A Crafty Christmas

by Mollie Cox Bryan

  “Yep,” she said, and nodded her head. Then she turned her attention to her food.

  After breakfast, Bill showed up for his weekend with Lizzie. Beatrice had to admit that he was good with her. It was the rest of his life he was not so good at—but bad decisions affected parenting, too.

  As soon as she was gone, Bea sauntered over to her computer and clicked it on. She checked the ship’s Web site to make certain the ship was moving away from the Mexican coast. She needed the certainty of knowing.

  It was there that she read the news that another death had occurred on the ship. Harold Tuft, who had been a friend of Allie Monroe. Cause of death: unknown.

  Unknown? Did that mean he was killed, too? Hmmm. Beatrice searched for him and Allie online. Sure enough, she found rumors about them dating and so on. Lawd, there were a lot of things online about this woman. Some kind of scrapbooking star. Hmph. Scrapbooking star or not, someone didn’t like her or her boyfriend.

  Chapter 20

  For the first time in several years, Sheila didn’t start her morning with a run. She felt like crap. Her head still ached and she was sore everywhere from her fall. She hated to miss a run, but even Eric had mentioned to her the night before that she should not run with a head injury—as mild as it was.

  She picked up her cell phone from the bedside table, wanting to call her husband. He might be able to pick up a call from her by now; he was leading a group of Boy Scouts through a part of the Appalachian Trail. She smiled at the thought.

  She saw a text message from Annie.

  Looking into murder vic’s background. Bad divorce.

  Her soon-to-be ex on board? His name is John.

  Sheila placed her glasses on her face and read the text again. That Annie. She couldn’t resist sleuthing, even if she wasn’t even on board. But a chill traveled up through Sheila as she remembered the dead man last night. Allie’s boyfriend was offed, too. It would seem that Allie’s soon-to-be ex would be at the top of everybody’s suspect list. It would be good to know if he was on board and exactly who he was so she could make certain to stay the hell away from him. Still, if she could put this together sitting in bed with a cell phone in her hand, surely Matthew Kirtley and Ahoy Security had already done so. It seemed so clear cut.

  But later, showered and ready for breakfast, she grabbed her passenger list from the table. Not everybody was privy to this list, but as the Creative Spirit winner, she was. She couldn’t read through all two thousand names, but she and her friends could together.

  She grabbed her purse and phone and pressed in Steve’s number again. She still couldn’t get through to him. No signal again. Yet, Annie’s message had gotten through sometime in the middle of the night. Off and on again; it was maddening.

  She had her meeting with David’s Designs and then she was teaching a class. She planned to meet her friends at the pool later. All of this scrapbooking was intense, even for her. She needed a break, especially after last night. Evidently, her designs weren’t as good as she thought. She swallowed, willing away tears of embarrassment. Everything she had worked toward had seemed to crash around her at the meeting with Theresa.

  When Sheila walked into the dining room, her eyes went immediately to the large decorated Christmas tree, brightly lit and trimmed in red and gold. Christmas music was being piped through the intercom. She was overwhelmed by a longing for home, to be sitting next to Steve and their own tree with all of their kids around them. She felt no Christmas spirit here. After last night, it had gotten worse.

  As she glanced around the room for her crew, she observed the man who had been watching her so intently yesterday. She scowled. Then she spotted her group and walked toward them.

  “Good morning, sleepyhead,” Paige said, looking up at her as she approached the table.

  Sheila grunted and sat down, immediately reaching for the coffee.

  “Are you feeling okay?” Vera said. She looked up at Sheila from a stack of fruit and crepes.

  “I feel about the same as yesterday,” Sheila said.

  “It’s going to take a few days,” Eric said, then took a huge bite of sausage. “Try to eat something. The buffet is fantastic.”

  “Coffee and toast for me this morning,” Sheila said. Her stomach was still queasy.

  Randy was standing up to get his second or third helping from the buffet. “I’ll bring you some toast,” he said. “Maybe it will settle your stomach and then you can eat more.”

