Terns of Endearment

by Donna Andrews

  “Can you throw down the ladder?”

  Michael appeared, and between the two of us we figured out how to unfurl the ladder in question. Just as the officer was climbing up, Mother emerged from the dining room door. When he climbed over the railing, she stretched out her hand.

  “Welcome!” she exclaimed. “You can’t imagine how glad we are to see you.”

  “Er … yes, ma’am. Who’s in command of this ship?”

  “Technically, that would be Captain Detweiler,” Mother said. I was relieved that she hadn’t pointed to herself. Or for that matter, to me.

  “Captain Detweiler is in his cabin,” I said. “But I think you’ll find that he’s incapacitated. Most of the officers are incapacitated—except for First Officer Martin, who doesn’t show his face much—and most of the crew as well. Food poisoning. We’ve managed to restore emergency power—and by we I mean a group of passengers with tech and engineering skills—but according to the one member of the engineering crew who’s been conscious enough to help out, we’ll need parts to repair the several other things that still need fixing.”

  The officer blinked at us for a few moments. He was young—surprisingly young—with clean-cut features and close-cropped hair so blond it was almost white.

  “I’m Lieutenant Tracy,” he said.

  “Meg Langslow.” I offered my hand, and introduced Mother and Michael. The lieutenant didn’t seem all that happy to meet us.

  “Maybe you should show me just what’s going on here, ma’am,” he said, when the introductions were complete.

  “Glad to,” I said.

  He snapped a command down at his boat, and three of the four crew members in it scrambled up the ladder. Then he ordered another crew member to stay at the ladder.

  “Lead me to the bridge, please, ma’am,” he said.

  When we stepped into the dining room, we found at least half of the passengers there. The crowd cheered enthusiastically but, thanks to Mother’s and Michael’s efforts, they didn’t mob the Coast Guard party. In fact, they left a path clear through the middle of the dining room.

  I led them up to the bridge. Captain Detweiler didn’t answer his door, but apparently he’d left it unlocked before passing out on the floor of his cabin. Lieutenant Tracy almost managed to conceal the distaste he felt at the sight. First Officer Martin didn’t answer his door, either, and it was locked. On the bridge, Gerard Hoffman, the recovering member of the engineering crew, was delighted to see the Coast Guard party and gave the lieutenant a voluble account of the several things that had gone wrong with the ship. I almost understood parts of it. To my delight, he also waxed eloquent about the great work Delaney and her crew had done.

  By the time he finished, the lieutenant was looking a little stunned.

  “Do you have any idea where to find your first officer?”

  Hoffman and I shook our heads.

  “Any of your officers?”

  I stepped over to the windows at the front of the bridge and pointed. The lieutenant joined me and we looked down on the sun deck where some of the ailing crew members were still recovering. You could sort of tell they were crew members because most of them wore at least some part of their uniform. Some of them—no doubt the ones who were still feverish—had cold compresses over their foreheads. Bob was taking the pulse of one. Dad had his stethoscope to the chest of another. Rose Noire was handing around cups of something. Not, I hoped, one of her herbal teas. Léonie was refilling water glasses.

  “We brought the sick crew members out on deck because of the heat,” I said. “Dad—that’s him with the stethoscope—says we were lucky. Severe dehydration can be fatal. But we didn’t lose anyone, and Dad’s optimistic that they’re all past the worst of it. I think a couple of the officers are out there.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” He nodded as he studied the crew. “Is there someplace more private where I can call my captain?”

  “I’ll be in the small mechanical room,” Hoffman said. He shuffled out the door.

  “I’ll leave you in peace to call your captain in a minute,” I said. “But first there’s something I wanted to tell you without an audience.”

  Chapter 33

  “There’s more?” The idea didn’t seem to cheer up Lieutenant Tracy.

  “Well, yeah,” I said. “You can already see why we were so relieved when we saw your ship.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the lieutenant said. “Actually, we call it a cutter.”

  “Even when it’s that big?”

