by Maddy Hunter
“Are you going to mention the thong?” Tilly asked.
I rolled my eyes and plunged on. “After nine long months of phone calls, separation anxiety, and cybersex, after an agonizing month dealing with his short-term memory loss, do you know what he finally remembers to ask me?”
Nana raised her hand. “I know, but I don’t wanna spoil it for no one else.”
“HE INVITES ME TO THE MICELI FAMILY REUNION NEXT MAY! Next May! It might as well be the next millennium. And why does he invite me to his family’s reunion?” I gave Nana a take-it-away gesture.
She sucked on her dentures and offered a little shrug. “You’re goin’ a little fast for me, dear. I’m still back at the part where you done the cybersex.”
I threw my hands into the air. “Because I have to meet his grandmother! It’s mandatory. Before you can entertain even a fleeting thought about marrying into the Miceli family, you need to pass muster with Nonna Annunziata. And her appointment book is filled until next May because the family has grown so large. Just my luck — Micelis are serial breeders.”
Tilly thwacked her walking stick on the leg of the cot. “Old world culture, Emily. These Swiss/ German/Italians aren’t the kind of people who frequent Las Vegas wedding chapels.”
“I don’t think they do weddings, period.”
“They love weddings,” Tilly corrected. “But they’re also known to have engagements that last forever. Italian men don’t believe in rushing into anything when they have the rest of their lives to plan the details.”
“Well, I have no intention of being engaged for the rest of my life! I’m thirty years old. I have better things to do than wait for Etienne Miceli to parade me past all the relatives for their ‘old world’ approval. If he can’t decide on his own that I’m the woman he wants to grow old with, then…then…”
I heaved an anguished sigh, feeling like a Mylar balloon with a helium deficiency. “What is it with me? All the men in the world, and I have to fall in love with an old-world European.”
“You’re thirty?” Bailey asked, awestruck. “I never would have guessed you were that old.”
Oh, yeah. That made me feel a whole lot better.
Bailey tightened her hand around her tissue, her emotions unraveling. “This…this is the worst day of my life. You might have lost your boyfriend,” she sobbed, “but I lost the man who’s the head of my graduate committee. He was supposed to sign off on my dissertation! How am I supposed to finish my Ph.D. without him? I’m in debt up to my eyeteeth to pay for my education, and I could be left with nothing! No degree, no title. No nothing!”
She stuck her hand out for another tissue. Tilly obliged.
“Was Professor Smoker in good health?” I asked gently, trying to redirect the conversation. “I mean, did he suffer from vertigo, or motion sickness, or some other kind of condition that might have caused him to lose his balance and fall over a five-foot-high rail?”
Bailey removed the tissue from her face and stared at me wide-eyed. “Fall? He didn’t fall. He was pushed!”
Chapter 3
“WHAT?”
Fresh tears scalded Bailey’s cheeks. “It was horrible. I saw the professor struggling with someone near the aft rail. I screamed at them to stop. I yelled for help, but” — her voice cracked — “no one heard me! The deck was deserted! Two thousand passengers on this ship, and not one of them was within earshot to help me!”
I stared at her, too numbed to say anything but, “He was pushed?”
“He was murdered!” Her tone grew screechy as she battled a rising sob. “The…the two of them disappeared behind the bulkhead when I was running toward them. I thought I could reach him in time to help, but…I wasn’t fast enough.” She sucked in her breath, then let it out again in a rush of words. “By the time I reached the stern, Professor Smoker was in the water and the man who pushed him was gone!”
“Fella musta run around the other side a the deck,” Nana speculated. “Did you run after ’im?”
“No! I had to help Professor Smoker. I…I ripped a life ring from its box and tossed it over the side, but” — her face grew crimped and red as she wailed out — “but his head had already disappeared! I couldn’t see him anymore!”
She buried her face in her hands, shoulders shaking, chest heaving. I wrapped my arms around her and patted her back. “You can’t blame yourself.”
“Yes, I can! If I’d run a little faster, Professor Smoker might not be dead!”
“If you’d run a little faster, you might be dead,” I said gently. “Think about it. After taking care of the professor, the killer might have turned his sights on you.”
