Cruise Ship Cozy Mysteries 06 - Cruise Millions Read online

  There were also three middle-aged men in the office. I wondered if Kelly had called them in to catch the spiders too. But from the way they were looking at me, that didn’t seem to be the case.

  “Are you trying to fit us all in there?” said a man in his forties with slicked-back black hair that looked greasier than a plate of bacon.

  “Sorry?”

  The three men laughed, while Kelly put her hands up to her cheeks in embarrassed surprise.

  “I didn’t mean insect spiders, Adrienne. I meant people Spiders. I wanted to introduce you.”

  I considered explaining that spiders were actually arachnids and not insects, but I realized it was neither the time nor the place. The bucket suddenly felt heavy in my hands. And it also felt incredibly awkward.

  What do you do when you turn up with a bucket to drop a spider in but then find out you no longer need it? I wasn’t sure if I should tuck it away in the corner or put it down in front of me, so I kept holding it.

  “I’m Paul Parker,” said the man with the slicked-back hair as he stepped toward me, his hand outstretched.

  I stuck my hand out to shake his, but mine was still holding the bucket. He looked down at it and back up at me with eyebrows raised.

  “Sorry!” I shuffled the bucket into my other hand, and on my second attempt I managed a proper handshake. He had incredibly soft skin that was also slightly oily. After shaking his hand, I wanted to wipe my own but resisted the temptation. It would look incredibly rude.

  I glanced up at his head again. Was his hand greasy from his hair? Or had he just applied a liberal amount of baby oil on his skin? I hoped it was the latter.

  “You’re the Claim Your Million organizer, right?” I asked. It all made sense now.

  “That’s right. And these are two of the Spiders who’ll be joining me for our event.”

  “Stan Westbrook,” said one of the men, stepping toward me and also offering his hand. He looked to be in about his forties, and he had what I could only describe as bright gray hair. It looked like he had dyed his dark hair a kind of shiny silver color. He had piercing blue eyes, which matched the blue suit he was wearing, and dark stubble on his square jaw.

  “Nice to meet you,” I said shaking his thankfully non-greasy hand.

  “Alejandro Ciudad,” said the third man with a faint trace of Spanish behind his accent.

  He was wearing brown cowboy boots, dark blue jeans with an oversized belt buckle, and a white shirt that was unbuttoned more than it was buttoned. Like Paul Parker, he had dark hair, but it wasn’t slicked back; he had shoulder-length curly hair that hung in ringlets down to his shoulders.

  When he shook my hand, his grasp was warm and friendly, and he gave me the sincerest smile from the three of them.

  “As you’re aware, Paul Parker is leading this event and, along with the investors Stan and Alejandro, they’ll eventually choose a winner from among the competing guests to invest in.”

  “Excellent,” I said, my earlier embarrassment fading. “Is it okay if I get some pictures of you three gentlemen? I can start spreading the word among the guests.”

  Kelly shook her head. “No, no, no. Only Paul Parker. The other two want to keep a low profile. We don’t want the guests trying to lobby them before the actual competition takes place. We need to keep our Spider investors anonymous for now.”

  “I see. Got it.” I smiled at the men. “I’m the social media manager on the ship, so let me know if there’s anything I can assist you with.”

  They nodded politely, though without enthusiasm. They were probably wondering what a social media manager could actually do for them aboard the ship. I was wondering that myself.

  We were interrupted by a knock on the door. To my astonishment, when it opened, it was Cece, wearing her housekeeping uniform. Wasn’t she supposed to be on vacation?

  I narrowed my eyes at her as I tried to figure out what was going on. It all made sense when she lifted up her hands to reveal that one of them was holding a dusting cloth and the other a bottle of her own Cece’s Lemony Liquid Gold.

  “Hi!” she said with uncharacteristic brightness. “Just doing some cleaning. Don’t mind me.”

  We all looked on as Cece made a scene of spraying her cleaning product into the air several times as if testing that the sprayer worked.

