Terns of Endearment

by Donna Andrews

  My body wasn’t having any of it.

  I got up, donned my flip-flops, grabbed my Pastime card, and slipped out of the room. I told myself virtuously that it was the considerate thing to do—why risk waking up Michael and the boys? They’d had a long hard day—hauling all those buckets of water.

  Which was nonsense. Tired as they were, I could have done a clog dance back and forth between the rooms while blowing an air horn and they wouldn’t wake up. I was just tired of watching them sleep while I couldn’t.

  I hesitated in the hallway. My first impulse was to go out on the sun deck and gaze over the ocean. I even took a few steps that way and then changed my mind. Gazing over the ocean from the deck four sun deck was what I’d been doing just before everything went to hell. Not tonight.

  I could go up to the sixth floor and gaze over the ocean from a different vantage point. Or drop down to the third floor and see how the repairs were getting along. I could even go down to deck zero and see if there was anything that needed doing for the recovering crew members—if I couldn’t sleep, at least I could make myself useful.

  But no. I was peopled out. I wanted some peace and quiet.

  “Should have brought my book club book,” I grumbled to myself. If anything was going to put me to sleep, that would.

  But I had my phone. Delaney had put one of her beloved weresquid books on it, hadn’t she? I could read that.

  Yes. And I could retreat to the library lounge, which was only a few doors down, and read there until my eyes felt heavy. If the weresquid didn’t thrill me as much as it did Delaney, I could search the shelves for something else.

  I turned right, toward the library lounge.

  So nice to have light back. Only the dim emergency lights, until they finished working on the main power system, but still. Light. Running water. Flush toilets. Life was good.

  I was reaching to open the door to the library lounge when I saw something odd. The door to 411 was just closing.

  Desiree’s room.

  Chapter 34

  I crept silently down the passageway—which wasn’t easy in flip-flops. I stopped at the door to 411. It was closed now. Maybe I’d only imagined the brief flash of movement.

  I put my ear to the door and listened.

  Nothing. Long seconds of nothing.

  I was just jumpy. Some sort of delayed reaction to everything that had happened over the past couple of days. I’d probably imagined the door closing. I’d be fine as soon as—

  I heard a creak. A familiar creak. Someone was opening the closet door.

  Okay, it was unlikely that anyone had stashed another body there in preparation for tossing it overboard, but still—no one should be in there.

  I should probably go find the Coast Guard, I told myself. They were right downstairs.

  But whoever was burgling Desiree’s room could get away while I fetched them. If I needed the Coast Guard, all I had to do was scream.

  First, I’d find out what was going on.

  I fumbled at my pocket. In addition to my own Pastime card—yes, I was still carrying around Anton Bjelica’s card. I pulled it out, quickly slid it through the lock of 411, opened the door, and stepped inside.

  “What the hell are you doing in here? This is my cabin.”

  Desiree was standing in front of the closet, wearing a chartreuse green-flowered silk kimono over a fuchsia satin nightgown and holding a glass of red wine in one hand and a wine bottle in the other. She wobbled unsteadily on her feet, as if this hadn’t been her first glass.

  “What the hell am I doing here?” I repeated. “What the hell are you doing here? You’re supposed to be dead.”

  I let the door close behind me. I should probably call the Coast Guard on her. In a minute. I wanted to find out what she’d say. I didn’t see her as much of a threat under any circumstances, and particularly not in her present inebriated condition.

  “Supposed to be dead? What do you mean by that? Are you threatening me?” She clutched the neck of her dressing gown in a gesture straight out of a silent movie—the fragile, wide-eyed heroine threatened by the evil villain. The effect was rather spoiled by the fact that she sloshed half the contents of her wineglass onto herself.

  “We found your shawl, your Christian Louboutin shoes, and a suicide note by the railing on the fourth-floor sun deck.” Why was I telling her this? She was presumably the one who’d put them there. “We thought you’d jumped overboard.”

