Mask on the Cruise Ship

by Melanie Jackson

  “WHO DID THAT?!”

  I sped off to change for swimming.

  Chapter 12

  Lavinia makes like a clam

  I arrived at the pool still clutching the mug. In my hurry to get far, far away from Fill-In, I’d forgotten to return it.

  Jack reached into his pocket, found a quarter and dropped it in the mug. “Isn’t Trotter paying you enough for crooning?” he inquired.

  “I’m not laughing at any of your jokes today,” I told him disapprovingly. “Not after last night. I just can’t believe you want to get married!”

  A tanned, middle-aged woman was easing herself into the nearby hot tub. Hearing my words, she glanced from me to Jack, startled. I didn’t pay much attention. I was too indignant.

  Jack, whose back was to the woman, gave my chin a friendly pinch. “Well, you know my feelings, Dinah. Is it so bad to express how I feel?”

  The tanned woman’s mouth dropped. I hardly noticed; I was thinking of Madge, not even graduated from high school yet. Okay, so she had less than six weeks to go. The whole idea of Jack stealing my sister away from Mother, Wilfred and me was outrageous. “It’s way too soon,” I objected.

  Jack looked thoughtful. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe in a year?” he asked hopefully.

  Frozen, the tanned woman mouthed disbelievingly, “A year?”

  I glared back at her. Who’d she think she was, eavesdropping on us? I was entitled to be upset about the idea of Jack and Madge getting married. It was none of her business.

  I was so annoyed that I forgot to be squeamish about the water. Setting the Empress Marie mug on a patio table, I sat down at pool’s edge — at the shallow end, natch — plugged my nose and slipped in.

  When I emerged, blowing bubbles furiously the way Jack had instructed, he was regarding me with bemusement.

  “Do you want me to take your glasses for you?” he asked kindly.

  I did, but I wasn’t going to admit it. Not after his behavior.

  “I prefer to swim with them on,” I said.

  Okay, so this wasn’t logical. In a small, petty way it was satisfying.

  “Uh … all right. Anyhow, before I teach you how to tread water, I just want you to know I’m sorry if I, y’know, alarmed you last night. With the talk about marriage and everything.”

  I shook my head to try to get the drops off my glasses. I saw that the tanned woman had stepped out of the hot tub and was approaching Jack. I squinted. Her face was contorted with rage. I wondered, What are Jack and Madge’s plans to her?

  “We’ll talk about marriage when I’m thirteen,” I told Jack. After all, I thought, my thirteenth birthday was months away. An eternity.

  The woman stopped behind Jack. She was clenching and unclenching her fists. “Thirteen!” she mouthed.

  What was with her? However, I then got distracted by the sight of Mr. Trotter, tiptoeing carefully along the pool’s edge in a pair of blue-and-white canvas shoes, with matching white pants and a shirt set off by a blue scarf tucked in at the neck.

  I forgot about the enraged tanned woman — for the moment.

  Mr. Trotter was carrying an Empress mug, from which he took a long, delicious slurp before setting it down by mine on the patio table.

  I sniffed the scent that was wafting from the mug. I was always interested in what other people were eating and drinking. “Lemon,” I said. “Lemon tea?”

  The program director was vaguely annoyed. “Yes, Miss Galloway. But I’ve come to tell you — ”

  “You should order a whipped-cream mocha next time,” I advised. “And from the fill-in woman. Her morale’s kind of low right now.” I rested my arms on the edge of the pool and smiled up at him. Time to repair our relationship, I felt. And what better way than to be helpful?

  “I can’t order anything with whipped cream,” Mr. Trotter snapped. He patted his mustache delicately. “It makes these soggy. I have to drag out the wax again, and — oh, I don’t want to get into it.”

  He reached for his mug. Or what he thought was his mug. Picking mine up by mistake, he took a long swig — and ended up spitting out the quarter. “WHO PUT THIS HERE?” he shouted, red-faced.

