“Oh, come on,” Margaret insisted. “Don’t be such a spoilsport. Besides, you already told us you took a nap before dinner. We’re four single women who have happened, through the luck of the draw, to come up with something that’s supposedly statistically impossible on board a cruise ship—two eligible bachelors. If you think we’re turning either one of you loose that easily, you’re crazy.”
It looked as though Marc Alley was stuck for the duration, and so was I. And that’s how, a half hour or so later, Marc and I ended up at one of the posh, upholstered banquettes in the Starfire Breeze’s spacious Twilight Lounge. André Morton, the ship’s self-proclaimed pianist/comedian, was six decades and several bushel-loads of talent shy of qualifying as the next Victor Borge. André wasn’t nearly as funny as he thought he was, and it seemed to me that he didn’t play the piano all that well, either. Victor Borge has always been considered something of a national hero in the Scandinavian-stocked homes of my boyhood in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhoods. The old Dane continues to be hilariously funny. Even pushing ninety, Borge plays the piano with a gusto André Morton will probably never achieve. In other words, I didn’t care for the show, and I wasn’t much looking forward to the dancing, either.
It’s not that I can’t dance. When I was in eighth grade, my mother saw to it that I had a year’s worth of lessons. Mother was a single parent who raised me alone without child support and without the benefit of any help or encouragement from her parents, either. She was a talented seamstress who did alterations and repairs for several Ballard-area dry cleaners. She also had a regular clientele among Seattle’s tight-fisted upper crust, who came to our upstairs apartment with photos of the latest New York and Paris fashions which they had clipped from various magazines. From the photos alone Mother was usually able to create wonderful knockoffs at a fraction of the price of the designer variety.
That’s where my dancing lessons came from—Mother’s sewing. She whipped off two or three ball gowns for a lady named Miss Rose Toledo who ran the local dance studio. The next thing I knew, I was dressed in a suit and tie and shipped off to dance lessons at four o’clock every Thursday afternoon for nine whole months—the entire duration of eighth grade.
Looking back, I wish I could have found a way to be more appreciative of what Mother was trying to do for me. Instead, I was a typically sullen and lippy teenager. I remember arguing with her that ballroom dancing was so old-fashioned—that nobody danced together anymore, not since somebody invented the twist. But Mother prevailed, and so I went—sulking all the way.
But that particular night, all those years later in the Twilight Lounge on board the Starfire Breeze, I was grateful she had insisted because dancing, it turns out, is just like riding a bicycle. I may have been rusty to begin with, but I still remembered the moves.
I confess I had my work cut out for me. I was spread thin over three partners while a much younger Marc Alley only had to deal with one. Admittedly, Marc’s was a handful. Margaret Featherman danced with her body glued to his in a way that made it look as though she was ready to seduce him on the spot. I remember Mother warning me about girls who danced that way. Miss Toledo told me much the same thing. Somehow, I don’t think anyone ever got around to telling Marc Alley.
I was taking a turn around the floor to the tune of “Dancing in the Dark” with Naomi Pepper, the plumpish woman who had winked at me earlier. We passed close by Marc and Margaret just in time to catch Margaret nibbling on the poor guy’s ear.
“Reminds me of The Graduate,” Naomi said. “How about you?”
“Marc’s so young that he’s probably never even heard of that movie,” I replied.
For me, that’s one of the advantages of hanging out with women my own age. They know the same jokes and music. We saw the same movies back when we were kids. The generation gap was something that had driven me crazy about working with my last partner, Sue Danielson. She had been so much younger than I was that we’d had major communication problems. Now, with Sue dead, there was no way those problems would ever be resolved.
“Margaret was after Marc to begin with,” Naomi confided, bringing me abruptly back to the dance floor. “Once she saw the stricken look on Chloe’s face when she caught sight of him at our table, Margaret went into overdrive. Poor Marc’s fate was sealed right then, and he didn’t even know it.”
“Isn’t it a little sick for a mother to be in that kind of overt competition with her own daughter?” I asked.
