Cruise Ship Cozy Mysteries 11 - Cruise Control Read online

I still wasn’t fond of this job. I would have rather been assembling some food abomination for Instagram, but alas, such was my life as a temporary liaison.

  “Why are we inside?” Vernon Nunn, the much talked about CEO, was finally here. “It’s a gorgeous day outside, and we’re inside in a dining room?”

  Vernon lived up to what I expected of him.

  He wore an unbuttoned Hawaiian shirt, showing off a hairy chest, with cargo shorts and sandals to complete his outfit. He had a shaggy beard and a bit of a mane, I would assume to emphasize the fact that he wasn’t simply any old CEO.

  “We can’t be out in the open when we’re all together like this, Vernon,” a bald man said to him. His hairstyle, or lack thereof I suppose, was likely a choice: he seemed fairly young and couldn’t possibly be older than his mid-thirties. “Corporate espionage is very real.”

  Sam and I had taken our stances in the corner, smiling and being good little servants, whispering to one another.

  “Is this what you do all the time?” I asked her.

  “No. Just when we’re supposed to suck up to people like this. Kelly really wants this one to go well. I’m guessing it’s orders from corporate?”

  “Ivan, we aren’t even discussing company secrets here.” Vernon chugged some of his fruit smoothie. “We’re just talking about how we’re planning the trip with the ship’s crew.”

  “They could sell our information to our competitors. LightningBlossom won’t flourish if our competition beats us to the market with our projects. Even the knowledge of this trip could be used against us.”

  That seemed very normal and not overly paranoid at all.

  The doors to the dining room creaked opened and in came Captain Ellman, and right on his flank was the handsome Ethan Lee.

  I couldn’t help but smile at Ethan. We’d been dating for a while but I still felt like it wasn’t real, like I wasn’t meant to have such a hunk as a boyfriend.

  He was the first officer of the ship. Although he was technically a subordinate to the captain, it really felt like he was in charge of things. Juggling security issues, ornery passengers, among… other problems that tend to happen on the Swan of the Seas.

  “Mr. Nunn, I hope the cruise has been kind to you so far.” The captain reached out to offer a handshake.

  Vernon responded by taking the hand and pulling him into a brotherly hug, much to the captain’s surprise and dismay. “Nice to meet you too,” he said, before releasing the captain.

  Free from Vernon’s grasp, he cleared his throat and took his seat, a bemused Ethan next to him.

  “Do you have to do that?” the man, who Vernon called Ivan earlier, said.

  “What?”

  “Hugging a person you just met.”

  Vernon pushed some of his shaggy hair out of his face. “I’m trying to build stronger personal relationships between myself and others. A handshake is so sterile these days. It’s meaningless. Gotta show you care and are willing to go against the grain.”

  If he had less money, he was definitely what someone would call creepy or even a little off his rocker, but since he was loaded, he was eccentric. It was what the word was explicitly created to describe.

  “Adrienne!” someone called from outside the room. It was Kelly, hustling into the room at her usual super speed. “Looks like you lost someone.”

  Behind her was Holly. Again.

  “If I didn’t know any better, it’s almost like you’re trying to lose your intern on purpose! How is she supposed to learn from you if you keep leaving her wandering the halls?”

  I wanted to say that this wasn’t my normal job anyway, but I wasn’t in the mood to argue, and in front of the guests was hardly the place for it either. “Oh, Sam and I are just trying to apply our manpower the right way. We need to liaison with all of them, right?”

  Kelly leaned in with a whisper. “Yes, but liaising with the VIPs is much more important.”

  “I think I got all the tech people to the buffet anyway, Ms. Addy!” Holly said. “I don’t know what this has to do with social media, but I think I’m doing well!”

  She pushed herself up close to me again and I looked at her, trying not to let my annoyance show. “Yes. Yes, you are.” Personal space wasn’t a thing for her, I supposed.

  “Speaking of interns,” Kelly glanced at Sam, “where’s Jane?”

  Sam shrugged. “I haven’t seen her in a while.”

