Granny on Board

by Harper Lin

  I looked on, appalled, as Lauren fondled my boyfriend. Octavian looked uncomfortable, but he stayed in character, smiling at her and asking her all sorts of technical questions about the “sport and art of bowling.”

  I kept reminding myself that he was doing this for the sake of the case. Seeing the rest of the Six Mouseyketeers leering at them from the other lane did not help matters.

  Finally, he threw the darned ball and took out six pins. Lauren gave him some more hands-on instructions, and he picked up the spare.

  “Very good,” she said, squeezing his shoulder. “Ooh, you have some strength. I see you work out.”

  “Seniors’ yoga three times a week, and I go power walking on off days,” Octavian said with pride.

  I fumed and selected a ball.

  When it came to be my turn, Lauren motioned to me from several steps away.

  “Now just do it like I showed Octavian.”

  No hands-on instruction for me. I let loose, and it went straight into the gutter. My second ball only took out three pins.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll get the hang of it,” Lauren said. She turned back to Octavian. “So where did you say you live again?”

  “Cheerville.”

  “I’ve never heard of it.”

  “There’s no reason why you would have. You’re a good teacher. Why couldn’t you get Maggie up to the mark?”

  Lauren gave a sly look at the Six Mouseyketeers, who had stopped watching her poach my boyfriend and were huddled around the scorecard.

  “Oh, she wasn’t as hopeless a bowler as Georgina lets on. She wasn’t at our level, mind you, but she sure was competition in other matters.”

  “How so?” Octavian asked.

  Lauren was about to speak, but then her eyes went wide, and she looked beyond us. “What are they doing here?”

  Two of our new shipmates had come in, all golden tans and coifed hair.

  “Oh, a gay cruise ship had some engine trouble, so they’re joining our cruise,” Octavian said.

  “Hi, Grandpa!” one of them called to Octavian and waved. “Seven girls all to yourself. Why you randy old man!”

  Octavian blushed.

  “He only gets one of us!” Lauren called back with a grin.

  “Indeed he does,” I growled. I knew I shouldn’t have been alienating a witness (or suspect), but it just came out.

  The two young men sauntered over to the lane next to us.

  “These shoes are horrid,” one complained. “Why can’t they make bowling shoes that look fetching? And they squeak when I walk. I sound like a mattress in a cheap motel.”

  “The balls are nice, though,” his friend said, holding up a pair.

  They both started tittering.

  “Disgusting!” Georgina snapped. “Girls, let’s go.”

  Lauren went pale and hurried over to her friends, and they tromped out, noses in the air. Each carried her own bowling ball except for Alicia.

  “Bye, ladies!” the man who had complained about the shoes cried in a singsong voice, wiggling his fingers in the air.

  The couple at the other lane made their escape too.

  He turned to us.

  “Why haven’t you two fled with the rest?” he asked.

  I studied him a moment. “Young man, I may not look like it now, but I was in the armed forces for thirty years. You can’t shock me.”

  I could see in his eyes that he didn’t believe a word I said. He gave me a mock salute then dove in and gave his companion a long French kiss.

  When they came up for air, they saw us doing the same.

  “Augh!” they cried in unison and fled for the door, their ugly bowling shoes squeaking furiously.

  Octavian and I laughed.

  “That was nice,” my boyfriend said. “We should shock the young more often.”

  We finished our game in the now-abandoned bowling alley and took a stroll, arm in arm, around the ship.

  It had changed character completely. The three different bars had turned from places of quiet conversation to loud parties. The pool was full of bronzed bodies doing back flips or splashing about and laughing, and the casino was packed.

  “Finally, this ship has a bit of life to it,” Octavian said.

  “I thought you liked seniors’ cruises because they were quieter.”

  “Yes, but I like seeing stodgy old people getting offended even more.”

  He had a point. Most of the seniors had retreated to their cabins or those last bastions of the older generation—the shuffleboard court and the bingo hall. No young gay man had stepped foot in either of them. I wondered if elderly gay men played shuffleboard or bingo. Gay people are allowed to be boring, too, aren’t they?

  We didn’t see Georgina or her friends anywhere, so we guessed they had gone to their cabins like so many others.

  “Let’s split up,” Octavian said. “We can cover more ground that way.”

  “In horror movies, that always leads to someone getting gruesomely killed,” I replied.

  “But this isn’t a horror movie.”

  “Maggie was murdered.”

  Octavian grew serious. “All the more reason to get cracking. I’ll go knock on one of the cabins and have a chat. Maybe I can find out something more.”

  “Avoid Lauren.”

  “A potential murderer is no competition for you, pretty lady. They see you as competition, though, and will open up more if you’re not around. Why don’t you sneak around and see what you can find elsewhere? We’ll meet in a bit.”

  “All right.”

  I wasn’t sure what “sneaking around” would accomplish, so I returned to my cabin to use my phone without any disturbance from the party I could hear echoing down the corridors. Like a good detective in the cyber age, I did some Internet research on Maggie. It wasn’t hard to find a librarian in Schenectady. Margaret Underwood had very little in the way of an online footprint, even for someone of our age. There was a short article in the library newsletter about her retirement but no mention of her in any previous newsletters. No mention of any awards or commendations either. She appeared to have had an unremarkable career.

