MOON OVER THE MEDITERRANEAN
A Novel of Romantic Suspense
Sheri Cobb South
Prologue
Let these describe the undescribable.
GEORGE NOEL GORDON, LORD BYRON,
Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
August 1961
Venice, Italy
The sunlight reflecting off the water created dappled patterns of dancing light on the ceiling as I sat up in bed and stretched my arms wide. Somewhere out on the canal beyond the window of my hotel room, a gondolier sang a plaintive melody in a minor key. I could only pick out the odd word or two of its lyrics; my very limited Italian, painstakingly gleaned from a phrasebook, was unequal to the task of translation. After all, lyricists in this, the most romantic city in the world, rarely waxed rhapsodic over directions to the Piazza San Marco or the time of the next train to Rome.
Nearer at hand, the hum of an electric razor (a more mundane sound, but one no less romantic, at least to my mind) penetrated the closed bathroom door. Smiling to myself, I threw off the covers and slid my arms into the sleeves of my blue satin robe.
“I’ll be outside,” I called in the general direction of the bathroom, then pushed aside the curtain, opened the French window, and stepped out onto the tiny balcony overlooking the canal. I leaned forward and propped my elbows on the ornate wrought iron railing, admiring the play of sunlight over the unfamiliar band of gold adorning the third finger of my left hand.
The dark prow of the gondola sliced through the water beneath my balcony, its sleek curve resembling the neck of a great black swan. At that moment the sun disappeared behind a cloud, and I shivered, even though the summer morning was already growing uncomfortably warm. The melancholy song of the gondolier began to fade, and I found myself hoping that, by the time my husband and I left Venice in a week’s time, the haunting music and the lapping of water against the side of graceful old buildings would have once more become the quintessential Venetian experience, and no longer the stuff of nightmare ...
Chapter 1
Travel, in the younger sort, is a part of education;
in the elder, a part of experience.
FRANCIS BACON, Of Travel
Three months earlier
En route to Barcelona, Spain
When a boy would rather be at the bottom of the sea than on dry land getting married to the girl he claims to love, something is terribly wrong somewhere.”
Those pearls of wisdom, dropped at an altitude of twenty thousand feet, were my first inkling that the purpose of this trip was not, as I had been assured, that of helping my poor widowed aunt (her description, not mine) cope with the loss of her husband, my Uncle Herman, some fifteen months earlier. Unfortunately, it was too late to do anything about it now, as our Boeing 707 would soon be making its final approach into Barcelona with its one hundred and fifty passengers, among whom were my Aunt Maggie and me.
“Gene does love me,” I insisted. “Besides, he’s on a submarine, not at the bottom of the sea.”
Maggie waved one manicured hand in a gesture of dismissal. “He might as well be, as far as you’re concerned.” She took my hand and squeezed it so tightly that her red-lacquered nails cut into the skin. “Robin, honey, it’s not that I don’t like Gene. I just hate to see you waste the best years of your life waiting for him to be ready to settle down. Some men never do, you know.”
I turned away and fixed my eyes on the window, staring down in apparent fascination at the red clay tile rooftops rising to meet us. In truth, I couldn’t think of anything to say to Aunt Maggie; after all, she hadn’t said anything that I hadn’t thought, however reluctantly, myself. Gene and I had been dating since our sophomore year of high school, and the only question regarding our eventual marriage had not been ‘if,’ but ‘when.’ After graduation, he had joined the Navy, and I, having nothing better to do, had enrolled in college. I had been rather puzzled at the time by my mother’s insistence that I further my education; after all, in Mother’s view, there were only three reasons for higher education for a female. A girl could go to secretarial school and eventually marry her boss, or she could go to a teacher’s college and eventually marry the principal, or she could go to nursing school and eventually marry a doctor. Since I’d always been good at English, I chose the teaching route. Mother was disappointed—I suspect she’d hoped to have a doctor in the family—but to my mind, it made very little difference: by the time I earned my diploma, Gene’s four-year commitment to the Navy would be complete, and we would marry and settle down to raise a family, without my ever having seen the inside of a classroom, at least not from the teacher’s side of the desk.
