Slay Bells Ringing

by Emily James

  I straightened. A man who wasn’t a good man. What if the mistake I’d been making in all of this was assuming that Garth had to secretly be a good man because Carrie loved him?

  Carrie didn’t know him—not really. She’d only met him six weeks ago. If I removed the assumption that Garth must be a good man because Carrie loved and married him, then Carrie might well be a pawn in another of Garth’s schemes.

  A scheme that would have let him slip away to South America, the same way Robert Vesco had done, with all his embezzled money. With the investigation into Garth Bodie’s activities ongoing, it would have looked suspicious for him to plan a trip out of the country—but not if he was going on his honeymoon, on a cruise with his new wife. He’d also have needed a way to make his disappearance less suspicious. The best way to do that was to stage a kidnapping or murder.

  My chest tightened. Poor Carrie. If I was right, Garth sent that note telling her to get off the ship. He’d wanted to frame her for his disappearance, knowing his son would argue to anyone who would listen that Carrie had murdered his father for his money.

  It even explained why his toiletries were gone from their room, but he’d left his wallet and passport behind. He’d planned to assume a new identity once he reached South America, but he’d needed his personal items to stay clean in the meantime. I’d made another unproven assumption when I thought Carrie grabbed his items by accident instead of her own.

  It was the one scenario I hadn’t considered. With the most likely suspects in Garth’s disappearance crossed off the list, it left us with the old Sherlock Holmes saying. When you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.

  Mark’s fork clinked against his plate. “I don’t like that look. It’s the look that says I’m not going to get to finish my breakfast.”

  If I was right, he might not. “I think I might have inadvertently made things worse.”

  Mark pushed back from the table slightly. “What things?”

  I filled him in on my suspicion.

  Mark pressed his fingers into the line above his eyebrows. “Which means he’ll have to find another way off the ship before we get back to American soil.”

  I nodded. “And I think the only way for him to do that, short of jumping into the Pacific Ocean, is to force everyone to abandon ship.”

  We’d be picked up by South American rescue crews. He’d have no trouble sneaking away once the rescue crews brought us back to land.

  Mark’s skin had returned to its natural healthy color since we’d found the source of his sickness. Now it took on a grey tinge again. “People might panic, causing injuries, even accidental deaths.”

  A tiny part of me wanted to throw myself into his arms because he had such trust in me and my instincts that, no matter how crazy my ideas sounded, he believed me. The bigger, more logical part of me knew we’d have plenty of time for that later. Right now, we had to figure out how Garth Bodie planned to force an evacuation of a cruise ship in time to stop him.

  Chapter 14

  How did a man force a cruise ship full of over a thousand people to evacuate?

  “We’d be forced to dock if there was a hurricane,” Mark said, “but he can’t manufacture one of those.”

  “Pirates?” The thought slipped out before I had time to stop it.

  Mark raised an eyebrow at me. “Pirates?”

  Okay, that one was crazy even for me. I’d heard of cruise ships having to stay away from certain routes to avoid pirates, but this wasn’t one of those areas. Besides, it wasn’t like Garth Bodie had pirate contacts hiding up his sleeve that he could call in on a whim.

  That left only one thing I could think of. “Fire.”

  Mark’s Adam’s apple rode up in his throat and then plunged down. “You can’t trick the fire alarms on modern cruise ships with a cigarette or match. There are built-in heat sensors. He’d have to set an actual fire.”

  Dear Lord, no. An unnecessary evacuation was one thing, but a real fire was another. People could be trapped and burn to death. “How do we stop him?”

  Mark glanced back toward the stage. I followed his gaze. The captain was still there, answering questions from a group of passengers who’d clustered around him.

  “I’ll talk to him,” Mark said.

  He didn’t say so, but he didn’t have to—the captain was more likely to respond to a request from Mark. It’d been clear the captain hadn’t liked the way I’d forced him into doing what I wanted last night. As much as I hated being outside the loop, Mark was right, and letting him do this was part of working as a team.

  Five minutes passed with me squirming in my seat as Mark tried to get the captain alone to speak to him. He couldn’t explain what we thought was going on with passengers around. Panic would have roared through the ship faster than a fire.

  It was like watching an old silent movie, their hand gestures and facial expressions telling me as much as words could have. Even in jeans and a t-shirt, Mark managed to look professional. We’d often talked about how he had trouble in social situations, but when he was working, no one handled themselves as well as he did—in my biased opinion, anyway.

  The captain’s body language closed down, and he shook his head. Mark said something more. The captain crossed his arms.

  Mark turned around and walked back toward me. I rose to my feet. The captain wasn’t going to listen. He thought we were making trouble for our own benefit now. Or something like that. Whatever reason he gave Mark didn’t matter. I could tell even from this distance that he wasn’t going to act on our suspicions.

  Which meant we had to figure something out ourselves. And fast.

  Mark took my hand as if we were just going to leave the dining hall and return to whatever we’d originally planned for the day.

  “We’re going up top, near the lifeboats,” Mark said quietly. “If this goes wrong before we can figure out a way to stop it, I don’t want you trampled.”

