Killer Cruise

by Laura Levine

  By now I knew the way to his office, but I doubted he’d still be there, not at this time of night. My guess was he was tucked away in his suite giving Prozac a belly rub.

  I hurried to the lobby reception desk.

  “I need to talk to the captain,” I said to one of the clerks on duty, a cool blond Paige wannabe.

  “I’m afraid he’s not available right now,” Ms. Wannabe replied, with a plastic smile. “May I be of assistance?”

  “No, you may not. Just take me to the captain.”

  “That’s impossible,” she said, her smile still firmly in place “He’s busy steering the ship and cannot be disturbed.”

  How frustrating! What the heck was he doing steering the ship, anyway? Didn’t he have first mates and bo’suns and ship steerers for stuff like that?

  I would’ve broken the rules and busted in on him but I had no idea where this ship-steering action took place. And Ms. Wannabe was not about to tell me. I made her promise to have the captain contact me the minute he was through, and I started back to my cabin.

  But then I had the bad luck to bump into Ms. Nesbitt.

  “What’s going on?” she scowled. “Kyle’s not in the Tiki Lounge.”

  I put on my most innocent face.

  “I swear, Leona, he was there just a little while ago.”

  She shot me a look that could wilt steel. “And why aren’t you with Emily?”

  “Um…she woke up and asked me to get her a magazine. I’m on my way to buy it now.”

  Nesbitt snorted in disbelief.

  “That’s impossible! I gave her two sleeping pills. How could she wake up?”

  “Beats me,” I shrugged, and scooted off before she could continue her inquisition.

  Back in my cabin, I stretched out on my bed, waiting for the captain’s call. This time, I could not possibly allow him to blow me off.

  I was in the middle of rehearsing a very stern speech, threatening to sue Holiday Cruise Lines all the way up to the Supreme Court if need be, when I heard a knock on the door.

  “Who is it?”

  “Message from the captain,” a woman, probably Ms. Wannabe, replied.

  But it wasn’t Ms. Wannabe. Which I should have figured out at the time. If I’d had half a brain cell working, I would have recognized whose voice it really was. But so eager was I to speak with the captain, I raced to the door and flung it open. Only to find Emily standing there in a sweat suit, her normally mild blue eyes blazing.

  In her hand she clutched one of Anton’s ice picks.

  I was so caught off guard at the sight of her that I was an easy target when she shoved me back into my cabin. What happened to the frail old lady I’d seen lying in bed just a little while ago? The fiery little dynamo who’d just given me a shove had definitely been eating her Wheaties.

  As she lunged at me, I made a mad dash for the bathroom, slithering in just before the ice pick came crashing down on the door frame. Frantically I locked the door and began screaming for help. Surely someone was bound to hear me.

  If only I had a phone in the bathroom! But this was the Dungeon Deck. I was lucky I had hot and cold running water.

  So busy was I screaming bloody murder that I didn’t hear Emily jimmying the bathroom lock with the ice pick. By the time I did hear it, it was too late. Suddenly there she was, charging in the door.

  All I could think of was the shower scene in Psycho. Oh, Lord! I was going to wind up dead in the bathroom like poor Janet Leigh!

  I looked around, frantic, for something to defend myself with and grabbed the first thing I saw—Prozac’s litter box.

  I flung the contents in Emily’s face and felt a surge of joy when she was temporarily blinded. My joy was short-lived, however. Because when I raced past her to what I thought was freedom, I slipped on the sand. I tried to regain my balance but stumbled out into the bedroom and fell flat on my face. By the time I sat up, Emily was standing over me clutching her trusty ice pick.

  “What on earth are you doing with a litter box in your bathroom?” she sputtered, spitting sand from her mouth.

  “It’s for my cat. She’s a stowaway.”

  “Really, Jaine,” she tsked. “A stowaway? How very foolish. But then, you’re a very foolish girl, aren’t you?”

  “I suppose so.” I had to keep her talking and pray that someone had heard me screaming.