  “Coast Guard tradition, ma’am. All our vessels are cutters.” He glanced over at the door. “You said you had some information you wanted to communicate privately?”

  “Yes.” I took a deep breath. “And you’re probably going to think I’m some kind of paranoid loon or something, but please hear me out.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Someone murdered a crew member and threw him overboard,” I said.

  “Are you sure about that, ma’am?” He was frowning. And looking at me oddly, just as I expected. “Our information was that it was a woman passenger. And that she jumped overboard.”

  “Yes, we had that happen, too,” I said. “And maybe she committed suicide but my father—the one with the stethoscope—was suspicious of the circumstances, and not very happy with how little investigation the captain was conducting, so we managed to obtain a key card that we could use to search her cabin. He wanted to look for anything that would shed light on her state of mind. Whether she was really suicidal—they call it a psychological autopsy.”

  “And the ship’s captain agreed to this, ma’am?”

  “No, he just wanted to sweep the whole thing under the rug,” I said. “Which is why we did our search in the middle of the night, and I’m not going to tell you how we managed to get hold of that key card.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I could tell he was trying to suppress a smile.

  “And we found a body in the wardrobe. Not the alleged suicide—a crew member named Anton Bjelica. Dad—did I mention that in addition to being a doctor he’s a medical examiner back home?—Dad estimated, from the degree of rigor mortis, that he’d been dead for a few hours, but less than a day. And there were ligature marks around his neck, which to Dad suggested that he’d been killed by ligature strangulation.”

  The lieutenant wasn’t smiling anymore. He was looking at me oddly again.

  “And then we heard someone unlocking the door, and we hid in the bathroom—because remember, we weren’t really supposed to be there—and while we were hiding, whoever came in threw the body off the room’s balcony. We didn’t realize he was doing it until we heard the splash, or we’d have tried to stop him.”

  “And you didn’t see who did it?”

  “We were in the bathroom with the door open just a crack—maybe this much.” I held my thumb and forefinger about an inch and a half apart. “Maybe less. And we were trying not to be seen, so we weren’t peering through that crack. But when whoever did it left, we checked the wardrobe again and the body was gone.”

  “And you didn’t tell anyone?”

  “Like a member of the crew?” I asked. “Because apart from the fact that most of them were deathly ill, they’d all have had access to the room, and any one of them could have done it. And then faked being sick to have an alibi.”

  He nodded. But he was looking at me as if he couldn’t quite decide whether to believe me or ask what I’d been smoking.

  “Ma’am, I don’t suppose you have any proof of … well, any of this,” he asked finally.

  “I took pictures.” I pulled out my phone, opened up the first of the Anton shots, and handed him the phone.

  His eyes went wide. I could understand. There was something about the expression on Bjelica’s face, with its half-open, unseeing eyes, that made you realize it was no hoax. He was dead. The facial expression and the odd, unnatural way his head was bent to the side. Although I suspected it was the close-ups of the ligature marks that really conv
inced the lieutenant.

  “Good thing you had the presence of mind to think of taking pictures, ma’am,” he said.

  “And I can share them with whoever’s going to be investigating this,” I said. “I have no idea who that would be.”

  “Neither do I, ma’am,” he said. “But I imagine the CGIS might want a piece of it. Coast Guard Investigative Service,” he translated.

  “I guess you wouldn’t routinely bring them along on a mission like this,” I said.

  “No, ma’am. But once I fill my captain in on what you’ve just told me, I expect he’ll put in a request to send out a CGIS team on the double.”

  “Fill your captain in, by all means,” I said. “But not our captain. Or any of his crew. Because Dad and I are still here on the ship. And so is whoever threw Bjelica overboard. It would make me very nervous if word got around that Dad and I knew anything about that.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “One more thing—Bjelica was a member of the engineering crew. And whatever went wrong with the ship happened while he was in the middle of doing some kind of maintenance on the emergency generator system that required taking it apart on the engine-room floor. Maybe it’s just a coincidence that it was the generator expert who got strangled and tossed overboard. But I understand you’re going to send over some of your engineering crew to help us out.”

