Murder Packs a Suitcase

by Cynthia Baxter

  “No problem. Phil was bothering all of us, not just you.”

  “Still,” Courtney persisted, “if I had more experience, I might have handled it better. I’m actually pretty nervous. About being in charge of a press trip for the first time, I mean.”

  “It’s a big responsibility,” Mallory said sympathetically. “All those details to juggle—and all those different personalities. But you’re doing just fine.” She heard herself speaking in a motherly tone, no doubt because Courtney wasn’t much older than her daughter. “Besides, if anyone was acting unprofessional, it was Phil. In fact, he was behaving like a junior high school boy on his first trip away from home. You’d think that by now he’d know better.”

  As they walked inside the building, she was annoyed that the nasty scene from lunch was seeping into the rest of the day. As if talking about Phil Diamond wasn’t bad enough, she couldn’t get his off-key rendition of the theme song from the James Cameron movie out of her head. Of course, the piped-in music, a Celine Dion wannabe crooning a song that sounded just different enough from the famous one not to precipitate a lawsuit, didn’t help.

  Still, she was determined to forget about the oafish journalist and concentrate on the famous disaster. She smiled at the ticket seller, a young man dressed in period costume consisting of black pants, a black vest, and a white shirt and tie.

  “One, please,” she said, proffering the voucher she’d found in her press kit.

  “And I’m with Florida Tourism.” Courtney flashed an ID card the same way cops on TV were always flashing their badges.

  Her credentials clearly had just as much clout here in Florida, where sightseeing was the official state pastime.

  “The next tour begins in fifteen minutes,” the young man advised, pushing two tickets toward them. “These are each printed with a name of one of the Titanic’s actual passengers. At the end of the tour, you can check the Memorial Wall to find out whether or not you survived.”

  Mallory expected to be a scullery maid or one of the other third-class passengers who, in the movie, was kept behind a locked gate as the great ship went down. Instead, she saw that for the next hour or so she would be the Countess of Rothes, also known as Lucy Dyer-Edwards.

  “I’m a countess!” she exclaimed. “Who are you?”

  “Mrs. Latifa Baclini.” Frowning, Courtney noted, “I’m traveling third-class.”

  “Oh, she’s a good one,” the ticket seller gushed. “Latifa was Lebanese and didn’t speak English. She and her daughters weren’t even supposed to travel on the Titanic. They had tickets on another liner. But while they were in Cherbourg, France, one of the girls got pink eye and they had to delay their departure until she got better.”

  “What about the countess?” Mallory asked.

  “Definitely first-class. She was British, married to the nineteenth Earl of Rothes, mother of two sons. A real lady, from what I understand.”

  Mallory walked just a little more gracefully than usual as she wandered over to a glass display case, which held a copy of the New York Times dated Tuesday, April 16, 1912. The headlines read:

  Titanic Sinks Four Hours After Hitting Iceberg

  866 Rescued by Carpathia, Probably 1250 Perish;

  Ismay Safe, Mrs. Astor Maybe, Noted Names Missing

  Ismay, she recalled from the movie, was the muckety-muck who ran the White Star Line, the company that owned and operated the Titanic. The Astors were household names simply because they were so rich. As for the number of casualties, she knew from the reading she’d done before coming to Florida that it was even larger: 1,503.

  But she copied down the headline, word for word, in case she decided to include it in her article. As she wrote, she overheard a man who had just come into the ticket office.

  “So what exactly is the experience?” he asked the man behind the counter. “Do you, like, get wet?”

  Maybe I should be writing an article on macabre Florida, she thought.

  “We have a few minutes before the tour starts,” she told Courtney. “Let’s check out the gift shop.”

  Mallory quickly decided that the gift shop also belonged in an article on macabre Florida. After all, there was definitely something unseemly about a retail establishment whose theme was one of the worst tragedies of the twentieth century.

  Still, she couldn’t resist a store of any kind, much less one with a clerk dressed like a maid from the early 1900s, in a long black dress and crisp white apron and cap. Mallory wandered among the displays, wondering if Jordan would appreciate a fluffy white bath towel embroidered with White Star Line—Titanic.

