Chapter 29
I jumped before I realized it was only Dad sneaking up behind me.
“Possibly,” I said. “Remember Anton Bjelica?”
“Of course.” Dad shuddered slightly. “So that’s how you pronounce it?”
“According to Léonie. I searched his cabin.”
“Oh, well, done! What did you find?”
“Not much,” I said. “The only interesting thing was a bunch of papers that suggested he wasn’t exactly in the running for employee of the year.”
“Oh, dear.” Dad’s face showed that he wasn’t entirely sure I should be speaking ill of the dead.
“Which still doesn’t give anyone the right to toss him overboard.”
“Agreed. So where are the papers?”
I held up my phone.
“I decided not to steal the actual papers,” I said. “I think mutiny on the high seas is enough of a crime for today. So I took pictures instead.”
Dad peered at the screen and shook his head.
“Too small,” he said. “Maybe we need to get Delaney to transfer that onto a computer.”
“Give me a few minutes.” I pulled the phone back to the optimal position for reading it myself and used my fingers to enlarge the first photo. “I know what they are, more or less, from seeing them while I took the pictures—six official notices reprimanding Bjelica for disciplinary infractions.”
“What kind of disciplinary infractions?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Okay, this first one is for being five minutes late for duty. They docked him an hour’s pay for that.”
“A good thing I’m not on the crew.” Dad chuckled softly. “I’d never break even.”
“The second one is for not being in proper uniform. Another hour’s pay docked. Now this is interesting. This second one has an addendum from First Officer Martin. ‘The missing button has been replaced and Mr. Bjelica’s uniform is now acceptable. Penalty reduced by half.’”
“Very interesting,” Dad said. “So the captain is a stern disciplinarian and the first officer takes a more humane approach?”
“Or maybe they’re just running good cop/bad cop on the crew,” I said. “Here’s another uniform infraction—this time the captain’s dinging him two hours’ pay for having a dirty uniform and the first officer cancels the fine entirely. Apparently Bjelica was in the middle of performing regular maintenance on the backup generator when he was called to go to the navigation bridge immediately. And this next one—good grief; shades of Captain Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. Apparently Bjelica raided the kitchen and ate food designated for consumption by the passengers. Detweiler docked him a whole day’s pay for that.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Dad said. “It reminds me of Oliver Twist asking for more gruel while Bumble the Beadle dines on roast beef. Or am I imagining that scene?”
“It’s probably in one of the movie versions. And since you and Léonie figured out it was feeding the crew beef considered too far gone for the passengers that caused the food poisoning epidemic, maybe Bjelica had good reason for raiding the passengers’ food. First Officer Martin all but erased Bjelica’s punishment for that, too.”
“Good for him.”
“I hate it when I have to completely rearrange my view of the world,” I said. “Here I’ve been thinking of Captain Detweiler as sort of a distant, benign authority figure, the nautical equivalent of an absentminded professor—too focused on navigation and whatever other lofty things a captain has to worry about to pay much attention to the passengers who happen to be cluttering up his ship, but essentially good and noble. Who delegates dealing with the passengers to his first officer, who isn’t all that good at it but at least tries. Now it begins to look as if Detweiler is a petty vindictive tyrant crushing the souls of his crew. It’s going to take a while to get my head around that.”
“Yes.” Dad nodded and looked thoughtful. “I suppose we’ll have to try to think more kindly of poor Mr. Martin. Especially since … well, remember that bit of French you asked your mother to translate? Any more news on that front?”
“You mean, have I found out if the captain’s a secret tippler?” I shook my head. “No idea. Of course I haven’t seen the captain since yesterday morning, so who knows? Although I think we should probably take anything Léonie says about the officers with several grains of salt. I get she’s definitely a disgruntled employee, and while I completely understand why, it means she might not be the most reliable source when it comes to Detweiler and Martin.”
“If only Martin would stop trying so hard.” Dad sighed and shook his head.
“Yeah, his manner’s a little smarmy,” I said. “Maybe that’s understandable, if Detweiler’s a martinet and Martin has a vested interest in making sure no one complains about anything. Still—he’s trying too hard. Someone should do him a favor and tell him to tone it down a bit. Someone other than me,” I said, before Dad could volunteer me for the job.
“I’ll suggest it to your mother,” he said. “None of this exactly gives anyone a clear motive for murdering … um … Anton.”
“No. Now if it had been the captain’s body we found, Anton would be top of my suspect list right now. But I’d still want to check out everyone else’s personnel files before arresting him.”
“Yes.” Dad looked thoughtful. “There could be other crew members with equally good reason to resent the captain.”
“In fact, for all we know, Anton’s the captain’s golden boy,” I mused. “Everyone else could have an inch-thick collection of nastygrams instead of only six. But since the captain’s not our victim, all that’s irrelevant.”
“And what does Anton’s murder have to do with Desiree’s alleged suicide?” Dad went on. “Because it’s a little hard to imagine that two suspicious deaths happening so close together in such a small community aren’t related somehow.”
“Also a good point.”
“Perhaps Desiree was pushed—and Anton witnessed it! Forcing the killer to do away with him!”
