Deadly Cruise: A Humorous Cruise Ship Cozy Mystery (Cruise Ship Cozy Mysteries Book 7)

by A. R. Winters

  Ethan nodded.

  “Okay. Let’s talk to her together in a moment.” He turned to address his security team. “I need this area sealed off. One of you contact the cruise director and let her know that all events in this area today need to be canceled and rescheduled right away. I want photographs, I want samples, I want professionalism, and I want discretion. Is that clear?”

  “Sir!” they all replied in perfect unison, the yes preceding the honorific not even needing to be said.

  I recognized a couple of the security guards from previous incidents aboard the ship which had needed their presence, though they had always been too busy for me to get to know any of them.

  “Good morning,” said Doctor Ryan as he emerged onto the deck from a nearby exit. “Or… not,” he said, wincing, as he looked down at Zoya.

  The handsome young doctor was in charge of the ship’s medical facilities. He also happened to be dating Cece, though I hadn’t figured out if they were officially a couple or still ‘getting to know each other.’

  “Hey Ryan. Afraid we’ve got another one for you.” Ethan and Ryan both sighed as they looked down at the body. “Give the men a while to document the scene, and then grab a couple of them to help you get her below.”

  “Will do.”

  Ethan raised his eyebrows at me and nodded toward Susan. She had barely stirred despite the arrival of half a dozen new people. She still sat, staring off into the distance.

  Was it all an act?

  Ethan reached into the pocket of his shirt and pulled out a small device.

  “What’s that?”

  “Tape recorder. Well, digital recorder. No tape. Let’s see what Susan has to say.”

  Before we talked to Susan, Ethan reached up to a stack of chairs and removed two at once with a single hand. Seeing him swinging them effortlessly with one strong arm gave me my first proper smile of the day.

  “Hi, Susan,” he said gently as he set the two chairs down in front of her. We would be sitting with our backs to the ocean, facing the movie screen and what was going on below it.

  “Good morning.” Her voice was soft, a far cry from the usual confidence I heard in her tone.

  “I was wondering if you could tell us what happened this morning.” Ethan sat down slowly, put the voice recorder on his knee, and pressed the record button. He nodded down at it to make sure Susan knew she was being recorded, but he didn’t give her the option of declining. I took the other chair, doing my best to look sympathetic rather than suspicious.

  Susan repeated what she’d told me earlier, almost word for word.

  “I see,” said Ethan when she’d finished. “And did you see anyone else here? Or even on your way over?”

  “No, no one around here. I might have seen a housekeeper near my cabin, but there was no one on the deck or in this area at all.” After a few seconds, she added, “Except Zoya.”

  “Right. You and Zoya… you weren’t friends, were you?”

  Susan didn’t answer right away. She opened her mouth once or twice and closed it again, hesitant to answer.

  “Well?”

  “No,” she admitted. “We weren’t friends. We used to work together a lot, though. But for the last ten, twenty years, we’ve barely seen each other. Her career ended after she tried to break into more serious roles—although she would never admit it. She thought she was only one audition away from having her name back in lights. But no one else did.”

  “And you?” Ethan leaned forward, his hands on his knees as he questioned her.

  “I guess I was in a similar position. I had more roles than her, though. Small ones. Bit parts. Even working as an extra sometimes. Some work is better than no work, right? But Zoya thought she deserved to be in the big time. She didn’t want to take the kinds of roles I’d been taking.”

  “When you did work together, back in the seventies, were you friendly then?”

  “We were… cordial. I don’t like to admit it, but she was the bigger name then. And I often worked as her body double. I’d do the scenes that she wouldn’t lower herself to. You know, ones without clothing. That’s what a body double does” A small smile crept onto her face. “And of course, I had a much better body than her anyway. Still do.”

  I thought the final two words were a little tasteless given the circumstances, but Ethan was in charge of the questioning and didn’t bring it up.

  “I see. Would you say she looked down on you?”

