The Beautiful and the Wicked

by Liv Spector

  Spotting another member of the crew washing down the deck, Lila approached him. Her legs were still unsteady.

  “Excuse me?”

  The man turned with the hose in this hand. He was a squat, red-­haired fellow, with meat paws for hands and powerful, stocky limbs. His freckled skin was a deep reddish brown, as if it had been repeatedly sunburned into permanent defeat. He looked at her silently. His inquisitive green eyes were as bright as emeralds. Like everyone else she’d met so far on the boat, she knew him from the police report. His name was Hamish Rankin, but everyone called him Mudge. His Scottish brogue had been so thick during his interview with police that she had to listen to it three times to understand everything he’d said.

  “Hi, I’m new to the boat,” she began.

  “We’re all new,” he said in a heavy Scottish accent. “Name’s Mudge. Lead deckhand.” He extended his giant hand with its thick, short fingers. Lila shook it. She had never felt calluses so profound.

  “Pleasure to meet you,” she said. “I’m Nicky. Second stewardess. And I’m also late. Would you happen to know where the galley is?”

  He gave her a perplexed look, then burst into laughter. “Oh, that’s a good one. Next you’ll be asking me where’s the ocean?”

  Lila just stood there blankly. Seeing her serious face, Mudge quickly pulled himself out of his swell of merriment. “You mean you’re serious?”

  Lila nodded.

  “No ship I’ve ever seen has a galley anywhere but belowdeck,” he said. “But that don’t mean I know it all.” There was a sheepishness in his voice. Lila could tell he was trying to be kind and she was grateful for his momentary generosity. “It’s back where you came from,” Mudge said, pointing to the staircase that led to the lower level.

  With a thanks and a sigh, Lila returned to her subterranean dungeon and hightailed it to the galley, where she found an ever-­frowning Mrs. Slaughter along with a sunny blonde and a tiny, beady-­eyed man in an impeccably white and starched chef’s coat. The chef was using long tweezers to carefully place crystallized lilac flowers on a tray of elaborate pastries.

  Lila had a hard time explaining to Mrs. Slaughter why it had taken her eight minutes to get to the galley as opposed to the five minutes the head stewardess had allotted. It was imperative that Lila pass as someone who had at least a bit of a clue about life on a yacht, otherwise she knew she’d be out on her ass.

  The blonde leaned in to Lila. “Hiya,” she whispered. “I’m Sam.” With her tanned, long-­legged, bubbly radiance and sweet southern accent, Sam was the absolute platonic ideal of an all-­American beauty.

  “I’m Nicky, your new roommate,” Lila said with a smile.

  “If you can call that a room,” Sam said.

  A serious and straight-­backed Mrs. Slaughter cleared her throat loudly, annoyed at the two whispering stewardesses. “You’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other, I assure you. Now it’s time to get to work. In less than twenty-­four hours, Jack Warren and one hundred VIPs will board this ship expecting nothing less than utter perfection. And that’s something, given the current state of affairs,” she said, looking directly at Lila, “that frightens me. I need not tell you that most of the crew is new to this boat, and to its owner, so we must be flawless. Of course, we are greatly honored to have the Michelin-­starred chef François Vatel aboard.” Mrs. Slaughter turned toward the chef, acknowledging him with a ladylike smattering of applause, to which the chef just snorted in response and returned to his painstaking work.

  “The French,” Mrs. Slaughter silently mouthed, with a roll of her eyes and a shake of her head. “Chef Vatel and his sous chef will be hard at work preparing for tomorrow, and so will we. I have precisely detailed the tasks that need to get done and the exact time each job must be finished and ready for my personal inspection.”

  Mrs. Slaughter handed both Sam and Lila a clipboard. Lila glanced at the endless list of tasks: iron linen sheets, make beds in all ten guest suites, scrub toilets, polish all brass knobs and door runners, restock clean towels, etc, etc, etc. She bit back a groan as she set off to work.

  For more than six hours, she scrubbed, polished, folded, and ironed every inch of The Rising Tide until her knees ached, her back throbbed, her hands began to cramp in protest, and her fingertips were red and puckered from hours in soapy water. Each and every move she made was icily observed and monitored by the ever-­present Mrs. Slaughter. Whenever Lila looked up from the task at hand, there she stood, with straight back and chin thrust up, staring down on Lila with overwhelming disapproval.

