Death on the Aegean Queen

by Maria Hudgins

  Death on the Aegean Queen

  A Dotsy Lamb Travel Mystery

  Maria Hudgins

  Copyright © 2010 by Maria Hudgins

  All rights reserved.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by an electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  First Edition

  First Printing: May 2010

  Published in 2010 in conjunction with Tekno Books and Ed Gorman.

  Set in 11 pt. Plantin.

  Printed in the United States on permanent paper.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  (attached)

  Dedication

  For Nelson and Aquilla Bible

  Cast of Characters

  (in order of their appearance)

  Dotsy Lamb—Ancient history professor from Virginia and an archaeology buff

  Lettie Osgood—Librarian from Virginia and Dotsy’s frequent travel companion

  Ollie Osgood—Lettie’s husband. Back home he’s a building contractor

  Marco Quattrocchi—Carabinieri captain from Florence. He and Dotsy haven’t seen each other since she and Lettie went to Italy three years ago

  George Gaskill—Car salesman from Indiana

  Kathryn Gaskill—George’s wife

  Luc Girard—Famous archaeologist and resident lecturer on the Aegean Queen

  Malcolm Stone—Antiques dealer from England

  Willem Leclercq—Belgian home designer/architect

  Demopoulis—Junior officer in ship security

  Letsos—Chief of ship security

  Constantinos Tzedakis—Captain of the ship

  David Bondurant—FBI agent from U.S. Embassy in Athens

  Brittany Benson—Pennsylvania native and member of ship’s dance troupe

  Sophie Antonakos—Another member of the dance troupe, from northern Greece

  Nikos Papadakos—The ship’s photographer

  Lieutenant Dimitris Villas—Policeman from the island of Mykonos

  Nigel Endicott—Mysterious passenger from Vermont

  Ernestine and Heather Ziegler—Mother and daughter from Chicago

  Goatman—Hygienically challenged man who is following Dotsy

  Robert Segal—Brittany Benson’s boyfriend

  Chapter One

  “Why do we have to go to that voodoo island?”

  Lettie Osgood glared at me as if I were in charge of the itinerary. In a few minutes a tugboat would pull our ship, the Aegean Queen, out of Piraeus Harbor on the south side of Athens. The Greek sun glanced off my sunglasses, warmed the top of my head.

  Lettie, her husband Ollie, and I leaned over the rail of the Poseidon Deck and looked down on the heads of late-arriving passengers as they tugged their wheeled carry-ons up the gangway. We were waiting for Marco, a friend of mine from Italy. I had starved off seven pounds and bought new clothes in preparation for this cruise, inspired daily by my “Greek Islands” desk calendar and the photo Marco had stuck into a Christmas card. A picture of himself and me at the Coliseum in Rome.

  “What voodoo island?” My brain returned to the present.

  “The brochure says ‘day seven, Santeria.’ Didn’t you read your brochure, Dotsy?”

  “Santeria?”

  “Santeria is just another word for voodoo, and I don’t care what you say, zombies are real!” Lettie scowled at me.

  “It’s Santorini, Lettie,” Ollie said. “Not Santeria.”

  I bit my lip.

  “Santorini used to be Atlantis, scientists believe.” Ollie’s voice had taken on a scholarly tone. “Then it disappeared beneath the waves.”

  “So what’s for us to visit?”

  It promised, I thought, to be a great trip.

  Lettie leaned over the rail and pointed. “That man is going the wrong way.”

  I found the man she was pointing to, a rather bow-legged guy in a red-and-yellow sport shirt and Bermuda shorts. He was weaving aggressively through the oncoming foot traffic. Bumping shoulders and dodging suitcases like a tight end with the football. “He’s probably been seeing someone off and he’s trying to get back ashore before they pull up the gangway.”

  “They weren’t letting anyone but ticketed passengers through security,” Ollie said. “If he isn’t going with us, how did he get past the guards?”

  On the deck behind us, a three-piece musical combo fiddled with their microphones and speakers. Waiters lined up scores of blue drinks in tall glasses on the bar, inserting a little Greek flag and a white flower into each glass. Passengers whisked the drinks off the bar as quickly as the servers could put them out.

  “Here’s Marco!”

  “Where?”

  Lettie clapped her hands and pointed over the rail toward two women, one overweight and one overloaded, who were obviously traveling together. Behind them was a man in a blue shirt and tan shorts. But that couldn’t be Marco. Marco wore a beard.

  Marco Quattrocchi, a Carabinieri captain from Florence, was the friend I expected to join us. Lettie and I had met him two years ago when we were on a tour of Italy and a member of our tour group got murdered at our Florence hotel. I had graciously made my observational and analytical talents available to the ensuing investigation, and thereby had become Marco’s friend, then enemy, then friend again. We’d kept in touch, and it was he who had suggested this cruise. Ollie, who normally isn’t interested in the foreign tours Lettie and I love to take, had been persuaded to come along this time because, as he put it, “On a ship, nobody tells you when to get up and get on the bus.”