“Margaret and Chloe have been at each other’s throats from the day Chloe was born. Sometimes it happens that way between mothers and daughters,” Naomi added with what struck me as a wistful shrug.
“I take it you have kids, too?” I asked.
She nodded. “A daughter, Melissa—Missy. She’s more than ten years younger than Chloe—and a hell of a lot more trouble. At least Chloe went to school and got a degree. Missy’s getting an altogether different kind of education.”
I thought of my own daughter, Kelly. She wasn’t a problem now, but as a teenager she had marched to her own peculiar drummer. She had run away from home at age seventeen and had wound up living with a young actor down in Ashland, Oregon. She and her husband, Jeremy, are now the parents of my three-year-old granddaughter, Kayla. My son, Scott, is a newly minted electronics engineer with a good job in Silicon Valley. He had brought his girlfriend, Charisse—also a double E—to his grandmother and Lars’ wedding. At the time Scott had told me, on the Q.T., that he intended to give Charisse an engagement ring come Christmastime. In other words, I know that raising kids isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be.
Next up on my dance card was Sharon Carson. She was elegant, beautiful, and an excellent dancer. I was happy to learn that she was far more concerned about looking good on the dance floor than she was about carrying on casual conversation. As a consequence, when I danced with her, there was almost no talking, and that was fine with me.
Last came the redhead, Virginia Metz. After cruising around the dance floor with Sharon Carson, dancing with Virginia was like dancing with a plywood cutout. She held me at a firm arm’s length. “So,” she said eventually, “besides your room and board, what else do you get out of this?”
I was stumped. “What do you mean?”
“Come on, Mr. Beaumont. I know what you’re after. You cruise dance hosts are all alike. The cruise line lets you travel for free as long as you make yourself available to all the poor, lonely single women on board. Meanwhile, you’re hoping to waltz your way into some well-to-do widow’s bank account and/or bed,” she added with a reproachful and unkind look in Marc Alley’s direction.
“I think you’re operating under a bit of a misapprehension,” I said.
“Really?” she returned sourly. “I don’t think so.”
I was building up to some kind of smart-mouthed reply to Miss Poisonality’s pointed comments when a tall man with a thick mane of white hair came pushing and shoving his way through the couples on the dance floor. He ran full-tilt into Virginia’s shoulder, knocking her off balance. I had to use both arms to catch her and keep her from falling. The man, however, didn’t pause or apologize.
“Maggie Featherman!” he roared. “Just what in blue blazes do you think you’re doing?”
Margaret and Marc Alley were on the far side of the floor. As the man came charging up to them, Marc broke away. The look on his face was one of sheer astonishment. Margaret came up grinning from ear to ear.
“Why, Harrison,” she said sweetly. “How good to see you again. What a surprise, running into one another like this! I should have known Chloe would have to run straight back to Daddikins and tattle.”
“Surprise, nothing!” he shot back. “You set this whole thing up to embarrass me. You even contacted the cruise company and changed Marc’s dinner reservation. You’ve no right to do that, Maggie. It’s stalking, that’s what it is, and it’s against the law. When we get back home, I have half a mind to take you to court over it. If nothing else
, I’ll at least get a court order to keep it from ever happening again.”
“Come on, Harrison, lighten up. It’s not necessary to cause a scene here. People are on vacation. They’re dancing and having a good time. They don’t need to be exposed to our messy domestic relations.”
“There’s nothing ‘domestic’ about it,” he replied. “This is war, Maggie. W-A-R. And as soon as we get home, you can tell Joe Reston that he’ll be hearing from my attorney.”
“My, my. You really are hot, aren’t you,” Margaret Featherman said with a chillingly superior smile. “And I must say both Joe and I will be shivering in our boots.”
Harrison Featherman glowered at his former wife. “You ought to be shivering, you little bitch,” he declared. “By God, you ought to be!”
By then, summoned either by the bartender or by the sound of raised voices, two uniformed members of the Starfire Breeze crew entered the lounge and were making their way across the crowded dance floor.
