Terns of Endearment (Meg Langslow Mysteries)

by Andrews, Donna

  “Only on paper,” Angie said. “I’m very mild-mannered in real life.”

  “Yeah, right,” the martini drinker said.

  “I’m Kate.” The birdlike woman pointed to herself. “Tish and I write romance.” The gray-haired woman raised her glass, no doubt to indicate that she was Tish. “And Janet writes fantasy.” Janet was the martini drinker.

  “Doorstopper fantasies,” Janet said. “Big eight-hundred-page sagas. At the moment I’m doing a long-running series about a swordswoman adventuring her way through a pseudo-medieval world. Which means nothing that happens on this journey will ever make it into my books in recognizable form.”

  “Bookmarks, ladies,” Tish said. All four writers reached into their purses and dropped brightly colored bookmarks on the table in front of me. “Our calling cards,” she explained. “If anything we say makes you feel the sudden urge to learn more about our books, or better yet, buy them, we want you to be able to.”

  “Also some of us have our pictures on them, which will help you tell us apart,” Angie added.

  “I’d better pass out a lot of those suckers,” Janet said. “So at least I’ll get some good out of this trip.”

  “Janet’s still vexed that we’re not taking this cruise on a sailing ship,” Kate explained.

  “Too expensive, and the schedules weren’t convenient.” Tish’s tone suggested this was a discussion they’d already had a few million times.

  “And besides,” Kate began. “I— Oh, my God! You won’t believe who’s here.”

  We all craned to see where she was looking.

  The diva had just walked in.

  Chapter 3

  “Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world,” Janet muttered.

  “Do you know who she is?” I asked.

  “Desiree St. Christophe,” Kate said. From her expression, I could tell she expected me to recognize the name. “Not a romance reader, I deduce.”

  “Sorry, no,” I said. “I gather if I was I’d recognize the name?”

  “Maybe if you had a two-book-a-day romance habit,” Tish said.

  “And were fond of a particular flavor of romance that not many people write anymore,” Kate added.

  “Because there’s almost no market for it,” Janet pointed out.

  “The kind with a heroine who’s innocent and virginal,” Kate said.

  “And thick as a plank.” Tish rolled her eyes.

  “And gets ravished repeatedly by a series of rogues and ne’er-do-wells,” Kate continued. “Until one of them finally realizes he’s actually in love with her and marries her to produce the obligatory happy ending. Desiree was big back in the seventies and early eighties, when there was more of a market for that kind of book.”

  “She has made something of a comeback with the new series,” Angie said.

  “A fluke.” Tish waved her hand dismissively.

  Desiree was scanning the room, just as I had, and having no more luck finding an empty table. In fact, even less luck—after glancing up when she entered, the Three Stooges had returned to their beer mugs. And my four newfound friends all had expressions that clearly said, “Please, God, don’t let her sit here.”

  Desiree stood for a few more moments, looking around the room with a brittle smile on her face, as if annoyed that no one had noticed her plight and jumped up to offer her their table. My group were all studiously examining the contents of their glasses or carefully selecting just the right bits of pretzel from the bowl of bar chum on the table, so I followed their example. Then Desiree frowned and teetered over to the Three Stooges’ table. Either she didn’t often wear four- to five-inch heels or the ship was swaying more than I realized.

  “Mind if I join you?” she asked the Stooges. She parked herself in the empty chair without waiting for an answer. “There don’t seem to be any vacant tables.”

  “Oh, don’t mind us.” One of them leaped up. “We were just leaving.”

  “Yeah, we’re about to be late for … um…” The second one was following his friend’s example.

  “Karaoke,” the third one exclaimed. “Can’t miss the start of the karaoke contest.”

  They all three hurried out. I pulled out my Pastime brochure. I remembered seeing a photocopied insert that contained the day’s schedule. Boarding time, safety drill, cast-off time, dinner service, Grandfather’s lecture on the ecosystem of the Baltimore harbor. No karaoke contest.

