DOUBLE KNOT (12 page)

“You and that book.” I could barely hear her.

“What does it look like?”

“It’s a long dark way up.” Her voice echoed around. “And it’s tight. The only one
of us who’ll fit up there is Poppy. Go get her.”

“Seriously? Surely it’s not that small.”

“Yes, it is,” she said. “She’s the only one of us who’ll be able to move in here.
The whole way up it’s made of material that looks like concrete but it’s not. It’s
moldy.”

“How could it be moldy? This ship isn’t old enough to be moldy.”

“Mold
ed
,” she said. “Shaped funny. It’s not the regular wood or metal framing you’d expect
to see behind a wall.”

“That’s because it’s a bulkhead, not a wall.”

“Your cat must be climbing it.”

“How?” I asked.

“It loops around,” she said. “It’s not straight up and straight down.”

“Maybe she’s jumping.”

“Whatever.” Then she yelled, “HEY! HEY!”

“Who is it! Who is it? Do you see someone?”

“Davis, shut up. HEY! HEY! CAN YOU HEAR ME? CAN ANYONE HEAR ME?”

“Can they? Can anyone hear you?”

Her face appeared in the opening. “If they heard me and tried to answer, how would
I hear them with you jabbering? And would you please get off me?”

I heard footsteps and got off her in a hurry.

“Davis?” My mother filled the doorway. “Where is that thieving cat of yours?”

Fantasy froze behind the mirror.

“What are you doing on the floor?” Mother asked.

“I’m resting.”

“On the floor?”

I heard Fantasy snicker.

“Where’s that cat of yours?”

“She’s in the closet.” I pointed. “Why?”

“Because my portable phone plugger is gone.”

“What, Mother?
What
? Someone took your phone plugger?”

“I didn’t say someone. I said your thieving cat.”

“Where was it, Mother? Did you have the phone plugged in?”

“In what?”

“An outlet? In the wall? Where was your phone plugger?”

“Don’t you take a tone with me, Davis.”

Sigh. “I’m sorry, Mother. Your phone plugger is missing. When did you see it last?”

“In my powder room.”

“And it’s not there now?”

“Davis, did you get too much sun? I just told you my phone plugger is gone. And your
cat took it.”

My cat did not take it. My cat hadn’t been out of this room. “But your phone still
has power, right?”

“Just a little bit,” she said. “Which is why I wanted to plug it up. So I could call
your father later.”

She made it sound so simple.

“Where is it now, Mother?”

“My phone?”

“Yes.” Sigh. “Your phone. Where is it?”

“I hid it and I hid it good.”

Great.

“And you can dial down the sass, young lady. There’s soap on this boat, you know.
If you think you’re too big for me to wash your mouth out with it, just keep trying
me. Get up,” she said. “It’s two o’clock. You can’t swim in here.”

I sat there panting, my head between my knees, until Fantasy asked if the coast was
clear. She crawled out.

“She’s wrong about the soap,” she said. “Dish soap, anyway, and what the hell is a
phone plugger?”

“She means her charger.”

“Davis.” We sat side by side on the floor of the dressing room. “I hate to state the
obvious. But the envelope didn’t tape itself to the mirror and now your mother’s phone
plugger is missing. One of these people, either Jess, Poppy, or Burnsworth, or all
three, are in on it.”

Before we left the dressing room we stuffed the hole in the wall behind the mirror
with Bianca’s Monique Lhuillier strapless gown. It occurred to me later that we should
have blocked Anderson’s path with a
Probability
bath towel.

ELEVEN

“I won’t fit,” Fantasy said. “I’m too tall. Even if we knocked out enough wall for
me to climb through, I’d get stuck. I wouldn’t be able to get a leg up. Or even move.”

Fantasy and I were whispering over Mother’s sun chair while she swam laps, the translation
of which is as follows: Mother, wearing a bright yellow rubber swim cap and mirrored
swim goggles, was hopping across the shallow end of the pool on the pads of her feet
while furiously dog paddling, water shooting up and out in a three-foot fountain around
her. Fantasy and I were using the time wisely.