  “Maybe it’ll be more like the Titanic and people won’t take it seriously enough to panic.”

  I scrunched up my nose. That wasn’t my best analogy. A lot of people died on the Titanic who didn’t have to because they didn’t take the need to evacuate seriously. I certainly didn’t want a repeat of that here.

  Mark, graciously, didn’t respond.

  We didn’t know where to start looking, and we were only two people. Even if Mark would agree to running around the ship separately right now—which his insistence on heading for the lifeboats made a slim possibility—the odds of us finding Garth Bodie before he set a fire weren’t great.

  We needed help.

  The problem was that the people most likely to be able to find Garth and stop him were the security personnel, and they’d all want to check with the captain before helping us. If he hadn’t been willing to mobilize them after Mark spoke to him, he wasn’t going to change his mind after we tried to go behind his back.

  The only way to circumvent the captain seemed to be to enlist the help of someone the security officers would obey without going to the captain first. Someone who would believe us quickly that Garth Bodie was capable of doing something like this and who would want to stop him from escaping.

  I tugged on Mark’s hand. “We need to find out where they’re holding Hart.”

  * * *

  The female officer who’d looked at me suspiciously before was the one in the security office when we arrived. It took claiming to be Hart’s legal counsel and a phone call back to my partner Anderson in Michigan to convince her to take us to him. The captain had posted two other security personnel outside his quarters.

  Hart tapped a staccato beat on his thighs as I explained to him what we thought happened and what we needed from him. “This isn’t some trick?”

  There didn’t seem to be anything I could gain from trying to trick him except to get his staff into trouble. I couldn’t think of a single reason I’d want to do that. “No trick. Remember how I said I�
�m after the truth?”

  He nodded.

  “I’m still after it, and I don’t want to see you convicted of a crime you didn’t commit.”

  Hart rocked back in his chair.

  We didn’t have time to wait for him to make his decision. My parents were either going to be very annoyed or very proud of me for my next bargaining tactic. “If you help with this and we’re able to catch Bodie, I’ll make sure you’re represented by the top criminal defense firm in the country for a price you can afford.”

  Since he’d basically confessed, he might not be acquitted, but my parents’ firm could at least bargain for a lenient sentence.

  “Call my staff in,” Hart said.

  Watching him talk to his people made me even more glad that I’d offered to get him represented by my parents’ firm. Only one of the three security officers present stopped to confirm that he wouldn’t try to leave the room while they were gone. And they all took Hart at his word when he said he’d stay put.

  The female officer left him with her radio, saying she’d get another one from storage while they called in the off-duty officers. Hart would need the radio to coordinate their search, she said.

  We stayed with Hart and listened to them talk back and forth as they searched the most likely spots for Garth to start a fire. Hart had figured them out based on the fact that he believed Garth would want the best chance at making it safely off the ship himself once he started things rolling.

  About a half an hour into their search, one of the teams went silent. At least I thought they did. The chattered seemed to lessen. I grabbed Mark’s arm.

  “We got him,” a man’s voice crackled through the radio. “But I sure hope they’ll call the Coast Guard this time. Based on the fight he put up, I don’t think he’s going to stay quietly in his room like you are, Rick.”

  Hart got up and headed for the phone, presumably to call the captain himself.

  With Hart’s back turned to us, Mark leaned down and gave me a kiss that sent heat shooting straight through my body.

  “When the captain hears he has to call the Coast Guard,” Mark whispered, “I think he’ll find a way to make sure we don’t get our voucher for another trip.”

  “That’s okay.” I leaned in. “For our next honeymoon, I’d much rather go someplace where there aren’t any other people. That way, we can be sure we won’t be interrupted by another crime.”

  Mark laughed, and I cut it off it with a kiss full of the promise of many more to come.

  Ginger Dead Man

  A Cupcake Truck Novella

  Chapter 1

  The two homeless people staring at my food truck from across the street made my skin break out into a clammy sweat.

  I loosened my scarf and handed my lone customer her cupcake and coffee. December in Michigan, as it turned out, wasn’t a very profitable time to be a food truck. No one walked anywhere, let alone wanted to stand in a line while the wind cut them to tatters. I’d sold five cupcakes all day.

  My customer left, and the only people remaining on the street were me and the homeless man and woman across the road from me. Maybe it was time to close up and move on.

  I climbed out of my truck and unlatched the first support bar that held my front flap open.

  It wasn’t that I had anything against homeless people. In fact, I stopped each morning to give a coffee and a cupcake to an older man busking on the street in the snow. It wasn’t much, but it was what I had to offer. My margins were so tight right now that I was only eating once a day myself.

  The man looked so vulnerable, with his scraggly white beard and coat two sizes too big, that when he asked me to stay and visit with him while he ate, I always did. In return, he gave me tips about the best places to park my truck to try to find more business—or, at least, the places he’d had the most luck begging for money. Yesterday, he pulled up his pant leg to show me the new socks he’d bought—bright orange with green stripes—to prove to me that he was trying to get money for things he really needed.