  Maybe a reminder of how fragile life is would prompt him to hang it up every once in a while, she thought, instead of leaving it on the bathroom floor in a mildewing heap. When she spotted the price tag, however, she decided there had to be cheaper ways of training an eighteen-year-old boy.

  She reached for a long thin box sporting a picture of the doomed ship. Inflatable Titanic, the box read. Twenty inches. Educational and fun.

  Very educational, Mallory thought grimly. It teaches the lesson: Go by airplane.

  The box also warned, Do not use as a flotation device, which she decided was excellent advice.

  Nearby she spotted a plastic replica of the famous ocean liner, one that was apparently battery powered. Cruises on surface the copy on the box noted.

  That, Mallory concluded, was undoubtedly designed to calm potential customers who feared the toy would go under the very first time it was used.

  But showtime was imminent. As she and Courtney waited in line with two dozen other tourists who were part of the tour, their eyes were glued to a video with actual footage of the great ship.

  “The ship was nearly four city blocks long,” the narrator reported with pride. “Its passengers included famous names like Guggenheim, Astor, and Strauss.”

  “I’m surprised you’ve never been here before,” Mallory commented, figuring that part of being a good travel writer was making conversation with the people who had sponsored her trip.

  Courtney scrunched up her nose again. “Actually, it’s been a really busy year for me. I just graduated from college last May. And then Greg and I got married in August. Planning our wedding was a huge job. But it was worth it.

  “You should have seen it!” she gurgled, just assuming Mallory would be interested in the details. “We got married at this really gorgeous hotel, outside in the garden. We had almost three hundred guests, and a million flowers…. My wedding cake had five tiers. Five! It was like something out of a fairy tale—or the food channel!”

  “It sounds wonderful,” Mallory said politely.

  “Oh, it definitely was. Then, right after our honeymoon, I started working for the Tourism Board. So I’ve spent the past few months getting used to both a new job and my new status as a married lady. All of a sudden, I had this completely different life, compared to my four years at college.”

  “Did you go to school in Florida?” Mallory asked.

  Courtney nodded. “Florida State University. I majored in Communications. I also had some really cool part-time jobs. I worked for a local radio station my first two years. Then I moved to a public relations firm. I ended up learning a lot.”

  “Sounds like a tough schedule,” Mallory observed, thinking of all the hours Amanda logged in at the library. “Being a full-time student plus working, I mean.”

  Shrugging, Courtney replied, “But I got such great experience. When I graduated, it helped me get exactly the job I wanted.”

  Without going to law school or business school, Mallory couldn’t help thinking. “It sounds as if you really enjoy working in the tourism field.”

  “Ooh, I love it!” Courtney gushed. “It’s so much fun. I get to meet all kinds of interesting people and go to fun places—like today! I’m having a great time. Aren’t you?”

  By that point, the group had started shuffling forward. When they reached the front of the line, their tour guide, the same young
man who had played the role of ticket seller, ripped her ticket in half.

  “Welcome aboard, Countess,” he greeted her.

  In response, she bowed her head. She wondered with amusement if she could induce her son to start addressing her the same way. As for her daughter, she was undoubtedly a lost cause.

  Yet Mallory found her cynicism dropping away as the tour group entered the first room of the exhibit, the offices of J. Bruce Ismay. The caption underneath his portrait, which hung on the green-and-white-striped wall, explained that he was the son of Thomas H. Ismay, co-founder of the White Star Line. Junior became the manager of the company when his father died in 1899.

  J. Bruce Ismay—or at least the handsome, mustached actor who was portraying him—suddenly appeared on the video screen above the huge wooden desk. The actor managed to make him seem suitably arrogant as he announced that the ship formerly known as R.M.S. No. 401 had just been launched. He smugly explained that the 882-foot ship made from 45,000 tons of steel was the most luxurious and safest ship ever built and that it was practically unsinkable.

