“I… can’t… breathe…” I said between pants. “Poison…”
“Yes, you can. You are breathing. You’re not poisoned.”
“I... can’t feel... my legs. I’m… poisoned…”
“Adrienne!” There was a stinging slap across my cheeks and I immediately felt outraged. But I couldn’t do anything about it. I was poisoned—now I was being slapped.
“You’re having a panic attack. You need to breathe slowly. You haven’t been poisoned.”
“Need... air...”
My arms felt tingly. My head spun. Why was Sam telling me not to breathe? I couldn’t breathe. I needed to breathe more!
“Adrienne! Listen! You’re hyperventilating. That’s why you can’t feel your legs. You need to slow down, and breathe. You’re not dying. You’re not poisoned. You’re having a panic attack.”
Her words somehow cut through my fog-addled mind. A panic attack. Was that possible? I tried to slow my breathing, switching to long, slow breaths instead of the panting I had been doing.
I still felt like I wasn’t getting enough oxygen. That I couldn’t breathe. But Sam coached me through it.
“Breathe in slowly. One, two, three. Now hold it for a couple of seconds. Now slowly, breathe out, slowly.”
She held my hand and squeezed it and, somehow, I managed to slow my breathing. Sensation began to return to my legs and my mind began to clear. I remembered what I knew about panic attacks.
She was right; I’d hyperventilated. That was why I’d lost the feeling in my legs. That’s why I thought I was dying.
I hadn’t been physically poisoned.
But I had been psychologically poisoned.
Chapter 22
Bit by bit, my vision began to clear and sensation began to return to my limbs. I was in the lounge but I could still smell the Cincinnati chili wafting in from the other room. I wished I couldn’t.
“Adrienne? What happened. Try and talk to me, slowly. It’ll help get your breathing back to normal. But don’t pant.” Sam squeezed my hand hard. “Breathe slowly,” she reiterated a final time.
I nodded and swallowed. Looking around the room, I saw Kelly, and that woman from catering, Betty Dwayne.
“I’m okay now,” I said to Betty. “You can go back to the event.”
She paused, hesitating, but finally she gave a nod.
“You’re the boss. I hope you feel better soon.” Betty gave me a sympathetic smile and then walked out of the room, looking over her shoulder a final time to check on me as she did so.
Then she was gone. Now I could talk.
“Sam. Something’s happened… something’s going on.”
“What is it?”
“The diner.” I paused to take another long, slow breath. “I don’t know how but... it’s for me.”
“What do you mean it’s for you? Are you feeling confused right now?” She leaned over and put her palm on my damp forehead, frowning. “You don’t have a fever.”
I took another long, slow, deep breath, counted to three, and then breathed it out again. I would get through this.
“The diner set looks the same as the one from last year.” Another slow breath. “The one just before... you know.”
Sam knew what I was referring to, but she wasn’t sure what I meant about the diner. I had to explain.
“In our set, there’s a poster. It’s exactly the same as the one in the diner I was in last year. And the food! Cincinnati chili. Why do we have that?”
“It’s kind of Mexican?” Sam said raising her palms up.
I shook my head.
“No way. It’s nothing like Mexican.” Another slow breath. “It was weird when I saw it in Arizona last year. It’s too much of a coincidence for it to be here, too.” And breathe… “But there’s another reason. There’s more. There’s a newspaper in there. In the booth.” Another breath, slower and calmer. “It’s from last year. The exact same day as... you know, what happened to me. How could it be?”
Sam’s face was wrinkled up in confusion as she thought. I could understand why. It didn’t make sense me either. But I saw what I saw, read what I read, and smelled what I smelled. It was all deliberate, but I had no idea who was responsible or why they were doing it.
“But it just seems... impossible?” said Sam. Of course she believed me. She was my best friend. But what I was saying didn’t make a lot of sense.
“I know! That’s what I thought. But there’s more. I didn’t tell you. On the last cruise, someone sent me a postcard again. A ‘Greetings From Arizona’ postcard. Hand-delivered, not sent through the mail.”
Sam’s eyes went wide as she worked through what I’d told her. She bit her lip in consternation.
“You’re saying someone on the ship did it?”
I gave a sad little nod and took another slow in and out breath. A few minutes earlier I’d felt like I was dying, now, impossibly, I was almost back to normal.
“It has to be someone on the ship. And worse, it has to be someone who’s been on all three of our cruises.”
Sam’s eyes grew even wider, and she looked over her shoulder as if to check for someone creeping up on us.
“But who could it be? Who would want to do something like that? It’s sick!”
It was. I thought that part of my life was over and done with. I’d done my best to forget about it. They say there’s no point in dwelling on the past, but now the past had literally come back to haunt me.
“Whoever it was must have known about this murder mystery cruise, and sabotaged the diner setting. Who would even have access to that?”
From outside, I could hear the happy chattering of the guests in the ‘diner’ next door. The smell of the Cincinnati chili seemed to be getting even stronger, though now it had thankfully been joined by the aroma of fresh-baked dinner rolls.
Sam pulled another armchair around and sat down next to me. She leaned over and took my hand again and gave it another supportive squeeze.