  “Mmm, smells good, right? Lemony freshness that just promises ultra cleanliness!”

  She hurried past us and over to Kelly’s desk, which she spritzed with more of her cleaning product.

  “This liquid gold is just fantastic! Not only does it make everything clean, it smells so good you’ll want to eat your desk afterward.” Cece broke into uproarious laughter at her own joke.

  I smiled while everyone else just stared at her.

  Kelly decided enough was enough.

  “Umm, we’re having a meeting right now. Do you think you could do that a little bit later, please?”

  Cece looked up with the most radiant smile I’d ever seen on her face. “No problem. Let me just take out the trash for you.”

  Cece took the small plastic bag out of Kelly’s trash can, which seemed to be almost empty. Holding it in her hand, she headed out of the room. Just before she left, she turned and said over her shoulder, “It smells so good in here now, doesn’t it?” She sucked in a deep breath in apparent delight.

  It certainly did smell lemony. Though whether that was good or not depended on your personal opinion about the smell of lemons.

  “You forgot your bottle!” Kelly said, picking up the plastic container of Cece’s Lemony Liquid Gold from the desk.

  “Oh, no point going back for it now. I’m almost out the door. Why don’t you keep it?” she said, pointedly looking at the three men rather than Kelly.

  Just as a confused Kelly was about to say something else to Cece, the vacationing housekeeper slipped out the door and closed it behind her.

  I tried to keep the smile off my face, but it was hard not to laugh at Cece’s antics.

  “It does smell nice, doesn’t it?” I said in support of my now absent friend.

  Achoo!

  Silver-haired Stan Westbrook sneezed, and then took a couple of steps over to the desk, lifting up the bottle of cleaning product. He held it up to his nose, took another sniff, and immediately sneezed again. He put the bottle back down on the desk in a hurry and scurried away from it.

  When he was back standing next to Alejandro, he sneezed again, paused, and then sneezed three more times.

  “Bless you,” I said, hoping that it wasn’t caused by Cece’s cleaner.

  “I think I must be allergic to that cleaning spray,” he said shaking his head.

  Oh, cornstalks!

  Then came another knock on the door, and I hoped it wasn’t Cece coming back. Now would not be a great time.

  “Come in?” said Kelly tentatively.

  The door swung open, revealing Sam.

  “Sorry I’m late. I was dealing with a customer.”

  Kelly introduced Samantha to the three men and explained how the other two Spiders—investors—wanted to keep a low profile until the actual time came for the contestants to pitch their products.

  “Okay, Sam, we’re going to need you to do a bit of people management,” said Kelly. “Paul Parker has some very serious fans, and some of the amateur inventors and entrepreneurs can get a little bit crazy. We need you to make sure they don’t bother Paul too much.”

  It sounded like Kelly was repeating something that Paul had told her.

  “Do you really get fans like that?” asked Sam. “Like pop stars do?”

  Paul Parker raised his hand to his head, as if he was going to run his fingers through his slicked-back hair. He didn’t. Instead, he just kinda patted himself on the head, as if making sure that no stray hairs had escaped.

  “Yep. When someone’s got an idea that they think’s going to make them rich, they won’t leave me alone. Bunch of crazy idiots. They call, they knock on my door, they get my
phone number and send me messages—they just won’t leave me alone. I can’t sleep because of their hounding.”

  Really? I wanted to say in disbelief. Surely, he was exaggerating. I’d never even heard of the guy until I found out he was going to be on our cruise. As far as I was concerned, he was more like a cheap knockoff of that TV show Cece told me about.

  “Must be a tough life,” said Sam, nodding along. I was the only one in the room who knew she was being sarcastic, which was probably better for her.

  “Oh, it is. I can’t even sleep at night without my little magic pills to knock me out. Sometimes I even wonder whether it was worth claiming my millions and millions and millions—but then I look in my twelve-car garage and think, ‘Yep, it’s worth it!’”

  Everyone laughed except for Paul Parker. He was apparently dead serious.

  “Still, it’s nice to have fans, huh?” I said.

