by Harper Lin
“A prank? What sort of prank?”
“Oh, it was so juvenile. Alicia is afraid of spiders. Georgina bought a packet of those little plastic spiders and was going to …” Lauren took in a long breath, her face turning a sickly color.
“Are you all right?” I asked.
“Urrggg … BELCH. Oh!” She staggered to my bathroom and let loose. Most of it did not make it into the toilet.
After another minute of retching, she stumbled out of the bathroom. I had opened the porthole. It didn’t help much. The stench was so bad I could have brought her up in front of a UN tribunal for using chemical weapons.
“Sorry,” she mumbled, covering her mouth. She fumbled with the door, got it opened, and nearly fell into the hallway.
“What was Georgina going to do?” I asked.
“Huh? Urg, oh, I think I’m going to be sick again.”
She stumbled across the hall and pounded on a cabin door. Fiona opened it, took one look at her, and slammed the door in her face. She ended up puking in the hallway.
Some roommate.
I rang for Phil, pulling out another hundred-dollar bill as a tip. The poor boy had earned it.
Thirteen
My next move was obvious, but getting it done was going to be tricky.
I needed to get a key card for Georgina’s room, and I needed to get it right now.
In other words, I had to breach cruise ship security while drunk.
No sweat, right?
At least I knew what cabin she was in by process of elimination. Fiona opening the door for Lauren had left only one unidentified cabin on B Deck, Hall 5. That must be Georgina’s cabin. She had her own, of course. No doubt so she could bathe in blood and hang from the ceiling like a bat without anyone bothering her.
The first thing I needed to do was get an employee ID card in order to access the computer system. That was easy enough. I just waited until Phil showed up and slipped it off the keychain dangling from his belt while he was having a panic attack about the vomit in my cabin and the unconscious senior citizen in the hallway.
“I’ll call the cleaning service.”
I left another hundred dollars in my cabin as a tip for the cleaning service. I filched the money from Lauren’s purse.
No, that is not stealing. That is justice.
Next I needed a distraction, so it looked like poor Octavian had some more work to do. I knocked on his cabin door as Phil and the cleaning lady got Lauren to her feet and carried her off to the infirmary.
Octavian didn’t answer. I knocked harder. Still no answer.
Uh-oh.
I called him. When he picked up, I asked, “Where are you?” I couldn’t keep a slightly accusatory tone out of my voice. It was the tequila talking.
“In my cabin.”
“I was just knocking on your door.”
“You think I’m going to answer a knock with these hyenas prowling the hallway?”
He opened up then waved his hand in front of his face.
“Whew! You stink of tequila.” He sniffed again. “What is that infernal miasma wafting from your cabin?”
I had left the door open. If I had to suffer, the entirety of B Deck, Hall 5 would have to suffer too.
“I had a drinking contest with Lauren. She lost. Now we need to steal a key card and sneak into Georgina’s room.”
“Right into the spider’s web, eh? Count me in. What do I have to do?”
I told him my plan. My drunken plan. He looked dubious. I tried to calm his nerves. This was sure to work. I had thirty years in the CIA and a high blood alcohol content on my side, after all.
So ten minutes later we were at the concierge desk. Or more accurately, Octavian was at the concierge desk, and I was standing down the hall, pretending to look out a porthole.
Octavian strode up to the desk, slammed his hand down on it, and said “I demand a refund! This cruise is the worst I’ve ever taken in all my seventy-two years.”
The young man behind the counter looked unphased. Night shift at a concierge desk on a cruise ship had no doubt given him ample experience in dealing with rude customers.
“First we get delayed because some poor woman is so frustrated by the bad service that she throws herself off the ship, then we get delayed again while you pick up the passengers from another ship, and now there’s a big party going on in my hallway.”
“What cabin is the noise coming from, sir? I can call and ask them to keep it down.”
“Are you deaf? At your young age? It must be all that darned rock music you kids listen to. I said there was a party in my hallway. HALL. WAY. They’re boozing it up in the hall, right outside my door. I nearly slipped on a pool of vomit just trying to get here!”
“I’m terribly sorry about that, sir. I’ll send security.”
“Security? No, I want you to come.”
“But, sir, I need to stay at my—”
Octavian slammed his hand on the counter again. “You need to solve this problem immediately!”
I put my hand to my mouth to hide my smile. He was playing his role of the disagreeable old man admirably. The two young men walking by hand in hand agreed, judging by the scandalized looks they gave him.
The concierge went with him just to shut him up. Octavian led him in the opposite direction of his actual cabin. Hopefully he’d take him as far away as possible.
As soon as they were out of sight, Octavian’s grumblings fading in the distance, I moved over to the concierge desk …
… and moved away again. Some seniors were passing by.
As soon as they were gone, I went back to the desk, only to have to move away again because a waiter passed.
The third time I went, a young man came down the hallway. I stood in front of the counter like I was waiting for the concierge. He stood behind me for a moment as I fidgeted, looking around.
