Death on the Diversion Read online

  A string of city lights along the shore reflected into the water, doubling its impact. At first narrow, the string unfurled, growing brighter and thicker, like diamonds in a necklace design that became bolder yet could not compete with the huge, glittering rock at the end.

  The lit face of the Rock of Gibraltar rose in sheer, illuminated mass.

  “That is impressive,” I murmured.

  I’d passed it before in cruising with Aunt Kit, but never this close.

  From those other trips, I knew the rock was the eastern end of the strait. And it wasn’t the closest Spain and Africa came to meeting, that came a little farther west-southwest along the Spanish coast. But that huge rock was the emotional demarcation of leaving behind the Mediterranean Sea and embarking into the Atlantic Ocean.

  No wonder the ancients considered it one of the twin pillars of Hercules and the end of the known world.

  A perfect image for my life. This trip was the end of my known world and I was about to embark on a voyage into unknown territory, with great possibilities, but also great dang—

  “Are you famous?”

  Pop. There went the balloon of my exalted mood of fear and exhilaration.

  “No.” Firm, but polite. I mastered that tone years ago.

  “Somebody said you’re famous.” I realized the voice came from the woman who had led the five into the spa. Queen of the Harpies. Something more firm and less polite might be needed to shake off this woman. “What do you do?”

  The heck if I know.

  But I was still the public face of Aunt Kit’s literary creation for a few more days. “I’m an author.”

  “Oh.”

  I bit my lip to not laugh. Those two letters not only conveyed her complete lack of interest in books or those who wrote them, but also irritation she’d been hoodwinked by someone into thinking I was worthy of interest.

  She started to turn away, but the redhead came in closer with an odd look on her face.

  “You had some book that was made into a movie, didn’t you?” she demanded.

  “Yes.”

  “A big movie.”

  “In some quarters.”

  “You are famous,” accused the first one.

  “I can’t be famous or you’d know me.”

  After a couple breaths, the dark-haired leader’s face cleared. She found my logic persuasive, but the redhead with the odd look wasn’t satisfied. To forestall her, I said to them, “It’s your friend who’s being taken to the hospital, isn’t it? I’m surprised you’re not seeing her off.”

  “Her husband’s with her,” the leader said with little interest.

  “What a shame that happened, especially at the start of the cruise. Is she okay?”

  “Yeah. She’ll be fine.” The redhead oozed empathy … but only in an upside-down universe. “What movie?”

  Why was I answering this inquisition? Oh, yeah. Aunt Kit.

  “Abandon All.”

  The redhead’s eyes changed to boredom. I realized what had been odd before — she’d been frowning with only her eyes because her facial muscles didn’t move.

  “I never seen— I don’t recall that movie,” the leader said.

  “Artsy-fartsy,” the redhead said.

  Mildly, I said, “A classic.”

  The redhead sniffed. But the leader didn’t write me off entirely. Because she said, “See you ’round,” before she swept off in her skyscraper shoes.

  Heels can elongate and highlight the wearer’s legs. But her calves bunched into obtrusive knots under her tight leggings.

  The redhead gave me an unfriendly final look before following.

  * * * *

  A boat that had come up to the Diversion, presumably for Coral, took off toward a point someone declared was the hospital, his expertise coming from Google maps.

  While most of the observers left during the Diversion’s maneuvers away from Gibraltar, I stayed up late with a few other railbirds to watch us complete the passage through the strait and exchange the Mediterranean Sea for the Atlantic Ocean.

  One of those railbirds said he’d served as chaplain for British forces in Gibraltar and entertained us with tales, some possibly tall tales. Enjoyable, nonetheless.

  I woke the next morning to dreams of mice in the walls, which was one of Aunt Kit’s constant worries about the brownstone having encountered the problem in several places she’d lived before making a living wage writing. One of her interview questions for household help was how they felt about killing mice. If they started talking about the Disney version of Cinderella and how the mice became white horses to carry her to the ball, they were out.

