Cruise Ship Cozy Mysteries 11 - Cruise Control

by A. R. Winters

  I couldn’t figure out who was yelling what.

  “I demand something to bar my room to stop the murderers from getting in.” The entire room was devolving into sheer chaos.

  “This whole ship is a disaster. You’re a disaster. You’re all disasters!” Until one usually calm, kind man unleashed the beast we didn’t expect him to have.

  “ENOUGH!”

  His voice thundered, fire in his eyes, as he managed to stare down everyone in the room simultaneously.

  The captain had finally decided to speak. “We’re going to be quiet, sit down, and figure this out like the rational adults we are. Or the rational adults we should be.”

  A fierce declaration was all that was needed to restore order.

  “You need to stop this holier than thou attitude, LightningBlossom people,” the captain stated. “One of your people is responsible for this. This is a fact.”

  “That’s absurd of you to accuse us of such things.” Sebastian was raising his voice once more.

  “No. It is not absurd. You executives have your own little corner of the ship. You all hate each other to varying degrees. And random murders from people we do not know? This does not happen outside of freak circumstances. People murder people they know, Mr. Hawk. Both of the dead are among your people, so it’s clear to me that your people are the ones who brought this plague onto our ship.”

  For as dumb as his original theory was earlier, the captain was speaking the truth now. Maybe he wasn’t good at the details, but he could yell in the right direction.

  Unfortunately, being angry in the right direction was all I had definitively. All of them were suspicious. Greedy, opportunistic, prone to anger, willing to tank their peers’ names to prop themselves up. They would happily frame some of the others if it got them what they wanted.

  All of them were untrustworthy, and all of them were still suspects.

  “Well?” Sebastian said, his arms crossed.

  “Well, what?” the captain fired back.

  “Are you going to throw an actual accusation? Offer an explanation of what happened? Or is it your turn to act holier than thou against us?”

  The captain looked at Ethan, and then at me. Ethan shook his head, and I followed suit. I was never one to act unless I was absolutely sure. A false accusation was something I had accidentally done before, and it felt awful to throw that at someone who truly didn’t deserve the negativity targeted at them.

  “When the internet finally comes back on, or maybe when we finally get back to shore,” Sebastian announced, “I’m going to have a very long talk with the company’s lawyers. You have until then to convince me not to throw every bit of LightningBlossom’s deep coffers into suing Swan into absolute oblivion.”

  The captain stood tall.

  “All of you. With me,” Sebastian said, calling out his people. They filed out of the room one by one.

  Kelly rushed toward the captain as soon as the coast was clear. “That was so brave of you, standing up to all of them like that.”

  The captain’s face shifted from military man sternness to country boy ‘oh shucks’ in a second flat. “You know how it is. They drill you to be a man. But you don’t want to be crass like that. You want to be a kind person. But sometimes, you know, you gotta give them the bull and the horns.”

  “I don’t know if that tone is all bad…” Kelly trailed off.

  “Right,” I said. “Should we show ourselves out before this gets too lovey-dovey?”

  “I don’t know,” Sam added. “I put up with you talking like this to Ethan all the time.”

  I glared at Sam.

  “What? It’s cute, and I’m kind of jealous.”

  The three of us saw ourselves out of the captain’s cabin anyway.

  “Well,” Sam said, splitting from us further, “I probably should go and see what I can do to calm them all down, before they start taking pitchforks and torches to the captain in mutiny.”

  “Pitchforks?” I smiled. “Where do you get a pitchfork on a cruise ship?”

  “I don’t know. But if they give up on finding those and decide to use only the torches, then we still have trouble.”

  We had a healthy supply of the tiki variety, and they were perfectly capable of igniting things, a fact that the poor captain knew all too well.

  Sam parted from us, leaving me alone with Ethan. Unfortunately, Ethan didn’t want to talk about fun stuff. “The cameras being down. That’s what makes all of this messy. We could have solved this in a minute if we had them,” I said.

  “Well, yes, but why obsess over what we don’t have?”