  Jack and I assumed blank expressions. Mr. Trotter wiped his hand against his mouth and continued: “What I was trying to tell you is that there’s to be no more talk about Gooseberry Eyes. You’re frightening the passengers. There’s a rumor circulating about the ship that you,” he thrust his mug in my direction, “suspect the mask thief of being the same person who knocked Miss O’Herlihy down at the cruise terminal. And who shoved you in Mendenhall Lake. Yes?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “NO!” Mr. Trotter took a long slurp of his tea to calm himself. “We can’t have Empress Marie passengers thinking a crazed stalker is following the ship hundreds of miles from Vancouver to Alaska. I need you to STOP with the theories already, young lady. It’s one thing after another with you!”

  “She’s just a kid,” Jack defended me.

  Mr. Trotter’s mustache curls trembled. “I was a kid once myself,” he huffed. “I never caused trouble. I was a devoted son.” He scowled from me to Jack as if daring us to argue with him.

  Jack winked at me teasingly. “I intend to be a devoted son-in-law one day, provided a certain young lady will have me.”

  “THAT DOES IT!” the tanned middle-aged woman burst out. Raising her arms Frankenstein-style, she stalked toward Jack. “CRADLE-ROBBER!”

  And with a whoomph!, she pushed him in the pool.

  A mini-tidal wave shot up, drenching Mr. Trotter yet again.

  After my lesson, I walked along the deck outside the pool. Laying my palms flat on the air in front of me, I made circles with my arms, very pleased with myself. I’d actually treaded water! Hadn’t sunk!

  Well, aside from that one time I’d started laughing at the memory of Jack being shoved in the pool. I’d gone under then.

  After thinking about it, Jack said the tanned woman must’ve somehow misinterpreted what we were talking about. Myself, I just thought she should go for therapy. I mean, pushing people into pools! Aggressive or what?

  I continued making circles. I couldn’t believe it. I, Dinah Galloway, infamous water coward, had swum!

  I passed a large room filled with people gesturing just like I was, only more so. They were raising their arms high, and even lifting one leg and then the other.

  A banner across the far wall read MEDITATION EXERCISES. Harp music was playing in the background.

  “Huh,” I commented. Not really my type of thing.

  I would’ve moved on, but then I noticed Lavinia O’Herlihy in the room. Great! I’d been wanting to talk to her.

  If wiggling your arms and legs around was all there was to this meditation exercise stuff, I could easily blend in.

  Lavinia had her eyes closed. There was a rapt expression on her face.

  I sidled over to her, flailed my arms and asked, “When you were on the day trip to Juneau, did you see Gooseberry Eyes again?”

  She popped her eyes open. “What? Gooseberry — no, no, I didn’t.”

  I noticed then that the other people were exercising very slowly, floating a hand or foot this way and then that. No oomph in what they were doing — hardly exercising at all, in my opinion.

  The class wasn’t even trying. To show that I, at least, was serious about physical fitness, I hopped from one foot to the other, stomp, stomp, stomp!, as well as vigorously windmilling my arms.

  “Lavinia, you’ve got to speak to Captain Heidgarten. Tell him Gooseberry Eyes crashed into you at the cruise ship terminal. Mr. Trotter thinks I’m just causing trouble by talking about Gooseberry Eyes. But the same guy tried to break into my house, I’m sure of it,” I puffed, starting to get out of breath.

  Lavinia dropped her arms, which she’d been holding up in an arc shape, and glared at me. “The Captain did ask me about that, Dinah Galloway. Most embarrassing it was, too — right in the middle of a bingo game! Dreadful, being stop
ped and questioned, with everyone listening in.” Lavinia drew a deep breath through her nose and scowled at me down the length of it, as if I smelled. “A lady, Dinah Galloway, does not become involved in notoriety!”

  I had no idea what notoriety was. Maybe some other game the ship was offering? “But you’re involved in bingo,” I pointed out.

  Lavinia screamed, “THERE WAS NO GOOSE-BERRY EYES! I NEVER SAW HIM! NOW LEAVE ME ALONE!”

  The room, not surprisingly, had gone silent. The instructor strode up to me. “You may be the Empress’s singing sensation,” she snapped, flicking her long, blond hair back so angrily that a couple of her students had to duck. “I guess that gives you a giant ego as well as a giant voice. Fine.” The instructor turned a blazing pink. “But it does not give you license to intrude on my class and mock us — by gyrating.”

  “Gyrating!” I put down my arms, which, absentmindedly, I’d been continuing to flail about. “Well, that’s nice. After I’ve been trying to set a good example.”