  His name was Jimmy, he’d said. And he’d made a lot of mistakes. He’d ended up on the streets because he drank his life away.

  And that last part was what worried me about the two homeless people now whispering to each other across the street from where I parked.

  Many in the homeless community could be bribed with alcohol, drugs, or money. They were the kind of people my husband could easily convince to help him find me. If Jarrod found me, I’d be dead.

  The homeless pair crossed the street, the woman in the lead.

  My fingers went cold despite the sweat still beading on my upper lip. Maybe they were simply going to ask me for money or some food. Logically, I knew that was the most likely reason for them to approach me.

  But Fear screamed at me that they’d been sent by Jarrod. And I trusted Fear. He kept me safe.

  My deadened fingers made it hard for me to release the last clasp. It took me two tries. I finally lowered the flap and secured it into place.

  “Hey,” a woman’s voice said from much too close behind me.

  I turned around slowly, even though my heart was beating as if I’d been sprinting down the street.

  The woman stood close enough to make me uncomfortable, but not close enough that I could really say she was inside my personal bubble. Her eyes were bloodshot, and the broken capillaries around her nose suggested she was a drinker. Her breath backed that guess up.

  The man now stood next to her. He was shorter than her by a couple inches, but broader. He wore his long blond hair pulled back in a ponytail.

  “Sorry.” I shuffled a step to the side in the direction of my door. “I’m closed.”

  “We’re not here for food,” the man said.

  “I’d take something for free,” the woman grumbled under her breath.

  I slid sideways another few inches and fished around in my pocket for my keys. The woman sounded like she might be happy to get a handout and leave, but the man’s words were almost threatening. If they weren’t there for food, there was only one other reason I could think of for them to be there. They were trying to figure out if I might be the woman they’d been hired to find.

  Except his tone of voice wasn’t threatening. It sounded almost humble.

  The part of me that had insisted I stop to feed Jimmy wanted to give them both cupcakes and a cup of hot cocoa. It wasn’t like I was going to sell all the cupcakes anyway. And they were delicious. I was working on perfecting a gingerbread cupcake with eggnog icing. Jimmy raved about my latest tweak to the recipe.

  If you feed them, Fear whispered, maybe you can buy their loyalty.

  I doubted that. Jarrod had a lot more to offer than I did, but it was worth a shot to distract them at least.

  I edged toward my truck door until the handle hit my back. “I could get you a couple cupcakes if you’d like. I don’t serve anything else except coffee.”

  My voice sounded a lot calmer than I felt.

  “No,” the man said at the same time as the woman said, “Yeah.”

  They exchanged a look. Hers clearly said why not? while his said stick with the plan.

  She crossed her arms over her chest. “Jimmy said they were good.”

  The tightness in my chest eased. Maybe I was letting my past drive my present too much. If they were here because I’d been kind to Jimmy, then I didn’t want to seem mean to them by leaving. Not only did I always hear my dad in my head telling me to show mercy to those who needed it most, showing kindness to them would hopefully make them allies and not enemies in case I needed allies in the future.

  “It’s no problem if you’d like one.” I forced out a smile and concentrated on making it big enough to crinkle my eyes. It was a trick I’d figured out. Fake smiles didn’t normally reach the eyes. “I think they’re good, too, but I’m biased.”

  The man held out a hand in front of the woman as if to stop her from accepting my offer. “Maybe after. We need your help first.”

 
It’s a trick, Fear said. Run.

  But they had me curious now. What help could I possibly offer other than to give them food or money? I didn’t have any money to give, and they’d already turned down my food…or at least the man had.

  “I’m Dwayne,” the man said. “This is Carla. We’re friends of Jimmy, and we haven’t seen him in over a day.”

  Living on the streets, my assumption would be they often didn’t see each other every day. Perhaps the opposite was true. Perhaps they watched out for each other more than they would have if they’d had their own apartments, jobs, and regular lives.

  Perhaps I was the only one who didn’t have someone watching out for me.

  Dwayne’s introduction still didn’t tell me why they’d sought me out. It did ease my mind that they hadn’t been sent by Jarrod. He would have had to be watching me for a while to know about Jimmy. If he knew my location for that long, I’d have already been dead and buried.

  “What brings you to me?” I asked. The question sounded strangely formal, but I wanted to find the right balance between sorting this out so I could get out of the cold and being polite.

  “We need a ride to find him.” Carla scrubbed her running nose on her sleeve. “We don’t have money for a cab.”

  Her voice sounded annoyed that Jimmy would cause her this much trouble. It wasn’t the same worried vibe I got from Dwayne.

  The fleeting thought about how I’d be safer if I had the favor of those in the homeless community came back to me.

  And it wasn’t like I’d be losing any business. I’d been sitting here for three hours now, and the lunch time “rush” of the handful of people who’d braved the cold was long past.

  Silly as it sounded, my conversations with Jimmy had been the high points of my week. Most people would only see how I’d been kind to him, but he’d also been kind to me. For a little bit, sitting on the street and eating cupcakes with a homeless man, I’d felt normal.