And it could still be just an accident. It might not have been anyone in the kitchen who had contaminated his food. The food might have been contaminated at the factory and there hadn’t been any recalls done yet. Or the product had been recalled, but no one had checked the ship’s stores for goods that needed to be recalled.
Or the captain might have become allergic to something that he hadn’t been allergic to before. Nobody would have known that. Not the doctor, the chef, or even the captain himself. Sometimes those things did just happen out of the blue, and if the allergy sufferer didn’t have an autoinjector handy or reach medical care quickly enough, that could be the end of it.
“Terry, did he have an Epi-Pen? Or some other kind of autoinjector?”
Terry would know what she was talking about. He had investigated two other deaths by allergy in Bald Eagle Falls since Erin’s arrival.
“Not on him, no. From what the doctor and the crew say, he didn’t like to carry it with him. He had one in his office and one in his cabin, and the doctor has epinephrine in the infirmary. But he was one of those people who didn’t like to carry one with him. He figured he’d have enough time to get to it if he ever needed it. And he was usually in his office or cabin, where it would be immediately on hand.”
“But he didn’t use it last night?”
“No. It was still there in his desk drawer. He must have reacted too quickly to get to it.”
“How horrible.”
Other passengers were looking sideways at Erin, and she realized they were eavesdropping, or trying to. She looked away, toward the bay filled with clear blue water.
“It’s such a beautiful day. If it just wasn’t so darn cold!”
Vic looked over at Erin and laughed. “I feel bad for all of those birds standing out on the ice,” she said. “I’ve never been so cold in my life, and I’m bundled up! The cold just cuts right through everything!”
“Maybe you need to put on some weight,” Willie joked. “Fat is a good insulator.”
Vic pretended to slap his arm. “If I was going to live here, I might just have to do that, and then wouldn’t you be sorry? But lucky for you, I am not going to stay here any longer than we have to for our tour. Then I’m going home and I’m never going anywhere with ice again.”
“Nowhere with ice? No ski vacations? That’s it?”
“That’s it,” Vic confirmed. “I am only taking tropical vacations after this.”
“Then you have to get shots and worry about tropical diseases. And the spiders and snakes in warmer climates. All kinds of venomous things.”
“I’ll put up with bugs. I never minded creepy crawlies. But the cold is just too much for me. My body wasn’t built for this climate.”
“If you lived here for a few years, you’d get used to it eventually.”
“Did you not hear the part where I said I was never going to live here? Or anywhere with ice? I’m not going anywhere cold ever again. I’m just going to go home and sit by the fire and warm my bones until I’m old.”
“We should go to Mexico,” one of Vic’s pink-haired friends piped up, moving closer. “I’ve been there before and it’s great. So warm, and the people and the vibe there are just so awesome. I’m enjoying the cruise too, but cruising in the south is totally different than coming up here to the top of the world. I don’t know how people could actually live here year-round. Maybe for the summer, but once it got like this, as far as I’m concerned, everybody should migrate south.”
Erin forced a smile. She noticed Willie holding Vic’s arm protectively, as if afraid she might bolt if given the opportunity. Poor Willie. He was good to Vic and she’d never given him any reason to be concerned, but Willie was suffering from all of the attention she was getting.
Erin was exhausted after they got back from the tour, though it was only mid-afternoon. She hadn’t managed to get much sleep the night before. She suspected Terry and the others were feeling the same way. They all made their way toward the cabins without discussion. Erin wanted nothing more than to lie down and go to sleep. Maybe for the rest of the night. She was feeling bruises she hadn’t known she had sustained in the attack the night before, and her muscles ached like she had been doing a strenuous workout. She assumed it was fighting off her attacker the night before that had left her feeling so sore and fatigued.
“I am going to be so glad to just sleep normally one night,” she told Terry, as he unlocked the door.
K9 burst into a volley of barks. Erin saw that there was someone in the cabin and let out a shriek, sure that it was either her attacker or Vic’s burglar, having returned to finish the job. Terry held his hand out to block her from entering the room, his other hand automatically going to his hip. Erin withdrew, not wanting to get caught in any crossfire if the invader was armed. Willie let out a shout and ran over to help Terry out. But they both stopped in the doorway, and didn’t go in to arrest the person who had broken in.
Terry started speaking in a soothing voice, holding his hands up and giving K9 the order to be silent. K9 stopped barking, but still appeared threatening, teeth bared.
Willie withdrew, stepping back from the room. “You might have better luck here,” he told Erin.
“What? Who is it? What’s going on?”
He motioned for her to go in. Erin peered into the room to see what was going on. She saw a tiny woman cowering in the corner of the room, her entire body shaking. She sobbed and held her hands up in front of her face protectively. Erin’s fight-or-flight response ebbed. She stepped into the room and moved slowly toward the woman.
“Hey. Who are you? What happened? Did you get confused about which room was yours?”
Getting closer, she could smell the cleaning fluids that clung to the woman’s clothes and hair. She took in the light linen uniform, loosely fitted around the woman’s slim form, her brown skin, and her Asian features. Clearly, she wasn’t a passenger who had somehow found her way into the wrong room, but a maid who had been cleaning the room and been frightened by K9’s threats.