  It took a few moments to realize where I was and that the scratching was at the cabin door.

  I opened it to Petronella. “Oh, good. You’re awake.” She breezed inside. I followed, half comatose. “You’ll never guess.”

  After a minute or two of silence I realized she wanted me to accidentally guess at something she’d said I’d never guess. I settled for “What?”

  “They returned my sweater.”

  Sweater? Returned? … The one she’d wrenched that Coral woman’s head up to stuff in. Florence Nightingale she wasn’t. “Good.”

  “Not only that, she had it cleaned for me. Wasn’t that nice?”

  “Uh-huh.” I’d bet it was the crew, not Coral who’d seen to that detail.

  “But you’re not dressed,” Petronella observed.

  What do you say to something like that? I grunted.

  “Don’t you want breakfast?”

  “It’s being served for another hour and a half.” A possibility began to form in my sleep-shrouded brain. “I might skip breakfast today. But you should go down and get some.”

  “Without you?”

  “Absolutely. You can’t let me deprive you of sustenance.” I saw the argument brewing in her head. “I’d feel awful. You don’t want me to feel awful, do you?”

  I’d cornered her with her own determination to coddle me into oblivion.

  “But…”

  I guided her toward the door and sent her on her way. Then I went back to sleep.

  * * * *

  On my way to stake out a nice sunny deck chair by the pool, the buffet supplied me with breakfast. Next stop was to get a couple towels. I joined the line to hand over my ShipCard so I could be charged if I failed to return the towels.

  “Watch this.”

  It wasn’t a kid asking for a parent’s attention.

  It was a command from an empress to a serf.

  It was Leah’s voice over my shoulder with that order.

  I’d been whiling away the wait wondering if this practice of monitoring towel usage arose because passengers absconded with towels in their luggage (Why? They felt like cardboard), because towels were flung overboard in great quantities in exuberant good spirits (How? They’d make lousy kites), or because they were left all over the ship and someone had to pick them up (Were they any harder to pick up than empty glasses and dirty dishes?).

  Despite myself, Petronella’s tale of the towel-grabbers from yesterday resurfaced. It would be easy to grab a towel from the far side of the large rack of clean ones, which would block the view of the crew members giving them out. On various cruises I’d see any number of passengers snag a towel without a crew member seeing or, at least, not letting on that they’d seen.

  That left us rule-followers to creep forward toward the counter where our accountability would be ensured with a swipe of our ShipCard. The process slowed even more because one of the two crew members who’d been dealing with passengers melted away.

  Had this prescient crew member seen Leah approaching? In that case, I couldn’t blame him. I’d have melted away, too, if I’d had warning she’d demand I watch something of hers.

  My stomach sank a little. My head said, Oh, nasty-word to itself. It was too early on a blue-skied, sunny day to deal with her.

  Somewhere between my stomach and my head said, Get a grip. Say y
es or say no, but make it your decision.

  I turned.

  First, I noticed the line behind me had disappeared. People scattered at her approach? Took off with the absent crew member?

  Next, I decided I didn’t care about that. I was too focused on the fact that she wasn’t talking to me. She didn’t even acknowledge my existence.

  Yippee! said the streak of yellow down my back.

  She was talking to the towel guy. She plunked a large pink bag of woven straw atop the counter.

  Now I felt bad.

  Doubly bad.

  First, at the inherent imbalance of power between a service-providing crew member instructed to smile graciously at a passenger behaving badly. Few passengers do, but the ones who did were real stinkers.

  Second, that I had not previously recognized that the guy behind the towel counter was the leader for my muster group. The same one Leah had sniped at.

  I pivoted my head toward the towel guy/muster leader, whose nametag identified him as Badar.

  “No, ma’am. We are not allowed to take responsibility for a passenger’s belongings.”

  As it had been for the muster drill, his accent was distinct, but his English was clear and precise.