  “Because I think our hint is whoever convinced Vernon that no cameras was a good idea. Corporate is well aware of the liability issues, so Vernon must have fought hard about it, so it was something he staunchly believed in. Have you ever heard of people being so superstitiously afraid of video cameras, of all things?”

  We strolled down the hallways, showing no haste to get wherever we were going. I was rubbing my chin as we went, trying to brainstorm with Ethan. “I had a Native American friend in high school. He told me that some of the older members of his tribe thought a photograph would steal your soul. I don’t know how that applies to video, and it seems very troublesome to keep up in the modern day. It’s one of those traditions that’s in a few other religions too, but it gets pushed aside because it’s impractical.”

  “Vernon is this big tech superstar, right? He has to get used to being on camera. Do you think his offices literally have no security cameras as well? I doubt he had them running for only four hours a day. Or what about all those interviews he did, in front of cameras?”

  “This cruise was meant to be a total detoxification, as he put it.”

  Ethan shook his head. “He can’t be that stubborn. Someone encouraged him to this level, if only for this trouble. Did that shaman he was rambling about want him dead?”

  “And lose his best source of income? Let’s not be silly, Ethan.”

  “How judgmental you’re being of a spiritual man, Addy.” He grinned. “What do you say we take a break and head down to the buffet? It’s about that time of day.”

  “You’re asking me if I want food? I thought you knew me better than that!”

  Staff on the ship usually ate in the staff canteen, although once in a while I used my social media work to eat at the various restaurants on board. Tonight, my gut agreed with Ethan that it was a buffet night.

  There was still no internet, and I figured the ship’s executives had to be stressed out of their minds about all of this. With few vices, it was with time that I hoped I accidentally ran into another lead in the evening.

  Hanging around the food and booze was as good of a way to hedge my bets as anything.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  O peration Look For Leads didn’t serve me well at the Buffet. Maybe because I was too busy stuffing my face with spaghetti, but not a single executive came down there. They either chose the Captain’s Club or were skipping dinner for whatever reason. It was something that I personally would never understand people doing, especially when they had such options available to sate their appetites.

  I enjoyed my time with Ethan, but we decided to split up to look for our leads, remembering to not stray off alone, staying cautious until we solved that pesky murderer problem.

  After dinner time had passed though, the ship took an eerie turn. Everything felt too quiet. Fewer people, that was something I was aware of. No kids causing chaos also greatly decreased the feeling of life on the ship. The empty hallways made it feel like some super immaculate ghost ship. With two actual ghosts.

  The cocktail bar at least had some people in it. The bartender, and a few LightningBlossom employees, were favoring harder drinks. You’d think obviously with a cocktail bar, but they had a supply of beers on tap just like Hemingway’s because way too many folks had walked up and asked for beer anyway. The customer was always right, even when it went against the theme of th
e establishment.

  What caught my eye though was Benedict Jones. He was sitting alone at a table, a wine bottle there, and a glass half full. He insisted on drinking it all fancy-like, underhand grasped, taking in the bouquet, then gulping it down. I thought wine connoisseurs were supposed to sip, but I supposed he also wanted to get drunk, so he had to compromise somewhere.

  “Is this seat taken?” I asked, grabbing a glass of water from the bartender to blend in more with the people at the bar. Maybe he’d be talkative. Maybe he’d spill some useful info. I hadn’t really grilled him either outside his whole tell me each and everything he did that night spiel.

  “Go right ahead. I’m not picky about my company at the moment.”

  With no protest, I sat down. “Why so glum?”

  “My friend is dead, my boss is dead. Maybe this is how I grieve.”

  “You didn’t seem to like Vernon too much. Guess Ivan was different?”

  He nodded, swishing around his wine some. “Not like he was my best friend, though. More of an acquaintance. Fellow wine connoisseur, but he could never sip like a dignified man. Would gulp it down and then move onto vodka soon enough.”

  “And you and Vernon?”

  “We all were irritated with him. Believe me, I didn’t want the man dead or anything, but he had his head up his… you know. With all this mystical stuff.”

