“Captain Madera’s been so helpful,” my mother said. “He even gave us free passage for another cruise because of our suffering. Wasn’t that nice of him? You know, I don’t think he’s married.” She tapped my arm. “Valentine? You’re not listening.”
She was right. I knew where this conversation was leading. So far, my mother had considered suitors in the form of a funeral director, a car salesman, a neighbor’s grandson, the minister’s nephew, a retirement home senior, Kashi, and now the ship’s captain. All that were left were the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker. Was it any wonder I was still single?
“Where’s Dad?”
She nodded to the poolside bar. “He’s over there, having a drink with Clive.”
I could smell the rum in Clive’s glass from where I was standing. He was in his usual spot, hanging half off his barstool. Beside him was a tousled-haired man two days past shaving, wearing a casual shirt over rolled-up pants and flip-flops.
I blinked wide. “That’s Dad? He hasn’t shaved! And his shirt isn’t tucked in with a belt around his waist.” I gaped down at his flip-flops. “What happened to his fear of getting athlete’s foot?” My jaw hung loose, but I couldn’t snap it shut. “And why is his hair sticking up all over?”
My parents could look after themselves, but I kept their hair styled and my father’s nose hairs trimmed. It was hell being a perfectionist.
“He’s getting into this cruise thing.”
“That still doesn’t explain why he looks like one of the Beach Boys. And why isn’t he looking for Tantig? She’s his aunt.”
“Your father? The king of carefree? He roamed the deck for half an hour, searching for her. Said she’d show up before we all went to bed.”
Sounded like something my father would say. I gawked at him taking a slug from his drink.
“He’s been on this Blackbeard kick since Nassau,” my mother said.
“Blackbeard?”
“Yes. Legend says Blackbeard used to light his beard to scare off merchant captains.”
“An-n-nd?”
“And he’s growing a beard.”
“A beard. To scare off merchant captains.”
My mother raised her palms. “You know your father. Anything for attention. And he’s thinking of piercing a gold hoop through his ear.”
I shook my head, sure I didn’t hear right. “A gold hoop.”
“Yes. Like Max. Stella Bartola said her Frank went through a similar period. Dressed up like Gene Simmons from KISS. Bought platform shoes and everything. Stella said he walked around town like that for a week before his rheumatoid arthritis started acting up.”
“My father. Blackbeard, with a gold hoop.” My life as I knew it was over.
The cruise director called out for volunteers, and our gazes swung back to the ring. We heard a distinct cry, and a second later, Kashi bounced to the stage.
“Yes! I, Kashi Farooq, will take the challenge!” He bowed. “In my country, we are proficient at sword-fighting. The khanda is a weapon of great prestige.”
“That’s uh, lovely,” the cruise director said, a vague look crossing her face like she hoped she hadn’t welcomed a knife-wielding closet terrorist into the ring. She raised her eyebrows at the crowd. “Anyone wish to take on Kashi?”
“Valentine will! Yoo-hoo! Julie McCoy! Over here!”
“No!” I backed up from my mother and ducked.
My mother grabbed my arm and hauled me to the front. “This is the perfect opportunity to get to know Kashi. You said yourself he hasn’t said more than two words to you.”
“That was at the beginning of the cruise. Since then we’ve said hi and nice day.”
“Hi! What does hi tell you? Nothing.”
“I’m okay with that.” There was no point telling her he was a murder suspect. She’d only come back with everyone’s innocent until proven guilty. I grasped at straws. “My hand! It’s in a cast!”
“You said yourself it was a scrape.”
“What about Tantig? I should keep looking for her.”
“She’s not your responsibility anymore tonight.” She gave me a shove. “Go.”
I tripped into the ring in my white heels and short flowered skirt. Everyone cheered me on.
The cruise director gave us both a foam sword and said to play clean. What was clean? I didn’t know a thing about sword-fighting, or fencing, or whatever it was called.
“And if you can’t play clean”—she snickered—“play dirty!” Then she blew a whistle.
I stood there, red with embarrassment, waving my purple toy sword like a wand.
