“While we’re moving people about, we should take an inventory, or census, or whatever,” I said. “Make sure every crew member who’s supposed to be here really is.”
“You think the lady with the purple hair is not the only one to go overboard?” she asked.
Her words reminded me of hearing Anton Bjelica’s body splash into the ocean, and I wasn’t sure I could keep a poker face. So I exaggerated my reaction.
“Oh, good heavens, I hope not,” I said. “No, I was worrying about the possibility that one of the crew could have become ill while in some remote part of the ship and be lying there sick, with no one to help him.”
“True,” she said. “Those of us who are not unwell have not had much time for searching. One could make a list—see, each cabin has two or four slots outside, with little cards to say who is supposed to be in it. Once we have a list, then we can search to see where each one is.”
From the way she phrased it, I deduced that she was not volunteering for the task. That was okay. I was hoping to avoid doing much nursing.
“I’ll make the list,” I said. “And then perhaps you could help me figure out where everyone is.”
“Bien. For now, I will fetch more water.” She hefted the bucket and headed for the stairs.
I went up and down the corridor, jotting down names. Then Léonie and I made a quick trip up and down the passageway, matching names and faces. Apart from the captain and the first officer, whose quarters were on the third floor by the bridge, only three crew members were not here on deck zero, either among the stricken or among those caring for them.
One of them, of course, was Anton Bjelica. So although I couldn’t say so to Léonie, it was really only two missing crew members.
According to Léonie, Bjelica was a member of the ship’s engineering crew, as was the other crew member whose continued existence we hadn’t yet confirmed. The rest of the engineers were among our patients. No wonder repairs were going so slowly.
“An unfortunate coincidence,” Léonie said. She had switched from cleaning to nursing, and was patiently spooning water into the mouth of one of the patients.
Simply a coincidence? Or an ominous sign? If someone had wanted to sabotage the ship and keep it marooned for some period of time, they’d probably want to put the engineers out of commission. Maybe Anton Bjelica had turned up his nose at the beef stew and had to be dealt with some other way. What about the other one we hadn’t found yet—Third Engineer Gerard Hoffman. Had he gone overboard, too?
“Have you seen Gerard Hoffman lately?” I asked.
“He should be up on the bridge,” she said. “He was the only one really trying to fix the ship.”
“He’s not sick then? Or at least not as sick as the rest?”
“Just as sick, if you ask me. But more stubborn.”
I decided to go up to the small mechanical room and see if the missing Hoffman was there—helping, hindering, or just observing what Delaney and her volunteer tech force were up to.
But before I went …
“If you’re not using them, may I use your cleaning supplies? I might as well help out for a little while, as long as I’m here. With some cleaning,” I added. “I didn’t inherit any of Dad’s medical abilities.”
“Cleaning is also important.” Léonie smiled, and then returned to spooning water into her patient’s mouth.
I picked up the nearby bucket and sponge and went down the hall to an empty room. Not just any old empty room—one I’d already scouted out as a target.
Chapter 28
The room I wanted to search was a four-person room, but occupied on this journey by only two crew members. If Gerard Hoffman came back while I was here, I’d pretend I’d picked this room to clean on purpose, to thank him for his heroic efforts to fix the ship in spite of his illness. Anton Bjelica wasn’t going to show up to complain that I was invading his privacy. And I suspected no one else would much care if I searched the things Bjelica had left behind while I was cleaning up the room he’d never see again.
Although there wasn’t that much to search. Beside each set of bunk beds were two narrow lockers—you couldn’t really call them closets—and beneath each set were two built-in drawers. Probably one locker and one drawer per crewman. Since I didn’t know which bunk was Bjelica’s, I started with one of the drawers on the right and quickly figured out it belonged to Hoffman. Presumably Bjelica’s bunk, drawer, and locker were on the left.
Not a tidy person, Anton. The drawer was mostly full of t-shirts and underwear, jumbled together in a way that probably made it difficult to get dressed in a hurry. I did find a few interesting items. I took a picture of his Slovenian passport. And of the scattered papers that were obviously a part of his personnel file. Half a dozen disciplinary actions in as many months—was Bjelica a marginal crew member? Or was Captain Detweiler a stern martinet? My money was on the latter. And yes, it was Detweiler’s signature on all six of the reports.
I shoved them back where I’d found them and went on to the closets. Nothing in either Hoffman’s or Bjelica’s closets except several sets of Pastime uniforms. White shirts with gold epaulettes, white trousers with stripes of gold braid, white belts with gold buckle—between the dazzling white fabric and the overabundance of polished gold-colored hardware, I felt the momentary impulse to put on sunglasses.
And just out of curiosity, I checked the sizes on some of Bjelica’s clothes. His t-shirts were XXL. His uniform didn’t have sizes, but I eyeballed both the pants and jacket and compared them to Michael’s clothes. He was definitely shorter than Michael’s six foot four, but not by that much. And he was wider. Barrel-chested, and not slim. A big guy. Not someone who’d be easy to throw overboard.
