Terns of Endearment

by Donna Andrews

  “Excellent,” Grandfather said.

  “It’ll do,” Wim said.

  “At least the fade finally works,” Guillermo added.

  “I think it’s awesome,” I said. “How soon can we get it to the outside world?”

  “I can upload it to the Blake Foundation website,” Wim said.

  “And then we can send out a link to all our mailing lists,” Caroline said.

  “And—”

  Suddenly we all heard a noise behind us. It appeared to be coming from the elevator shaft. Then the elevator doors burst open and Delaney stepped out.

  “Let there be light!” she exclaimed.

  Cheers erupted all over the deck.

  “Only emergency lights,” she added, as she strolled over to join us. “But that’s better than nothing. And the elevator and the water pumping system are also on the emergency circuit—so flush toilets!”

  “But not the air-conditioning?” Caroline asked.

  “Big power hog, so no,” Delaney replied.

  “Then I think we need to see about moving some of the crew members up on deck where they can cool off,” Caroline suggested. “It’s already steamy, and I suspect it’s going to get worse before it’s better. The passenger cabins are bad, but at least they all have windows that can be opened. The crew cabins are like ovens.”

  “Let’s go move them,” Grandfather said. “To the rescue!”

  Guillermo and Wim hoisted their cameras.

  “Not you, Monty,” Caroline said. “I need you to look over some more of this video footage. See if you can think of any way we can salvage a video out of it if this tub ends up being sent back to Baltimore instead of on to Bermuda. Or if there isn’t, figure out what, if anything, the boys can shoot to fill in.”

  Grumbling, Grandfather sat down in front of her laptop, put on his reading glasses, and began pressing keys on her laptop.

  “We don’t want him overdoing it and keeling over down on deck zero,” Caroline muttered as soon as the elevator doors closed.

  “Is it safe, giving him access to the video footage?” I asked.

  “Don’t worry—we never let him anywhere near the original files,” Guillermo said.

  “We don’t even want me near the original files,” Caroline added. “So anything on my laptop’s a copy.”

  Down on deck zero, things were looking better than they had even a few hours ago. Maybe because the worst of the befouled cabins had been cleaned and it smelled better. None of the sick crew members looked totally recovered, but most of them were either sleeping or lying quietly. They all looked pale and drawn, but definitely alive and for the most part happy to be so.

  Dad heartily approved the idea of moving the patients to cooler quarters on deck. So we filled the sun deck in the bow of deck two with recliners, rigged some canvas covers so they’d have shade, and helped the recovering crew members out there—or simply carried them if necessary. Dad turned the Moonbeam Lounge into an impromptu hospital for a few of the critical cases—including Aarav, who was still unconscious.

  “If he comes to—”

  “If he comes to, it could be a while before he’s strong enough to be questioned.” Dad frowned at me and shook his head as if disappointed by my lack of consideration for Aarav’s well-being. “He’s almost certainly got some degree of concussion.”

  “I’ll let you decide when he’s ready for questioning,” I said. “Just keep in mind that it could be rather useful to find out who gave him that concussion. Because that might be someone we don’t want helping out with the nursing.”

  Dad returned to watching over Aarav with a more troubled face.

  The afternoon wore on. The fresh air seemed to revive the outdoor patients. Some of them merely slept peacefully, while others were sitting up and seemed to be enjoying the novel sensation of being waited on by passengers.

  I prowled through the ship, checking on things. Delaney and her tech crew were back in the small mechanical room, doing something that might possibly let them fix the navigation system. Michael and the boys were having another fencing session with Janet. Grandfather was pecking away with two fingers on his laptop—no doubt writing up a scathing indictment of Pastime. Or maybe he was still planning to give a lecture tonight. Preparations for dinner—and much-anticipated after-dinner coffee—were under way in the kitchen. Most people still had their cabin doors open, for cross-ventilation, but I saw fewer people just sitting miserably. An informal backgammon tournament had broken out in the dining room. Nearly every hall had a few bridge foursomes playing. People were coping.

  I hoped some rescuers arrived before the current mellow mood evaporated.

  On one of my trips to the bridge, I ran into Léonie carrying a tray of food and knocking on the captain’s door, with a worried look on her face.

  “Perhaps your father should check on the captain?” she asked when she saw me.

  “He does, at regular intervals,” I said. “And after the captain passed out, we searched his cabin and confiscated all the alcohol. Does he do this often?”

  “Never!” She looked shocked. “Well, almost never. He is not a bad man, merely…”

  “Weak?” I suggested.

  “Perhaps,” she said. “He takes the safe path, always. So now, when so many things have gone wrong that there is no safe path, he does not know what to do.” She stared at the captain’s door for a little longer. Then she seemed to rouse herself, shrugged, and strode off, still carrying the tray.

  At one point, I spotted Wim racing down the stairs with his camera. Maybe he’d just spotted a rare bird perched on the ship’s rail, but still—I followed to see what was up.

