Murder Packs a Suitcase (7 page)

As she wove among the tables, she felt someone touch her arm. She turned, surprised, and saw that Wade had caught up with her.

“Good job,” he said. “Putting some limits on that idiot, I mean. You did us all a service.”

“Thanks,” she said, suddenly shy.

“I'm glad we have someone as spunky as you on our trip. It should make things much more fun.”

“Spunky, huh?” She laughed. “No one's ever called me spunky before.”

He just winked. “Catch you later,” he called as he headed out of the coffee shop.

By that point, Phil had slithered up to her. “Have fun on the
Titanic,
” he commented. “I just hope you're a good swimmer.”

And then, in a much lower voice, he added, “And I promise you'll be seeing a lot more of me. You and I will definitely have the chance to get to know each other a lot better.”

“Jerk,” Mallory muttered after he'd strutted away.

But as she left the restaurant, it wasn't annoying Phil that she was thinking about. It was the Canadian. Wade.

Interesting fellow, she thought.

She immediately asked herself if the reason she'd gotten that impression was that he had an exciting career publishing his own magazine—or if it was because he was recently divorced and had divine blue eyes and a luscious smile.

You're here to do a job, Mallory reminded herself firmly. You've come to Orlando to uncover the old Florida, not flirt.

Still, she realized it was the first time she'd come even close to having such thoughts since David had died. She was surprised to find that she was still capable. She was even more surprised by how good it felt, as if the warm Florida sunshine was thawing something deep inside her that had been frozen for much too long.

4

“Happiness is a direction, not a place.”

—Sydney J. Harris

W
hat better place to seek out the old Florida than at an attraction built around the world's “Ship of Dreams”? Mallory mused a few minutes later as she and Courtney pulled into the parking lot of the first attraction on her list, Titanic: The Experience.

The ticket office was housed in an oddly shaped geometric building in front of an open-air shopping mall with Spanish-style architecture, called the Mercado. A painting of what was arguably the most famous ship in history hung above the entrance, with a sign identifying it for anyone who had just arrived from another planet. Jutting upward from the building's flat roof was a gigantic inverted triangle that was covered with circles and had a metallic look.

“That's such a funny-looking building,” Courtney commented, scrunching up her nose. “I can't imagine what they were thinking.”

“I can.” Now that Mallory had a chance to study it, she realized that the strange building was the architect's version of the
Titanic.
A tad abstract, perhaps, but at least the designer's approach had been more creative than simply copying the actual ship's design. “It's supposed to be the
Titanic.
See? The upside-down 3-D triangle shape is a re-creation of the hull. The circles symbolize the bolts.”

“O-o-h,” Courtney said vaguely, as if she didn't really see at all. She was about to open the car door when she paused and said, “By the way, Mallory, I wanted to thank you for sticking up for me before. That was really nice of you.”

“No problem. Phil was bothering all of us, not just you.”

“Still,” Courtney persisted, “if I had more experience, I might have handled it better. I'm actually pretty nervous. About being in charge of a press trip for the first time, I mean.”

“It's a big responsibility,” Mallory said sympathetically. “All those details to juggle—and all those different personalities. But you're doing just fine.” She heard herself speaking in a motherly tone, no doubt because Courtney wasn't much older than her daughter. “Besides, if anyone was acting unprofessional, it was Phil. In fact, he was behaving like a junior high school boy on his first trip away from home. You'd think that by now he'd know better.”

As they walked inside the building, she was annoyed that the nasty scene from lunch was seeping into the rest of the day. As if talking about Phil Diamond wasn't bad enough, she couldn't get his off-key rendition of the theme song from the James Cameron movie out of her head. Of course, the piped-in music, a Celine Dion wannabe crooning a song that sounded just different enough from the famous one not to precipitate a lawsuit, didn't help.

Still, she was determined to forget about the oafish journalist and concentrate on the famous disaster. She smiled at the ticket seller, a young man dressed in period costume consisting of black pants, a black vest, and a white shirt and tie.

“One, please,” she said, proffering the voucher she'd found in her press kit.

“And I'm with Florida Tourism.” Courtney flashed an ID card the same way cops on TV were always flashing their badges.

Her credentials clearly had just as much clout here in Florida, where sightseeing was the official state pastime.

“The next tour begins in fifteen minutes,” the young man advised, pushing two tickets toward them. “These are each printed with a name of one of the
Titanic
's actual passengers. At the end of the tour, you can check the Memorial Wall to find out whether or not you survived.”

