Killer Cruise

by A. R. Winters

  “Thanks?” I was confused. I was meant to be thanking her, but she’d preempted me already.

  “Sure. You’re basically inviting a murderer to come to my cabin. That’ll be awesome. I’ve never met a murderer before.”

  I giggled. “Nah, they won’t know I’m here.”

  “Shame. Maybe you could Tweet it out? I could do with some more excitement in my life.”

  I just shook my head at her. I envied her ability to make light of basically anything. I bet if there were a nuclear apocalypse, she’d spend the last three minutes before impact making wisecracks about toasting marshmallows or needing to put on some SPF 5000 sunscreen.

  “That’s why you called me earlier, huh? You were checking I didn’t use my magic card to get into your room?”

  I nodded. “I thought you might have wanted to borrow something. It’s cool if you do. I didn’t want to embarrass myself by telling Ethan that I’d had a burglar if it was just you.”

  Cece sat up straight, a wicked look on her face. “I figured it out!”

  “Oh?” I said, excited, though I shouldn’t have been after seeing her face. That face meant mischief, and since I was the only one there, I was going to be the victim.

  “This was all just a ploy to get Hot Stuff into your cabin, wasn’t it?”

  I smacked her with my pillow. “Don’t be silly. If that was my plan, and it wasn’t, why would we go to my cabin? His is way nicer.”

  She narrowed her eyes at me. “Oh, I was too late. You were already in his cabin? Damn girl, you move fast.”

  I gave her another whack with my pillow. “I had to speak to him. I saw Janice Murphy with Carl, in his room!”

  “No way! Sounds like all the pieces are coming together.”

  I nodded. “Yeah. But the problem is, they don’t fit.”

  Cece quirked one eyebrow at me. “I bet I can think of a couple of pieces that would fit together real good.”

  I was confused for a moment until I realized what she meant, and then she got another well-deserved thump with my pillow.

  When I was finished beating her, I tossed my blanket and pillow onto the top bunk.

  “Come on, I’m starving. Let’s get some dinner.” Cece hopped to her feet.

  “Yeah. And while we’re eating, you can tell me just exactly why you’re the only person without a roommate.”

  She interlocked her arm with mine, and together we headed off for dinner. I thanked my lucky stars that I’d met her. With Sam locked up, I would have felt very alone if it wasn’t for Cece.

  Chapter 27

  I was just blinking my eyes awake when a voice whispered in my ear. “Welcome to Grand Cayman.”

  In my half-dreamlike state, I wondered whether I was in a commercial.

  “What?”

  Cece punched me in the arm and my dream-like state collapsed into messy reality. I was lying on the top bunk in Cece’s room after a surprisingly restful night’s sleep. Despite all that had happened, I’d zonked out not long after dinner and probably could have managed another hour or day if it wasn’t for my annoyingly cheerful human alarm clock.

  “I said we’re in Grand Cayman. Last stop of the cruise. It’s awesome, you’ll love it.”

  “I will? I don’t think I’m allowed off the ship.”

  Cece shrugged. “Yeah, me neither. But hey, it’s the last stop, and that’s always awesome. It means we’re nearly done. Come on, get up. I’m hungry.”

  A few minutes later, we headed to our regular breakfast spot, Mess Hall Two. After loading up our plates with an unseemly amount of food, we sat down at one of the plastic tables in a corner near the entrance.

  “I was thinking,” said Cece after swallowing a mouthful of toast. “Whoever broke into your cabin must have known you were investigating.”

  “Yeah...” I took a sip of coffee while I waited for her to continue.

  “So I bet it’s one of the suspects you already have, or someone really close to them. Who is that you’ve got?”

  “Well there’s Janice Murphy, the wife of the victim of course, and this business partner Carl. Greg the chef, and Sylvia.”

  “Assuming it was one of them, what do you think they were looking for?”

  “Good question. What could I have that would interest them? Maybe they were hoping I had one of those big wall charts with photos and bits of string linking them all together.”