“Sir,” one of them said quietly, laying a restraining hand on Harrison Featherman’s shoulder. “I believe that’s enough now!”
The good doctor spun around and focused his fury in a new direction. “Enough!” he repeated with a snarl. “It most certainly isn’t enough—not nearly! I intend to find out who it was at Starfire Cruises who released my confidential travel information to my ex-wife. As soon as I do, I’ll have that asshole’s job!”
With that, Harrison Featherman shook off the crewman’s hand and stalked off across the dance floor. The band, which had let the music die a fitful death during the encounter, seemed to wind back up again, the way my grandmother’s old 78-rpm Victrola would rev back up when I’d grab the handle and give it a few spins. Throughout the confrontation, Marc had looked as though he hoped a hole would open up in the dance floor and swallow him down in a single gulp. Instead, as soon as the music began again, Margaret Featherman—looking totally nonchalant—wrapped both arms around his waist and somehow cajoled him into dancing again. Virginia Metz, on the other hand, heaved a sigh of disgust, turned, and flounced off the floor, leaving me no gentlemanly alternative but to follow her back to the table.
Flopping into her chair, she crossed her arms and shook her head.
“What was that all about?” Naomi Pepper demanded. “What’s up with Harrison?”
“I tried to warn you that coming on this cruise was a mistake,” Virginia replied. “Didn’t I tell you there was no such thing as a free lunch, especially not where Margaret Featherman is concerned?”
“You told us, all right,” Sharon Carson agreed. “I guess Naomi and I were just hoping you were wrong.”
3
AT SIX THE NEXT MORNING I was awakened by a determined knocking. I staggered out of bed and limped to the door on feet that complained bitterly about my previous night’s maneuvers on the Twilight Lounge dance floor. Peering out through the peephole, I found Lars Jenssen standing in the carpeted corridor holding two lidless cardboard cups filled to the brim with hot coffee. He was stooping over to put one of them down in preparation for knocking again, when I swung open the door.
“There you are,” he said, easing himself into the room and handing me one of the steaming cups. “What are you trying to do, sleep your whole life away?”
“Lars,” I said as patiently as possible. “This is a cruise. People are supposedly allowed to sleep late.”
“Well, for cripes’ sake, it is late. It’s after six, you know.”
In my jobless state, 6 A.M. was still very much the middle of the night. “Is there a problem? Is something wrong with Beverly?”
Easing himself down on my sofa, Lars nodded his head glumly. “I’ll say,” he muttered.
I felt a clutch in my gut as my mind went shopping through the vast array of medical disasters that could possibly befall someone my grandmother’s age. “What’s the matter?” I demanded, sinking down on the foot of my recently abandoned bed. “What’s going on?”
“Why didn’t you tell me Beverly had a problem?”
In actual fact, during the course of their whirlwind courtship, Lars had never asked me a single question about my grandmother’s physical or mental health, nor had he asked for my opinion. Come to think of it, she hadn’t asked me about his, either. For a change, I felt totally blameless.
“What kind of problem?” I asked.
“Slot machines,” he answered.
“Slot machines?” I repeated.
“Ya, sure. One-armed bandits, or whatever the heck you call them. She seems to love the gosh-darned things. She went into the casino last night right after dinner and it took me the rest of the night to get her back out again. All she wanted to do was sit there on that little stool and throw her money away, one quarter at a time. Of course, they don’t take quarters, either. You have to go up to that little window and buy some kind of stupid tokens. When she ran out of tokens, she wanted me to go buy some more so she wouldn’t have to move away from that one certain machine, but I told her no way. I told her hell would freeze over before she caught me buying something so she could dump more money down a rathole.”
“You woke me up at six o’clock in the morning to tell me Beverly played the slot machines last night?”
“We had a fight over it,” Lars admitted sheepishly. “She locked me out of the room. I spent the night out on deck until it got too cold. Then I went upstairs to the buffet. I’ve been there ever since.”
