Deadly Cruise: A Humorous Cruise Ship Cozy Mystery (Cruise Ship Cozy Mysteries Book 7)

by A. R. Winters

  “I know you’d never be dishonest with me.” He leaned forward and put on a mock stern face. “Right?”

  “Right. Do you know anything about Polly Stratton?”

  Ethan rubbed his chin before shaking his head.

  “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  I filled him in on what I knew about her and what Judd had told me. “But she did seem really nice when I met her. I’m sure she didn’t have anything to do with Zoya’s death.”

  Ethan tapped his chin again.

  “Even nice people can do stupid things when they get angry. And some people have a temper on them you wouldn’t believe until you experience it.”

  That was true. I just couldn’t imagine Polly getting that angry. But then I remembered the conversation she’d been having when she walked past me and Judd. She was irritated then. If her business was on the line…

  BZZZ.

  “Expecting visitors?”

  “Actually, yes. Ryan was going to drop by. It slipped my mind when you walked in.” Ethan used the intercom on his desk to tell the orderly who was stationed outside to let the doctor in.

  “I have that effect on you, huh?” I couldn’t keep the smile from my lips.

  “You sure do.”

  The door swung open, and Ryan walked in holding a knife. He wasn’t actually holding the knife; it was in a clear plastic bag that swung as he walked.

  The young doctor was wearing his white coat, though I was mildly disappointed he didn’t have a stethoscope hanging around his neck. Doctors should have one on them. All the time. That’s what years of TV does to you.

  “Come to carve a turkey?” I asked.

  He raised his eyebrows at me, before realizing I was joking and giving me a little snort of a laugh. I guess my joke was a little tasteless, given the circumstances.

  “I’ve examined the body, and I’m certain that this is what killed her. It was embedded in the body when she was found, and there are no other signs of serious injury. Although we don’t have a proper lab aboard, the blood samples I extracted confirm this isn’t a ruse—she’s dead because she got a knife in the back.”

  “Thanks, Ryan. Do you have anything else that could help?”

  “Actually—maybe. We might be able to get some prints off the handle.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Right. It’s not my area of expertise, but I’ve kept the knife in this bag and tried not to smudge the handle.”

  “Excellent. I’ll see what I can pull from it.”

  I was staring at the knife. It looked kind of familiar.

  “Could I see that a moment?”

  Ryan walked over to me and handed me the clear plastic bag by the top. I held it up in front of my eyes and peered at it intently.

  “You’re not trying to identify the fingerprints by sight, are you?” asked Ryan. From his tone, it only sounded like he was only half-joking. What did he think I was like?

  A puff of laughter came from between my lips.

  “No! Of course not. I was just thinking this knife looks familiar.”

  “Oh? Did you see someone waving it around?” asked Ethan with a slight smile and a teasing tone.

  “Actually… yes.”

  The two men stared at me.

  “During the first talk that was given by Tom Devlin, the critic. He actually swung a knife like this around when he was describing a scene from an old horror flick. I was far away so I can’t be sure, but it really did look like this one.”

  “Tom Devlin?” Ethan frowned. “He wasn’t the biggest fan of Zoya either, was he? I heard him talking about her at the big dinner.”

  “Right. He said a lot of mean things about her. But it sounded as if his dislike for her went back years—it would be odd for him to finally decide to do something about it now.”

  “He was drinking a lot that night.” Ethan had his eyes half-closed as he recalled the events of that night. “Once he and Judd got into the whiskey, they stopped making any kind of sense at all.” Ethan drummed his fingers on the desk. “I’ll speak to him. And it’d better be before we arrive in port tomorrow.”

  I’d forgotten about that. Almost all of the cruises I’d been on followed the same route, leaving from New Orleans before heading on to Cozumel and then either onto the other stops or back to New Orleans. If a murder suspect knew we were onto them, they could disappear when we were docked.

  Ryan said, “I’m going to leave you to it unless there’s anything else, Ethan? I’ve got a whole family with colds clogging up my sickbay. They’re convinced they’re dying of pneumonia.”