  “So,” I said, “I guess you weren’t really sleeping when I was in your cabin just now.”

  “Of course not, dear,” she said, flicking a piece of cat poop from her shoulder. “I never take those silly pills Leona gives me. I don’t need sedatives. I’ve been happy as a clam ever since I killed Graham. But I played the role of the grieving fiancée quite beautifully, didn’t I?”

  “Oh, very,” I said, inching away from her on my tush. “You had us all convinced you really loved him.”

  “I did, so very much when I was young and naive. But Graham was an evil man. He pretended he loved me and wanted to marry me. But when Daddy offered him money to leave me, he didn’t hesitate to take it. He was gone like a shot. He broke my heart.”

  For a brief flicker, her eyes turned vulnerable. But they quickly hardened again.

  “And then, all these years later, when he saw me on the ship, he didn’t even remember me. I thought about him every day of my life, and he didn’t even know who I was. He was still playing his same old games, giving out those sentimental pendants to foolish women.

  “Evil like that must be punished,” she said, a mad gleam in her eyes. “It says so in the Bible.”

  Holy Mackerel. Emily clearly had more than a few screws loose.

  “The minute I saw those ice picks, I knew how Graham would meet his end. It was just a matter of when. And then, after Cookie made that big scene in the Grand Showroom, I knew the time had come. If anything happened to Graham, everyone would blame her.

  “I followed Graham after he dropped me off at my cabin that night, hiding in the shadows as he met with Cookie and told her he was just waiting for me to die and inherit my money.

  “Such a dreadful man,” she tsked. “Such a pleasure to stab him in the heart. A fitting end, don’t you think, after all the hearts he’d broken?”

  “Absolutely!” I said. “In fact, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced you did the right thing. So why don’t you just put away that ice pick, and it’ll be our little secret?”

  I flashed her what I hoped was a trustworthy smile.

  “Nice try, dear. But it won’t work. As we say at sea, you’re dead in the water. It’s all your own fault, you know. You really should have minded your own business.”

  She wagged the ice pick at me reprovingly.

  “I suspected something was up when Ms. Nesbitt told me you’d been questioning her. And then when I heard you on your cell phone in Cabo, talking about your plan to go to the police, I simply had to stop you. I tried to scare you off by cutting your scuba hose.”

  “You?” I blinked in surprise. “But you weren’t even in the water.”

  “Of course not, dear. I hired one of the busboys in the restaurant to do it for me. Remember when I broke down and ran to the ladies’ room in tears? Well, those tears were just an act. Part of my performance. And I wasn’t in the ladies’ room. I was outside the men’s room paying a darling busboy named Jaime two hundred dollars to snip your air hose. I told him that it was a practical joke. That you were an experienced scuba diver. I don’t think he really believed me, but for two hundred dollars, he was happy to oblige. Labor is so reasonable in Mexico, don’t you think?”

  So Nesbitt had been right. It was one of the locals!

  “But did you take the hint? Noooo. You went right on snooping and spying, and now it’s come to this.”

  By now I’d inched my way up against the wall, not easy to do from a sitting position. Unfortunately, Emily had inched her way right along with me.

  “Well, this is it, Jaine. Time to go to that great cruise ship in the sky
.”

  She tested the tip of her ice pick and smiled.

  “Nice and sharp.”

  Was it really going to end like this? Hacked to death by a crazy lady in a poop-stained sweat suit? I was too young to die! I hadn’t been to Paris. Or Rome. Or the Ben & Jerry factory tour in Waterbury, Vermont!

  What the heck was wrong with me? I couldn’t just sit there, cringing like a coward, and let her kill me without putting up a fight.

  I had to do something. Now!

  And so, as she knelt down to get better aim at me, I kicked her in the shins with every ounce of strength I had. Which, from my awkward position on the floor, wasn’t much. But it was enough to send her stumbling backward.

  Free at last from her hovering ice pick, I leapt to my feet and charged at her.