  The man who turned at the top of the ramp and waved to me was Marco without a beard, and I didn’t like it at all. He looked shorter. His upper lip was too thin. I’d never seen his upper lip before. Oh, dear. He disappeared into the side of the ship where the stairs to our deck were located.

  “Dotsy! And Lettie!” Marco appeared at the top of the stairs and hurried across the deck. He took Lettie’s left hand, my right, and gave us air kisses on both sides. “Your hair, Dotsy,” he said in his thick Italian accent. “You have …”

  “Let it go natural.” I finished his sentence for him. I’d forgotten that, in addition to losing seven pounds, I’d let my hair grow out to its natural auburn and gray. It didn’t occur to me he might not like the changes in my appearance as much as I didn’t like the change in his.

  We introduced him to Ollie and sent the men to the bar for drinks while Lettie and I grabbed a vacant table. Marco returned with two of those blue cocktails, Ollie, with a blue thing and a Heineken.”

  A building contractor at their home in Fredericksburg, Virginia, Ollie was known as “The Snowman” to his workers, but they didn’t call him that to his face. Big, barrel-chested, and bald as a trailer hitch, he had no neck at all and a rather button-like nose. I lived in fear of accidentally calling him “Frosty.”

  After we were all seated, Lettie said, “When did you get here, Marco? Did you fly straight from Florence?”

  “No.” He swigged the blue liquid and poked himself in the eye with the Greek flag. “Unfortunately I could not find a flight straight from Florence to Athens. I had to drive first to Milano. Alitalia has a straight, no-stopping flight from Milano to here.”

  I had to become reaccustomed to Marco’s refusal to use contractions. His English was pretty good, but I supposed he thought the use of contractions would be pushing the linguistic envelop
e. He also had a way of putting the same stress on all his syllables, which made the rhythm of his speech awkward. I had to listen intently when he talked.

  The band’s spirited rendition of “Never on Sunday” wound down, and a piped-in announcement broke into our chatter. It was delivered in Greek, then repeated in French, English, Italian, German, and Japanese. “We will depart Piraeus in five minutes. All visitors should now be ashore. If you are onboard and are not sailing with us, you must disembark immediately.”

  Ollie slipped a pair of sunglasses out of his shirt pocket, stretched the earpieces over his temples, and looked toward the stairs leading up from the gangway.

  “There’s that wrong-way guy again.”

  I followed Ollie’s gaze. The man in the yellow-and-red shirt, now toting a duffle bag, was back on board.

  * * * * *

  Soon after the ship left the dock, we had the mandatory lifeboat drill, which Marco suggested was actually a trick to give the crew a chance to slip our luggage into our rooms. It was the only time until the end of the cruise, he pointed out, that the halls would be clear of passengers. We each had to don the life jacket we found on the bed in our room and wait for the announcement to dash to our designated lifeboat station on deck. Marco and I were assigned the same station because our rooms were on the same level and a mere four doors apart. I waited for him in the foyer at the foot of the stairs leading up to the next level where a long row of lifeboats hung suspended above the promenade deck.

  It startled me to see a small Cycladic figure in a display case at the base of the stairs. A female figure carved out of marble with a sloping head and arms folded above the belly, its abstract form hinted at an eerie link between the prehistoric and the modern. I’d seen similar sculptures in the textbooks I used in my ancient history classes and I knew they could be found in Greek museums, but I would never have expected to find one on a cruise ship. I read the descriptive plaque. They claimed it was genuine and from Naxos, an island in the Cyclades, 2500 b.c.

  Marco slipped up behind me and blew in my ear. I jerked around, prepared to slap somebody, then smiled when I saw him, but I didn’t like the way he looked in a life jacket. My virile, fearless Florentine cop looked a bit silly in an orange jacket and with no beard.

  “Can you believe they have an actual Cycladic fertility figure on a cruise ship? Isn’t this dangerous?”

  “Dangerous?” Marco looked baffled. “Do you think it is going to promote too much conception among the passengers?”

  “No, silly. I mean this is so valuable. Priceless! Irreplaceable! How can a cruise line afford to buy such things? Who would let them buy such a thing? The ship might sink! The figure might get swiped or broken.”

  “Dotsy, if you knew the conditions thousands of these—what you call them?—priceless objects are in right now, you would realize this little woman is very lucky. There are Etruscan antiquities hidden in warehouses that are fire-traps. There is Minoan pottery painted black by smugglers who try to pass it off as cheap souvenirs at border crossings.” Marco’s eyes took on an intensity I’d only seen in him once or twice before, as if a dentist’s drill had struck a nerve.

