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

by A. R. Winters

“Can’t? But you can get in anywhere!”

  Cece’s housekeeping electronic keycard opened every door on the ship, or at least she claimed it did. We had even let ourselves into the captain’s cabin before on an earlier cruise. For a good reason, of course. The fact that she was now denying me entry had me worried.

  “Yeah, well, I could, but not anymore. The captain’s turning into some kind of recluse. We have to leave the sheets and towels outside his cabin now, and he cleans it himself.”

  “No way!”

  “Yep. Can you believe it? Who would clean their own cabin when you’ve got staff? When I’m rich I’m going to have, like, twelve little Ceces keeping my mansion clean.”

  Sam and I giggled at our friend. I could imagine her bossing around her own team while she lounged back in a silk robe on her chaise lounge with a dirty martini in one hand and a cigar in the other.

  “He’s got a lock on his cabin door now too. Not just the electronic one, but an old-fashioned one. With a metal key.”

  “Well, that isn’t suspicious,” I said with a dry laugh. What was the captain up to in there?

  “Did he give any reason?” asked Sam.

  Cece shrugged. “I think so, but I wasn’t there. The head of housekeeping said it was something about him having valuables in there and he wasn’t sure if he could trust all the new staff.”

  I raised one skeptical eyebrow. “Do you have a lot of new staff in housekeeping?”

  “Not really. Just three or four over the last couple of cruises. And I don’t know why they’d hire them if they didn’t trust them. Seems dumb.”

  “Sure does. What am I going to do about the ring?”

  “Maybe you should tell Ethan,” said Sam.

  “Yeah. Maybe I will.” With an annoyed sigh I stood up. “Later guys.”

  So my brilliant plan was busted before it had even begun. But I couldn’t face telling Ethan exactly how I’d messed up just yet. I decided to go for a walk instead.

  Wandering around the ship, I tried to figure out what I was going to do about the captain and the missing ring. Some small consolation was that at least the ring wasn’t of sentimental value to Ethan, so I didn’t have to worry about having lost his grandmother’s ring or anything like that.

  I found myself approaching the pool deck, and although the yellow tape was still blocking access, the piles of sun loungers that the security guards had set up to make a kind of blockade had been moved to allow a small accessway if you were willing to duck under the tape.

  I saw flower petals on the ground. There were yellow, white, pink, and red all mixed together, and they seemed to create some kind of trail. I doubted Ethan had ordered it to be laid, so I ducked under the tape to see what the meaning of it was.

  When I was through the passage between the sun loungers, I put my hands on my hips and stared at what was ahead of me. On the other side of the pool looked to be a memorial. About half a dozen people were milling around it, as if the yellow tape blocking access had been a mere suggestion they were happy to ignore.

  I walked around the edge of the pool to get a closer look. Dozens of pictures of Zoya had been stuck to the side of the ship’s wall. There were pictures from magazines, cheap posters, and even a few photos of her that had been printed during this cruise.

  Most of the mourners were staring at the pictures. Below the photos were piles of flowers.

  I stared down at the flowers. While there were a few loose stems, there were also several bouquets, table pieces, and bunches of flowers still in vases. I recognized some of the table pieces from the Captain’s Club restaurant, and the flowers in vases were like the ones Patsy had used to memorable effect on Ginger Lodgers and her husband in the Grand Ballroom.

  This was a memorial to Zoya Maxwell of the most DIY kind, made from knickknacks and stolen foliage from around the ship.

  Just to the side of the memorial was the apparent instigator of this makeshift effort.

  Polly Stratton had set up a little table from which she was selling various items from her movie memorabilia business. In pride of place was the prototype Zoya Maxwell bag I had seen her with on the first day, though it now had a sign saying ‘One of a kind collector’s edition!’ attached to it and a four-figure price tag.

  She smiled at me as she saw me eyeing everything, but it was a warier smile than what I remembered before. Remembering what Judd had told me about Zoya rejecting her plan to use her image on a range of memorabilia, I was immediately suspicious.

