“She’ll love it,” I predicted warmly. “I know I would have when I was little.”
Henry and Martha Hollis seemed so nice and so, well, normal that it seemed impossible to believe I had really heard what I thought I’d heard. Was it possible I had misunderstood? Sometimes words in a foreign language could sound strangely like English words to which they had absolutely no relation: I still remembered the hilarity that had ensued in my college French class when the professor pointed to a poster on the wall and announced, “C’est une affiche,” to which the entire class responded, “Tuna fish.” Was it possible they hadn’t said my name at all, but some other French word or words that to my untrained ear had sounded like it? Surely that must be it; no other explanation made sense.
I made up my mind to dismiss the argument from my thoughts and focus instead on my aunt. She would want to hear all about the rest of my day in Pompeii, and I had no intention of worrying her with groundless suspicions. I realized to my surprise that I, like Mrs. Hollis, had finished a roll of film, and resolved to drop it off for developing; I would be as curious as Maggie to see what I’d taken pictures of, for I couldn’t remember anything that happened after that strange encounter in the House of the Tragic Poet.
Once back on ship, I headed straight for the photo counter, and was unaccountably relieved to find Markos there in his crisp white uniform; evidently he hadn’t been ashore in Pompeii “admiring the artwork” in the lupanar, after all.
“Good evening, Miss Fletcher,” he said with a smile, white teeth gleaming against his tan. “Did you enjoy your day ashore?”
I nodded. “The first half of it, anyway. But Maggie—my aunt, Mrs. Watson, that is—had to return to the ship early, and I’ll admit I missed having her company.”
“So you were left on your own for the rest of the excursion?”
The question seemed innocent enough, but there was something—an intensity about his eyes, perhaps—that sug-gested some hidden meaning, although I couldn’t imagine what it might be. One thing was certain, however: my charming dance partner of two nights ago was gone, and this suspicious and faintly accusing stranger had taken his place.
“Yes,” I retorted defensively, although exactly what I was defending myself against, I couldn’t have said. “I promised Maggie I would take plenty of pictures so she could see what she missed. So if you could put a rush on these, I would appreciate it. I don’t suppose my photos from Pisa are ready yet?”
“Unfortunately, Miss Fletcher, there are six hundred passengers and two hundred crew members on board the Oceanus, and every one of them believes his—or her—photos are more important than anyone else’s.”
If he’d hoped to put me in my place, he was going to be doomed to disappointment. “Maybe if you’d been working yesterday instead of gallivanting about Rome, you would be caught up by now.” I grimaced inwardly at my own choice of words. Gallivanting? I sounded like my own grandmother. Fortunately, the English term seemed to escape Markos.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said woodenly.
“I saw you yesterday, near the Trevi Fountain.”
He shook his head. “I’m afraid you must have mistaken me for someone else, Miss Fletcher.”
If I had been uncertain before, I was dead sure now, although what Markos had been doing in Rome—and why he was lying about it—I couldn’t even begin to guess. I was given no chance to challenge his assertion, for he had already turned to assist the next passenger. The message was clear: He had nothing more to say to me. With a little huff of annoyance, I turned on my heel and made straight for Maggie’s stateroom. I tapped on the door, and a muffled voice invited me to come in.
I found my aunt sitting on her bed reading, leaning back against the headboard with her injured foot propped up on a pillow. When she saw me, she closed her book and laid it aside.
“I noticed the passageway was suddenly noisier, and hoped it meant the tour buses were returning,” she said, tilting her head so I could kiss her on the cheek. “How was the rest of Pompeii?”
“Beautiful and sad,” I said. “I dropped my film off as I came up. When I get my photos back, we’ll look at them together. But did you see the ship’s doctor? What did he say about your ankle?”
“Paul was right: It isn’t broken, but you couldn’t prove it by me. The doctor gave me something for pain and told me to keep it elevated. So I’m afraid I won’t be going to dinner with you,” she added apologetically.
“Never mind that,” I said impatiently, wondering at the same time how I was ever going to look Sylvia and Devos in the face. “How are you going to eat?”
