Cruise Ship Cozy Mysteries 11 - Cruise Control

by A. R. Winters

  Vernon had always been a heavy sleeper, but there are things no one could dream of sleeping through.

  A tightness around his neck, constricting more and more.

  He awoke, coughing, but the sounds were swiftly silenced. He held his neck. Something was wrapped around it. Slicing into his neck. He couldn’t breathe.

  He flailed, but it was too late.

  The nice thing about the searing pain was that it was only temporary.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  I was drowning in a sea of pure comfort.

  That may have been more literal than I believed. I was sinking into the softness of the bed, covered in thick blankets and fluffy pillows, not too hot, not too cold, just right.

  In other words, absolutely positively perfect.

  I didn’t want to get up. I didn’t even want to move. I had decided that I lived here now and I wouldn’t let anyone convince me otherwise.

  Then, well, someone started knocking on the door.

  Ugh. Someone else could get it. Sam would hear them eventually.

  Sam normally slept like a log. A gunfight could erupt near her and she would sleep right through it.

  More knocking. Relentlessly.

  Logic demanded I get up. That I answer the door.

  But I didn’t want to move. Too comfortable. What if I could never get this comfortable again? Nope, nope, I was staying right there. They’d get bored and leave me alone eventually.

  Knock. Knock. Knock. “Hey, answer the door or I’m going to use my fancy key to come in there anyway. If I have to do that, you’d better be like dead or something, or I’ll kill you myself!”

  Cece.

  With a great exertion of willpower, I managed to get the blankets off of me. Slightly less comfortable, the willpower to finally pull myself up was easier to summon.

  I grunted and finally got to my feet. By the time I reached the door, Cece was already holding her keycard ready to intrude on us.

  “What’s up, Cece?” I said, my tone making it very clear I wanted to go back to my comfortable heaven as soon as possible.

  “Oh, good, I don’t have to kill you.” Cece pushed her way past me, and I closed the door behind her. “I had to come and scope out this VIP room you got.”

  The housekeeper’s quarters on the ship weren’t in the same wing as the other staff cabins like the one Sam and I normally shared. That meant the chances of impromptu upgrades for Cece were much lower.

  “You know what we need to do? Order some super expensive room service. Let them deliver breakfast to us, and we can sit in front of the eighty-inch TV and gorge ourselves before we have to actually get up and do work.”

  “That sounds like a great idea, Cece.”

  “Then let’s do it!” she said, rushing to the room’s phone.

  “Except the internet is currently nuked, and Sam and I didn’t get a blank check for room service as much as we just get to use a nicer room for this trip.”

  Reality intruded and took all the wind out of Cece’s plans. “What a buzzkill. What’s the point of the super nice room if you can’t live in excessive luxury?”

  “I was enjoying it before you showed up.”

  “A fancy bed is really that nice?”

  “Yes. Yes, it is.” I stumbled over to the sofa and collapsed into it as I continued my journey to full consciousness. I guess I had to wake up and do work anyway. Whatever it was that liaisons did for people in the morning.

  “What are we even supposed to do? I can only play games on my phone for so long before even that won’t stave off my boredom.”

  “The ship has a library. It’s decently stocked. Could always go there and expand our minds.”

  “You can read for fun all you want, but me? I need more stimulation than black text on white pages.”

  “Cece?” Sam groggily said. She had stumbled up behind us. “Didn’t we give Holly the sofa? I don’t know where we’re going to put Cece.”

  It would take her a bit for her brain to boot up and realize everything that was going on.

  Cece said, “Don’t worry. I ain’t sleeping here. I got my own room.”

  Sam’s incoherent, half-asleep babbling did remind me of something though. “Where is Holly, anyway? She was supposed to be sleeping on the sofa, and well, she isn’t here. Did she ever come back after I sent her to go shadow Vernon?”

  Cece turned on the TV, flipping through blank, signal-less channels as if one was going to magically come through. “You actually care where she is all of a sudden?”