  “Thank you, Randy,” Sheila said. What a nice young man. Too bad his relationship hadn’t worked out. “Have you heard about last night?” Sheila turned to her friends, who were all happily mooning over their food.

  “What? Your meeting?” Paige said.

  “No,” Sheila said. She took a drink of coffee. She didn’t want to talk about that right now. And she was sure that the meeting with David’s Designs would be the same kind of thing. Who did she think she was? A real designer? “There was another death.”

  “What?” Vera exclaimed. A man who was seated at the table behind them turned and glared at her.

  “Keep your voice down,” Sheila said.

  “Really!” Vera said, her face reddening. ‘You can’t lay something like that on me and not expect me to get a little excited.”

  Sheila took a breath. “Okay. The man was Allie Monroe’s boyfriend.” She mouthed the word “boyfriend.”

  “I thought she was married,” Paige said.

  “She was going through a divorce. A bad one.” Sheila said.

  “Ahh, so now Annie’s text makes sense,” Paige said.

  “You got that, too? I wondered what that was about,” Vera said.

  Sheila pulled out her passenger list and divided it among the group at the table.

  Randy came up with a plate of food for himself in one hand and a plate of toast for Sheila in the other. He set it down in front of her. She smelled the toast and wasn’t sure if she could manage to eat.

  “What’s this?” Randy said.

  “This is the passenger list. We’re looking for a John Monroe on the list. Allie Monroe’s husband,” she said.

  “Oh, he’s not here,” Randy said. “I mean, you can look to double check, but I saw Matthew last night and they had already searched through the passenger list looking for him, probably thinking what you’re thinking. The other murder . . .”

  “Murder?” Sheila said. “Then he was killed?”

  He nodded. “In exactly the same way as Allie Monroe.”

  “How do you know all of this?” Sheila asked.

  “I told you,” he said, and sat down next to his mother. “I saw Matthew last night. We met for drinks.”

  Everybody stopped eating and looked up at him.

  “What?” he said. “It was just drinks. It wasn’t a real date or anything, and he kept getting pulled away to deal with everything.”

  “Well, Randy, is there anything else you found out last night that you’d like to tell us?” Paige said.

  His mouth full, he shook his head, then finally said, “Nothing I can think of. But Matthew is very cute, don’t you think?”

  Paige’s neck, then face, reddened. Vera looked away and Sheila took a deep breath and bit into her toast.

  “Not to scare anybody,” Eric said, “but I doubt the guy would be using his own name. If you were planning to kill someone on a cruise, would you?”

  It was no use. Sheila swallowed her bite of the dry toast, but then set it down on her plate with a thud.

  Merry effing Christmas.

  Chapter 21

  Not on the ship. Unless he’s using a fake name, said the text message from Sheila.

  Annie put her phone down. After taking the brisket out of the freezer to thaw for their Hanukkah dinner tonight, she sat down at her computer to write another chapter on the Mary Schultz book before the boys got out of bed. They were really sleeping in this morning.

  She turned her thoughts back to the Jezebel.

  Well, there was no
way she could find out anything about the man if he was using a fake name. So he could be on the ship. But if he was out to get his ex-wife, maybe he posed no threat to Annie’s friends. Maybe. But if he was crazy enough to kill someone—anyone—he might do it again.

  She clicked on the cruise Web site again, as if it could provide her with some peace of mind. She’d read over this site a dozen times in the last twenty-four hours. What was she looking for? Clues? Comfort?

  She clicked on the newsletter, read it over. It gave the upcoming events of the day, as well as highlighted a few things that took place yesterday. In the left hand corner of page three, a death was mentioned. A death? A Harold Tuft of Sarasota, Florida—hmm . . . the same place Allie lived—was reported dead. Annie shivered. Could this guy have known Allie? Surely he did—she was a scrapbooking star from his hometown and they were on a scrapbooking cruise.

  She heard the rustling around of her boys heading to the kitchen. She left her computer and followed the sound.

