by Emily James
She shook her head and backed a step away from me. “They’ll blame me.”
Clearly we needed to rewind a few steps. Maybe she didn’t understand how the law worked. I’d seen it a few times before back in DC when we encountered a client whose family immigrated from another country where laws and customs were different. Due process and innocent until proven guilty weren’t universal standards.
In the United States, she couldn’t be held responsible for her husband’s death if she hadn’t been involved. More importantly, we didn’t even know anything had happened to her husband yet. “Someone broke into your room while you weren’t here. There’s nothing you could do about that.”
She sank down onto the floor and sat cross-legged. That answered my question about where she’d been sitting for the past eight or so hours.
“His family thought from the start that I was marrying him for his money.” Her voice had an edge to it—a little bit scared and a little bit angry. “They didn’t think I could love someone so much older so fast. I signed a prenup, but Jeremy—his son—said prenups only mattered if he divorced me, not if I killed him. He said if anything happened to his dad, he’d know it was me, and he’d make sure the police knew.”
Garth’s son sounded like a gem, as my grandma would have said. That said, I likely would have felt the same way and suspected the same things if my mom was gone and my dad married a much younger woman.
Carrie’s voice was ramping up in volume and pitch.
We didn’t need anyone passing by to hear her. Cruise ships probably didn’t have the same rumor mill as Fair Haven did, but that didn’t mean word wouldn’t still get around about a hysterical woman yelling about killing someone.
I patted the air in a shushing motion.
She gulped in a breath. “It doesn’t matter what really happened. If anything bad happens to Garth, Jeremy will think I was involved.” She’d brought her voice back down to a normal level, but now she dropped it even lower. “I left the door propped open with a pen. Garth said it was okay because he wasn’t going anywhere, and I didn’t want to take my key card.”
She patted her tight shorts as if to say no pockets. Now that I had a closer look at her, she did still seem to be in workout clothes. She hadn’t showered or changed.
Leaving the door propped open didn’t look good. Any worthwhile prosecutor would argue she’d done it to give easy access to their room to whoever she hired to kill or kidnap her husband. They’d say she made it up that Garth agreed to it. They’d say a lot of things given the age difference and the prenuptial agreement.
Still, we couldn’t sit here doing nothing. “You know we have to report this. Otherwise you wouldn’t have asked me in here.”
She nodded her head.
I waited, but she didn’t levy anymore arguments at me. If she knew that, then what she wanted before we called security was reassurance that she wouldn’t have to face the questions alone.
She wanted some line of defense in case someone wanted to implicate her. I couldn’t blame her. The spouse or significant other was always the first person the police looked at. Many people often had a fear—not entirely unfounded—that if they said something wrong or acted in a way the police viewed as suspicious, attention would turn to them even if they weren’t guilty.
Having a lawyer by your side from the start could make you look guilty. It could also help protect you if you weren’t.
I held out a hand to lift her to her feet. “Do you want to call or should I?”
Chapter 3
Carrie held the shipboard phone in one hand, her other hovering over the buttons. “Do I tell them I think something bad happened to Garth?”
The way her bottom lip quivered told me she shouldn’t make the call at all. She’d be likely to fill the security officer’s ear with all her fears about what happened to Garth and how her son-in-law would want to blame her.
Right now, we didn’t actually know what had happened. In fact, we didn’t know that Garth hadn’t fallen asleep out on the deck with his ringer turned off on his cell phone. Or maybe, judging by the state of the room, he’d had an argument on the phone and was walking around, trying to calm down before returning to his cabin. A nasty business call could ruin someone’s mood on their honeymoon, and maybe he simply hadn’t wanted to take it out on his new wife.
There were still a lot of scenarios that didn’t add up to fingers pointed at Carrie.
I stretched out my hand, palm up. “Maybe it’d be better if I did it.”
She tossed the receiver to me like it burned her. I missed the catch, and the cord yanked it back, setting it swinging. I scooped it up.
Instead of throwing a bunch of details at the security officer, I told him my friend came back from working out and found her room had been disrupted. She hasn’t been able to reach her husband, and she’s scared.
In the time it took someone to reach us, I prepped Carrie to only answer what she was asked and to not mention her fears about being blamed.
The man who knocked on the door less than ten minutes later looked awfully young, with a haircut that said he’d gotten this job straight out of the military and was more used to breaking up drunken arguments than investigating crimes.
The way he ogled Carrie also told me he would have flirted with her had she not been wearing a wedding ring—and a big, flashy one at that.
His obvious attraction seemed to play in our favor, at least. He didn’t seem to suspect she’d had anything to do with what happened, and he offered to carry her bags to another room. The current room, he said, would have to be locked down until his manager decided what to do.
He also promised to personally help search the ship for her husband.
He lifted her bag like it was nothing and held the door open for us to leave.
“I have to go take care of Mark,” I whispered to Carrie. “I’ll check in on you later, okay?”
She nodded and trailed after the security officer like she wouldn’t have known what to do if someone wasn’t leading the way.
