Cruise Conundrum: A Cruise Ship Cozy Mystery (Cruise Ship Cozy Mysteries Book 5) Read online

  My eyes, and then my hands, closed around the wireless microphone sitting on the desk. Tentatively, I picked it up. There was crackling from the speakers.

  “Oh, cornstalks!”

  There was more laughter as I flicked the switch to turn it off. Great. They’d heard me hyping myself up over a live mic and would no doubt think I was an idiot before I’d even started.

  Way to impress the audience, Adrienne.

  I switched off the feed to the big projector screen and began to flip through slides. There were dozens of them, but luckily a lot of the information was familiar to me from my college days. My memory was a little rusty, but seeing the pictures and the brief captions or bullet points was enough to bring a lot of it back.

  As I went through the presentation plan, I made an executive decision to cut out a big chunk about photography in late nineteenth century Austria. We hadn’t covered that in my college course and the slides were too vague for me to bluff through. But the rest of it I figured I could handle.

  Even though the microphone was off now, I didn’t give myself any more personal pep talks. I’d already had enough embarrassment for one day. When I felt doubt creeping in, I thought back to Ethan’s office and how he’d made me feel.

  None of this with the audience really mattered compared to that.

  As seven o’clock rolled around, I had a rough idea of the contents of the presentation, but still needed more time to prepare so I wouldn’t be reading off the slides verbatim. But it was time for a kind of a trial run.

  I stood up, grabbed the wireless mic, switched it back on, and made my way to the center of the stage.

  “Good evening, everybody!” I said to the audience. The room was about three-quarters full and it really looked like a lot of people. To my relief, they gave me a friendly “good evening” in response.

  “I’m afraid there’s been a change in the initial program. Unfortunately, Dr. James Clearson couldn’t be with us today.” There were a few sighs and mumbles, but most of the audience just waited in anticipation. “He missed the boat.” The audience erupted in laughter at the weak pun. I nodded happily to myself. A crowd that would laugh at that would be a forgiving one.

  “Instead, I’ll be giving the presentation. My name’s Adrienne James and I’m a journalist, currently working as the ship’s social media manager, and of course I love photography. In fact, I studied the history of photography in college.”

  There were appreciative oohs and aahs from the audience. What I didn’t tell them was that I had taken a single solitary class on the subject during my sophomore year and I was basically going to wing the presentation. What they didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.

  “Since we’re still waiting for some guests to arrive, and there are a couple of technical issues to be resolved, we’re going to delay the start until seven thirty, but we will be offering complimentary cocktails while you wait.”

  There were happy murmurs from the crowd and I got the impression that the promise of free drinks more than made up for the delayed start time or the change of presenters. I had the strange, unlikely feeling that the audience actually liked me. At least so far. We’d see how they felt by the time nine o’clock rolled around.

  The noisy clink of glass came from the side door near the stage, and like an angel, the chubby beaming face of Minnie from the Boulevard Café appeared. She was pushing a cart loaded with colorful cocktail glasses.

  The audience, on seeing her entering the room, began to clap and cheer, and Minnie raised one hand in response, waving out to them like the queen of cocktails. She was a large Caribbean lady who was probably the happiest person I’d ever met.

  “… And here they are! Please come down to the front and help yourself.”

  I hopped off the stage and greeted Minnie.

  “Thanks. You’re a lifesaver.”

  “Anytime, dear, anytime. I love to make people happy. Look at them!” Minnie and I looked together at the people making their way down, excited smiles on their faces. Who would have thought a simple drink would make people so ecstatic?

  After a minute or so of watching everyone happily taking their drinks, I headed back to the desk to study up on the presentation. I had a feeling things were going to work themselves out.

  This cruise was going to be different.

  Everything was going to go perfectly.

  I could just tell.

  “… and that wraps up today’s lecture on the history of photography!”

