Jaine Austen 8 - Killer Cruise (26 page)

“Evil like that must be punished,” she said, a mad gleam in her eyes. “It says so in the Bible.”

Holy Mackerel. Emily clearly had more than a few screws loose.

“The minute I saw those ice picks, I knew how Graham would meet his end. It was just a matter of when. And then, after Cookie made that big scene in the Grand Showroom, I knew the time had come. If anything happened to Graham, everyone would blame her.

“I followed Graham after he dropped me off at my cabin that night, hiding in the shadows as he met with Cookie and told her he was just waiting for me to die and inherit my money.

“Such a dreadful man,” she tsked. “Such a pleasure to stab him in the heart. A fitting end, don’t you think, after all the hearts he’d broken?”

“Absolutely!” I said. “In fact, the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced you did the right thing. So why don’t you just put away that ice pick, and it’ll be our little secret?”

I flashed her what I hoped was a trustworthy smile.

“Nice try, dear. But it won’t work. As we say at sea, you’re dead in the water. It’s all your own fault, you know. You really should have minded your own business.”

She wagged the ice pick at me reprovingly.

“I suspected something was up when Ms. Nesbitt told me you’d been questioning her. And then when I heard you on your cell phone in Cabo, talking about your plan to go to the police, I simply had to stop you. I tried to scare you off by cutting your scuba hose.”

“You?” I blinked in surprise. “But you weren’t even in the water.”

“Of course not, dear. I hired one of the busboys in the restaurant to do it for me. Remember when I broke down and ran to the ladies’ room in tears? Well, those tears were just an act. Part of my performance. And I wasn’t in the ladies’ room. I was outside the men’s room paying a darling busboy named Jaime two hundred dollars to snip your air hose. I told him that it was a practical joke. That you were an experienced scuba diver. I don’t think he really believed me, but for two hundred dollars, he was happy to oblige. Labor is so reasonable in Mexico, don’t you think?”

So Nesbitt had been right. It
was
one of the locals!

“But did you take the hint? Noooo. You went right on snooping and spying, and now it’s come to this.”

By now I’d inched my way up against the wall, not easy to do from a sitting position. Unfortunately, Emily had inched her way right along with me.

“Well, this is it, Jaine. Time to go to that great cruise ship in the sky.”

She tested the tip of her ice pick and smiled.

“Nice and sharp.”

Was it really going to end like this? Hacked to death by a crazy lady in a poop-stained sweat suit? I was too young to die! I hadn’t been to Paris. Or Rome. Or the Ben & Jerry factory tour in Waterbury, Vermont!

What the heck was wrong with me? I couldn’t just sit there, cringing like a coward, and let her kill me without putting up a fight.

I had to do something. Now!

And so, as she knelt down to get better aim at me, I kicked her in the shins with every ounce of strength I had. Which, from my awkward position on the floor, wasn’t much. But it was enough to send her stumbling backward.

Free at last from her hovering ice pick, I leapt to my feet and charged at her.

You’d think I’d have an easy time of it. After all, she was at least three decades older than me. But the woman had the strength of the truly insane. Not to mention that darn ice pick clutched in her hand.

Just as I was biting her wrist in an attempt to get her to drop it, she snuck in a blow to my stomach that sent me reeling.

The next thing I knew she had me straddled on the bed.

“Okay, Jaine,” she said, her face grim with determination. “It’s all over. No more games.”

It looked like my time was up. The End. Finito.

But then, just as I was preparing to take my last breath on the planet, I saw it: Samoa’s manuscript, where I’d tossed it on my night table.

I waited till Emily raised the ice pick above her head to gain thrust, and in that millisecond while her arms were raised, I grabbed the manuscript and held it over my chest.

She plunged the pick with the force of an Olympian. But it barely made a dent in the massive tome.

Furious, she raised the pick to give it another shot, but she never got a chance. Because just then two security guards came rushing into the room.

Thank heavens someone must have heard my screams and called for help.

There was much scuffling and shouting as they pried her off me and wrenched the ice pick from her hands.

But I barely registered what was happening.

