Dark Passage

by Marcia Talley

  ‘I feel almost guilty about going out for moule frites while she’s …’ I nodded toward the coffin. ‘… well, you know.’ I stood up and kissed my father on a cheek – warm, slightly damp and rough with stubble. ‘You look exhausted.’

  ‘I am.’ He scrubbed a hand over his steel-gray curls as if trying to wake himself up, starting by stimulating his scalp. ‘I’m glad we booked into a hotel tonight, rather than trying to drive back.’ He linked one arm through mine and the other through Georgina’s, then cocked his head in Ruth’s direction. ‘C’mon, Ruth. There’s a bouillabaisse at the Parc with my name on it.’

  It took only ten minutes to stroll from the funeral home back to our hotel at the corner of Locust and Eighteenth, directly across from Rittenhouse Square where bicycles were chained by twos and threes at intervals along the iron fencing. The evening was balmy, and the sidewalk outside the Parc Brasserie was crowded with couples dining elbow-to-elbow with their neighbors, seated on cane chairs at small round tables under burgundy-colored awnings that were so relentlessly French that even the numéro de téléphone was printed French-style – 21 55 45 22 62 – on the awning.

  As the hostess escorted us inside the restaurant to a table for four, not far from the enormous zinc-surfaced bar where a variety of Belgian beer seemed to be on tap, Daddy said, ‘I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your support.’

  ‘Are you kidding?’ From her chair, Ruth reached up and curiously fingered the white lace curtain that hung from a brass rail over her shoulder as if she were considering whether to buy it. ‘It’s no secret that Aunt Evelyn and I weren’t particularly close, but she was family, after all. I owe her something for that.’

  ‘Ruth’s lying to you, Daddy. She came to Philadelphia because of the molten chocolate cake with raspberry sauce you promised her.’ I picked up the oversized menu, encased in plastic, turned to the back and scanned the desserts. ‘As for me, I work cheap. After the moule frites, it’s crème brûlée pour moi, s’il vous plaît.’

  Two hours later, after desserts, cappuccinos and deeply warming glasses of Monbazillac, Daddy picked up the check and we wandered up to our rooms on the tenth floor. Daddy called it an early night, gave us each a hug, then disappeared into his own room just down the hall.

  Georgina had to scan the key card three times before the light blinked green and the door decided to open but, once inside, she immediately kicked off her shoes and sprawled, spreadeagle, on the gray-green velvet sofa of the two-room suite the three of us were sharing. ‘So, what about that cruise we were talking about?’

  ‘Am I not allowed to catch my breath?’ I dropped my handbag on the floor and crossed to the mahogany desk where I’d left my laptop. I flipped it open and powered it on. A few minutes later I was hunched over the screen, clicking around the website Ruth’s customer had recommended. ‘Do we want to sail out of New York or Baltimore?’

  ‘Baltimore,’ Georgina said without hesitation. ‘Getting ourselves up to New York and back would add a couple of hundred dollars to the cost.’

  ‘Right,’ I said as I clicked on ‘Baltimore’ and waited for the screen to refresh. ‘And I understand that parking is dirt cheap at the Baltimore Cruise Terminal, not to mention convenient.’

  ‘How many days do you think we can afford to be away?’ I asked a few moments later while scrolling down through a long listing of ships and sailing dates. ‘Here’s a five-day cruise to Bermuda and back, seven days to the eastern Caribbean. Here’s one for nine days, twelve …’

  ‘Five hardly seems worth the effort.’ Ruth extracted a Diet Coke from the minibar in the vestibule near the door and pulled up the tab. ‘I’ll have to check with my assistant, but if she can put in a few extra hours, I should be able to clear seven days, or even nine. Lord, I haven’t had a proper vacation since Hutch and I went on our honeymoon. Georgina?’

  Georgina shrugged. ‘Depends on the dates.’

  ‘There’s a nine-day cruise that leaves in three weeks for the Eastern Caribbean,’ I said. ‘San Juan, St Thomas, Dominican Republic, Haiti …’

  ‘Who on earth would want to go to Haiti?’ Georgina grumped.

  ‘Can we afford twelve days, maybe?’ I asked. ‘Here’s another one to San Juan, setting off on the twelfth of June, calling at St Thomas, St Maarten, Antiqua and Tortola, then back.’

