Princess Charming

by Jane Heller

  “Good man,” I said, trying to convince myself that they weren’t all bad.

  Jackie ate every morsel of her own dinner and nearly all of mine too.

  “I’m cured,” she announced. “Per cured me. He’s a medical genius.”

  “Bill is an excellent doctor as well,” said Pat.

  “Tell us about your day with Albert,” Jackie suggested, getting Pat off the subject of Bill. “What’d you guys do in Saint Croix?”

  “Well, after our art safari, we took a taxi ride to the Ghut Bird Sanctuary,” she said.

  “Why am I not surprised?” said Jackie.

  “It was right in the midst of an exquisite rain forest,” Pat continued as I tuned out. I just couldn’t make myself care about the tropical birds Albert saw or the raptures he went into when he saw them. And so I half listened but mostly I thought about Sam, or tried not to.

  I think Pat was waxing poetic about some bird’s plumbage (she had probably meant plumage), when I heard a rustling sound over by the cabin door and saw an envelope being slipped under it.

  Assuming that it was yet another message from Sam—and that Kingsley was merely being efficient in slipping it under Jackie’s door instead of mine, given that I was having dinner in her room—I tiptoed over to the door, grabbed the envelope, and stuffed it surreptitiously into my pocket.

  I’ll read it later, I thought. No point in spoiling the evening with more of Sam’s ramblings. He was my problem, not my friends’.

  The party broke up about nine, and I weaved my way down the hall to my cabin just in time to hear Captain Solberg’s nightly weather report. I had barely stepped inside my room when there was a knock at the door. I assumed it was Pat or Jackie, since we had literally just left each other.

  I opened the door.

  “Let me have five minutes to explain. Just five minutes.”

  It was Sam. Gee, it’s really a shame that he’s a hit man, I thought as I regarded him. It had been Country & Western Night in the dining room, so he was wearing blue jeans and a denim shirt. All that blue made his eyes only more devastating. I despised how attractive he still was to me.

  I tried slamming the door in his face, but he was stronger than I thought and he was easily able to muscle it back open.

  “Fine. I’ll just give Security a jingle,” I said coldly, moving toward the phone.

  “Slim, look,” he said, following me inside the cabin. “I really think you’re overreacting here. I understand how you could feel lied to, confused, betrayed. But the way you’ve been avoiding me, refusing to even speak to me, is a little—”

  “Hello?” I said into the phone, ignoring Sam’s speech. “Yes. I’m calling to report that a man has broken into my stateroom and is harassing me. That’s right. My cabin number is—”

  We were cut off. Sam had placed his finger on the cradle of the phone.

  “Oh, so you’re going to kill me now? Is that it?” I said with a sneer.

  “Kill you? What the hell’s gotten into you?”

  He looked genuinely bewildered by my remark. Which only proved what a terrific bullshit artist he was, as far as I was concerned.

  “Just five minutes,” he bargained. “If you don’t want to talk to me after that, I swear I’ll never bother you again.”

  “Never bother me again? What would Eric think of that?” I scoffed.

  “Eric? Your ex-husband? What’s he got to do with this?”

  God, he was good. Maybe acting was the right career for him, not killing poor, defenseless ex-wives. He could win an Oscar with that innocent act.

  “Five minutes, Slim. Just five minutes,” he said again.

  I was mildly curious about what he would say, how he would explain the Sam Peck—Simon Purdys bit, never mind the rest of it.

  “Five minutes,” he repeated, sensing he was getting somewhere.

  “All right,” I said finally, taking the dare. “But not here.”

  “Wherever you say then.”

  I considered the situation. I wasn’t about to spend even five minutes alone with the man. That would be much too risky, I knew. The question was: Where on the ship would I feel safe with him?

  “It’ll have to be in a very public place,” I mused. “With lots of people around.”

  “Name it,” Sam said, his confidence building.

  I walked over to the dresser, picked up the ship’s schedule of events for that evening, scanned the listing, and lit on the perfect place for Sam to plead his case.

  “We’ll meet in Her Majesty’s Lounge on Deck 3,” I told him.

