Beauty Queens and Cruises: A Humorous Cruise Ship Cozy Mystery (Cruise Ship Cozy Mysteries Book 4)

by A. R. Winters

  Cece had been pushing me and Sam to start frequenting the staff gym with her, but we’d never quite managed the time to get to it. As soon as I began to climb, my arms and legs began to ache and I regretted not making the time for more exercise.

  Next time, I promised, I’d join Cece in the gym.

  Kimberly seemed to be going up at a slower pace than when I’d watched her before, but from glancing up I realized it was because she was deliberately taking a more difficult route. She was really stretching out her arms and legs to reach for distant holds, and I think I even saw her dangling from a single arm at one point as she swung a leg over to reach a distant rock.

  With growing confidence, I made my own way up the wall. I wasn’t moving like Kimberly, but I was putting one hand up after the other, stepping on the most prominent and forgiving rocky outcrops to make my own way up the wall.

  I knew I was taking the easiest route up, but it didn’t matter. I was doing it! Up, up, up I went. It was almost like climbing a ladder.

  Arm, foot, arm, foot. Perhaps I should take up climbing instead of going to the gym with Cece. I had read it was a great form of exercise and it certainly seemed more interesting than spending hours on a treadmill or exercise bike.

  Then I made a mistake.

  Nearly a fatal one.

  I looked down.

  At four stories high, the climbing wall hadn’t seemed that imposing from the ground level. But once I was halfway up, it had taken on an entirely new perspective. The people below me looked so far down I could hardly believe it, and I was only halfway up the wall!

  “Keep going!” shouted Jill. “Don’t look down!”

  I was looking down. And it was making me dizzy. I tried to look back at the wall, for my next handholds. Tentatively, I let go of the wall with one hand and tried to reach up. I couldn’t do it. My hand went straight back down to where it was and it locked in place. I couldn’t let go.

  “Are you stuck? If you’re stuck just let go and we’ll lower you down!”

  Let go? Were they crazy? I was at the cruising height of an airliner and they wanted me to just let go of the wall?

  “No!” I retorted with as much calmness as I could muster. I think it came out like the yelp of a strangled cat.

  I tried not to look at the ground, and looked up instead. Above me, Kimberly was at the top of the wall, sitting on it with her legs dangling over the edge like she was sitting on a bench instead of at the top of a giant cliff. She did not offer me any encouragement; instead, she glared at me.

  My fingers began to ache and I realized that I was squeezing my handholds too hard. They were cramping. But if I didn’t hold them so hard, I’d plummet off the wall.

  “Just let go! We’ll get you down!”

  I shook my head to myself and tried to calm my breathing. Peering up once more, I saw Kimberly smirking at me. Then, she frowned and looked across the room.

  “Just let go! Don’t worry! You’re perfectly safe!”

  Could I? Could I just let go of the wall? I did have a rope on, and the harnesses. It’s what they were there for, wasn’t it?

  I would. I’d do it. I’d let go.

  Down below I heard some kind of shouting, but I ignored it. For once, I was focusing entirely on myself.

  One… two… three!

  I let go.

  I’d expected to start swinging in the air before being gently lowered.

  I did not expect to start plummeting toward the ground.

  But I did.

  “Argh!”

  Down below me, I saw the man who was holding my rope. Only he wasn’t holding my rope. He was staring in the other direction.

  This was it.

  I was falling to my death at a climbing wall because of a beauty pageant.

  The rope sliding through the anchors must have slowed me to some extent, but it wouldn’t have stopped me from smacking into the ground with a deadly splat.

  There was a flash of white below me, someone snatched up the rope and with a breath-removing jerk I was saved.

  Winded, but saved.

  Blinking tears out of my eyes, I peered down to see Ethan holding onto the rope, staring up at me with shock and concern.

  “Adrienne! Are you okay?”

  I just shook my head. Of course I wasn’t okay.

  Blinking more tears out of my eyes, I looked out at the people below me. Most of them weren’t looking up at me, despite my scream, despite my near death experience.