  “Are you both trying to purposely lose the new people?

  Sam raised one shoulder in a half-shrug. “Hey, Addy might be trying something, but not me. I’ve tried to be open and welcoming. She’s just… not here.”

  “This experiment is just falling apart at the seams already, isn’t it?” Kelly took her seat next to Ethan and flashed a smile at Captain Ellman.

  “Ah, yes, this is where it is. I swear, this ship is a labyrinth.” In came a woman, about forty or so, power walking toward the table. “Vernon, you can’t even pretend to be professional, can you?”

  “We’re on a cruise, Kayleigh. Dress the part. You’re not even dressed for Casual Friday.”

  She really wasn’t. Long black skirt, very conservative, and a red button-up blouse. Her hair was cut short for a woman, hardly any bounce to it. The kind of cut that said ‘I’m feminine, but I’m also all about business.’

  “Every day is a vacation with you, Vernon. Four-hour days aren’t true workdays.”

  Kayleigh sat down next to Ivan. She tried to pull something out of her pockets but came out with nothing.

  “Oh, right, our dear leader decreed we’re not allowed to use any technology for this trip. How are we supposed to stay on top of things, Vernon?”

  “This trip isn’t for work. It’s for detoxing. It’s about vibes. About being family.”

  “We’re a corporation, not a family!” She looked at him and grimaced, shaking her head. “I’m wasting the best years of my life here.”

  “It’ll all balance out. Just chill. We focus our chi together, we look toward the future, and we’re destined to be truly fruitful.”

  “We could be at the top of Forbes’ list now,” said another man who walked into the meeting room. Much older than the rest, he was in a suit, with a balding old man’s signature horseshoe hair. It was still mostly brown. “We could have been at the top of Forbes’ list last year, Vernon. You need to push our project forward or we’ll be at the bottom of the list soon enough. And I don’t even know what the bottom of the list is.”

  “Benedict, my man, I told you. You can’t rush perfection.” Vernon tried to approach him with a hug, but Benedict shrugged him off. I wondered why he hadn’t tried to hug Kayleigh; he didn’t seem to be the type to be worried about issues like harassment.

  Benedict sat down and set his briefcase on the table. “We don’t need to be perfect. What we have is great and we’re only hurting ourselves by delaying any longer. You seem to be content with waiting until we’re so poor we can’t even afford one nice house, let alone four. That’s poverty, Vernon. Poverty!” Everything he did was a bit overblown and dramatic.

  It seemed that Vernon wasn’t the only executive with a few screws loose.

  “I’m telling you, the LightningBlossom will finally bloom when it’s good and ready to. If we rush it, it’s fruit won’t taste nearly as good.”

  “What does their company even do, anyway?” Sam whispered to me.

  “I don’t know. Kelly doesn’t either. They’re just into tech or something?”

  “It’s been ripe for a while now, Vernon. It’s now rotting on the branch.” Benedict opened his briefcase, dug into it, and stopped. Likely, he was also looking for a laptop or some other gadget. “Why did I even bother coming to this company?”

  “I ask myself that every day,” Kayleigh said.

  ‘You work here because, like me, you saw the limitless potential of LightningBlossom and its future.” Strutting into the room with absolute confidence was an older man in a slate gray suit with curling silver
hair and a goatee. “Even before the IPO, it has grown to greater potential than I ever thought possible.”

  “Hello, John. Thank you for coming.” Vernon’s shoulders sank.

  “You’re so thankful that you were about to start without me, the guest of honor.”

  “John, you’re a guest. You’re not required to show up to our meetings. You’re perfectly welcome to spend your time on deck getting wasted on our dime.”

  “Perish the thought. I’m jealous of your company’s success, boy. Maybe at this stage, you’re the one who can start giving me pointers.”

  “No IPO yet. We’re worthless right now. Absolutely, positively worthless,” Benedict said, bending a pencil.

  “All speculators expect you to even blow my company out of the water, and you did it with a little bit of angel investment. Seems to me you’re going to be my competition soon, so I should know your ways.”