  I arrived on deck two, where all the sick crew members were recovering, to find a demonstration getting started. Half a dozen of the crew members were waving picket signs. Not very traditional picket signs—evidently sticks and cardboard had been hard to find aboard ship, so the discontented crew members had made their signs using Sharpies on white plastic garbage bags. More like picket banners. PASTIME UNFAIR TO WORKERS! one banner read. NO MORE 20-HOUR WORK DAYS! read another. But the other four all read simply UNION NOW! And, of course, Wim and Guillermo were busily filming from various angles.

  Caroline was standing nearby, nodding her approval. I had no doubt she’d egged them on. She was fond of mentioning that her grandmother had been a suffragette. She regularly marched for a variety of progressive causes. And she was always the first to show up when Grandfather organized a demonstration to protest some environmental issue. One of her pet peeves was that she rarely got arrested anymore. “They deliberately ignore me,” she had been known to say, “because they know how bad they’ll look arresting a tiny little gray-haired grandmother.”

  I went over to stand by her.

  “Just out of curiosity, in what way is Pastime unfair to workers?” I asked. “Not that I have any doubt that they are, mind you—by now I’m quite willing to believe the worst of them. But I was wondering what particular injustice sent the crew over the edge at this already complicated moment in time?”

  “What you really want to know is why they’re protesting at a time when you’d rather have them doing everything they can to get the ship back in action and keep the passengers as comfortable as possible in the meantime,” Caroline said.

  “Well, not really,” I replied. “Since I recognize all six of them as either kitchen staff or housekeeping staff who wouldn’t be able to make much of a contribution to getting the ship back in action. They’ve all been working like dogs alongside the passengers all day; if they want to use their scant leisure time to protest Pastime’s heinous labor practices, more power to them.”

  “And would it surprise you to learn that their heinous labor practices may have helped cause the pickle we’re currently in?”

  “I’m all ears,” I said.

  “The ship’s understaffed,” she said. “Seriously understaffed in just about every department.”

  “We knew that,” I s
aid. “Including engineering, I assume?”

  “Especially engineering. Which means that they were already behind the eight ball when the navigation system broke down, and things got even worse when most of the crew members with any technical expertise succumbed to the food poisoning. So, any chance you could get more of an audience for this shindig?”

  “You mean the demonstration?”

  Caroline nodded. I considered pointing out that it wasn’t that much of a demonstration—six crew members marching up and down the deck, looking rather anxious as they waved their banners and chanted their slogans

  “Preferably witnesses with cell phone cameras,” she added.

  I found Hal, our town crier, and tasked him with circulating through the ship to advertise the protest. By the time I got back to deck two, the protest was sounding a lot more confident.

  And had gotten a lot bigger. It was up to nearly two dozen picketers now. All the new recruits were passengers—including Rob and Caroline. Although most of the crew members still recovering in recliners seemed to be cheering them on.

  Before long, Hal’s announcements bore fruit. I glanced up to see that the front rails of decks four, five, and six were lined with passengers looking down on the protest. Many of them were holding cameras or cell phones.

  “What is the meaning of this?”

  Damn. First Officer Martin had appeared.

  “How is Captain Detweiler feeling today?” I asked him, more in the hope of distracting him than anything.

  “I want every one of you to stop this ridiculous nonsense right now!” he bellowed. “Do you realize how bad this looks?”

  I could see some of the crew members cringe—and for that matter, one or two of the passengers. But they kept marching. Martin snorted slightly, reminding me of a bull about to charge a matador.

  But just as he took a step toward the protesters, Caroline stepped out of the picket line and into his path.

  “These crew members are all off duty,” she said. “And they are exercising their first amendment rights to—”

  “They can go exercise their first amendment rights someplace else.” Martin looked rather smug. “This deck is private property—Pastime Cruise’s property—and they do not have permission to demonstrate here.”

  He probably had a point. Not a point I wanted to spend time arguing—I had a few other things to get done. But I was curious, so I hung around and watched as he and Caroline went back and forth for several minutes.

  “Fine,” Caroline said finally. “We won’t picket on Pastime’s deck.”

  The first officer smiled in triumph—no doubt thinking that he’d nipped the crew’s rebellion in the bud.

  “Attention, everyone!” Caroline called out. “We move to plan B.”

  One of the crew members began passing out life jackets and life preservers. The protesters, crew and passenger alike, quickly strapped themselves in. Then Rob and one of the kitchen crew climbed up on the rail and jumped off the ship.

  Chapter 32

  “Wait! What are you— You can’t—”

  But no one was paying attention to the first officer’s sputtering. Some of the protesters leaped off the ship, whether gracefully or awkwardly. The majority donned their lifesaving gear, trotted toward the stairs, and eventually reappeared at the stern of deck one, which made for a lot shorter jump.

  I was relieved to see that Caroline had opted to stay on board. Not that I had any doubt of her ability to stay afloat, but she’d be much more useful here on deck to foil the first officer’s attempts to squelch the protest.

  He lifted his gaze to the upper decks, and his scowl faded a little. Perhaps he was taking momentary comfort at seeing that the cheering passengers with their cameras and cell phones had disappeared. No doubt his annoyance would return when he realized that they’d dispersed to vantage points along the port and stern sides of the deck, the better to see and film the new phase of the demonstration.