Anyone would have assumed she’d married Garth for money, especially given the size of her diamond. But I had a feeling it was more that she’d been looking for a sense of stability and someone to do the thinking for her. She wanted to be taken care of, and a well-off man so much her elder would have been a perfect fit.
The ship intercom system started paging Garth Bodie as I was paying for a bottle of ginger ale for Mark.
I’d been gone a lot longer than I’d expected to be when I’d left the room for dinner. Any minute now, Mark would probably start to worry about me. The last thing I wanted to do was worry my sick husband.
Besides, I shouldn’t have left him alone this long when he was sick.
Maybe I wasn’t going to be very good at this wife thing. I’d hoped it would come naturally. I’d get married and just magically know how to live as a married woman and how to balance my relationship with my work. I should have known better. My parents weren’t your normal couple. They both worked long hours, and conversation around our dinner table had been mostly case-related. A proper work–life balance—or even how to take a vacation—wasn’t in my DNA.
I added a package of saltine crackers to my purchase and headed back to our cabin. I only made one wrong turn this time. Navigating the cruise ship made me miss Fair Haven. I could get almost everywhere I needed to by now without a GPS.
Mark was sitting up in bed when I entered. I tore open the crackers, poured him a glass of ginger ale, and climbed up onto the bed next to him.
What was the right thing to do here? Did I tell him what happened with Carrie, or did I let him rest?
It was one of those relationship moments that I just didn’t know how to handle. If I told him, it could seem inconsiderate. He was sick and needed to rest. He didn’t need me running around and dealing with someone else’s problems rather than caring for him.
On the other hand, if I didn’t tell him and he found out later, he might fe
el like I was keeping things from him. I’d set a rule early on that I wouldn’t keep secrets from Mark. That was one of the positive lessons I’d taken away from my parents’ marriage. They might lie to everyone else, including me, but they didn’t lie to each other.
I also knew that secrets among members in the Cavanaugh family were a crime up there with stealing. I was a Cavanaugh now, albeit by marriage.
But I couldn’t quite bring myself to tell him I’d fallen into the middle of a mystery on our honeymoon. “Do you want to hear about an interesting puzzle?”
Mark quirked an eyebrow at me, a sign the ginger ale and crackers were making him feel a little better. “If you were anyone else, I’d think you meant a riddle. Please tell me that at least there’s no dead body involved.”
One of the things I loved so much about Mark was that he understood me in a way that no one else seemed to. Unfortunately, that tended to also backfire on me at times. “No dead body.” I mouthed the words at present.
Mark must have read my lips because he rested his head back against the headboard. “I’ll take what I can get. Whatever your puzzle is will be better than thinking about my rolling stomach.”
He was a doctor. Even though as the county medical examiner he usually worked with dead people, he’d gone to medical school. He should know whether what he had was food poisoning or something more serious. I had to trust that this would pass within a couple of days.
In a weird way, I was glad it wasn’t me. If I were the sick one, people would assume I was already pregnant.
In the meantime, I could distract Mark. That was something I could do to help.
I explained to Mark why I’d gone to Carrie’s room and what I found there.
“That’s only marginally better than a dead body being involved,” he said when I finished. “At least it’s not a murder.”
I popped one of the crackers into my mouth. I wasn’t really hungry, but I was a stress eater, and the crackers were all I had handy. “I’m afraid it might be. Or a kidnapping.”
Mark took a slow sip of his ginger ale. “It could be, but the mess in the room sounds like it also could have happened from something less suspicious.”
While I had more experience dealing with criminals one-on-one, Mark had seen more crime scenes than I ever would, even if I worked until I was eighty.
He handed me his empty glass. “Garth Bodie is an overweight man in his late fifties, early sixties. It sounds like he might have felt dizzy when he got out of bed, lost his balance, and tipped over the chair and wiped everything off the desk in a fall.”
I understood what Mark wasn’t saying. He didn’t think Garth had been murdered and tossed overboard or kidnapped for ransom. He thought Garth felt sick, left his room to head for the shipboard infirmary, and collapsed with either a heart attack or stroke.
“Wouldn’t someone have spotted him if he went for help and didn’t make it?”
“Not if he collapsed in a stairwell. Most people take the elevators. Even the staff.”
Crap. He was right. If Garth had been trying to reach the infirmary quickly and wasn’t thinking straight, he might have opted for the stairs rather than waiting for the elevator.
“I’m going to try to fall asleep while you go check,” Mark said.
I leaned over and kissed him, plague possibility notwithstanding. He knew I wouldn’t be able to rest or think about anything else if Garth Bodie might be lying somewhere, still alive and in need of medical attention.
Chapter 4
I spent the next hour checking every possible route from Carrie and Garth’s cabin to the shipboard infirmary. As far as I could tell, Garth wasn’t in any of the stairwells, or anywhere else, for that matter. Given how many times I got turned around, I was certain he hadn’t collapsed anywhere along a false path, either.
It wasn’t until I finished that I realized I’d been wandering around in stairwells alone on a ship that might have a murderer also running loose. It showed either how sick Mark was or how convinced he was that Garth disappeared of natural causes that he hadn’t thought of it, either.