  “Morning, boys,” she said.

  “Morning, Mommy,” they said together, and ran to her, hugged her.

  “Morning sugar is the best kind,” Annie said, and smiled. “Go sit down and I’ll make you some eggs. How does that sound?”

  They both made their way to the table and Annie headed for the fridge. She took out the eggs and readied her frying pan. She loved mornings with her boys now that they were a little bit older.

  Annie beat her eggs and tried not to think of Sam beating up that boy because he said terrible things about the Jewish people. And then there was the time that Ben came home sobbing because a friend said his parent would never let a Jewish boy into their home.

  Annie tried not to think about it too much, but being Jewish was on her mind because of Hanukkah. After dinner and family time, she was heading over to Sheila’s basement to meet DeeAnn for their weekly crop. She was thinking about a special book. A book about being Jewish. A spiritual scrapbook—sort of like Cookie’s scrapbook of shadows. Cookie. Finally, she was able to think of her with some fondness, without the horrible, black, bereft feeling. Still, she was unable to make complete peace with the disappearance of her friend.

  She poured the eggs in the pan as Mike was entering the kitchen.

  “Juice, boys?”

  They both said yes. Mike tried to skirt around Annie, brushing up against her, which he couldn’t help. Their kitchen was tiny and they were always tripping over one another.

  The Chamovitzes were saving for a down payment on a bigger house. As the boys were getting older, space was more and more of an issue—along with the fact that they only had one bathroom.

  “How did you do on that math test yesterday?” Mike said as he set the filled juice glasses on the table in front of the boys.

  “I think I did okay,” Sam said. “I won’t know until Monday.”

  “I got a one hundred on my spelling test,” Ben said.

  “Good for you,” Annie said. She scooped the eggs onto plates for her boys and sat down at the breakfast table.

  After breakfast, Mike took the boys out and left Annie to work. When she went back to her computer, the screen with the cruise on it was still up. Before she got settled in to her writing she decided to give Vera a call. She knew it would be expensive, but she needed to talk with at least one of them. She really wanted to talk to Sheila, but she knew that she was in meetings off and on and had events planned. Better to call Vera.

  “Hey, Annie,” Vera said.

  “Hey, Vera. How’s it going?”

  “Honestly?” she said, and laughed.

  “Well, as honest as you can make it,” Annie said, smiling.

  “The food is great. The scrapbooking is intense. We took a bit of a break from it today. We’re all at the pool. Well, everybody but Sheila. She’s at a meeting with David’s Designs.”

  “How is she?”

  “She still has a headache and not much of an appetite. I swear she had maybe two bites of toast this morning. Poor thing. We’re all worried about her, but we’re keeping an eye on her.”

  “How did her meeting go yesterday?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know; she didn’t mention it at breakfast. We talked about the murder. She had a passenger list and was ready to go over it, but then Randy saw the ship’s security chief last night and he said they’d already looked through it.”

  “Yep, I guess that would be the first thing a security team would do,” Annie said, more to herself than to Vera. “But what about this Harold Tuft? How does he fit in?”

  Vera explained to Annie everything she knew about Harold.

  “It’s been awful,” she said with her voice lowered.

  “I keep looking at men and wondering if they are the one. Also, they say they’ve got the poison situation in hand. That it wasn’t food poisoning. But I don’t know what to believe. Eric says I’m paranoid. But I can’t stop thinking about it. I can’t wait until we make land. The FBI is going to meet the ship at the next port. I’ll feel so much better then.”

  Chapter 22

  “So where are you headed now?” Beatrice asked Vera.

  “We should reach Grand Caymen later tonight or tomorrow. Sheila will be leading a photo expedition. She was supposed to be doing that in Mexico, but with the storm and everything . . .” Vera said. “Oh, Mama, it’s just so beautiful looking out over the pool and in the distance is the sea, such a beautiful blue color.”

  “Try to stick together.”

  “We’re all here now, except for Sheila. She has a meeting this morning, then is teaching a class. We’re all going to try to get there,” Vera said.