As a veteran of my own relationship disasters, I felt nothing but sympathy. “You’re not the first groom to be locked out of a honeymoon suite,” I assured him. “And you sure as hell won’t be the last. Do you think she’s still mad this morning?”
Lars shrugged his shoulders and looked miserable. “Beats me,” he said.
“What did she say?” I asked. “Tell me exactly.”
“That she’d spent as many years as she was going to living with some stubborn old coot who was forever telling her what to do. She told me that if she wanted to spend her ‘mad money’ on slot machines, then it was nobody’s business but her own. She said if I didn’t like it I could lump it—and sleep somewhere else.”
In other words, Margaret Featherman wasn’t the only passenger on the Starfire Breeze who wasn’t letting anyone else tell her what to do. I didn’t like being cast into the role of marriage counselor, but there I was—caught in the middle.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“I said that earning money was too damned hard to just stand on the sidelines and watch somebody throw it away. You know, you put the coin in the hole and it goes chink, chink, chink, and nothing happens, and no money ever comes back out.”
“Look,” I said. “Wait until eight o’clock or so, then show up at the door. On the way there, stop by the gift shop and buy something nice. Maybe even some flowers, if they happen to have some on board. Tap on the door. When she opens it, hand her the flowers or whatever, tell her you’re sorry, and everything will be fine.”
“But I’m not sorry,” Lars insisted. “I’m pissed. Couldn’t I just stay here with you? You’ve got a nice big room.”
Through some kind of travel agent wizardry I had lucked into a junior suite at the last minute. It was a nice room with a marble-surrounded Jacuzzi tub and a separate shower in the bath. As rooms go, it was more than large enough to accommodate two people, but I sure as hell didn’t want to spend the next six days sharing it and my king-sized bed with a disgruntled bridegroom who probably snored like an eighteen-wheeler going up a steep grade.
Thinking about a solution, I stalled for time by taking a tentative sip of my coffee and scalding the top layer of skin on my upper lip in the process. Meanwhile Lars downed the contents of his cup as though the temperature of his drink were less than lukewarm. Watching him, the term “asbestos lips” came to mind.
“I’m sure Beverly will get over it,” I offered.
“Nope,” he insisted. “I don’t think so.”
For several moments we sat in stark s
ilence drinking from our respective cups. “So how was dinner?” I asked.
“Dinner?” Lars growled. “Too darned much food. Do you have any idea how much food goes to waste on a ship like this? It’s downright criminal.”
I waited for him to tell me about the starving children in China. He didn’t.
“And all that foreign food on the menu. What’s the matter with good old American food? Whatever happened to pot roast? Whatever happened to chicken pot pie? And why on earth would anyone want to eat snails?”
In other words, the escargots hadn’t been a big hit.
“How about the people at your table?” I asked. “What are they like?”
Out of deference to the newlywed couple’s privacy, we had agreed in advance that Lars and Beverly would eat during the first seating, and I would take the second.
“They hooked us up with a couple of kids,” he grumbled. “Max and Dotty. They’re here celebrating their fortieth,” he added. “As if sticking together for forty years is anything to brag about.”
“Look,” I said. “I’ll go shower. You hang tough. Once I’m dressed, we’ll take a turn around the deck. Things’ll probably look better in the clear light of day.”
“It’s raining,” Lars said. “It’s September. What do you expect?”
I reached over and pulled aside the blackout curtains. Sure enough, outside nothing was visible but a second curtain, this one made up of sheets of falling rain.
Grabbing some clothes from the closet, I disappeared into the bathroom. I came out twenty minutes later—shaved and dressed—to find Lars sound asleep. Snoring softly, he was sitting bolt upright with his now-empty coffee cup clutched in one massive fist. I figured that if he could sleep that soundly having just downed a cup of full-strength coffee, he must have needed the rest. So, recalling that sage advice about letting sleeping dogs lie, I slipped out the door and left him there. After hanging the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the doorknob, I went in search of Beverly Piedmont Jenssen.
Birds of Prey : Previously Copub Sequel to the Hour of the Hunter (9780061739101) Page 3