  He nodded.

  “Tell them to watch their backs.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “I think under the circumstances the captain will probably detail guards to watch their backs for them. So they can concentrate on their work.”

  “Good.” Armed guards, probably—I liked that idea.

  “This happened last night, is that correct ma’am?” he asked. “Mr. Bjelica being thrown overboard?”

  “Yes,” I said. “And Desiree St. Christophe the night before that, or more accurately very early yesterday morning. It was starting to look like an oceangoing remake of And Then There Were None. We were overjoyed to see your sh—your cutter show up; at the rate we were going we’d have been a ghost ship before long.”

  I didn’t say “what took you so long?” but maybe he deduced that I’d been thinking it.

  “Sorry you had such a long wait, ma’am,” he said. “We’re out of helicopter range here.”

  “And I know it takes a while to get here from Baltimore.”

  “Portsmouth, actually. That’s the nearest RCC—Rescue Coordination Center. But really, it shouldn’t have taken this long except…”

  He stopped as he was about to say something he shouldn’t. And then, apparently, he decided the hell with it.

  “The Wanderer’s personnel weren’t very … efficient in their communications. They reported the passenger overboard and seemed to imply that they were stopped briefly for minor repairs. It was only when Dr. Blake sent out his message that we became aware—that anyone not on board became aware—of the extent of the problem. And, of course, we were giving first priority to organizing the search for the missing passenger. Which is still ongoing, of course.”

  “Very discreetly, I gather.”

  “Discreetly, ma’am?”

  “Well, we haven’t seen anyone searching,” I said. “I don’t suppose they’re doing it with submarines?”

  “No, ma’am. We’ve got several Coast Guard cutters deployed, and of course the information went out over AMVER—the Automated Mutual-Assistance Vessel Rescue system. Which means any vessels along the Wanderer’s route will be keeping a lookout, and some may even change course to help out with the search.”

  “Our route?” I was puzzled. “But she went overboard here. After the ship was already stationary.”

  “How do you know this, ma’am?” He didn’t quite emphasize the “you,” but I got the point.

  “Maybe the captain didn’t believe me, but I woke up at four thirty-five A.M. The ship was stopped, and I went outside on the deck to see what was going on. And when I figured out nothing was, I went back to sleep. And sometime between seven fifteen and eight o’clock, while the captain was pretending to brief us on why the ship was stopped and actually saying nothing, a crew member came running into the dining room to say that someone had jumped overboard. They found her shoes, her shawl, and a suicide note right where I’d been staring at the moon a few hours earlier. So unless someone moved her stuff after the fact, all those ships searching between here and Baltimore are wasting their time, aren’t they?”

  He stood motionless for a few long seconds, looking at me.

  “Would you excuse me for a minute, ma’am?” he said. “I should brief my captain. Stay here.”

  He crossed to the other side of the bridge, taking a radio from its holder on his belt as he went. I stood by the window and watched what was going on down on deck two.

  Eventually he put away his radio and came back over to my side of the bridge.

  “This is unbelievable,” he said. “If your information is accurate, we’ve got hundreds of personnel searching halfway to Baltimore when they needed to be searching right here. And your ship’s captain didn’t even notify his salver.”

  “His what?”

  “His salver, ma’am. Any vessel entering U.S. waters is required to have a contract with a marine salvage company that can perform any repairs that are beyond the capabilities of the ship’s engineering staff or tow the vessel if they can’t get it moving again.”

  “Kind of like triple A for ships,” I said.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He chuckled at the idea.

  “Maybe they forgot about that little requirement. I’ve been getting the impression that playing by the rules isn’t Pastime’s strong point.”

  “Oh, they have a salver, all right.” The lieutenant’s smile took on a grim cast. “Apparently their salver was surprised not to have heard about this already. Surprised and, I’m willing to bet, not very happy.”