  “Yeah, or a big stack of notes labeled ‘My First Murder Investigation.’”

  We both giggled. I didn’t want to vocalize another possibility: they had been hoping I was there, or planned to lie in wait for me but had to leave for some reason. That would explain why barely anything was touched. What would they have done if we’d met? Threaten me? Worse?

  I suppressed a shudder and said, “Maybe they knew about us going through Murphy’s suite and were seeing if we’d found anything.”

  “Hmm, maybe.”

  “And that means... maybe they searched Murphy’s suite and they couldn’t find something, so they thought I might have it. Right?”

  Cece nodded. “Yeah, that could be it. You don’t want to go back there again, do you?”

  I did. “Third time’s the charm?”

  Cece gave me a look of amazement. “You don’t give up, do you?”

  “Nope. Quitting is for quitters.”

  She snorted. “You know, there probably aren’t many people who have a keycard that could get into your room. And if we think about that, and then we consider who we know to have been snooping already…”

  “Oh... do you mean...”

  Cece smirked. “You do see, don’t you?”

  I nodded. I did indeed. While we’d been doing some snooping of our own in Murphy’s suite, Sylvia’s presence that day was still unexplained.

  Cece lifted her coffee mug and downed about half of it in a single giant gulp before setting it back down with a bang. “So what’re you going to do? Go straight to Murphy’s?”

  “First, I better... oh, cornstalks.”

  “Hold up, hold up, hold up. Did you just say cornstalks? What is that?”

  My cheeks were turning red. “Nothing. It’s just something my grandma used to make me say, instead of swearing.”

  Cece made a point of looking over both of her shoulders. “I ain’t seeing any grandma in here.”

  I shook my head. “Well, now it’s a habit. Leave me alone. We don’t all need to curse all the time.”

  “Hey, I don’t curse all the time.”

  I gave her a look.

  “Just half the time. Anyway, what were you going to say before you started cornstalking?”

  “Ethan Lee was going to call me as soon as he found out who it was—he was going to check the key logs—but I haven’t been in my room!”

  “What in the world are you doing here then? Go! Shift yourself!”

  I popped the last bit of a bagel and lox into my mouth, slurped down the rest of my coffee, and gave her a wave.

  I hurried over to his office and when I arrived I was relieved to learn that he was on an early shift, and so he was there even though it was not yet nine.

  “You can go straight in,” said his orderly upon seeing me, jerking his head in the direction of the door.

  Ethan’s eyes flew wide as soon as I walked in through the door. “Adrienne! I’ve been worried sick about you.”

  “Worried? Why what’s up?” I asked, sitting down opposite him.

  “I called you last night but you didn’t answer, and then I checked your room and you weren’t there either.”

  “Oh, sorry! I decided to sleep in a friend’s cabin instead.”

  “Right. I thought of that, but you’d told me you didn’t want to change cabins.”

  I nodded. “I don’t want to change cabins. But last night, I just didn’t want to be alone. I stayed in my friend Cece’s room. She’s one of the housekeepers.”

  “Cece Blake? She’s a solid employee.”

  “Yep.” I was surprised
he knew who she was. Then I thought about it a moment—actually, no I wasn’t. Cece was a pretty memorable character.

  “I pulled up the records and found out who accessed your room.”

  I dug my nails into my palms nervously. “Who?” I said, my voice quiet. I was pretty certain I knew who it was, but I kind of hoped it wasn’t her.

  “It was your boss. Sylvia.” Oh, cornstalks. “Can you think of any reason she may have had to enter your cabin?”

  I paused before answering, making sure I was certain. “I can’t think of a legitimate reason, no.”

  “Then it looks like we have a bit of a situation, doesn’t it?” He sat there in thought.

  “Well, where is she? Can we go and talk to her?”