  “How is Sheila?”

  “Not good, Mama,” Vera said in a hushed voice.

  “That’s too bad. Call Elizabeth. She’s with Bill. She misses you,” Beatrice said, and hung up.

  Poor Sheila. But, Beatrice knew Sheila enough to know that it was hard to keep that woman down.

  Her timer went off and she walked into the kitchen, grabbed a pot holder, opened the oven door, and pulled out her poppy seed cake. Ohhh, it looked perfect—and smelled of sugar, cinnamon, and poppy seed. She sat it on the counter and glanced out the window. A fine snow was starting to fall and blanketed the grass.

  Beatrice’s phone rang. If that was Elsie again, she might scream. This Christmas bazaar should be an easy function to put together. Why was she making mountains out of molehills?

  “Hey, Beatrice. I’m on break at the bakery and thought I’d check in with you. How are you?” DeeAnn said.

  “I’m fine, other than Elsie driving me crazy and the fact that my daughter is on a cruise with a killer,” Beatrice said.

  “Did you hear about the second killing?”

  “Yep. If her ex-husband is on the ship, there’s no trace of him.”

  “Maybe what we should do is get Annie to check into the background of the other guy. . . . What was his name? Harold?”

  “Yes, Harold Tuft. But I don’t know what good that would do. He’s dead.”

  “But why?”

  “Obviously he was boffing that Allie woman and it upset her husband. Imagine that,” Beatrice said with a clipped tone.

  “I’m kind of worried about Sheila. I mean, she knows these people and is kind of hanging out with them. What if she gets in the middle of something?”

  “You’re borrowing trouble. We have to trust that they will be careful and not get themselves into a bad situation,” Beatrice said, but inside she was quivering. She’d promised Gerty, Sheila’s mother, that she would watch out for her daughter.

  After she hung up from DeeAnn, she called Annie, a voice of reason. Most of the time.

  “What do you think, Annie?”

  “I think it’s odd that there’s not been much in the news about this. Yesterday there was a bit about Allie, but nothing today. I keep racking my brain trying to remember if I know any journalists in the area who could look into the situation more. But I don’t think I do.”

  “
What bothers you about it?”

  “For one thing, the person you’d suspect right away would be Allie’s soon-to-be ex-husband.”

  “A no brainer,” Beatrice said, stirring cookie dough.

  “And he’s not on the ship—unless he’s using a fake name.”

  “There’s no way to figure that out. He could be anybody.”

  “We could figure it out by process of elimination if we had the list. We could start by eliminating any man who’s there with his wife. Guys on a ship in the Caribbean surrounded by scrapbooking women. Poor schmucks. You know they aren’t up to murder. And then we go from there.”

  “I’ll text Vera to see if she can e-mail me the list.”

  “I was also wondering if you still subscribe to your databases.”

  “I do.”

  “Why don’t you run her ex-husband through some of them,” Beatrice suggested. “You never know what might come up.”

  “I plan to do that later today, after I finish talking to you, make lunch, and put the brisket in the oven. I’m on it.”

  “Good,” Beatrice said, then hung up. She reached over to the radio and turned it up. One of her favorite Christmas songs was playing, “Silver Bells,” by Perry Como. She looked out the window. It had stopped snowing, but clumps of snow were clinging to shrubs and grass. She took a deep breath—the cookie dough smelled fresh and sweet. But the nut filling smelled even better. Nut-filled cookies were a must for her season. It was a recipe her mother had used when Beatrice was growing up. It wouldn’t be Christmas without those cookies.

  The snow. The cookies. The music. It was the holiday season, but she knew she wouldn’t fully feel it until Vera and the others were back home safely.

  Chapter 23

  Just as Sheila walked into the lounge, the ship lurched and she found herself plastered against the wall. Her bag went flying and the items in it splayed all over the tiled floor. After she gathered herself and all of her things, she stood up, brushed herself off, and proceeded to walk.