  I sipped my glass. I liked the ship’s water. I knew it wasn’t supposed to have a taste, but something was refreshing about it. “Yeah, he turned off all the cameras. Pretty annoying for us when we’re trying to settle this.”

  “The funny thing? That wasn’t even Vernon’s idea. He never cared about the cameras for the longest time. But a few weeks before this trip? Ivan told him that cameras are vampires and suck out your life energy. Only the most sensitive of people could pick this up, he said, and turns out, Vernon had achieved the level of consciousness needed to sense it as soon as he was told about it.”

  That left me confused. Ivan seemed tech savvy and never one to believe such nonsense. Not to mention I was hoping this would give me insight on who the killer is. Ivan was a victim, and Benedict was telling me he had signed his own killer’s getaway plan. “Why on earth would Ivan tell Vernon that? Didn’t the mystical stuff annoy him like it did everyone else?”

  He took another big swig of his wine. “Beats me. Maybe he thought it was funny watching Vernon flip out. It could’ve been the first step in a long line of making Vernon believe more and more nonsense. But who knows? We can’t exactly know a dead man’s intentions, can we?”

  I ran my finger around the lip of my glass. It was an odd joke to play. My best guess was that he was trying to drive Vernon crazy with more and more off the wall conspiracy theories until he stopped being a cult leader and started being a CEO again.

  “How’s the rest of the company taking it? Sebastian seems to be loving the opportunity.”

  “Oh, him? Yeah. He’s been grooming himself for the job for a while. I don’t know if he was expecting shareholders to vote Vernon out once the IPO was sold, or maybe he thought Vernon would up and leave and go on some pilgrimage in the Himalayas or whatever, never to return. I don’t think he planned on him being strangled on a cruise ship.”

  It was definitely a way to make his goals become a reality though, and I couldn’t ignore that. He wasn’t here at first, but that didn’t make it impossible for him to be involved. He could have easily hired someone to do his dirty work. Ivan, though, was the nagging flaw in that theory.

  Benedict continued his rant about his peers, swinging his glass around as he spoke. “Monica, that’s a girl drinking the same Kool-Aid as Vernon. Probably trying to contact the dead in some absurd ritual if I had any bet. Kayleigh? She’s a cold one. Pretty sure she hates me, hated Vernon, and hates everyone else.”

  “And what about John Heaven?”

  “Him? Good egg. Got us all started. Consider him a friend. Not much to gossip about with him, because what’s there to gossip about?”

  I leaned in. “I heard he wasn’t too stoked that Vernon’s company was becoming bigger than his. That maybe he wanted to sabotage LightningBlossom.”

  “First time I’ve ever heard of any of that.” He then grinned, increasing his smugness tenfold. “If you want dirt on John, why don’t you go ask his daughter?”

  “You mean Holly? Yeah, she’s my intern for this trip. She’s a nice girl.”

  “Wait, you know?” His features collapsed, him utterly crestfallen at my knowledge of what was supposed to be a juicy bit of gossip. “You’re no fun.”

  “I’m a good detective. Sorry.”

  He finished off his current glass, slammed it down, then poured more. “What do I care about little secrets, anyway? I’m going to be a millionaire in a few weeks.”

  “There you are!” Sam called out to me, walking up with Cece at her flank. “When do you hang out in the cocktail bar?”

  “I’m over twenty-one. I can hang out here drinking water if I want to.”

  “Or no, maybe a billionaire. Now a trillionaire, that might be impossible.”

  “Wait, you can become a billionaire?” Cece said, sitting down across from Benedict. “For just doing stuff with computers?”

  “Yes?” Benedict said. “It’s a new market. Bit of a wild west. Be an innovator, be the first, or make some drastic improvement, and you’ll be at the top of the mountain in no time.”

  Cece’s eyes were wide as she heard him out. “I had no idea you guys were so loaded.”

  “We aren’t yet. Soon though, in the silver lining of this chaos, Sebastian will put out our IPO and then I’ll be fabulously wealthy beyond my wildest dreams. If I play my cards right, I’ll be able to buy my own superyacht with billions to spare. Or maybe an island. Yes.”