Just then I heard someone coming down the hallway, so I hurriedly pushed the drawer shut and focused on cleaning. Hoffman’s bunk wasn’t too bad—obviously he’d spent most of his sick time up in the small mechanical room. Bjelica’s bed didn’t look as if he’d been sick in it at all. It didn’t even really look slept in—more as if he’d pulled back the sheet and then been called away before he actually got into bed.
“This is better.” I looked up to see Léonie standing in the doorway, rubbing her back as if to ease it.
“It wasn’t all that bad to begin with,” I said. “But I’m assuming Gerard Hoffman’s up there trying to help with the repairs, in spite of being so sick, so I thought he deserved a clean room to come back to. What about his bunkmate—Anton … er…”
“Be-yell-it-sa,” she said. “That’s as close as I can come, anyway. You can ask him when we find him.”
“Have you seen him lately?”
“No.” She shook her head. “Not since all this began. And that is odd, because he should be either in the engine room or the small mechanical room.”
“Could he have fallen overboard?”
“Unlikely. They do not want to be sued all the time, so they make it hard to fall overboard, even for a passenger who has been drinking. And for an experienced crew member, in such calm weather?” She shrugged as if to say stranger things had happened but not by much.
“So if he went overboard it was no accident.”
“You think perhaps he, too, jumped overboard?”
“That, or maybe someone had it in for him. I mean, there aren’t a lot of places for him to hide.”
“If he has enemies, I don’t know who they are. And I would not expect him to kill himself—but then I did not know him well. He speaks no French, and his English is very bad, and I do not speak Slovene. On duty, he stays in the engine room, and he spends most of his off-duty time by himself, listening to heavy metal music.” She shuddered slightly. “I am not sure I would recognize him without his earbuds on. So who knows? Perhaps he was an unhappy soul, and the example of Madame St. Christophe drove him over the edge. They do say that suicide can be contagious, no?”
“Yes.” Of course, so could murder. I was tempted to confide what Dad and I had seen to Léonie—but no.
I trusted Léonie more than the rest of the crew, but still.
“Or perhaps he is somewhere else on the ship,” she was saying. “Some people, like dogs, prefer to be solitary when they are sick.”
“I’ll spread the word to keep an eye out for him.”
“Well—to work.” She straightened up, picked up a bucket, and headed down the passageway toward the stern. I wondered how many times today she’d gone up and down the stairs between deck zero and the kitchen. She was going slowly so she could glance into each cabin as she passed. We’d propped all the doors open, partly so we could do this and partly in the hope that it would keep the cabins a little cooler. Unfortunately, deck zero didn’t have windows that could be opened, only sealed portholes. Probably a safety issue, this close to the surface of the ocean—or were we below the surface? I hadn’t actually noticed—but in either case, tough on the occupants with the air-conditioning not working.
I headed the other way, toward the central stairs, and tried to do the same thing—glancing left and right. I spotted several of Dad’s team sitting with patients.
Near the end of the passageway, I glanced inside a cabin and then stopped in the doorway. The man inside was moaning something. Moaning and clutching his abdomen. I took a step into the cabin and realized it was one of the few crew members I actually knew: Serge, who’d attended Grandfather’s lecture and cleaned up after Evans so Léonie wouldn’t have to do it. Serge who, according to Mother, was Léonie’s young man. I couldn’t remember his last name. I glanced up at the sign outside his door. Charlier. Was that it? I couldn’t remember. And given the way we’d been moving people around to empty the cabins for cleaning who knew if this was his own cabin or just where we’d parked him while we cleaned his out.
Irrelevant anyway. I stepped to his bedside to see if I could do anything to help him.
“Serge? What’s wrong? What do you need?”
He opened his eyes—half opened them, actually, and they were so glazed with pain that I wasn’t sure he really saw me.
“My turn,” he muttered. “My turn.”
His turn for what?
“His turn to die,” was the first thing that came to mind.
“Don’t be melodramatic,” I told myself. He was half unconscious and probably hallucinating something completely unrelated to anything happening on board. He could be flashing back to some childhood memory. His turn to bat. His turn to ride the pony. Or maybe, given his expression, something less pleasant. Although offhand I couldn’t think of any childhood traumas that involved turn taking.
Not a puzzle I could solve now. I grabbed the plastic tumbler sitting on a narrow shelf behind the head of his bed and filled it from a nearby bottle of water. I also dampened a washcloth. Dad had recommended cool compresses. Room temperature was the best we could manage at the moment, but at least it was usually a little cooler than the patients’ fevered brows.
I returned to Serge and tried to get him to drink a little of the water—with no success, but I took a corner of the washcloth and managed to drip a little into his mouth. He seemed to like that, swallowing convulsively each trickle I squeezed in and then opening his mouth in a way that reminded me of a clutch of orphaned baby birds I’d helped Grandfather raise, so young at first that their eyes weren’t yet open, and yet their mouths were always open wide for food.
It was a slow process, and my eyes began to roam around the tiny room. And then suddenly froze. Hanging over Serge, attached to the bottom of the top bunk, was a little charm made of shells and feathers. I still had the charm I’d found with Desiree’s shoes, shawl, and note, but I didn’t have to pull it out to realize that it was nearly identical to the one dangling over Serge.
“Help.”