  Triumphant, I stood in the center of the stage and let the applause wash over me. Although I’d given presentations in my college classes, it had never been up on a stage in front of a crowd of people who weren’t my peers. These were ‘real’ people, not college classmates, and I’d done it!

  As the applause continued, I gave them a shy bow, and after a moment more I switched off the mic and climbed down from the stage. I didn’t want to milk it.

  “Yay! You were amazing!” said Kelly as she simultaneously hurried over toward me and clapped her hands in a rapid-fire staccato burst. She had arrived about five minutes before the end, slipping in the side door and taking an empty seat at the front.

  “Thanks, Kelly. I think it went pretty well.”

  She nodded enthusiastically. “It did. That was a really good idea of yours to get them drunk first. They’d enjoy anything after those cocktails!”

  Minnie chortled at Kelly’s attempt at flattery. “But they would have loved your talk even stone cold sober. It was very good.” She followed it up with another rich round of laughter.

  “Oh, yes! That’s what I meant,” said Kelly. “Even sober like me, it was great! I owe you one!”

  She definitely did owe me one. This could be my chance to grill her about the captain.

  “How about buying me a drink to celebrate pulling that off?”

  Kelly’s face went from smile to frown and then back to a smile in a flash.

  “I’ve got a trillion things to do, but… okay! Let’s do it!”

  My body was still filled with adrenaline and the applause from the happy, tipsy crowd had reinvigorated me. I hadn’t felt this confident and full of energy since… I couldn’t remember when. Perhaps after my first little presentation back in college.

  What a day it had been. First Ethan, and now this.

  I took a moment to look at what remained of the crowd, an indefatigable smile on my face.

  “Come on. Let’s go.” I gave Kelly a nudge.

  We waved goodbye to Minnie and went off for, what I felt was, our reward.

  A reward and a chance to dig into the captain’s past.

  Chapter 4

  Kelly and I decided to go to the Cocktail Club for our drink. It was one of the classier establishments aboard the ship, with less of the laid back tropical charm of the pool bar, Hemingway’s, or Minnie’s Boulevard Café.

  The inside was dimly lit, and it struck me as the perfect place to discuss secret goings-on or shady pasts. I hoped that was what I could pry out of Kelly.

  We both ordered Manhattans from a middle-aged bartender in a tuxedo and settled into a corner booth. The leather seats were quite high, and I couldn’t help but notice that Kelly’s feet didn’t touch the floor when we sat down. Instead, her legs swung back and forth like a little girl, punctuated every now and then with small thumps as her heel caught the base of the booth.

  “So how are you enjoying your job as cruise director?”

  Kelly was relatively new to the ship, this being only her third cruise. She had, however, worked for the company a number of years, both at the company’s headquarters and on board other vessels earlier in her career.

  I had also applied for the role of cruise director, but I had withdrawn my application before it advanced too far along. After being put in charge of a special event, I realized I didn’t enjoy that kind of role all that much, and anyway, I didn’t have enough experience yet. For the time being, I was happy to be back in my social media manager role.


  “It’s great!” she said in an incredibly chipper tone.

  “It certainly seems to keep you busy.”

  Every time I saw her, she was always in a hurry to get to the next thing on her to-do list. This was one of the few times I’d seen her somewhat still, though she did seem to be swinging her legs under the table and had already begun the serious work of turning one paper napkin into a million tiny pieces.

  “Oh, yes. So, so busy. But that’s the modern world, isn’t it? Everyone’s busy all the time.”

  As I was nodding agreement, the waiter came back and placed our drinks onto the table. We thanked him with smiles and watched as he stiffly turned and walked away.

  I immediately picked up my glass and took a small sip. Kelly wrapped a hand around hers but didn’t begin to drink it yet, running her fingers over the cool rim instead.

  “I wanted to ask you something, Kelly.”

  “Uh-oh.” She followed up with a nervous laugh.

  “Don’t worry. I just wanted to ask you a little bit about the captain.”

  Kelly stared down at her drink, and for once she didn’t answer quickly. A delay like this was uncharacteristic of her.

