Cruise Conundrum: A Cruise Ship Cozy Mystery (Cruise Ship Cozy Mysteries Book 5)

by A. R. Winters

  “Okay, okay. I’m pretty sure that was Andy’s writing. I saw him write something before, but we need to go and check, to make sure.”

  That was a good point, actually. I turned and went back to the bed, pulled out my phone, and took photos of both the re-created note and the photograph.

  “Come on. We’ve got to find Greg.”

  “Greg Washington?”

  “Do you know any other Gregs?”

  “Sure, I used to know a guy called Greg the Stud. We used to call him that because he—”

  “I mean on board the ship.”

  “No, I guess not, but you’ve got to hear about Greg the Stud, you won’t believe how b—”

  “Later! Come on.”

  Before we left the room, we gathered up all the scraps and put them back into Cece’s large apron pocket. It would be even quicker to reassemble them next time, if we needed to, now that we knew exactly what they were.

  We hurried over to the large kitchens behind the International Buffet.

  “There he is,” I said, pointing across the room, where Greg Washington seemed to be arranging a row of pans on a shelf so that they were lined up perfectly neatly, adjusting and readjusting each one so that each handle pointed at exactly the same angle as all of its neighbors.

  “Yo, Greg!” called Cece as we approached. “Stop playing with your pans. We’ve got a question.”

  He had a happy grin on his face as he greeted us, seemingly glad for the interruption.

  “What’s going on, ladies?”

  “This is important,” I said, looking him in the eyes. “Do you have that camera recommendation Andy gave you?”

  He laughed and went to stick a hand in his pocket.

  “Are you doing some urgent camera shopping?” His eyes darted back and forth between Cece and me, as if trying to assess why we might need an urgent camera recommendation.

  “No. I want to see Andy’s writing.”

  “I know, right? It was beautiful, honey.” He turned to Cece, still trying to figure out what we were about. “Are you into handwriting?”

  She scowled at him. “Into handwriting? Am I into handwriting? Cece Blake? Do you even know me?”

  “Hey, just asking. Hold on one sec.”

  Greg pulled out his wallet, opened it up, and withdrew the Awesome Andy business card he had received the other day. He put it face down on a stainless steel work surface in front of us. As soon as Cece saw it, she grabbed me by the arm.

  “It’s the same!”

  “Yep.” I was already holding up my phone with the picture of the note we had taken on the bed. The writing was exactly the same, as was the ink color. It was Andy. He hadn’t been having an affair with Jessica; he had been blackmailing her.

  “Are you guys going to hang out for a bit?” asked Greg, a glimmer of hope in his voice.

  “Can’t. Working.” Cece shook her head at him.

  “Sorry,” I said over my shoulder. I was already leaving. I had to see Ethan right away.

  “Charming…” said Greg loud enough that we could hear as we left him on his own to get back to straightening his pots and pans.

  It wasn’t time for charming; it was time for investigating. I felt like I was hot on the case now and wanted to get it solved as soon as possible.

  Chapter 20

  I got to Ethan’s office quick enough to put Kelly Cline to shame.

  “Can I go in?” I asked the orderly in a rush, my hand already reaching for the door.

  “No—” my blood started to boil before I heard the rest of the sentence “— he’s not there.”

  Deflated, my hand fell back to my side. “Where is he? When will he be back?”

  “He has a meeting with the captain now, and then after that there’s the heads of department meeting. You’ll probably want to give it a couple of hours. Do you want me to take a message?”

  “Just tell him to call me as soon as he gets back.”

  “Will do. Have a good one.”

  With my sense of urgency now obliterated, I headed out onto the deck. I probably should’ve gone straight back to my cabin and finished that listicle about common photography mistakes, but I was too pumped up from our discovery to face sitting down at a desk and writing fluff.

  I headed out onto the constitutional deck and slowly began to walk around, thinking about what we’d just found out. If Jessica had been blackmailed by Andy, then she would have a very good reason to want him out of the picture. I laughed at that. The picture.