But Gene had re-enlisted within a month of my graduation from college, and I’d spent the last two years attempting to explain split infinitives, dangling participles, and predicate nominatives to uninterested eighth-graders. And now, halfway through his second tour of duty, I’d learned that Gene had requested—requested!—an assign-ment aboard a submarine, delaying our wedding once again so that he could see the world before settling down to a life of domestic bliss. (“How much does he think he’ll be able to see from a submarine?” had been Aunt Maggie’s not unreasonable response to this newest postponement.)
“Besides,” she continued now, releasing my hand with a final pat, “if he wants to see something of the world first, why shouldn’t you do the same? After all, what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.”
“We’re not barnyard fowl,” I protested.
A sudden jolt punctuated my objection, and I realized with some surprise that the back wheels of the plane had touched down. I was in Europe now—Spain, to be exact—but although the big adventure promised by Aunt Maggie might be said to have begun, I didn’t feel any different. The bumpy taxiway to the terminal looked very much like the one we’d left back in the States, and the hard lump of pain at what I couldn’t help thinking of as Gene’s betrayal was still firmly stuck somewhere between my throat and my chest. The plane finally lurched to a stop before the terminal, and Aunt Maggie dragged her patent leather handbag from its resting place at her feet, rummaged inside for her compact, and began to powder her nose.
“Look at it this way,” she said. “If your Gene is going to make a career of the Navy, he’ll want a wife who can hold her own with the other well-traveled Navy wives. In that case, you’ll want to be a credit to him.”
Yes, I decided resolutely as I unbuckled my seat belt, rose stiffly from the seat I’d occupied for the last eight hours, and attempted (without visible success) to smooth the creases from my white poplin sailor dress. I was going to have a lovely time, and the next time Gene saw me, I would no longer be a small-town junior high English teacher, but a cosmopolitan woman with a smattering of Spanish, French, Greek, and Italian at my command. He would take one look at the sophisticated creature I had become, and thank his lucky stars that no other man had snapped me up while he’d been dragging his feet. I snatched my round beribboned hat from the rack above me and plunked it firmly onto my head (the better to hide my slightly mussed ash-blond hair), then picked up my purse and followed Aunt Maggie down the aisle toward the front of the plane.
I emerged blinking into the bright sunshine, and made my way down the rollaway stairs and onto the tarmac, where I drew my first breath of European air. The temperature was pleasantly mild, but heat rose from the pavement in visible waves, promising an uncomfortably warm afternoon. Baggage handlers were already at work unloading luggage from the cargo hold, and it was easy to pick out my suitcase and its matching cosmetic case, a gift from Aunt Maggie and Uncle Herman upon my graduation from college. Still unused two years later, they were starkly, pristinely white (“bri
dal white for the honeymoon!” I had exclaimed delightedly—naïvely—at the time), embarrassingly so amongst all these less beautiful but far more worldly bags bearing labels from London and Paris, Hawaii and Bermuda. I was aware of a certain self-consciousness as I picked them up and followed my aunt to the customs barrier. Aunt Maggie—no believer in traveling light—had collared a skycap to wrestle her four bags through customs and to the taxi stand, where he dumped them (with considerable relief, it seemed to me) into the trunk along with mine. Meanwhile, Aunt Maggie gave instructions to the taxi driver, overcoming the language barrier through a combination of gesticulation and sheer volume. At last we piled into the back seat and the taxi peeled out, tires squealing, into the traffic.
“He reminds me so much of your Uncle Herman,” Aunt Maggie said with a reminiscent sigh.
“Who, the taxi driver?” I glanced in bewilderment at the back of his head, and tried to reconcile the memory of my tall, thin, gray-haired uncle with the dark, somewhat stout Spaniard at the wheel, hurtling us through the streets of Barcelona at a speed that sent the plume of smoke from his cigarette flying out the open window in wispy white shreds. “Why?”
