Vegan Baked Alaska (Auntie Clem's Bakery Book 9)

by P. D. Workman

  “If we can find someone with a button missing from their uniform…” Erin suggested, “then we could be sure. We’d know who it was that was involved in the fight, and that would be a good place to start the investigation.”

  “What if someone lost it innocently? What if someone did lose it in a fight, but they sewed a new one onto their uniform before wearing it this morning? Or dumped the old uniform and put on a new one? How are we supposed to prove any wrongdoing? A button doesn’t prove anything.”

  “It’s not proof,” Erin agreed. “But at least it’s a little bit of evidence that I did see something. I was there. It wasn’t just a dream. This button isn’t just a figment of my imagination.”

  “It could have been left there by anyone at any time since the boat left port. You have no way of knowing where it came from.”

  “It’s just a coincidence that it was right where Erin said there was a fight and a man was thrown overboard?” Vic demanded. “Whatever happened to ‘I don’t like coincidences’?”

  “I still don’t like them,” Terry agreed.

  The waitress delivered their drinks to them and took their meal orders. Erin couldn’t even think of food. She shook her head. “I didn’t dream it, Terry. I know the difference between a dream and real life.”

  “But dreaming and hallucinating when you are sick is different altogether. You don’t know how it might have affected you. Hallucinations can seem very real.”

  “I know the difference,” Erin insisted.

  “Okay.” Terry held up his hands and shrugged. “Okay. Assume it was real. Where do we go from here?”

  “I don’t know.” Erin had been building herself up over the past hour while they talked and waited for Terry to get back from the tour, but her good spirits came crashing down. “We went to the captain and told him about it.”

  Terry nodded. “And? What did he have to say about it? What is he going to do?”

  “He isn’t going to do anything at all.”

  “It’s pretty hard to prove wrongdoing when there’s no body. There are a lot of issues with accusing someone of murder when you don’t have a body.”

  “But it’s possible. You can convict someone of murder without ever finding the body.”

  “Yes, of course. But if the captain isn’t convinced…”

  “I don’t understand how he could be so blasé about it. He acted like… it wasn’t anything to be concerned about. How could you have someone come to you and tell you there was a murder and not even care about it?”

  “I understand why you’re frustrated. I’ll do a bit of research, but the law on boats like this can get a little complicated… I’m not sure who has jurisdiction. If the captain doesn’t want to do anything about it, the buck may stop there. That may be all we can do.”

  “What about the FBI? There must be someone who can open an investigation. A man was killed! It doesn’t matter whether he is on a boat or on land, does it? There’s still a law!”

  “I’ll look into it.”

  Willie took a swig of his beer, watching them. “Do you know who it was? How much did you see?”

  “Not enough to identify them. Two men. Medium height. One of them was wearing a white uniform and the one who got thrown overboard wasn’t. But it sounded like they both worked here. I couldn’t see their faces, only their backs.”

  “That’s not much to go on.”

  “I know it doesn’t narrow it down very much. But I’m not going to make things up. I’m telling it like it is. That’s what I saw.”

  “I believe you.”

  Erin felt a warm flush. After everyone else’s reactions, she was happy that at least someone believed, without any reservations, that she had seen what she said she had seen. And he cared about it.

  “I want to find out who it was. I don’t want their loved ones to think that he just… ran off somewhere and never came back. I want them to know how he was killed, and why.”

  Vic patted Erin’s hand. “Of course you do. You’re a good person. You care about people. We’ll figure it out. If we can. It might take a while.”

  “It might not be possible without the assistance of the crew,” Terry said. “If the captain has said that they aren’t going to do anything… the crew members are supposed to obey him. It’s a militaristic power structure. The captain is over everyone and he isn’t to be disobeyed.”

  “But people must,” Erin pointed out. “This isn’t the fourteen hundreds anymore. People can think for themselves and there are other opportunities and other places for them to go if he doesn’t like it. It’s more important to do the right thing than to just obey a power figure.”

  “That may be true. But you may also find that the people who tend to be employed here are very young or very poor. Both of those demographics are easy to intimidate.”

  Erin let out a sigh. She sipped at her wine and stared at the button, trying to figure out what to do about it. There had to be something that she could do to figure out who had been thrown overboard, even if she couldn’t figure out who had done it.

  “They must be able to tell who is missing pretty quickly. Crew members must have to check in and out. And there must be surveillance. It’s not the dark ages. We have the technology.”

  “Good thoughts,” agreed Terry. “If we can get them to cooperate.”

  They talked about other things and listened to the lounge act and eventually got their plates. Erin still wasn’t very hungry, and had ordered a salad and sandwich, but neither appealed very much to her as she sat there looking down at them. Vic had ordered a pizza. It had artichokes and other unusual vegetables on it and no cheese. Terry had encouraged her to order the no-cheese version rather than the vegan cheese, which he seemed to be developing a distinct dislike for.

  “If it’s not real cheese, they should just leave it off,” he said. “They should just leave well enough alone. Some things you just can’t replicate with vegetables.”