  They were looking at Ruth Allen.

  The feminist protestor was wearing a beauty queen’s crown and a sandwich board with protest words scrawled across it. She held up a megaphone to her mouth.

  As I dangled, I listened to the ship’s biggest troublemaker and almost cause of my death.

  “Down with beauty pageants! Down with beauty pageants! Down with beauty pageants!”

  There was booing from the assembled beauty contestants as they protested the protest that was supposed to be ‘for’ them.

  Down below me, Ethan was holding onto my rope with one hand while angrily spinning around the climbing wall instructor with his other hand. The young man stared up at me, and then back at Ethan, and then up at me again.

  He had the kind of apologetic look on his face that made me want to kill him.

  Ethan handed the rope over to him and said something that looked very harsh. Not harsh enough in my book. I glared at him the whole way down as he slowly lowered me.

  As soon as Ethan had handed the rope over, he sprinted away toward Ruth, who was still screaming slogans into her megaphone.

  “Thanks,” I said with as much sarcasm as I could muster with my shaky voice when I finally made it to the ground. “Get these off me,” I said, smacking at the harness around my waist.

  “Nor more lookism! No more lookism! No mo—”

  The megaphone-enhanced voice came to an abrupt stop as Ethan removed it from Ruth’s hands. She was standing right in the middle of the activity space, nearly surrounded by angry looking beauty queens with hands on their hips and fierce expressions on their faces. I half-hoped they’d all pounce on her.

  I stepped out of the harness and hurried just as fast as I could on shaky legs to Ethan and Ruth.

  The megaphone was now on the floor, and Ruth was standing defiant. I could now read the front of the sandwich board she was wearing, “Only Inner Beauty Is Real” and “Cancel the Pageant!”

  “Ruth, come with me, please.” Although the words sounded like a polite request, the way Ethan said them was so powerful it couldn’t be taken as anything other than a command of the strictest order.

  “Stop the contest!”

  “Now.”

  Ruth seemed to pale and with a hesitant nod she reluctantly began to walk with Ethan out of the room.

  “You’ll thank me one day!” she shouted over her shoulder as she began to leave.

  “No, we won’t!” shouted one of the pageant contestants. The rest shouted agreement.

  That reminded me that I wasn’t done with Kimberly. I turned around, expecting to see her still sitting at the top of the wall, or perhaps on her way down.

  But she was nowhere to be seen. Impossible as it seemed, she must have climbed down on her own during all the commotion.

  She was gone.

  Chapter 16

  Not knowing where to look for Kimberly, I headed to Ethan’s office. It was time to tell him my suspicions about her, as well as what else I had discovered.

  Outside Ethan’s office door, there was an orderly stationed who had something of a look of consternation on his face.

  “Hey, is he in there?” I figured Ethan had probably brought Ruth to his office. It was either here or the brig, and I didn’t think he would have taken her there yet. After all, she was a paying passenger—even if she was a particularly annoying one.

  “Yes, but I think he’s busy right now,” said the blond man in a white uniform.

  As I got closer, I could hear Ruth’s loud
voice from inside, but I couldn’t quite make out what she was saying.

  “Is everything okay in there?”

  The orderly shook his head.

  “She’s a live one, all right. Let me check. He might appreciate the support.” The orderly used the intercom to call through to Ethan’s office. He picked up quickly. “Miss James is here to see you, sir.” The orderly slowly nodded into the phone.

  “He says you’re to go in immediately.”

  With some trepidation, I pushed open the door. The indistinct noise of Ruth’s voice immediately became clear as the soundproofing provided by the closed heavy door was removed.

  “No more pageant! No more pageant! No more pageant!”

  Inside the room, Ethan was sitting behind his large wooden desk, a weary expression on his face.

  Ruth Allen was not sitting. She was pacing up and down—marching, I supposed—while chanting the same slogan over and over again.