“The cabin steward is going to bring me something on a tray. Make my excuses to everyone at dinner, will you?”
I promised her I would, and returned to my stateroom to shower and dress for dinner, grateful in a way that my aunt’s injury would give me something to talk about without blurting out my suspicions regarding Sylvia and Devos.
As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. Graham Grimes had come down to dinner, apparently recovered at last, and everyone was eager to express their pleasure at his return to our little group. Sylvia was as devoted to him as anyone might have wished. She and Devos, on the other hand, addressed one another—when they addressed one another at all—with the sort of impersonal courtesy of chance-met strangers. I became more convinced than ever that I had misunderstood the words I’d heard in the House of the Tragic Poet.
Still, I reminded myself, they had been together, and they had been arguing; of that much I was certain. And so, when the subject turned from Mr. Grimes to the missing members of our party—Paul as well as my aunt—I seized my opportunity. “My aunt is stuck in her stateroom tonight with her foot up on a pillow,” I explained when Mr. Grimes asked. “She took a tumble in Pompeii this afternoon and sprained her ankle. I imagine Paul is with her, keeping her company.”
“I expect he’s giving her mouth-to-mouth resusci-tation,” Henry Hollis said with a twinkle in his eye.
“Henry!” cried Mrs. Hollis, shocked.
“After all, Martha, he is a doctor,” pointed out Mr. Hollis, the very picture of wounded innocence.
“I suspect you’re probably right,” I said, grinning at him. “It’s so important for foot injuries, you know.”
“And you’ve been on your own all afternoon?” Mrs. Hollis asked, embarrassment on her husband’s behalf giving way to concern for mine. “You poor dear! You should have joined us—Henry and me, I mean.”
“That’s very kind of you, Mrs. Hollis,” I said, and meant it. “I would have, if I’d seen you. It would have been more fun than wandering about on my own.” I turned to address Sylvia and Devos, both of whom had remained silent throughout the exchange. “What about you, Sylvia? Mr. Devos? Did either of you visit Pompeii today?”
They exchanged a quick look—a look so subtle that I wouldn’t have noticed, had I not seen and heard what I had that afternoon—and Sylvia spoke first.
“We did. In fact, my experience was much like yours, except that I became separated from my tour group. I wandered about by myself until I came upon Mr. Devos, who was sightseeing on his own.”
“Then it was you I saw!” I exclaimed brightly. “I thought I recognized the two of you coming out of a domus. The House of the Tragic Poet, I believe. What a romantic name, don’t you think?”
“Oh, but you should have joined us, Miss Fletcher,” Devos chided me with an air of exaggerated gallantry.
“I thought about it,” I lied blithely, “but you seemed so deep in conversation that I didn’t want to interrupt.”
Devos regarded me with narrowed eyes, and I met his suspicious gaze with a look of wide-eyed innocence.
Sylvia gave a laugh that was just a bit too hearty to be real. “What she means is that she heard us quarreling. And so we were, for this—this philistine—” She waved one manicured hand toward Devos—“insisted that the frescoes on the walls of the atrium are examples of the Pompeiian Second
Style, when any fool can see they represent the later Fourth Style.”
“I guess I’m one of the fools, then,” Mr. Hollis confessed cheerfully, shrugging his stooped shoulders. “I wouldn’t know one style from another—or either one of them from a hole in the wall.”
I found the Midwestern farmer’s self-deprecating humor rather charming, but Mr. Grimes came gallantly to his defense. “I’m sure you do yourself less than justice, Mr. Hollis. I suspect you would not only recognize a hole in the wall, but you’d know just how to repair that hole, too.” He turned to Sylvia and beamed at her, obviously proud of her knowledge of art history. “I’m afraid you have the advantage of the rest of us, my dear.”