  “Miss Collins,” she’d ask in a voice full of disdain, “aren’t you familiar with how to iron and fold a fitted sheet?” “Miss Collins, I hope you aren’t planning on using Windex to clean the mahogany.” “Miss Collins, are you sure you’ve scrubbed a toilet before?” And on, and on, and on, and on.

  As Lila moved about the yacht, she took in all of its grandeur and elegance—­even if she was seeing most of it while scrubbing the floor on her hands and knees. There was the glass-­encased whirlpool on the top sun deck that Lila had to make streak-­free; a white-­tiled spa (which, she noted, was four times the size of her quarters) that she had to scrub vigorously so that it sparkled enough for Mrs. Slaughter’s specifications; a special-­order copper bathtub in the master cabin’s en suite bathroom that needed to be polished; a ten-­person screening room that had to be vacuumed and each of the plush leather theater seats gently wiped down.

  Lila swept the helicopter pad. She laundered and stacked the towels for the yacht’s vast workout room, cleaned its floor-­to-­ceiling mirror, vacuumed under its barbaric-­looking Pilates equipment, and sprayed down all the yoga mats. Then there was making the baking-­soda-­and-­water preparation to clean the walls of the red cedar, eight-­person sauna.

  And that was only in the first ­couple hours of work.

  But she had to admit, the yacht was one exquisite piece of work, even if it was a total bitch to clean. No expense had been spared, no luxury denied. Each choice was the absolute best and most elegant example of its kind. Lila had plenty of experience living among the most indulgent billionaires imaginable, and she knew that money didn’t just buy the fine things in life. It also bought flashy, garish, over-­the-­top displays of hideous grandeur. But The Rising Tide was nothing like that. It was perfection, classic and exquisite. It was as close to a work of art as a boat could get.

  By midnight, when Mrs. Slaughter tersely said, “That’ll do for now,” Lila was beyond relieved to call it a day. She was so profoundly vanquished that returning to her little coffin tucked into a nook of the lower deck sounded like heaven. Lucky for her, her claustrophobia and seasickness were no match for her profound fatigue. But the moment she entered the room, a jolt of energy shot through her as she saw Sam, her bunkmate, stretched sleepily out on the bottom bunk, unaware that she was a thin mattress above a treasure trove of drugs and money.

  “Hiya, Nicky. Long day, huh?” Sam chirped. Glowing with vibrant good health, she seemed untouched by the day’s endless labors.

  Lila just nodded in agreement. She wasn’t sure what to say. Did Sam really not feel the lumps and bumps of the contraband beneath her? How could Lila get her off that bed?

  “Who knew old Slaughterhouse could be such a horrific shrew?” Sam asked. “I’ve never been bossed around so much in my whole fucking life.”

  Again, Lila nodded. Sam shot her a perplexed look.

  “Is something wrong? Or is speaking just not your thing?” Sam asked with a teasing smile.

  “It’s only that . . .” Lila paused, looking at Sam’s cheerful, inquisitive face. She bet that Sam was the prettiest and most popular girl in her run-­down town. Most likely she believed the whole world was about ten times kinder than it actually was, a naïveté shared only by the beautiful and the dumb. “I’m afraid of heights,” Lila lied. “Could I sleep on the
bottom bunk?”

  Sam, dressed only in a tank top and ruffled pink cotton underwear, bounced right off the bed like a spring. “Oh, totally!” She clambered up to the top bunk, which was so close to the room’s low ceiling that sitting up was impossible.

  “Thanks. I really appreciate it,” Lila said, shedding her soiled uniform and throwing on a camouflage T-­shirt in size XXL, which she was horrified to discover had a deer caught in a rifle scope on its front. She’d been in such a rush at the sporting-­goods store in the mall when she grabbed it that she hadn’t noticed what was on it, which was something she now deeply regretted.

  “Nice duds,” Sam laughed. “Now I know why we’re bunking together.”

  “Why?” Lila asked.

  “Because we’re both a ­couple of rednecks.”