  He shook his head. “Nope. She’s doing one of those behind the scenes tours for the VIP guests again. Important as this is, I can’t interrupt one of those sessions. She’s on a split shift today though, morning for the tour, and then she’s the MC at the cabaret this evening. I’ll try and catch her after she’s done for the morning.”

  I was annoyed we couldn’t go and grab her right away, but there was something else I needed to do anyway.

  “I think we need to go back to Murphy’s suite. Now.”

  “Murphy’s suite? Why?”

  “I think Sylvia was looking for something in my room. And she knew I’d been in Murphy’s suite. I want to see if there’s anything missing from Murphy’s stateroom. I bet you there is. I found her in there before, remember?”

  “I told you yesterday that I want you to stop investigating, Adrienne.”

  I shook my head at him. “But not now. I can’t. We’re so close. I’m going to Murphy’s suite, Ethan. Come with me if you want.”

  I turned on my heels and started to head out of his office.

  “Wait, I’m coming,” he called.

  Thank goodness he was. I didn’t even have a key to get me in there, and Cece deserved a break from our spree of breaking and entering.

  He soon caught up with me, and lockstep we quickly made our way through the ship, back to the scene of the crime.

  Chapter 28

  While it had taken a keen eye to see that my room had been messed with, it did not take the same to tell that an intruder had been through Murphy’s room.

  “Oh, my,” I said as soon as the door was open.

  “I would have opened with something stronger than that,” said Ethan, giving my shoulder a squeeze.

  Whoever had searched my room had been careful not to mess it up too badly, but assuming it was the same person, they had no such qualms about wrecking the deceased’s cabin. I wasn’t sure if I should feel pleased about that, or not.

  Almost everything that could be moved had been moved, and not carefully—cushions from the sofa had been lifted up and tossed onto the floor, books and magazines opened and flung aside, clothes tossed, thrown, and heaped in a pile.

  “Seems like someone was looking for something,” said Ethan.

  “I want to take a look around, see if anything obvious has gone since last time I was here.”

  We stepped inside, and I could see Ethan frowning at the contamination of the crime scene. The rusty-colored bloodstain was half-concealed by a cushion from the sofa, which itself had been shoved a couple of feet backward, presumably to check underneath it.

  Toward the back of the room was the art history book I had noticed before, only now it was lying on the floor.

  “Have a look at this.” I walked over to it, and using a hand towel that was lying on the floor nearby I picked it up.

  Underneath the book was the letter that had previously been inside, the one which accused Greg Washington of trying to poison Murphy and demanding he be fired. The letter had been unfolded, and then tossed.

  “What is that?”

  “Here, there’s a letter. It was inside this book before, but the intruder apparently looked at it and tossed it aside. It was about Greg Washington—Murphy wanted him fired.”

  “And the intruder wasn’t interested in it?”

  I shrugged. “Nope. Doesn’t look like it.”

  Mentally, I pushed Greg even lower down my list of suspects. It would have been odd if he had searched the room and not taken the letter accusing him of wanting to kill the victim. It would suit Sylvia to have the letter still around, though.

  “I saw something else interesting last time I was here, too.”

  “Oh?”

  Ethan Lee was looking at me with what seemed to be interested respect, and a surge of pride welled up inside me. The first officer of the ship was looking to me for insight.

  “Come on, in here.”

  I led him into the master bedroom, and as I was doing so I wondered what Cece would say if I told her. You took Hot Stuff into the master bedroom of a VIP suite? And no one else was there?

  “By the nightstand, there was a thing.”

  He grinned at me. “A thing, huh?”

  I giggled. “Yeah. Hold on, I’ll see if it’s still here.”

  The top of the nightstand had been completely cleared. The lamp and coaster that were on top had been swept onto the floor, and the nightstand drawer removed, emptied, and tossed onto the bed.

  I dropped to my knees and searched around for the deposit slip, peering behind the nightstand, and where the bed covers hung down to see if it was underneath where they overhung. I couldn’t see it anywhere.

  Returning to my feet, I brushed myself off.