  ‘Sounds divine, but no way I could talk Scott into covering for me at home for twelve whole days,’ Georgina said. ‘Seven, maybe. Ten, max. He hates to cook.’

  I turned around in my chair and grinned. ‘That’s why God invented McDonalds, Georgina.’

  She laughed.

  I turned back to the laptop and leaned close to the screen. ‘Looks like June is the window of opportunity, then.’ I swiveled in the chair to face my sisters. ‘Are we all clear, date-wise, for sometime mid-June?’

  I could hardly believe it when both women nodded.

  ‘OK. Why don’t we each go home, discuss the plan with our husbands and decide how much money we’re willing to spend. For planning purposes, the fares they’re quoting here work out to about a hundred dollars a day, but that includes food practically twenty-four/seven and everything except the booze, so to my way of thinking it’s quite a bargain.’

  ‘Gosh,’ said Georgina. ‘You can hardly stay at a Holiday Inn for a hundred dollars a day, and all you get for breakfast is a donut and a cup of weak coffee with powdered cream.’

  ‘I’ll talk to Paul, then tomorrow night I’ll set up a conference call and we can finalize things.’ I flapped a hand at the laptop where photos of cruise ships, quaint colonial ports, pink sand beaches and palm trees had begun to slide and fade across the screen. ‘If we’re going to do this, we should probably hurry, or the slots might be gone.’

  Ruth drained her Coke and set the empty can down on the end table. ‘You don’t need to call me about dates, Hannah. Hutch has been working on a big libel case so I hardly see him anyway. Even if they settle, there’s no way he’ll wrap that up by June, so whatever dates you two decide on is fine with me.’

  ‘Will we share a cabin, like we’re doing here?’ Georgina asked.

  I thought about the cabin that Paul and I had booked on the Queen Mary Two – twin beds squished together made up as a queen, with a pull-out sofa. Three people sharing would have been a tight squeeze. I was all for sisterly bonding, but crawling over a sibling in the middle of the night in order to go to the bathroom was taking sisterhood a bit too far. ‘We’ll definitely need two cabins,’ I said. ‘The rates are based on double occupancy, but we could …’

  ‘I’ll take the single,’ Ruth interrupted. ‘No worries there.’

  I could have hugged her. I’d shared sleeping arrangements with Ruth before and, not to put too fine a point on it, the woman snored. ‘Well, it’s decided, then!’ I snapped my laptop shut and sprang to my feet. ‘C’mon, Georgina,’ I said from the door that led into the adjoining bedroom. ‘If we’re going to be roomies, we better start practicing. You and I get the king. Ruth, the sofa is all yours!’

  TWO

  ‘There are approximately 200 overnight ocean-going cruise vessels worldwide. The average ocean-going cruise vessel carries 2,000 passengers with a crew of 950 people. In 2007 alone, approximately 12,000,000 passengers were projected to take a cruise worldwide.’

  Cruise Vessel Safety & Security

  Act of 2010 (H.R. 3660)

  Paul slotted a platter into the dishwasher. ‘I think that’s a terrific idea.’

  ‘You do?’ I hadn’t expected Paul to disapprove of our plan, but I wasn’t expecting him to stand up and cheer for it, either. The man was practically waving pompoms.

  Paul reached out a soapy hand and tapped the tip of my nose. ‘I’ll miss you terribly, of course, but what a wonderful opportunity, especially for Georgina. That girl doesn’t get out enough, in my humble opinion.’

  ‘That’s because, as Georgina is quick to remind me, she has four children.’ I scraped the leftover spaghetti sauce into a
plastic container, snapped on the lid, then passed the dirty cooking pot to Paul. ‘I’m hoping that Scott doesn’t throw a monkey wrench into our plans. Georgina didn’t seem too worried, but you know and I know that Scott can sometimes be a spoiled brat.’

  ‘Don’t be too hard on the guy. He’s stuck with your sister through some pretty tough times.’ Paul attacked a patch of burnt-on tomato sauce with a scrubby sponge. ‘How’s the new therapist working out?’

  ‘Very well, I think. Georgina was worried when Doctor Christopher retired, but she’s settled into a routine with the new guy that seems to be working out for both of them. She hasn’t had a depressive episode in over a year.’ I gave him the thumbs up. ‘Kudos to the shrink and to the new meds.’

  ‘Anyone is better than that quack. What was her name? Voorhis?’ Paul rinsed the pot with hot water and upended it in the dish strainer. ‘What a piece of work she was!’