  Kayleigh ran a finger around the lid of her coffee cup. “LightningBlossom is a tech company. You’re a venture capitalist. We’re not in the same field. We’re not competitors, John.”

  “Everything’s a competition. Everything. For glory, for money, for countless other things. I don’t intend to go quietly into the night as a mere footnote in your company’s legend.”

  “I’ve told you, John. Cooperation, not competition, is what is going to make us truly succeed against the world.”

  Sam leaned into me. “How much you want to bet this John guy is devastated for showing up to the meeting fifth instead of being the first to arrive?”

  I stifled a laugh. “I wouldn’t bet against you there.”

  Kayleigh’s head weighed heavily on her hand. It was pretty clear she wanted to get this over and done with as soon as possible. “Everyone who matters is here. Shall we get started?”

  “Monica isn’t here. We don’t start without Monica.” Vernon looked serious as he uttered those words. Like this Monica mattered to him.

  “Oh, really? We need the company masseuse here to discuss business? Really?” I could feel the intensity of Kayleigh’s eye roll from across the room, and more than noticed that her joke didn’t only amuse her—Ivan and Benedict were pleased by it too.

  “Shush! Monica is key to our company’s flow. We do nothing without her among us.”

  So they waited. And waited some more. John had begun flipping a coin and silently calling it before it landed.

  Vernon was serious about not starting without this disdained woman.

  “Oh, there it is, sorry!” a more youthful voice said as a woman with dark hair dashed into the room.

  She was actually wearing a dress rather than business garb. It was one no one would bat an eye at being in an office, but it was distinctly more feminine than what Kayleigh was wearing.

  Were those two competing over something? I never understood that ‘all women hate one another’ cliché, but here? It seemed to be alive and well.

  “Did someone hold you up? You practice your medicine on them?” Kayleigh continued her snark assault.

  Monica didn’t even respond to her. She instead greeted the ship’s crew. She did a little bow before each of them on her greeting. It struck me as sort of odd, almost Asian, but Monica was very much not Asian.

  They all settled in. Sam, Holly, and I darted around at their bidding, trying to make sure everything was just right as we brought them food and a bit of liquor. The Captain’s Club restaurant was the best the ship had to offer, so I was a little jealous as I delivered plates of food. Greg’s take on fish and chips smelled heavenly, and I would go and wheedle him for my own plate of it at a later date.

  “How much of your job is just being a waitress again?” I nudged Sam as we walked away from the table.

  “You do what’s needed, Addy. You’re sort of a jack of all trades on the ship. The focus is on passenger satisfaction, but we’ll eventually do other things.”

  “If you say so.”

  The whole meeting was sort of eerie. Everyone seemed so hostile to one another, and the tension between them was so thick I felt like I had to wade through it.

  “What’s the point of all this, Vernon? Really?” Benedict had taken to scribbling down numbers on paper in lieu of actual computers. “You spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the entire company tickets to this cruise, and then you torture us. You take our devices away, and you sit there, smiling, like this is a good thing.”

  “It is a good thing. It’s a very good thing.” Vernon had shifted to sitting cross-legged on his chair, leaving his sandals on the floor. “All that radiation from our phones, our computers, the screens, all of it. It takes something out of us, man.”

  “And you’re making decisions off such an idea because…?”

  “My shaman said so. He’s a wise man, one who has lived over three hundred years.”

  Kayleigh smashed her head into her palm. “You cannot be serious.”

  “He knew it from the 1930s, felt the bad juju. I understand they’re, like, vital to society and all that, but we need to use them sparingly.”

  Benedict crumpled up a piece of paper and tossed it to the ground. “A company should be guided by numbers and facts, Vernon. Not mystical mumbo jumbo, not nonsense from some old man who claims he’s a shaman. LightningBlossom has been ready to go public for months and day after day you waste our time as we march forward to oblivion!”

  John drummed his fingers on the table. “I’m aching for that big payday too as an investor, but the buzz is strong. Vernon has been doing something right.”