  We climbed the stairs together, joining the throng of passengers heading for the deck. At the top of the stairs, Lettie and Ollie passed us, and I had to choke back a laugh. A puffy orange life jacket, its straps let out to the fullest extent, on Frosty the Snowman was like water wings on a blimp. Ollie looked as if he’d certainly float without any help. In fact, he looked as if you could unstack him and save several smaller, denser folk.

  “The lifeboat drill is required by law,” Marco told me, “but they have another reason to do this. It helps them find stowaways.”

  “Stowaways?”

  “Certainly. Anyone who is still inside or who does not have a properly numbered jacket is not supposed to be here.”

  “What would they do with a stowaway?”

  “They would make him walk off the plank. Have you not seen the pirate movies?”

  * * * * *

  I wasn’t sure how dressed-up to get for dinner. The men would be wearing suits, or at least ties, I thought. I settled on my black dress with red poppies and, since the dress had a scoop neck, a black onyx necklace and earrings.

  We four had elected the first seating for dinner and were joined at our large, round table by George and Kathryn Gaskill, of Elkhart, Indiana. After introductions all around, we exchanged the basic information: what do you do, how many children, is this your first cruise, and so on. As usual, I took top honors for most children. Ollie and Lettie had two, Marco, two, the Gaskills, none—they had apparently married late—and me, five. Our children, grown now, we were all empty-nesters including, I suppose, the Gaskills, whose nest had never been full.

  The Gaskills made an unassuming little pair. Kathryn was a small, round woman with short black hair and a rather vacant face. George had a goatee and wore his hair slicked straight back. A round, flesh-colored Band-aid bobbed on the curve of his jawbone below his left ear as he talked.

  “He cut himself shaving this morning.” Kathryn said. I must have been staring at his jaw.

  “I sell cars,” Gaskill said, in response to Ollie’s question. “Used cars.”

  George talked with a slight whistle. His prominent front teeth made him look like a beaver. His dark hair plastered to his skull, his goatee twitched as he talked. Make that a wet beaver. When he reached for his wine glass, I noticed the sleeves and collar of his white shirt were frayed.

  He asked Marco about the Carabinieri. “What is it? Is it like our police?”

  “It is the military police in Italy. We also have police. La polizia. But we, the Carabinieri, we have nicer uniforms,” Marco said, glancing around the table as he said it.

  I knew he was testing to see who had a sense of humor.

  “If someone gets mugged,” Kathryn asked in a small, squeaky voice, “does he call the Carabinieri or the police?”

  “He can call either one. Our duties, unfortunately, are not clearly . . . different. In spite of the fact that our government has tried to unite the two and to spell out the responsibilities of each, we still do many of the same things.” Marco paused and glanced around the table again. “But the Carabinieri do it better.”

  Lettie giggled and put her napkin up to her mouth.

  Ollie said, “How’s the car business, Gaskill?”

  “Slow. Very slow. Normally, I wouldn’t take a vacation in June like this, but sales are so slow it didn’t seem to make any difference whether I left or not.”

  “It’s the economy,” Lettie said. “Money is so tight.”

  “Speaking of money . . .” George Gaskill turned to acknowledge the waiter who was attempting to maneuver a lobster cocktail between George’s and Kathryn’s shoulders. “I see they have a casino on the Poseidon deck. Anyone for a wager or two after dinner?”

  “I’ll join you,” Ollie said and looked at Marco.

  “No, thank you. I want to see the show,” Marco said. “The Greek dancers. Dotsy, will you come with me?”

  I nodded.

  “Does anyone else want to go with us?” he asked.

  Lettie indicated she’d rather see the show than gamble, but Kathryn said she needed to go to their room and finish settling in.

  * * * * *

  The show lounge was on the Dionysus deck. The Aegean Queen’s decks were all named after Greek gods. The top one was called the Zeus deck, an appropriate name since Zeus was the king of the gods, and below it, the Hera deck where we had just eaten. Then in descending order, the Apollo, Poseidon, Dionysus, Ares, Athena, and Demeter. My stateroom was on the Athena deck.

  Marco, Lettie, and I grabbed a table for four near the round stage. A waiter took our order immediately, but we had no more than sampled our drinks when Kathryn Gaskill slipped in and joined us.

  “Settling in didn’t take as long as I thought it would.” She gave the waiter her order and looked around. As the lounge filled up,
we checked out our fellow passengers. “That’s a lonely-looking man over there,” Kathryn said.

  She nodded toward a lean, angular man with chin-length hair, a goatee, and black-rimmed glasses. At a table in the corner, he sat, slouched, with his chair pushed back against the wall, one finger running idly around the rim of his glass.

  I knew him.