“You have to tell Ethan about this. All of it. We need help.”
I began to nod and then a horrible, impossible thought flitted across my mind. I didn’t want to think it. I hated to think it about the tall, handsome first officer. The man I’d been on dates with. The man I was closest to on this whole ship. The man who was also one of the most powerful and influential.
“Sam. I... I don’t want to tell him.”
She furrowed up her brow in consternation, but when she saw the look on my face her gaze fell and her features softened.
“Oh.... oh.”
Ethan was one of the people I trusted the most on the ship. He was strong, capable, honorable, and trustworthy. At least, that’s the impression I had of him. But if you were the opposite of those things, wouldn’t you try and give the impression that you were anyway? Had it all been an act? Was I a fool?
“What are we going to do?”
After another long, slow breath I looked her in the eyes.
“Maybe I should quit. Leave it all behind. Whoever it is seems to want to keep tormenting me, and I’m a sitting duck here. There’s nowhere to escape to. And maybe they won’t stop at just leaving little reminders for me like this. Maybe next time it’ll be something worse.”
Sam tried to suppress a shudder but I could see it anyway. It’s hard to hide your feelings from your friends.
The door to the lounge swung open with a whoosh of air and a draft blew across the room. We both looked up sharply to see who it was.
“Yo! What’s going on?”
Cece swaggered into the room, still in her housekeeper’s outfit. I caught Sam’s eye, giving her a little shake of my head. I didn’t want her to tell anyone. Not even Cece. I needed to know what I was going to do before we told anyone else.
“Adrienne?” said Cece with concern when she looked at me properly. I must have still looked pale, and no doubt Sam and I had serious-as-death looks on our faces. “Are you okay? Someone said you fell over.”
“I felt re
ally ill all of a sudden. I think it must have been something I ate. It was like a wave of dizziness. But I’m feeling much better now.”
Cece came over and looked at me with concern.
“You’re working too hard. It’s the stress, not the food. What happened this morning... it can affect people in different ways.”
I could have pointed out that it was hardly the first dead body I’d seen, and I hadn’t had the same reaction before. But then I remembered I was trying to keep what had happened a secret.
“Yeah, that’s probably it. Sorry for scaring you, Sam.”
She squeezed my hand hard enough for it to hurt. But it was a good hurt.
“Hey, we look out for each other.” Sam looked up at Cece. “How’d you like your scene earlier?”
Cece grinned. “It was awesome! I should have been an actress, don’t you think?”
We all shared a good-natured laugh.
“Sure. You’d be a great actress,” I told her.
She gave a smug I know look and a nod. Then her expression became more serious.
“I’ve got something to show you though.”
“Oh?” said Sam.
I just raised my eyebrows. Although I was much better, I was still working on my breathing.
“Check this out,” she said, reaching under her apron and into the black dress we’d borrowed from Harley. Like my blue gown, the black dress also had a big, largely ornamental pocket on the front. Cece pulled out a folded piece of paper from within and opened it up.
“What’s that?” I asked her.
“It’s a note. I found it in the dress. Take a look.” She handed the paper over to me.
Sam leaned over while I looked at it. It was handwritten, in dark black pencil by someone who pressed down far too hard while they wrote. And the writing looked very familiar.
“Meet me in the library so we can talk,” I said, reading the words of the letter out loud.
“Felicity wrote that, right?” asked Sam.
“Yep. It’s her writing, and the same pencil she used in that notebook.” I stared at the paper, letting the meaning of it all sink in.
“Guys? We’ve got to take this to Ethan. I think we just found our killer.”
Chapter 23
We were waved into Ethan’s office immediately. It was almost like he’d been expecting us.
“Adrienne!” he called as soon as we entered. He was standing right by the door and looked like he’d been pacing up and down. “Cece, Samantha,” he said with a nod when he noticed the other two trailing behind me.
Ethan took me by the shoulders and peered at my face as if expecting it to have three eyes. “Are you okay? I heard you fainted.”
In my excitement over the finding of the note, I’d almost forgotten about my panic attack. Half an hour earlier I’d thought I was dying, but now it had completely slipped my mind. It’s funny how the brain works. But the new evidence we’d found was much more important than a panic attack.
“Oh, yes, I’m fine now. Must have been something I ate. We—”
He shook his head. “Doesn’t sound like food poisoning to me. If it was, you’d still be sick. You wouldn’t just faint and then be up and about again.”
“Right. Must have been something else then. What we—”
“Adrienne!” Ethan interrupted me to make sure I fully got his scolding mother lecture. “Your health is important. If you fainted for no good reason, then you have to see a doctor about it. It could be something serious. I mean it.”
He was making it very difficult for me to tell him about the new evidence.
“Look, it wasn’t the food, all right? If you must know, I had a panic attack. I was just overwhelmed by everything, you know? The death, my new job, all the people depending on me to produce a good murder mystery...”
Ethan released his hold on my shoulders, frowned, and paced across the room.
“I still think you need to go and see a doctor.”
I made a non-committal mmhmm in agreement, just to get him to let me continue with the actually important stuff. “Right. Will do. Very soon.”
“We’re here about something else,” said Cece loudly.