The rest of us all murmured our agreement, but behind my smile, my head was spinning. I knew that experts, whatever their field, could get into vehement debates over details that would seem minor to anyone else—I remem-bered two professors in my college’s English department who had been quarreling bitterly for more than a decade over the identity of Shakespeare’s Dark Lady—but I didn’t believe for one minute that Sylvia and Devos had been arguing over the art in the atrium. For one thing, they had been standing in the peristyle when I’d overheard them. If Sylvia had really wanted to prove a point about Pompeiian art, she surely would have dragged him back into the atrium to point out the differences in the respective styles. For another, I couldn’t quite picture Sylvia as an art historian. Sylvia had brains, all right, but it seemed to me that her kind of intelligence tilted more toward the cunning than the scholarly. Clearly, she had some knowledge, but where she might have gained it, and why, I couldn’t imagine.
All in all, it was a relief when I could excuse myself, claiming the need to check on my aunt—or chaperone her, as I laughingly confided to Henry Hollis—and make my escape from the dinner table. But my ordeal was not yet ended. As I reached the dining room doors, I all but ran into Markos, camera in hand. I stammered an apology, which he accepted with a terse nod, and hurried past. At the foot of the staircase I turned back, and saw him still standing just outside the double doors leading into the dining room, regarding me with suspicion in his dark eyes.
* * *
The next day was spent at sea as our ship plowed its way eastward toward the Greek island of Mykonos. Maggie was thankful for a day to spend relaxing on deck, as it gave her some time to recuperate before our next port of call. Although my need wasn’t quite so urgent, three days of sightseeing had left me glad of a day to revel in slothfulness and, judging from the number of sunbathing bodies lounging about the swimming pool, it appeared that most of our shipmates felt the same.
We staked our claim on two deck chairs, spreading beach towels over them to pad the wooden slats. Maggie picked up her thick paperback copy of James Michener’s Hawaii, and I slipped out of my short terry cloth cover-up, prepared to christen my navy-and-white nautically-inspired one-piece with a dip in the pool.
“Oh, drat!” Maggie grumbled.
I folded my cover-up in half and draped it over the back of the deck chair. “What’s the matter?”
She squinted at the bricklike book in her hand. “I forgot to bring my reading glasses. I left them on the nightstand beside the bed—and a fat lot of good they’ll do me there.”
“Give me your key.” I picked up the terry robe I’d just shed and shrugged my arms into its sleeves. “I’ll go get them for you.”
“Would you?” Maggie surrendered her stateroom key gratefully. “You’re a doll, Robin.”
“I know,” I said with a grin, then retraced my steps back to our staterooms on Capri Deck, my open robe flapping about my legs. I fitted Maggie’s key in the lock, gave it a twist, and pushed the door open.
The curtains covering the porthole were still tightly drawn—it was funny, in a way, how we still closed the curtains when we dressed even though there was nothing beyond the porthole but miles of open sea—but in the dim light I could see Maggie’s closet door standing ajar, swinging back and forth with the pitch and roll of the ship. It reminded me of my self-inflicted midnight scare two nights earlier, and I turned away, shuddering. One of the dresser drawers gaped open, and a cut-glass bottle of Shalimar perfume lay on its side. I felt a pang of guilt at seeing such signs of neglect on the part of my usually tidy aunt; apparently Maggie had had a difficult time of it, hobbling about on one ankle. Although the cabin steward would soon set things to rights, that didn’t excuse my failure to at least offer to help her. I picked up the bottle of perfume, sniffed for any sign of leakage, and tightened the gold cap before setting the rather top-heavy bottle upright. I slid the gaping drawer shut, then crossed the tiny cabin to the closet and pushed the door closed until I heard the latch click.
I found the reading glasses on the nightstand, exactly where my aunt had said they would be. I picked them up and tucked them into the pocket of my robe, then exited the cabin and locked the door behind me.
As I turned away, something—I didn’t know exactly what—froze me in my tracks. I stood there in the passageway, trying to determine what was wrong, when I noticed a sliver of sunlight shining on the floor from beneath my own stateroom door; unlike Maggie, I had thrown open the curtains after dressing, flooding the tiny cabin with sunlight. But even as I watched, a shadow moved across the wedge of bright light, blotting it out. Something—or someone—had moved between the porthole of my stateroom and the door to the passageway. Even as my brain struggled to make sense of this discovery, I became aware of a tremor, a series of rhythmic vibrations unconnected with the deeper throbbing of the ship’s engines or its bobbing motion through the waves. No, this movement was not mechanical, but human.