  “Let me guess: It costs Pastime money if they have to call the salver.”

  He nodded.

  “Then that’s probably the reason,” I told him. “I’ve been getting the definite feeling that Pastime is all about cost cutting.”

  “Keep all this to yourself for the time being, ma’am,” he said. “We were already planning to bring on board a couple of petty officers to help with the repairs and also our corpsman so he can report back to the captain on the recovering crew members. After I relayed your information to the captain, he’s decided to send a couple of guard details—as I expected.”

  “Good,” I said. “And thanks.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  “If Captain Detweiler objects to having guards, you could always explain that you’re doing it to keep the rowdy passengers in order. As you may have figured out by now, we kind of stepped in and started doing things the crew were too sick to do. Like tending the sick, repairing the emergency generator, cleaning the ship, cooking meals—stuff like that. I’m sure the captain wants to hang us from the yardarm as scurvy mutineers.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind, ma’am.” He was fighting a smile again. I hoped that meant that charges of mutiny weren’t in any of our futures.

  The rest of the afternoon passed in a whirl. By nightfall, Dad had pronounced all of the crew members out of the woods, and a few of them were back on limited duty—although without the passengers who’d volunteered to help in the kitchen, neither dinner nor the post-dinner cleanup would have happened.

  Once the Coast Guard engineering crew figured out that Delaney knew exactly what she was doing, they let her continue to work on repairs, and by bedtime she’d managed to get the ship’s Wi-Fi working. The Internet connection was still spotty, but it was lovely to text friends and family on board to find out where they were instead of hunting from floor to floor.

  Grandfather gave an energetic after-dinner talk on parasitism, symbiosis, commensalism, mutualism, and mimicry in marine creatures. I’d have to talk to him about finding a catchier title. Nothing wrong with the lecture, which was
full of dramatic pictures and videos—clownfish darting around unharmed in the stinging tentacles of sea anemones. Boxer crabs warding off predators by picking up stinging anemones with their claws and waving them around. A mimic octopus changing shape to resemble a stingray or a lionfish. Imperial shrimp avoiding predators by riding around on poisonous nudibranchs. Pearl fish living inside the intestines of sea cucumbers by day and swimming out at night to eat crustaceans. Even the Coast Guard officers who sat in on the lecture—either to keep an eye on what we were all doing or because they’d heard of Grandfather before—applauded enthusiastically at the end.

  And after Grandfather’s lecture, while Michael and the boys stuffed themselves with cookies and ice cream brought over from the Coast Guard cutter, I actually managed to read three chapters in my book club book. It was a relief to know, whenever problems came up, that I could tell people to take it to the Coast Guard. The cutter’s captain left Lieutenant Tracy on board in charge of two guard details—one in the engine room, and one on the bridge.

  I wondered if the bridge detail was also keeping an eye on the captain and the first officer. The captain was still sleeping it off—I knew this because the lieutenant called in Dad to examine him and make sure there was nothing really wrong with him—and I hadn’t seen the first officer since the Coast Guard’s arrival.

  Of course, that didn’t mean the Coast Guard hadn’t been chatting with him.

  “All’s well that ends well,” Michael said, as he was trying to stop yawning long enough to finish brushing his teeth.

  I wanted to point out that everything wasn’t ended. We still had no idea when the salver would arrive. Or how long it would take to either fix the ship or tow it to port. The investigating team from the CGIS was supposed to arrive in the morning, but what were the chances that they’d be able to figure out what had really happened to Anton Bjelica? Or, for that matter, to Desiree?

  But I didn’t want to spoil his good mood, so I just nodded and turned out the bedside light.

  If only my brain had an off switch.

  Michael fell asleep almost immediately. I tried to match his soft breathing. It didn’t help. After a while, I switched to the kind of yoga breathing Rose Noire insisted was an infallible way of falling asleep—breathing in quickly, holding your breath for a count of seven, then breathing out slowly.