  “Right here, on the nightstand. There was a banking deposit slip, from a bank in the Caymans.”

  “The Caymans? As in, where we are right now?”

  I remembered Cece whispering in my ear that morning to wake me up.

  “Yeah. It was a bank in Grand Cayman. I think Murphy had an account there.”

  Ethan was tapping his chin thoughtfully. “I wonder why it was taken. Just a deposit slip, right? It didn’t have—I don’t know—a banking password scrawled on it, or something like that?”

  “Nope. It was just a receipt, from what I could tell.”

  “I don’t think you can really do anything with just a receipt, can you?” He wasn’t really asking me the question, just thinking out loud.

  “Right. You’d need identification or authorization of some kind to get access to an account. I think.”

  “Don’t have many secret bank accounts in The Caymans, Adrienne?”

  Laughing, I shook my head. “Do you?”

  “Nope. But occasionally I’ve heard guests talking about them at dinner.”

  “Yeah?”

  He nodded. “Oh yes, people open up about all kinds of things. I can’t count the times I’ve heard our VIP passengers exchanging tips on tax evasion, the best places for secret bank accounts, how to move their funds without incurring excessive fees, all that kind of stuff. For some of them, a cruise can be a kind of networking event for them.”

  “You must have met some interesting people,” I said.

  “Well, yes, but actually most of them aren’t all that interesting. All they talk about is money and business and cruising, and I’ve got no interest in any of that.”

  “But you pretend?”

  “Oh yeah. I learned that dining with my superior officers in the navy—each and every one of them is the most fascinating person you’ve ever had the pleasure of dining with. At least, that’s what you pretend.”

  “As long as the food’s good, I don’t care if the conversation is bad,” I said with a grin.

  “Then we should have a meal sometime. My conversations are boring but I know some good places to eat.”

  He was kidding… I think.

  I did the only reasonable thing I could think of in the circumstances and just laughed it off. He surely wasn’t asking me on a date in a burgled murder victim’s cabin. No way.

  “So you’re sure that deposit slip is missing? Anything else?” He was back to business now.

  “It’s hard to say if anything else was taken—look at this
place, it’s a mess—but I am certain that slip was here and now it’s not.”

  “Well, that’s good enough for me. Let’s check out the rest of the suite though and see if there’s anything else we can learn.”

  We split up. I went back into the bathroom where I’d hidden before and had to hold my nose; the burglar had emptied out the bathroom cabinets onto the floor, smashing a small glass bottle of aftershave in the process. It must have been nearly full because the strong scent was overpowering. I couldn’t find anything of interest, though I did take a moment to inspect the bathtub to check for any evidence that I had been there—a stray hair or the like. When I was satisfied it was clean, I returned to the living area.

  We reconvened near the door.

  “Anything else?”

  “Nope, you?” I asked, glancing around one last time in case I’d missed something glaringly obvious.

  “Nada.”

  “Sylvia should be finished with that tour soon. I want to go and speak to her.”

  He was already shaking his head as soon as the first word had come out of my mouth.

  “No, Adrienne. For multiple reasons, I do not want you approaching Sylvia. I’m worried this is all getting out of hand. I’m going to need you to get to a public area of the ship—somewhere nice and busy, perhaps by one of the pools. And stay there.” He ran his hands through his short hair. “There’s a killer out there, Adrienne.”

  His tone was so sincere and unwavering I didn’t have the heart to argue with him. I wouldn’t win, and it would just make him mad at me.

  But I wasn’t just going to do nothing. No way.

  Chapter 29

  After leaving the ship’s most annoying first officer, I went to seek out the best source of shipboard knowledge I knew: Cece Blake.

  “Hey girl, come to help me again?” she greeted when I caught her.

  She was outside of a cabin with her cleaning cart, pink gloves pulled up almost to her elbows and a bottle of disinfectant spray in one hand. The way she held it, she looked like a gunslinger ready for action.

  “There isn’t any more jello, is there?”