  Susan shrugged. “Maybe she did then. But more recently, I’d say I was looking down on her. To be honest, I hadn’t even thought about her in years. Our paths didn’t cross much anymore. Before this cruise, we didn’t so much have a bad relationship as a non-existent one.”

  “The picture in the poster is you, right?”

  Susan hesitated again. Finally, she nodded. “Yes, that’s me.”

  “It must have been annoying to see that such a fuss was going to be made over a poster that was actually of you.”

  I kept my eyes locked on Susan’s face to see if I could discern whether she was hiding anything or keeping something from us. The problem was that she was a professional actress. It’s hard to know what to trust when you’re dealing with someone whose job is to basically lie all day long.

  “It… brought back memories.” She stared down at the deck now, no longer meeting Ethan’s gaze. “I… I did it. I’m sorry.”

  Did she just confess!?

  “What?” Ethan and I both said together.

  Susan’s head whipped back up in surprise. “Not the killing! The poster. It was me. I wrote on it.”

  False alarm. We had a confession, but I wasn’t sure if it was even to a crime. A misdemeanor, at best.

  “You were jealous?” Ethan asked.

  Susan’s face scrunched up for a second in annoyance. Then, she let it go and finally gave another little nod. “It’s hard to admit to, isn’t it? Jealousy?”

  Reaching over, I gave her knee a little squeeze. it was partially out of sympathy and partially because I wanted to keep her talking.

  “I’m sure it is,” said Ethan.

  “It was just so… ridiculous. A fancy unveiling in the Grand Ballroom? For a movie poster from forty years ago? And it wasn’t even her in the picture! Can you blame me?”

  “We all deal with emotions like jealousy in different ways.” Ethan was being diplomatic. I almost smiled but managed to contain myself as I imagined Ethan defacing a picture because he was jealous. It was too ridiculous to contemplate without being amused.

  “It did seem a little over the top,” I said in agreement. I was thinking about the day before, and how emphatically Susan had denied it had been her. She’d been so convincing. How could we trust anything she said?

  “But it was just a prank. A bit of harmless fun.”

  While she may have thought that, I’d seen the look on Zoya’s face. It hadn’t been fun for her. She’d been distraught.

  The talk of the poster had reminded me of something else. The day before, Polly had mentioned she was hoping to get Zoya to endorse her business.

  “You know,” I said, “there’s an entrepreneur aboard the ship who does prints on bags and the like. She was hoping to get Zoya to endorse her products.”

  My angle was that Susan was jealous—if she knew that Zoya might be profiting from the old movie posters now, in the current day, she might have wanted a cut of the money. Or to at least stop Zoya from having hers.

  Susan looked at me sadly. “Is that so? I didn’t know anything about that. I got my payment years ago, and I was paid very well for it too. Not just for the poster, but for whenever I acted as her body double. I earned more than enough thanks to Zoya over the years.”

  Hmm. I wasn’t sure if I believed her or not. If she’d been paid years ago, then the money must have been spent years ago too. It would be easy for her to think she deserved more now that Zoya was likely to be profiting from it again. Perhaps they had argued again… and things got out of hand… Bef
ore I could work through it any further, my train of thought was interrupted.

  “What’s going on?”

  Ethan and I looked up, startled. This area was supposed to be sealed off.

  It was Judd Cohn, with a manila envelope tucked under his arm. He was looking down at Susan with concern. He must have taken the walking path around the deck.

  I turned around to see if the body was still visible. It wasn’t, having now been covered up with a small tarp by Ethan’s team. While the news of Zoya’s death would inevitably get out, we didn’t want to be advertising it before the murder scene had even been cleared.

  “Zoya’s dead! Murdered!” said Susan in a much louder voice than we’d heard from her all morning.

  I saw Ethan’s jaw clench and quiver. So much for keeping it a secret.

  Judd’s eyes narrowed. “What? Are you sure it isn’t some kind of stunt, to get revenge for the poster?”