  I glanced around and noticed that the shawl, or one just like it, was draped over the end of the bed. I suspected the shoes were back in the closet. And there was stuff scattered everywhere—bits of clothing and cosmetics. None of that had been here when Dad and I had burgled the room last night.

  I focused back on her. She was staring at me. Then, as if figuring something out, she assumed an expression of fear and took a step back.

  “They wanted to kill me! That must be it!”

  “Who?” I tried not to sound skeptical. I must have failed.

  “You don’t believe me.” She threw herself into the small armchair with a sob. “No one believes me.”

  “Try me,” I said. “Who tried to kill you?”

  “I have enemies,” she said. “They’ve been spreading malicious rumors about me, even accusing me of murder. I can’t get away from them, not even on this cruise. And now they’ve tried to kill me. They’re insidious!”

  “They also appear to be unsuccessful,” I pointed out. “You still look pretty much alive. Where have you been the last two days?”

  “I’m not sure where I was,” she said. “I was out on deck, just gazing at the moonlight. Bathing in the healing light of Mother Luna. And suddenly everything went black.” She refilled her wineglass from the half-empty bottle of merlot and took a gulp.

  “Then what?”

  “I was unconscious for a long time,” she said. “And when I woke up I was bound and gagged and blindfolded. And drugged. I kept slipping in and out of consciousness. I had no idea how much time was passing. And then, just now, I woke up and found myself here. In my stateroom. It was horrible!”

  She shuddered, lifted the glass to her lips with both hands, took a gulp, and then held it there, as if the wine vapors somehow strengthened her. Then she spoiled the effect by glancing quickly at me from under her brow, as if to gauge whether I was buying it.

  If I’d been kidnapped and drugged and suddenly found myself free, I don’t think my first reaction would be to put on my nicest silk dressing gown and get sloshed. I wasn’t even sure I believed it was Desiree’s first reaction. But I tried to keep my face neutral.

  “Sounds like a horrible experience,” I said. “And you have no idea who did it?”

  “Oh, I know,” she said. “But I’ll save that for the police.”

  “Probably wise,” I said. “We don’t have any actual police here at the moment, but we do have some Coast Guard officers down on the bridge. I think some of them are MPs, or whatever the equivalent is in Coast Guard lingo. I’m sure—”

  Just then the door opened.

  “Oh, great,” someone behind me said.

  I whirled around to see First Officer Martin standing in the doorway, pointing a pistol at us.

  “Just what I need,” he muttered, as he let the door fall closed behind him and dropped whatever he was holding in his left hand on the floor with a thud.

  “Deal with her,” Desiree said—rather loudly. “I want you to—”

  “Shut the hell up,” Martin raised the gun slightly. “And hands up. I don’t want to have to shoot you.”

  “I’m paying you—” Desiree began.

  “Not enough.” Martin’s face took on a look of … long-suffering patience? No, downright annoyance. “Not nearly enough. This has been the longest two days of my entire life. You too. Hands up.” He gestured at me.

  I put my hands up. Not way up in the air like a first grader dying to answer the teacher’s question. Just up at shoulder height, palms facing him
so he could see I wasn’t concealing a gun or, unfortunately, the cell phone I’d tucked into my pocket before sneaking down to Desiree’s room. But ready to grab anything that looked like a weapon if the opportunity arose.

  “You were hiding her in your cabin, weren’t you?” I asked.

  “It was only supposed to be for a few hours. They find her clothes and the suicide note, and when the Bermudian authorities search the ship they find her bound, gagged, and blindfolded in the cabin of some people she has it in for. She gets the headlines, her enemies are in a world of legal trouble, and Johnnie Martin’s just a little bit richer. And then the stupid drunken idiot goes and sets up the fake suicide twenty-four hours too early.”

  Desiree waved her hand, in a gesture that clearly said “what’s the big deal?” She wasn’t even looking at him. I like to keep my eye on people who are pointing weapons at me, or even in my general direction. Not to mention the fact that I’d be making more of an effort not to annoy someone who looked as mad as Martin did right now.