  She did have a social media presence, but an odd and profoundly sad one. Her Facebook page was public, and once I made an account for myself, I could see everything. I was surprised to see she had 942 friends. As I scrolled down, I saw that none of them appeared to be actual friends, but random people she chatted with. It said, “Friend me and I’ll follow back” right on her bio.

  I’d heard of this, people getting on Facebook and following anybody and everybody in order to bump up the numbers. I didn’t get it. Wouldn’t having almost a thousand nonfriends make you feel more alone than not having social media at all?

  Looking through her status updates, a few things did catch my interest.

  The first was a photo of our cruise ship taken from the pier, dated to the day we set sail. The caption said, “My second cruise, and my first without you. At 9:17 tonight I will do what we once did together. Our special time. You may be far away, but you are still in my heart.”

  Nine seventeen p.m. was roughly the time that Maggie got murdered.

  Farther down, in earlier posts, there were some selfies of her bowling with a bunch of people I didn’t recognize from a group called the Schenectady Bowlers’ Meetup. They all had those plastered smiles of fake fun that made me suspect this was some sort of organized social event rather than a group of real friends. There were also photos of her cats and gerbils, way too many of those, and photos of sunsets and birds in her little garden. Yes, this was definitely a lonely woman.

  But then, in a series of status updates from six months before, I came across some images that were of an entirely different nature.

  I knew I was onto something when I saw a close-up of Maggie in some restaurant. She was beaming at the camera, looking truly happy instead of wearing a pasted-on smile. I found myself smiling back at her. To see someone who had had such a gray, unhappy lif
e looking so at peace and joyful for a change was truly heartwarming.

  The next picture told me why. It showed her hugging a man around her age. Both were smiling at the camera, standing on a pier at the seaside somewhere.

  The catty side of me noticed that this man was not what you’d call a prize catch. He needed badly a gym membership and a fashion makeover. He looked as dull and conventional as Maggie. As big and bulky too.

  But they were obviously in love. I could see that from the next several pictures. Them at the beach. Them at a theater. Them smooching in front of a statue of Jimmy Carter.

  Jimmy Carter? With a bit of Googling, I discovered he had briefly lived in Schenectady while he was a student. I never thought of Jimmy Carter as a particularly romantic personage, but these two lovebirds obviously did.

  Actually they probably didn’t care. You could have set them in front of a statue of a cow patty at the Kansas State Fair, and they would have still snuggled and smooched.

  Then came several photos of them on a cruise ship—playing shuffleboard, eating at a buffet, watching a sunset, and doing an imitation of the scene from Titanic on the prow, him behind her, both with their arms upraised and looking forward as the ship hove through the waves.

  The time stamp for that shot was 9:17 PM.

  The night she embarked on our cruise, she wrote how she would relive that happy moment and give anyone who looked at this public profile her exact whereabouts and the time she’d be there.

  After a few more shots back in Schenectady, there were no more pictures of the mystery man, who the status updates named only as Wesley. Previous shots were the same dreary collection as those that came later. Judging from her Facebook, Wesley had swept her off her feet about eight months ago and disappeared from the scene six months ago.

  Two months. Two months of happiness. That’s all she got. I felt like crying.

  I searched for Wesley on Facebook, and it looked like he didn’t have an account. He wasn’t tagged in any of the photos, and he had never commented on any of her status updates.

  Or maybe he had unfriended her. Oh dear, that would be even worse. Finally finding someone and being cut out. Losing the one real friend she had out of nearly a thousand fake ones. What a waste.

  I stared at my phone, distraught. I had gone through a long period of self-pity when my husband, James, had died. In the blackest periods, I had felt like I was alone in the world, although I knew in my heart that wasn’t true. I had my family. There was no mention of family in Maggie’s Facebook. I had friends, too, real ones. I had all those things we take for granted on a day-to-day basis but which are vital to living a healthy, full life. Having those things helps pull you out of the bad times. They sure helped pull me out of my period of mourning.

  But who was there to help Maggie? No one.

  Maybe she really did throw herself off the boat.

  A knock at the door woke me out of my reverie. I opened it. Octavian walked in and slammed the door behind him. He looked furious. Octavian was normally so placid, so friendly to everyone. It was strange to see him red with rage.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “What a nest of vipers! Those drug traffickers and dictators you used to go after were probably better people.”

  “What happened?”

  “I didn’t know who was in which cabin, so I just knocked on a random one in this wing. They’ve taken over all of them like some cancerous growth. It turned out to be Brenda and Charlotte’s cabin. They were in there, drinking of course. That seems to be all these people do, that and spit venom. Well, they sat me down and poured me a tall one and then started bashing you.”

  “Me?”

  “Oh yes. I won’t even repeat the things they said about you. They went on and on, and I noticed Brenda sending a text. She tried to hide her phone behind her, but I saw. And guess who showed up a minute later?”

  “Lauren.”

  “That’s right. And the instant she arrived, the other two made an excuse to leave.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “No prizes for guessing what happened next.” He paced back and forth, seething. This being a cabin on a ship, he only got to take three steps in any one direction before he had to turn around, and he was walking so fast it made him look like a spinning top. I started to giggle.