  Susan stared up at the producer. “No. I saw it. Look, she’s over there.” She pointed over her shoulder at the tarp.

  Judd’s eyebrows shot up, and he started to walk over to the scene of the crime.

  “Stop!” commanded Ethan, standing up as he did so. Judd froze in his tracks.

  “Did you not see the tape?” Ethan said. “This area is closed.”

  Judd looked back the way he had come. The entrance to the pool deck had indeed been sealed off with two lines of black and yellow NO ENTRY - CLOSED tape. He must have ducked under it.

  “I thought it was just a prop,” said Judd, shrugging his shoulders. “This is the horror movie area, right?”

  Ethan glared at him, but I guess he knew he couldn’t really argue that point.

  We’d need to put up a barricade of sunbeds or something to really drive home the fact that this area was actually closed, and not just decorated like some kind of slasher movie crime scene.

  “Please, leave the area now. This is an active crime scene and we wouldn’t want it to be contaminated with false evidence.”

  Judd nodded, looking down at his shoes and hands, as if worried they might have already incriminated him in some way.

  However, he didn’t leave immediately. Instead, he stood there quietly, thoughtfully. “I was supposed to meet Zoya last night.”

  “Oh?” Ethan was suddenly no longer eager to get Judd away from the scene.

  Judd held out the manila envelope. “She gave me this script, about a girl from Nebraska who gets kidnapped. It was really very good. We were supposed to meet last night, but she never showed up. There was no answer at her cabin either. That’s why I’m out now. I was hoping I might run into her.”

  “You were supposed to meet her last night?” Ethan rubbed his jaw with his hand. “Judd, could you come to my office a little later? I want to talk to you about your last conversations with her.”

  “We could do it now,” he suggested.

  “No.” Ethan waved his arm around to indicate the whole area. “We’ve got work to do here. Come by after lunch and we’ll talk then.”

  I was barely listening by this point. My mind was running at a thousand miles an hour, thinking of what he’d said about the script.

  A movie about a Nebraskan girl who’d been kidnapped?

  I was a Nebraskan girl who’d been kidnapped.

  And this wasn’t the first time I’d been reminded of it while working aboard the cruise ship.

  There had been the Arizona postcards left in my cabin—and Arizona was where it had happened.

  There had been the diner set we used for a murder mystery cruise, with props seemingly designed to remind me of the kidnapping.

  And there had been the motivational speaker who’d used the example of a kidnapped Nebraskan girl as an example of resilience and overcoming obstacles.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d been reminded of that difficult moment in my past, and it was far too much of a coincidence.

  “Can I have the script?” I said it a bit too bluntly, and it probably seemed out of the blue from Judd’s perspective.

  He gave me an incredulous look. “No, you may not.” He turned back to Ethan. “You’re the first officer, right? I’ll come to your office at about one-thirty. Okay?”

  Ethan squeezed my arm and then nodded at Judd. “See you then.”

  “Do you know where Zoya got the script?” I asked Judd, just as he was about to leave.

  He just shook his head at me and walked away.

  I wasn’t sure if the gesture meant he didn’t know where Zoya got it from, or whether he just meant he wouldn’t tell me.

  I was going to do my best to find out, though. I was hoping this cruise would be a peaceful one, without memories of my past being dragged back up to taunt me with.

  But no such luck.

  It reminded me of something else, too.

  There was a mysterious man who’d been on several of the previous cruises, disguising himself as a housekeeper, a guest, and more. We didn’t even know his name; we just called him the mystery man, or the fake housekeeper.

  I hadn’t seen any sign of him yet this time, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t aboard. He was good at moving about unnoticed. On the last cruise, he actually helped me out by tripping someone up who I was trying to catch, but I still hadn’t figured out what his motives were.