  You’d think I’d have an easy time of it. After all, she was at least three decades older than me. But the woman had the strength of the truly insane. Not to mention that darn ice pick clutched in her hand.

  Just as I was biting her wrist in an attempt to get her to drop it, she snuck in a blow to my stomach that sent me reeling.

  The next thing I knew she had me straddled on the bed.

  “Okay, Jaine,” she said, her face grim with determination. “It’s all over. No more games.”

  It looked like my time was up. The End. Finito.

  But then, just as I was preparing to take my last breath on the planet, I saw it: Samoa’s manuscript, where I’d tossed it on my night table.

  I waited till Emily raised the ice pick above her head to gain thrust, and in that millisecond while her arms were raised, I grabbed the manuscript and held it over my chest.

  She plunged the pick with the force of an Olympian. But it barely made a dent in the massive tome.

  Furious, she raised the pick to give it another shot, but she never got a chance. Because just then two security guards came rushing into the room.

  Thank heavens someone must have heard my screams and called for help.

  There was much scuffling and shouting as they pried her off me and wrenched the ice pick from her hands.

  But I barely registered what was happening.

  All I could think of was that my life had been saved by Do Not Distub!

  Minutes later Captain Lindstrom showed up and at last listened to what I had to say. He quickly dispatched minions to search Emily’s cabin.

  Then he turned to the security guys, who had Emily by the elbows.

  “Let her go,” he commanded, holding out his arm to her in a courtly gesture.

  “Shall we, Miss Pritchard?”

  “Of course, captain,” she said, smiling serenely.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to spend the night in custody.”

  “Oh, I don’t mind. I’ve always wanted to see a ship’s brig. How very exciting!”

  Gone was the vengeful madwoman who’d just tried to eviscerate me with an ice pick, and in her place was the slightly eccentric old lady who’d greeted me so effusively that first night at sea.

  “You mustn’t worry about me, Karl,” she said. “I don’t regret what I did, not for a minute.

  “The only thing I do regret,” she added, with a sly smile in my direction, “was my bad luck in dinner companions.”

  And then she headed out the door on the captain’s arm, her eyes as clear and bright as they’d been all those years ago on her very first cruise.

  Chapter 25

  Those of you keeping track of my calorie intake—I’m glad you are, because I’m not—know that I never did get to eat those brownies I’d brought back to my cabin ages ago.

  And by now I was starving. Near-death experiences tend to make me a bit peckish.

  So I zipped over to the buffet to make up for lost chocolate.

  I’d just polished off my second brownie and was licking the frosting from my fingers when I looked up and saw Robbie making his way across the nearly deserted room.

  I slumped down in my seat, dreading the thought of facing him. Not only had he caught me attempting to break into his safe, but now I was going to have to tell him his beloved Aunt Emily was a psychopathic killer.

  “I figured I’d find you here,” he said, sitting across from me.

  “Look, Robbie, there’s something I should tell you.”

  “If it’s about Aunt Emily,” he sighed, “I already know. The captain told us.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “To tell the truth, I’m not all that surprised.”

  “You aren’t?”

  “Aunt Em’s always been slightly off-kilter. As she grew older, I sensed it more and more. That’s why I was so happy when she hooked up with Graham. He seemed to be so good for her.” He smiled ruefully. “Could I have been more wrong? I never dreamed he’d be the one to send her over the edge.

  “But the strange thing is, when I went to see her just now, she didn’t seem upset. It’s as if killing Graham brought her peace somehow.”

  “I know just what you mean,” I said, thinking of how calmly she’d walked off with Captain Lindstrom.

  “We’ll get her the best attorneys money can buy and hope they get her off with an insanity plea. The poor defenseless thing doesn’t belong in prison.”

  If you ask me, Emily was more than capable of defending herself in prison, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “Anyhow, Jaine,” he said, frowning, “I’m here because I want to talk about what happened today in my cabin.”

  I cringed at the memory.

  “I’m so sorry about that, Robbie. I swear, I’m not a thief.”

  “I know you’re not. You were looking for the cuff links.”