  “I fail to see why this is so funny,” Octavian growled.

  I pinched him on the cheek. “Because you are such a gentleman. Fending off the ladies to be true to your girlfriend. It’s adorable.”

  “It was sickening, adult women acting like catty little middle schoolers. And a waste of time too! I learned nothing from any of them.”

  “Oh, Octavian, that’s where you’re wrong.”

  He stopped and looked at me. “How?”

  I showed him Maggie’s Facebook feed. Realization dawned on his face.

  “Oh. That poor woman. One of them poached this Wesley fellow. No wonder she said they had ruined her life. They really did. I bet they didn’t even want him. I bet they did it out of pure spite and malice.”

  I nodded. “Do you think Maggie really did kill herself?”

  He rubbed his chin. “Maybe, but did you see how they all got tense and defensive when you talked about her suicide? Everyone but Georgina, that is. My gut tells me one of them pushed her.”

  “My gut says the same thing.”

  “And your gut is far more experienced than mine.”

  “Don’t underestimate your gut, Octavian. I think quite highly of your gut.”

  “And I hate their guts,” Octavian said with more heat than I’d ever heard from him. “Let’s find out who did it and nail them. But how?”

  “We’ve found their weakness. They’re so toxic they go after anyone who looks happy.”

  “As a salve for their own unhappiness. But I fail to see how we can exploit this to find the murderer.”

  I pinched his cheek again. “That’s because you’re a good man. If you want to fight evil people, you have to think like an evil person. It’s not pretty, but there it is. So here’s what we’re going to do …”

  Eight

  After a long conference with Octavian, in which it took a great deal of convincing to bring the old dear around to my way of thinking, we dug some more on the Internet for information about Maggie, found nothing, and then tried to look up Georgina and the others. We found virtually nothing on any of them. We didn’t know any of their last names, so we had to scan through various pages of information on their hometown. All we got was a mention of their bowling team, which did not list the members and therefore didn’t help us find their full names. We needed to find those out if we were going to do any digging on these people.

  At last we gave up and went to dinner. I was surprised at how late it had already become. Tracking down a killer always made the clock speed up. What’s the old saying? Time flies when you’re having fun.

  Octavian was having less fun. He was not happy with his role in this investigation. And he was bound to get a lot less happy.

  When we arrived at the main dining room, we discovered we were still at Georgina’s table. I got the impression she was almost relieved when we showed up, and she immediately brought us into the conversation by asking mock scandalous questions about what Octavian and I had been doing. Lauren looked unsettled, as did some of the others. If Lauren was trying to steal Octavian from me, she obviously hadn’t gotten Georgina on her side.

  That was odd, considering how much of a ringleader Georgina was and how the day before she had been leering with the rest of them.

  I noticed when we arrived that they had left two spare seats for us. Lauren sat next to one of the spare seats. Octavian sat next to her, but he hardly got to talk with her because Georgina, as usual, dominated the conversation.

  Georgina was choosing to have us close. That got me to thinking. If she was guilty, there would be no reason to latch on to a pair of strangers just before committing the murder and keep them along ever sinc
e. No, she must be innocent, but she had to know that someone in her group did it. Georgina was many things, but I could tell she wasn’t dumb.

  So, what was her motivation to have us here? Was she afraid she might be next and hoped having witnesses around might protect her? Did she see Maggie’s murder coming and grab us into their circle right at the beginning in the hope that the murderer would get scared and not go through with it?

  It was time to put our plan into action.

  Octavian leaned in and whispered something in Lauren’s ear. The rest of the table leaned in, trying to catch it. It was like a strong wind had come and blown us all over.

  Lauren laughed at whatever Octavian had said and gave me a sly look.

  Once when I was in El Salvador, I stayed at a particularly nasty hotel. It was part of an undercover operation where I was posing as a drug addict. That hotel sure fit the role. I came out of my room one night, pretending I was going to try and score on the street as a way to sniff out the local dealers, when I saw a man from another room come out at the same time I did. The walls were so thin he probably heard me get up, put on my shoes, and get ready to leave, and he timed it so he could come out at the same moment, as if by coincidence. He gave me that exact same sly look.

  To my surprise, he didn’t attack, which told me what I wanted to know. I went around the corner of the hallway, counted to ten, and went back.

  He had already jimmied the lock on my door, entered my room, and drawn a knife, obviously so that he could grab me when I came back.

  I broke his nose, his collarbone, three ribs, and hopefully changed his assumptions about the likely victimhood of lone foreign women staying at shoddy hotels.

  Breaking Lauren’s collarbone sounded like fun. It probably wouldn’t advance the case, though, and if I tried to break someone’s bones these days, I’d just as likely break one of my own in the process.

  Lauren whispered something back to Octavian, and soon they were in a secret conclave. I pretended to be oblivious. I’m good at feigning stupidity when I need to. Getting your enemy to underestimate you is an age-old tactic. It was impossible to hear what they were saying anyway. The dining room was a lot more raucous now that we were sharing the cruise with young people.