  “Just don’t tell the chief stewardess. I don’t want to give her yet another reason to hate me,” Lila said as she lay back on her bed. Never had lying horizontally felt so good. “Hey, thanks again for switching bunks with me.”

  “Actually,” she heard Sam say quietly as she closed her eyes, “I picked the bottom bunk because it was so lumpy. I thought you’d be more comfortable up here. But if you prefer the bottom bunk, then all the better. If you change your mind, let me know. I’m easy. The main thing about me is I don’t want any drama. I always get along with everyone, except this one time . . .”

  While listening to the sweet nattering of her bunkmate as the yacht slowly swayed side to side, Lila felt her eyelids grow heavy. She blinked a few times before she fell into a profound sleep within seconds.

  That night, as the boat rocked Lila like a baby in a cradle, she was visited by her sister in a vibrant, Technicolor dream. In the upside-­down world that her sleeping mind created, Lila found herself back in her childhood home, which was floating in the middle of a vast lake. She and her sister were on its main floor as ice-­cold water began pouring into the house from the windows and under the doors. As Lila rushed about with a bucket trying to keep their home from sinking, Ava was focused on protecting her paintings from the deluge, clutching them to her chest as the water rapidly rose around her. Lila, angry that Ava wasn’t helping bail out the house, grabbed the paintings from her hands. Then she looked at them, seeing, with horror, that every canvas was covered in violent black brushstrokes with bloodred slashes through the middle, a sight so frightening that it ripped her out of sleep.

  She sat up, hitting her skull on the bunk above her. “Crap,” she said under her breath, rubbing her head and wincing. The panic she felt in her nightmare still clung to her as she tried, in the pure blackness of her windowless room, to shake off the haunting image of Ava getting swallowed up by the water. But, as the sounds of Sam’s whistling snore sailed down from above and she felt the ship gently rock below her, Lila managed to calm herself enough to lie back down, close her eyes, and let her painful dream drift out of her memory.

  BEING A STEWARDESS on a superyacht had its downside, as Lila learned bright and early the following morning at her 5:30 wake-up call. But her job also had a great number of potential advantages. If the previous day was at all standard, she would have access to almost every imaginable corner of the ship, including the guest rooms and, hopefully, Jack Warren’s massive master suite on the fourth deck.

  The very essence of her job was to be invisible until she was needed, and then to promptly recede into the background once her duties were done. Nothing could have suited her mission more. She was there to prove that Elise Warren had killed her husband on the night of his fiftieth birthday, and to gather enough evidence so that she could, once and for all, clear her sister’s name. A lot of snooping would be involved, and she was in the perfect position to do it.

  Though she was desperate to stash the drugs and the money in a safe hiding spot, she knew that moving either now would be premature. Once the crew and the guests were settled in and Lila had a better sense of what went where, she’d be able to find a location where the contraband wouldn’t be discovered. Until then, she’d just hope and pray no one looked under her mattress. But really, she figured, no one cleans the room of the cleaning ladies, right?

  Lila threw on a robe, grabbed her toiletry bag, and sleepily padded down the narrow hallway to the crew bathroom. Just as she was about to turn the door’s handle, the door flew open and out popped a very bright and chipper Sam.

  “Morning, sunshine!” Sam said, a little too ebulliently for Lila this early in the morning. Sam stood before her, with her flaxen hair, the pale vibrancy of corn silk, twisted up in large Velcro rollers, her makeup perfectly applied, and her lips, painted a deep coral, stretched into a smile.

  “Morning,” Lila grumbled as she slipped past Sam into the tiny doll-­size bathroom.

  Once Lila was dressed and presentable, she made her way to the crew mess, where Sam was happily chattering away with an exhausted-­looking Mudge, who was bent over a cup of coffee and failing to acknowledge her sunshiny existence.

  The mess was a cozy spot, with a few portholes that allowed Lila a glimpse of the outside world, not that there was any sun at that ungodly hour. She nodded to Pedro the deckhand, who was slumped down in one of the two banquettes. She poured herself a cup of coffee and slid a piece of bread into the toaster. Just as the caffeine was beginning to help her feel like a normal human being, Mrs. Slaughter marched in and ruined the whole thing.