  “Eight hundred eighty-two feet…forty-five thousand tons of steel…” Mallory muttered as she copied down the facts she thought she might need for future reference. “Most luxurious and safest…”

  She continued taking notes as the group was led through the Belfast Shipyard, where a reproduction of the ship’s giant propeller was on display. Next came the boarding area in Southampton, England, where, the tour guide explained, all passengers, including those traveling first class, were checked for head lice. She snapped some photos inside the elegant black-and-white Verandah Café, with its glass displays of china and silverware.

  Then the group entered a room that contained a re-production of the ship’s Grand Staircase, which everyone recognized from the movie. A plump woman in a floor-length black dress, a black hat trimmed with feathers, and an overabundance of jewelry burst into the room.

  “I’m Molly Brown,” she introduced herself energetically. “You may have heard of me.”

  Sure, Mallory thought. You’re a famous historical figure who’s best known for not dying on the Titanic.

  Actually, Mallory had read about her in one of her guidebooks, so she knew there was a lot more to her. The real Molly Brown was the daughter of Irish immigrants who’d fled the famous potato famine of the 1840s. At age thirteen, she got her first job in a tobacco factory in her hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. She moved to Colorado and married a mining engineer named J. J. Brown, who became a millionaire after inventing a method for digging deeper in the gold mines. Even though the Browns began hobnobbing with the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, and the Astors, she never stopped fighting for improved labor conditions and women’s rights and even ran for Congress.

  This version exhibited the brash personality that became Molly Brown’s trademark. She explained that the solid oak staircase spanned seven flights and that first-class passengers used it to reach the dining room, where they enjoyed ten-course dinners and champagne. Mallory had to admit that so far, the exhibits had managed to capture all the glamour of the ship.

  But of course it couldn’t last. Molly Brown led the group through the lower deck, where they could hear the ominous rumble of the engine. As they passed the iron gate that blocked off the quarters of the third-class passengers, the lights began blinking on and off.

  The mood darkened even further when the group stopped in front of an actual iceberg.

  Mallory glanced around and saw that everyone in the group appeared to be enraptured.

  “Put your hand on it for fifteen seconds,” Molly Brown instructed. “It feels cold at first, but then it starts to burn. It’s thirty-two degrees in here. The night the Titanic sank, the air was thirty-one degrees and the water was twenty-eight degrees. Adults can last ten to twenty minutes in that temperature before hypothermia sets in and they suffocate.”

  I guess this is part of the Experience, Mallory thought, jotting down the gruesome figures the tour guide had just rattled off.

  She was disappointed that the exhibits included a real life iceberg, which struck her as the height of bad taste. But her attitude changed once she dutifully filed over to it with the rest of the group and pressed the palm of her hand against it.

  The iceberg was torturously cold and frighteningly solid. In fact, it was only when she had actually touched the enormous chunk of ice herself—experienced it—that she fully understood what a formidable foe it had been.

  The re-creation of the deck was almost as cold. Once the group had gathered around the ersatz Molly Brown, she pointed out that here, as on the real Titanic, there were stars in the sky but no moon. As Mallory stood shivering in the dark, frigid air, she could really relate to the horror of that night.

  Maybe this is a little too much of the Titanic experience, she thought, shivering as Molly Brown launched into a detailed description of the horrors that occurred as the ill-fated ship went down. It wasn’t until she was explaining that the passengers had never had a lifeboat drill, since it wasn’t scheduled until later in the trip, that she noticed that some of the children on the tour were turning blue and moved them along to the next room.

  “Model of the propeller,” Mallory wrote as she shuffled along with the others. “Molly Brown, actual iceberg, cold then hot…”

  As promised, there was a Memorial Wall near the end that listed all the passengers. The survivors’ names were in bold letters. Mallory was relieved to see that both she and Courtney had made it out alive.

  “Look, we survived!” she cried. “See, here’s my name, Lucy Dyer-Edwards, Countess of Rothes. And here’s yours, Mrs. Latifa Baclini.”