  “Her Majesty’s Lounge is a piano bar,” Sam pointed out. “They have a couple of Ferrante and Teischer knock-offs performing. I doubt there’ll be much of a crowd.”

  “They’re not performing there tonight, according to this activities sheet,” I said. “It says the ship’s food and beverage manager is giving a lecture in Her Majesty’s Lounge—an event that’s sure to be very well attended.”

  “Why? What’s the subject of the lecture?”

  “Napkin folding.”

  18

  I insisted that Sam and I take separate elevators to Her Majesty’s Lounge on Deck 3. God forbid that we should take the same elevator, that it would be crowded, and that my body would be forced to brush up against his.

  As luck would have it, my elevator got to the third deck a few minutes before Sam’s. So I went straight to Her Majesty’s Lounge, which, I discovered, had been set up to resemble a classroom instead of a bar, with several rows of chairs facing a lectern. There were close to seventy-five people in the room, and every chair but three was occupied. I quickly appropriated one of them and put my purse on the one right next to it, saving it for the man who’d been hired to murder me. Talk about bizarre.

  The speaker standing at the lectern, the ship’s food and beverage manager, was a woman named Ashley Bliss. When I arrived, she was in the midst of explaining that, although the art of napkin folding might look tricky, it was, in fact, a remarkably simple skill to master. She went on to say that there was no better way to create an atmosphere for a dinner party than to design one of the “soft sculptures” she was about to demonstrate to us.

  “Select the fold to suit the mood, I always say,” she said jauntily as she fingered the sample napkins that were resting on the lectern. “And be sure to remember that while napkins made entirely of synthetic materials may be the easiest to clean, they do not hold a fold the way linen, cotton, or even cotton-synthetic blends do. But the most important thing I want to stress before we get started here tonight—and I do mean stress!—is: Always fold your napkins before your party guests arrive, while you still have time and don’t feel stressed!”

  Everyone applauded, including me. This was riveting stuff, let me tell you.

  Sam slipped into his chair, just as Ashley was beginning to discuss the Basic Ring Fold and the fact that its versatility and “gentle contours” made it the design of choice for a casual supper.

  “We can’t talk here,” he said and was instantly “shushed” by the people sitting in front of us.

  “We’ll just have to whisper,” I whispered, then glanced at my watch. “You asked for five minutes. If I were you I’d get started.”

  Sam smiled. “You’re beautiful when you’re angry.”

  “Oh, please. Enough with the movie lines,” I hissed, relishing the compliment in spite of myself. “Just get on with it, would you?”

  I couldn’t even look at Sam. Just sitting so close to him, trying not to breathe his scent, was hard enough. So I fixed my gaze on Ashley, who was folding a napkin into a triangle, point facing upward, demonstrating the aforementioned Basic Ring Fold. I watched in awe as she brought the left corner of the napkin up to meet the top point and then repeated the process with the right corner, folding the lower left edge in to meet the centerline, repeating that process with the right edge to form a kite shape, folding the napkin back along the centerline, and holding the folds in place, pulling the bott
om of the napkin through a napkin ring and shaking the folds out into little fans. “See how easy?” she said, receiving a thunderous applause.

  “My real name is Simon Purdys and I live in Manhattan. On the corner of Eighty-fifth and Third,” he said in a hushed tone.

  “I already know that,” I snapped. “I checked out your driver’s license while you were in the bathroom getting ready to…” I shook my head when I remembered that I had nearly let this homicidal maniac enter my sacred temple.

  “I’m not in the insurance business,” he went on, not even addressing the issue of why I had been riffling through his wallet. “I’m a travel writer. For Away from It All magazine.”

  I snickered. “And I’m the articles editor for Playboy.”

  My reference to Playboy triggered more shushing and a couple of dirty looks.