  “The buzz doesn’t last forever. You have to strike when the iron—uh, when the buzz is loudest.”

  The big boss threw a hand up to demand silence from his executives. “It is not the time. Soon. Soon it will be the time, and my word is final.”

  Vernon seemed to be a cult leader who had switched places with a CEO. Out there was some cult being lectured on how to increase their dividends and IPAs and maximize quarterly reports.

  I laughed to myself, catching a weird glance from Sam. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  She shook her head.

  “Are you all really that addicted?” Monica spoke up, the one person among them who actually had a smile on their face. “Five days. Are you seriously unable to go five days without checking the internet or getting text messages or whatever else?”

  Kayleigh leaned back in her chair. “A masseuse wouldn’t know anything about the importance of connectivity in modern business.”

  “Or maybe I see it for what it is. An addiction. You all need some serious rehab. Maybe I don’t know a lot about the toxic radiation thing, but it’d do you all some good to unplug for a bit.”

  Vernon nodded. “Thank you, Monica. At least someone at this table has brought good vibes.”

  Kayleigh narrowed her eyes. “Someone is a suck-up because there’s no other way she would get promoted like that.”

  “Enough, Kayleigh. No more negativity over this lunch. We are to express our needs and thoughts with the ship’s staff, Captain Ellman, and his wonderful crew in shaping the ship to all of our needs.”

  Vernon himself gratefully nodded, and Monica followed suit. The others had no such gratitude.

  “Oh, we’re happy to oblige!” Kelly said with a smile. “We brought in a specialist to make sure all the tech is shut down.”

  “All of it is off? The toxicity is all gone?”

  “We’ve turned off everything we can without breaking the law. Regulations disallow us from endangering the staff or the passengers.”

  Thankfully that meant we would still have stuff like lights. I wouldn’t have enjoyed carrying around a candle or anything like that.

  “Good to hear,” Vernon said. “And when we reach Cozumel?”

  “Oh, Samantha over there,” Kelly gestured toward my friend. “She’ll be your MC and the organizer for your games. She and Adrienne are there to help you in any way they can. Holly too.”

  “She remembered me!” H
olly whisper-shouted. “Am I part of the crew yet?”

  “We can’t delay at Cozumel for long,” the captain added. “We’re on a schedule, and we’ve all got a million things to do here on this. A million and one. Delays could cost us everything!”

  He and Kelly exchanged knowing nods, while Sam and I exchanged knowing smiles.

  Vernon spread his arms wide apart. “I would not ask for special treatment for us at LightningBlossom.”

  “Instead, you ask them to force us to live in the Stone Age,” Benedict muttered under his breath, but still loud enough to make sure his complaint was heard.

  “So, if you need anything,” Kelly intervened, “please talk to Sam. Plan out your games. She’ll make sure the itinerary lines up and that everything goes well. We don’t want to leave anyone behind.”

  “I don’t know…” Kayleigh shifted her eyes to the side. “Getting lost for a few months in Mexico would almost be preferable to continuing to work for this company.”

  “The Company World Championships, you mean,” Vernon said, learning to ignore the rest of the suits’ chatter. “They’re absolutely vital. We need to get our people out in the sun. I fear that they have very low vitamin D levels, and that makes them especially vulnerable to the toxic radiation of electronics.”

  A small dose of reality, and then right back into crazy town with this guy.

  “Yes… your Company World Championships,” Kelly echoed, nodding along. She knew that the customer was always right, even when what the customer wanted made zero sense whatsoever.

  Vernon nodded with glee. “The team that’s declared Company World Champion will be people for the rest of the company to aspire to, and remind them there is more to LightningBlossom than being good at computer things.”

  In unison, all the executives except Monica massaged their temples in frustration. I didn’t see how being good at volleyball made you a better programmer myself.

  “Right!” Kelly said, nodding cheerfully. “The team who wins the Company World Champion will definitely go on to do great things for your company. As I said, whatever you need for it, ask Samantha over there. She and her assistants are to fulfill your every wish during our voyage.”