“Have you seen the concierge?” he asked.
“No, but I saw Tony Iron walk down the hallway a couple of minutes ago,” I said, pointing.
His face lit up. “Really?” He ran off.
I got behind the counter and swiped Phil’s card, and the computer gave me access. It only took a minute to find the key cards in the counter drawer and authorize one to open Georgina’s cabin. I logged off and got out from behind the counter just in time to avoid being spotted by another waiter.
Cruise ships sure are busy at night. Makes it hard to sneak about.
Now for phase two.
I went back to my hallway and saw the cleaning lady working on my room. It still stank. Wrinkling my nose, I knocked on the door of Octavian’s cabin and found him already there.
“What did you do with the concierge?” I asked.
“Gave him the slip when he had to stop some young men from singing ABBA songs too loudly in the hallway.”
“Good man. Now I need you to see if Georgina is in her cabin. If she is, ask her to go on a walk. Act interested. Keep her away for as long as you can.”
“Doing that and remaining loyal to you might prove tricky.”
“I know. I trust you. It’s almost over. I hope.”
I stayed in Octavian’s room while he went over to Georgina’s. I pressed a glass against the door and my ear against the glass.
Because the door was soundproofed to provide a sound sleep (“That’s Silver Siren service for you!”) I couldn’t hear any words, only voices. Octavian was talking then Georgina. Then I heard a door shut, followed by silence.
I counted to ten and peeked out the door. The coast was clear. While the door to my cabin stood open, the cleaning lady was inside and could not see me. Considering the mess Lauren had left, she would be in there for some time.
The key card worked, and I slipped inside Georgina’s cabin, quickly turning on the light and closing the door behind me.
That made me notice an interesting detail that I hadn’t thought about before. In most hotels, the key card was also used to turn on the lights by sticking it in a slot
just inside the door. Here they had a regular light switch. Someone could take your key card while you were in your cabin, and as long as you didn’t leave and try to come back, you’d be none the wiser.
The cabin was identical to my own except with far more clothing and empty bottles. I started searching systematically through the drawers, closet, and bathroom then went through her luggage.
I didn’t find what I was looking for until I searched the wastepaper basket.
A packet of plastic spiders. Unopened.
Georgina had not played that trick on Alicia, but Lauren had thought she had.
And why had she thought that?
Because Georgina said she was going to as a cover for stealing her key card.
Lauren probably caught her at it, and Georgina had to come up with an excuse. Being the wily woman she was, Georgina already had a cover story and a prop in place just in case that happened.
Georgina had switched more than the key card. She had switched the bowling ball. All the bowling-ball bags were identical, the same color with the same team logo. Only the individual color and name on each ball showed whose ball it was. Georgina had switched her ball with Alicia’s well beforehand, an easy enough thing to do at any time, perhaps even before boarding ship, and Alicia wouldn’t have known the difference until they had gone bowling. Before that happened, Georgina switched the key cards, committed the murder with Alicia’s ball, and then exchanged balls once again, thus implicating Alicia.
The gang must have been drinking somewhere. Georgina would have had only a few minutes to commit the murder and switch the balls. She would have needed precise timing. But she knew when Maggie would be standing at the prow. She must have gone to the dimly lit observation deck, saw Maggie standing there, and waited for the group to pass by so she could strike. With the wind and the waves, Maggie would not have heard her approach.
I had what I came for, now I needed to get out of here.
I listened to the door and heard nothing. I stepped out …
… and nearly bumped into Lauren.
“What the heck are you doing in Georgina’s cabin?” she demanded. She looked pale and haggard, but at least she was vertical. She had recovered from her binge drinking remarkably well. The power of experience.
“Wait. I can explain.”
Lauren pulled her phone out of her pocket and speed-dialed a number. I stepped toward her, and she put out her hand, stepping back as she did so.
“You come any closer, and I’ll scream,” she said.
I heard a faint voice on her phone.
“Georgina? Guess what. I just caught Barbara breaking into your cabin.”
I heard a curse on the other end of the line, and Georgina hung up.
Lauren sneered at me. “And now I’m going to call security and have you arrested.”
“Lauren, wait. This is important. Georgina killed Maggie!”
“What? You’re crazy. Maggie killed herself. She was always a loser.”
“No. Listen. You saw Georgina steal Alicia’s key card and replace it with her own, didn’t you?”
Lauren gaped. “How could you know that?”
“Because that’s how Georgina was going to get into Alicia’s room to play the plastic-spider prank, except that’s not why she really went in there. Alicia said she found her bowling ball covered in blood. Georgina used it to murder Maggie and left it in her room to incriminate her. She wasn’t strong enough to push Maggie over the edge, and she wanted a fitting weapon to knock her off.”
“But this is ridiculous. She—”
Lauren stopped as I opened the door, pulled out the unopened bag of plastic spiders, and held it up.