All I could think of was that my life had been saved by
Do Not Distub
!

Minutes later Captain Lindstrom showed up and at last listened to what I had to say. He quickly dispatched minions to search Emily’s cabin.

Then he turned to the security guys, who had Emily by the elbows.

“Let her go,” he commanded, holding out his arm to her in a courtly gesture.

“Shall we, Miss Pritchard?”

“Of course, captain,” she said, smiling serenely.

“I’m afraid you’re going to have to spend the night in custody.”

“Oh, I don’t mind. I’ve always wanted to see a ship’s brig. How very exciting!”

Gone was the vengeful madwoman who’d just tried to eviscerate me with an ice pick, and in her place was the slightly eccentric old lady who’d greeted me so effusively that first night at sea.

“You mustn’t worry about me, Karl,” she said. “I don’t regret what I did, not for a minute.

“The only thing I do regret,” she added, with a sly smile in my direction, “was my bad luck in dinner companions.”

And then she headed out the door on the captain’s arm, her eyes as clear and bright as they’d been all those years ago on her very first cruise.

Chapter 25

T
hose of you keeping track of my calorie intake—I’m glad you are, because I’m not—know that I never did get to eat those brownies I’d brought back to my cabin ages ago.

And by now I was starving. Near-death experiences tend to make me a bit peckish.

So I zipped over to the buffet to make up for lost chocolate.

I’d just polished off my second brownie and was licking the frosting from my fingers when I looked up and saw Robbie making his way across the nearly deserted room.

I slumped down in my seat, dreading the thought of facing him. Not only had he caught me attempting to break into his safe, but now I was going to have to tell him his beloved Aunt Emily was a psychopathic killer.

“I figured I’d find you here,” he said, sitting across from me.

“Look, Robbie, there’s something I should tell you.”

“If it’s about Aunt Emily,” he sighed, “I already know. The captain told us.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“To tell the truth, I’m not all that surprised.”

“You aren’t?”

“Aunt Em’s always been slightly off-kilter. As she grew older, I sensed it more and more. That’s why I was so happy when she hooked up with Graham. He seemed to be so good for her.” He smiled ruefully. “Could I have been more wrong? I never dreamed he’d be the one to send her over the edge.

“But the strange thing is, when I went to see her just now, she didn’t seem upset. It’s as if killing Graham brought her peace somehow.”

“I know just what you mean,” I said, thinking of how calmly she’d walked off with Captain Lindstrom.

“We’ll get her the best attorneys money can buy and hope they get her off with an insanity plea. The poor defenseless thing doesn’t belong in prison.”

If you ask me, Emily was more than capable of defending herself in prison, but I kept my mouth shut.

“Anyhow, Jaine,” he said, frowning, “I’m here because I want to talk about what happened today in my cabin.”

I cringed at the memory.

“I’m so sorry about that, Robbie. I swear, I’m not a thief.”

“I know you’re not. You were looking for the cuff links.”

“You knew that?”

He nodded. “I figured you suspected one of us of killing Graham. I was just so hurt that you thought it was me.”

“Oh, but I didn’t suspect you!”

He shot me a laser look.

“Okay, so maybe I did suspect you. But my heart wasn’t in it. Honest! You do believe me, don’t you?”

I waited for an agonizing beat.

And then—hallelujah!—his lopsided grin made a triumphant return.

“I believe you,” he said. “And by the way, if you had looked in my safe, you would’ve found this.”

He took a small jewelry box from his pocket and handed it to me.

“Go ahead. Open it.”

I did and found a lovely silver dolphin pin inside.

“It’s beautiful!”

“One of these days,” he grinned, “we’re going to swim with the dolphins.”

Okay, this was it. I had to come clean and tell him the only thing I wanted to go swimming with was a rubber float in a heated pool, preferably with a built-in holder for a gin and tonic.

But this was me we’re talking about. So the words that actually came out of my mouth were: “I can’t wait!”

Oh, well. I had to look on the bright side. Compared to the dolphins, I’d look positively anorexic.

Then he reached over and took my hand, and the same electric jolt I’d felt that night out on deck coursed through my body.