  Paul was right. Georgina’s first therapist had been so twisted that someone had murdered her for it. Sadly, Georgina had discovered the woman’s body. She was still recovering from the trauma.

  ‘When will you be gone?’ Paul asked. He pulled the plug and watched in apparent fascination as the dirty water swirled in a counter-clockwise direction down the drain.

  ‘Around the second or third week of June, depending.’

  ‘On what?’

  I closed the refrigerator door on the leftovers. ‘There must be a gabillion cruise lines out there, Paul. Cunard, of course. Holland America. Princess. Seaborne …

  ‘They’re all owned by Carnival, aren’t they? Carnival owns Costa, too.’

  ‘Right. But Carnival doesn’t own the cruise line we’re interested in.’

  Paul wrung out the dishcloth and draped it over the edge of the sink where it could dry. ‘Hannah, sweetheart?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Promise me something. Pick a cruise line that doesn’t run into solid objects. Like Italy.’

  I had to laugh. ‘Don’t worry, I have. It’s one I’ve never heard of, though.’ I picked up my iPhone and powered it on. ‘They’re called Phoenix Cruise Lines. According to the Phoenix website, they’re owned by some fellow named Gregorius Simonides. Wikipedia says that young Greg is the second son of a Greek national. Rather than helping to lead his native country out of its current debt crisis, he’s living and spending his father’s fortune in the UK. He buys up still serviceable, but slightly shopworn ships and rehabs them.’

  ‘Hence the name,’ Paul commented.

  ‘Gregorius?’ I asked, puzzled. Then, ‘Oh, Phoenix, you mean. Right. New life rising from the ashes.’ I turned the iPhone screen in Paul’s direction. ‘Judge for yourself. From the pictures, his ships are fairly posh. Not as posh as the Queen Mary Two, of course, but posh enough.’

  As Paul scrolled through a slide show of ships of the line, I said, ‘The vessels are all named Phoenix something – Phoenix Sun, Phoenix Wanderer, Phoenix Adventurer – you get the picture. The Explorer goes through the Panama Canal to the Galapagos, and the Odyssey cruises exclusively in the Mediterranean – no surprise. If I can get the dates to work, we’ll be on the Islander. Eight days to Bermuda and back.’

  Paul was examining a schematic deck layout of the Islander when the instrument began whoop-whoop-whooping in his hand, the claxon-like ring tone I’d assigned to my sister, Georgina. He passed the phone to me as if it were radioactive.

  ‘Hey, Georgina. I was just about to call you. What’s the good word?’

  ‘I have good news and bad news,’ my sister replied. ‘Which do you want first?’

  If there’s one thing I hate, it’s the good news/bad news game. I braced myself, figuring that the worst that would happen would be I’d be setting sail on the Islander with only one of my sisters: Ruth. ‘I’ve had a long day, Georgina. Don’t torture me. Give me the good news first.’

  Georgina’s voice was upbeat, bubbly. ‘The good news is that Scott is in favor of the cruise.’

  ‘So what’s the bad?’

  ‘He says if I want to go, I’ll have to take Julie.’

  My niece, Julie Lynn Cardinale, is fourteen years old going on twenty-three. With her red hair and green eyes, she is the image of her mother at that age. I was very fond of my niece and at times, particularly during the Voorhis murder investigation around ten years ago, Julie and I had grown very close. ‘I think that’s a great idea,’ I told my sister, truthfully. ‘The ship has a teen club and all kinds of supervised activities for kids. She’ll have a ball. And it nicely settles the question of how many cabins to book, and who gets to room with whom.’

  Georgina let out a long breath. ‘I’m so relieved! I thought you’d be pissed off.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. I adore your daughter.’

  ‘Yes, but you don’t have to live with her,’ Georgina said. ‘The hormones are raging.’

  ‘Emily was a handful at that age, too,’ I reminded her. ‘Now she’s a respectable mother of three and president of the Hillsmere Elementary P.T.A.’ I dragged a chair out from under the kitchen table and sat down on it. ‘I’m sure we can handle Julie, but does Scott understand that will double the price?’ My brother-in-law was a successful C.P.A, as cautious with his own money as he was with his clients’. Except for occasional stints as a substitute church organist, my sister had never needed to work outside the home.