  Paul Parker rolled his eyes at me. “If only you knew.”

  I stopped myself from rolling my own eyes back at him. I was only trying to be nice.

  “So, Sam, you’ll be doing most of the liaising between our super team of Spiders here and the customers. And Adrienne, you document everything and share it everywhere, okay?”

  “Mmhmm,” Sam and I both said in unison. An uncomfortable silence settled over the room, and it seemed like Pete and his Spiders were eager for us to leave.

  “I’d better get back out on deck,” I said.

  “Good idea. See you girls later,” said Kelly with a wave.

  Sam and I left the office together.

  “So what do you think?” I asked when the door was safely closed behind us.

  “The chief Spider’s a bit full of himself.”

  “People like him always are, aren’t they?”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Time for a coffee break before we get back to it?”

  Arm in arm, we headed to Minnie’s Boulevard Café.

  Chapter Three

  The Boulevard Café’s tables were mostly located on the deck outside, scattered amongst a generous sprinkling of trees and bushes in large planters.

  The coffee shop was run by a cheerful Caribbean woman named Minnie, whose near-constant chuckling and giant smile always cheered me up.

  After greeting Minnie and ordering a couple of coffees, we chose a table underneath some large, exotic trees in planters—large for what you would expect to see on a ship anyway—next to the walking path that wrapped around the ship.

  “I don’t know what they see in that Spider guy,” I said. There was something about Paul Parker, the oily motivational speaker, that rubbed me the wrong way.

  “I know, right? He’s why I was late for the meeting. One of his fans wouldn’t leave me alone. She was demanding to know who the investors were, where they were going to be dining, where their cabins were, and on and on. She wouldn’t stop no matter what I told her.” Sam shook her head at the memory of it.

  “I hope they’re not all like that. I guess the promise of fortune excites people”

  “Maybe. Speaking of which…”

  I turned to see Cece, hurrying toward us. As soon as she arrived, she plopped down in an empty chair at our table.

  “There you are! Those men were the investors, right? The Spiders?”

  She was staring at me intently, her big brown eyes glimmering with a manic glint that I didn’t recognize in my friend.

  I nodded slowly. “Yeah, that was them. But they don’t want to be disturbed. They’re supposed to be undercover—the two investors anyway—so don’t point them out to anyone, okay?”

  “Of course not! I don’t want any of the other competitors to know, do I? That prize is all mine. Soon you’ll be calling me Millionaire Cece Blake.”

  “Don’t you think you’re getting your hopes up a little too much? I’m sure there are lots of people competing, and it’s not always the best product that wins. They might be looking for something specific.”

  Sam nodded in agreement with me. She clearly didn’t want our friend to get too excited and then have her hopes dashed. “You see it all the time on those TV shows. People with great products don’t get chosen and go on to be successes, and others they do choose you never hear from them again.”

  Cece blew out a puff of air and followed it with a laugh. “You guys don’t understand. Liquid gold is what I’ve got. Gold, I tell you.”

  “But that’s just a name, isn’t it?”

  She shook her head. “It’s a brand, honey. But you guys wouldn’t know about that.”

  “There you are!” a woman’s voice cut through the air and stopped our conversation in its tracks.

  Sam immediately grimaced before putting on her best customer service smile. Intrigued, I inspected the newcomer.

  She was an expensively-dressed middle-aged woman, clutching what appeared to be a travel mug. She had on an airy floral sundress that I would wager cost more than I earned in a week and sandals that looked deceptively casual but sported a designer’s logo on the strap.

  “Where did you run off to?” she said to Sam in an accusatory tone. “I still had some more questions.”

  “Sorry, I had a work meeting. We’re on duty.”

  The woman looked down at our table and the three of us sitting around it. She didn’t buy the argument that we were working. I felt a tap on my shin, and Sam’s eyebrow twitched for only a second.

  I knew what she meant. This was the same woman that had delayed her from coming to our meeting earlier.

  “Helen, wasn’t it?” Sam confirmed. Guests always liked it when you remembered their names.