“Because Herman never listened to a word I said, either.”
Anything I might have said to this was obliged to wait, for at that moment the taxi turned a corner so sharply that I had to grab the armrest on the door to keep from being flung into Maggie’s lap. Once the danger passed, I settled back in my seat and watched as the city flew past, medieval churches juxtaposed oddly with billboards advertising Coca-Cola.
And suddenly there was our ship: the Oceanus, her sleek lines blindingly white against the blue of the sky and the still bluer hue of the sea, festooned from bow to stern with brightly colored flags flapping gaily in the breeze. The taxi drew up with a screech of brakes and a cloud of dust, and we climbed out, stretching our limbs gingerly to make sure they were still intact. I took a deep breath of air that smelled faintly of salt and fish while Aunt Maggie paid the taxi driver, a procedure that required yet another round of shouting and gesturing.
At last the matter was settled to the satisfaction of both, and the driver opened the trunk and unceremoniously dumped our suitcases on the sidewalk as if he couldn’t be rid of them soon enough. We gathered our luggage—I tucked Aunt Maggie’s smallest case under my arm—and we took our places at the end of the line straggling out from the gangplank. This, it soon transpired, wound its way through a maze of vendors’ booths, all selling souvenirs to tourists eager to lighten their wallets before boarding the ship. Offerings of chocolate and cured meats reminded me that I’d had nothing to eat but the modest breakfast provided by the airline, but Aunt Maggie pointed out that we would have all we could eat and more, once we’d boarded the ship. I did sigh briefly over a selection of lace mantillas in black, white, or scarlet, but my resolve was strengthened by the daunting prospect of putting down my luggage so that I might rummage through my purse for pesetas sufficient to make such a purchase. Another booth caught my eye, a booth festively decorated for Christmas although it was now the middle of May, and I stopped to stare in bewilderment at foot-long lengths of rough log with stubby wooden legs and a happy face painted on one sawn end.
“What are they?” I asked the smiling Spanish woman tending the booth. “¿Qué es?”
Her smile grew broader as she picked up one of the logs, and I couldn’t be sure whether she detected a potential sale, or she simply thought my accent was funny.
“This, it is the caga tió, the, how do you say, the shitting log.”
“The what?” I hardly knew whether to be shocked or delighted.
“It is a very old tradition in Catalonia,” she explained. “Beginning with the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, the children feed the caga tió and cover it with a blanket to keep it warm. Then on Christmas Day, they sing to it and beat it with sticks so that it will sh—”
“Will poop,” Aunt Maggie put in primly, although I knew that with sufficient provocation, she could air a vocabulary that would make most sailors blush.
“Si, will poop, as you say, candy and nuts.”
“That does it,” I announced, setting my luggage down and fumbling in my purse. “I’ve got to buy one of these things, or no one at home will believe it. How much? Er—¿Cuánto?”
She named a sum—I had no idea whether it was a bargain, or highway robbery—and I counted out the coins into her hand and took possession of my very own caga tió. Declining her offer to box it up, I tucked it under my arm and picked up my suitcases—not without some difficulty, as Pooping Pedro kept trying to slide out from under my arm—and Maggie and I headed toward the gangplank and took our places in the slow-moving line of passengers waiting to board.
When we finally reached the top, the reason for the delay became obvious. After we had produced passports and boarding papers and collected our cabin keys, we were commanded to “Smile!” by a dark-haired, bronze-skinned young man whose face was obscured by a large camera. There was a burst of light from the flashbulb—apparently the lifeboats suspended overhead cast enough of a shadow to make the flash necessary in spite of the brilliant sun—and then the photographer lowered the camera.
“One more,” he said, and disappeared behind the camera again, but not before I’d had a glimpse of dark eyes, white teeth, and a nose that belonged on a Greek coin. I was suddenly and painfully aware of my wrinkled skirts and shiny makeup, all the more noticeable next to my aunt’s polished elegance. I need not have worried, though, for no sooner had the flash popped than he turned his attention to the elderly couple boarding the ship behind us. “Smile!”