She gaped. For a second I thought she was going to throw up again. When she spoke next, her words came out in a ragged whisper. “She left the table the night Maggie died. She took Alicia’s key card and left the table …”
“Where is she now? She took Octavian somewhere. Where did she go?”
Lauren leaned heavily against the wall. “We all talked about it. We all talked about killing her. I never thought one of us would actually go through with it …”
I gripped her by the shoulders. “Where are they?”
“They went on deck. Georgina said she knew a nice dark place. I don’t know where exactly.”
My heart turned to ice. A nice dark place. Octavian thought he was playing his part, flirting with Georgina to cover me, but Georgina now had him in the perfect place to catch him unawares and push him over the edge.
Because she had heard I was onto her and knew that Octavian must be in on it too.
I started to run, knowing I may already be too late. Behind me, a door slammed.
Fourteen
I got on deck and breathed a sigh of relief. There were plenty of people around, but that didn’t mean that Georgina wouldn’t have a chance to make her move.
A dark place on deck. What place would be darker than the others? It all looked equally dim, the lights few and low so that people could admire the stars and have little trysts.
Perhaps I had guessed wrong, and they were on one of the upper decks? There were actually three decks, the main one and two higher ones on the ship’s superstructure. But no, you couldn’t push a man off the upper ones, because they were set in from the main deck. Even if she had gone up there with him, she would have led him down to the main one after being warned.
A shout from aft made me hurry in that direction.
I cursed my old legs, sore from last night’s dance and wobbly from the aftereffects of three shots of tequila. I wasn’t running. I was barely managing a fast walk.
There was another shout, a male cry.
“Octavian!”
I came around the corner and saw two figures struggling by the railing.
“Octavian!”
I blinked in the dim light as I drew closer. It was two young men tickling each other.
“Who’s Octavian?” one asked.
I hurried on.
And then I saw two figures right at the tail end of the ship. One moved toward the other who quickly drew away. The first one followed, backing the other against a corner of the railing. No one else was in sight.
“Octavian!”
“Right here, pretty lady.”
I moved over to the two shady figures, my legs aching. Georgina had him cornered. Octavian was trying to keep her off as politely as he could.
“Get off him!” I demanded.
I could just barely make out Georgina’s smug smile in the dim light.
“Why should I? He came to me. Looks like your little Octavian doesn’t like you as much as you thought.”
“It was a ruse,” Octavian told her. “To get you out of the way.”
“What?”
“I searched your cabin,” I said, putting a restraining hand on her wrist, and Octavian squeezed out from the corner she had boxed him in. “I found that bag of plastic spiders. You never had any intention of putting them in Alicia’s room. That was only a lie you told Lauren to cover up your real intentions: switching the bowling balls!”
Georgina looked confused. “What? Lauren gave me those spiders saying I should play the trick on Alicia. I said no and threw them in the trash. I never entered Alicia’s cabin until we went in together.”
“That sounds like a load of horse pucky,” Octavian growled.
“You’re a clever one, Georgina. I’ll give you that. You’ve been playing us all along, but I’ve found you out. I’m going to—”
I didn’t get to finish my sentence. All of a sudden, Octavian pushed me to the side. I stumbled and fell, jarring my elbow.
Not that I’m complaining, mind you, because he saved me from the bowling ball that was coming right for my head.
Swung by Lauren.
She had crept up behind me and tried to brain me with her ball. Octavian had seen her at the last moment and pushed me aside.
But now Octavian had his own problems to contend with. Fiona was t
here, too, fingers gripped in the holes of her own bowling ball, which she swung like some medieval mace right for Octavian’s face.
That kind, handsome face.
He ducked remarkably quickly considering his age. All that seniors’ yoga had paid off, and instead of hitting Octavian, Fiona hit Georgina.
She grunted and slammed against the railing, her body bending and falling through the space between the bars. She dropped out of sight.
“No!” Fiona cried. She rounded on Octavian. “This is all your fault!”
While I struggled to rise, pain lancing through my elbow, Fiona and Lauren closed in on him, backing him into the same corner that Georgina had.
“Oh, this is a problem,” he muttered.
“It’s all right to hit a lady in this situation!” I said.
“Really?” he asked, ducking another bowling ball.
“Really!”
He dodged an attack by Lauren then belted Fiona with an impressive right hook just as she was readying for another strike.
She toppled backward.
“Oh, I am so sorry!” Octavian shouted, getting on his knees and grabbing her hand. “Are you all right?”
He was so flustered by acting ungentlemanly that he didn’t notice Lauren right over him, raising her bowling ball for the kill. I got to my feet but then fell again, my legs buckling because of the strain, the tequila, and just darned old age. My eyes widened as the bowling ball swung down straight at the skull of the man I loved …
… to be stopped by a pair of strong hands.
“Ow!” the newcomer shouted. I blinked.
It was Tony Iron.
Using his famous muscles, he wrenched the ball from Lauren, who hissed in pain as her fingers got scraped from the holes in the ball.
“What’s going on here?” the music legend demanded.