  “Hi!” Polly greeted me in a chirpy tone, but her eyes kept darting around as if looking for trouble.

  “What is this?” I waved my hand at the memorial and her table of wares.

  “We were all such big fans of Zoya we decided to create a little memorial to her. It’s what she would have wanted.”

  The we looked more like an I to me. The whole thing reeked of a business opportunity rather than a genuine expression of grief for the departed.

  “Did you get permission?”

  “Oh, you know how these things just spontaneously appear. Usually it’s outside the gates of the person’s house, but since we’re on board a ship I guess it just popped up here, where the awful thing happened.”

  Spontaneous? Yeah, right.

  “I see.”

  Frowning and shaking my head, I took another look around. There were several guests I vaguely recognized from the cruise, but none who I had spoken to. I took a couple of pictures of the memorial, but I was unsure if I would be able to use them.

  I walked away from Polly and called up Kelly. The cruise director answered on the first ring with a cheery, “Hi!”

  “Kelly, I’m at the pool deck. Polly Stratton has set up a memorial and is selling stuff here. Did you know about this? Is she allowed to?”

  “Who did what where now?” I could almost hear Kelly’s shocked expression. This was definitely something she hadn’t signed off on. I repeated what I’d told her with a bit more detail.

  “I’ll be there in one and a half shakes of a lamb’s tail!”

  I felt like a little kid tattling on another, but in this case, it was justified. Polly had no right to be using this area for her business, and profiting off of Zoya’s death in such a way seemed downright ghoulish.

  While I was waiting for Kelly, I called Sam and told her about it too. She also promised to be there shortly.

  “Oh. My. Goodness!”

  Sticking my phone back in the pocket of my jeans, I saw that Zoya’s number one fan, Kirk Field, had arrived and he looked aghast.

  “What is going on here?” He crouched down next to the pile of stolen flowers, poking at them.

  “We made a memorial for Zoya,” called Polly with a hint of pride from behind her table.

  Kirk stood up again and walked over to her. He stopped in front of the display she had created and stared down at the array of items she had for sale, and in particular at the prototype bag with Zoya’s image on it, along with its new eye-watering price tag.

  “This… this is a commercial enterprise!”

  Polly shook her head at him. “We all just felt that Zoya needed some kind of memorial. So we could pay our respects. So that she could live on, in a way.”

  Kirk slapped his hands on the table and glared at her. He then lifted up his left hand and thumped it against his chest.

  “Zoya lives on in our hearts! Not on a tawdry table full of trash to cash in on her! As her number one fan, I demand you stop this immediately!”

  Polly crossed her arms in front of her chest. “I will not. You’re not her only fan and you don’t have a monopoly on grief. We all have our different ways of dealing with it.”

  “Grief? You don’t even know her!”

  “Of course I knew her! I run a movie memorabilia business! We were going to go into business together!”

  “Oh, really? You know Zoya? What elementary school did she go to? Which drama teacher in high school did she credit for the courage to take on the role in Painted L
ittle Flower? What was her middle name?”

  Polly shook her head at him, refusing to answer the questions. “If you cared about her so much, why don’t you buy this bag?” She nudged the bag with the Penultimate Victim image toward him.

  “I will not! Never! I won’t buy a thing now that she won’t see the benefit.” He smacked the table with two thumping fists. “Take all this stuff and throw it overboard!” He turned to look at the heap of stolen flowers. “You can leave that though. She might have liked the flowers.”

  “Hello! Hello! Hello!” It was Kelly, rushing toward us with her legs flying at an impossible speed. She almost skidded as she stopped in front of the table. Then, her head swiveled to look at the flower memorial. “What is going on?”

  Kirk managed to get his explanation in first.

  “This heartless woman is trying to profit from Zoya’s death! I demand she be arrested!”

  I raised my eyebrows at that. No longer content to have her operation shut down, he wanted her locked up!

