Terns of Endearment (Meg Langslow Mysteries)

by Andrews, Donna

  With that he stomped off.

  “A logical explanation.” I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. “If you ask me, ‘our ship broke down and we’re trying to fix it’ is pretty damned logical.”

  “He’s just annoyed because he can’t figure out an environmental reason for it.”

  “An environmental reason?

  “Like someone trying to smuggle some endangered species out of Bermuda and stopping here to hand off the loot to their henchmen. He liked that theory at first.”

  “Well, I can see the flaw in it.”

  “You can?” Rob sounded surprised. “He had to tell me.”

  “And just what did he tell you?”

  “Well, there are a fair number of endangered species in Bermuda—including some that live only in Bermuda. But most of them are crustaceans and marine worms, and none of them have any commercial value. So that theory’s a no-go.”

  “Very true.” I nodded with approval. “There’s also the fact that we’re on our way to Bermuda, so even if any of the worms and crustaceans had some commercial value, we’re still hundreds of miles away from them, and rendezvousing with the henchmen would be premature. Did he really say ‘henchmen’?”

  “He did.” Rob grinned. “Maybe he was being ironic.”

  “Grandfather doesn’t do ironic. It’s always possible that someone is trying to smuggle something into Bermuda—I’m sure that happens all the time—but I’m not sure why that would require stopping in the middle of the Atlantic for hours.” At least I hoped it would only be hours. “Because the idea of rendezvousing with the henchmen out here in mid-ocean is pretty improbable.”

  “Why?” Rob looked put out. Maybe the mid-ocean rendezvous had been his contribution to the theory.

  “I’m pretty sure smugglers try to be as unobtrusive as possible,” I said. “Handing off the merchandise in port, under cover of all the passengers coming and going from the ship—that’s what I’d aim for if I were an international smuggler. Not sitting in the middle of the ocean where the passengers, on top of already being anxious and suspicious, have nothing else to do but watch every little thing that’s happening on board.”

  “I guess Gramps and I wouldn’t make very good smugglers. So you think that’s all that’s happening—the ship broke down and they’re trying to fix it?”

  I nodded.

  “Bo-ring.” Rob rolled his eyes to emphasize his disappointment.

  “Yes, I hope it will be.”

  I headed down to deck five and back to the bow, where the miniature golf course was. Michael and the boys were gone—presumably to lunch—but Rose Noire was sitting cross-legged at the front of the sun deck, meditating. Or maybe only trying to meditate. Her face didn’t wear its usual serene post-yoga expression. She opened her eyes and smiled at me.

  “You’re too late for yoga,” she said.

  I tried to hide my shock. Normally Rose Noire had an apparently endless capacity for yoga. Had the boys actually tired her out?

  “But we’re going to smudge the ship later,” she said, “as soon as I figure out a good blend of herbs and essential oils. And then I’ll go looking for Léonie again—unless you’ve found her?”

  “Not yet.”

  “I’d have kept looking, but I realized that I needed to do something to improve the ship’s energy. A lot of people have been spiraling down into a very dark mood—and that’s very dangerous in a place like this. Do you know how many ships and planes have been lost here? And we’ve already lost one passenger—I would not be at all surprised to find that the insidious miasma of the Bermuda Triangle was what drove Desiree St. Christophe to suicide.”

  “Alleged suicide,” I corrected. “Dad’s suspicious that she might have been pushed.”

  “A murder’s even worse! So I rounded up as many people as I could for a couple of hours of yoga and meditation.”

  “That’s nice.” At least I hoped it had been nice—that she hadn’t drafted too many unwilling participants and hadn’t talked any of the senior citizens into attempting headstands. Unfortunately her yoga and meditation hadn’t seemed to lighten her mood.

  I sat beside her, though not cross-legged, since I wasn’t feeling all that limber today. “Right now, if you’ve got a moment, I’ve been meaning to ask you something.” I reached into my pocket and fished out the little feather charm. “What do you make of this?”

  “What is it?” She took it and began turning it over in her fingers.

  “You tell me. Give me a read on what you think of it, and then I’ll tell you what I know.”