“We need a kid,” Fantasy said. “Someone half my size.”

“Which any other day would be me.”

“Davis.” She looked over her sunglasses. “We can’t knock out enough wall for you either,
and even if we could, I wouldn’t let you.”

“I wouldn’t let myself.”

We watched Mother.

“And to think we were talking about sending Poppy up the wall.”

“Yeah.” Fantasy let out a long breath. “That’s not happening. We’ve got a phone-plugger-stealing
rat in this suite and it may very well be her.”

“Jessica is too tall,” I said.

“Jessica might be the rat, Davis.”

“Seriously, Fantasy? I don’t see it. We’re getting way ahead of ourselves anyway.
Let’s not worry about who to send up the wall just yet. If we can get close enough
to land to get a call out, we won’t need to climb the wall. That’s going to take getting
the phone away from Mother, which won’t be easy, because she won’t let us out of her
sight.” Just to prove my point, Mother took a timeout and waved from the pool. We
waved back.

“Your mother is having the time of her life.”

“I know.”

“We have to make a call before her phone runs out of juice, Davis. If we can’t get
a call out, sending someone up the wall will be our only option. And we have to get
away from your mother long enough
to
knock out the wall. Before that, we’ve got to find something to knock out the wall
with
.”

We sat quietly, thinking about jackhammers.

“Tell her, Davis.”

“I can’t.”

“Then let me.”

“No. You just said it; she’s having the time of her life. We’re not telling her.”

Fantasy dribbled a line of Hawaiian Tropic Sheer Hydration SPF 10 down one leg, up
the other, then rubbed. “If we’re going to rule out Jess,” she whispered, “who do
we think it is? Poppy or Burnsworth? Or do we think they’re working together?”

“It looks to me like they’re avoiding each other,” I whispered back. “I haven’t seen
them exchange one word.” The only thing either of them had done all day was stay busy
looking busy. Either could have taken Mother’s phone plug, because unlike Jess, they
didn’t constantly make their presence known. I’d get a bead on one, then the other,
only to look back to see the first one gone. “If either of them are in on it and their
job is to kill us, they’ve failed miserably. They could have tossed us overboard last
night, yet here we are.”

“And Burnsworth could have spiked our drinks.”

“Obviously, that’s not the plan,” I said. “The plan, so far, isn’t to hurt us. They
need something from us.”

“How can you be so sure?” she asked.

“Because we’re alive.”

Mother was trying to float on her back and the strange noises coming from her were
her laughing at her own failed attempts.

Fantasy sunscreened her arms. “Poppy’s jumpy,” she said.

“She doesn’t seem too upset.”

“Davis, if upset is the criteria, Jessica wins.”

“What about Burnsworth?”

Fantasy no more had the words out of her mouth before he sneaked up behind us. I almost
had a heart attack. “Burnsworth!” I slapped my chest, trying to stop my heart from
jumping out of it. “Please stop doing that!”

His face reddened. “I apologize.”

“What do you need?”

“Just checking on you.”

“Well, I’m fine.”

He stood there.

“Is there something else?”

He looked at his watch. “It’s almost three o’clock.”

“And?”

“He’s off,” Fantasy said. “He’s off duty from three until five.”

I’d forgotten.

“If you don’t need me, I’ll report back to work at five.”

“Take your time,” I said. “There’s not much to do.”

He evaporated. Like smoke.

“He’s way too calm,” Fantasy said. “And slippery. He wants us to think he’s taking
all this in stride. And have you noticed he’s always watching us?”

Of course I’d noticed. It was impossible to miss.

“Your mother might be right about him.”

My mother was right about several things.

“You know what we need to do?” I asked. “Figure out a way to toss their rooms.”

“There’s nothing in Jessica’s room to toss.”

“True,” I said. “Maybe we could find her clothes. And then she’d put them on.”

