in there. None of the other passengers know they’re related.”
“I can see the tension in Dad’s face, though,” Pamela said. “Now he’ll never take her ba—” She stopped, her eyes wide. “I can’t believe what I think I was about to say!”
“Sort of the universal desire, isn’t it?” said Emily. “After my parents split, even though they fought like tigers, I wanted us all under one roof.”
“Maybe so,” said Pamela, wrapping her arms around her knees. “I guess what I long for, really, is the family I wanted us to be.”
The following day we were docked at Oxford, and Pamela’s mom had gone on a tour of the ship for those who didn’t go ashore. Somehow she had wrangled an invitation from the captain to dine at his table that night, one of the few evenings he was eating on board this week.
“I can’t watch,” Pamela told me when she saw them together. “How did she manage that?”
“Maybe this is just what she needs,” Yolanda said. “Attention. From a guy in uniform, preferably.”
Sherry Conners had dressed for the occasion in a white silk dress, butt-enhancingly tight, with a deep neckline. Her fingernails and toenails were painted pearl white, and she was easily the most attractive woman at the table. Captain Haggerty sat next to her, and Ken McCoy introduced her to the five other guests in their party.
What she didn’t have, however, was the satisfaction of seeing her ex-husband watch her dine with the captain because, we found out from Pamela, he and Meredith had reservations that evening for the Robert Morris Inn. And as the dinner progressed, we could see her eyes scanning the dining room for someone who wasn’t there.
It was difficult to focus on my assigned tables. I found my eyes darting to the captain’s table all night, where Mitch was serving, and I could tell that things were going from awkward to unpleasant. At one point, when Dianne approached the table with a new bottle of wine, I saw the almost imperceptible shake of the captain’s head, and Dianne and the wine immediately disappeared.
I was taking dessert orders at the table next to the captain’s when I heard Sherry say, “I’d think you’d be seated on the other side of the dining room, Captain. All the action seems to be over there, by the dock.”
I saw the raised eyebrows of the other guests. Haggerty kept his composure but didn’t smile: “I’m sorry you find this table disappointing,” he said.
“On the contrary,” one of the men said quickly, “the pleasure is in the company.”
Pamela had heard too, and her face turned a fiery red, beginning at the neck.
Instead of apologizing, Pamela’s mom continued her nowraspy harping: “It doesn’t seem as though there are as many people in the dining room tonight as usual. I’m surprised passengers dine off the ship; I’d think they’d want to enjoy what they paid for.”
The captain smiled politely. “We hold no prisoners, Ms. Conners, I assure you. Oxford has many lovely restaurants, particularly the Robert Morris Inn, which is a landmark here, and many of our passengers book reservations well in advance.”
You could almost see the light beginning to dawn on Sherry’s face. Her big night with the captain, and her ex-husband and his girlfriend were living it up somewhere else. “Well, no one told me about it,” she said, and weaved slightly in her chair. The wineglass in her hand tipped dangerously before the captain steadied it for her. “Maybe our dinner should have been held there.”
The other guests at the table were too shocked to comment, but Haggerty had obviously had enough.
“Officer McCoy,” he said, “I believe that Ms. Conners is having a rather unpleasant evening. Would you escort her to her stateroom, where I think she’ll enjoy the quiet?”
Sherry Conners looked shocked. She began to protest, but then she collected herself enough to thank the captain for inviting her, said good night to the others, and, leaning on Ken’s arm, walked slowly away from the table.
Pamela was in tears when we met in the galley. I gave her a hug, but she turned for a moment, swallowed a sob, then gamely picked up her coffeepot and headed for the dining room once more.
After dinner I stood at the bow of the ship in the darkness with Pamela and Gwen, waiting for Liz to finish galley duty. There was a big poker game going on in the dining room among the stewards and deckhands, but we wanted to talk among ourselves, just the four of us.
We watched Pamela’s dad and Meredith strolling leisurely back from their dinner out. Bill had his arm around Meredith’s waist, and they’d obviously had a good time.
“It was every bit as wonderful as they say,” we heard Meredith tell Quinton as they boarded below. “It was a fantastic meal.”
“So glad you enjoyed it. We’re always happy to recommend the Robert Morris,” Quinton said.
“Hey! I put some extra chocolates on your pillows,” Pamela called down to them.
They looked up and waved.
“A perfect end to the evening,” Meredith said. “There’s always room for chocolate.”
Liz came up at last with lemonade, and we went up to the top deck, sitting in a little circle near the bow, our bare toes touching on the end of Gwen’s chaise longue. Some of the guys sprawled nearby, Curtis and Josh comparing the calluses on their hands. Bugs circled and buzzed around a dim deck lamp.
“Well, so the worst happened and you’re still here, Pamela,” Gwen said.