  “We won’t keep you. Let me know if you think of anything else.”

  “Will do. See you.”

  He waved to us both as he left the office, his long white doctor’s coat swishing in the air behind him.

  “Time for our ice cream break?” said Ethan with a schoolboy grin as soon as the doctor had departed.

  “I think it—”

  BZZZ.

  “—isn’t?”

  Ethan lowered his head to the desk and hit it with a soft thump.

  “Hey, I’m counting on those brains to help figure out what happened to Zoya.”

  He was smiling as he lifted his head again. Ethan used the intercom to talk to the orderly outside the office. We were informed there was a guest who wanted to speak to Ethan.

  “Send them in,” he said without enthusiasm.

  We waited patiently in comfortable silence for a few seconds. When the door opened, it was a nervous woman in her early thirties. She was wearing a baseball cap, and she had her black-and-blonde-streaked ponytail sticking out the back of it. She had on a T-shirt from a German soccer team and cargo shorts with big pockets.

  “Hello? Are you the security man?”

  Ethan stood up to greet her.

  “I am head of security, yes. Would you like to take a seat?” He gestured toward the seat next to mine.

  The woman came over and sat down.

  “So what can I do for you?”

  “My name’s Patsy Prince, and I’ve got some…” she turned and stared at me, as if unwilling to continue with me present.

  “It’s okay. Whatever you have to say, you can say in front of her. She’s staff. A senior manager.”

  Patsy looked relieved when she heard that I worked on board the ship and wasn’t another guest like her. It was nice that Ethan mentioned I was a senior manager. In a way, I suppose I was. I was definitely the most senior manager in the social media department, anyway. Never mind that I was the only employee in it.

  “The thing is… I’ve got some rather valuable jewelry. I wanted to know just how secure the room safes are.”

  Ethan nodded his head slowly as she spoke. “We’re honored that you’ve brought such wonderful jewelry with you on board our ship. I’m sure it will delight the other passengers during our formal events. The room safes are best-in-class, but they are, by their nature, not impervious to everything. Since they’re designed to fit inside our guests’ closets, they simply can’t be Fort Knox, as it were.

  “So, what we do have is a much bigger safe here in my office. While I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s a bank vault, it’s not far off. If you’d like to store your valuables in that safe, I can issue you with a receipt. I assure you that everything that goes in and out of it is thoroughly logged and checked. Only a few people have access to my office, and they have been thoroughly vetted. We also have CCTV cameras.”

  Patsy Prince was nodding the whole time Ethan was speaking, pleased to hear about the level of security available. With her almost scruffy, casual appearance, she didn’t seem like the kind of person who would have anything so valuable that it needed to be stored in an extra-secure safe. But I was probably just being snobby.

  “So what do you have?”

  The woman removed a small cloth bag from one of the pockets of her cargo shorts. Handy, I thought. You could get a lot of expensive gems and jewels in all those pockets.

&
nbsp; “In here is a diamond necklace. It used to belong to my grandmother before she…” she looked down.

  “I understand. If you’d like to hand it to me, you can watch me put it in the safe right now.”

  The woman stood up and walked over to Ethan’s desk, handing over the small bag. Ethan picked it up, and then he stood up and walked across the room to a large oil painting of an old wooden ship with a giant mast, complete with cannons.

  To my astonishment, he grabbed one side of the frame and pulled it, revealing that it was actually a kind of secret door. After seeing the painting move, I wasn’t surprised at what was behind—a large safe.

  “I had no idea!”

  Ethan chuckled. “I must have forgotten to give you the full tour of my office.”

  He certainly had. I stood up and joined the guest by the safe, while Ethan spun the dial back and forth at dizzying speed to put in the combination.

  With a final click, the door was unlocked, and Ethan let it swing open. The heavy door moved effortlessly through the air, on silent hinges unhindered by rust or any other contaminants.