  And however nice it was to have my curiosity satisfied about what really happened to Desiree, and why, and where she’d been all this time, the fact that he was coming right out and saying all this wasn’t reassuring. He was looking at us with calculating eyes. I was pretty sure he was calculating how to dispose of us without making any noise. I had to find some way to turn the tables on him before he figured it out. I suspected that any story he came up with about how we ended up full of bullets would be nearly as lame as the one Desiree had just tried to spin. The police or the FBI or whoever investigated would see right through it, but that wouldn’t do me much good if I were already dead.

  And that was assuming anyone did investigate. If he managed to toss our bodies overboard and invent a plausible story about the gunshots …

  I should keep him talking.

  “And you got Anton Bjelica to sabotage the navigation system, didn’t you?” I asked. “Wasn’t that kind of overkill—having both the ship’s system failure and Desiree’s kidnapping the first night out?”

  “None of it was supposed to happen the first night out,” he snapped. “She wasn’t supposed to pull her disappearing act until we got to Bermuda—the second night out. And Bjelica wasn’t supposed to do his thing with the navigation system until we were heading back to Baltimore—after I had had plenty of time to convince both the passengers and Pastime’s management that Detweiler had fallen off the wagon worse than usual and kept sailing in spite of some kind of maintenance issue that could bring the whole show to a halt at the worst possible moment. Bjelica was supposed to come up with something subtle—something no one would suspect was sabotage. But no—the idiot jumps the gun and just whacks a few key parts with a ball-peen hammer. Even the idiots in the head office could look at that and realize it was sabotage. But he was impatient—he couldn’t wait to start blackmailing me. And before you ask, no, it wasn’t my idea to do it while the backup generator was in pieces on the engine room floor. Do you think I enjoy cold showers and half-spoiled food? Idiot! I can still pull it off, though. Convince them that Detweiler was so far gone he failed to spot a dangerously unbalanced crew member. Failed to take proper security measures. Yeah. That should fly.”

  He seemed to be losing himself in planning how he was going to turn Bjelica’s premature and obvious sabotage to his benefit. Maybe I could jump him while he was distracted. Grab the gun and—

  “Don’t even try it,” he barked—although I’d hardly moved a muscle. “Get over there.” He gestured slightly with the gun. “Closer to the old cow.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “I like it right here.”

  I said it to test him, and his reaction—or lack of it—reassured me. He was smart enough that he wanted to avoid shooting me if he could.

  “Old cow,” Desiree muttered. “You keep talking to me like that and you won’t get that bonus we talked about.”

  “Ha, ha,” Martin muttered. He took another step closer and in passing kicked aside whatever it was he’d dropped when he entered. It looked like a couple of crumpled black plastic garbage bags, and they’d made a heavy clunking noise when his foot had hit them.

  I focused back on Desiree. Good. She was frowning at him. But I needed her furious.

  “I suspect he’s not really worried about the bonus,” I said to Desiree. “If I had to guess, I’d say he’s trying to figure out whether you can keep your mouth shut about him hiding you in his cabin for the last two days, or whether he should just tie a weight to your foot and toss you off your balcony.”

  Desiree shook her head slightly, but she was listening.

  “He came prepared.” I pointed to the garbage bags. “I’m not sure whether he’s planning to stuff you in one of those or whether they’re for throwing your belongings overboard after you, but he’s got some kind of weights in them.”

  Desiree blinked and looked confused. Confused, and maybe just a little anxious.

  “Why would he do that?”

  “Because you can tell on him,” I said. “If you reveal that he helped you fake your suicide, he’ll be in a lot of hot water. With Pastime, and maybe even with the police.”

  “It wasn’t a fake,” she said. “It must have been him! He kidnapped me and kept me in his cabin all this time. Who knows what sinister plans he had?”

  “Oh, come off it,” Martin said. “If I were planning to toss her off a balcony, why bring her back here? I could have just tossed her off my own balcony.”

  He had a good point. Unless—

  “Not really,” I said aloud. “Your cabin’s on the starboard side, where the Coast Guard cutter is. You don’t dare toss her off there. But you figured if you waited until dark and did it off the port side, you could get away with it.”