Mallory expected to be a scullery maid or one of the other third-class passengers who, in the movie, was kept behind a locked gate as the great ship went down. Instead, she saw that for the next hour or so she would be the Countess of Rothes, also known as Lucy Dyer-Edwards.

“I'm a countess!” she exclaimed. “Who are you?”

“Mrs. Latifa Baclini.” Frowning, Courtney noted, “I'm traveling third-class.”

“Oh, she's a good one,” the ticket seller gushed. “Latifa was Lebanese and didn't speak English. She and her daughters weren't even supposed to travel on the
Titanic.
They had tickets on another liner. But while they were in Cherbourg, France, one of the girls got pink eye and they had to delay their departure until she got better.”

“What about the countess?” Mallory asked.

“Definitely first-class. She was British, married to the nineteenth Earl of Rothes, mother of two sons. A real lady, from what I understand.”

Mallory walked just a little more gracefully than usual as she wandered over to a glass display case, which held a copy of the
New York Times
dated Tuesday, April 16, 1912. The headlines read:

         

Titanic Sinks Four Hours After Hitting Iceberg

866 Rescued by Carpathia, Probably 1250 Perish;

Ismay Safe, Mrs. Astor Maybe, Noted Names Missing

         

Ismay, she recalled from the movie, was the muckety-muck who ran the White Star Line, the company that owned and operated the
Titanic.
The Astors were household names simply because they were so rich. As for the number of casualties, she knew from the reading she'd done before coming to Florida that it was even larger: 1,503.

But she copied down the headline, word for word, in case she decided to include it in her article. As she wrote, she overheard a man who had just come into the ticket office.

“So what exactly is the experience?” he asked the man behind the counter. “Do you, like, get wet?”

Maybe I should be writing an article on macabre Florida, she thought.

“We have a few minutes before the tour starts,” she told Courtney. “Let's check out the gift shop.”

Mallory quickly decided that the gift shop also belonged in an article on macabre Florida. After all, there was definitely something unseemly about a retail establishment whose theme was one of the worst tragedies of the twentieth century.

Still, she couldn't resist a store of any kind, much less one with a clerk dressed like a maid from the early 1900s, in a long black dress and crisp white apron and cap. Mallory wandered among the displays, wondering if Jordan would appreciate a fluffy white bath towel embroidered with
White Star Line—Titanic.

Maybe a reminder of how fragile life is would prompt him to hang it up every once in a while, she thought, instead of leaving it on the bathroom floor in a mildewing heap. When she spotted the price tag, however, she decided there had to be cheaper ways of training an eighteen-year-old boy.

She reached for a long thin box sporting a picture of the doomed ship.
Inflatable Titanic,
the box read.
Twenty inches. Educational and fun.

Very
educational, Mallory thought grimly. It teaches the lesson: Go by airplane.

The box also warned,
Do not use as a flotation device,
which she decided was excellent advice.

Nearby she spotted a plastic replica of the famous ocean liner, one that was apparently battery powered.
Cruises on surface
the copy on the box noted.

That, Mallory concluded, was undoubtedly designed to calm potential customers who feared the toy would go under the very first time it was used.

But showtime was imminent. As she and Courtney waited in line with two dozen other tourists who were part of the tour, their eyes were glued to a video with actual footage of the great ship.

“The ship was nearly four city blocks long,” the narrator reported with pride. “Its passengers included famous names like Guggenheim, Astor, and Strauss.”

“I'm surprised you've never been here before,” Mallory commented, figuring that part of being a good travel writer was making conversation with the people who had sponsored her trip.

Courtney scrunched up her nose again. “Actually, it's been a really busy year for me. I just graduated from college last May. And then Greg and I got married in August. Planning our wedding was a huge job. But it was worth it.

“You should have seen it!” she gurgled, just assuming Mallory would be interested in the details. “We got married at this really gorgeous hotel, outside in the garden. We had almost three hundred guests, and a million flowers…. My wedding cake had five tiers. Five! It was like something out of a fairy tale—or the food channel!”

“It sounds wonderful,” Mallory said politely.

“Oh, it definitely was. Then, right after our honeymoon, I started working for the Tourism Board. So I've spent the past few months getting used to both a new job and my new status as a married lady. All of a sudden, I had this completely different life, compared to my four years at college.”