  “I just want to make sure everyone’s okay. She annoys me, but it’s not like I want her to dive overboard or something.”

  “Oh, oh, yeah,” Sam said, speaking up in a sudden burst of clarity. “Yeah, she was here last night. I saw her snoozing on the sofa when I came out for some water. So yeah, she was here.”

  “Late to bed, yet up before any of us.” I reclined back on the sofa. “How much you want to bet despite lacking sleep, she’s still bursting with energy?”

  “Is that girl capable of being any other way?”

  A loud dinging sound began echoing through the halls. Instinctively, I scrambled up before remembering why I did that. A call for help.

  Still dressed in my sweats and T-shirt, I threw open the door and followed the sound, Sam and Cece at my flank. It didn’t take long to find the source.

  Vernon’s room.

  Rushing in, I was greeted with a colorless, unmoving Vernon, aside from the bright green slop and the broken glass that was all over his chest.

  Standing over him was Holly, freaking out and still pressing the bell for assistance.

  “Stop ringing the bell, please. Stop,” Sam pleaded as she went over and forcefully removed Holly’s hand from it. “We’re here. Calm down.”

  “Ohmygodohmygod,” she was rambling, her words near incomprehensible. “Vernonsdeadohmygodhesdeadwhatdoidowhatdoido!?”

  Approaching Vernon, I didn’t need to understand her directly to see what she was fearing.

  Cold. Lifeless. It was something that still turned my stomach but I had begun to develop a resistance to my revulsion.

  Vernon Nunn was dead.

  “Calm down, seriously,” Sam continued, trying to keep Holly from having a heart attack. “Tell us what happened.”

  There was a mess on his chest. It smelled of fruit and almond milk, likely some sort of nutritious smoothie or something or other. Broken glass was within it too, but it was clear to me that had nothing to do with why Vernon was lifeless.

  No, that had a pretty clear explanation. A cable around his throat. A plastic bit of… zip tie?

  I didn’t want to touch it, but I could get close enough to see that he was strangled with the surprisingly durable piece of plastic.

  “So I was like… um… trying to be his liaison. His intern. So I got up extra early to make his special vegan protein shake that I knew he adored. I brought it here for him, and, uh… he was dead. I freaked out. I spilled the shake. I rang the bell.”

  It happened again. It was like some sort of curse I had to deal with. “Sam, Cece, stay with Holly. Keep her or anyone else from coming in and snooping around. I need to go and find Ethan.”

  The whole technology embargo was suddenly very inconvenient for me, so I would have to find my boyfriend the old-fashioned way and drag him up here.

  I had another job on the ship that beat out my position as a social media director or even as a liaison helper. Something that was an unofficial title, because a cruise ship having someone listed at it would be not very comforting for the passengers.

  Our pseudo-detective. The one who found out the truth when things went wrong.

  Unfortunately for me, what had been going wrong a lot was murder.

  And Holly was now my top suspect.

  CHAPTER NINE

  I t never got any more normal. Ethan would come up. He and I would take a lot of pictures of the scene. Then, Dr. Ryan would have the deceased loaded up and brought down to so
mewhere where it was less likely to cause concern.

  Just like me, Ryan wasn’t someone who did autopsies officially, but he’d been getting a lot of practice at it anyway.

  The ship’s management had gathered around outside sickbay. Ethan, the Captain, Kelly, Dr. Ryan, Sam and I were tasked with figuring out our next move.

  “So… I’m thinking that maybe, somehow, somehow, he managed to strangle himself.” That bizarre suggestion was from the captain.

  “There are cuts on his fingers,” Dr. Ryan said. “This suggests that he was trying to pull the zip tie away from his neck but was overpowered by an attacker.”

  “He would also to not get choked out by like… uh… a noose?” The captain was new to this ship, and he didn’t seem to know what to do whenever bad things happened. He kept getting stuck on the nicest possible explanations, something that would happen in a more just world.