  Desiree didn’t look as if she minded the Stooges’ departure. She hoisted her purse into one of the now-vacant chairs. At least I assumed the enormous pink woven straw thing was a purse. Maybe she’d forgotten to check one of her suitcases. Then she looked around petulantly for the bartender, whose sense of self-preservation appeared to be highly developed, given the haste with which he raced to her side. They began a lengthy conversation. The writers and I watched in silence.

  At least they were watching Desiree and the bartender. I was surreptitiously studying them, matching the writers to the bookmarks.

  Kate Trevanian—had fortune blessed her with an elegant name, or was that a pseudonym? She was fifty-something, petite, slightly plump, and definitely birdlike. She moved like a bird, with quick, darting motions, abrupt, yet not ungraceful. I was willing to bet her hair required outside assistance to maintain its medium-brown color, but the result was utterly natural looking. Her bookmark showed a handsome couple in Tudor dress with a modified version of Neuschwanstein in the background. Historical romances, evidently.

  Tish, aka Patricia Gregory. She was about the same age as Kate or maybe a little older. Her tall frame was lean, elegant, and languid, rather like a greyhound at rest. Her salt-and-pepper hair was cut short and gave the impression that all she had to do was dunk it in water and run her fingers through it to achieve a carefree, tousled look. I tried not to hate her for this. Her bookmark showed only two sets of legs from the knees down—one male, clad in faded jeans and worn sneakers, the other female, in bright red high heels—and the way the legs were angled suggested that the two were closing in for a kiss. Contemporary romance, no doubt.

  Janet and Angie were somewhat younger—late thirties, or possibly early forties. Janet Costello was a little shorter than me and about the same shape—well padded, but far from fat. Angie Weyburn was blond and barely over five feet, and while that probably made her much too short to be a model, she was definitely skinny enough, and had the cheekbones. I decided that if I wanted a relaxed conversation, Janet was the one to pick, but if it came to fending off the Three Stooges—verbally or even physically—I should opt for Angie. Janet’s bookmark showed a cover with a woman wearing worn leather armor, holding a reasonably realistic sword, and eyeing something offstage that, from her expression, was about to test both armor and sword. Angie’s bookmark showed a blond woman in a black FBI windbreaker holding a black gun two-handed and pointing both it and her steely gaze straight at me.

  I looked up to see Angie scowling at Desiree and the bartender with much the same menacing expression.

  “What could possibly be taking so long?” She began tapping her empty glass on the table. “I need another drink.”

  “And I haven’t even had one yet,” I said. “Maybe she’s trying to order something they don’t carry.”

  “It’d have to be something pretty exotic.” Janet held up her empty glass. “They had at least a dozen different kinds of gin.”

  “Probably telling him all the things she’s allergic to or disapproves of,” Kate said.

  “It could be worse,” Tish said. “What if Nancy were here and had to watch it all?”

  “Hell, yes,” Angie muttered. “In that case, we’d have to kill Desiree. It would be justifiable homicide.”

  Just then the bartender hurried over to our table. His name tag identified him as Aarav Lal, from India.

  “So sorry.” He had what sounded like a rather posh English accent. “Sailing days are absolutely bonkers! Now what can I get you?”

  I had to w
ait until the writers had ordered refills and I’d selected a frozen margarita before picking up the thread of the conversation.

  “Who’s Nancy? And why are you glad she’s not here?” I was also curious about why they’d have to kill the diva if Nancy had been here, but with any luck they’d tell me anyway.

  “Actually, we’d be delighted if Nancy were here,” Kate said. “We’d much rather have her than Desiree.”

  “Not much of a contest,” Janet agreed. “We’d rather have Attila the Hun than Desiree.”

  “Nancy Goreham—she was the fifth member of our writing group,” Kate explained. “She always loved cruises.”

  Her tone—and her use of the past tense—sent a small shiver up my spine.

  “Every year we take a trip together—a writing retreat to someplace beautiful and peaceful and above all warm,” Kate continued. “We write, and we talk about writing, and we soak up whatever exotic scenery is around us to use in our upcoming books. Nancy always wanted us to do our retreat on a cruise, but we never managed to get it together. So since she’s no longer with us, we finally decided to do it. In her memory.”