  He had ordered a Japanese dish with lots of noodles and rice and fewer vegetables than Erin would have expected. Willie had accepted Terry’s recommendation of the chili and had a bowl, sans cheese, for his main course.

  Erin picked at her sandwich. There wasn’t anything wrong with it but, on the other hand it, wasn’t anything very exciting, either. If she were making it, she would have used a rustic loaf of hand-shaped bread, and grilled veggies, and some kind of sauce… she wasn’t sure what, yet, but not just mayonnaise. Maybe aioli. Maybe hummus. Something that wasn’t just mustard or mayo.

  “Not very good?” Terry asked.

  “It’s fine. I’m just not very hungry. My stomach is still a little queasy.”

  “You’re probably about due for another motion sickness pill, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah… I guess. I’ll have one after dinner, when we go back to our room.”

  “I thought you were going to do something with us tonight,” Vic objected. “Dancing or playing a game or something. You’re still not feeling up to it?”

  “No. I don’t think so. And if you suggest a movie, I’m just going to fall asleep in the middle of it, so you may as well just watch it without me.”

  “Okay… I hope you’re feeling better tomorrow.”

  “Me too.”

  Willie had been tapping away on his phone, without any indication of what he was doing, but then he looked up, pushing it away from himself. “Wifi in this place sucks. You’re right about there being jurisdictional issues, though,” he told Terry. “The jurisdiction of the boat when it is in international waters is the country the boat was registered in.”

  “I wonder where the Carolina is registered. It’s a US tour, so that must be where it is registered.”

  Willie shook his head. “Nope. According to online chatter, it’s registered in Liberia.”

  Erin blinked at him. “Liberia? I don’t even know where that is. Why would it be registered in Liberia?”

  “Apparently something to do with favorable tax treatment. I
n other words, the fewer laws they have to obey, the better. But that also means that if you wanted to open a police investigation, you would have to get Liberian officials involved. You would have to get Liberian police on the ship. And since they are halfway around the world… chances are pretty slim that they would send anyone.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Maritime law is different. Chances are, if we try reporting it to the Juneau police, they’re not going to be able to do much.”

  Erin continued to pick at her sandwich, thinking about it. Terry tried to catch her eye a few times, but Erin deliberately ignored his glances. What was the good of having an officer for a boyfriend if he wouldn’t even use the weight of his position to look into a murder? She couldn’t believe that he was just going to stand aside and let an injustice go without being addressed. “There’s a missing girl, too,” she said.

  Terry’s head turned toward her. He didn’t say anything at first, concentrating on his noodle dish, but he couldn’t resist asking for more details. There was his cop’s curiosity, even if it was a bit late to the party.

  “A missing girl?”

  “Yes. We were talking to her mother when we got out from reporting the murder to the captain.” Erin looked at Vic. “You might want to tell him that I didn’t just dream or imagine it. I wouldn’t want him to think that I am just making it up.”

  Vic rolled her eyes. “Erin… give the guy a break. It’s understandable that he doesn’t want to believe that there might have been a murder on the ship. And that you might have been a witness… again. This was just supposed to be a vacation. A getaway, to relax and put all of that stuff behind us. Behind you, especially.”

  “It’s not my fault that it followed us here.”

  “No. I just mean… you can see why Terry doesn’t want it to be true. I’m not saying that it isn’t. I’m saying that he doesn’t want to believe it. He doesn’t want to believe that you were in danger. That something could have happened to you here, where it was supposed to be safe.”

  Erin looked over at Terry. He was watching her seriously. No dimple.

  “I’m not making it up about the missing girl, either. Her mother was looking for her.”

  “A little girl or a teenager?”

  “Teenager. Her mother was very concerned, though. She had gone all of the places that the girl should have been. She had never gone back to her cabin last night.”

  “Kids do things like that. I imagine there are a lot of teens who stay out past curfew on a ship. They want to let it all hang out too.”

  “Something might have happened to her.”

  “You think she was thrown over the rail too? I think two people being thrown overboard on one night would be quite a coincidence. I don’t think that actually happens very often on cruise ships.”

  “I didn’t say she was thrown overboard,” Erin said crossly. Terry might think he was being amusing, but he wasn’t. She didn’t like his poking fun at her.

  Terry frowned. “Did you want me to look into this girl’s disappearance too? You said the mother went to the captain. Was he going to start any kind of search for her?”

  “I don’t know. We didn’t stay around long enough to find out.”

  Erin looked around the restaurant, seeing if she could spot Carisa. She had almost forgotten about the incident with the discovery of the button. But she wouldn’t forget Carisa Shepherd’s face, so distraught over the disappearance of her daughter.

  Vic glanced around too. “I don’t see her.”

  “No, me neither.”

  “That doesn’t mean that they didn’t find her,” Terry said. “They just aren’t eating dinner right now. A lot of people won’t eat until later. You guys are used to eating early, and we were hungry after our tour, but,” Terry looked at his watch, “it’s still pretty early for the supper rush.”

  “I hope they found her.”