  “You knew that?”

  He nodded. “I figured you suspected one of us of killing Graham. I was just so hurt that you thought it was me.”

  “Oh, but I didn’t suspect you!”

  He shot me a laser look.

  “Okay, so maybe I did suspect you. But my heart wasn’t in it. Honest! You do believe me, don’t you?”

  I waited for an agonizing beat.

  And then—hallelujah!—his lopsided grin made a triumphant return.

  “I believe you,” he said. “And by the way, if you had looked in my safe, you would’ve found this.”

  He took a small jewelry box from his pocket and handed it to me.

  “Go ahead. Open it.”

  I did and found a lovely silver dolphin pin inside.

  “It’s beautiful!”

  “One of these days,” he grinned, “we’re going to swim with the dolphins.”

  Okay, this was it. I had to come clean and tell him the only thing I wanted to go swimming with was a rubber float in a heated pool, preferably with a built-in holder for a gin and tonic.

  But this was me we’re talking about. So the words that actually came out of my mouth were: “I can’t wait!”

  Oh, well. I had to look on the bright side. Compared to the dolphins, I’d look positively anorexic.

  Then he reached over and took my hand, and the same electric jolt I’d felt that night out on deck coursed through my body.

  “Oh, no,” he groaned, taking his hand back.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Don’t look now, but that idiot ice sculptor is coming.”

  “But that’s impossible.”

  Surely Anton wasn’t still interested in me after our last encounter in my cabin.

  How wrong I was. I turned and saw him trotting over to our table, ponytail swaying, holding a covered plate in his hand.

  “Jaine, babe!” he leered, his libido alive and kicking. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

  Apparently it no longer bothered him that I knew all about his checkered past as the Butterfly Bandit.

  “Look what I sculpted for you. An egg salad Kiss.”

  He whipped off the cover of the plate, and sure enough, there on the plate was a reasonably good facsimile of a Hershey’s Kiss in egg salad.

  “Whaddaya think? Terrific,
huh?”

  At which point, Robbie got up from the table and stood between us.

  “Sorry, buddy,” he said. “She’s already got a kiss.”

  And right there, in the middle of the twenty-four-hour buffet, he took me in his arms and kissed me.

  Needless to say, I went back for seconds.

  YOU’VE GOT MAIL

  To: Jaineausten

  From: Hot-to-Trotsky

  Subject: Wedding with Me

  Hello, Ms. Jaine Austen—

  My name Vladimir Ivan Trotsky. I come from beautiful land of Uzbekistan. I meet your beautiful mother at Universal Studios Tour and she tell me all about you, what a beautiful woman you are, what beautiful cook and homemaker.

  I am tall, dark, and very beautiful, too. Plus I have all my own teeth. So I write to see if you be interested in wedding with me?

  Write back and we will arrange dowry.

  Yours very sincerely,

  Vladimir Ivan Trotsky

  Epilogue

  Needless to say, I did not marry Vladimir Ivan Trotsky—in spite of his tempting offer to shower me with all the yogurt I could eat and a goat of my very own.

  Back here in the States, Emily Pritchard is out on bail and awaiting her murder trial in a luxury sanitarium for the Rich & Cuckoo.

  Her lawyers are confident they’ll get her off on an insanity plea.

  She was certainly sane enough to disinherit Kyle when Maggie spilled the beans about his embezzlement. To avoid a jail sentence, Kyle returned all the money he hadn’t already spent. Needless to say, he and Nesbitt never made it to the Cayman Islands. Last I heard, they were foaming lattes at a Starbucks in Burbank.

  Free from Kyle’s tyranny, Maggie got a job as an assertiveness training counselor and is dating a guy she met at Gamblers Anonymous.

  Cookie Esposito sued Holiday Cruise Lines for false arrest and settled out of court for a small fortune. She quit the cruise biz and settled down in Palm Springs, where she married a mega-wealthy widower. For their honeymoon, they sailed around the world on their own private yacht. The only time she sings now is in her travertine marble shower.