  “It’s true,” Simon whispered. “I’m doing a story for the magazine on cruises. For the past month and a half, I’ve sampled every damn cruise line there is: Carnival, Royal Caribbean, Norwegian, Celebrity, you name it. Sea Swan is my last assignment. In other words, Slim, I’m here on the Princess Charming on business. And when I travel for business, I don’t use my own name—ever. If the people who run cruises, hotels, and resorts find out I’m there to cover them for a national travel magazine, they fall all over themselves to give me VIP treatment and I don’t get the real story. So I use aliases. A lot of travel writers do. This time, I happened to pick the name ‘Sam Peck.’ As in ‘Peck’s Bad Boy.’ I’ve certainly lived up to the name in your opinion, haven’t I?”

  I didn’t respond for several seconds, preferring to listen to Ashley finish discussing the Sea Wave, a fold in which the napkin achieved a ruffled look, suitable, she said, for a Sunday brunch. Was this Simon Purdys telling the truth? I asked myself, wanting to believe him but afraid to. Could he be a writer for Away from It All? I’d read the magazine every now and then but only rarely taken note of the bylines. I’d never had a client in the travel industry, so I’d never needed to get to know travel writers, take them to lunch to pitch them a story, any of that. Still, if this guy were really just a travel writer pretending to be an insurance agent so he wouldn’t get VIP treatment from the cruise line, why hadn’t he told me the truth? We had grown so close in such a short time. Why, I wondered, hadn’t he trusted me with his real identity?

  “I was going to tell you,” he said, reading my mind. “I was going to tell you everything last night. After we’d made love.”

  The “made love” incited more shushes and dirty looks, especially from Ashley.

  “I’m afraid I’ll have to ask the couple in the back to step outside to finish their conversation,” she called out from her lectern as she was beginning her demonstration of the Buffet Bundle, a napkin fold that held silverware in a nifty little package.

  “Come on, let’s get out of here,” Simon said, grabbing my hand and pulling me out of my seat.

  “If you two would like to see the rest of the demonstrations, simply turn your in-cabin television sets to the Princess Charming Channel at six o’clock tomorrow morning,” Ashley offered in a conciliatory tone. “They’ll be replaying my entire lecture.”

  “Okay. Now what?” I said when we were outside in the corridor.

  “Have a seat,” said Simon, pointing to the floor.

  “Here?” I asked.

  “You wanted to talk in a public place. Well, this is a hall. Halls are public places. People will be walking past us by the dozens, so you won’t have to be alone with me. And you won’t have to get your dress dirty.” He took the sheet of paper containing the evening’s schedule of activities out of his shirt pocket, unfolded it, and spread it onto the floor, indicating that I was to sit on it. I sat on it. He sat next to me—a little closer to me than I would have liked. Either that, or he did not sit close enough. I couldn’t decide which.

  “So. Where were we?” I said, trying to pick up the thread of our conversation.

  “I was saying that I was going to tell you about being a travel writer for Away from It All—”

  “If you’re a travel writer for Away from It All,” I interrupted, “then what was that whole song and dance about your conflict over your career? You told me you were wrestling with a job change, remember? Or was that just part of the insurance-agent-who’s-afraid-to-fly bullshit?”

  He shook his head. “The part about the career conflict was true. I have been considering a job change. Actually, I quit the magazine last year, but I have a very persuasive editor. She offered to pay me twice what I was making, so I came back. Don’t get me wrong—I love writing and I love traveling. But I want a life. I’m forty-five years old. The novelty of flying off to some exotic foreign country every other month has worn off. I actually took the cruise assignment as sort of a no-brainer—a few weeks where I could try to figure out what the hell to do with myself.”

  “If any of this is true—and that’s still an ‘if,’” I said, “I can’t figure out why you didn’t tell me who you were. I’m a big girl, not to mention a PR person who’s had more than a little contact with magazine writers. I would hardly have gone straight to the public address system and announced your real identity to everyone on the ship, for God’s sake.”

  “The more involved we became with each other, the tougher it was for me to tell you, Slim,” he said. “I didn’t expect to get attached to anybody on this cruise. I didn’t expect to get attached ever again, if you want to know the honest truth.”

  “‘Honest truth’ is a redundancy, as any journalist would know,” I said huffily. “Frankly, I don’t think you could spot an honest truth if it hit you in the face.”