I hurried along the deck after Maggie, not quite certain whether to be annoyed by his indifference, or grateful for it.
It was cool and dark below deck. I followed Maggie down the corridor to the narrow doors marked 322 and 324—our side-by-side cabins—inserted the small brass key into the lock of number 324, and pushed it open.
“It’s tiny!” I exclaimed.
“It’s a ship, Robin, not the Ritz-Carlton,” Aunt Maggie pointed out. “The cabins are not large, but you’ll be surprised at how much they manage to cram into such a tight space.”
She was right. On the opposite wall, two twin beds were positioned on each side of the curtained porthole with a small nightstand in between, while nearer at hand one corner had been turned into a rudimentary closet. A narrow door to my immediate right opened onto a private bath with its own microscopic shower. My luggage, which had been snatched away by a porter while I waited in line, had arrived before me, and now waited at the foot of one of the beds.
“Not spacious, perhaps, but it has everything you need,” Aunt Maggie said, apparently reading my mind. “Still, I thought we might find sharing a single cabin a bit too much togetherness. I’ll be right next door, though, if you need anything. And now,” She paused long enough to cover a yawn with one hand. “I intend to lie down and take a nap. I never sleep well on planes, and that infant across the aisle who cried all night certainly didn’t help. I suggest you do the same. Take a nap, I mean, not cry all night.”
I agreed to this plan, but once Aunt Maggie had departed for her own cabin, I found myself too restless to even think of sleeping. I set Pooping Pedro on the nightstand, then hefted the larger of my two suitcases onto the bed and began to unpack, hanging my dresses from the rod that constituted the closet and folding my underwear into the nightstand drawers. The second suitcase contained my cosmetics and toiletries, and these were soon stowed away in the bathroom. Having completed this task, I stepped out into the corridor (noting the “Do Not Disturb” hanger dangling from Aunt Maggie’s doorknob), locked the cabin door behind me, and retraced my steps to the deck.
Passengers were still boarding, although the line had slowed to a trickle. Looking at my fellow travelers, I began to understand why Gene had been so encouraging when I’d written to tell him of Aunt Maggie’s invitation: there was no one on board for him to be jealous of. The av
erage age of the Oceanus’s passengers seemed to be about seventy, the only exceptions being the Greek god with the camera (who couldn’t really be said to count, since he was a member of the crew) and a slender young woman standing at the rail and looking out to sea, her long black hair hanging halfway to her waist beneath the wide brim of her hat. Someone’s daughter, I guessed, only to be proven wrong a moment later when she was approached by one of the older passengers, a well-preserved man with silver hair who stole an arm about her waist and planted a most unfatherly kiss on her scarlet lips. As she turned toward him, the sun caught her full in the face, and I realized she was older than I’d thought—forty if she was a day, although she was carefully and heavily made up to look at least a decade younger. The mistress, I thought, and abandoned any half-formed hope of making a female friend nearer my own age.
Any further inspection of my fellow passengers was interrupted by the loud blast of the ship’s horn announcing the “all aboard.” A flurry of activity followed, as the last stragglers came running up the gangplank, only to meet the hastily departing visitors running down after seeing their loved ones safely on board. Fifteen minutes later, the gangplank was lifted and the ropes that tethered Oceanus to her berth were cast off. Slowly, very slowly, the ship began to move away from the pier. Far below, the unfortunate souls left behind stood on the dock waving a final “bon voyage” to their friends and relatives. I leaned over the railing and waved back at them madly even though I didn’t know a single soul.
As the pier shrank from view, the long night of flying finally caught up with me, and I realized how sleepy I was. Resolving to follow Aunt Maggie’s example, I returned to my stateroom for a nap. I turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open—and saw a face grinning maniacally at me through the gloom.
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