“I wish I was dead,” Bailey sobbed. “Everything I’ve worked for — without Professor Smoker’s imprimatur, it’s not worth spit.”
Nana retreated into the bathroom and returned with a paper towel compress. She placed it on Bailey’s forehead. “At least you got a good look at the fella.”
“But I didn’t,” she whimpered. “He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt and sweatpants. I didn’t see his face. I couldn’t see his hair. I think it was a man, but I was so far away, I’m not even sure about that. For all I know, it could have been a woman! The captain asked me for a description when he looked in on me a little while ago, and all I could tell him was that the person was wearing a hooded gray warm-up outfit.” Sobs. Tears. Nose blowing. “What good am I as an eyewitness? If they never catch Professor Smoker’s killer, it’ll be all my fault!”
I’d be more apt to fault the fashion industry for encouraging the unisex look in athletic attire, but that was just a personal opinion.
“Why was Professor Smoker on deck twelve in the first place?” Tilly inquired.
“He wanted to check out the golf simulators.” Bailey gave an indulgent eye roll. “He loved golf. He claimed it was his only vice. Well, that, and Indian cuisine. So while he drooled over the simulators, I searched out a quiet lounge where we could look over the Ring journal. And I found one on the top deck, overlooking the bow. So I took the stairs back down to deck twelve and” — her voice caught in her throat — “and that’s when I saw the commotion at the rail. I ran to help him. I ran as fast as I could, but I was half a city block away from him! Why do they make these ships so big?”
“Economics, dear,” Nana piped up. “The bigger they are, the more guests they pack in, the more money they make. I seen that on an A&E special that took an inside look at the cruise industry. But it don’t make no sense to me about the professor. He seemed like a nice enough fella. Who’d wanna kill ’im?”
“Everyone wanted to kill him!” Bailey cried.
Oh yeah, that’s what I wanted to hear. “Excuse me?”
“Did you see who showed up at the lecture?” she choked out. “The World Navigators? The Sandwich Islanders? Do you know who those people are?”
I recalled the three World Navigators we’d met earlier. “Umm…ifI tossed out the phrase ‘Viking look-alikes,’ would I be close?”
Her face whitened with the kind of shock people experience just before cardiac arrest. “You’ve never heard of them, have you? How could you not have heard of them?”
“We’re from Iowa,” Nana explained.
Bailey’s shock continued to parade across her face. “I’m sorry. It’s just that we run into their anti-Cook literature so much at the university that I naturally assume everyone has heard of them. Both groups set forth ideas that are radically opposed to Professor Smoker’s theories about Cook, and they’ve been vicious in their attempts to discredit him. Scathing papers. Hateful articles. Threatening emails. In the week before we left, some of their emails became so extreme that I begged the professor to consider canceling the cruise. But he wouldn’t. He could be so stubborn. He said he wasn’t going to let a bunch of miscreants ruin his holiday in paradise.” She rubbed her nose and sniffed. “Besides, he enjoyed lecturing too much to miss an opportunity to influence a new audience.”
“I should think the chancel
lor’s office would have forbidden him to lecture anyplace where his life might have been in jeopardy,” Tilly theorized.
Bailey heaved a guilty sigh. “He didn’t report it to the chancellor’s office. He didn’t tell anyone. He considered the threats to be quackery; acknowledging them would have been beneath his contempt.”
“Did he realize both groups were going to show up for the cruise?” I asked.
“Not until he walked into the lecture room and saw them all sitting there with their society affiliations pinned to their chests.”
Aha! So that’s what he’d looked so unsettled about. Receiving threatening emails was one thing, but knowing you were in the same room with the people who might have sent them had to be downright scary. “Had the professor met any member of either group before he stepped into that room today?”
Bailey shrugged. “I’d have no way of knowing that.”
“He didn’t mention that he recognized anyone?”
“Not to me. But when you’re as successful as Professor Smoker was in academia, you inspire professional jealousy, and everyone starts gunning for you. You make more enemies than you know what to do with.” She slanted a hard look at me and sniffed. “Dorian Smoker had enemies crawling out of the woodwork on this ship, and you saw the end result. One of them killed him.”