“It’s okay,” Erin soothed again, reading out to touch the woman. “It’s fine. We didn’t mean to startle you. You’re just cleaning, right?” Erin pointed to the little plastic caddy of spray and squirt bottles and assorted rags and brushes. “You’re cleaning?”
The woman nodded. Tears still ran down her face, but she seemed to be more confident with Erin than she had been when confronted by the two men.
“I’m sorry. We didn’t mean to scare you like that. You didn’t do anything wrong. We just didn’t expect there to be anyone in our room.”
The woman said something in her own language. Erin didn’t understand a word. She shook her head.
“English. Do you know English?”
The woman shook her head impatiently and tried again. Erin thought she recognized a few words of Spanish, but she wasn’t sure.
“I don’t speak that either. Do you know any English?”
The woman began patting her pockets, and eventually tried to push herself up from where she had collapsed in the corner. Erin reached down and helped to pull her up. The woman was older than Erin had thought from her smooth, unlined face. She was tiny and bent over. She immediately grabbed her cleaning caddy and thrust it toward Erin.
“I know, I know. You’re just cleaning,” Erin said. “I understand. I’m sorry we bothered you.”
The woman again patted her pockets as if looking for something. She shook her head at Erin. “Boss say to clean room,” she said in thick, broken English. “No food and no money until they all clean.”
Erin nodded encouragingly. “You were assigned to clean these rooms. I get it. You can finish. We’ll… we’ll go into my friend’s cabin while you finish this one.”
She looked at Terry for his agreement. Terry looked at her, shaking his head. “No… I don’t want anything in here touched. There may be evidence that we don’t want to lose. The assault last night, we didn’t look for any stray hairs or fibers. We shoul
d try to collect whatever trace we can…”
“Oh.” Erin hadn’t thought about that. She looked at the little woman again. “I’m sorry. I guess we don’t want the room cleaned at all.” She tried to give the woman a few coins from her pocket. “We don’t need you to do anything.”
The woman’s hand closed around the money and quickly transferred it to a pocket, but she shook her head. “Have to clean.” She motioned to her surroundings. “No cleaning, no money.”
Terry bent down to pick up a piece of paper that had been left on the writing desk. Erin thought it must be one of her lists, and Terry clearly thought so too, but then he looked down at the paper, frowning. He looked back up at Erin.
“Oh, no…”
Chapter Thirty
W
hat is it?”
He held the paper back from her, but Erin reached farther and took it from his hand. She looked down at it. Her cabin number. Vic and Willie’s cabin number. One on a deck that she didn’t recognize. Then a few more words scribbled at the bottom that were apparently written in the woman’s native language.
“What’s wrong?” Erin asked. “I don’t understand.”
“This is our cabin, Vic and Willie’s cabin, and the captain’s cabin.”
Erin nodded. “So you’re saying that we’re getting special treatment? Like the captain?”
“I’m saying… someone gave this woman orders to clean the cabins that might contain evidence from the captain’s death.”
“But you wouldn’t have put it in Vic and Willie’s—”
“They know we’re all friends. You and Vic are together all the time. They know that I could end up over there, talking with them, maybe ask them to do me a favor and put something in their safe or in their fridge. As a misdirection, or just because mine was full.”
“But who would do that?”
“Someone trying to cover up a murder.”
“Oh. Oh, no.”
Terry held the paper out to the woman. “Have you already done these other rooms? Is ours last or first? Did you clean this room up?” he tapped the captain’s cabin number with his finger, looking at her sternly.
The woman was obviously terrified of him. She shrank back, breaking into a long stream of foreign words to express her alarm. She ran for the door, and Terry blocked her. “No, you don’t. Stay here. Talk to me.”
“I get son,” the woman said. “I get son to tell you.”
“We’ll go together. You’re not going anywhere by yourself.”
The woman needed this fact repeated several times before she finally seemed to understand. She nodded and indicated with a motion that they would all go together. She grabbed Erin’s hand and walked with her, but she wouldn’t get close to Terry. Willie ducked out of the way, going to his cabin to update Vic on what was happening. Erin squeezed the woman’s hand warmly.
“You do a great job around here,” she told the maid. “I rarely ever see any of the cleaners or the other staff, but the ship is always spotless. Ship shape. You do good work.”
The woman bowed to her and kept moving. Erin walked along with her, and the woman led her unerringly to a younger man who was working on a vending machine, repairing something wrong with the inner workings. At the woman’s burst of words, he looked up at her. He saw Erin holding her hand and looked immediately alarmed.
“What is wrong?” he demanded. “What do you think she did? She wouldn’t do anything wrong. She wouldn’t do anything to make any inconvenience for you.”
Terry spoke to the man. “She isn’t in trouble. There’s just a communication barrier. She said that we could talk through you.”
“Why? What is going on?”
“I need to know whether she has already cleaned this other room or not.” Terry held up the note with the cabin numbers on it and indicated the captain’s.