  Rose Noire didn’t shrink from the challenge. She held the feather charm up to the light and turned it this way and that. Then she held it so close to her eyes that she went cross-eyed while studying it. She lifted it to her nose, inhaled deeply, and held her breath for a few seconds. Finally she enclosed it in both cupped hands, shut her eyes, and sat motionless. If I asked her what she was doing, she would probably look offended at the interruption and explain that she was assessing its aura. I try not to ask questions when I can already guess the answer.

  And I knew better than to rush her. “Assembly of Japanese bicycle require great peace of mind,” I reminded myself—one of Michael’s favorite quotes, from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Since I was pretty sure Rose Noire sometimes tested us, to prove that she had the greater mastery of patience and fortitude, I liked to out-zen her as often as possible.

  So I closed my own eyes and tried to think of something useful. Aha! My book club book. Maybe I should come up with a few deep insights about it to share if I couldn’t weasel out of attending the meeting. Although deep insights would come more easily if I could actually stay awake while reading it.

  I found myself feeling sorry for the writers of meaningful, socially relevant fiction. They didn’t really seem to have a lot of fun. They didn’t dare have their heroines end up with anything like an attractive hero at the end of the book, or they’d be accused of writing romantic twaddle. I doubted that they were allowed the vicarious pleasure of having their heroines take up sword fighting and highway robbery like Janet’s Rafaella, and I was certain they weren’t permitted dragons. They could probably get away with a modest number of dead bodies, but only if the deaths gave their main characters the opportunity for some profound spiritual awakening. Maybe, if the few earnest members of the book club continued to insist on foisting their choices on us, I should suggest—

  “Meg?”

  I opened my eyes. Apparently Rose Noire had finished her examination of the little feather charm’s aura.

  “Sorry,” I said. “A lot going on. So what do you think of it?”

  “I don’t know what to think of it.”

  “Dad came up with a theory that it might be a sinister voodoo fetish that’s causing all of the problems on board the ship, and if we don’t throw it overboard the ship’s systems will never be fixed and people will keep jumping overboard until there’s no one left.”

  “He can’t possibly believe that.”

  “No, I don’t think he believes in voodoo to begin with. But that doesn’t stop him from thinking it’s a neat theory.”

  “A misguided theory. I sense no evil in this. There are hints of some kind of pain and suffering in the background, but they’re definitely in the past and have been completely healed. There’s nothing but good energy in it now. So what do you know about it?”

  “I found it lying right by the shoes and shawl Desiree St. Christophe left behind when she jumped overboard,” I said. “And I’m pretty sure the feathers are from a tern. Or a gull.”

  “Well, it certainly didn’t make her jump overboard,” she said. “Maybe it was just left there by someone completely unconnected with her suicide.”

  I nodded.

  “Then again…” Her eyes went distant, and she sat holding the feather charm. I waited patiently. I trusted Rose Noire’s insights. I didn’t necessarily buy that she had the ability to read auras or whatever she
was doing at the moment. If you asked me, her insights came from a keen if sometimes overly optimistic knowledge of human nature. But sometimes they were uncanny.

  “It feels to me like a protective charm,” she said. “So perhaps whoever left it at the site of Desiree’s suicide did so to help counteract the pain and negative energy left behind by her act.”

  “And didn’t bother to report her suicide?”

  “Perhaps they knew how much pain the news would cause.” She smiled and handed the tiny bundle of feathers back to me. “All I know is that there’s nothing evil in this.”

  I hoped she was right.

  “Which is more than I can say for this place.” She shuddered slightly, as she swept the horizon with her gaze. Then she shut her eyes and returned to breathing slowly, with a determined expression on her face.

  I went back to searching the ship’s public spaces for Léonie.

  She wasn’t on the fifth-floor stern sun deck, where Mother and Aunt Penelope, still occupied with their sketches, had been joined by a half-dozen elderly people, fanning themselves with room service menus and copies of yesterday’s activities schedule, and fretting about how much warmer it was going to get. Maybe it was a good thing we didn’t have Internet, so I couldn’t check the weather and give them what I suspected would be an unwelcome forecast. And none of them had seen Léonie.