  “What’s so funny?” It was Sam. I’d been so distracted with my own thoughts I hadn’t even noticed her and had almost walked right into her. It seemed to be happening a lot lately. I guess trying to solve murders can do that to a person.

  “Nothing. Well, something. I just found out that Awesome Andy was more like Avaricious Andy.”

  “Ava-what-now?” said Sam.

  “Avaricious. It means like… really greedy? After money? That kind of thing.”

  “Ooh, more six-figure deals?”

  I shook my head at her.

  “Nope, not that. He was blackmailing Jessica.”

  Sam looked at me, impressed.

  “No way! How?”

  “As you won’t be surprised to find out after the bushes incident, it turns out Jessica was having an affair with some guy. But Andy knew about it, and he had photos to prove it. She was paying him off, on a regular schedule, to keep it a secret. We found a note he left for her.”

  “That’s wild.” Sam rubbed at her chin as she considered the obvious implications. “That means that maybe Jessica…” She whipped her right index finger across her throat, in a cutting motion.

  “Yep. Sounds pretty likely to me. What are you up to?”

  “Same as you. Going for a walk. Xavier has all the photographers off in the Mayan ruins, trying to capture the best macro image, for a kind of mini practice competition. I’ve set everything up for the next event and now I’m taking a breather.”

  “Nice.” Something caught my eye—or someone, rather. I nodded my head behind Sam’s shoulder. “Look, there’s Raina. I wonder why she didn’t go ashore.”

  We ambled over in her general direction, but before we got there, she pulled out her phone and started dialing a number. She had it pressed up against her head by the time we were close.

  “…well, the cruise was going well, darling, but there’s been a bit of a snag. Yes, yes… Uhhh… You’re not going to believe this, but you’ve got to keep it a secret, okay?”

  Sam and I looked at each other. A secret? She wasn’t about to spill the beans, was she?

  “…Andy died last night… yep… no, not on stage, literally … yes, as a doornail … No, I don’t know how… flu or something…”

  Sam and I gripped each other’s wrists. She was blabbing! She had promised to keep it a secret. And it wasn’t like it accidentally slipped out. She had just called someone up specifically to tell them. What did she think she was playing at?

  The only saving grace was that she hadn’t announced that it was a murder, instead saying that she didn’t know what had happened to him. Not that that would help much if whoever she was blabbing to started spreading it around.

  “…I know, it’s so tragic for you. I feel so sorry for you… The wedding’s still three months away. You can find someone else… I know nobody else is as good… What about Howard? He did my engagement photos and they were spectacular, before we managed to secure Andy for the wedding. There’s an idea…”

  Sam and I stood just a few yards behind her, carefully listening to the rest of the conversation to see what else she said. Mostly she just talked about wedding photographers and didn’t say anything else about Andy’s death. When the call was finally over, we approached her.

  “Hi, Raina. Who was that you were speaking to?”

  She appeared taken aback. “You weren’t eavesdropping, were you?” she asked with a frown.

  “Oh, no, I just couldn’t help but overhear. Umm,
did you just tell someone about what happened to Andy?”

  “No, I was just—”

  Sam didn’t have time for nonsense.

  “We heard you just tell someone he was dead.” Sam was much better than me at being direct.

  “Yes, but it was Steph, not just someone.”

  “Steph? Who’s Steph?”

  “Steph is my best friend. If I know something, she knows something. I wasn’t telling her a secret—I was merely maintaining our friendship by not hiding it from her. She won’t tell anyone. You can trust Steph.”

  We can trust Steph? We don’t even know Steph. We barely knew Raina. And we were supposed to take her word that some friend of hers was going to maintain that secret? I doubted that very much. I wondered how long it would be before it got out now.

  “You see, Andy was supposed to do her wedding photographs. I had to tell her—I just had to. She needs to find another photographer ASAP. Do you know how hard it is to book a great photographer at the last minute? That’s she had to know right away. I mean, it’s a real tragedy for Steph.”