Pamela sighed. “Yeah. I sort of think Mom will behave now that she’s made a total fool of herself. And she wasn’t so drunk that she didn’t realize it.”
“Maybe it’s good that it happened, then. Get the venom out of her system,” Liz suggested.
“Just so Dad and Meredith have a good time,” said Pamela. “I promised to go biking around St. Michaels with them tomorrow if they get up early enough. I think they’d like that. It’d be nice to do something with my dad for a change.”
“Four more weeks!” I said. “And then … we start a whole new life.”
I had just reached for my glass of lemonade on the deck beside me when suddenly the air was split with the shriek of the alarm, immediately followed by Captain Haggerty’s voice over the PA system: “Man overboard, man overboard, this is NOT a drill.”
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Curtis got up so fast, his chair tipped over.
The captain’s voice continued: “Passenger over port side aft. Go immediately to stations.”
We were all on our feet and running. Each of us had our own assignment, and Pamela was beside me, her face chalk white. Then I lost her.
The door to the pilothouse must have been open as I passed the Chesapeake deck on my way down because I heard loud squawks coming from a transmitter. Passengers were gathering port side, many in robes and pajamas, but I continued on to the lounge deck’s fantail. Gwen got there momentarily.
“Anyone know who it was?” I asked Rachel, who was looking over the rail.
She didn’t take her eyes off the water. “No. Quinton and Dianne are checking the staterooms.”
We heard the microphone click on again, and then Haggerty’s voice: “This is your captain. All passengers return to your staterooms to be counted. All passengers, to your staterooms.”
Gwen and I focused on the water.
A few yards from the ship, a life preserver made a ring of bright orange, bobbing up and down on the dark water. The flashing beacon from a buoy bobbed next to it. They separated, came together again, then the space between them grew wider. And all the while, a searchlight scanned the surface.
By leaning out and looking down, I could see Frank on the main deck holding a Jacob’s ladder. I’d seen it before—a plastic device that floats and looks like a ladder to assist someone getting back onto the ship. Curtis was beside him with a shepherd’s hook. While the deckhands prepared for a rescue, the stewards’ job was to locate the person in the water and never take our eyes off him or her. But the ominous thing was that we couldn’t see anyone anywhere on the surface.
“At least we’re still in port,” Rachel said. “If the ship had been moving, we’d immediately have to stop and go into reverse, and we might lose sight of the passenger altogether.”
Ken McCoy came up from below to talk with a man who stood barefoot, shirt unbuttoned. It looked as though he’d been undressing for bed.
“Are you the one who saw the passenger fall in?” Ken asked.
“Like I said,” the man told him, “all I heard was this woman’s scream. So I opened our cabin door, and some lady was running by saying somebody jumped and pointing out there.” The passenger turned and pointed in the direction of the life preserver.
“I heard the scream too,” another passenger said, coming over. “My wife thinks she heard the splash.”
“The splash and then the scream?” Ken asked. And, into the walkie-talkie, “I’m talking with some passengers now. They all seem to agree it was port side aft.”
“Uh … I guess it was the scream and then the splash,” the second man said.
The beam of a searchlight swept the water again. On the dock a small crowd was gathering, despite the hour.
“Can you tell me who the woman was who told you someone had jumped?”
The barefoot man let out his breath. “Whew. Haven’t a clue. I mean, you hear someone jumped overboard, you head for the rail, that’s all.”
A woman behind him spoke up: “I heard that all you could see were two arms going under. That’s what the woman next to us said.”
“Did she see it?”
“No, she was in bed like we were. That’s what she heard.”
“I heard someone pushed her!” another voice called.
Quinton’s voice behind them all: “People, we have an emergency situation here, and we’re checking the passenger list now. Please go back to your staterooms so we can tell who’s missing.”
Some began to leave, others lingered, then left. I heard the harbor police arriving on the deck below, and a minute later we saw Josh and Curtis out in a speedboat, slowly circling the life preserver in wider and wider arcs.
Someone edged in beside me at the railing. It was Pamela. I slipped my arm around her. None of us had to ask what she suspected. And when Dianne and Quinton had checked off every person on the passenger list, the only one missing was Pamela’s mom.
In the water the speedboat circled again and again. The police boat joined the search. We took Pamela around and around the walkway, just to keep moving.
“What are they doing?” someone on dock called up to us.
And when we didn’t answer, one of the passengers called back, “Rescue operation. A woman jumped.”
“Recovery operation,” someone murmured behind us.
I’m not sure how long we waited. Forty minutes, maybe. Pamela sat down on a bench, wrapped in Gwen’s arms. Mr. Jones sat on the other side of them, arms on his knees, hands dangling. Meredith stood at the railing, looking down. There’s a point at which you feel that not knowing is worse than knowing, even when the news is bad. That not knowing is a poison that makes you sick all over. You’re physically ill, not just worried.