  “I don’t like to gossip about my colleagues,” she finally said.

  I nodded understandingly.

  “Oh, I know. I don’t care for gossip either.” I wasn’t sure if I was telling the whole truth. Gossip could be a kind of guilty pleasure sometimes, but I wasn’t exactly after gossip. I wanted details on his shady past.

  “Good,” she said with a smart nod to herself.

  “As you probably noticed, Ethan and I often work together on some of the security issues…”

  Ethan hadn’t asked me to investigate the captain. This was my own doing, but I could let Kelly infer what she liked.

  “Yes…”

  “And, well, the captain seems to be acting a little suspicious. Of course I know from his records that he’s on his last chance on this ship—I assume you know that too?”

  Kelly’s eyebrows shot up and before she could control herself she had already bobbed her head up and down in surprised confirmation.

  It was true about the captain’s record; I had seen it. At least some of it, anyway. But it hadn’t been because Ethan gave it to me, and not in any official capacity. An undercover corporate spy on a previous cruise had the records of the captain and all the other employees of the ship, and in the course an investigation I had come across them.

  Kelly may very well have assumed that I’d been handed the records in an official capacity, but I certainly wasn’t saying it.

  “So you know about what happened?”

  “Not really. I only know a little bit. What can you tell me? I promise it’ll stay between us—it could be something serious.”

  Kelly ran her finger around the rim of her glass while she thought. Then, she slapped her hand down on the table and smiled at me, her mind made-up. She would tell me what she knew.

  “As you know, the captain and I were both on the Swan Countess, and our regular route used to take us much further south, down to Cartagena, Columbia. It’s a beautiful place.”

  I’d vaguely heard of the port but didn’t know much about it. I took a sip of my drink and nodded to Kelly to continue.

  “There were rumors that the security on board the ship was… not good? He wasn’t formally accused of sabotaging the ship’s security, but it was suspected that he deliberately turned a blind eye to certain activities.”

  Ooh. This could be juicy.

  “What kind of activity?”

  Kelly looked around furtively, before dropping her voice to a low whisper I could barely hear.

  “Drugs,” she mouthed. She looked around again as if the mere mention of the word might have brought down trouble on us. When it didn’t, she continued. “Trafficking them. Or at least allowing them to be trafficked.”

  “Oh, wow.” I said with a frown. “How come he wasn’t fired or sent to prison?”

  Kelly’s eyes went wide in apparent alarm at my question. She leaned over the table so our heads were right next to each other.

  “He wasn’t caught. Just suspected. And the company didn’t involve the authorities because of the potential for bad publicity. They wanted to deal with it all quietly. They didn’t want to fire him because he threatened to sue for unfair dismissal—and if he did that, then they would have to either accuse him of what they wanted to keep quiet, or pay out a huge settlement.”

  Of course. Money. Swan, like every big business, cared more about its bottom line than anything else. That wasn’t a surprise. It was still surprising though that they hadn’t somehow managed to get rid of a captain accused of such a serious offense, though.

  “So they just let him carry on?” I asked with my nose wrinkled in disapproval.

  “I don’t know what happened behind the scenes. But the captain resigned that commission, and after a brief leave of absence, he moved to this ship.”

  “So instead of investigating, they just tried to move him out of the way. It was a cover-up?”

  Kelly tapped her bright yellow nails against her still full cocktail glass. Then she looked up at me and shrugged.

  “I guess? From Swan’s perspective, it was better than a formal investigation. And if he’s away from that route, the problem will be solved. Right?”

  “Right,” I said but I was shaking my head in disbelief as I said it.

  With a slurp, I sucked up the last of my drink with the straw. Kelly nodded at it. “Another?”

  Before I could answer she picked up her own glass, took out the straw and flicked it onto the table, and then tipped back the whole drink, swallowing it in a series of continuous large gulps.