  She marched me out of the room.

  I stood outside, doing some meditating of my own. Another chunk of yesterday’s icy memory was thawing.

  Just now, Lavinia had been pretty mad at me. I realized I’d glimpsed her fury once before. Through binoculars, yesterday afternoon. She’d been the person stomping around the Visitors’ Center looking irritated and baleful.

  What had Lavinia been so upset about?

  And today she’d denied Gooseberry Eyes had bumped into her at the cruise ship terminal.

  Why was Lavinia suddenly so reluctant to talk?

  Chapter 13

  Musical chairs on the scenic tour

  Mr. Trotter put Mother in charge of the scenic tour tickets, each in an envelope labeled with a passenger’s name, to be handed out at the train station. The program director had informed us, with a pointed glance at me, that he was far too stressed to hand out the tickets himself.

  Not everyone had signed up for the three-hour tour to the Yukon gold fields. There were lots of shops to explore in Skagway, and friendly locals to greet you in a hearty, cowboy drawl.

  It’s a Skagway tradition to recite poems to visitors. I stopped and listened to a man with gold teeth intone one that started:

  Skulls, skulls, in the midnight sun,

  Bleached by snow, every one!

  Now that was my type of poetry. None of this “I wandered lonely as a cloud” stuff that we had to memorize at school.

  I grinned at the man. He grinned back, his gold teeth blinding me. I don’t know about the midnight sun, but the noonday sun this far north was intense, almost white.

  “Come along,” urged Mother as I shielded my eyes. “I want to get to the station before everyone else.”

  She bustled me off. The man called after us:

  Better get sunglasses!

  Or else be fated to burn

  In the Gold Rush passes.

  “I wonder if he always speaks in rhymes,” said Madge, hurrying along with Jack to keep up with us. “Maybe he’s got some kind of syndrome, like the one that makes people swear all the time.”

  Jack finished her thought. “So instead of swear words pouring out of his mouth, you get rhyming couplets,” and they both laughed.

  Madge, I saw, was looking very happy. Fresh and bright too, I noticed, glancing over my shoulder at her as Mother rushed us towards the station. Then I realized — Madge wasn’t wearing any makeup. No foundation, no eyeliner, nothing. And her hair was up in a plain old ponytail. A first.

  Not that Madge needed makeup. Her skin was like porcelain and her eyelashes, framing those brilliant lupine blues, were naturally long and dark.

  I remembered Jack’s talk with her about not having to be perfect all the time. It had paid off! My sister was finally loosening up.

  Wait a minute. Madge being too happy isn’t good, I thought. Too happy could lead to a wedding. I frowned at Madge and Jack, who were poring over a brochure with a map of the White Pass & Yukon Route train tour we were about to take.

  “The White Pass summit is two thousand, eight hundred feet,” Jack observed and let out an appreciative whistle. “Hey!” he exclaimed to Madge. “You sure you’re going to be all right on this trip? The train really barrels along, and on a pretty narrow track. I mean, with your, uh, your — ”

  “Tendency to throw up?” Madge supplied. She smiled at him. “Know what? You’ve been very therapeutic for me. After we had our talk last night, I didn’t throw up once.”

  “I think I’m about to, though,” I muttered.

  “About to what?” inquired Mother. She gave me a harried look over the shoebox full of tickets she was carrying. “Dinah, you’ve got this odd habit of mumbling to yourself. I’d reprimand you for it, except I know you inherited it from me. It used to drive your father crazy … Here, you keep this, dear,” she thrust the box into my hands, “and I’ll check people off on this clipboard as they pick up their tickets. Yes, good plan, Suzanne,” Mother mumbled to herself.

  I sat down on the bench, the shoebox on my lap. “Dah DAH dah dah DAH dah,” I sang. “The TRAIN on the TRAIN track … Hey, will Evan be on the tour?”

  “No, he’s staying on the ship.” Mother shrugged. “Wants to work on his song. Says he can’t enjoy excursions when he’s trying to think of lyrics.”

  Phhht! I ran my fingertips along the tops of the envelopes. Evan might have another reason for not going on tours. A sinister one. It had sure been suspicious the way he snuck down to Julie’s door when he knew she was busy playing volleyball. Maybe he intended to prowl around some more.