  She wasn’t in the Starlight Lounge, and there wasn’t even anyone tending the bar—only a small bottled water collection, neatly arranged on one of the tables like a silent apology. I snagged one.

  She wasn’t in the equally empty library lounge.

  She wasn’t kibitzing on Dad’s and Horace’s experiments in throwing weights over the side of the deck four stern sun deck.

  She wasn’t in any of the public spaces on any of the decks. Nor did I see a single crew member anywhere. On the second floor, I actually went out on the bow sun deck and looked up to make sure all the lifeboats were still hanging in place. I’d begun to wonder if the entire crew had sailed away and left us behind.

  Then again, what if those weren’t the only lifeboats? What if there had been a fleet of inflatable lifeboats, hidden down on deck zero, that the crew had taken to—

  “You’re getting a little paranoid,” I told myself.

  I loitered for a while in the boarding lobby, near the door that led to deck zero, waiting for someone to come out. I finally tried the door, only to find it locked. I slid my Pastime card through the nearby slot, but the card-reader’s light remained stubbornly red.

  On my way up, I tried a few doors. Trevor’s room was locked and my Pastime card wouldn’t work on it, either. The door to the navigation bridge was locked, and I didn’t even bother knocking.

  Frustrating. If the cabins had ordinary door locks I’d have had a go at picking the one to Trevor’s cabin. Some years ago, after rereading too many Dortmunder and Bernie Rhodenbarr books, Dad decided to learn how to pick locks. To his great dismay, he proved to be an almost comically incompetent lock picker, but he’d taken some consolation in the fact that I’d become reasonably proficient. But even if I’d brought along his burglar’s kit, it would do nothing against a card key lock.

  But Delaney might have some idea how to deal with it.

  I trudged back up to the sixth floor.

  Delaney had disappeared. Though clearly she was intending to come back—she’d left Rob half dozing in his recliner, with all her little solar devices arranged in a delta at his feet. Caroline, performing a similar function for Grandfather’s collection of solar devices, looked less thrilled by her enforced idleness.

  I took a nearby chair and settled in to wait for Delaney. If Dad showed up, I’d claim to be doing some deep thinking. More like deep worrying. Something really peculiar was going on aboard the ship. At least one person had gone overboard—maybe two, if Trevor had made it back on board in time to sail with the ship—and the crew was becoming almost as invisible as Desiree and Trevor.

  Desiree and Trevor. I didn’t like putting them in the same sentence, given that Desiree was definitely fish food by now, and I hoped Trevor was merely back in Baltimore, sulking over being left behind.

  And wasn’t it more than a little weird, Trevor getting left behind? Trevor, who didn’t even need to look at his well-worn leather planner to know exactly where Grandfather needed to be at any given moment? Who always checked on traffic, road closures, and weather conditions before setting out to drive Grandfather anywhere? Who could always find anything Grandfather needed, whether it was the power adapter required to plug in a laptop in Botswana or an authentic Macanese restaurant within driving distance of Caerphilly?

  Okay, maybe I could see Trevor getting left behind because of bad information from the Pastime staff. If they told him he had plenty of time to go in search of ginger beer. But what if he’d wanted to be left behind?

  I pondered that for a while.

  Even if Trevor had deliberately engineered being left behind, there could be an innocent reason. Maybe, given how badly he suffered from seasickness, he’d chickened out at the last minute. Decided that with so many people there to ride herd on Grandfather—Caroline, Wim, Guillermo, Dad, even me—he could stand down this time.

  Still. Not like Trevor. So unlike Trevor that I found myself trying to think of some less innocent reason for his absence. What if he’d done his research on Pastime and foreseen that our trip was likely to fall afoul with the sort of problems we were experiencing? No, he’d have told Grandfather, surely, and tried to talk him out of it.

  Maybe he had told Grandfather. And maybe Grandfather had ridiculed his misgivings and gone ahead with the trip anyway.