The man’s eyes flicked over the note and then to his mother. He spoke to her rapidly, looking back at Terry and Erin a couple of times to make sure that they didn’t understand what he was asking her. They seemed to be arguing about something. The man eventually shrugged at Terry.
“She has finished the other rooms. She is sorry that she was still in your room when you returned. She did not know that she was going to be done so quickly. If you wish to go and sit in the lounge or the restaurant and have a coffee, she will be finished, and it will be fresh for you.”
“She’s already cleaned the other rooms?”
The man nodded. “Yes. All done. And yours will be done soon, I promise.”
Terry groaned. “That cabin was a crime scene. If she’s cleaned it, then she’s destroyed all kinds of evidence. Who gave her these instructions?”
The man spoke to his mother. Their conversation grew increasingly heated. The woman kept shaking her head.
“I don’t know who gave her these instructions,” the man said. “I will try to find out. She will freshen your room and then you can rest and relax.”
“I don’t want my room cleaned. I need to know where those instructions came from. Someone is trying to hide evidence.”
“No, nobody do that. It’s just an accident. She should have done yours first. Soon it will be taken care of.”
“No. She doesn’t need to clean my room.”
The man bowed to Terry, pressing forward as if he needed to explain something important to him. “You must let her clean the room,” he insisted. “If she does not clean the room, she doesn’t get any money or any food. She must do it!”
Terry looked at Erin. They had heard this explanation from the old woman as well. “She won’t get any money or food? What do you mean by that?”
The man looked at him as if he were crazy. He spread his hands wide. “Food. She needs food to stay alive. They don’t give her much because she is so old. She doesn’t get much money to buy the things she needs. If she loses her pay, she will die! You want to kill an old woman?”
“What do you mean? They have to pay her for her job. They can’t withhold money, and they certainly can’t withhold food. Who told her that?”
“That is the way it works here,” the man insisted. He looked around as if worried someone might overhear them. “We must work hard for food and money. Many of us support families back home. We just eat what we can and send all of our money home to our villages. It is hard to make very much money.”
“They have to pay you a proper wage,” Terry said, shaking his head in disbelief. “They can’t withhold her pay. If she’s working here, they have to pay her.”
The man shook his head. “If she doesn’t do everything they say, they will not give her anything.”
“Who is your boss? Or her boss? Who is it that handles payroll on the ship?”
The man looked frightened. “You must not talk to them. We want to keep our jobs. You will make them take away our jobs, and then we will starve and our families will starve. They need the money that we send to them. My own children are grown, but they have children who are still small. My mother and I both send them money to live. You cannot take that away. She would rather die than stop sending money to her grandchildren.”
“Nobody is going to die,” Erin reassured. She looked at Terry. “Do you think they’ve really been told that the cruise line will let them die if they don’t do everything they are told?” she asked in almost a whisper.
“At this point… I wouldn’t put it past them. If they are murdering to cover their tracks…”
Erin smiled reassuringly at the man. “How many people work here like you do? How many people are from your country?”
The man’s eyes went wide. “There are many of us. I don’t know how many. There is much work to be done in a ship like this.”
“There must be,” Erin agreed. “I saw a few of them in the kitchen when I was there with Chef Kirschoff. And if they are the ones who clean the cabins and keep everything well-organized…”
The man’s eyes widened at the mention of Chef Kirschoff’s name. He made a little bow,
anxious and trying to withdraw from the conversation.
“I have been watching the crew members, but the other support staff are nearly invisible,” Terry said slowly. “But how could they run a ship like this on the small number of crew they employ? There is a lot of work to be done.”
“How do we find out? If you talk to the first mate, what would he tell you? He would just obfuscate, wouldn’t he?”
Terry nodded. He looked at their interpreter. “You need to show me.”
“Show you?”
“Show me where you sleep. Where your rooms are. I want to get an idea of how many others there are. Are you all being paid such low wages? So low that it is hard to survive?”
The man was beginning to see that he had caused more problems than he had solved with his claim. He shook his head. “It’s okay. I will look after my mother. She’s such a silly woman. I’m sorry that she interrupted your vacation.”
“No.” Terry put his hand on the man’s arm. “I need to see what you’re talking about. This isn’t right, and I can get things fixed so that you can make better money and not have to worry about your mother starving or not having any money to send to your grandchildren.”
“No. I should not have said anything. She should not have said anything. I should have just kept my mouth shut. We are sorry for the inconvenience.”
The man was bowing and trying to pull away. “No, no, please. We have work to do. You go back to your cabin. You enjoy your vacation. We will not disturb you again.”
He eventually managed to squirm away from Terry and backed a few steps away. Terry had no authority and couldn’t detain the man against his will if he decided to leave.
“We need to find out what’s going on here,” Terry said. “You take K9. Go back and get Willie. I’m going to find out where these immigrants are being housed and see if I can get an idea of what’s been going on.”
“Okay.” Erin did as he asked her to, leaving Terry with the mother and son duo. She hurried to get back to her cabin to explain to Willie what was going on and to see if he could help.
Vegan Baked Alaska (Auntie Clem's Bakery Book 9) Page 18