  “She’d be pleased,” Angie murmured.

  “To Nancy!” Janet raised her martini glass. The rest of us followed suit.

  “She has a lot of nerve.” Tish was staring over her reading glasses at Desiree. “Showing up for Nancy’s memorial cruise.”

  “She probably didn’t know.” Kate, evidently the peacemaker.

  “The hell she didn’t.” Tish scowled briefly, then looked up at Kate and winced. “Sorry. Not mad at you. But she had to know. It’s been all over the discussion lists—how we were going to take the cruise in Nancy’s memory, and have a small memorial service the last night out. So many people sent memories for us to share at the service. She knew.”

  “Maybe she has a vendetta against all of us for some reason,” Kate suggested. “And now that she got rid of Nancy, she’s going after the rest of us.”

  “I’d like to see her try,” Angie said.

  “Sorry—this must be pretty incomprehensible for you.” Janet had noticed my puzzled expression. “You see, we blame Desiree for Nancy’s death.”

  Chapter 4

  I glanced over at Desiree, who seemed oblivious to all the hostile stares aimed at her. Did the writers actually suspect her of killing their friend?

  “Nancy committed suicide,” Kate said. “And no question, Desiree drove her to it. So as you can see, we’re not exactly thrilled to be in the same galaxy with her, much less cooped up together on a relatively small boat.”

  “Ship,” Tish corrected.

  “Whatever.” Kate rolled her eyes.

  “And just look at her,” Angie said. “The show-off.”

  Desiree was sitting sideways in her chair, with her right arm draped languidly across the back. Perhaps it was only an accident that she held her hand so that a shaft of sunlight glinted on the several large, sparkly rings that adorned her fingers. Her left hand toyed with the rim of her drink—something pink, graced with the requisite paper parasol. Her legs were crossed and one of her shoes was half off and dangling rather precariously from the toe. A highly impractical shoe if you asked me, with five-inch heels so thin they were almost invisible. The shoe itself was bright red suede with a lot of fussy scalloped detail around the edges, and the sole was either made of red patent leather or painted to look like it. And she was twitching her foot so madly that if I’d seen it in a movie I’d have suspected she was a secret agent using some sort of footwear-based semaphore signals to convey a message to her handler. This being real life, she was probably aiming either to flirt or to show off her fancy shoes.

  “I wish my dad were here,” I said aloud. “As a doctor, maybe he could tell us whether all that foot twitching is merely a nervous tic or the early warning sign of some profoundly serious neurological disorder.”

  This sent the writers into gales of laughter so loud and prolonged that soon nearly everyone on the lounge was staring at us. Even Desiree glanced in our direction briefly before looking away again and resuming the expression of someone bravely though ostentatiously ignoring a bad smell.

  “Oh, God, I wish she’d heard that.” Tish was wiping away tears.

  “It’s deliberate, you know,” Kate said. “To show off the shoes.”

  “I suspected as much.” I shrugged. “But her efforts are wasted on me. I know even less about fancy shoes than about romance novels.”

  “Christian Louboutin,” Angie explained. “You can tell by the shiny red soles.”

  “I’ve heard of Christian Louboutin shoes,” I said. “My mother often covets them noisily. I, on the other hand, couldn’t tell them from a cheap knockoff.”

  “And probably aren’t the least bit impressed.” Janet raised her martini glass in salute. “I like your priorities.”

  We clinked glasses.

  “How—” I began.

  But just then the speakers strategically placed throughout the room crackled to life.

  “Good afternoon, cruise family!” a perky voice exclaimed. “I’d like to invite you all to make your way to the main dining room for our mandatory safety drill.”

  “If it’s mandatory, she’s not really inviting us, is she?” Tish said. “She’s telling us.”

  “Please make your way now to deck one,” the voice continued. “There could be a wait for the elevators, so we recommend taking the stairs if possible. Start working off some of that delicious food you’ll be eating this week!”