  “Nonsense. I’m not dragging this around with me while I look for people worth talking to. Watch it.” She shoved the pink tote toward him. “My tablet’s in there. I’ll know who to blame if it’s gone.”

  “No, ma’am. We are not allowed to take responsibility for a passenger’s belongings.”

  She narrowed her eyes like a gunfighter. “I thought you’d have learned a lesson after last time.”

  They had a history. I’d guessed as much at the muster drill. Last time confirmed it.

  “I did learn, ma’am. I learned the proper thing to say is No, ma’am. We are not allowed to take responsibility for a passenger’s belongings.”

  “I’ll see that your supervisors hear of your insolent rudeness. Today. Now. Then we’ll see.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Please call them. That is who instructed me to say we are not allowed to take responsibility for a passenger’s belongings. Ma’am.”

  “Why, you smart-mouthed—”

  She raised her cane.

  I sucked in a breath and took half a step forward in instinctive preparation to grab at the cane before it could strike Badar.

  He didn’t move. But fire flared in his dark eyes.

  Rather than bringing the cane down on him, Leah jabbed it into the air, perhaps indicating his supervisors or her pull with the big wigs or even with the big guy upstairs. “You won’t get away with this. They’ll hear from me. They’ll all hear from me. And then you’ll hear from them and you won’t be so insolent.”

  She spun away, cane still raised — which did make me wonder how much she needed it when she could make that spin move on a ship that wasn’t lurching, but also wasn’t like solid ground — and started off.

  “Ma’am,” Badar called after her.

  She spun back. Cane still raised, no sign of unsteadiness. “What?”

  Triumph showed in her eyes and the smirking pull on her lips. She expected him to back down, to apologize.

  “You forgot your bag.”

  She growled. Not a little noise, but a full-throated Hound of the Baskervilles growl.

  She snatched at the bag one-handed, the other still holding the cane pointed straight up. The bag’s weight, with a good dollop of momentum behind it, hit the side of her knee.

  She stumbled.

  Another automatic reach on my part. I held her arm until she turned that growl on me. I released her and stepped back. She marched away.

  “Towel, miss?”

  The other attendant had reappeared, even though there was no need for his services, since the line behind me hadn’t yet re-formed.

  “Yes, thank you. Two, please.” I handed over my card. But then I stepped to the side, closer to where Badar still stood. “My name is Sheila Mackey. If you need a witness to this encounter, feel free to call on me. Or have your supervisor contact me.”

  “Thank you, miss. There is no need.”

  The words sounded hopeful, but his tone was wooden, his expression grim. He blocked me out as thoroughly as he’d blocked out Leah.

  “Really, if there’s any trouble—”

  “There you are,” Petronella said from behind me. “I found two chairs that won’t get nearly as much sun as yesterday.”

  I wasted no time in getting into the pool.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Hunger, pruning skin, and the need for more sunscreen drove me out of the pool and into lunch.

  After we’d snaked around the various buffet stations, and to Petronella’s evident dismay, I asked a young man sitting alone if we could join him. He nodded his long-haired head and smiled.

  My chatting with him kept Petronella’s overzealous helpfulness somewhat at bay. Presumably because she thought I needed protection from the kid, who — as the conversation revealed — was twenty-one and newly out of college.

  My guardian relaxed some at that.

  She would have been significantly less relaxed if she’d gathered from several terms he used and she clearly didn’t understand that the farm he talked about heading to for a year’s “service” — “So wholesome,” she declared — was likely a marijuana operation. Also, if she’d known he played footsie with me under the table.

  Initially, mild and passably innocent.

  I ended it when his foot tried to bypass my knee for higher points.

  Lunch over, I said I was going to the hidden spot I’d scoped out the day before and Petronella should do whatever and go wherever she wanted. She followed me with a sigh.

  I refused to feel haunted.