Someone was in my cabin. The footsteps were approaching the door, and in a matter of seconds, the door would open, bringing me face to face with the intruder.
Chapter 8
The passengers are just that distance from death.
ANACHARSIS, Diogenes Laertius
I glanced wildly about me, searching desperately for somewhere to hide. My aunt’s stateroom was the obvious place, but my hands were shaking so badly I doubted my ability to unlock the door and shut myself inside before the door to my own cabin was opened. I was too far from the midships staircase for it to be of any use, and waiting for the elevator was obviously out of the question. Although the passageway curved slightly, echoing the line of the ship’s hull, the trajectory of the curve was so slight that I would have to run almost the entire length of the ship before I would be hidden from sight. There was nowhere to hide in the passageway itself, nothing but blank doors at intervals down its long length—doors of staterooms like my own and my aunt’s, along with one door marked “CREW ONLY.”
I didn’t hesitate. I ran to the forbidden door, threw my weight against it, and ducked inside. I found myself in a corridor that ran parallel to the one I’d just left, only here there were none of the luxuries provided for the passengers. The floor beneath my feet was not carpet but linoleum tile, and the walls were painted a utilitarian white. Only a few feet away, a narrow staircase of perforated metal treads led down into the bowels of the ship. Driven by sheer terror and a mindless need to escape whoever was about to emerge from my stateroom, I plunged headlong down the stairs, silently cursing the loud ringing of my sandals against metal. I reached the landing and took the lower corridor at a dead run, then turned a corner—and ran full tilt into a crew member. I looked up and found myself face to face with Markos, who regarded me with puzzled concern.
“I’m afraid this area is for crew only, Miss Fletcher,” he said.
“S-s-someone in m-my cabin—” I stammered incoherently. “There’s someone in my cabin.”
He put his hands on my shoulders and gave them a reassuring squeeze. “I’m sure it’s nothing to worry about. It’s probably the cabin steward.”
“No,” I insisted, shaking my head so emphatically that my hair swung back and forth. “It isn’t the steward. Maggie’s bed isn’t made yet.”
“Maggie’s bed?” ec
hoed Markos, all at sea in more ways than one.
“I’d gone to Aunt Maggie’s stateroom to fetch her reading glasses,” I said, annoyed at the necessity of wasting time making explanations. “Her bed wasn’t made, and her cabin obviously hadn’t been straightened.”
“There you are, then,” Markos said in the same tone he might have used to soothe a frightened child. “The cabin steward is probably working in your stateroom, and he’ll move on to your aunt’s when he’s finished.”
“I’m telling you, it can’t be!” I insisted. “The steward always leaves the door open while he’s cleaning, and my door was—is—closed.”
“If the door was closed, how do you know someone was inside?” His dark eyes narrowed as concern gradually gave way to suspicion, and suddenly I remembered that I was dressed in nothing more than a bathing suit and robe—and realized that I was clinging to the front of his shirt as if he were my last hope of heaven.
I released my death grip on his formerly crisp uniform shirt and took a step backwards, grabbing the dangling belt of my robe and cinching it tightly about my waist. “I saw his shadow in the crack beneath the door. And I heard—or felt, rather—the vibration of footsteps.”
“And do you know of any reason why someone would want to break into your stateroom?”
“I wasn’t aware that thieves had to have a reason,” I retorted, goaded by his obvious skepticism.
“All right, then, let’s go have a look,” he said.
Without waiting for an answer, he grabbed my hand and led me back up the corridor to the stairs. I wasn’t sure if I had convinced him, or if he had just decided it was the only way of getting me out of the forbidden “crew only” area; I suspected it would not reflect well on him if we were discovered together there, especially given my current state of undress.
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