“Could be.” In one of Dad’s beloved mysteries, that would almost certainly be the case, but real life was rarely that neat. “I like that idea better than the possibility that someone knocked off Anton to keep us stranded here as long as possible. Maybe we should figure out who the rest of the engineering staff are and put a guard on them.”
“I wish we could definitively prove that none of the writers are involved.” Dad’s tone was rather wistful. “Angie’s got an excellent head for plotting—she could be very useful in solving this.”
“I’m definitely keeping my eyes open for anything that would prove their innocence.” Of course, I was doing it because I liked the writers, doubted that they’d done in Desiree, and didn’t want whoever eventually investigated this to give them a hard time. I suspected Angie’s plotting expertise was in inventing intricately convoluted plots that would baffle her FBI agent sleuth—and her readers—until the last chapter. That didn’t necessarily translate into being good at unraveling a real-life puzzle.
“I don’t think the writers are high on my suspect list for throwing Bjelica overboard,” I said aloud. “I’m pretty sure only one person entered Desiree’s cabin while we were hiding in the bathroom. Does that match your recollection?”
Dad nodded.
“I checked the sizes on his clothes, and Anton was a big guy. Not that much shorter than Michael, and definitely a bit wider.”
“The writers aren’t that big. Or that young. For that matter, I don’t think the first officer’s as tall as I am. The captain, now…”
“Don’t underestimate what a fit person can do, especially a fit person who’s trying to cover up evidence of a murder.”
“Good point.”
He looked so glum.
“Hey!” I said. “There’s a set of free weights on the fifth-floor sun deck, right beside the miniature golf course. Shall we have a weightlifting competition and narrow down our pool of suspects?”
I meant it as a joke. Dad seemed to be seriously considering.
“Maybe later,” he said. “For now, I should go back and check on my patients.”
“How are they doing?” I asked. “And there’s only us here—don’t sugarcoat it.”
“They should all make it.” He looked grim. “But no thanks to the captain. Food poisoning isn’t usually fatal—although sometimes the sufferer may wish it was. But severe dehydration can be fatal, and I don’t think the healthy crew members were really aware of the danger.”
“Not to mention the fact that even if they’d known what to do, there might have been too few of them to cope with so many patients. Look in on Serge Charlier, will you? He seemed a little worse off than the others.”
He nodded and dashed away.
I decided to drop by the bridge, on deck three, to see how the repairs were going.
I found Delaney sitting on the floor reading a technical manual of some kind. Nearby, a rumpled crew member slept on the floor. She held her finger to her lips and motioned me to step outside.
“Gerard finally stopped puking and fell asleep,” she said. “I hope that means he’s over the worst of it. And given how hard he’s been trying to help while still feeling horrible, I say let him sleep.”
“Gerard Hoffman.” I pulled out my crew inventory and put a check mark beside his name. All of the crew names now bore check marks except for Bjelica and Arav Lav, the bartender. Most of the passengers probably knew Arav—I’d ask if anyone had seen him. For now, I planned to keep pretending to most of the world that I didn’t know where Bjelica was. “So how’s it going?”
“You want the good news or the bad news?”
“Let’s start with the good news,” I suggested. “Because I have the sinking feeling that you’re about to deliver a pinch of good news and a pound or two of bad.”
“Something like that.” She grinned, though, so I was encouraged to hope that even the bad news would be something we could handle together. “The good news is that there is a backup generator. It didn’t kick in when the main power went off because for some reason no one can quite explain, it was lying in a million pieces on the engine room floor. But we should be able to reassemble it and get it going.”
“How soon?”
“Not sure,” she said. “I’ve got most of my team focused on that right now, but none of them’s exactly a generator expert. They can do it, but it will take longer.”
“Does the ship have a generator expert?” I asked. “Wait—don’t tell me. He’s on the sick list.”
“No, we already checked, and the generator guru’s not down in the sick ward. Maybe we could get Hal to add a message to his announcements for him to report to the engine room. It’s a guy named Anton something-or-other.”
“Anton Bjelica,” I said.
“That sounds right.”
“But we can fix the backup generator without him, right?”
“Eventually.” She frowned. “What do you know that you’re not telling?”
I suppressed a wayward impulse to say that Anton Bjelica was now sleeping with the fishes.
“Dad and I were doing some skulking about last night,” I said instead. “I’ll tell you the long version when we have more time. The short version is that Anton Bjelica is dead, and someone tossed his dead body overboard last night.”
“Oh.” She blinked and looked momentarily stricken. “That’s awful. Did you report it? To the captain or whoever?”
“We didn’t see who did the tossing,” I said. “And we assume whoever did that was either the person who garroted him or an ally. So no, we didn’t report this, because for all we know we’d be reporting it to whoever did it.”
“Good point.” She thought for a moment. “Well, if you need me, I’ll be down in the engine room helping with the generator. The backup generator won’t run the whole ship, but it will get us emergency lights and the water-pumping system.”
“Running water? Sounds like heaven.”
“And with luck, working toilets. If they were stupid enough not to put the toilets on the emergency circuit, I’ll rewire a few myself. And while running water and working toilets won’t get us to Bermuda any faster, they’ll sure make being stranded here a lot less painful. So I think we should make that our priority.”