  “He’s just jealous because he didn’t think of it first. We loved Zoya and we need to remember her!”

  Kelly shook her head at Polly. “This area is off-limits! You can’t do this here. You have to pack this all up and leave!”

  “Arrest her! It’s an outrage!”

  I took Kirk by the arm and led him aside.

  “What she did was wrong. Don’t worry—there will be consequences for her.”

  “Yes,” he said with a nod, “there must be! I couldn’t believe when I heard about it. I was in the buffet and I heard another guest talking about the Zoya memorial. And I thought to myself, ‘Zoya memorial? What Zoya memorial? I’m the world’s number one Zoya fan and I don’t know about any memorial.’ And then when I came here—I couldn’t believe it!”

  “I know, I know. Me neither. This whole section is still supposed to be closed.”

  I saw Kelly watching Polly closely as she piled up her stuff and shoved it all into a big canvas bag.

  “Look, she’s being shut down. This won’t happen again. Why don’t you leave us to it and go and watch one of the movies?”

  “I’ll never be able to concentrate. I’ll be thinking about this debacle. I think I’d better go take a nap or something.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Would you like me to walk you back to your cabin?” Sam had arrived and just caught the end of our conversation.

  “I want to make sure she’s gone first.”

  Polly had everything in her large bag now, and a mean expression on her face, annoyed at being thwarted in her business efforts.

  “I’ll make sure she takes it all back to her cabin,” I said to him.

  “You do that. And if you get a chance, throw that bag of hers overboard. It’s an outrage!”

  “Umm, okay. I’ll see what I can do.” Strange as it may seem, Swan did not actually allow us to throw guest’s belongings overboard, even if they did break the rules. In fact, we weren’t allowed to throw anything overboard. Or anyone.

  While Sam led Kirk away, I encouraged the remaining loiterers to leave as well, shooing them inside.

  The way I had arrived, along the deck, wasn’t the only way to the pool deck. I saw that the tape which had been used to close off the nearest bulkhead door leading inside had been completely removed. I assumed that was more of Polly’s handiwork.

  “We need to get this taped off again,” I said to Kelly.

  “Already on it! I just called security. Actually, they’re nearly finished here and it’ll be opening up again real soon, but it’s going to be sealed off properly again in the meantime!”

  “Good.”

  Kelly lowered her voice. “Why don’t you escort Polly back to her room? Make sure she puts all that stuff away. And that the nutty fan doesn’t chase after her.”

  “Okay. Will do.”

  In all the excitement, I’d almost forgotten about the ring. At least this was taking my mind off it while I thought about what to do.

  Polly slung her big canvas bag with all her wares over her shoulder and stalked off toward the door leading inside.

  “See you later!” I called to Kelly as I followed Polly inside the ship.

  It looked like it was going to be yet another interesting afternoon.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Apart from appeasing Polly and Kirk, I had a reason of my own for wanting to follow Polly back to her cabin. Since learning from Judd that she had been turned down by Zoya just before she died, I wanted to follow up on it.

  I caught up with her in a hallway inside.

  “Can I help you with your bag?” I asked.

  Polly wasn’t aware that I had tattled on her, and she blamed Kirk for being shut down. So despite being annoyed at the situation, she was still willing to talk to me.

  “I’ve got it.”

  “I wanted to talk to you about something, actually. I’ve taken quite a few pictures of you and some of your products. I’ve come up with a few captions to put under them, and I wanted to make sure they were okay with you and really captured the philosophy of your business.”

  “Oh? I guess that would be okay.” Hearing about something that might help her business seemed to cheer her up. “Come on. My cabin’s just down here.”

  Inside the room, everything was neatly arranged and the space smelled of fresh flowers. It seemed she hadn’t just used the blooms she liberated from other parts of the ship for Zoya’s memorial, but also to brighten up her own cabin.

  “I can’t believe they wouldn’t let me have a memorial for Zoya,” said Polly as she sat down on one of two chairs around a glass-topped wicker coffee table, offering me the other.