  There wasn’t much inside. In fact, as far as I could tell, there was only one thing in the safe already, and my eyes lit up when I saw it. It was an old, carved wooden ring box.

  I hadn’t seen it in several months. Assuming nothing had changed, inside it was a ring that Ethan had picked up from a pawn shop during a cruise stop sometime earlier.

  When I first saw it, I had been devastated, thinking Ethan had bought the ring for some other girlfriend. But it turned out that he had purchased it after the captain of the ship had sold it. The ring in question had seemed to be of great interest to the mystery man who we had also been hunting.

  “Oh. Don’t your other guests use this safe?”

  “Sometimes. On this particular cruise, no one else has asked. The room safes are very solid, but if you truly care about your necklace, I recommend you leave it in here with me.”

  “Yes, I think I’ll do that. Please, put it inside.”

  Ethan did as requested and then closed the safe door, spun the dial again, and pushed the picture back into its original position. When it was back in place, it was impossible to tell that it could move.

  I reached out and tugged on the edge of the frame. But the door didn’t want to cooperate. The picture didn’t budge.

  “There’s a catch,” said Patsy. “Just there.” She reached to the side of the painting and pushed her index finger behind the frame, lifting it as she pulled. The picture swung open again.

  “Eagle eye.” Ethan sounded impressed by the woman, and I felt just the teeniest bit jealous of her. I didn’t really have a lot of experience with secret safes and paintings that swung away from the wall.

  “Let me write you a receipt, and then when you need to get the necklace back you can make an appointment with my orderly outside, send an email, or call the number that’s on the receipt. Is that all right with you?”

  “Perfect. Thank you very much!”

  When Patsy Prince was gone, Ethan stretched his arms up and yawned.

  “What a day. Let’s get that ice cream, and then I’m going to hunt down Tom Devlin and see what he has to say.”

  “Sounds like a plan. You know, you should put your detective outfit back on.”

  “It would suit what I’m doing. But I’m not sure they’d take me seriously if I was dressed like that while trying to solve a murder. What happened to your reporter’s outfit? It was cute.”

  “Umm, I forgot?”

  Ethan laughed.

  “Oh, actually,” I said, “before we go. There’s one more thing.”

  Ethan sat back down again now and I saw him trying not to sigh as he did so.

  “Are you sighing?”

  “No, ma’am, not me. I’d never sigh when you wanted to talk to me.”

  “Yeah, you’d better not. Every word I say is a gem.”

  He nodded in agreement. “A glittering jewel worthy of my secret safe.”

  “And that’s what I wanted to speak to you about.”

  “You want me to buy you jewels?”

  Yes!

  “No. But I saw the ring box in the safe. That is the same ring, right?”

  “Yes…” Ethan sounded hesitant.

  On the last cruise, I had suggested a plan to him to try and draw out our mystery guest, and maybe even catch the captain doing something he shouldn’t be.

  “Let me wear it. Come on. We’re no closer to catching the fake housekeeper guy, or the captain. If I’m seen with it, we’ll draw them out, and then BAM!”

  “You’re going to shoot them?”

  “No! You’re going to jump on them and arrest them.”

  “I will. I’ll arrest anyone who so much as looks at your jewelry.”

  “Really?”

  “We’ll see. Let me think about it a bit more. After what’s happened to you in the past… I don’t want to risk your safety.”

  “I’m a grown-up, Ethan. How about you let me decide whether I want to risk my safety or not?”

  He sighed and nodded at me. “Let’s go get that ice cream. We’ll talk about it more later.”

  That was further than we’d gotten before, since he didn’t immediately shoot me down this time. I could tell he was going to agree to my plan. He just didn’t know it yet.

  Chapter Eleven

  We strolled to the ice cream shop, walking so close that our arms were touching the whole time. Since he was in uniform, and so was I, we didn’t hold hands.

  It was actually written in the employee rulebook—no public displays of affection among unmarried staff. And married ones were instructed to make sure they behaved ‘decently’ in public. The book didn’t explain what ‘decently’ actually meant.