  Sitting on the desk was the crown that I had seen Ruth wearing earlier. It was missing a prong which had been snapped off. That confirmed what I had thought before: the crown was the same one that had belonged to Diana. And had been missing since her death, notably absent from her cabin.

  “No more pageant! No more pageant! No more pageant!” Ruth smiled at me as I entered, in between repetitions of her chant. I frowned back at her. We had enough problems on the ship without adding her to the mix.

  “Ruth?” I caught her eye as I said her name. She paused her chanting, an expectant look on her face.

  “You have made your point very clearly and with great enthusiasm. I think we’ve got it. We really, really do. Do you think you could take a break for a moment, so that I could talk to Ethan?”

  Ruth pursed her lips in thought before giving me a little nod.

  “Are you going to talk about canceling the pageant?”

  “Possibly,” I fibbed, “but we also need to talk about the murder. This is serious stuff.”

  Ruth smacked her hand angrily against the front of her sandwich board.

  “This is serious,” she declared. “For too long, women have been nothing more than slaves or pretty objects for men to covet and collect, and it’s time we—”

  “Yes, yes, I understand. I really do. Could we talk about it in a few minutes, though? Would you mind waiting outside?”

  The struggle on her face was real, but finally reason won out.

  “I’m going to be right outside.”

  Ruth pushed back her shoulders and marched toward the door, repeating her slogan and slapping her hand against the sandwich board as she did so.

  “No more pageant! No more pageant! No more pageant!”

  I followed her to the door, and as soon as she was clear of it, I pushed it firmly closed behind her. Perhaps she could keep the orderly entertained while I talked to Ethan.

  “I’ve had it about up to here with her,” said Ethan, holding a hand up around the level of his eyes.

  “She sure has strong opinions.”

  I walked back across the room and sat on one of a pair of high backed chairs in front of Ethan’s large wooden desk.

  In addition to his large desk there was a pair of small leather sofas opposite each other with a coffee table in between on one side of the room. The walls were decorated with wooden paneling and the whole room felt very much like I felt a first officer’s shipboard office should feel like.

  The room had a subtle aroma of leather and pine, from a mixture of Ethan’s regular cologne and the furnishings of the room. Idly, I wondered whether he chose the cologne to match the office. I wasn’t sure whether men did things like that, though.

  “So did you just come to rescue me from Ruth? Which, by the way, I’m incredibly grateful for. Or was there something else?”

  “It’s Kimberly Dawson. We need to find her before we dock again and she can escape. I think she might be…” I hesitated, but that was enough to let Ethan know what I meant. “I think we should talk to her. About what happened to Diana.”

  Ethan steepled his hands under his chin and raised his eyebrows at me.

  “What have you found out?”

  I explained to Ethan everything I knew. That not only had she been Diana’s former protege, which had ended in disaster, but that we knew she had deliberately been sabotaging high heel shoes as well.

  I produced the disc of leather-coated wood from my pocket.

  “Here. This is one of them. She had dozens more of them though.”

  Ethan looked at it, nodding thoughtfully as he twisted it around with his fingers.

  “So she cheats in pageants. And she had a history with Diana. Do you think that makes her a killer?”

  I wanted to scream yes, but I think it may have partially been my annoyance at being embarrassed by her on the climbing wall coming into play.

  “Not necessarily. But I think you should definitely bring her in and talk to her. See what she has to say. And I’m sure Autumn would like to hear all about the ‘modifications’ she’s been making to pageant shoes. But we should probably give her a chance to explain first. I tried to talk to her earlier, but she ran away.”

  “Okay. I’ll try to have a chat with her. But I think it will look better coming from me, don’t you?”

  Reluctantly, I agreed. I was, at least in the eyes of the passengers and guests, merely a social media manager. It should be Ethan who formally handled anything to do with the security situation aboard the ship.

  “Now.” Ethan picked up the beauty queen crown from his desk. “Do you think you can try and work your magic on Ruth again? She wouldn’t say a single word to me earlier until I promised to cancel the pageant, which of course I didn’t. I want to know how she got her hands on this crown.”