  “It’s still a crime scene.”

  “Yes, but it’s what Zoya would have wanted. I’m sure of it.”

  “Umm, yes, maybe,” I said noncommittally. I expected Zoya would have liked to have not had a knife in the back more than anything else, given the choice.

  “And that guy who calls himself a fan. How crazy was he? A real fan would have been delighted at the memorial. And my bag.”

  “Actually, I was wondering about that. You had more products related to Zoya in mind, didn’t you?”

  Polly’s eyes lit up.

  “Oh, yes! Hold on.”

  She reached under the wicker table to a shelf that was below the glass top and pulled out a laptop. She opened it up and then twisted it around so we could both see the screen.

  “Look. I’ve got more designs, too. Not just the bag. I’ve got wallets, T-shirts, tank tops, even pens and pencils!”

  She let me swipe through images of products she had designed. It looked to me like Polly had been working on these even after Zoya died. Even after Zoya had firmly rejected her offer.

  “And Zoya was on board with this?” I asked as if it was just an idle question.

  “Oh, definitely. Look!” She reached under the table again and pulled out a thin paper folder. She opened it and showed me what was inside. “We signed a contract and everything.”

  I glanced at the document and it did indeed seem to be what Polly said, a business contract between the two of them, complete with a signature at the bottom featuring Zoya’s memorable giant letter Z.

  “You know something weird?”

  “What?” asked Polly.

  “One of the other movie guests told me Zoya had actually turned you down.” I tried to sound like I didn’t really believe what I’d been told but was doing her a favor by letting her know the gossip.

  Polly’s expression faltered for just a second. Was it guilt? Or confusion?

  “Oh, that’s just because she wanted to keep it under wraps. I’d shown a few people my bag, but not that many people knew about it, really. She wanted to have a big, grand unveiling after we had everything else printed and made. Like with her movie poster. That’s probably why she denied it, so that we could do a really big announcement with a grand product launch. But now…”

  Nodding along as if I beli
eved every word, I continued to swipe through the images on her computer. I got past the end of the product designs, and the next image was a photograph.

  “Oh goodness, what a picture!”

  The image in question was a photograph of Polly and Zoya. I figured it must have been taken on the night she was killed. In the picture, Polly and Zoya were together, but Polly was holding a knife in her hand like a demented killer, while the actress had one of her ‘I’m a heroine in distress and I’m screaming’ looks on her face.

  “It is, isn’t it? That was probably one of the last pictures taken of her, in fact.”

  It almost looked like it may have been taken right before Polly stuck the knife in her. The knife looked to me very much like the one that had been found buried in Zoya’s back.

  “When was it taken?”

  “You remember the night of the poster unveiling? And how Susan and Zoya had a fight outside? Well, after that was over, I went to talk to Zoya. I caught up with her outside on the deck and she agreed to have her picture taken with me. Since we couldn’t use the movie poster as a backdrop, we posed with the knife.”

  “But… where did you get it? And who took the picture?”

  Polly frowned as if trying to remember. “A nice man took it for us. Some bald guy in a colorful shirt. A Hawaiian one.”

  Uh-oh. That sounded familiar. Was our mystery man somehow involved in this murder?

  “He suggested we use the knife as a prop. Great picture, isn’t it? That knife came from one of those food trolley things, not far from where we were earlier.” She meant by the pool deck. I recalled that they had been serving food out there that evening, before the movie features.

  “Oh, wow. How convenient. Then what?”

  Polly tapped her chin as if remembering. Or maybe she was inventing something on the fly.

  “Let’s see… we took that picture, and then we went off to talk about my ideas. She was excited about them. We walked for ages, just talking and talking. Eventually I told her I actually had a contract already prepared—and she was thrilled!”

  “That’s amazing.”

  “It was amazing.” Polly closed her eyes. “You know, when we stopped to sign the contract, the funniest thing happened. Can you guess?”