  “Andy, too.”

  Raina tilted her head at me, as if confused. Then she seemed to catch what I meant and gave me a little nod. “Oh, yes, so sad.”

  “You must’ve been very happy with his work on your wedding to give such a glowing recommendation.” Raina started to nod at me, glad that I was finally ‘understanding’ her position.

  “Well, yes. He had such a great reputation I just had to hire him. That’s what I told my husband: ‘Only the best for me!’ In fact, it was Steph who recommended Andy to me in the first place. She’d heard about him from one of her contacts.”

  “And of course you wanted him to do that new photoshoot, of you and your husband, right? What a shame.”

  Raina let out a long, slow, sad breath. “Oh, yes, I would have loved that. My husband and I are so in love, and we want to capture the moment while we still look fantastic. I mean, don’t get me wrong. We’ll always look fantastic, but you’re only twenty-nine once, right?”

  I squinted at her. If she was twenty-nine, then I was twenty-one. And I was not twenty-one, because if I was, it would make Cece about eleven years old.

  “It must be nice to be so in love,” said Sam. There was something about the way she said it that I knew it was about to be followed up by something with a sting. “Your husband must really trust you, since saw you coming out of Andy’s room the other night.”

  Raina’s lips parted in surprise, and then when she realized what Sam was implying, her brow knit into a deep frown. “That was just business. I was there to talk about the photoshoot. Nothing more.” She shook her head at Sam, contempt burning behind her eyes. “You shouldn’t judge other people when you don’t know what you’re really talking about.” She put her hands on her hips and gave Sam a final disapproving glare. “Good day.”

  Raina swiveled on her heels and marched away, her head down and shoulders tight in anger.

  “I don’t think she liked my observation.” Sam shrugged her shoulders. “Oh well.”

  I was glad she was taking an upset customer so lightly. Raina had seemed to be really annoyed, and I hoped it wouldn’t come back to haunt us.

  “I think we’d better be careful around her. She seems pretty angry right now.”

  “The cruise will be over in a few days, and she’ll be gone with the rest of them. Don’t worry about it.”

  But worrying was what I did.

  Chapter 21

  I left Sam, who was going to go and set up a room for when the onshore photographers returned to the ship. They would all meet with Xavier and get some personal comments on the photographs they had taken, as well as get to check out what the others had snapped.

  The rapidly-improving photographers were going to put all of their best images up onto a projector screen and enjoy each other’s work.

  If I had my listicle done in time, maybe Xavier could put that up on the screen as well. Then again, it would probably be a bit too basic, even for the most amateur of the amateur photographers.

  I went to see whether Ethan was back in his office yet, hoping he might’ve slipped in between meetings. But when I arrived at his office, not only was the door ominously closed, there was no sign of the orderly who was normally outside either.

  With a shrug, I kept walking up the hallway. There wasn’t much more to this particular corridor; it rounded a corner and that was where the captain’s office was, and after that was a dead end. Since I didn’t have much cause to go to the captain’s office, I had never wandered up that way. But I thought the orderly outside the captain’s room might know what had happened to Ethan’s.

  Turning the corner, I saw that stationed outside the captain’s office were the same desk and intercom that were outside Ethan’s, and, just like Ethan’s, no one was there. Perhaps they were all off at lunch.

  Interestingly though, I could hear the sound of voices coming from the captain’s cabin.

  I took my time walking in that direction, not exactly intending to eavesdrop but just trying to catch whatever stray words floated my way, to see what the captain was talking about.

  The door was open, and even in the hallway, I could see the two occupants of the room, sitting opposite each other in a pair of armchairs around a glass coffee table.

  Both occupants were turned at an angle where they wouldn’t see me. If I’d gone and stood in the doorway and started waving my arms, they might’ve spotted me out of the corner of their eye, but from this far away, I was invisible unless they turned their heads.