  “STUFF AND NONSENSE!”

  I jumped. Ira Stone was beside me.

  He chuckled. “Frightened you, did I? Hee-hee!”

  I retorted good-naturedly, “Hee-hee, yourself.”

  Mother gave me a slight frown for being uppity, as she would say, with an adult. Remembering my duties, I flipped through the envelopes to the one labeled STONE, IRA and handed it to him.

  The effort of chuckling had shaken Ira’s thin frame; the cane he was leaning on wobbled this way and that, as if caught in a strong wind. Concerned he’d topple, I shot out a hand to steady the cane.

  Empress Marie passengers started approaching Mother. Ira whispered to me, “Could you do me a favor, young ’un? Seat me somewhere else on the train than beside Lavinia O’Herlihy. She got Trotter to put us side by side. Thing is, I can’t stand the woman — she’s always nagging me about what a good wife she’d make.”

  The effort of speaking was also too much for Ira. He broke into a series of racking coughs. I edged down the bench, away from him. The guy must be unleashing germs by the battalion — and he was not, I noticed in Mother-like disapproval, covering his mouth when he coughed.

  Me, Mother-like! Holy Toledo. I’d better watch that.

  Still, I did feel sorry for Ira. I didn’t blame him for feeling annoyed, with Lavinia trailing after him all the time.

  “Sure, I’ll change her seat.” I flipped through the envelopes, pfft! pfft! “Here she is. O’HERLIHY, LAVINIA.”

  The first few passengers, checked off by Mother on her list, were waiting behind Ira for their tickets. Among them: Jack and Madge.

  Hmmm. Mother had arranged for all of us to sit together…

  Maybe if Jack and Madge didn’t spend quite so much time with each other, they wouldn’t be thinking about the possibility of FRENCH, MADGE.

  “Boo-wa-ha-ha,” I said, pleased with this, my second scathingly cunning plan of the day. Was I on a roll, or what?

  Rapidly I switched Lavinia’s ticket into Madge’s envelope and vice versa. I winked at Ira. “Boo-wa-ha-ha.”

  “Hee-hee!”

  When the tickets in the shoebox had thinned to just a few, Mother told Madge, Jack and me to go ahead and take our seats on the train. She’d be right there herself.

  “I might buy some sunglasses,” Madge said, surveying a rack of them in a nearby shop. “I forgot mine on the ship, and people keep talking a
bout how bright the snow will be out the train windows.”

  She waved aside our offer to wait for her. “It’ll take me a minute or two. I have to find just the right hue of frames so the glasses won’t clash with my hair.”

  I lifted my eyebrows at Jack. My sister was getting more relaxed about herself — but she was still fussy.

  The tanned, middle-aged woman from the pool was already in her seat — right in front of Jack. “Ah,” said Jack, as her features, going red, took on the appearance of a sunburn as opposed to a tan. He remarked to her, “If I’d known you’d be close by, I’d have brought a towel.”

  In the seats across the aisle from Jack, where Mother would be joining me, I snorted appreciatively.

  The woman burned even redder. “I — I misunderstood about the girl you’re hoping to marry. I thought she was,” the woman avoided looking at me, “much younger than you.”

  Though the tanned woman wasn’t including me in the conversation, I saw no reason not to jump in. After all, Madge was my sister. “No way she’s much younger than Jack!” I exclaimed, reflecting that Madge was only two years Jack’s junior. Incredible to believe Madge would be graduating from high school in a month. “I can’t imagine being as old as she is,” I added, shaking my head.

  Jack laughed. “You’re making my one-and-only sound like an aged crone, Dinah. I think there’s a bit of life left in the old girl.”

  I airily waved a hand at the tanned woman. “Yeah, you’ll see her in a minute. She’ll be sitting right beside Jack.”

  I stopped in horror. No, Madge wouldn’t be sitting right beside Jack. I’d switched her ticket. It’d be Lavinia who’d plop down beside him.

  “Uh-oh,” I said and put on my phony bared-teeth smile. It was the only course of action I could come up with.

  Jack didn’t notice. His gray eyes were twinkling with amusement. “The ‘old thing’ I hope to marry some day should be along pretty soon,” he assured the tanned woman.