  He straightened his glasses over the bridge of his nose as if he had been hit in the face. “Oh, okay. I think I get it now,” he said, nodding his head.

  “Get what?”

  “Get what all this anger is about, this overreaction. You want to know about Jillian. If I fabricated her too.”

  “The thought has crossed my mind in the past twenty-four hours,” I replied. “Before that, whenever we’d be alone together and you’d descend into your—how should I term them?—‘sad silences,’ I’d assumed they were because of Jillian. Because you missed her. Because she died just before you two were to be married. But now that your story turns out to be a lie, who knows? You didn’t say how she died or under what circumstances. So maybe the sad silences were just a little method acting on your part, to keep yourself from getting bored on yet another Caribbean cruise. Maybe Jillian is really one of those twin nieces of yours that you mentioned at dinner the other night. Or come to think of it, maybe ‘Jillian’ never existed at all.”

  Simon gazed up at the ceiling before answering, as if hoping for divine intervention. Then his eyes met mine. “You were wondering if Jillian existed, and I was wondering how I would explain her to you.” He paused to collect himself. I remained unmoved. “Jillian Payntor more than existed; she was the center of my life, my whole world,” he began, then paused again to clear his throat. “She was a lawyer. An assistant prosecutor in the Essex County Prosecutor’s Office. When I met her, she was on a hot streak, hadn’t lost a case in two years. No one wanted to argue against her—least of all me.” He smiled, apparently at the memory of their love spats. “She was the sister of a friend of mine at the magazine,” he went on. “A photographer named Jason Payntor. Jillian and I were the lucky beneficiaries of Jason’s matchmaking.” He smiled again, this time at the memory of the First Date, no doubt. “Neither of us was looking for a serious relationship—I was always traveling, she was always trying cases—but we hit it off literally right from the start. There was no question in either of our minds that we would be together for the rest of our lives.”

  Sort of the way I’d felt about you, I thought with a heavy heart.

  “She gave up her condo in Montclair, moved into my apartment on Eighty-fifth Street, and commuted to New Jersey,” Simon continued. “Since I didn’t have to commute, my part of the bar
gain was cooking her dinner whenever I was in town.”

  He cooked her dinner, I mused, wondering what was on the menu at their place. Eric had made me dinner once: borscht. I’m allergic to beets, but he had forgotten.

  “How long did you two live together before you decided to get married?” I asked, still unsure if I was buying any of the story.

  “A year and three months. We were happy, Slim. Our schedules were hell to coordinate, but we made it work. We were determined not to be one of those two-career couples where it’s: ‘Dinner tonight? Check with my secretary.’ We were about as close as two people can be.”

  I nodded dully, remembering how Eric and I were about as close as two people who were suing each other.

  “We picked a wedding date in May,” Simon recalled. “Then came a glitch. Jillian couldn’t take a honeymoon until the following October, because of a big case she’d been assigned. There was no way we were putting off getting married, so we opted to do things backwards: have the honeymoon before the wedding. The magazine was sending me to the British Virgin Islands ten days before the ceremony. It seemed like the perfect solution to have Jillian come along.”

  “What happened next?” I said, hanging on his every word now and hating myself for it.

  “We had an incredible time,” he said, his voice becoming lower, softer, more wistful. “Jillian loved to sail and so did I. Toward the end of the trip, when we were staying at a place in Virgin Gorda, we chartered a thirty-eight-foot sloop, had the hotel pack us a picnic lunch, and sailed out of the harbor.”

  “I’ve never been to Virgin Gorda,” I said, suddenly feeling the need to insinuate myself into the story. “I hear it’s very romantic.”

  “It’s a pretty special place, kind of remote, the last safe harbor before you head out into the rough, open waters of the Atlantic. The North Sound is a haven for sailors, and the island itself is really lush—hills, coral reefs, cays, and islets, everything but crowds.”

  “No cruise ships there, I guess,” I said, trying to picture Simon and his bride-to-be in paradise. I wanted to be able to picture Jillian, specifically. Picture how she had met her untimely end.