  “He wouldn’t do that,” Desiree said. “In the past few days, we have formed a bond.”

  “In spite of him tying you up and blindfolding and gagging you?” I asked.

  “I have seen through his rough exterior to the noble and tender soul within,” she said. “And we have formed a bond forged in adversity, a bond—”

  “Will you shut the hell up?” Martin snarled. “I don’t want to hear any more of that sickening drivel. The world is not one of your stupid bodice-rippers, lady. Now both of you, lie down—”

  Desiree screamed in utter rage and began to stagger toward him waving the not-quite-empty merlot bottle. He instinctively took a step back. He was focused on Desiree, so I hoped he wouldn’t notice whatever I did. For a split second, I thought of just letting them fight it out, like the Cats of Kilkenny. Then I dived in, grabbed Martin’s right hand, and tried to aim the gun away from me. And away from Desiree, too, and, if possible, toward the outside wall of the cabin.

  Martin fired the gun. Two shots. I heard glass shattering. One of the bullets had hit the sliding glass doors to the balcony. Maybe both bullets. Then more glass shattering as Desiree took a swing at his head with the merlot bottle and hit the wall instead.

  She shrieked again, tossed the remnants of the bottle aside, and lurched forward, grabbing for his throat. He collapsed under her weight, and I was able to wrench the gun out of his hand on the way down.

  I could hear footsteps running up the stairs. The Coast Guard, probably. I didn’t want to be standing with the gun in my hand when they came in. I thought of just tossing it aside, but it was still touch and go whether Desiree would succeed in strangling Martin or whether he’d free himself and go looking for his weapon. So I stepped into the bathroom, tossed the gun in the toilet, and slammed the lid closed. Then I stepped around the patch of floor where Desiree and Martin were wrestling and went to open the door for the arriving Coast Guard officers.

  Chapter 35

  Sunday

  “Weren’t you worried when the Coast Guard ran in?” Janet asked the next morning. “Worried they’d shoot you or arrest you or something?”

  “A little,” I said. “But I figured with the other two rolling on the floor in a puddle
of wine and broken glass, trying to choke each other and shrieking things I wouldn’t have wanted the boys to hear, I looked pretty sane and trustworthy by comparison. Not to mention the fact that I opened the door and greeted them with ‘Thank heavens you’re here.’”

  We were standing at the front of the deck six sun deck. Below us, on deck five, we could see Rose Noire leading a group of eighteen or twenty passengers—including Michael and the boys—in a sunrise yoga session. Not that the sun had showed itself so far—the day had dawned cloudy and blissfully cool. Janet and I had opted for the less strenuous delights of experiencing the sunrise over a mug of coffee for her and a can of Diet Coke for me. Hot coffee and cold soda still felt like fabulous luxuries.

  And on either side of us, as the wisps of early fog gradually cleared, we could see more and more clearly the shoreline slipping past as the ship cruised up the Chesapeake Bay toward Baltimore. We took turns using a pair of Grandfather’s binoculars to study the passing scenery or gaze forward in the hope of being the first to spot the pier.

  Yes, we were returning to Baltimore. Shortly after the Coast Guard had transported Desiree and First Officer Martin over to their cutter to be locked up in the brig, the salver had arrived. And, wonder of wonders, they’d brought the right parts to mend the ship. We’d gone to bed in the Bermuda Triangle and awakened to Lieutenant Tracy announcing over the ship’s loudspeaker system that deboarding in Baltimore would begin at approximately oh-nine-hundred. I wondered if the Coast Guard would normally have left personnel on board to see the Wanderer safely home or if the fact that they’d done so was measure of how profoundly they distrusted Pastime. Either way, the passengers were happy. The way the Coast Guard ran a ship was a vast improvement over Captain Detweiler’s system.

  “And apparently that lawyer guy was wrong about crimes at sea not getting investigated,” Janet went on. “First the Coast Guard and soon the FBI, from what I hear.”