  One of the men was the captain, sitting in his lovely white uniform that he didn’t manage to pull off quite as well as Ethan did. While Ethan’s seemed to be tailored exactly to his body, the captain’s seemed to be a bit too baggy in parts and too tight in others, like it wasn’t really designed for him. The captain was sitting opposite a clean-shaven bald man, who I didn’t immediately recognize, though there was something familiar about him that I couldn’t quite place.

  It won’t hurt to watch for a second. I’m just wondering around the ship, casually looking around. I’m not spying or eavesdropping. No way. That’s not me at all.

  While I was busy not spying, and not eavesdropping, I picked up a few choice pieces of their conversation, purely by chance.

  “…I didn’t do anything illegal. Nothing.” That was the captain. Nothing illegal, huh? That was interesting. Usually when people are protesting that they didn’t do anything wrong, they almost certainly did do something wrong.

  “…I’ve got proof. I’m going to get you. Don’t think I won’t.” That was the bald man.

  “I’ve had just about enough of this. You can’t prove anything.” The captain finished this last sentence with a slap on the glass table of his palms, causing a white china ornamental stork in the middle to wobble.

  The bald man stood up angrily, waving his index finger at the captain.

  “You just wait and see.”

  The man started to turn, and I was pretty sure he was about to exit the captain’s cabin, so I jumped back.

  Out of the line of sight of the office, I walked away quickly, rounding the corner near Ethan’s office before either of the men could catch sight of me.

  The bald man had looked so familiar somehow. But it wasn’t until I was outside on the deck again that I realized who it was that I had seen. It was the image of the man when he went to stand up that made me suddenly realize who it was.

  The reason I hadn’t recognized him right away was because of his disguise. Not the disguise he had on now; he’d removed it. The disguise he had been wearing when I saw him last.

  The curly hair and the french cut beard, both of them had been fake. I had finally gotten a glimpse of what the man who posed as a housekeeper and danced with Kelly actually looked like: bald and clean-shaven.

  What did it mean? Who was this man? And what was it that he had on the captain? That he was threatening the captain of the ship meant
he was at least somewhat dangerous—to the captain if not everyone else.

  Now I had two reasons to see Ethan. But he still wasn’t there.

  There was only one thing for it.

  I’d have lunch instead.

  A girl’s got to keep her energy levels up, after all.

  Chapter 22

  I treated myself to a nice little fourteen-course lunch. Okay, it wasn’t really fourteen courses. But I did have fourteen different items from the International Buffet, and I took photos of all of them, so it felt like I’d had fourteen different courses.

  Once I was certain I was full and had killed enough time for Ethan’s meetings to be over, I had a stack of plates in front of me piled up almost to the level of my neck.

  I was staring at the plates, contentedly and letting my lunch settle while I contemplated whether or not to have some dessert, when I was met with a rude awakening.

  “Adrienne,” said Ethan, appearing from behind me. “Had a light lunch?”

  I felt my cheeks beginning to flush. How embarrassing was this?

  “Ethan, I didn’t expect to see you here. Actually I was looking for you.”

  “I know you were. That’s why I came looking for you.”

  “You should’ve sent me a message…”

  “But that’s no fun.” He looked at the stack of plates and then at the three other empty chairs at the table. None of them had even been pulled out, and it was clear I had been dining alone.

  “I was taking pictures. That’s why there’s so many plates.”

  Ethan pulled out one of the chairs and sat down, an amused smile playing on his lips. “I’m sure they were fantastic pictures. And how was the food?”

  “I didn’t eat that much,” I said, trying to keep a straight face, “but what I had was pretty good. Greg Washington runs a good kitchen.”

  “That he does. I don’t like to come here in case I overindulge.”

  “Yeah, me too. But I needed some pictures. Sacrificing for my art and all that.”

  Ethan clasped his hands together on top of the table in front of him and settled comfortably in the chair.