  Curious person that I am—it’s why I originally wanted to be a reporter—I had asked HR during my training what they meant by ‘behave decently.’ They informed me that it was ‘about what you would expect.’ Which didn’t help me much, since I had no idea what to expect.

  Ethan would probably know. But I wasn’t about to ask him since we weren’t even officially a couple. Asking about how much making out we would be allowed to do if we were married seemed a bit premature.

  The ice cream shop was called Two Scoops, and despite the fact it wasn’t all that big, a large screen television had been set up to play romantic comedy movies from morning until dusk. Gilt and Gold Movies had really gone all out on this cruise.

  When we got there, we chose a booth, sat down, and took some time to consider the menu before ordering. I decided what I wanted before Ethan. Actually, there were half a dozen things I wanted, but I decided to only tell Ethan the top of my list. I didn’t want him thinking I was greedy.

  “I’ll have two scoops of chocolate caramel crunch.”

  “Two?” he said raising an eyebrow.

  “Have you never been here before?”

  “How did you know that?” He sounded surprised that I could tell he hadn’t been there.

  I pointed at the big painted slogan on the white wall beside us. It read, ‘We Don’t Know the Meaning of the Word One.’ He peered at it, seemingly even more confused.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that their smallest order is two scoops. You can’t order one. So I’m actually ordering the smallest thing on the menu.”

  “Ohhh,” he said. “And here I was thinking you must have missed lunch.”

  Yeah, right. Miss lunch? Me? Did he know me at all?

  “I did only eat a small lunch. And it was an early one too.”

  “I guess I’ll get myself two scoops too.”

  “Four scoops?”

  “No, I mean—”

  “I know. I’m just kidding.”

  While Ethan went up to order, I stared out the window. There was a Julia Roberts movie playing in the background on the big television, but we weren’t sitting close enough to it for me to really pay attention to it.

/>   When Ethan returned, he had a tray to carry the two bowls with two scoops each, two spoons, and a small stack of napkins. He set it down in the middle of the table.

  “Is that vanilla?” I asked him.

  “Yep. It’s my favorite.”

  “Really?” I asked, surprised. Who chooses vanilla as their favorite ice cream?

  “Yes. Well, no, not usually. I like it when it’s made with actual, real vanilla beans, not the fake stuff. Usually when you get vanilla it’s some boring, flavorless extract. But the girl at the counter assured me it was handmade from the finest vanilla pods.” He shrugged and stuck his spoon in, lifting up a sample. “Want to try?”

  Like he needed to ask. I always avoided vanilla because I thought it was boring, but now that Ethan mentioned that it was his favorite, I was suddenly desperate to give it another try.

  I wrapped my mouth around the spoon and was surprised by how powerful the flavor of the ice cream was. He was right; it wasn’t boring. The flavor was far more complex than I’d ever given it credit for, with a richness I had no idea the flavor could provide. It was downright delicious.

  “Say… don’t suppose you want to trade a scoop with me?” I asked, grinning.

  “Sure thing.” He stuck his spoon back into his bowl, and he lifted up the scoop that was still whole and got it into my bowl without dropping it. I spooned over one of my dark brown ones, and we happily began to work our way through them.

  Ethan must have been hungry, because he ate his ice cream almost as fast as I did.

  “Which one was your favorite?” I asked him.

  “Your chocolate one was good, but I think just one scoop of that’s enough. Gets a bit rich. But I could eat that vanilla all day long.”

  “I think you might be onto something.” He was right; the chocolate one was rich. But to be honest, I could eat either of them all day long. And into the evening. And…

  “Hold on.” The relaxed romantic feeling of our date melted away as Ethan hurried to his feet and rushed off.

  I turned to watch him, curious and a little wary as to what had just happened.

  As he rushed out of the shop, the bell above the door dinged. I twisted my head again to look out the window, and I saw him chase someone down outside. Even before that person turned around, I could tell from the scruffy appearance who it was: Tom Devlin.