Kashi bowed from his side of the ring, a fiendish look on his face. He gave a blood-curdling scream and lunged at me with his green sword like he was about to spear a bull.
I shrieked and scooted in my stilettos to the opposite side of the ring, narrowly missing being jabbed by his sword. What was I doing here? I liked romantic dancing and glittery tutus. Not sword-fighting. I wasn’t Holly. She was the one who liked boxing and beating up on boys.
We parried each other, me avoiding getting lanced while Kashi did his own rendition of the “Mexican Hat Dance.”
“Boooo!” The spectators shouted. They weren’t interested in us tap-dancing around. They wanted blood. The volume doubled and was enough to work up my courage. I had nothing to be embarrassed about. I’d been through enough today to stand up to a lifetime of humiliations.
I puffed out air and looked at Kashi with new eyes. He was a mealworm. A guppie. A flea on a dog. Nobody I should be intimidated by or scared of. At least not in such a crowd. I was mentally reinforcing myself of this as I got the hang of poking and prodding, shuffling my own jig around my opponent.
Sweat rolled down my temples, and my heels pinched my feet. My dance probably looked more like a chiropractic nightmare than that of a professional fencer.
“What is it with you, woman?” Kashi did the en garde thing. “You have no talent with such a weapon. You are a worthless opponent.”
This wasn’t what I needed to hear at the moment. I’d spent the first half of this cruise on edge. I wasn’t going to take it from Kashi Farooq. I narrowed my eyes at him, threads of steam escaping my ears. Suddenly, I pictured him pouring that vial of blue liquid into Lucy’s drink, and all the fury I had building inside me exploded. I went on the attack and clocked him on the side of the head with my sword. Ha! Take that!
His head rotated in a circle from the blow, and he lost his balance. The crowd cheered. Things were picking up.
I whacked at his legs until I took him out. He landed with a thump, and I jumped him, losing my shoes in the process. We rolled around on the ground, me bending my sword around his scrawny neck, him trying to beat me off like a horse.
“Why did you kill her?” I cried in his ear.
“What are you talking about?” he shrieked, his wire-rimmed glasses askew on his face.
I got on top of him, straddling his stomach, my skirt fanning out around me. “Don’t play dumb with me.” I tightened my hold around his neck. “I saw you!”
“You saw me?”
“Yes. I saw you pour something in Lucy’s drink. You poisoned her!” True, I wanted to deem him innocent, but the moment and the fright of a killer on board was getting to me.
“I, Kashi, would not hurt a tick!”
“That’s flea!” I smacked him again with my sword. Smack. Smack. Smack.
“Aaaaah! Get this beautiful crazy woman off me!”
“This is great!” the cruise director cheered. “You two know how to have fun!”
The crowd whistled and applauded. “More! More!”
“You heard them,” she sang. “Round two!”
“Round two!” Kashi cried. “I will need an ambulance after round one.”
I ground my teeth at him. “Tell me what you poisoned Lucy with.”
“It was nothing. Honestly! It was only blue food coloring.”
“Food coloring.”
�
�Yes.” He straightened his glasses. “If you let me live, I will tell you all about it.”
“Not until you tell me what you did with Tantig!”
“Who? Why is Kashi responsible for everything? I do not know any Tantig!”
“Five-foot-nothing. White hair. Pasty skin. Ring any bells?” My hands were trembling. “You gave her a brooch, and…and”—tears swelled in my eyes—“she’s missing!”
“I know nothing! Please. I liked that pasty little woman. I wouldn’t hurt a”—he dared to look in my eyes—“flea!”
I swiped away tears with my unraveling bandage while someone peeled me off him. Two long feet in flip-flops told me it was my father.
“Valentine,” he said, “you’re embarrassing your mother and me.”
I shoved away from his grasp. Gee, I wouldn’t want to humiliate Blackbeard.
“And we have a winner!” the cruise director said. “The lady wins the Saber Cup.”
I accepted the two-inch toy trophy, gave her a wan smile, then fixed my skirt and pulled my tangled hair out of my eyes.
I collected my heels from the edge of the ring and saw one of the white bows had been torn off. Fabulous. I stuffed the bow in the toy trophy and slid on my scuffed stilettos. Then I seized the back of Kashi’s shirt.