  “I’ll wait for an elevator, thanks.” Janet was holding her martini under her nose and inhaling with a blissful expression on her face.

  “Let’s finish this round and then head down,” Kate said.

  “Remember,” the perky voice added. “Everyone must attend the mandatory safety drill—”

  “Or they’d call it the optional safety drill,” Tish muttered.

  “And the ship cannot cast off until the safety drill is complete.”

  “Good grief.” Janet took a healthy gulp of her martini. “They’re escalating to threats already? I suppose we should wrap this up and get a move on. I most definitely do not want to be the last one to walk into the drill.”

  We weren’t the last to arrive. Not by a long shot. My cousin Horace was probably the first one there, other than the crew, but being a Caerphilly County deputy as well as a crime scene investigator, he had an ingrained appreciation for following rules and orders. He also had a peculiar fondness for arriving first at a social event and studying his surroundings—I assumed so if by chance anything untoward happened, he’d have at least a general idea what the crime scene had looked like beforehand.

  Michael and the boys had arrived with him, probably because the boys were under the erroneous belief that the safety drill would involve rowing away from the ship in the lifeboats, or at least jumping off the deck in a life jacket. Horace, Michael, Josh, and Jamie were the only other passengers there when the writers and I entered, although we were soon followed by an elderly couple who arrived on matching bright red rolling walkers, looking expectant at the mere idea of the mandatory safety drill, although I feared it might be as much excitement as they could handle for one day.

  You’d have thought the crew would be delighted with the early arrivals, but instead they looked almost startled to see us. Obviously passengers who showed up early for the safety drill were a rarity. And it quickly became obvious that nothing would start until everyone was there, and someone would have to entertain the boys for a good long while.

  Luckily Michael and Horace were up to the task. They’d helped the boys into a couple of life jackets the crew had brought in for the demonstration, and were pretending that the small stage at the stern end of the room was a life raft. Josh and Jamie took turns jumping off the stage into the dangerous waters represented by the dining room rug, while Michael and Horace, wearing dinner napkins folded over their faces as a sort of rudimentary great white shark costume, circled mena
cingly and occasionally pounced.

  The elderly couple seemed to find this all charming. The crew seemed to find it rather startling. I wondered if perhaps the boys’ game was a trifle insensitive to people for whom great white sharks were a genuine professional hazard. Although any resemblance between their game and real sharks was only coincidental—after all, real great whites probably didn’t waste time tickling their prey before biting into it.

  Satisfied that the boys were happy, I scanned our surroundings, since we’d be spending a lot of time here in the main dining room. It was filled with tables—mostly tables for four or six, with a few two-person tables tucked into corners. All of them had small brass stands in the center with the table number. Was there assigned seating? I didn’t remember seeing anything about it in the pages and pages of information they’d sent us. And if there was, would it be a good thing or a bad thing? That might depend on who was assigned nearby. Or was it one of those situations where you chose your own table the first time and were then stuck with it, like in first grade, when thanks to being one of the last kids to arrive at school, I’d had to sit for the whole year between the class bully and the class clown?

  “Just take any seat for the safety drill,” one of the crew members said, so I settled down with the writers for the time being.

  A few more people trickled in, but clearly the mandatory safety drill was pretty low on most passengers’ lists of things they wanted to do while on board.

  An officer strode in—at least I assumed he was an officer, since his uniform had more gold buttons and braid than those of any of the others in the room—although possibly less than First Officer Martin’s. He shook his head at the scanty crowd, and spoke briefly to the crew. One of them went over to the wall, opened a small door, and pulled out a microphone.

  “Attention, Pastime family!” The voice that came over the loudspeakers was the same perky one we’d heard before, which was curious, considering that it originated in a diminutive young woman whose fixed smile clearly showed that talking on the loudspeaker made her very nervous. “The mandatory safety drill will begin shortly in the main dining room. Please show up early—you don’t want to miss the complimentary cocktails and smoothies!”