“If they get the next two hours off, with absolutely nowhere to go, there’s no tossing
their rooms,” I said. “They’ll be in them.”

Jessica DeLuna stepped out from the salon in her blood red undies and
Probability
bathrobe. Her hands full of V2s. And she was anything and everything but taking it
in stride.

“That nutjob isn’t going to give it up, is she?” Fantasy asked.

“Nope.”

“Maybe we should tell her.”

“Tell her what? About the wall?”

“That she’s a nutjob,” Fantasy said.

“Go ahead.”

Jessica looked at the sun chair she’d enjoyed her tequila from early, decided it was
too close to Mother, and turned her dark head in our direction.

“Come on, Jessica,” I said. “Come sit with us.”

Fantasy growled.

“We’ll send her to Mother’s room to get the phone,” I whispered. “Mother will notice
if one of us goes inside. She won’t notice or care if Jessica isn’t here. And we can
see which team Jessica is playing for.”

“Good thinking,” Fantasy said. “If she shows up with the phone she’s not the rat,”
Fantasy said. “If she palms the phone and tells us she couldn’t find it, we put her
out of her misery.”

I peeked over my sunglasses. “Fantasy? You have anger issues.”

Jessica remained in the doorway weighing her many undesirable options and decided,
of all the bad choices, we were the least offensive. She made her pitiful way to us,
dragging her bare feet across the deck. She pulled up a chair and collapsed into it.
“So,” she said. “My life isn’t worth living.”

I reached for
The Compass
. “Jessica.” I went to the directory at the front of the book, ran my finger down
the list, found what I was looking for. “How good are you at math?”

“Very.” She squinted in the sun. “I can calculate conventional loans in my sleep.
Why?”

The oddest words I’d heard the woman say yet. Were they a reference to the narcolepsy
or was she shopping conventional loans?

“Why?” she asked again.

“I’m trying to distract you with something other than how unhappy you are.” Flip flip.
“Cheer up. Stop acting like it’s the end of the world.”

“You don’t understand.”

“What don’t I understand? I’m locked in here too.”

She banged her two stacks of dead V2s against each other.

“Listen, Jess.” I found what I was looking for. “A nautical mile is a little over
a regular mile.”

“So?”

Fantasy chimed in. “So?”

“We’ve been on the move since seven o’clock last night.”

“So?” (Both of them.)

“And this says our cruising speed is thirty knots per hour.”

“How many miles do we go per knot?” Fantasy asked.

“A little more than one,” I said. “I’m trying to figure out how far we’ve traveled.
We’re going thirty knots per hour with Cuba five hundred and fifty miles from Biloxi,”
I pushed my sunglasses up on my head so I could think better, “and we’ve been traveling
for roughly nineteen hours.”

“We’ve traveled six hundred and fifty miles,” Jess said.

Fantasy and I stared at her.

“Give or take,” she said.

Fantasy and I stared at each other.

Jessica tipped to the edge of her seat, V2s hitting the deck, and peered over the
railing. “So, where’s Cuba?”

Fantasy was counting on her fingers and toes, trying to keep up with the math. “She’s
right. We should be there.”

“Yeah, but we’re not crows flying to Cuba. We’re swinging way east. We’re taking the
long way.”

“So?” Jess twirled a thick strand of dark hair. “We’re not even going to Cuba.”

I was back in
The Compass
. “No, but we’re going to get close enough to the city of Arroyos de Mantua to see
it.” Total lie. The guests on the port side of the ship would see Arroyos de Mantua.
We were starboard. We’d never see it. But we needed Mother’s phone, and if it took
lying about which way the ship was pointed to recruit her to get it for us, I wasn’t
above it. “I think we’ll get close enough to Cuba to pick up a signal.” Which wasn’t
so much of a lie; regardless of what side of the ship we were on, we might still be
able to make a call. “The thing is,” I said, “someone has to sneak into my mother’s
room and get the phone.”

“Me.” Jess bounced up and down in her seat. “I’ll do it.”

“Perfect.”