A sudden commotion below, and Mr. Jones stood up. He went down to the main deck, and it was a while before he came back. His face was gray and drawn.
“Did … they find her?” Pamela asked weakly.
He had something in his hands and sat down beside her. It was a scarf. “They found this floating on the water,” he said. “Was it hers, do you know?”
Pamela broke into tears, nodding violently, and this time leaned against her father. He pulled her close. My own knees felt shaky. I crouched down where I was so I wouldn’t fall, and grabbed Liz’s hand.
Not another summer like last one! How could Pamela cope with this? How could we? We weren’t even halfway over the shock of losing Mark Stedmeister last August.
And suddenly I heard Meredith say, “Sherry!”
I rose to my feet and stared as Pamela’s mom came through the little crowd and looked around.
“What’s going on?” she asked timidly.
There were stains on the front of her jacket, and her hair was disheveled, her face groggy.
“Mom!” Pamela cried, startled, but she didn’t stand up. Bill Jones stared at his ex-wife in disbelief.
In moments Captain Haggerty and a police officer came up from below.
“She’s here!” people told him. “Sherry Conners is here!”
Haggerty looked at her closely, relief and doubt on his face. “Ms. Conners, you’ve been reported missing,” he said.
“Why … no! I just heard all the commotion and …” Sherry looked around.
“Can you tell us where you’ve been the last hour?” the policeman said.
“Well, I don’t know … I was in the restroom downstairs for a while—”
“We checked there, several times,” said Dianne.
The barefoot man worked his way through the crowd. “That’s her!” he said. “That’s the woman who told me someone had fallen in!”
“Ms. Conners, would you come down to the office please so we can clear things up and let our other guests go to bed?” Captain Haggerty said. “Our hotel manager needs to file an onboard incident report.”
Ken called down on his walkie-talkie to bring the speedboat in, retract the buoy.
Pamela and her dad and Meredith stood with their arms around each other. No one, not even Pamela, had welcomed Sherry back.
It was after one when we finally got to bed, and even then, we sat around crew quarters, trying to put it together.
“Where do you suppose she was all that time? We checked everywhere!” Yolanda said. Six of us had crowded onto Pamela’s bunk; the others sat on the beds across from us.
“She’s small—she could hide anywhere,” said Pamela. “Under a desk. Behind a sofa.”
“But why?” Liz asked.
Pamela turned on her. “There doesn’t have to be a why, Liz. It’s Mom! It’s the way she operates. Whatever brings the most attention.”
“What do you think they’ll do to her?” asked Natalie.
“Nothing,” said Rachel. “She said she couldn’t remember anything, and who could prove she couldn’t? Haggerty’s so relieved we didn’t lose a passenger on his
watch that he could have peed himself.”
Pamela hugged her knees, her chin resting on top. “It’s the first time in my life that I hope she was dead drunk. I can’t stand the thought that she probably planned the whole thing—the scarf and all. One minute I’m so glad she didn’t jump, and the next minute I …” Her voice wobbled. “I feel like I hate her guts.”
“I think a lot of us are pretty mad at her,” I said.
“Know what?” said Emily. “Tomorrow everyone will be touring St. Michaels and what happened tonight will be yesterday’s news. Let’s get some sleep.”
I couldn’t, though, for a long time. Inside I was seething at Pamela’s mom and aching for Pamela. She must have been having trouble too, because some time later she crawled in my bunk with me, snuggled up against my back, and put one arm around me. I patted her hand to let her know it was okay, and when I felt her breathing more slowly, I fell asleep too.
When I came up on main deck early the next morning, I saw Pamela’s mother wrapped in a yellow raincoat, wearing dark glasses and a scarf around her neck, sitting beside two suitcases near the gangway.
I knew Pamela had seen her too because she’d been watching from the lounge deck. I paused, wondering if I should say something to her. But a taxi pulled up in the parking lot, and Curtis removed the line across the gangway and carried the bags down.
Pamela’s mom followed without looking back and climbed in the cab. I watched her leave without a wave, a hug, a goodbye to her daughter, even.
Pamela was going to spend some time in St. Michaels with her dad and Meredith, but I just wanted to stroll around and see more of the town—let myself unwind. Mitch and I decided to eat lunch somewhere onshore.
“Pamela okay?” he said as we left the dock to the flapping of sails on the boats anchored nearby.
“I think so. She’s with her dad, anyway.”
“Anyone know where her mom was while we were all looking for her?”
“Rachel said she was sitting in Stephanie’s office in the dark, watching us search the ship. Dianne found her when she turned on the light.” I sighed. “She was doing so well for a while. We thought she had turned a corner when she started working, got an apartment, and had a boyfriend… . And Pamela’s supposed to leave for New York this fall. Got a partial scholarship to a theater school.”
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