  The scenarios he put forth were always useless. Well-meaning, but still useless.

  “You’re suggesting he hung himself. Using zip ties.”

  “He’s a tech nerd, right? He’s more familiar with that than using rope.”

  Kelly glanced his way.

  Ethen said gently, “There’s no indication that he showed any suicidal tendencies.”

  “You can never tell, can you? Someone’s fine until they aren’t.”

  Kelly smiled, nodding and agreeing with the captain. “That’s absolutely right. Such an excellent theory. The staff will of course look into it.”

  Ethan and I were staring at Kelly skeptically, but the captain seemed pleased.

  “On top of it as always, Kelly,” he said.

  At his praise, she giggled. Actually giggled. “All right, Captain, I guess the two of us should get going. I’ve got a million things to do and I know you’ve got—”

  “A million and one!” he finished, beaming at her.

  Kelly nodded. “Well, let’s get out of here and leave them to it.”

  The captain followed Kelly out of the room, only stopping at the door. “Remember Ethan, consider my theory seriously. As Kelly says, it’s completely plausible.”

  “We will, Captain,” Ethan forced a smile. “Nothing will be unconsidered until we get to the bottom of this.”

  Kelly pulled on his arm and finally led him out of sickbay. Thank goodness for Kelly, I thought to myself.

  “Is it remotely possible what he said, Doc?”

  Ryan thought to himself, juggling thoughts in his head, silent for a time before giving out a firm and resounding, “No. The only way he could inflict such wounds on himself would be with a complicated setup, and we found nothing but him and zip ties.”

  “Good. We considered that theory and now I’m not lying to the captain when I tell him later.”

  Sam had her phone out and was flipping through it. The cell service and internet were blocked, but modern phones were still reasonably powerful computers otherwise. “So, looking at the passenger assignments, the only people who were in the area were the other executives.”

  “Hollyhuck Flutter as well,” Ethan added. “She found him, so she had access.”

  That stung a bit. She had only gone to him because I told her to, because I wanted to get her out of my hair. Because I couldn’t tolerate someone just being happy without a reason, I went and got her labeled as the top suspect in a murder case.

  Way to go, Addy. Someone annoyed you, and you get them framed for murder.

  Ugh. I needed the truth. My heart told me it wasn’t Holly. She didn’t seem to have that violent instinct, but I had been surprised other times aboard this ship. And as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t completely write her off as a suspect.

  “Shouldn’t his door have been locked?” Ryan asked. “How did Holly get in without a key?”

  Sam put her phone back to sleep before leaning back into our discussion. “Vernon practiced an open-door policy. Apparently, at LightningBlossom he just outright removed his door. That’s not practical here, so it translated to him just refusing to lock it.”

  “Would that be known among his employees?” I asked. “It’s one thing to go into your boss’s office, but these suites are effectively personal rooms, bedrooms. Not really something I’d feel comfortable barging in on the captain or Kelly if they were in their own quarters, even though they’re about as open with me as Vernon is with his general workforce.”

  Ethan nodded in agreement. “It’s a possibility, but we should start with those who definitely would know the door was unlocked first, or would have easy access. We go from there and work outward if we need to. No point in casting a big net first and causing ourselves way more work.”

  “So that makes our first suspects Holly… and the executives? They really seemed to dislike Vernon on a personal level.”

  “There’s always the housekeeping staff,” Ethan said. I wasn’t stoked about the thought of accusing Cece again so, well, I wasn’t. “Sam should have a card for access, and therefore, uh, you as well, Addy.”

  So in addition to my intern, my friends and I were also now potential suspects.

  I was sure it’d get cleared up soon enough, but it was one heck of a way to start the day.

  Ethan pushed himself to his feet. “First thing we should do is the obvious. Check the cameras and see if that clears anything up. Should be easy to see who else went into the room last night.”

  “Shall we then?” I rose to his level.

  “We shall.” Ethan shot a glance back at Ryan. “Let me know if you find anything else of interest.”