  We took the direct route from our table toward the exit, passing through the grouping of buffet islands in the middle.

  Ahead of us, I saw Leah jump up with no indication that she needed that cane, leaving a table that included the rest of her group. She crashed into a tall waiter carrying a full tray of dirty dishes. She warded off the tray and used his arm to balance herself, in the process upending the tray. All its contents spilled down his front and into a glass-breaking cascade to the floor.

  “Watch where you’re going, idiot” she snapped, stepping clear of the mess and continuing on.

  The young man stood there, agape.

  “Oh, oh, dear.” Petronella clucked her tongue and began picking up pieces of glass and pottery.

  Two other passengers and I followed suit, with three more people from nearby tables chipping in. On the other hand, the redhead and Piper minced past as if the mess would give them the plague.

  “No, no,” protested the waiter. “Please, you must not get yourselves cut or dirty.” His uniform looked as if it had been washed in garbage from mid-chest, down the length of the tunic the waiters wore, with a reprise around his knees.

  Another waiter hurried over, handing us trays to hold our gathered flotsam. A supervisor came on the scene, directing a third waiter, “Get the mop and bucket from the utility closet.” When he objected, “I don’t have a pass card,” she said, “It’s not locked.” Then to us, “Here’s a trash can for that, but please, please, no need for more.”

  The original waiter pitched in, taking the worst of the mess.

  “I can’t get any dirtier,” he said philosophically. To the supervisor, he added, “I have a clean uniform in my cabin. I’ll go—”

  “No, no,” she said. “I can’t spare you with lunch still going. Get a clean tunic from the supply in the closet. If no pants fit, you’ll have to make do for now. We’ll sort it out later.”

  With that she concentrated on shooing passengers away from cleanup duty, while more workers arrived.

  We continued toward the exit, trailing the stained waiter, who opened a door on the left I hadn’t noticed before, showing a utility closet with stacks of the disinfectant offered at every door of any place offering food, flats of water bottles, and a clo
thes rack of uniform pieces.

  This was probably where the young bartender headed after getting splashed yesterday by Mr. Grandpa’s Sailboat on the Label.

  Petronella clucked and sighed over Leah’s rudeness — without ever saying her name — as we used the restroom, then I led the way to the short stretch of deck beyond the indoor pool.

  She heaved a confirming-her-worst suspicions sigh when opening the door revealed Leah and Wardham sitting toward the near end of the line of chairs, Maya and Ralph at the far end, and Odette in the middle.

  Odette smiled at us, while the other four pretended to have their eyes closed. I took her smile as an invitation.

  I sat next to her on the Maya-Ralph side and Petronella took the next chair on the other side, leaving only two between her and Wardham.

  Odette and I chatted for a minute or two about the morning and the weather.

  Then we all settled in.

  The only sound above the wind, the creak of the chairs, and the whispers of the ship’s structure, came from scraps of conversations tubed to us from the upper deck down the conduit of the stairway.

  I know. I could have not listened. But we already established I’m lousy at that.

  People talk, I listen.

  One voice informed us — presumably along with a companion on the upper deck — precisely how bad her feet were. In not-so-glorious detail.

  “It was like they wouldn’t obey me. Just wouldn’t obey. I tripped and fell in the hallway. Couldn’t wear shoes all summer. I mean I was stuck in sandals and gym shoes all summer long. Can you imagine?”

  Horrors.

  New voices slid in… I’d been landed in the middle of an episode of medical drama. Tests, results, medications, side effects, surgeries, scars … I only hoped they wouldn’t display them to check whose was bigger…

  Drifting along — on the water and in my head — I wasn’t entirely sure what was said and what my brain filled in.

  “…he died in Rome. But she picked up the transatlantic cruise and…”

  “…with these same people?” a woman’s voice asked.

  “No. Though they’re about interchangeable, that’s how much this group was like the one she and her husband were with then. After it happened, that gang cut her out immediately.”