  “Ready to work?” she said to Lila and Sam. Sam jumped to her feet so quickly that Lila thought she was seconds away from saluting.

  “Can I finish making this toast?” Lila said.

  Mrs. Slaughter glared at her. “You most certainly cannot! Eating happens on your own time. It’s six A.M. now. Mr. Warren and his guests will be arriving in mere hours, and there are countless things to do before then. We simply must get started.”

  Lila did as she was told. No cheek. No sulk. No moods. No breakfast.

  WHEN JACK WARREN glided onto the boat at a quarter to 4:00 P.M., along with his wife, Elise, and their twenty-­year-­old daughter, Josie, a perfectly appointed yacht awaited them. Only minutes before the owners boarded, there was total frenzy throughout the boat as the fifteen crew members dashed around putting the final touches on everything. But now, in place of the chaos, all was pristine order and calm. Nothing was out of place. Everything was just as it should be. That was the thing about having a $500 million boat that cost $250,000 a week to maintain—­the price tag gave you the right to expect absolute perfection.

  Lila didn’t see the family board, because she was busy hiding her contraband while the rest of the crew ran around like chickens with their heads cut off. Earlier that afternoon, when she was bringing lunch to some of the engineers in the gigantic all-­white engine room, she’d spotted the perfect place to stash her stuff—­a lifeboat. She figured that no one would use a lifeboat unless circumstances were so terrible that they wouldn’t care the least if they found bricks of cocaine underneath their life vests. So, careful to stay unnoticed, Lila went to her cabin, stuffed the drugs and money in the duffel bag, crept to the lifeboat, and quickly hid all of it in a small compartment at the bow.

  Feeling an incredible sense of relief, she resumed her current duty of placing flower arrangements throughout the three-­thousand-­square-­foot sprawling master suite, which had its own private deck stretching out above the sea and a retractable moonroof. She placed five vases full of cherry blossoms, fanning high above a gorgeous cluster of pale yellow garden roses and pink peonies, around the room in the exact locations that the chief stewardess had specified.

  Just as she was about to leave, a chauffeur burdened with several pieces of Louis Vuitton luggage entered. She gave him a cordial nod, and was about to return to the main deck when she heard Jack Warren’s booming voice coming down the hall. After a decade spent learning as much about him as was possible, it felt like a voice she knew intimately.

  “I won’t hear it.
This is a goddamn disgrace,” Jack barked, his growl getting louder and louder as he drew closer to Lila with every step.

  “Just shut up, Jack,” a woman hissed. Elise Warren.

  Lila froze. She was feet away from the man who would supposedly die by her sister’s hands and the woman who used all her wealth and privilege to destroy Ava’s life, and her first instinct was to hide. Then another horrified thought dawned on her. What if he recognizes me? What if my sister showed him pictures of our family?

  But as they came closer, she knew she had no choice but to face him. Jack and Elise entered the master suite with an icy tension hovering between them. He was taller in real life than Lila thought he’d be, with rich caramel-­colored hair that was graying around the temples, a long, aquiline nose, and a neatly manicured beard. He wasn’t what Lila would consider handsome, but he had a strong presence, and exuded the power of a man accustomed to getting his way. His wife, on the other hand, was gorgeous, no question about it. A former model whose failed acting career had peaked with her role as “Dead Call Girl” in a Law & Order episode, Elise was five ten, with willowy limbs and shoulder-­length dark brown hair. Her side-­swept bangs expertly framed her perfectly symmetrical face.

  Lila stood by the doorway, holding her breath. It suddenly dawned on her as she watched Jack and Elise go about their business in the suite—­she on the balcony, he on the computer, each ignoring the other—­that she was in the same room with Jack and Elise Warren and they hadn’t once looked at her. In fact, neither of them had so much as acknowledged her existence. That was one thing Lila had learned about rich ­people: they were experts in not seeing the help. To them, she was as good as invisible.

  And she was determined to take full advantage of it.

  Just as Lila was about to leave the room, Josie Warren, Jack and Elise’s twenty-­year-­old daughter, barged in. She was wearing jean shorts, a string of Tibetan prayer beads around her neck, and nothing else.