  The woman nodded. “That’s right. Helen Johannsen. Remember the name, because I’m headed for fame!” She dropped her head back as if staring at the sky as she cackled in a peal of laughter at her little rhyme. She dropped her head back down again, looking serious.

  “This is it,” she said, waving her mug for emphasis. What was the this she was referring to? It looked like she was gesturing at something with her coffee cup.

  “What is?” I asked her with a confused frown.

  “This.” She waved her hand emphatically again, this time in my direction. I peered down at my dark blue Swan-issued work blouse, completely lost.

  “I think she means the mug she’s holding,” said Cece, jerking her chin in the direction of Helen’s hand.

  “That’s the spirit! Even the maid can see it. Can’t you, girl?”

  “I’m not a ‘maid,’ I’m a housekeeper, but on this—”

  Helen held up a hand for Cece to stop talking—right in front of her mouth—and then proceeded to talk over her, preventing her from explaining that she, too, was actually a guest on this cruise.

  “This is no ordinary mug. This is the future.”

  “Is it?” Sam didn’t look convinced. Neither did Cece or I.

  “What does it do?” I assumed there had to be some kind of gimmick.

  It was a pretty unremarkable travel mug. It was tall and seemed to be stainless steel on the outside, and it was doing a fine job of containing the liquid that was presumably inside, but nothing about that was groundbreaking.

  “This is just a prototype. Once I get the investors on board, we’ll produce all kinds.” Helen spread out her arms expansively. “Made of china, glass, plastic, stainless steel, perhaps even platinum and gold ones for high rollers.”

  “But surely it does something? Right?” I still didn’t understand what was so special about her ordinary mug.

  “If you’d stop talking for just one second, I would explain it to you.”

  We all looked at her expectantly.

  She stood there staring at us, as if waiting for absolute silence. Absolute silence never comes on a cruise ship. Even late at night, in the middle of the ocean, there’s always at least the background hum of the massive engines and the sound of the sea lapping against the side of the vessel.

  “Well?” said Cece after several seconds had passed.

  “I said ‘be quiet,
’ girl. What it does—is has a sensor inside.” She held the cup up in front of her mouth. “You drink from it, like any normal mug.”

  Helen very helpfully showed us how to drink from a cup, taking several sips, looking at each of us between each one to make sure that we fully understood how to drink from a travel mug.

  “But then, once the remaining liquid gets to here,” she tapped the side of the mug about two-thirds down with her index finger, “the sensor recognizes that it’s time for a refill.”

  “Can’t you just tell by the weight? Or when nothing else is coming out?” I asked her, not understanding all the fuss.

  The woman shook her head at me in disappointment. “It’s not for the person drinking it, obviously. It’s for the help.”

  “The what?” asked Sam.

  Helen pointed a finger at Cece. “The help. Your staff—whatever you have—butlers, housekeepers, waitresses, or even just a day girl on those low-staff days. Once the mug detects that it’s nearly empty, it sends an electronic signal to the staff kitchen, and then they’ll know that you’re due for a refill. You won’t even have to call them—it’ll make life easier for the staff too! Your maid can just wait for the bell, which will be installed when you purchase the mug, and hurry on out with a fresh pot of coffee for a refill. Genius, isn’t it?”

  If I had met her a few months earlier, before I started working on the ship, when I was back in my hometown and in the company of humbler—normal—people, I would’ve thought she was joking. But I’d spent enough time around some of our VIP customers to know that she wasn’t.

  “Is that… necessary?” asked Sam, struggling to find the right words. “Why don’t you just get a bigger cup?”

  “Necessary? What does ‘necessary’ have to do with it? Is a cashmere scarf necessary? Is a Bentley Continental necessary? Is a VIP cabin suite necessary? Is a real pearl necklace necessary?”

  “Nope, nope, nope, and nope, but I’ll take all of them, please,” said Cece, her eyes alight with the thought of all the luxuries she would be able to afford after she ‘claimed her million.’