“Aah!” he yelped.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Over there. I need a drink.”
We settled ourselves at a table for two and gave a waitress our orders.
Kashi removed his glasses and wiped the perspiration from his eyes. “I am humbly sorry,” he said. “I did not know about Tantig.”
I rewound my bandage, staring at him, not sure if I should give him the benefit of the doubt.
“You really do know how to beat butt.” He dabbed his neck with a napkin.
“You mean kick butt.”
He slid on his glasses. “That too.”
The waitress brought Kashi a banana daiquiri and me a cranberry cocktail.
“So, what’s the story?” I asked, after she left. “Why’d you pour food coloring in Lucy’s drink?”
“First, you must understand there is a long history between Lucy Jacobs and me.” He removed the orange umbrella from his glass and took a swallow of his drink. “I have a successful hair boutique in New York. Lucy was my greatest competitor.”
Same thing Sabrina had told me, but I’d hear him out.
“If I ran a special on tanning, Lucy would top that and give away tanning products with their special. I’d run a buy-one-get-one-free. Lucy’s sale would be buy-one-get-two-free. It was continual.”
Sounded like the same tricks Candace Needlemeyer pulled on me. The witch.
“That little spitball was constantly undermining Kashi’s marketing genius. And that’s not all. Sometimes she would do nasty things like deliver a dead skunk in a hair box with a message saying it was free hair extensions.”
Huh? Wasn’t this what Sabrina had said Kashi had done? Who was telling the truth? “Are you sure it wasn’t the other way around?”
“What?” he squealed. “Why would I do something so distasteful? I love all animals. I would never hurt another living being.”
I sipped my drink, my eyes narrowed on him.
“Another time, she delivered a box of chocolate Turtles with clipped fingernails sticking out of the chocolates.”
I spit my drink back in my glass.
His eyebrows went up. “You see? Devilish.”
“Okay, you and Lucy weren’t the best of friends.”
“That is to put it coolly. So I decided to pull a Kashi prank on her.” He twirled the orange umbrella in his fingers. “Actually two.”
“Two?”
“Yes, two pranks.” He took another shot of his drink. “The first was after Lucy won Saturday’s competition. That little imp detested my ‘Get Out of Town’ brooches. Said they looked like beetles, and she hated beetles.” He shrugged. “I made a tiny brooch for her and snuck it in her bag. I told Sabrina to please not tell, as it was harmless. At most, Lucy would scream her fool head off. Sabrina nodded and told me to go nuts.” His eyebrows creased. “I took that to mean have fun—not the Cashew reference Lucy bestowed on me.”
I gave a small grin. “I’m sure that’s what she meant.”
He nodded in earnest. “Prank number two came after you spilled Lucy’s drink, then left the party. I slipped more food coloring in her wine bottle, and I took a picture of her holding her check. I said in my congenial fashion, ‘Smile,’ and she gave the brightest, bluest smile you ever did see.”
He laughed and slapped his knee. “I tell you, sometimes I outwit myself. She had no idea how ridiculous she looked. My plan was to post her blue face on social media and send it to the newspaper, announcing my wonderful friend’s win. But then she died, and I did not have the heart to go through with such a farce.”
He slumped in his chair, twiddling his umbrella. A moment later, a tear slipped down his cheek. “It is almost as if I did kill Lucy Jacobs. That was the last time I saw her, and here I was being Mr. Comedian.”
He sighed, looking up at me mournfully. “It seems there may have been others who had a bad relationship with Lucy.”
“What are you talking about?”
“About a year ago, there was a dead body. I’ll never forget it. I was on my way to work one morning, and I saw a corpse hanging on their salon awning. As I got closer, I realized it was a man.”
I guess I wasn’t the only stylist who discovered dead bodies. “Did you know him?”
“It was kind of hard to place him with half his features missing. But I heard he was tied to a drug ring. A note had been pinned to his clothes that said Happy Halloween.”
“And you think Lucy was involved?”