  “Yeah,” Vic agreed. “It would be pretty awful to lose your kid in a place like this. I’d be so worried about all of the things that could happen to her. You don’t know what kind of people might be on a ship like this. I mean, there isn’t any screening. You think that everyone is just out to have a nice vacation, but there’s nothing to say that a predator couldn’t come aboard just as easily.”

  “I think a predator would be found out pretty quickly,” Terry said. “You only have a limited population and a limited area to perform any crime in. There are cameras, lots of staff. It would be pretty hard to commit a violent crime and keep it quiet.”

  “Unless it was dark and late at night and there was no one else around,” Erin said. “Then it might be pretty easy.”

  He looked at her, shaking his head. “Do you want me to look into this, Erin? Into what you saw?”

  Erin noticed he didn’t refer to it as a murder. She was surprised that he would even have to ask. Why did he think she had told him about it? Why did he think she kept giving him details and had shown him the button and asked about law enforcement on board a cruise ship? “Yes! Of course I want you to.”

  “Because you know it’s not any of my business, right? This isn’t my jurisdiction. Especially not if the law of some other country is in force. We’re docked right now, so I think that means we’re not in international waters and US law prevails, but I’m not a lawyer and this certainly isn’t Bald Eagle Falls. What I’m saying is, I don’t have any authority here. No more than you do. As far as the officials here are concerned, I’m just a civilian.”

  “But that doesn’t mean you can’t ask some questions, take a look around. Ask them if they’ll investigate. I know the captain already said no, but saying no to a couple of women who show up with a strange story and saying no to a police officer is different.”

  “Maybe. Don’t count on it. This is the captain’s domain and he won’t like having his initial judgment questioned. He wants things his way.”

  “Yeah. I know. But if you ask… there isn’t any harm in asking and in taking a look around, is there?”

  “Maybe I’ll take a quick look around before I ask him to investigate. So that I at least know what I’m talking about.”

  “I can take you up to that deck. I’ll show you. I’ll show you exactly where it happened, and I’ll explain it all to you.”

  “Okay. We can do that after dinner. It’s already getting dark, so I don’t want to put it off and I don’t think you do either.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  E

  rin showed Terry to the deck where she had witnessed the two men fighting, just as she had shown Vic, walking him through what had happened, where she had been standing and what she had seen. She indicated the place where she had found the button on the deck and showed Terry where the wider man had pushed the other over the rail.

  “The one in uniform was the aggressor,” Terry said. “So it wasn’t the one whose body was slid over the rail who popped a button.”

  Erin nodded. “Right. The bigger one was the one who was dressed up. The other one was just in casual wear.”

  “And you don’t know for sure that he was on the crew. He could have been a passenger or other worker.”

  “Yeah. Could have been. But I got the feeling… I don’t know that it was anything they said or did, I just got the feeling that they worked together. That they were both staff.”

  Terry walked around, looking for any physical evidence of what had happened. He walked through it himself, looking through the porthole to the place where the fight had taken place. Erin took him up to the secret deck, embarrassed by how frightened she had been, but determined to tell him the whole story and convince him that it had been true, not just a dream.

  “Had you been up here before last night?”

  “No. Last night was the first time. I just looked on the deck maps, because Mary Lou had said there would be a secret deck. I thought I would find it and just sit there looking at the stars or the water until I got tired enough to sleep.”

  “You
hadn’t come up here for anything else before.”

  “You know I didn’t. I’d been stuck in our cabin the whole time, seasick.”

  “Well,” Terry scratched his jaw, “other than when you were sleepwalking, yes.”

  Erin stared at him. “Sleepwalking? I didn’t sleepwalk.”

  “You did. I went for dinner, and when I came back, you were wandering around on your own. And you were asleep. No doubt of that.”

  “Where was I?”

  “Still on our deck, just wandering the halls and out to the observation area. I was scared that you could have gone over the rail yourself. You could easily have had an accident or done something without realizing it was dangerous because you were dreaming.”

  “I didn’t!” Erin couldn’t believe it.

  Terry nodded. “You did. That’s one reason I figured… that this thing about the fight was just a dream.”

  “But it wasn’t. I’ve shown you everything. You can see that I didn’t just make it up. Dreams are different. The setting changes when your mind goes off in another direction. All kinds of things that aren’t possible in real life happen.”

  Terry nodded. “It holds together when you describe it and walk through it,” he admitted. “If it was a dream… I’d expect there to be some contraindications. That you wouldn’t actually be able to see them through the porthole. Or that the secret deck was actually three decks away instead of just one. But it’s all very cogent…” He looked around. K9 sniffed along the walls, but didn’t seem to find anything that concerned him. “You’ve already been through this to describe it to Vic, but you would have figured out when you were showing her if something didn’t fit with the narrative of your dream—your memory.”

  “But everything fits, because I was here. I really did see it.”

  “I’ll talk to the captain, see if he has any thoughts… I don’t know about calling the Juneau police or the FBI. I can’t promise anything like that.”

  “Okay. But you’ll talk to him. You’ll tell him that you believe me and you think I really did see what I said I did.”