  “I’ll do my best.” I looked at the crown Ethan was holding up. “You don’t think she…”

  Ethan shrugged.

  “I kind of hope she did. Then I could legitimately lock her up and stop her from bothering everyone else on the ship.”

  It was wry humor and neither of us could manage much more than a half-smile.

  “It would be ironic though, wouldn’t it? Killing a woman in order to protect women.”

  “Crazy is what it would be,” said Ethan.

  I looked over my shoulder toward the door. Crazy was kind of how she’d been acting. But surely not that crazy.

  “I’ll bring her in. Oh, by the way, there’s another thing I’ve got to tell you about. After we’re done with Ruth though.”

  “Oh? Something good?” Ethan’s voice had a faint glimmer of hope to it.

  “Nope,” I said with a cheerful grin. “Another suspect. Tell you in a bit.”

  As I approached the door I could hear Ruth haranguing the orderly outside. At least she wasn’t chanting anymore.

  When I opened the door, the orderly’s face lit up with relief.

  “Ruth? Would you like to join us again?”

  “Hold on,” she said, holding up a palm in my direction. She turned back to the orderly. “… and that’s why you should feel bad for being a cisgender male. Okay?”

  The confused orderly gave her a tentative nod. Satisfied, she turned smartly, smacked her palm against her sandwich board, and walked back into Ethan’s office. I held the door open as she entered and then closed it behind her.

  “Take a seat,” I said, pointing toward one of the chairs in front of Ethan’s desk.

  She shook her head. “Can’t.” She patted the front of her protest board again.

  Rolling my eyes behind her back, I followed after her and sat down on the right-hand chair. Ruth stood behind the other one, leaning on its high back.

  “So you’re canceling the pageant?”

  I saw Ethan about to respond and I knew what he was going to say; it was going to be a hard no. So I swooped in and saved the day.

  “We’d love to talk about that in a minute, but there’s something else we have to ask you first.”

  Seemingly satisfied with my prom
ise of a chance to talk more later, she consented.

  “What?”

  I turned away from Ruth back to Ethan. He picked up the crown from his desk and held it up for us to examine.

  “Ruth. I’m not making any accusations—” There seemed to me to be a silent yet after this pronouncement “—but today you were in possession of this crown. As you are no doubt aware, this belonged to Diana Penn, who was recently found dead. Murdered.”

  Ruth smacked her palm on the front of her sandwich board before she answered, the sharp slap acting as a complaint.

  “I would never hurt another woman! No matter how brainwashed she’d become by the oppressive nature of our sexist, male-dominated society!”

  “Right. As I said, I wasn’t making an accusation. I was hoping you would explain where you got the crown from, and why you were wearing it.”

  “It was given to me by one of my supporters.”

  Ethan and I exchanged a surprised glance.

  “Supporters?” I asked her.

  Ruth folded her arms across her sandwich-board-clad chest and nodded sharply.

  “Yes. The oppressed silent majority of women aboard this ship! They know that everything I say is completely true, but they’re too afraid of upsetting our corrupt patriarchal society to state it out loud!”

  That didn’t explain much. We needed something more specific.

  “Which supporter in particular?” I asked.

  “I don’t know which supporter.”

  “What do you mean? Where did you get the crown?” asked Ethan sharply.

  “Don’t talk to me like that! I have the right not to be violently abused with harsh language!”

  I squeezed my fingernails into my palms to stop myself from responding in some real violent language.

  Ethan was getting impatient because she was being obtuse, but he had retained a remarkable level of politeness. If I’d been first officer and head of security I don’t think I’d have been nearly as patient with her since her reign of disruption began.

  “Ruth. Please. A woman has been murdered. We need to know what you know. The killer is still out there. If we don’t catch them, they might even strike again. We’re just trying to get to the bottom of what happened.” I paused for a slow, calm breath. “Could you please tell us precisely who gave you the crown?”