I sighed to myself. Another vacation, another body. This was getting really old.
“You mentioned you and the professor were going to peruse my journal,” Tilly spoke up. “Do you have the journal with you?”
All color drained from Bailey’s face as she stared at Tilly. “Oh, my God. I forgot about…” She cast a frantic look about the room before squeezing her eyes shut and patting the left side of her chest. “Professor Smoker had it with him. He…he didn’t want to let it out of his sight, so he put it in the inside pocket of his jacket to keep it safe.”
“And the jacket is…where?” Tilly inquired.
“He was wearing it when he was pushed overboard.” Bailey swallowed slowly, like a boa constrictor trying to digest a house. “Oh, my God. I’m so sorry! I’ve lost Professor Smoker. I’ve lost your journal. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry!” The floodgates finally opened. Sobs. Tears. Wailing.
I heard a rush of footsteps in the corridor and looked over my shoulder to find the nurse scurrying into the room. “I think visiting hours are over for now, ladies,” she said quietly, circling the bed to tend to Bailey. We offered apologies and nods of sympathy before shuffling dutifully out the door, embarrassed that our visit had obviously made Bailey feel worse rather than better.
“You was right about the professor not fallin’ on his own,” Nana whispered to me. “Might be you’ll be back in contention for that human-interest story in the Register. Awful shame about that poor Howard girl, though. Last time I seen someone cry that much was twenty years back, when our NBC affiliate preempted the Lake Winnibigoshish ice-fishin’ championships for the local bowlin’ league quarterfinals. Your grampa was awful upset about that.”
Tilly leaned heavily on her walking stick, looking too dazed to put one foot in front of the other. “What if the journal wasn’t a hoax? What if it was the real McCoy? Good Lord, I may have single-handedly robbed the academic world of its most significant historical document in decades.”
Nana looped her arm around Tilly in a comforting gesture. “Don’t you go frettin’ now, Til. You put it in one a them zippered bags. Them things are real rugged. That’s why we pay the big bucks for ’em. Probably keep your book dry as a bone.”
Hope entered Tilly’s face. “That’s right. Ziploc bags lock in freshness like no other storage bag can.” She squared her shoulders and stiffened her spine. “All is not lost, then. Thank you for reminding me of that, Marion. What do you say, ladies? Is it time to regroup in the cabin?”
“Before I forget, dear.” Nana looked over both shoulders before motioning me closer, and saying in an undertone, “About that cybersex you and your young man was havin’. You mind if I take a peek at the instruction manual?”
We wended our way back through a maze of narrow passageways to the midship elevators. “Isn’t this somethin’?” Nana remarked as we waited for one of the upper directional arrows to turn green. “Lookit how level the floor is. Would you ever guess we was in the middle of an ocean? How come we’re not tiltin’?”
“Stabilizers,” said Tilly. “These modern cruise ships are built to remain steady even in the most brutal seas. Given the improvements in naval technology, seasickness may soon go the way of the dinosaur, much to the dismay of the makers of Dramamine, Bonine, and Queasy Pops.”
The elevator pinged to a stop. Nana and Tilly stood aside to let a couple of passengers off, then bustled forward to get the best places by the floor selection panel. Nana punched in a number before looking out the door at me. “You comin’ with us, dear?”
“I gained a pound just sniffing the air in the Coconut Palms Cafe,” I confessed, “so for the sake of my hips and thighs, I better take the stairs. I’ll meet you back in your cabin in a few minutes.” After I made a slight detour to deck twelve. I knew Bailey Howard was so emotionally distraught that her perception might be a little off, but something she’d said hadn’t rung true. I needed to check it out for myself.
I trudged up nine flights of stairs, staggered out the bulkhead door into the open air of deck twelve, and collapsed against the rail, starved for oxygen. Oh yeah, taking the stairs was a great idea. Maybe I’d try it again sometime…on my next vacation.
When I was able to breathe again, I cast a long look toward the stern, trying to picture what Bailey might have seen a little over two hours ago. She’d been right about one thing. The stern did seem half a city block away, but from this vantage point, you’d have a clear shot of anything that was happening at the port rail, though the details might be a little fuzzy.