“That is what I suspected. The police came, and in a flash, half of New York was gaping at the scene. Photographers. Media. It was crazy. Lucy was taken in for questioning. I heard two stylists quit shortly after, and people shied away from the salon after that.”
Hmm. Was this the real reason Lucy lost business? If so, why didn’t Sabrina tell me this instead of pointing the finger at Kashi? Was she trying to protect Lucy’s reputation? Or protect someone else?
Kashi stared down at the table. “I never should’ve left her room that night. Maybe she’d still be alive if I’d stayed.”
“Why? What else happened?”
“Nothing noteworthy. Another friend showed up at Lucy’s door. By then, it was very late. I was tuckered in and decided to hit the hatchet. I left as he came in.”
“Who came in? Who was it?”
“Don’t ask Kashi. I did not make his acquaintance. His head was down, and he wore a ball cap and had an ugly snake tattoo on his arm.”
“A tattoo. Did you share any of this with security?”
“Yes, when they questioned everyone after they found Lucy’s body.”
* * *
All I wanted was sleep, but after I finished with Kashi, I saw my mother talking to the captain. By the intense look on her face I knew it was about Tantig, and it didn’t look good. I approached the two to find out what was going on.
The captain said the ship couldn’t leave San Juan because Tantig’s disappearance occurred while we were docked at a U.S. port. My mother argued that Tantig was on board, but the captain was adamant. He assured us they were working with the police in San Juan, and he’d let us know of any developments.
My parents went back to their cabin to see if there was anything they could find among Tantig’s things that would explain her disappearance. I stumbled back to mine, wondering if Tantig really was on land.
I wobbled off the elevator, blisters stinging the backs of my feet, my hand throbbing, my head sore. The latest news from Kashi didn’t make me feel any better either. If security knew about the tattooed man who’d entered Lucy and Sabrina’s cabin, I bet Jock and Romero knew, too. And getting anything out of those two would be futile.
I put them out of my mind, stopped outside my
cabin door, and wondered what Phyllis had been up to. My day wouldn’t have been complete without some type of confrontation. I knew I shouldn’t have expected the worst, but with everything else that had happened today, it was a safe bet.
I opened the door, and my gaze swung from Phyllis, combing through our suitcases, to the tornado-swept room. Clothes and toiletries were strewn everywhere. Yesterday’s gown was in a heap on the bathroom floor, bras hung on doorknobs, and Phyllis’s vitamins and souvenirs were scattered on the rug.
My first thought was that we’d been robbed. But even a burglar wouldn’t make the mess Phyllis could. The backs of my eyes bled red, and nasty words brewed to the surface.
I inhaled, counted to three, and before I blew up, I took a good look at Phyllis. Her shades sat on top of her head, her feet were badly swollen, and huge blisters covered every inch of exposed skin. I looked half-dead, but Phyllis looked barbequed. I exhaled my rage and climbed the ladder to my bunk, asking with a gentle voice about her day.
She moaned, arms out, zombie-like. “If you didn’t notice, I got burned to a crisp.” Her sunglasses slid down over her forehead, and she tossed them on the bunk, flinching in pain from the sudden movement.
“And if that wasn’t bad enough, I went on one of those tropical tours of a rainforest. El Yunque. What a mistake that was.” She slapped down the flap on her suitcase, sank to the floor, and ripped off her sandals.
I was going to be sorry for asking, but I was a beggar for punishment. “Why was it a mistake?”
“Because I hiked twenty miles in these flimsy things.” She hurled her sandals under the bed and rubbed her foot. “I knew I should’ve bought those hiking boots last time I was at Target. The trails were full of lizards, or whatever they call them down here, and there were stumps and stones all over the place. Not only that,” she griped, “eerie-sounding birds swooped down around us. One even landed on my shoulder. What a pest. Everyone was snapping pictures like they’d never seen a bird before.”
I refrained from rolling my eyes.
“And to top off the day, a snake slithered by and scared the bejeezus out of me. Then some idiot knocked into me because she was scared, and I slipped down a slope of rocks. And the tour guide didn’t do a thing.” She reached for her makeup bag and fished around inside.
Murder, Curlers, and Cruises Page 16