  “Mmm, I love Manhattans.” She wiped her mouth a napkin and let out a happy sigh.

  “Yeah, maybe just one more.”

  Kelly couldn’t tell me much more about the captain, and I told her to keep the fact that I’d been asking questions to herself. She promised me she would, and since I knew she wasn’t a fan of gossiping, I trusted her to keep her word.

  After a final drink, sipped by me and gulped down by Kelly, we called it a night. On cruise ships, you work pretty much from sunrise until well after sunset, so you have to be either foolish or in possession of unnatural amounts of energy to have many late nights during a cruise. Cece had late nights pretty much every day, I however, did not.

  “Good night, Kelly. Thanks for the information.”

  “No problem, but remember, it didn’t come from me!”

  I grinned and waved her off. We left behind four empty glasses and a pile of torn up napkins almost as high as the drinking vessels.

  Kelly sure was an interesting one, but at least unlike the last two cruise directors, she seemed to have her heart in the right place and a work ethic to put any corporate bigwig to shame.

  With thoughts and ideas running through my mind, as well as the lingering memory of how Ethan and I had reconnected earlier, I retired for the evening.

  After all, I had to get up early for my breakfast date at the Croissant Club.

  Chapter 5

  Since I was supposed to meet Ethan for breakfast at eight, I was up before seven to get ready. I’d never had a breakfast date before, and it was making me nervous.

  In my first few dazed minutes before I’d really woken up, I was panicking about what to wear. Then I remembered, with some relief, that I didn’t have a choice; I had to wear my work clothes, as would he. That meant my blue polo shirt with the Swan logo and a pair of dark jeans and sneakers.

  As a roving pseudo-reporter, I had just about the most casual uniform of anyone aboard, bested only by the bartenders at Hemingway’s tropical bar who got wear Hawaiian shirts and shorts.

  “What time is it?” said Sam in an annoyed voice from her top bunk.

  “Almost seven! Rise and shine!”

  Sam pushed herself up and stared down at me with the bleary eyes of a demon.

  “
Seven? Are you out of your mind? Wake me up just before the last chance for breakfast.”

  “No can do today—I’m having breakfast with Ethan!”

  Sam’s head disappeared as she dropped back onto her bed with a whoomph. She seemed to fall back to sleep again immediately. She’d never been a morning person, and she clearly had no intentions to become one yet.

  After messing with my hair and makeup for half an hour, I finally left the room with more than thirty minutes to spare and decided to stroll around the outside of the ship and catch the tail end of the sunrise before I met Ethan.

  It was gorgeous outside, and the morning rays and salty air seemed to invigorate me with every deep breath I took.

  Feeling surprisingly calm and fresh, I arrived at the Croissant Club just before eight.

  “Nice morning, huh?” said Ethan in greeting.

  He was standing outside the door waiting for me, wearing his white and gold uniform that looked like it had been designed specifically with him in mind. I hadn’t realized I was into men in uniforms until I’d met him.

  “It is! I was just watching the sunrise out on deck. Such a lovely time of day to be outside.”

  “I didn’t realize you were such a morning person, Adrienne.”

  There was so much approval in his voice that I decided not to ruin his impression by telling him the truth: I only got up as early as I absolutely had to. Maybe this really was the start of me becoming a morning person, though.

  “Best time of the day,” I said. “Before the problems start.”

  He laughed and pushed open the heavy door to the restaurant.

  “Shall we?”

  I stepped inside ahead of him and walked toward a table for two next to a large window on the other side of the room. I’d never eaten in the Croissant Club before, and it was impressive at first glance. It was decorated like a French bistro. Or at least this farm girl’s impression of what a French bistro would look like. I’d never been to Europe.

  The tables were all dark wood, and pretty chandeliers hung from the ceiling above. Along the walls were old advertisements from the early twentieth century, posters in glass frames advertising old French brands I’d never heard of. Even though I didn’t know anything about 1930s engine oil or butter from the lower Alps, I appreciated them.