“So, where is it?” Jessica got so excited her arms and legs shot out, then with no
warning whatsoever, she totally deflated. She flopped everywhere. It’s a wonder she
didn’t slide right out of her chair.

“Holy shit,” Fantasy said. “How does she do that?”

“The better question is how did she do the math?” It didn’t fit. I sat straight up.
“The bank.”

“The bank?”

“Jessica and her husband came from a bank.” I checked our immediate area: Jess was
out like a light, Mother was doing the backstroke, Burnsworth and Poppy were off duty.
“Their background is in banking.”

“And?”

“What if this is about the bank?” I asked. “Specifically, the bank upstairs?”

“Upstairs?”

“The casino bank, Fantasy.”

She clapped her hand over her mouth and talked through it. “Oh, dear Lord. This is
about the casino. And
she’s
the problem?”

“I doubt she’s the problem, Fantasy, but she may very well be the solution.”

“Wake her up!”

“No,” I said. “Let her sleep. When she wakes up, she won’t remember what we were talking
about. It’s like she loses her short-term memory. I’m going to try something.”

“Go for it.”

Several minutes passed before one of Jessica’s legs flew up in the air and slapped
right back down. Her head snapped up. She blinked fifty times. “So? What?”

“You were telling us about your husband,” I said.

“That greedy bastard.” She waved him off. “What a dick.”

I hoped my babies couldn’t hear through
The Compass
. “You were saying he knows who I am. He knows I’m not Bianca Sanders.”

“So he tricked that out of me, Davis. He total snow-jobbed me, because he’s a total
prick. I hate him so hard.”

I was beginning to hate him pretty hard myself.

“The phone, Jessica.”

“The phone?”

“You were going to go to my mother’s room and find her phone.”

“I was?”

“Get the phone and we’ll call Cuba.”

“Right. Where do I look?”

“She hides everything in her underwear drawer. Find her underwear and you’ll find
the phone.”

“So. Ewwwww.”

“We need it, Jess.”

“Right.”

We watched her hurry away.

“We may have stumbled onto the very reason No Hair is being detained and we’re trapped
in this suite,” I said. “This may be nothing more than a simple casino heist.”

“There’s nothing simple about fifty billionaires in a casino, Davis.”

Which would make it a very complicated casino heist.

“I hope she doesn’t fall asleep in your mother’s room.”

“Let’s hope she doesn’t make a mess in my mother’s room.”

“That too,” Fantasy said. “We’ll have a dead body on our hands.”

“Let’s hope it doesn’t get to dead bodies.”

* * *

Ten minutes passed and Jessica hadn’t returned. I spent five of the minutes trying
to remember everything No Hair had told me about
Probability
banking and the other five trying to remember everything I could about Jessica’s
husband. Mother was stretched out along the slick edge of the pool after her vigorous
workout, soaking up the sun and patting her feet against the top of the water.

“Davis?”

“Yes, Mother?”

“Look how the sky and the water are the same color.”

“It’s beautiful.”

“I wish your father could see this.”

She looked like my much younger mother, content, happy, and carefree, to the extent
she ever allowed herself to be free of care. Maybe I was time traveling and my much
younger father, the strong and handsome father of my childhood, who was genuinely
content and happy as a rule where Mother was only situationally satisfied, and not
all that often, would walk up behind her and kiss the top of her head. Or push her
in the water and jump in after her. Daddy was the only person who could make Mother
let go, and I never realized how genuinely affectionate my parents were with each
other until I was happily married myself and understood how much the smallest of touches
or locked eyes across a crowded room meant. I always thought of marriage as something
that started out with a giddy bang, then diminished, every minute, a little more every
day, until I married Bradley. It was only then I realized nothing about my parents’
relationship had paled through the years. Several weeks ago, on my last trip to Pine
Apple, when Mother had been given the green light by her doctors after her tests came
back clean, my sister Meredith and I watched our parents from the porch swing as they
returned from a tour of Main Street. (They were gone all of two minutes.)