I realized that I’d frozen in place, staring at the charm, and Serge had grown restless. His eyes were half open again.
“My turn.”
I kept dripping bits of water into his mouth until he finally subsided into sleep. Then I put the not-very-cold compress on his forehead and stared for a few more moments at the feather charm. Stared at it, and then took out my phone and snapped a picture of it.
Then I backed out of the cabin and pulled out my list of crew members. Yes, Serge Charlier—he was in his own cabin. And as far as I could tell, his own bunk. So the feather charm must belong to him.
I went looking for Léonie. I found her spooning drops of water into the mouth of a pale young woman with circles under her eyes so dark they looked like bruises.
“Has Dad been here to check on his patients recently?” I asked.
“Just an hour ago. Is there a problem?”
“I’m a little concerned about Serge. He seems agitated.”
“Yes.” She frowned and shook her head. “He seems so much worse than the others. Perhaps it was because he tried to keep going after he began to sicken. Although your father says it’s more likely that his immune system was already a little weakened, so the poisons in the stew had more effect. But he will be fine, your father says.” She sounded understandably anxious.
“If Dad thought he was in any danger, he’d be with him.” I made my tone as reassuring as possible. “He’s in his own cabin, right? Serge, I mean, not Dad.”
“Yes.” She looked puzzled.
“That’s good,” I said. “I think people who are sick do better in familiar surroundings.”
“Yes.” She smiled slightly. “Even such surroundings as these.”
“I’m going to look in on everybody and then go up to see how the repairs are coming.”
She nodded and returned to her patient.
I did look in on everybody. I took a good, long, hard look to see if anyone else had any little feathered charms in their cabins. No one had.
Did that mean that Serge had something to do with Desiree’s suicide? Alleged suicide, as Dad and Horace would insist.
I decided I’d done my bit for nursing the sick crew members. I needed to find a quiet corner where I could digest what I’d found here on deck zero.
And for that matter, where I could take a closer look at the papers I’d photographed in Anton Bjelica’s cabin.
I trudged up to deck one and made sure the wedge that was keeping the door open was wedged in tightly. That wouldn’t prevent someone—I suspected the captain or the first officer—from periodically slamming it closed.
Hmm.… maybe if we detached the card reader for the time being? Or maybe just disassembled the lock. If I could find some tools, I could do that myself. I took out my notebook and added it to my task list.
I peered into the main dining room. Things looked a lot less frantic there than they had when I’d left. Mother spotted me and hurried over. Oops! Chances were she’d have new work for me.
“Come inspect the kitchen, dear,” she said. “You wouldn’t recognize the place.”
She was right. For one thing, the place was spotless—I was willing to bet it hadn’t been that clean when the ship sailed. And for another, the swarm of cleaners had been replaced by a much smaller crew who appeared to be cooking lunch.
“We’ll be having canned chicken noodle soup, tossed salad, and several kinds of canned vegetables,” Mother said, noting where my gaze had gone.
“That’s great. Delaney got the power going, then? Or is it just the emergency power?”
“The stoves are propane-fueled,” she said. “So no electricity needed.”
“Still a fabulous improvement.”
“We could have had hot food all day yesterday if there had been anyone well enough to cook it. And I’m sure everyone’s looking forward to hot coffee in the morning.”
Actually, I was hoping the ship would be back to normal by morning, but I didn’t want to jinx it, so I just praised her efforts to the skies.
Michael and the boys were still hauling up buckets of water, but now most of their buckets were being poured over swimsuit-clad passengers. And according to Mother, the cleaning crew was moving on to cleaning cabins and latrines on the uppe
r decks.
“And it’s not even noon yet,” Mother said, with understandable satisfaction.
I pulled out my phone and checked. Only eleven-thirty.
“Great work,” I said. “I’m going up to check on Delaney.”
As I strolled down the passageway, I pulled out my phone again and opened up the weather app. The forecast wouldn’t have updated since the ship’s Internet went out, but at least I could see what the National Weather Service had been predicting back then.
And it wasn’t good news. Apparently, we were still within range of the heat wave that had been baking the entire Eastern Seaboard. A high in the low nineties today. The mid-nineties tomorrow. And while the two tropical systems forming in the Atlantic had seemed very far off indeed when we’d set sail, I’d feel a lot better if I knew where they were now. And whether they were moving in our direction, and if so, how rapidly.
Not problems I could do anything about. So I continued up to deck two. If I stayed in the main dining room, I’d be sucked into solving someone’s problems. Or I’d feel guilty about other people working and pitch in to clean something or haul more buckets of water. But on deck two there was a small lounge area. If there was no one there—and yay! There wasn’t—I could examine the photos I’d taken in peace and quiet and still hear if anything was happening.
In fact, I could even open the sliding glass doors and step out on one of the few balconies that wasn’t private.
And there was a breeze—not much of one, but still, any breeze was welcome. I lifted my face and breathed a few calming breaths.
Then I pulled out my phone. I opened up my pictures of the official reprimands Anton Bjelica had received. Which would have been a lot easier to do with the papers themselves instead of the tiny pictures on my phone’s screen. Still—
“Found something interesting?”
Terns of Endearment (Meg Langslow Mysteries) Page 24