  The doctor shrugged. “Pretty sure he was choked to death. Don’t know what else is there to say.”

  I allowed myself a moment of Captain-like musing. “I don’t know. Could be drugs in his system, or was he drunk, or he outlined his complicated suicide process on a note and then swallowed it for some reason.”

  “You actually believe that as a possibility?”

  “Stranger things have happened.”

  Dr. Ryan just threw his hands up in the air. “Sure, sure, anything I learn, I’ll share. But I’m sure it won’t be that.”

  Ethan and I took off through the hallways, heading to the nearest security station. There usually wasn’t an excess amount of crime on a cruise ship. It was one of the safer places you could be compared to most vacation destinations. Didn’t mean we shouldn’t have cameras and security everywhere.

  We grabbed control of the room from the security officer, giving him an extra break to go get a second breakfast and an extra strong coffee. He seemed almost smug as we claimed the room from him.

  It was easy to see why.

  “Uh… the cameras aren’t working.” I pressed a button on one of the monitors, and nope, it was still a black screen.

  Ethan too fiddled with the controls looking to see if he made some sort of mistake. “Did we seriously cut power to all the cameras? I thought we were keeping the electricity on when it was legally necessary.”

  “Cameras aren’t legally necessary, then?”

  “I guess not. I suppose the security guy was just taking the time to catch up on his reading rather than doing security the old-fashioned way.” Ethan gestured to the thick paperback on the counter. Rip My Bodice On the Seas. I never would have guessed that was what the thirty-something schlubby security guy was reading.

  “What now?”

  “I don’t know. This can’t be right. I feel like I would have been told if the cameras were going to be cut off. I would have come in here earlier to tell this guy to do something more productive.”

  “And I’m guessing that’s why he didn’t bring it up.”

  “The data terminal is still up and running, but there’s nothing useful showing up. The keycards are electric, so they need to be on for them to work. But the system used to report card usage was shut off.”

  I leaned on a wall in the tiny room, searching through my thoughts for anything useful. “So, with all his anti-tech mumbo-jumbo, Vernon engineered the perfect situation
for someone to go and kill him in? None of our toys work, and no one knows how to do stuff old school.”

  “I’m not giving up.” Ethan stood up from the chair and took a few steps toward the door. “I’m not going to allow someone to be killed on my ship and get away with it.”

  “Your ship? Not the captain’s?”

  “Hey, I’ve been on the Swan longer than he has. Keeping this ship running is a point of pride for me, just like you put pride in your articles about breakfast abominations.”

  “Excuse me, I call them innovations, thank you very much. One of them is going to catch on and change the breakfast world forever.” Just then, I remembered something. “Oh… oh, the guy who was turning every off and putting all the machine blockers in. That Herman Graaf guy you warned me about. I saw him.”

  Ethan’s ears perked up and he looked at me with concern. “You ran into him?”

  “Yeah, he was in the neighborhood of the VIP cabins where Vernon and executives are, along with where Sam and I are staying for this trip. He was on a ladder doing something with zip ties.”

  “Zip ties?”

  When I said the phrase, both of us were struck with the same revelation simultaneously.

  “I guess I have an even more pressing need to find that guy now.”

  I nodded. “I can’t really say. I thought he may have used them for kidnapping purposes, but I guess they’re just versatile.”

  Ethan let out a long breath. “So much to do. We aren’t going to get an easy break with this one, so I guess we can’t put it off any longer.”

  “Put what off?”

  “We have to go talk to the other LightningBlossom executives and see what they want to do. This trip might be over before it even begins.”

  Cornstalks. And I really liked that VIP suite bed.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Ethan and I headed toward the conference room, and I guess someone had broken the news to them first because they were already loud and livid about what to do next.

  Must have been Kelly, I supposed.

  “We keep going. We say nothing to the employees,” John was saying. “We break the news that Vernon is dead, and we take all the joy that the employees have. Vernon was well-liked.”