“Did you go to school in Florida?” Mallory asked.

Courtney nodded. “Florida State University. I majored in Communications. I also had some really cool part-time jobs. I worked for a local radio station my first two years. Then I moved to a public relations firm. I ended up learning a lot.”

“Sounds like a tough schedule,” Mallory observed, thinking of all the hours Amanda logged in at the library. “Being a full-time student plus working, I mean.”

Shrugging, Courtney replied, “But I got such great experience. When I graduated, it helped me get exactly the job I wanted.”

Without going to law school
or
business school, Mallory couldn't help thinking. “It sounds as if you really enjoy working in the tourism field.”

“Ooh, I love it!” Courtney gushed. “It's
so
much fun. I get to meet all kinds of interesting people and go to fun places—like today! I'm having a great time. Aren't you?”

By that point, the group had started shuffling forward. When they reached the front of the line, their tour guide, the same young man who had played the role of ticket seller, ripped her ticket in half.

“Welcome aboard, Countess,” he greeted her.

In response, she bowed her head. She wondered with amusement if she could induce her son to start addressing her the same way. As for her daughter, she was undoubtedly a lost cause.

Yet Mallory found her cynicism dropping away as the tour group entered the first room of the exhibit, the offices of J. Bruce Ismay. The caption underneath his portrait, which hung on the green-and-white-striped wall, explained that he was the son of Thomas H. Ismay, co-founder of the White Star Line. Junior became the manager of the company when his father died in 1899.

J. Bruce Ismay—or at least the handsome, mustached actor who was portraying him—suddenly appeared on the video screen above the huge wooden desk. The actor managed to make him seem suitably arrogant as he announced that the ship formerly known as R.M.S. No. 401 had just been launched. He smugly explained that the 882-foot ship made from 45,000 tons of steel was the most luxurious and safest ship ever built and that it was practically unsinkable.

“Eight hundred eighty-two feet…forty-five thousand tons of steel…” Mallory muttered as she copied down the facts she thought she might need for future reference. “Most luxurious and safest…”

She continued taking notes as the group was led through the Belfast Shipyard, where a reproduction of the ship's giant propeller was on display. Next came the boarding area in Southampton, England, where, the tour guide explained, all passengers, including those traveling first class, were checked for head lice. She snapped some photos inside the elegant black-and-white Verandah Café, with its glass displays of china and silverware.

Then the group entered a room that contained a re-production of the ship's Grand Staircase, which everyone recognized from the movie. A plump woman in a floor-length black dress, a black hat trimmed with feathers, and an overabundance of jewelry burst into the room.

“I'm Molly Brown,” she introduced herself energetically. “You may have heard of me.”

Sure, Mallory thought. You're a famous historical figure who's best known for not dying on the
Titanic.

Actually, Mallory had read about her in one of her guidebooks, so she knew there was a lot more to her. The real Molly Brown was the daughter of Irish immigrants who'd fled the famous potato famine of the 1840s. At age thirteen, she got her first job in a tobacco factory in her hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. She moved to Colorado and married a mining engineer named J. J. Brown, who became a millionaire after inventing a method for digging deeper in the gold mines. Even though the Browns began hobnobbing with the Vanderbilts, the Whitneys, and the Astors, she never stopped fighting for improved labor conditions and women's rights and even ran for Congress.

This version exhibited the brash personality that became Molly Brown's trademark. She explained that the solid oak staircase spanned seven flights and that first-class passengers used it to reach the dining room, where they enjoyed ten-course dinners and champagne. Mallory had to admit that so far, the exhibits had managed to capture all the glamour of the ship.

But of course it couldn't last. Molly Brown led the group through the lower deck, where they could hear the ominous rumble of the engine. As they passed the iron gate that blocked off the quarters of the third-class passengers, the lights began blinking on and off.

The mood darkened even further when the group stopped in front of an actual iceberg.

Mallory glanced around and saw that everyone in the group appeared to be enraptured.

“Put your hand on it for fifteen seconds,” Molly Brown instructed. “It feels cold at first, but then it starts to burn. It's thirty-two degrees in here. The night the
Titanic
sank, the air was thirty-one degrees and the water was twenty-eight degrees. Adults can last ten to twenty minutes in that temperature before hypothermia sets in and they suffocate.”

I guess this is part of the Experience, Mallory thought, jotting down the gruesome figures the tour guide had just rattled off.