She gave me a funny look when she said it. I’d also told her I’d had food poisoning. I felt bad about having lied about the panic attack. But it was embarrassing, and I didn’t want to explain what had brought it on. Though being forced to run this big event and having to deal with a murder was probably excuse enough, without having to reveal everything else.
“What have you found?”
Cece pulled out the letter which she had placed back in her dress and held it up.
“Cece found that letter in the dress. It’s not her dress. She borrowed it from Harley.”
“Right,” said Ethan, nodding that he understood. “And what does it say?”
We showed him the note, and he read it slowly, a serious look on his face. He took it out of Cece’s hands, turned it over a couple of times, and even held it up to the light to see if it would reveal any more secrets. It didn’t.
“So. What do you think this means?” he asked us.
“Harley must have killed Felicity!” said Sam with a slight tone of annoyance.
“She must have gone there that night, something happened—or it was premeditated—and Felicity ended up dead,” said Cece.
“It’s got to be what happened,” I said firmly. “Harley must have found something out about Felicity that put her in her sights.”
Ethan leaned back against his desk, looking at the three of us. “You were quite convinced that Edward was the killer before.”
I nodded. “That’s where the evidence pointed. But how about this?” I put my hands on my hips confidently. “What if Felicity told Harley about Edward’s plan to kill her—but Harley wouldn’t believe her? She was having none of it. So in a rage at a ‘false’ accusation against her darling husband, she killed Felicity.”
Ethan frowned in thought. “So now you think Edward is planning to be a killer, and Harley actually is a killer?”
“Have you got a better explanation?” asked Cece defiantly.
“I don’t know,” said Ethan, shaking his head. “It’s possible, but I think perhaps we’re jumping to conclusions? Maybe Harley never even met Felicity that night. Maybe they did meet and the death happened later.”
“That would be some coincidence,” said Sam.
It was nice having both of my friends support my theory. Though now that Ethan was poking holes in it, I wasn’t entirely convinced I had it completely right. It did still seem to be the best explanation we’d found so far though.
“And anyway,” I said firmly, “the killer must have been someone who was familiar with our murder mystery plot—and Harley and Edward are more familiar than anyone. Apart from them, almost no one knew the way the murder was going to be committed.”
Ethan pushed himself off the desk. “The note does mean that Harley was at least planning to meet with Felicity that evening, so I do think I’ll ask her about it. I don’t think we should rush to think that makes her the killer though. Let’s just wait and see what she has to say about it, okay?”
We all nodded and mumbled in agreement.
“You did find that script by the pool, too,” said Samantha, to me.
“What’s that?” asked Ethan.
“That pool boy, Shaun Anderson, found a copy of the script on the pool deck. Someone had been reading it there. But it wasn’t where Edward and Harley were sitting.”
“So at least one other person knew the details of the fake murder?”
We all shrugged.
“Maybe. If they read that far. And maybe it was just Edward’s copy and he dropped it or something,” I said.
“Then I think the best thing is for me to ask Harley and Edward, very nicely, if they could tell me about the note, and whether they handed out any other copies of the script. Does that sound reasonable to everyone?”
“Yeah, sure,” I sai
d. My earlier post-anxiety-attack vision of Harley immediately clapped in irons didn’t seem likely to happen in the immediate future now, but perhaps that was for the best. Ethan had pointed out a few possible holes in our theory.
“Okay, I’ll see if I can go and find them. Adrienne, do you want to wait here?”
I nodded, pleased that I was going to get to see the interrogation. Well, polite questioning is what it would probably turn out to be.
“I think I’m about due for second dinner,” said Cece. “That chili wasn’t for me.”
“Yeah, I didn’t even try it,” said Sam. “I’ll join you.”
I rubbed my own tummy. I hadn’t eaten any either. Then I remembered I was supposed to be eating with Ethan that night. Perhaps that was why he asked me to stay in his office, so that we could go and eat straight after.
Ethan opened his office door.
“Ladies,” he said, smiling toward Sam and Cece. They both grinned back at him as they filed out ahead of him.
“Be back as soon as I’ve tracked them down. Make yourself comfortable.”
As soon as the door was closed behind them, I stretched luxuriously and looked around the room with fresh eyes.
You can really have a proper look at a place when you’re not busy trying to impress someone.
Slowly, I strolled around the room, running my hands across wooden and brass surfaces.
On the desk there was a plastic bag, a small one. Curiously I peered at it. I didn’t mean to pry, or peek, but it was just sitting there. Staring at me.
And he’d told me to make myself at home, right?
If I was at home and there was a plastic bag on my desk, and I didn’t know what was in it, I’d definitely have a look at it.
Anyone would, wouldn’t they?
Tentatively, as if it might bite or explode, I poked at the bag. I didn’t open it right away; that’d be prying. I just kind of let my finger go through the air near the opening at the top. My finger just happened to push the bag open a little.
I leaned over the desk, peering down into the opening of the bag. Inside, I could just about make out the shape of a wooden box.
Cruise Chaos: A Humorous Cruise Ship Cozy Mystery (Cruise Ship Cozy Mysteries Book 3) Page 15