“Oh, no,” he groaned, taking his hand back.

“What’s wrong?”

“Don’t look now, but that idiot ice sculptor is coming.”

“But that’s impossible.”

Surely Anton wasn’t still interested in me after our last encounter in my cabin.

How wrong I was. I turned and saw him trotting over to our table, ponytail swaying, holding a covered plate in his hand.

“Jaine, babe!” he leered, his libido alive and kicking. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”

Apparently it no longer bothered him that I knew all about his checkered past as the Butterfly Bandit.

“Look what I sculpted for you. An egg salad Kiss.”

He whipped off the cover of the plate, and sure enough, there on the plate was a reasonably good facsimile of a Hershey’s Kiss in egg salad.

“Whaddaya think? Terrific, huh?”

At which point, Robbie got up from the table and stood between us.

“Sorry, buddy,” he said. “She’s already got a kiss.”

And right there, in the middle of the twenty-four-hour buffet, he took me in his arms and kissed me.

Needless to say, I went back for seconds.

YOU’VE GOT MAIL

To: Jaineausten
From: Hot-to-Trotsky
Subject: Wedding with Me

Hello, Ms. Jaine Austen—

My name Vladimir Ivan Trotsky. I come from beautiful land of Uzbekistan. I meet your beautiful mother at Universal Studios Tour and she tell me all about you, what a beautiful woman you are, what beautiful cook and homemaker.

I am tall, dark, and very beautiful, too. Plus I have all my own teeth. So I write to see if you be interested in wedding with me?

Write back and we will arrange dowry.

Yours very sincerely,

Vladimir Ivan Trotsky

Epilogue

N
eedless to say, I did not marry Vladimir Ivan Trotsky—in spite of his tempting offer to shower me with all the yogurt I could eat and a goat of my very own.

Back here in the States, Emily Pritchard is out on bail and awaiting her murder trial in a luxury sanitarium for the Rich & Cuckoo.

Her lawyers are confident they’ll get her off on an insanity plea.

She was certainly sane enough to disinherit Kyle when Maggie spilled the beans about his embezzlement. To avoid a jail sentence, Kyle returned all the money he hadn’t already spent. Needless to say, he and Nesbitt never made it to the Cayman Islands. Last I heard, they were foaming lattes at a Starbucks in Burbank.

Free from Kyle’s tyranny, Maggie got a job as an assertiveness training counselor and is dating a guy she met at Gamblers Anonymous.

Cookie Esposito sued Holiday Cruise Lines for false arrest and settled out of court for a small fortune. She quit the cruise biz and settled down in Palm Springs, where she married a mega-wealthy widower. For their honeymoon, they sailed around the world on their own private yacht. The only time she sings now is in her travertine marble shower.

And speaking of happy couples, you’ll never guess who kissed and made up on the flight back home to Seattle? That’s right, Nancy and David—the battling Bickersons from my class. David wrote me a letter of apology for yelling at me at the pier in Puerto Vallarta. He said that, thanks to having aired their repressed resentments in my class, he and Nancy are now happier than ever.

(What’s more, he’s actually proud of the fact that Kenny’s YouTube video of their fight has scored over two million hits.)

As for Irritating Rita? She really did try to sell my autographed cocktail napkin on eBay—and had the nerve to start the bidding at fifty cents! There was only one bidder, some sap who wound up paying three bucks. I should be getting it in the mail any day now.

On the home front, you’ll be happy to know that Ricardo did a very nice job painting my apartment. True, my first choice in colors would not have been “Tropical Orange,” but I’ve cleverly toned it down by wearing sunglasses indoors.

Lance is dating Jean-Paul, the baker he met while planning “our” wedding. I sure hope it lasts. The guy’s éclairs are to die for.

For some insane reason, despite phone calls and e-mails to the contrary, Mom refuses to believe that Lance is really gay. According to her, it’s just a phase. Having convinced herself that we’re bound to eventually tie the knot, she went ahead and ordered me a wedding dress from The Shopping Channel. It’s a genuine Vera Wang knockoff. Only $89.95 plus shipping and handling.