  “Cece, why have your eyes turned into big dollar signs?” Sam had a sarcastic glint in her as she stared down her friend. It was an exaggeration, of course, but Cece was liking what she was hearing.

  “The Isle of Benedict,” Benedict continued, his hands spreading out like what he was saying would turn into a banner. “Or The Isle of Dr. Jones. I could be a mysterious figure. But I would have to get a doctorate from somewhere.”

  “Right. Nice talking to you, Dr. Jones,” I said, patting him on the shoulder.

  “My own castle. No. A palace…”

  He didn’t seem to be paying me much mind, fully immersed in his own fantasy of fabulous wealth.

  “Cece, let’s go,” Sam said, pulling her friend’s hand.

  “But I want to hear what other awesome stuff I can buy with a billion dollars.”

  “Cece, I’m sure you could think of a billion more tasteful things to do with a billion dollars than this guy ever could.”

  “Or, maybe, make the island my own country and crown myself King,” Benedict continued ranting. Just mentioning all of this to himself was enough to set him off. “No, Emperor! Emperor Benedict I, his royal absolute majesty.”

  “Okay. Thanks for the short chat, weird rich dude.” Cece saluted him and then finally joined me and Sam in retreating from the cocktail bar.

  “This is hardly the first rich person you’ve met on this ship, Cece,” I said as he headed through the ship’s corridors.

  “Well, it’s the first one where it aligned with a career I could see myself in. The guy’s thoughts were tacky, but I liked the roots of them. Imagine, Empress Cece,” she mimicked Benedict’s hand gesture of a massive banner in front of her.

  “I think someone in history already has that name. Or something that sounds like it, anyway. Should be more distinct. Your own thing.”

  “That’s, like, my actual name though. I need a proper regal title, Addy. If not Empress, then what? Queen is a step down, and that’s not gonna fly.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  “T his ship seems so utterly devoid of life,” Sam mused, making the same diagnosis I had earlier.

  She, Cece, and I were enjoying the peace and quiet of the mo
ment, relaxing near the pool in lounge chairs. The sun had begun to set.

  “I know what you mean, Sam,” I said. “I’m used to little kids running around. Passengers out and about, someone being obnoxious and rude. Plus, you know, just the feeling that every passenger in the ship isn’t sitting in their cabin and reading a book instead of doing anything interesting that you can only do on a cruise ship.”

  “They’re nerds without internet, Addy.” Cece leaned back, resting her head on her clasped hands. “It’s the nerdiest thing you can do without a computer.”

  “No, no,” Sam shot up, straddling her chair. “Nothing to do with any of that.”

  “Oh, I see. You’re mourning poor Vernon because apparently, no one else is.”

  “Not that either. The light of my life… He’s not here on the ship, being my sun,” Sam was overacting with her words. “Oh, how long must I go without you, my crush?”

  “Is not having the water aerobics guy here really that painful?”

  Sam’s shoulders bowed. “It is when I keep seeing you and Addy enjoying the company of very kind and loving gentlemen, and I remain here. Alone. Neglected. Unloved.”

  Cece stood up and patted her on the back. “There, there. If it makes you feel any better, I’m not spending as much time as I’d like with mine. Ryan spends more time with dead bodies than my very alive self.”

  “Ryan can only take so much of your heat, Cece,” I said. “Sometimes you need to take a breath before you can go back into the kitchen and really appreciate it.”

  “I guess spending time in the morgue is one way to relax. Your answer is acceptable, Addy, as you pointed out in some abstract way that I am indeed, very, very hot.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I meant. Of course I did.”

  Heavy footsteps on the wood came up behind us. “Ms. Blake, I finished all the rooms.”

  “Ms. Blake?” Sam said, cocking an eyebrow.

  I smiled. “Holly kept trying to call me Ms. Addy, but I tried to break her habit. I’m guessing Cece has no inclination to stop him herself.”