“Make it so,” I said.
“Aye-aye, Captain.” Delaney giggled and turned to leave.
“Wait,” I said. “That was the good news, right? What about the bad news?”
“Main navigation system’s hosed.” She grimaced. “And if you ask me, it was sabotage. I could explain why if you really want to know.”
“Would the explanation be technical?” I asked. “Because if it is, I’m not sure you should waste time explaining it to me.”
“Don’t sell yourself short,” she said. “But yeah, I should save the explanations for whatever law enforcement agency investigates the sabotage. The point is, whoever did this broke stuff. We need parts. Now that we have at least some contact with the outside world, they can fly in the parts—and experts to install them. But that’ll take time.”
“What kind of time?” I asked. “Hours or days?”
“I guess that depends on how organized Pastime is.” She shrugged. “So in the meantime, let’s see what we can do with the backup generator.”
She hurried off.
Two days ago, I might have been reassured to know that Pastime was aware of our plight. I’d probably have trusted that they’d do their best to end our ordeal as soon as possible. But after what I’d seen on board the ship …
“We need to talk to the Coast Guard,” I muttered.
Just then I heard a thud on the ceiling. Or, since there was nothing anywhere near the ceiling, maybe it was a thud on the floor of the deck above us.
Another thud. And another. Followed by three quick thuds close together.
Someone was pounding out SOS.
I raced for the stairs.
Chapter 30
What was above the bridge? I didn’t have time to pull out my map of the ship’s decks, but I was pretty sure I knew—the Starlight Lounge.
When I reached deck four, I looked around. No one in sight. I hoped the SOS was a genuine call for help, not a trap.
I opened the door to the Starlight Lounge carefully and peered in. It was dark—all the curtains were drawn. The pounding had stopped.
“Anyone here?” I called.
No answer. I pulled out my phone and turned on the flashlight feature. I played it over the room. The light reflected on glass tea light holders on the tables and on the crystal of the chandeliers.
The pounding started up again, somewhere to my left. I moved toward it, carefully and quietly.
It was coming from behind the bar. From what appeared to be a locked closet behind the bar.
“Is anyone there?” I called.
Rapid, though rather feeble pounding.
I tested the door. Locked.
Just then I heard Hal, the town crier, out in the corridor.
“Lunch is being served in the dining room!” he was bellowing.
I ran to the door.
“Hal! In here!” I called.
He came running, bringing a giant flashlight with him. Was it having more company or more light that made the room suddenly seem much less creepy?
“What’s wrong?” he asked.
“Someone’s trapped in there,” I said. “I want backup in case it’s someone who got locked in for a good reason.”
He seemed to find that amusing.
While I felt a lot more confident, now that I had backup, it would have helped if my backup was someone who might have a useful idea of how to open the closet door. Hal tried running at it in the hope of breaking it open with his shoulder.
“Owww!” He sat down hard on a nearby chair. “Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.”
“It’s a fairly sturdy door,” I said. “And I suspect it opens out. Let me try somethin
g.” The light from Hal’s flashlight had revealed that there was a card key reader beside the door. I still had Anton Bjelica’s card in my pocket. I slid it through the slot.
The lock clicked open.
I opened the door to find a walk-in wine closet lined with racks and coolers, and an unconscious figure slumped just inside the door. Aarav the bartender. He was clutching a bottle—a magnum of Dom Pérignon, I noticed. Apparently, that was what he’d been pounding with. He’d been sick, rather neatly, in the far corner of the closet, and I could see the fragments of at least one broken wine bottle on the floor. And some rather frayed and bloodstained cords.
“Poor beggar.” Hal seemed to forget about his shoulder. “Wonder how he managed to get locked in here. I’ll take him down to deck one.” He stooped down to pick up Aarav.
“Hang on a sec,” I said. “He’s not wearing his Pastime card around his neck on a cord like most of the crew.”
“He’s a crew member, though,” Hal said. “The bartender.”
“Yes—Aarav Lal.” I was searching Aarav’s pockets. “But what happened to his card?”
“Definitely not on him,” Hal said. “Hey, it looks as if he tried to cut his wrists. You think he tried to off himself, then changed his mind and signaled for help?”
“No, I think someone tied him up.” I pointed to the tangle of cord in the corner. “And he managed to break a bottle and saw through the cord to free himself.” On a hunch, I checked Aarav’s head. Hidden by the glossy black curls was a nasty lump. “And I’m pretty sure whoever tied him up knocked him out first.”
“Damn.”
“Take him down to deck zero,” I said. “And tell Dad to check for concussion.”
“Roger.” Hal gently lifted Aarav’s long but slender body and strode out.
I grabbed the door before it could close all the way and picked up something to prop it open with. Curious. The object I’d picked up was the push bar, the one that let you escape from the storage closet if you got locked in. Whoever had tied up Aarav did his best to make sure he didn’t escape.
And why had Aarav become ill so much later than the other crew members? Side effect of being hit on the head, maybe?
Terns of Endearment (Meg Langslow Mysteries) Page 25