  He seemed to have something to do with the captain of the ship. Both Ethan and I—and Swan Cruises—thought the captain was up to something nefarious, but we hadn’t found any proof of wrongdoing. And of course Swan couldn’t get rid of him without good reason. He’d threatened to sue them into oblivion if they tried. So, Ethan continued to keep a watchful eye on his boss, hoping to catch him doing something he shouldn’t be. And we were both keeping an eye out for the mystery man.

  “We’re going to try and get this all cleaned up quickly around here.” Ethan swung his arm around, indicating his team, who were already busy working. “We might even be able to get it open for movies again by tonight. I’m going to be busy for a while, so… see you later?”

  “Sure thing.”

  That was my cue to leave. I knew I’d have to give Ethan a written report about finding the body—this wasn’t my first rodeo—so I decided to do that right away.

  After that, I’d have to get back to my actual job. I hadn’t uploaded any pictures or posts since the night before. One of my first bosses on the ship had told me she wanted updates posted hourly, and I still tried to keep to that schedule. Of course I wasn’t actually doing it on the hour; I would queue things up to be drip-fed over time, but I was running behind.

  No rest for the wicked.

  Or me, for that matter.

  Chapter Nine

  By early that afternoon, I’d managed to get my report typed up so I wouldn’t need a full sit-down interview with Ethan, and I was now hard at work.

  If you can call going to a steak restaurant to watch a lecture ‘work,’ anyway.

  Judd Cohn was scheduled to give a talk about film noir and detective movies from the thirties to fifties. After what he’d said about the script earlier, I wanted to get to know him a little better and dig into the source of the script. I was hoping to kill two birds with one stone—killing was certainly on my mind—by both doing my job and investigating the origins of that script.

  John Grillman’s Steakhouse was the ship’s premier steak restaurant. It was also its only one. And there was no such person as John Grillman. He was an unimaginative character invented by Swan’s marketing team. Outside the restaurant, there was a silhouette of the supposed Grillman painted onto the glass windows, standing over a giant grill with dozens of steaks loaded on top and a big carving fork in his hand.

  Inside, the restaurant’s decor was dominated by leather and wood, the smell of which seemed to go well with the aroma of the grilling meat.

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t there to eat this time. I had eaten my far less appetizing lunch in the staff canteen below deck. I was just here for the talk.

  About a third
of the restaurant had been sectioned off, and there was a large white movie screen set up. This area was being used to show detective movies throughout the day. Along the walls, a number of props related to the genre had been set up, some of which Sam, Cece, and I had unpacked on the first day.

  There were old notebooks and pens, cameras with big flashbulbs, trench coats and replica guns, plastic cigars, and a whole display of hip flasks.

  The room had about two dozen people in it, a relatively small crowd considering how many people were aboard the ship, but I supposed it was something of a niche genre these days—unlike its heyday, when a detective flick could easily be the blockbuster movie of the year.

  Kelly Cline and Judd Cohn were both standing at the front of the room, ready to begin when I arrived. Before they started speaking, I managed to grab twenty or so pictures of them, as well as the various props, and a few of the guests who had dressed up in costume.

  I planned to put some of the pictures into montages and throw them up online later that afternoon.

  “Hi, everybody!” said Kelly. She didn’t have a microphone this time since the small venue didn’t really need it, and she had to make an effort for her high-pitched voice to carry across the room.

  “Good afternoon,” said Judd, in his much deeper tone. He didn’t seem to need any effort at all to make his voice reach me, even though I was at the back.

  Kelly went on to introduce Judd, explaining how he’d been producing movies for decades in all kinds of genres, but how today he was going to be talking about his favorite kinds of movies: film noir and other detective flicks.

  “But I’m afraid I have an unfortunate announcement to make before Judd begins. This morning, Hollywood scream queen legend Zoya Maxwell was found dead, stabbed in the back, at the drive-in movie theater.”

  Okay, this one definitely wasn’t going to be kept quiet. Since Zoya was one of the headlining guests, I guess they chose to go public with it. Often when a passenger died aboard, the company preferred to keep it under wraps so as not to cause bad press or upset the other passengers.