I began walking aft, the open ocean to my right, the bulkhead to my left. The deck was too narrow at this point for deck chairs, but as I passed beyond the curve of the bulkhead, the space expanded into a sports area that boasted a regulation-size basketball court enclosed within a flexible mesh cage, kind of like an aviary for amateur athletes. Adjacent to it, on the starboard side, a tangle of aquamarine waterslides corkscrewed like the L.A. highway system, spiraling down toward an elevated pool that looked much more geared toward children than the large, kidney-shaped pool on deck eleven.
But there were no giggles or splashing from the pool area. No hoopsters slam-dunking the ball on the basketball court. Two thousand guests on this cruise ship, and not one of them was using the sports area. The place was quieter than a Tuesday night at the Windsor City Drive-in Theater.
Which is exactly what Bailey had said.
But I hadn’t believed her.
I skirted around the basketball court, slowing my steps as I approached the golf simulators. I popped inside a little foyer cut into the bulkhead and noted two doors on the interior, one labeled SIMULATOR 1 and the other SIMULATOR 2, with a sign-up sheet posted on the wall. I checked the sheet and found Dorian Smoker’s name printed in block letters beneath a list of a half dozen other names, his assigned time for simulator two being eight o’clock this evening.
A little chill lifted the down on my arms. Was this evidence? Shouldn’t someone bag this and dust it for fingerprints or something? I looked around helplessly. Uff da. I didn’t even know who had authority over criminal investigations at sea.
I returned to the deck and as I rounded the stern, found my progress halted by a chain that extended from the rail to a hook on the bulkhead. Beneath the chain were several plastic cones stamped with the words, DANGER — WET — KEEP OFF. I guessed chains and cones were the cruise liner’s version of crime scene tape.
I regarded the narrow space between the rail and the bulkhead, a sour taste creeping into my mouth as I realized this was where someone had pushed Dorian Smoker to his death. I walked to the rail and in the stunning silence of the moment, peered down at the froth of wh
itecaps rippling the water below. Bailey had obviously been telling the truth.
There was a killer walking the decks of the Aloha Princess.
I propped my chin in my hands and sighed.
Déjà vu all over again.
“I could have donated it to the Smithsonian for future generations to study. They have a magnificent rare book collection.” Tilly sat achingly stiff on the narrow sofa in her stateroom, pining over what might have been.
She and Nana were booked into a “Large Oceanview” cabin — the “large” referring to the size of the porthole rather than the size of the cabin. But all the amenities were there. Twin beds aligned in an L against the interior and exterior walls. Mirrored vanity with a bank of lights. Minibar and refrigerator, itty-bitty safe, and television stacked in a wall cabinet. Sitting area complete with sofa and miniature coffee table.
“I could have donated it to the British Museum,” Tilly continued, “or…or the Naval Museum in Portsmouth.”
“Didn’t you want no money for it?” Nana was perched next to me on the edge of her bed, removing her stash of scavenger hunt items from her pocketbook.
Tilly looked appalled. “Financial remuneration is the last thing I would ever want for a document that rightfully belongs in the public domain.”
“Bet you coulda got millions for it at that famous auction place,” Nana contended.
“Sotheby’s?” I asked.
“Nope, eBay,” said Nana. “You wouldn’t believe what folks are sellin’ these days. Some fella advertised an aircraft carrier a couple a months back. I thought about biddin’ on it, but I chickened out.”
I looked at Tilly. Tilly looked at me. We both looked at Nana. “No place to store it?” I teased.
Nana shook her head. “Didn’t wanna pay the postage.”
I laughed in disbelief. “Why would you bid on an aircraft carrier?”
“For your father’s birthday, dear. By the time you reach my age, you run outta good gift ideas, so it was either that or a necktie.” She eyed the articles she’d arranged on the bed, then opened her pocketbook wide and poked her head inside. “Osmond give me one a them rocks from the spa when I seen him in the hallway, but I don’t know what I done with it.” Sweeping her scavenger items to one side, she dumped the contents of her pocketbook onto the bed in a Mount Everest of a pile. I eyed it in amazement. Wow. She’d really cut back on the nonessentials.