I turned to head back to our cabin but stopped. I hadn’t heard them page Garth over the intercom system recently. It had to have been at least twenty minutes. They’d been calling for Garth Bodie to report to one of the concierge desks every ten minutes prior to now.
That could mean only one of two things. Either they’d found him or they’d decided he wasn’t going to respond. My watch showed me that it’d been close to two hours since the first page.
The timeline matched with them giving up on him answering. If he hadn’t showed up within ninety minutes, he wasn’t likely to respond.
I needed to check in with Carrie and find out what was happening before I reported back to Mark. Hopefully he’d been able to fall asleep. One of us should get some rest. My mind certainly wasn’t going to shut down enough for a decent sleep until someone found Garth Bodie.
I’d thought Carrie’s new room number was 713, but when I knocked on the door, a thirteen-year-old boy answered. He gave me a look that said he wanted to tell his parents that some weird lady was at the door. Definitely not Carrie’s room.
I knocked on 731 instead. “Carrie?”
The door flew open—a vastly different reception than I’d gotten last time—and a woman threw herself into my arms.
It had to be Carrie, but it happened so fast that I didn’t get a look at her face. My parents would lecture me about professional distance. I didn’t care. This wasn’t about making money. I didn’t even want to be acting as a lawyer right now. I was in this as a friend. Carrie seemed like she needed one of those more than she needed a lawyer.
She pulled me into the room and shut the door behind her.
She’d showered and changed into shorts and a top that revealed her midriff. She wasn’t wearing any makeup. Without it, she looked younger even than I’d guessed before. Younger than I was.
As much as I hated to admit it, I could see why Garth’s son might be suspicious. Jeremy was probably at least ten years older than his new stepmother.
Her reaction to seeing me told me what I’d suspected—Garth hadn’t turned up yet. “Do you have any news?” I asked.
She dropped down onto the bed with enough force that she bounced. “Nothing. They’ve searched the ship and paged him for an hour.” The look on her face reminded me of someone who’d just discovered that all the money had been drained from their bank accounts. “Do you think he fell overboard?”
Possible but not probable, as Mark liked to say. If Garth had a health scare and had gone for help, he didn’t need to go above-board to reach the infirmary. Even if he’d gotten turned around, he wouldn’t likely have gotten outside and fallen over. It was even less likely he’d have done so without being noticed.
I sank down onto the bed beside her. “I doubt it.”
With everyone, including me, searching for him, it also seemed less and less likely that he’d collapsed on his way to the infirmary.
Carrie grabbed my hand and held onto it like she was the one afraid of falling overboard and drowning. “You said you were like Matlock. Will you help me figure out what happened to him?”
I hadn’t actually said I was like Matlock. I’d said I defended innocent people, and she’d filled in the Matlock part.
Setting that aside, there was a more important hurdle. “I’m on my honeymoon.”
Carrie wrapped her other hand around mine. I couldn’t have gone anywhere even if I’d tried. Not without knocking her over.
“Please,” she said. “I have no one else to turn to.”
She didn’t have to say It’s my honeymoon, too. In fact, she probably hadn’t even meant to imply it.
I heard it anyway. It was like I’d unintentionally flown into a planet’s gravitational pull, and I couldn’t break free.
I knew now that my compassion for people was one of my strengths, not a weakness the way my dad always seemed to think. In this case, th
ough, I wasn’t sure what the right thing to do was. It didn’t seem right to leave my new husband sick in our cabin to chase after a missing person. It also didn’t seem right to leave Carrie to sit alone in her cabin, afraid and uncertain about what happened to her husband.
Mark had said for better or for worse, the same way I’d said in sickness and in health. I knew he’d forgive me if I did this. Maybe it proved that I wasn’t going to be a good wife, because I was counting on that forgiveness, but if I didn’t help Carrie, I wasn’t sure I could forgive myself.
I squeezed her hand. “I’ll try.”
* * *
It took the next five minutes to get Carrie to stop hugging me. It reminded me again of how young she was. Too young to have to deal with something like this on her honeymoon. When she’d married a significantly older man, she’d hopefully done so knowing she’d be widowed young. I suspected, though, that she hadn’t figured on being widowed this young.
With Garth not responding to pages or showing up in the search, that might well be what she’d face.
Carrie would figure out soon enough that her husband was no longer alive. I wasn’t going to be the one to tell her, especially since there was a small chance I was wrong. We could hope for the best and plan for the worst, as my grandma used to tell me to do.
I suddenly missed my grandma. She seemed like she would have had good advice for me on how to be a wife and working woman. She’d worked as a nurse alongside my grandpa in his practice.
Now wasn’t the time to think about my own problems, though. Carrie’s were much more serious and pressing.
What we were hunting for now was justice and closure. Carrie didn’t need to live for the rest of her life with people wondering if she’d been the one to kill her husband, if he was dead. And whoever had harmed or taken Garth should be brought to justice.
We didn’t have long to achieve both those goals. Once this cruise was over, everyone would go their separate ways, making it nearly impossible to question anyone. The perpetrator could slip through the cracks. That might even be why they’d planned their crime for this moment. Given the small window of time and how well they’d hidden Garth away, it seemed safe to assume it had been premeditated.