  Meanwhile a new chant was floating up from the ocean’s surface.

  “One, two! One, two!

  “Pastime is unfair to crew!”

  I recognized Rob’s voice.

  “Three, four! Three, four!

  “Show those Pastime crooks the door!”

  Glancing over the side, I realized that the counting served a purpose other than providing convenient rhymes for insults to the cruise line management. Rob was leading the floating protesters in a primitive form of synchronized swimming. On the first “one, two!” they would all reach out with their right arms and roll over on their backs. On the second “one, two!” they’d reach out with their left arms and return to their original position. And on “Pastime is unfair to crew!” all those who were trailing banners behind them would wave them furiously in the air. And then with “three, four!’ they’d start the whole thing again. Occasionally four or five of them would gather in a circle with their feet in the center and wave their legs in something that might approach unison if they kept practicing for another century or two.

  “Five, six! Five, six!

  “No more Pastime dirty tricks!

  “Seven, eight! Seven, eight!

  “Fire the captain and first mate!”

  I glanced over at First Officer Martin. He was just staring at the swimmers with a mournful expression. He lifted his hand to his face and then pulled it down again, as if he really wanted to rub his temples to ease a headache, but was determined not to show weakness in public.

  Eventually he turned around and went back inside.

  Probably not the optimal moment to try enlisting his cooperation.

  The protesters kept it up for a while. Michael and the boys came down and joined in, although not until Mother had interrogated Grandfather and satisfied herself that there were unlikely to be great white sharks in the vicinity. Of course, for Grandfather there was no such thing as a short and simple answer to such a question, and long after the boys had joined the swimmers he was still holding forth on sharks.

  “Carcharodon carcharias is most commonly found in an epipelagic habitat,” he was saying. “And traditionally—”

  “Ship ahoy!” Wim shouted. He and Guillermo both had the enormous zoom lenses on their cameras and were leaning off the starboard side.

  “Well, that’s good news.” Grandfather picked up his binoculars and ambled over to join the two photographers. “Which way?”

  “Astern,” Wim said.

  “We’ll get a better view from deck six,” Guillermo said. The two of them dashed inside.

  “What kind of ship?” I asked. And then immediately wondered why it mattered. Because from the clenching of my stomach, clearly my subconscious thought it mattered. Maybe I’d been listening too much to various family members’ wild speculations about smugglers and pirates and voodoo curses. The odds were overwhelming that the ship, still invisible for those of us peering astern with only our naked eyes, would be perfectly harmless. Another cruise ship, changing course to assist us. Or a cargo ship playing Good Samaritan. Maybe even a Navy or Coast Guard ship. Why did its arrival fill me with such anxiety?

  Because as soon as possible, Dad and I had to find someone trustworthy to tell about Desiree’s alleged suicide and Anton Bjelica’s very definite murder. Right now, whoever had killed Bjelica probably thought he’d gotten away with it. He or she. Probably he, but if I had to, I could have hefted Bjelica, and I wasn’t the only strong woman on board. We had no idea who had thrown the body overboard, but the odds were pretty high that it was a crew member, since he’d been able to get in, both to hide and eventually to dispose of the body. And it also seemed logical that the killer was the one doing the body disposal—unless there was some kind of sinister conspiracy on board. I wasn’t sure I even wanted to think too much about that. And was it just my imagination, or did Bjelica’s murder give us all a good reason to look more closely at whether Desiree had really gone overboard under her own steam?

  So while everyone else was hoping the ship would bring
fresh provisions and whatever help Delaney’s crew needed to finish repairing our ship, I was really hoping there would be someone on board who could take charge of investigating all this. And the food poisoning that had felled the crew—was it really an accident? Was it really food poisoning?

  Someone to take charge of investigating all of this, yes—but someone discreet enough not to put Dad and me in danger. Because right now, whoever had thrown Anton Bjelica’s body overboard had no idea there were ear witnesses to his crime. He might worry that we’d overheard something that would let the authorities identify him. He might wonder if we were lying about not having seen him and decide to get rid of us as possible eye witnesses.

  And I was afraid that the longer we waited to tell someone in authority about Bjelica’s murder, the more people would be inclined to doubt us, no matter how hard we tried to explain the wisdom of not reporting it to someone who could be a suspect.

  The swimmers all scrambled aboard and nearly everyone made a dash for one of the stern decks—even a few of the recovering crew members. Most of them made for higher decks, which gave a better view.

  I went out through the main dining room to the small stern area on deck one. I leaned on the rail and tried to look as happy as the rest of the passengers as the Coast Guard ship slowly drew near. It pulled up a little way from our starboard side and promptly lowered a boat—a rather curious boat that looked like a cross between a sleek speedboat and an inflatable raft. The boat, carrying an officer and four crew members, pulled up beside where I was standing. They seemed a little surprised to see me. The officer stood up in the boat and peered at me.

  “Where are the crew?” he called out.

  “Incapacitated,” I shouted back. “Food poisoning.”

  He blinked for a second.