  Or maybe over the year and a half he’d been working for Grandfather he’d gradually built up a pathological hatred of his employer, and had deliberately helped steer Grandfather into signing with Pastime instead of one of the more well-known cruise lines. And bribed the captain and crew into arranging our being marooned in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle, and then, while we were all helpless and unsuspecting—

  I shook myself. Maybe I should leave plotting to Dad and the writers.

  Still, I’d feel a lot better when I’d had a chance to talk to Trevor and find out just what had happened.

  “Oh, look,” Caroline exclaimed, pointing at something behind me. “It’s your turn!”

  “My turn for what?” I swiveled to look in the direction she was pointing, but didn’t see anything unusual. Unless she was pointing at the unusually sleek and elegant-looking gull perched on the deck rail. Wait—was it a gull?

  “Oh, you mean tern with an E,” I said. “I get it. But what makes it my tern?”

  Chapter 21

  “I think she was pointing out the tern to me,” Grandfather said. “And yes—that’s it. Wim! Guillermo! Grab your cameras!”

  “Is it a rare sort of tern?” I asked. “An endangered tern species?” If so, it was rather nicer than some of Grandfather’s endangered species, which were all too often rather drab or slimy invertebrates. The tern was mostly white and pale gray, though its bright orange-red legs and bill added a nice note of color to what would otherwise be a pretty monochromatic look. And it had a sharply defined black cap of feathers that covered the top of its head, including the eyes, and continued on down the back of its neck, giving it the rather jaunty look of a winged Zorro.

  “No. It’s a South American tern, Sterna hirundinacea.” Grandfather didn’t take his eyes off the bird. “It’s fairly common in South America, as the name would suggest. Rather unusual to see one in the northern hemisphere, though. And yes, definitely Sterna hirundinacea. Too large to be Sterna hirundo, and notice the curve of the bill.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” I looked around to see what was taking Wim and Guillermo so long to appear with their cameras, and found that they’d already started photographing the visiting tern. Apparently the tern had appeared at a moment when their cameras were still equipped with the giant zoom lenses that I was so wor
ried would drag them overboard if they weren’t careful. In order to get a picture of the whole bird, instead of a close-up of one of its eyeballs, they had backed up so far that they were now more in danger of falling off the deck six sun deck onto the miniature golf course on deck five.

  “Also rather peculiar to find Sterna hirundinacea this far out in the ocean.” Grandfather was studying the tern with an enthusiasm that probably owed more to boredom than anything else.

  “Too far for them to fly?” I studied the tern to see if it was showing signs of relief at having found our ship just as it was sinking into exhaustion. It didn’t look particularly relieved. It looked rather sly and pleased with itself. Maybe it had spotted something it planned to purloin for its dinner.

  “No, they can fly just fine, but they tend to stay around the coastal regions. They feed on fish, crustaceans, and shellfish—easier to find those in coastal waters.”

  “Although I assume terns are like gulls and we should cover up any food we don’t want him to steal,” I said.

  “No, that’s one nice thing about terns,” Caroline said. “Gulls will eat anything, but by and large terns stick to a seafood diet. So unless anyone’s been eating sardines, our lunches are probably safe.”

  “I’m going to go get some of my reference books.” Grandfather turned, paused briefly to nod with approval at what Wim and Guillermo were doing, and strode off toward the stairs.

  “At least it’s not a Desolate tern,” Caroline murmured.

  “Would that be some kind of bad omen?” I was puzzled, since I hadn’t ever noticed Caroline to be especially superstitious. Of course, I hadn’t ever been becalmed with her in the Bermuda Triangle before.

  “Not so much a bad omen as a really unfortunate coincidence if we want Monty to be easy to live with. Relatively easy to live with,” she added, seeing my expression. “Okay, not a complete pain in the neck.”

  “So just what is a Desolate tern?” I asked.

  “Newly discovered species,” she said. “Inhabits the Kerguelen Islands, also known as the Desolation Islands, since they’re about two thousand miles southeast of Madagascar. Possibly a bit closer to Antarctica, which doesn’t much help with the isolation. One of the most remote and godforsaken places on earth, that’s the point. A former student of Monty’s is out there studying the wildlife and discovered a new, previously undiscovered species of tern.”