  She glanced over at Courtney, expecting to find her rejoicing in their good fortune. Instead, tears were streaming down her cheeks.

  “Courtney, are you okay?”

  “It’s so sad!” she cried. “Wives lost their husbands, children lost their fathers—”

  “It was a terrible tragedy,” Mallory agreed. She glanced around, slightly embarrassed that Courtney had chosen this particular time and place to mourn an event that had taken place nearly a hundred years ago.

  “To us, it’s just an interesting historical event,” Courtney sniffled. “But I’m sure it’s something those poor people who lost their loved ones never got over.”

  Why hadn’t Courtney done this when she saw the movie, Mallory wondered, like everybody else?

  She handed her a tissue, then led her to the final room of the exhibit. Fortunately, it focused on the tragedy’s commercial aspects. Hanging on the walls were posters from the various movies about the Titanic that had been made since the 1940s, along with photos of the actors who starred in them. The final display was a reproduction of one of the ensembles Kate Winslet wore in the most recent film, along with Leonardo DiCaprio’s actual costume.

  By the time they left the exhibit, Courtney was her usual cheery self again.

  “That was quite moving,” she chirped. “I’m glad I came with you. I’ll definitely recommend this to everyone who visits Orlando.”

  And I’m sure the tourists will appreciate it, Mallory thought. After all, there’s nothing like death to bring in the crowds.

  After an entire afternoon of Courtney’s chattiness, Mallory welcomed the silence of her hotel room. The Florida Tourism Board reception wasn’t scheduled to start for a couple of hours, so she sat down at the small round table, intending to read through the notes she’d taken that afternoon. But she couldn’t resist reorganizing them, then jotting down her impressions while they were still fresh in her mind. When she finally finished and surveyed what she’d written, she found that she’d filled six full pages.

  I had no idea I had so much to say, she thought, astounded by how easily this was coming to her. To think I was worried that I wouldn’t be able to do this—and now that I’m here, it turns out there’s no stopping me!

  She stood up to stretch, exhilarated by what she’d accomplished on her very first day as a travel
writer. When she glanced at the clock, she realized that she’d worked for almost a solid hour.

  Travel Writing: the Experience, she thought giddily as she headed into the bathroom to get ready for the reception. After a long, steaming hot shower, she slathered on the coconut-scented body lotion the hotel provided, deeply inhaling its delightfully sweet scent. Then she spent longer than usual blow-drying her hair, agonizing over the strands in front until she finally got them to curve gently around her face.

  At twenty minutes to seven, she slipped into a black halter-top dress splashed with red flowers. She smiled as she remembered what David said the last time he’d seen her in it: that it made her look like one of those women in the L’Oréal ads who claimed, “I’m worth it.” Then she slipped on a pair of strappy red sandals with heels that were much higher than she was used to. When she’d spotted them at Macy’s, she hadn’t been able to resist trying them on. When she saw how long they made her legs look, she’d had no choice but to whip out her charge card.

  The final touch was makeup. She put on more than she’d bothered with in months, with the exception of her interview at The Good Life. It was hard to believe that it was only days earlier that she’d ridden up the elevator with butterflies in her stomach. Now here she was, standing in front of a bathroom mirror more than a thousand miles from home, agonizing over which pair of earrings looked better, the white pearls or the red chandeliers.

  And enjoying every minute of the trip. In fact, she suddenly stopped what she was doing to marvel once again over how much fun she was having—and to recognize how little fun she’d had since David’s accident.

  She understood that she’d needed time to mourn. That in fact she was still mourning. Yet she was dealing with even more than grief. She also had to cope with the feeling that everyone she loved was deserting her.

  It was something that dated back to before David’s death. She’d spent so many years catering to the needs of her family that once they vanished, one by one, she had found herself floundering for a new way to define herself. When Amanda went off to college, Mallory had felt as if a part of her body had been physically cut off. But she still had David and Jordan with her at the dinner table every night. Then, when Jordan was only a couple of months away from going off to college, David was suddenly gone, too.