  ‘When Scott told me not to worry about the money,’ Georgina babbled on, ‘I thought that aliens had come and taken over his body! I explained about the prices, about the staterooms with windows – I have to have a window, Hannah! – but he’d already visited the Phoenix website. Typical Scott. He sat me down, accused me of being naive, and launched into a lecture about hidden costs. Had I considered alcoholic drinks, for example, excursions, spa treatments, tips for the staff, souvenirs, like I was a teetotal idiot. I just sat in his office with my hands folded, nodding, smiling my oh-Scott-you-are-so-smart-and-I-am-such-a-dingbat smile, and when it was all over, he said we could afford up to $3000, but not a penny more.’

  ‘Wow,’ I said. ‘Just, wow.’

  ‘So I told him, three thousand dollars would be fine.’ Georgina snorted. She lowered her voice then, as if Scott had suddenly walked into the room. ‘That should allow me to drink heavily.’

  I laughed out loud. ‘You can buy the first round when we hit the hot tub!’ After a moment I asked, ‘What’s happening with the boys?’

  ‘I can’t believe I didn’t tell you! Sean and Dillon have summer jobs that start the second week of June. Sean’s shoveling manure and wood chips at a nursery out on York Road, and Dillon’s going to be a counselor at a day camp for inner-city youth at Notre Dame.’

  Two sons down and one to go, I thought. ‘How about Colin?’

  ‘Scott’s driving Colin up to his mom’s in West Virginia,’ my sister said. ‘It was sweet of her to offer, really. Hannah, I so need this vacation!’

  I could believe it. The twins were off to the University of Maryland in the fall, Julie would be entering high school and Colin had just graduated from kindergarten into the first grade, beginning what would surely be the lad’s meteoric rise straight from Boy’s Latin to Harvard. ‘You know what, Georgina?’

  ‘Yeah?’

  I couldn’t keep the excitement out of my voice. ‘I think we’re going to do this!’

  ‘I can hardly believe it myself, Hannah. All the stars must be aligned.’

  But were they? I had a sudden chilling thought. ‘Passports?’

  I held my breath until I heard Georgina say, ‘Check.’

  ‘I’m so relieved!’ I explained about the cruise, the dates and the itinerary, which was basically out to Bermuda and back. ‘Are you comfortable with me making all the reservations?’

  ‘Of course,’ Georgina said. ‘Just tell me how much we owe and I’ll write you a check.’

  ‘I’d better hang up and get to it, then. ’Bye, Georgina, and I’m so glad we’re going to make this work.’

  ‘A
window,’ she said. ‘I need a window. Don’t forget.’

  ‘Check,’ I said, and pressed End.

  Fifteen minutes later, down in our basement office with Paul kibbitzing over my shoulder, I logged onto the Phoenix website, selected adjoining cabins on deck four and entered my credit card number, expiration date, and CCV code. My mouse hovered over the Buy Now button. ‘Here goes!’

  When the screen refreshed, a special offer gave us two hundred dollars in on-board credits as a thank you for the last-minute booking. I’d be able to buy my own tropical drink with an umbrella in it when we hit the hot tub.

  I hit Print and as the receipt rolled out of the printer, I relaxed into my chair. The Alexander girls were a sister act again, and that act was going cruisin’.

  THREE

  ‘240,676 people sailed on 100 cruises from the Port of Baltimore in 2012. “Since beginning a year-round cruising schedule in 2009, the Port of Baltimore has continued to make waves as one of the hottest cruise ports in the U.S.,” Governor O’Malley said. [It] handled the fifth-largest amount of cruise passengers among East Coast cruise ports, 11th largest in the U.S., and 20th most in the world. In 2011 the Port began using a state-of-the-art, climate- controlled enclosed passenger boarding bridge. The bridge is mobile and flexible to accommodate various sized cruise ships. Baltimore is within a six-hour drive of 40 million people.’

  Maryland Port Administration, January 30, 2013

  ‘I thought this cruise was sisters only,’ Ruth grumped when I telephoned her the next morning. ‘I’m not sure I want responsibility for a teenager running loose aboard.’

  ‘Julie’s not your responsibility,’ I said reasonably. ‘Nor mine. She’s Georgina’s.’

  ‘Shit, Hannah. Have you looked at Julie lately, really looked? She’s developed – and I do mean developed – into a beautiful young woman. No telling what kind of trouble she’ll get into.’

  ‘Don’t be silly! What possible trouble could Julie get into on a cruise ship?’